(Multichannel Merchant) Recent developments in e-mail marketing are creating new possibilities for an old set of direct marketing metrics: recency, frequency and monetary value.
Here's the twist. RFM has long been used in direct marketing to identify likely nonresponders in a list and suppress mail to them.
RFM is used in print mail solely to measure purchasing behavior. In the case of e-mail, the key variables are the recency and frequency of clickthroughs.
Imagine being able to track how recently people opened a catalog and flipped through it — even though they didn't buy — and then being able to act on that. Moreover, valuable insights can be gleaned by measuring mailing frequency against spam complaints.
One reason people press the "this is spam" button is that the marketer has hit them with too many e-mails in too short a period of time, says Deirdre Baird, chief executive of deliverability for e-mail delivery firm Pivotal Veracity.
In some cases, the merchant has waited far too long between contacts — the recipient has no memory of signing up for anything. Or people stopped wanting to hear from the firm a long time ago. "One of the things you want to look at is how frequently you've mailed a name," says Baird. "You also want to look at recency and frequency of clicks, which is something you can gauge with e-mail that you can't gauge in print. I would say clicks are like reading through the catalog. They're interested, but they didn't find anything they liked."
As a result, recency of clickthrough is a valuable measure of how engaged certain segments of a marketer's e-mail file are. People who have clicked recently are more likely to be responsive than those who haven't. Conversely, somebody who hasn't clicked in a long time — the definition of "long time" being different from marketer to marketer — is a prime candidate for removal from the e-mail file.
A little background: When e-mail first emerged as a marketing channel in the mid to late '90s, it would have been pointless to apply anything like RFM analysis to it. After all, e-mail costs so little to develop and send.
Since then, spam complaints have emerged as the number-one factor used by the major Internet service providers when determining whether or not to filter incoming e-mail.
Complainers often tend to be very new or very old to a mailer's file. They also can be people who signed up for a program, but believe they're getting too much e-mail. They complain to the ISPs instead of the mailer because it's one way to stop the onslaught.
