In a previous article, we showed the importance of keeping your user base active. An essential part of keeping your users active is by constantly sending engaging campaigns. One of the most important metrics to show whether your campaign is performing is the Open Rate. It is also the metric that actually confirms user interaction.
Measure campaign results
In Notificare, you can find full-blown stats for your campaigns. At a glance, you can find all the data you care about for each message. Knowing the impact of your campaigns is as crucial as the development of your app or website. Obviously, Open rates are one of the best ways to tell whether your messaging strategy is working or not. Yet, how to interpret these metrics depends on the channels you pick. Email, Push, SMS all differ from each other, and ultimately in an omnichannel approach, you will probably want to be able to compare these apples and oranges.
Sent
After you have selected your audience and once your message is sent, you obviously want to know how many users the message was sent to. After sending a message, certain messages that we could not deliver are subtracted from the initial number of devices you were expecting to reach.
It is important to understand that only when a message is sent, Notificare is able to receive information about a recipient. This means that our platform will automatically consider these as errors when you send a message. For example, a Push device that no longer has your app installed, an email address that no longer exists or a phone number that is no longer active.
Open Rate
Obviously, after sending the message, you want to know if the message is read. Whether a message performs well is often perceived from the Open Rate. Again this also differs per channel. With SMS, you can not detect if a message is opened at all. For both Push and Email, an Open event will only be measured after you've have clicked on it. Additionally, due to its nature, a Push message can already display the entire message on the lock screen. That's why an Open event in a Push Notification should be considered much more engaging in comparison to Email.
For both Push and Email, the Open Rate is displayed with a total number of opens and an unique number, collected when a unique user opens the message. For mobile app users, this is available when our Inbox functionality is enabled and implemented in your app. With an in-app inbox, users will never miss an update and your messages are always available just like an email message.
Click-Through Rate & Replies
After the recipient has opened your message, whether it is an Email, SMS, or Push message, you will probably want to include one or more CTAs (Call to action) that redirects your customers where you want them to be. With Email, the click rate is the percentage that indicates you how many time a CTA was clicked.
For push Notifications, we call these Replies and, accordingly, the Reply Rate. A Reply is prompt from a Push Action, which can contain more functionality than just a link. With this type of CTAs, you can create buttons in your message that can trigger a user input via text or using the device's camera, open the device's browser, deep link to a certain area of your app and quickly collect that input in Notificare (or even on your own servers).
For SMS, there is no standard function for this, but you can always use our Links to measure the click-through rate of a SMS campaign.
Fails
With each overview of the message statistics, you will usually find a total number of the Fails. The Fails represent the total number of messages that returned errors and weren't delivered. This metric is collected every time an error is received for each message that was sent and depending on its severity it might result on a Push device, Email address or SMS number being deactivated.
Think Omnichannel
Nowadays, it is essential that you combine multiple channels and make them work together to achieve streamlined interactions. By connecting the dots between the marketing channels you are using today, you can easily create new ways of orchestrating your messaging strategy in an omnichannel world.
Marketers often get stuck on the marketing channel they master and optimize these Open Rates as much as possible. For example, A/B-testing can help you slowly optimize your messaging campaigns. However, by intelligently using other channels you can witness bigger gains. For example, send a Push message to all the people that did not open your Email campaign. So are you happy and satisfied as a marketer with a 60% Open Rate? Or are you the one that can only be satisfied if you reach the other 40% on a different channel?
Want higher Open Ratios?
If you have questions about setting up a messaging strategy to optimize your ratios, please contact our Professional Services Team. If you want to get more insights from your campaigns, our engineers can assist you via our Technical Support.