Today's episode includes some screen sharing and what Doug refers to as "a walk down data street." Prepare yourself for some interesting insight as Mike and Doug dig through HubSpot's Covid-19 Marketing and Sales Benchmark Data.
Editor's Note: Kudos to HubSpot for putting this data together. If you want to keep up with the changes or see the data firsthand, you can visit https://hubspot.com/covid-data.
At first glance, both Mike and Doug are impressed by what HubSpot has done with this data, but after being asked if there's value in it, Mike gets hesitant. What are you supposed to do with this data? Because to Mike, benchmark data isn't overly useful because getting really clean, good data is hard. You can't trust a lot of data out there, and it's hard to make real decisions based off of it. You can only look at the trends and compare how you are doing to see if there is something you could do to improve your business.
Taking a closer look into the data, Mike and Doug bring up some questions: What's the seasonality impact? When looking at emails, why are they using open rate as the metric? When looking at sales emails vs. marketing emails, the data is showing that sales emails are up, but open rate is down while marketing emails are up and open rate is up. There's stories out there that no one wants a sales email and marketing emails are trying their best to elicit value (or something to that effect) and that's complete BS. Lots of salespeople and marketers send out shitty emails, but lots of them also send out great ones. And when it comes to using open rate as the measurement, that doesn't tell much other than the potential that the quality of emails has declined. This leaves Mike and Doug guessing as to what happens after someone has opened. Did they engage? This prompts another question: Is it better to have an open with no action or better to have no open? You'll have to listen in to see what side Mike and Doug take.
The saddest part of this whole thing is that fact that every week since Covid has been down which is depressionary. If you want to take a look at the data yourself, be warned. Let the data inform you of the trends, and be careful about what conclusions you bring out of it.