Maximizing Clicks in Email Marketing Campaigns for a Retail Company

Abstract

Retailers rely on strong marketing programs to make sales in a competitive environment. One of the biggest sectors of marketing is email loyalty programs. The industry uses Click Through Rate to measure the effectiveness of an email marketing campaign. Click Through Rate measures the ratio between emails sent to customers and the number of customers that open and click on the email's link. The purpose of this analysis is to define the relationship between the rate of emails sent and the amount of emails opened, opened and clicked, sent to spam, and unsubscribed. The authors' 800 million records of data consisted of all of the emails sent by a large retail company to its approximate 8 million customers and their responses to those emails for 12 weeks during the winter holiday season. The results show that the optimal send rate of 6.4 emails per week leads to an increase of emails opened and clicked while minimizing the number of users that unsubscribe, and, assuming open source revenue per click figures apply, would generate an additional $1.3 million in weekly revenue.