Is Anyone Measuring Response Rates on these Emails?

If I start posting really bad email solicitations that I get, will they stop? Each time I get a solicitation email that is just so bad from a reputable company, I have to ask myself, are they measuring the feedback? The click through rates? The unsubscribes? I have to conclude no. Someone inside the company must be concluding that these emails are good for business, but no one on the management team is looking at the metrics.

Here is one from an analyst firm:

From: Chris xxxxx
Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2014 2:25 PM
To: Bryan Semple
Subject: Chris with xxxxx ( changes @xxx)

Hi Bryan,

Not sure if you heard the news, but xxxxx did some internal reorganizing and you’ll now have just one point person for all the xxxxxx brands. With that, please let me know if I can be of assistance in any way. Attached is a one-sheeter on the xxx brands.

Sincerely,

Chris

The email is written as though I have a relationship with this firm ( I don’t), and even if I did, do I really care about their internal organization? Would the news of this firms internal organization really even show up on my radar? As marketers we are busy enough trying to make sure we are tracking our own external news, social mentions, and news of our competitors. Paying attention to the internal organization announcements of one of our vendors? Serious?

Here is another one from a company recently purchased by one of the major social networking platforms out there. Think really big. Not a small player.

From: Mike xxxxxxx
Sent: Thursday, September 18, 2014 2:15 PM
To: Bryan Semple
Subject: Touching base

Hi Bryan,

Hope you’re well. We’ve had a lot of exciting developments in the past few months, including xxxxxx acquisition of xxxxxx.

I also wanted to reach out to let you know that we’ve recently updated our media kit, which outlines xxxxxx full-funnel marketing solutions that help you:

Reach new prospects via targeted display, social, and video advertising
Nurture existing audiences using display and social advertising through multi-channel nurturing

Our newest offering, xxxxxxxxxx Nurturing, is helping customers engage more known prospects, convert more anonymous website visitors, and ultimately increase lead velocity into pipeline.

Can we chat about how you could incorporate this at SmartBear?

Best regards,

Mike

This entire email is to send me their media kit in the hopes I would reach out to them. I can’t imagine the CTR on this email is above .1%.

For all email communication we do at SmartBear, I always ask three questions:

which segment did you mail as we have highly segmented lists of prospects that respond differently
what was the click through rate
what was the form conversion rate once someone landed on the site

With these three pieces of information, I can:

use historical measures to see if the reported CTR really is high. Five percent might sounds great, but if this is the customer list that historically gets 10%, 5% is not impressive
use historical measures to see if reported CTR isn’t that bad. Point seven five percent CTR to our inactive segment might be really high comparatively
validate that the action taken in the email to cause people to click matches the offer on the landing page. Without conversion, a high CTR doesn’t matter.

I only wish the multitude of other companies who email all of us each day would use similar metrics to stop the crazy email messages that we all ignore.