According to a study on email marketing commissioned by iContact, more than half of small to med-sized companies use up to 20% of their marketing dollars on email marketing efforts. Chances are, you are already using email in your campaigns or have intentions to include email in the mix just as soon as you have a big enough list.
The majority of email marketing tools include tracking, or reporting, as a feature. Email tracking is accomplished by using cookies and web beacons and is very easy to implement provided you are using HTML messages. The key is to make sure you select a provider that supports tracking.
When you send an email message that is tracked, a tiny, invisible tracking image (single-pixel gif) is embedded by the email provider along with the content of the email. When the message is opened by the recipient, the tracking image is referenced sending some important metrics to the provider. Every time the recipient clicks on a link or opens an attachment, a different tracking code is activated and recorded by the system. Email providers aggregate these responses and make reports available to you.
Typical reports from email providers include the following metrics: Sent, Opened, Bounced, Unsubscribed, Clicks, Click-Through Rate. These metrics are not sufficient to help you understand the role of email in your integrated campaigns.
You want to know:
- How many people came to your website from the links in the email?
- How many people completed the call to action in the email?
- What is your ROI from the email marketing?
- What role did email play in the overall campaign success?
In order to answer the above questions, you have to go a step further when you are creating your email. You have to add Google Analytics tags to the destination URLs.
What do I mean by that? Google Analytics puts traffic in various buckets based on the values of certain variables. Google supports a lot of variables and lets you add custom variables. But for the purpose of this discussion we are primarily interested in the following variables:
Variable / Details
utm_source / Name of the email provider (Required)
utm_medium / “email” because we are talking about email tracking (Required)
utm_campaign / Something to identify the specific campaign (Required)
Once you have identified the destination URL and the values for the above variables, you can use the Google Analytics URL builder to get the complete tagged URL. Now set the hyperlink in the email to the value returned by the Google Analytics URL builder.
For example: An email we recently sent had the following link for “Signup for the Sandbox” button.
www.smartmpm.com/sandbox?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=agency-sandbox
Today nearly 42% of all commercial email is opened on mobile devices according to a study by Litmus Labs. Yet the 2013 Email Marketing Report from MarketingSherpa says that 58% of email marketers aren’t designing their emails for mobile devices in mind.
People are more sensitive to email downloads that have images on their phones due to expensive cellular data plans. Once the recipient sees it on their mobile device it is marked as read, but the email did not have true impact because the images were not downloaded. Creative ways to overcome these challenges with mobile devices will be addressed later, keeping the blog length in mind.
This post is part of a series on Your Integrated Marketing Strategy.
Catch the previous post on setting up goals and conversions here.
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