Digital Communications

[Katarina HongParticipant]

Metrics are vitally important to helping organizations at all levels of government optimize email outreach and engagement efforts. To get the most out of the data, it is critical to understand which metrics are most important to the public sector and why.

GovDelivery’s report, Digital Communication in the Public Sector: Improving Metrics That Matter, lays out what public sector email metrics are important and what you should be looking for.

Here are five public sector digital communication and email metric benchmarks that you should be keeping track of.

Benchmark 1: Engagement Rates. For government organizations looking at performance, engagement rate is one of the most important metrics. This shows how many individuals are interacting with your content and responding to your communication efforts over time. Some tips to improve your engagement rate is to do A/B testing to see what email version performs better, be relevant, keep it short and to the point and use strong calls to action.

Benchmark 2: Open Rates. This is the number of recipients who opened an email compared to the number who received it. Open rate is an important metric that feeds into the overall engagement rate. It is best used to understand the effectiveness of two similar messages when comparing over time. Tips to improve your open rate are to understand your audience and what they care about, be timely, have a good subject line and personalize the sender name.

Benchmark 3: Click Rates. Click rates can be a great metric for determining which messages prompt action and which need to be refined. This rate shows the percent of the recipients who clicked on at least one hyperlink within an email compared to the total number who received it. A few tips to help your click rate: experiment with different calls to action, make it easy, prioritize the links within the message and gather feedback to make adjustments.

Benchmark 4: Overlay Rates. An overlay is a clean, understated light window box that allows organizations to capture contact information from website visitors. You can connect with them and encourage them to visit a park, inform them of a policy or register for an event. Tips to having an overlay impact are to just implement an overlay, simplify it and avoid it being a nuisance.

Benchmark 5: Subscriptions per Subscriber. When people sign up for your communications, it is the start of an ongoing relationship. But organizations evolve over time with new programs or initiatives. This results in new opportunities to promote updated content to existing users. This metric is an effective way for government organizations to measure the success of this re-engagement and work to broaden the number of topics on which an organization can reach people. Tips to improve your subscriptions are to connect quickly, identify opportunities and organize subscription lists by groups.

Hopefully this report provided new insights that you can apply to your organization to improve your email programs and transform the citizen experience. To get more helpful tips about data and metrics, click here.

• This topic was modified 3 years ago by  Katarina Hong.

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