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How long does a marketing email live?

Posted on | September 18, 2008 |

I’ve been reading The Long Tail (The Revised and Updated Version) by Chris Anderson and it’s understatement to say it’s a pivotal work. I am starting to see Long Tails everywhere… So I wanted to challenge a belief of mine (and co-workers) that emails have a less-than-a-week lifespan.

What I found is that statement is both true and untrue.

If you’re counting the initial burst of activity as the “life” of the email, you are correct. However, there is a lot of activity after that 2-3 day spike that may be where prospects become customers.

Here is what I did to obtain my data:
1) I exported the data from a comprehensive marketing email sent out in June. I’ve used VerticalReponse for work marketing for over 3 years and about 3.5 million emails. I like their interface, but my findings here make me want to write their (awesome) customer service an email and try to expand its feature set.

2) In Excel, I counted the rows of links out from the HTML version - this one had a whopping 50 links to about nine different domains.

3) I went to Google Analytics for each domain, set the start date to two days before the email and left the end date today. I then went to Traffic Sources > Campaigns and looked for “Vertical Response” and the name of that campaign. I clicked. From that page, I exported the data to CSV and transpose-pasted it into a table. 

4) Repeat for each domain, placing each one under the other in same table.

5) The result was a data table containing clicks by day on the x axis and domains in the y axis. I then made a chart from this and raised its height to over six times standard dimensions. What I was looking for was the Long Tail.

Here is the chart from a distance:

Obvious long spike at the head, as we are used to… 55% of the clicks were in the first 3 days, and it was launched on a Wednesday at 10:30am.

Lets move closer in on the bottom of the graph:

Even beyond one week, there were still 20-40 clicks per day per domain.

Looking further down the tail, the clicks drop and drop but even today, fully 2 months later, people are still opening up that email and clicking.

The other 45% of the clicks happened over a time scale of 2 months. No kidding. A toast to pursuing empirical data!

Long tails are everywhere, even in marketing emails. So, how long does an email live? =D

Looking at one of the domains, I popped back into analytics to see what these visitors are doing. From 8/1/08 to 9/18/08, I see that the % New Visitors is only 34.30%. Yes! Average time on page is 2:37, and this was only 6% of the total visits.

Compare that to 7/14 - 7/31 on same domain: % New Visits: 77.71 (yes!), Average time on site was 2:55 (-10.26%). So, what can we surmise from this? No need - I used Google Analytics’ “Goals” feature. I set up three goals for the site for when they navigated away from the landing page. The one I like the most, which indicated intent to buy (there are no direct sales on this domain), was 1.36% from 7/14 - 7/31, and up to 4.26% for 8/1 - 9/18.

They came back to reconsider their interest. How wonderful! And some went to go find where to buy it.

Sticky messaging and content helps. It’s near-impossible to A/B test for 50 links. So this marketing email was designed to collate many kinds of offers, edutainment, news and blog posts into one simple portal for the consumer. I believe it is working quite well. The Long Tail is lives here, too. And here it’s for information and the scale is time.

Category: marketing
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