Evidence is the difference between theory and fact, and—as it relates to email—between saying email marketing is valuable and proving it. Any organization using email marketing is going to want to see evidence that results are being produced, and if you are the individual in charge of producing those results, your best friend in such situations is your data. If that word strikes fear into your heart, don’t worry, a term as all-encompassing as “data” can be intimidating in the big picture. But if you break it down, attaining the data you’re after is as simple as answering three questions:
1) What do I want to measure?
2) How am I going to measure it?
3) How can I make sure there is actually something to measure?
What do I want to measure?
Answering the first question is a good exercise, because it requires you to step back and define exactly what sort of results you need to see in order to consider your email program a success. Are you using email as a way to drive sales? If so, you’ll want to track visitors who arrive at your site via email to see what percentage of that traffic results in conversions. If your emails function mainly as a vehicle to sell advertising, keep close tabs on any factors that could contribute to higher/lower response to those ads—day of week, ad format, newsletter content, time of day, etc—and adjust accordingly to drive the results that will keep advertisers coming back.
How am I going to measure it?
How you measure your data is largely dependent on the resources available to you. Using an email service provider such as SubscriberMail will provide you with a reporting toolset that makes it easy to track and organize your email performance data. However, the data provided by your ESP can only tell the story up until a recipient clicks one of the links within your email. From that point, you’ll need to rely on your web analytics platform (whether a paid platform or a free service such as Google Analytics) to track visitors’ activity on your website. By adding the proper parameters to the links within your emails, you can make sure email traffic is tracked separately from regular web traffic in your web analytics platform. Once both of these systems are in place, and working in tandem, you’ll be able to create a variety of filters and funnels that make it easy to track the data that is most important to measuring the success of your program.
How can I make sure there is actually something to measure?
There are a few things you can do to make sure you have data to measure. First of all, don’t be so excited about the idea of running reports and seeing the results of your hard work that you forget to spend the necessary time on the “nuts ‘n bolts” beforehand. Assuming you are using both an ESP and a web analytics platform, take time to double-check (and test!) that the steps have been taken to enable proper tracking. Are the right parameters being added to all links within your emails that you want to track? Do all pages of your site have the appropriate web analytics tracking code installed (including any sub-domains)?
Once you are sure that data from your campaigns will be tracked the way you would like, optimize your emails to give recipients a “nudge” in the most important direction. If your goal is for recipients to fill out a registration form on a page of your site, make sure an enticing link to that page is the main call-to-action of your message. Include a link to the page in your pre-header. Some recipients will have your images blocked, so use ALT text behind images to persuade these recipients to visit your page as well. Point email links directly to the page with the registration form (i.e. not your homepage), and try to design the landing page in such a way that it is easy for visitors to take the next desired action—why add a hurdle so close to the finish line? Lastly, be sure to set up some sort of confirmation/thank you page that displays once visitors submit the registration form—it’s this confirmation page that represents the point of conversion you’ll want to measure in your analytics platform. Give your “goal” the best chance to be realized by making the conversion process as quick and easy as possible for visitors.
Check out Part 2 of “Email as a Data Source”
