How You Improve Conversion Rates

A successful broadcast mailing is largely dependant on the quality of your contacts. This topic includes steps you can take to improve your organization’s conversion rates.

A common myth about sending broadcast email is that—like direct mail—the larger your audience, the more likely your mailing is to be successful. In reality, succeeding with broadcast email depends more on the quality of contacts than the quantity. Sending email to people who have no interest in your product or service not only drags down your conversion rates, it can land you on lists that block delivery of future mailings across large swaths of the Internet.

One of the most effective ways to improve conversion rates is to filter your contacts by email viewing history. The system keeps track of each contact’s marketing activity in the Marketing Scorecard (ma_scorecard) table. When a contact views a mailing, the ma_scorecard.last_view field is updated with the date and time that the message was viewed. Knowing whether a contact recently viewed a message provides a reasonable basis for judging contact quality.

There are several reasons a contact might not view a message. For example, the message may contain an unfamiliar From address or an ambiguous subject line. It may be filtered as spam, bounced or blocked by the recipient’s mail server, or rejected due to the sender’s reputation. Whatever the reason, it is safe to assume that a contact who has not viewed a recent mailing is not likely to view one in the future.

Conversely, a contact who recently viewed a message is more likely to view future messages. Therefore, to optimize your conversion rates and protect your reputation, we recommend that you add the following filter to all segments:

• ma_scorecard.last_view greater than -90 Days Exactly (Relative)

This filter limits your segment to a list of contacts who have viewed at least one mailing within the past ninety days.

Tip: After you have added this filter to a segment and included the segment in an audience, be sure to perform an audience count. If the segment returns too small an audience, adjust the date value defined by the ma_scorecard.last_view filter to be less restrictive. But remember—the longer contacts go without viewing a mailing, the more likely they are to lower your conversion rates.

The contacts in the resulting list will be more likely to view future messages than contacts who are not listed. You can also assume that their email addresses are valid and that they are not marking your messages as spam. Therefore, the quality of these contacts is high.

Another way to improve conversion rates is to track your contacts’ engagement score. Based on historical contact interactions within B2C Service, the system evaluates each contact and assigns a contact engagement score on a scale from 0 to 100. This statistic is based on each contact’s hourly transaction history, such as content viewed, links clicked, web form and survey submittals, marketing emails forwarded, SmartSense ratings, and service transactions. Score value is stored in the ma_scorecard.score field, which is available for reports (for example, the Engagement Scorecard report), segments, and campaign decisions.

Note: Data older than 400 days is automatically truncated from the following tables: Marketing Activities (ma_trans), Bounced Messages (bounced_msgs), and Mailing Exclusions.

The Marketing Stats (ma_stats) table summarizes records in the Marketing Activities (ma_trans) table that share a unique combination of mailing_id, format_id, doc_id, flow_id, flow_web_page_id, and type values. This ensures that summary marketing transaction statistics remain available indefinitely, even after the originating ma_trans records have been truncated. All transactions related to unsubscribe, including list-unsubscribe header, feedback loop unsubscribe, and unsubscribe, will remain in the Marketing Activities table.

To ensure optimal conversion rates and protect your reputation, you should adopt a regular contact evaluation process to ensure that all contacts are valid and active.