Average Response Value

it is another user-generated performance metric that email marketers can use to measure the success of their campaigns. This metric reveals how many people typically respond to a mailing. By keeping an eye on this metric, email marketers can make changes to their broadcasts. Successful changes will cause the average response value to increase over time. While the goal of every email marketer will be to achieve a 100 percent average response value, this is likely a fools goal. Realistically, it is possible to achieve higher response numbers by changing variables in campaigns including: frequency of mailing, targeted communications to a segment of customers, mailing type, newsletter format or topic, and other variations of these elements.

Calculating the average response value for an email marketing campaign is fairly straight forward. This metric adds the click-through-rate or open rate for each mailing in a segment and divides by the number of lifetime or campaign specific mailings; the sum of click through rates / number of mailings = average response rate. For example, if the click-through-rate of the first mailing is 52% and is 60% for the second mailing, the average response value for the two mailings is 56%.

This metric can be used to examine the response over the full duration of or smaller segments of a specific campaign. Examining smaller segments of the campaign, especially a set number of newer mailings, allows marketers to keep up-to-date on their current performance. Click-through-rates from early in a campaign may skew this performance metric if large changes were made to any elements that either drastically increased or decreased the mailings’ open rate.