Thomas Pink: after the clicks

If your email communication's aim is to raise awareness of your Company or simply drive traffic to your website, open and click-through rates might give you an idea of success.

However, if your aim is to convert that traffic into online sales, these metrics only become an indication of your success if they can be attributed to any subsequent purchases. This is why Thomas Pink wanted to move their reporting beyond click-through and implemented post-click tracking.

Thomas Pink, the luxury shirt-maker from Jermyn Street London, has seen an enormous growth of the brand and business in the last couple of years. Stores are located around the world – in the UK, Europe, the United States, Asia and the Middle East. Furthermore, their online shop, available at www.thomaspink.com is available to customers 24/7.

Their monthly newsletter, sent out to over 75,000 recipients across their four global lists (UK, US, Europe and the rest of the world), does have a branding and CRM element but its central objectives are to communicate news about Thomas Pink and its products and to consequently drive sales.

Meaningful Metrics

To evaluate the success of their email campaigns and whether they were getting any return on investment, they needed a much more tangible metric than open and click-through rates.

Adding a post-click tracking capability into their PureResponse email marketing software gave them just this. By performing further analysis, they get a better understanding of the total sales and average order value (AOV) per campaign.

Thomas Pink's eCommerce team have been able to use this data in a number of interesting yet common-sense ways other than simply identifying how many sales were generated through the last email campaign.

Profitable times

The best time to send marketing emails depends largely on what you're sending and who and where your recipients are – what works for one business might not work for another.

Based on previous campaigns, Thomas Pink could measure opening rates and click-throughs as well as number and value of sales against the time of sending. From this, they aim to optimise campaign timing and maximise the return from each market. Thomas Pink also found that higher opening rates do not necessarily mean higher sales.

Safe designs

Post-click tracking has also allowed Thomas Pink to test various email designs and ascertain their effect on sales.

Recent newsletters sent have seen four slightly different designs and as part of this activity A/B tests were carried out to evaluate small nuances such as the use of different colours in emails.

In the eWorld, marketers always have to find a balance between branding and usability and Thomas Pink wanted to make sure this was at the heart of their approach.

Splitting one of their lists evenly in two, they sent out the newsletters in two different designs but with the same content – one design was more focused on brand, the other focused on accessibility and usability.

They were surprised to find that not only were open and click-through rates very similar but that the number and value of sales generated was almost identical. They also found that the colour didn't seem to have an impact on whether women or men responded better to the email.

In addition to the post-click tracking, testing for different email providers was absolutely necessary to ensure that the newsletter looked and behaved the same way in Outlook, Lotus Notes, Hotmail, Yahoo or other email providers.

The findings have given them the confidence to implement the new design without any concerns that it will adversely affect sales.

Evaluating Incentives

Incentives, a common card up the sleeve for any marketer aiming to increase sales, have also come under the scrutiny of improved reporting.

Through post-click tracking, the team at Thomas Pink studied the effect incentives have on the number of online sales and order values.

Thomas Pink usually only offers free delivery over a certain order value online so free delivery to newsletter subscribers for a limited period of time, independent of the order value, seemed to be a good incentive to use.

The team expected a good response with potentially low AOVs and, as anticipated, the number of orders placed was high but average order values stayed stable.

Clear returns

Whatever its potential uses, Jay Swanborough, Head of eCommerce at Thomas Pink, is clear on the fundamental benefit of post-click tracking: 'It's the clearest method for us to identify our return on investment.

'If your primary objective is to create online sales, then actually having a value attributed to your newsletter is a much stronger indication than open and click-through rates. However, these are still important statistics to evaluate what exactly works well and not within your email.'

Click here to find out how post-click tracking can help your business.