Web Analytic Matt

How Do You Track The Effectiveness of Your Email Campaigns?
Matt Hopkins posted in Web Analytics, Search Engine Marketing on March 24th, 2007

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My first question to you is “Do you track the effectiveness of any of your marketing campaigns?”. I deal with lots of companies on a daily basis that have no tracking for any of the marketing that they carry out. To me this seems very silly as you don’t know which marketing activities are working and where you are wasting money, but today I will focus on tracking the effectiveness of your email campaigns.

So, why would you want to track your email campaigns? What are the benefits?
You need to track your email campaigns so that you can differentiate the email shots that work from the ones that don’t, only then can you attempt to identify why some work and some don’t.

If you know which email campaigns drive traffic to your website, you can then start tracking which links within an email shot drove people and which didn’t. Ideally this means that you can, over time perfect your email campaigns for your market and get the best possible return on investment (ROI).

As well as knowing which email campaign drove traffic, you can also find out which campaign converted the most traffic and so track that all the way to how much money you made as a result of that one email shot. This is a true reflection of marketing ROI.

And how do we do this magical tracking?
Firstly, it isn’t magical. It really is very simple and embarrassingly easy.

Lets take an example of a newsletter sent out to 3000 current registered website users. Importantly you know who each one of those users is, well you know a name, an email address and maybe some other interesting data about them such as geographic location etc.

Using their name you can create a unique identifier for them, lets call it a UID code. Store this UID in your email database along with the users record.

Now, constructing your newsletter. Of course you need to write the content, that’s the hard part which may take many days or weeks. But the important bit is including the tracking.

You will probably have some headlines in your newsletter that link to the whole article on your main website. In these links is where the magic happens. For example, lets say that one of your links is http://www.webanalyticmatt.com/article1.html. That’s all well and good but a trackable example of the same link that takes them to the same page would be something like http://www.webanalyticmatt.com/article1.html?UID=765&Source=email&EID=22-03-2007&link=4.

Lets pull that URL apart now, notice that the only thing I added was ?UID=765&Source=email&EID=22-03-2007&link=4.

The ? shows the start of the query string for that page, importantly this does not usually impact the content on the page unless it is dynamic in some way. The UID value identifies the user, Source identifies that the visit came from an email, EID is the unique email identifier and link identifies which link within the email was clicked.

You can gain finer granularity of data with your analytics with the more specific values that you record. So if you wanted to record the users postcode in the email link as well then this could be analysed, allowing you to segment your market further.

Within your analytics application you should be able to perform look ups of your UID values against your email database to bring in the users actual full name and any other information you have on them. This gives your data real business context, especially if you only have a handful of registered clients, it allows you to monitor their website movements very closely should you wish.

Once you define a particular marketing campaign based on your tracking codes within your analytics, you can then see which email converted the most users, which email link or type of link converts the best, and event which dates are best for sending out email shots. Obviously if you have other Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that you use to determine the effectiveness of your campaigns then these should be used instead.

It is then up to you to calculate your return on investment (ROI) from your email campaigns based on the number of conversions it produces and decide whether email shots really work for your market segment.