While there are problems of scope in measuring return on investment, measuring costs was cited by a surprising number of respondents to the Mailgun survey. From one company to another, there was a distinct difference in what made up ‘cost’. The components of cost included, to varying degrees, infrastructure, software tools, data management and maintenance, compliance, creative production, and labour. Only about one in five of respondents included labour costs in their ROI analyses. Two teams working on campaigns in separate companies may report similar returns, but thanks to the difference in how they measure cost, one might achieve a tenfold ROI, the other a forty-fold. Email may be cheap and easy to optimise, but not free.
The survey results also suggest a gap between what marketers say they measure and what Mailgun states would be effective in helping marketing teams improve. Click rates and open rates are the most common measurements, followed by delivery and bounce rates. Measuring more complex, meta-indicators like revenue per campaign, revenue per email, and total channel revenue, is less common. Only 12% per cent of all email-sending teams say they use email ROI to measure performance.
