Addressing Underperformance

Does low performance have you wondering “why?”  We got your back.  Remember that not all campaigns can be above average.  It’s a great opportunity to learn about your contacts and use new insights to build an even better relationship with your audience.  In this post, we’ll break down a step-by-step workflow for diagnosing underperformance and implementing AI to get you back on track.

1. Set Realistic Goals

Before you can evaluate performance, you need to compare your current performance against a baseline or benchmark goal.  Without a goal, it’s hard to know what’s succeeding and what needs some TLC.

Set reasonable goals that balance current performance and business objectives.  If your overall average unique clickthrough rate is 1.5%, you shouldn’t expect to achieve a 300% improvement within 1-3 months.  But a 20% improvement in three months is more realistic.  Don’t set yourself and your team up for failure by aiming for something you can’t deliver.  It’s always better to exceed expectations than to miss them by a mile.

Use Motiva Performance Reporting to help you quickly calculate your baselines and set realistic goals.  

2. Separate the winners from the underperformers

Take a moment to recognize your successes.  Some of your emails and campaigns are knocking it out of the park.  Well done!  Take a look at what’s working for your different segments and appreciate the payoff of your hard work.

Now, turn your attention to the underperforming campaigns and find patterns.  Is it a certain type of email content, like newsletters or product updates, that are consistently underperforming?  Or is it a specific audience that’s engaging at a lower rate?

Use Motiva’s Performance and Persona Reporting to help you quickly identify underperformers.  Search the Performance Report using campaign naming conventions to isolate different types of content.  And use the Persona Report to see how different segments are engaging and quickly find the groups in the red.

3. Analyze the problem from several perspectives

There are four primary levers you can pull to improve performance: Segmentation, Content, Send Time and Frequency.  Motiva was built to help you analyze and improve each of these strategic aspects.

Segmentation: Take a look at your campaigns using Dark Pool Time Machine.  How many contacts are engaging, fatigued, disengaged and unreachable?  There may be inactive and unreachable contacts in your segment watering down engagement rates.  Remove unreachables and resegment to separate engagers from fatiguing contacts so you can address fatigue with win-back strategies.

Content: Filter the Performance Report using a Persona.  Then take a look at the different content you send to that group of contacts.  What content is above baseline and benchmark and which content is below?  How can you change the underperforming content to be more engaging?  Is it even worth developing this content if it’s consistently underperforming?

Send Time: Based on your Dark Pool Time Machine analysis, you’ll get a sense of how many contacts in your segment have activity data.  The more engaged contacts, the more data we can use to optimize send time for each individual contact.

Frequency: Use the Frequency Intelligence Report to analyze email frequency.  Filter by persona to see the analysis for a specific persona.  The contacts will be split into bars based on the average number of emails they receive each week.  How do the unique open, unique click and unsubscribe rates change as contacts in the segment receive more email?  Is there a sweet spot where engagement rates are high and unsubs are low?  Set up a frequency limit in the Frequency Management system and apply that limit to any content sent to that segment.

4. Choose the right combination of optimizations

Based on your analysis as well as the requirements and demands of your team, implement your first AI optimization.  You should implement one optimization at a time so you can see the impact of that one change.  You’ll find that just one optimization will turn some underperformers into winning campaigns.  But we’ve found that most campaigns require a combination of approaches and optimizations as well as custom configuration to make a lasting impact.

We suggest starting with Dark Pool to clean your segmentation.  Starting with a healthy data foundation will improve the impact of other optimizations.

Send Time AI is easy to implement on a variety of campaigns.  It takes 5 minutes to set up on the campaign canvas without changing any content.  It does require a 3-7 day send window so use it on any campaigns that are not time sensitive.  Send Time AI is great for optimizing your click rates, especially on bottom funnel, lead generation campaigns.

Persona Voice is easy to use for developing targeted content. Also use it to develop new email versions for Message Testing.  Message Testing requires at least 1,250 contacts and a 2-4 day send window to optimize content.

Implementing Frequency Management one region and/or team at a time can help you systematically set send limits and adjust as you track performance.

Implement, track and adjust

AI isn’t a silver bullet and it doesn’t work in every situation.  Track the impact of your AI implementations.  They will move the needle in some areas but not in others.  Approach AI implementations like an experiment where you test new approaches and adjust your strategy as you learn.  Motiva AI gives you more tools to solve complex problems.  Be nuanced and bold as you experiment and remember that it’s all about building quality relationships with your contacts even if you’re working at a massive scale.

Learn more about optimizing your email marketing strategy with AI from our post on how to optimize Direct-to-Purchase campaigns.