Enabler provide best practice advice around integrating Google Analytics with your email marketing software for B2B and B2C communications, from a multi award-winning email agency.

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Looking beyond the clicks: analytics – chapter two

If you read our first Reporting and Analytics blog, you’ll already know the importance of tracking your email campaigns, and what key metrics you should be recording.

So now you’ve got the basics covered, we’re going to delve deeper into email reporting metrics, more specifically looking at link tracking and Google Analytics integration. Excited?

You should be, because these metrics could help you turn clicks into conversions… now that’s exciting.

 

Why do we look beyond the click?

Every good marketer knows that ‘click thru’ rates are an essential metric that tell you how many people clicked on the links within your email, giving you a good indication of how engaged your customers were with your content. However, click thru rates do not give you the full picture of what happened past the initial click… did the customer make a purchase… did they drop off your website?

In order to find out how your customers are behaving once they land on your website, you need to put some tracking in place within your links and on your website.  This helps to unlock your customers’ behaviour beyond the click, and for that, we need Google Analytics…

 

How to track your customers using Google Analytics

Now this might get a bit technical, but bear with us as it’s worth it…

Google Analytics tracking works using something called the Urchin Tracking Module (UTM). You will be able to see this in action in this link:

http://www.enablermail.com/?utm_campaign=march-marketing-email1&utm_content=group1&utm_medium=email&utm_source=enabler&utm_term=offer-link

Everything after the first “?” in the link is the UTM, and it can be broken down into the following:

  • utm_campaign: Refers to the campaign name (in this instance we would be referring to the March marketing email.

  • utm_content: Content is used to track an individual or segments response. This could be based on any field in your database, for example user-id. For this example we have used a rather generic “group 1”, because who knows what data you hold! (Your options are endless). It’s important to note that this, like term, is an optional field.

  • utm_medium:  Tells analytics the medium used for marketing, (in this instance we would be talking about email).

  • utm_source: This is usually the media owner, but for email marketing it can be used to specify the source of email list or type of email, e.g. houselist, welcome-email, abandoned-basket. For the purposes of the link above we are using Enabler (the greatest email product on the planet… of course 😉 ).

  • utm_term: In AdWords, term is used to identify the keyword used to trigger the ad, but it can be used in email marketing to identify individual links e.g. offer-link. It is important to note that this is an optional field in email campaigns if your email provider lets you set up trackable links.

 

 

How do you create your own UTM codes?

There are three main ways you can create UTM codes.

1. Through your Email Service Provider (ESP)

Many ESP’s will have in-system methods of creating UTM codes. Enabler, for example, does it through its Web Links section, allowing you to fully customise your the tracking of your links.

2. Manually writing them

This is the long way of doing it, but there’s nothing to stop you manually adding tracking to the end of your link. All you need do is take my little template here:

?utm_campaign=xxx&utm_content=xxx&utm_medium=email&utm_source=xxx&utm_term=xxx

Just update the ‘xxx’ with your own tracking information, then add it onto the end of your link. Simples.

3. Using the URL builder in Google Analytics

Let Google create a custom URL which you can track through Analytics.  The URL builder tracking is limited in that it only allows you to enter the values for the parameters, for example, the campaign name and keywords, but this useful tool is a handy of generating a custom URL quickly.

 

 

Is there any best practice advice?

Link tracking is there to best used to suit your reporting purposes, so there’s no wrong way to do it, but here are some suggestions which should help point you in the right direction:

  • Naming conventions: Consider standardising this. Remember, each URL will have multiple parameters, you will want to keep it as clean as possible, and having a standard naming convention across the board will make this easier to manage for reporting purposes.

  • Type case:– Keep it lowercase.

  • Remember – Customers can see the URL too! This is one that people often forget, whatever your parameters are, your customers will be able to see in the link in their browser. Make sure whatever naming you use, is something you don’t mind being visible.

  • Use what you need: only use parameters that are 100% necessary to your campaign.

  • Shorten it: UTM codes can make links incredibly long. It’s always worth considering using a link shortening service like bitly or goo.gl to manage this.

 

How can you tell which traffic came from emails?

The best way to do this is to set up an Advanced Segment in Google Analytics which will report solely on your email traffic.

To set this up, select the Advanced Segment option using the down arrow at the top left above the reports in Google Analytics, then choose “Create New Segment” and set the Medium to “Email”. The Advanced segment will now be based on all visits to the site with a medium of ‘email’ set, provided that this is how you have labelled your links by tagging them.

Before you send out an email campaign, make sure you’ve tested the tracking by sending yourself (and preferably a few colleagues) the email, and clicked through to your website. Then log into Analytics to check you can see that the clicks are being registered by your new Advanced Segment in Analytics.

