Many marketers judge the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns simply on the number of recipients who open the message, but the open rate is only of limited usefulness in evaluating a campaign or planning future campaigns, according to findings from Jupiter Research.

Some 25% of companies polled by Jupiter say they are planning to implement an email marketing application within a year, but most had no plans to implement either email marketing or customer-level clickstream analysis to go with it. Retailers that don’t invest in analytical capabilities to track customer’s behavior on a site after they click through will be wasting some of their investment in email marketing campaigns, Jupiter contends.

By contrast, email campaigns that factor in relevant data gathered from clickstream analysis can boost response rates and sales significantly. Jupiter cites an online sports apparel retailer who assembled the customer list for an email campaign offering NFL jerseys based not only on recency-frequency-monetary data from past purchasers and geographic data showing which shoppers lived close to NFL teams, but also on clickstream data that identified shoppers who had frequently viewed apparel on the site in the past year. The response rate was 62% and the promotion achieved sales of $1 million over the previous year’s campaign, which did not use clickstream data.

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