Monitoring and Evaluating Online Projects With online communications we can measure and evaluate a lot more than in offline communications. The trick is to understand what stats are relevant/useable, what they tell us and what we can learn from them.
What do we mean by 'impact' in the world of digital communications and how we evaluate it.
Metrics:
Open rates, click-though rates
Conversion rate
Page views
Visits
Email sign-ups
Referrers
What can we evaluate online?
-how many people came to the website
-how many times people loaded (viewed) the page
-where they went after they viewed the page
-where they came from, what they searched for to end up on that page
-we can even analyze the behaviour of a specific segment of people ( for example -everyone who visited a page, or came from a specific location)
-how many people successfully took a journey we’ve set through the website
email
-how many people opened an email (HTML)
-how many people clicked on the links
-how many people who opened the email finished the journey (for example, donated or took a campaigning action)
etc, etc
Based on this data we can get a good idea of how successful a specific content is, what positioning of elements on a web page leads to more conversion rates etc..
Impact
In order to be able to measure impact you need to be clear about your communication strategy and how this contributes to impact of you initiative.
So old-school comms planning is the key and I always try to do it in an iterative way with the teams I work with:
1.When you identify objectives (why are you producing a piece of communication) immediately think how you’ll know that you’ve achieved it. Can you measure this – do you have internal systems set up to do it? If not, have a think again.
So for example a typical objective would be “To educate our supporters about XYZ”. How will you measure this? By the number of email sign-ups? Number of packs distributed? Online survey of your supporters before and after? None of these answers is wrong, but they do clearly set out what would reaching a specific objective mean for your organisation.
By asking these questions you identify the RESPONSE you need from your supporters.
2.Who is your audience? What are they like? Are they likely to respond in the way you want them to respond? If yes, great, but if no, maybe you need to rethink your objectives and therefore your response?
How to set your targets?
The best way is learning from the past or from baseline studies.
Or you can just evaluate by monitoring trends – for example, “%increase” or “more of ….”. But then you need a baseline which shows what the current situation is – so you have something to compare to.
If no baseline, compare to same industry benchmarks (e-benchmarks study),
Baselines
E-benchmarks study - US http://www.e-benchmarksstudy.com/
Performance benchmarks - UK - www.fairsay.com
Showing posts with label email. Show all posts
Showing posts with label email. Show all posts
Wednesday, 25 November 2009
Tuesday, 31 March 2009
eCampaigning forum: Email is still the no1 way of engaging supporters
Open rates
one example
- general list - 20 -25%
- segmented list of 30k - 75%%
other example
general list - 15-19%, segmented list - 35%-45%
27k list about public broadcasting. If content is related to the recession
- open rates increased - from 25% to 40%
12% action rate (conversion)
- a lot of email activity lately because it's cheaper
- not always able to test emails due to lack of time/staff
- quick wins - easy to forget that there are many areas to look at to make an email successful
- split AB test with a new subject line
- test the landing page
- email content - Obama example - some emails are only 300 words
- user journeys need to be thought out - emails tailored accordingly. Need to be careful in how you welcome then and what they'll receive next.
- Thank you email should always be personalized
- some emails are building capital (giving info, fun) and some emails are taking capital (data)
- different from name
- donation is a form of political action
Social networks
- Facebook - people keen to join up but it doesn't convert people
- forward this email to a friend - needs to be more prominent
- set the target - it works well for the people - donations go higher and people re-visit the page to check if the donation got higher due to their donation
- relating email that you are writing now to the next email - like a soap-opera - so that every email works on its own
Segmentation
- based on who is likely to respond to the action
- based on people's behaviour and based on people's preferences
one example
- general list - 20 -25%
- segmented list of 30k - 75%%
other example
general list - 15-19%, segmented list - 35%-45%
27k list about public broadcasting. If content is related to the recession
- open rates increased - from 25% to 40%
12% action rate (conversion)
- a lot of email activity lately because it's cheaper
- not always able to test emails due to lack of time/staff
- quick wins - easy to forget that there are many areas to look at to make an email successful
- split AB test with a new subject line
- test the landing page
- email content - Obama example - some emails are only 300 words
- user journeys need to be thought out - emails tailored accordingly. Need to be careful in how you welcome then and what they'll receive next.
- Thank you email should always be personalized
- some emails are building capital (giving info, fun) and some emails are taking capital (data)
- different from name
- donation is a form of political action
Social networks
- Facebook - people keen to join up but it doesn't convert people
- forward this email to a friend - needs to be more prominent
- set the target - it works well for the people - donations go higher and people re-visit the page to check if the donation got higher due to their donation
- relating email that you are writing now to the next email - like a soap-opera - so that every email works on its own
Segmentation
- based on who is likely to respond to the action
- based on people's behaviour and based on people's preferences
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