 Your Web-analytics solution is likely providing copious detail about customer and prospect behavior, such as number of unique visitors, site-navigation patterns and top entry pages. But are you using it to shed light on how well email-marketing campaigns are performing?
For example, do you know how many email visitors reached the cart and then left before completing the purchase? How long email visitors spent on each page? Which pages caused most of them to bail? Which email campaigns have higher conversion rates – even though their open and click-through rates are similar?
Answering questions like these can dramatically improve the effectiveness of email campaigns. For example, your marketing director may have a theory that free shipping and handling will boost email-campaign conversion 25 percent. web analytics can help you test whether a new offer actually worked. And it can help your creative team come up with future emails that do a better job of converting the visitors who slipped away the first time.
Beyond the click-through
The true effectiveness of email campaigns really begins, not ends, with the click-through. Email click-though rates don’t provide meaningful data about what the visitor did after arriving at your Web site. To obtain actionable data that can improve your email-marketing campaigns, look beyond the usual metrics and use web analytics to determine:
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Time on the site. To get a more holistic view of your campaign, you need to know more than how many visitors showed up. Did they stay around? For how long? You can use average time on site for all visitors as a benchmark, then compare that with average time on the site just for visitors that came in through the email marketing campaign.
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Campaign exit rate. How many people reached your landing page but didn’t convert? If you see high exit rates, you’ll probably want to reconsider how well your landing page reflects the promise you made in your email message (such as a free-shipping offer).
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Where the visitors bailed. This is crucial to consider when you want to improve performance. If you can identify a page with high abandonment, you can then do some troubleshooting.
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Pages visited after the landing page. Here is where you can extract helpful data even if visitors didn’t do exactly what you wanted. For example, you wanted visitors to make a purchase, but they downloaded a white paper instead. Or they didn’t buy online, but they went to a chat session for more information. That’s a measure of engagement and an opportunity to develop new ways to bring them back.
Integrated solutions versus the do-it-yourself approach
If your email-marketing solution and Web-analytics solution are integrated, it’s easy to extract data on individual users that you can use later to create highly targeted email marketing campaigns. Using standalone systems doesn't offer this level of granularity, but you'll still be able to track trends that affect your email visitors as a whole.
For example, if a large percentage of email visitors expressed interest in a certain product, you can make that product the centerpiece of your next email campaign. Or, if a high number of visitors exited immediately from the landing page, you can fix the landing page before your next email blast.
How can you extract this data even if your email-marketing and Web-analytics tools aren't integrated? You can create a dedicated landing page for the email campaign and monitor what groups of visitors do there.
Or, if creating a dedicated landing page for every single email campaign is too unwieldy, you can add a unique tracking parameter to the landing-page link from each email campaign, such as: www.landingpage.com?source=aug08email.
That way, you can send visitors from multiple campaigns to a single landing page, and your Web-analytics tool can use the tracking parameter to segment which visitors came from which campaigns.
If your email marketing and web analytics solutions are integrated, you can be more sophisticated in your analysis. That's because your web analytics tool will be able to feed information on what individual visitors do between entering and exiting the site back to your email-marketing tool. This gives your email-marketing team greater freedom to send targeted messages to custom segments based on their Web behavior.
Which email visitors abandoned the shopping cart? You can extract this segment from your Web-analytics tool, and remind this select group via email that the items they nearly purchased are still available. Or if a certain group visited a particular product page, you can send them additional information or special offers related to this product.
Using web analytics to monitor the true effectiveness of your email campaigns will help your marketing team create more relevant messaging, boost sales conversions, exploit new opportunities for cross-selling and recover missed opportunities. And it's all because you took the time to uncover what email visitors were up to after they clicked through.
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About The Author
Dan Miller is professional services and sales engineering manager at Lyris. He helps companies adopt data driven marketing techniques to improve their ROI.
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