Email Stats Galore Are Great, But What Can You Really Do With Them?

If you do email marketing you'll want to check out EmailStatsCenter.com, which posts email research stats from a great many sources on a great many email-related topics. (Thanks to Katie Paine for pointing it out.) I just love reading a tidbit like "Average time allocated to a newsletter after opening it only 51 seconds. - Jakob Nielsen (2006)" and thinking about how that reflects on how we do the Measurement Standard.

Do we have anything like this for PR measurement? I can imagine a vast online compendium of public relations research results. I know a few sites that provide a lot of resources, including KDPaine&Partners' measuresofsuccess.com, the IPR site research section and Constantin Basturea's NewPRWiki. But none of them offer the browse-able bazaar of stats that is EmailStatsCenter.

Maybe there's a good reason. As you look through all those research results, you've got to wonder how much you can trust them to be applicable to your own situation. Don't get me wrong, I think EmailStatsCenter is pretty cool, but there are lots of reasons why any given result might have limited usefulness, despite how interesting it seems at first. As we all know, this stuff is so complicated that research results are often specific to specific situations. And PR measurement is so complex that a pile of stats might not be that useful without:

1.) Links back to the original reseach papers so you could check the methodology, and

2.) Some expert analysis to help understand what the stats really mean. As Chris Nolan at Spot-on said recently (he is talking about the value of newspapers, but still...), "The editorial function - finding what's important, or good or interesting - and showing it to a larger group of people in a way an audience understands and appreciates isn't going to be replaced by the search for raw information." And so maybe all those research stats should come with an experienced guide. And a caveat about the dangers of a little knowledge... --WTP

Comments

[Simms Jenkins]

Thanks for the mention and your interesting take on stats (for email and other marketing channels). I agree they are not very helpful unless you apply them to specific situations. Again, no one should base their email strategy on a few stats but there was a void in information like this. We tried to fill this void and I hope we did so in decent fashion (launch was today - site should expand and improve over time).
I think people will use them in presentations, reports and quick references. Maybe even to compare against their own internal metrics.
Enjoy!