RECENCY
When did your subscribers last interact with your email campaigns?
Recency is the third and final customer engagement metric we recommend you monitor. Put simply it is a measure of how long it has been since any given subscriber or group of subscribers on your list interacted with your email campaign(s). Here at Alchemy Worx we pay particular attention to recency metrics because they not only tell us a great deal about why open rates for example are rising or falling; but when used in conjunction with open reach (how many people have opened at least one message) and open frequency (how many emails your subscribers have opened), they give us a multi dimensional view of what is going on.
The key factor influencing the recency of subscriber interactions is the percentage of your subscribers that open more than one of the emails that you send per month/quarter/year. The more subscribers you have that open 1 in 2 emails received as opposed to 1 in 4 emails the better your recency will be.
In the example of open recency above; you can see for example that 29% of subscribers last opened/enabled image download in June; and 47% of subscribers have opened at least one email in the last quarter. However the chart also shows that 40% of subscribers have not opened a single email for 6 or more months. You might also want to investigate what you did in February that was so effective or what went wrong in January and March.
This immediately begs the question: what benchmark should I set for recency?
The first question to ask is how many of the emails you send can you reasonably expect a subscriber to your program to open. And that will depend on the following:
1. Sales or purchase frequency or cycle - grocery retailers or office supply companies for example might expect 1 or more transactions a month from a subscriber to their emails, while a hotel or company selling insurance might only expect 1 or 2 a year!
2. Value-added Content - do the emails you send contain content that will provide value even if the subscriber is not about to make a purchase?
3. Offer - most consumers know a truly great offer when they see one and as such are highly likely to (re)engage with your email program when they see a great offer. Given that you cannot make a truly great offer every time you send an email, a lot of consideration should be given to timing and targeting.
4. New subscribers - are more likely to interact with your emails than old subscribers, so a growing list will have better recency profile than an ageing list.
Once you have decided on what a reasonable expectation for frequency is, you can set your recency benchmarks; for example 60% of your list should have opened at least one email in the last 6 months. Your frequency objectives will heavily influence and enhance your approach to triggered campaigns, timing and targeting of offers, lifecycle messaging and ultimately your results.
