Recently we were conducting an e-newsletter critique for a long time customer, The Product Care Group, and we entered into a discussion of how best to measure reader interaction.    Bill Harding, Product Care Group’s President, uses the IMN service to keep his company’s name in front of his manufacturers’ reps, building a strong brand for his company issue after issue.   Bill has been measuring the success of his e-newsletters by tracking open rates.  Open rates are one of few analytics Bill is currently able to measure because he is not utilizing microsites within his e-newsletter due to the layout scheme he has chosen.  We pointed out to Bill that with a few minor changes (such as adding multiple articles with full story links and topic hyperlinks), he could take advantage of many more statistics about his readers’ engagement with his e-newsletter and his company.  And he will be able to tell the difference between his readers’ inertia and interactivity! 

Why go beyond open rates?  

While open rates are a good baseline measure, they also can be very deceiving, leaving you thinking that you are having greater success with your newsletter than you actually are.  This is because with many of the browsers that your readers are using today, there is a capability to have a “preview” window open all the time.  When emails are sent and tracked by analytical systems like IMN’s, the emails in the “preview” window are recorded as “opened.”  That means even if your readers do not click on and actually open your email, it’s still tracked as if they did.  What you’re really measuring, therefore, is their inertia versus their interactivity.  

How can you go beyond “open rates”?

IMN’s e-communications services enable you to track much more than open rates.  In fact, we provide you with a unique capability that you won’t find with any other service and that’s the ability to incorporate a microsite with your e-newsletter. You may be asking yourself at this point, “what exactly is a microsite and what does it have to do with measuring the interactivity of my newsletter?”

A microsite is…

When you use the full capability of IMN’s content management and layout systems with links to full stories after a short synopsis on the Cover Page, you are using our microsite functionality.  When your readers click on the “Full Story” link, you are actually sending them to a microsite that resides on an IMN server. 

What happens when your readers go to a microsite?  IMN’s extensive analytic system is now able to track the path the your readers take when they engage with your newsletter.  This means that every time they click on a “Full Story” link, you will be able to track that activity – which is an indication of your readers’ interest in your content – through our reports in a variety of ways:

• Hits, Clicks, Opens.  The IMN system measures total hits, clicks, and opens that can be used for the measurement of overall performance statistics from issue to issue or from mailing to mailing.  The system also tracks unique hits, clicks, and opens that can be used as a more refined measurement.  This means that you are not only provided with baseline measures (from the totals) in each of these categories, but you can also see how many subscribers took repeat actions within your newsletter by comparing the total and unique numbers. 
  
• Content Popularity.  This report goes beyond baseline measures and tells you by article how many people clicked on the “Full Story” link, showing you which articles are of most interest to your readers.  You can also drill down to the subscriber level from here to see who exactly are the most interested readers per article.
  
• Subscriber Activity.  From this report, you can tell by subscriber what articles interest them most and, sometimes more importantly, least.
  
• Issue versus Mailings.  All the reports in the IMN system can be viewed on an issue-by-issue basis, or if you have multiple lists that each issue goes to, you can compare the interactivity of one mailing list versus another.  

For the Product Care Group, this means that once they utilize this capability, they will be able to start measuring what articles are of most interest, what services their manufacturers’ reps are interested in, and most importantly, who their most interested reps are.   

For more information on how you can utilize microsites with your e-newsletter, contact us at info@imninc.com.