 

 

Can you see who is converting based on my email campaigns?

I’m glad you asked!  There are a few ways you can do this, but the ways we have found most successful is the use of Event Tracking and Page Tracking in Google Analytics.

Event Tracking essentially works by embedding an image tag within your email with information that Google can use to track customers from email clicks through to conversion. (See Google Developers for more detailed information on how to set up your Events). Once you have your Event set up, you will need to add the URL into your email. It would need to be positioned within your email like this:

<html>

<head>

…some other head contents…

</head>

<body>

…some other body contents…

<img src=”URL GOES HERE”/>

</body>

</html>

and the link would look something like this:

http://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&tid=UA-12345678-1&cid=CLIENT_ID_NUMBER&t=event&ec=email&ea=open&el=recipient_id&cs=newsletter&cm=email&cn=Campaign_Name

This link will tell Google everything it needs to know to track your conversions.

Page Tracking works slightly differently, but is similar in concept. Each email service provider will have a slightly different way of doing this, but the idea is the same. On Enabler, your dashboard report will have a line in the report which feeds back information about revenue generated.

It does this by working in conjunction with your tracked links and your website. In order to track the pages that your audience visit after they’ve landed on your site, the site needs to send some information to Enabler. In this regard Enabler works in the same way as Google Analytics and requires that each page you wish to track contains a small snippet of code.

Some of this may sound complicated, but trust me when I say that the initial leg work is worth it.  So many of us have problems justifying the email campaigns we want to deploy, and in-depth tracking helps demonstrate how valuable a channel email really is.

Additionally, I don’t know about you, but I’m a sucker for watching the sales pour in after a campaign has gone out. That’s right, analytics is fun.  Happy tracking!

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Tracking your email campaigns – the key metrics for reporting and analytics

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So much information is available about email campaigns now that it can be hard to separate out what’s useful and what’s not, and sometimes even harder to know how to use the data you have to inform and improve your future campaigns.

Don’t worry though, I’m here to help!  I’ll talk you through which metrics are important and how you can use these metrics to improve your results.

 

Firstly, tracking your email performance is super important. There are three key reasons why you should make tracking your campaigns a priority:

Three Reasons to Track Your Email Campaigns:

1. Moving on up

Without tracking your emails, you’re not going to know how they are performing or be able to compare what works and what doesn’t. This means that in future sends, you’ll have no way of making them better, or even knowing what content you should or shouldn’t be using. With tracking in place you can get to know your customers better and, in turn, give them more of what they want.

2. The proof is in the tracking

Marketing budgets can be tight, and the higher-ups in your business may be looking for areas to make cuts in. Having the stats which prove the ROI of your efforts can be the difference between you being able to send effective emails and missing out on a key area of digital revenue.

3. Focus pocus

You’re a busy person, you’ve probably got a million and one things on your plate. Having metrics available that show you where you’re performing well will help you drive more focus to the areas that need help, and allow you to nurture the areas that are already doing well. It gives you a comprehensive overview of how to split your time, and in the marketing world, it’s imperative to success.

 

 

Now we know why we’re tracking, let’s take a closer look at what we’re tracking. These are the key metrics that you absolutely 100% of the time want to focus your attention on:

Open rate

Open rate measures how many people on your email list opened up your campaign and is usually expressed as a percentage. Let’s say that you sent your email to 100 people and you got an open rate of 30%.  This means 30 people out of the 100 you sent to opened your email.

Open rates will vary hugely, dependent on anything from list size to method of data acquisition.  Here is a list of average open rates split out by industry to give you an idea of what to benchmark your open rates against.  If you’re an Enabler customer, you’ll be able to find your open rate quickly in the dashboard report.

 

Knowing whether you have a high or low open rate is a good gauge of how effective your subject line has been at engaging people and driving them to open the email.  If you have a consistently low open rate, it could mean that your email might have ended up in the recipient’s junk/spam folder, which hardly anyone checks.  If you have a low open rate, it’s worth taking a look at your email deliverability.

 

Click-through rate (CTR)

Click-through rate measures how many people clicked on the links within your email and, like open rate, is usually expressed as a percentage. It’s calculated by the amount of people who clicked on your email, divided by the number of people who opened it. Let’s say you sent that same email to the 100 people. A CTR of 30% in that instance would mean that for every 10 people who opened the campaign, 3 went on to click a link.

Your CTR will vary based on a number of factors, including email content and list size. You can find a list of average click through rates by industry here. If you’re an Enabler customer, the click throughs for your campaigns can be found in the dashboard report.

Knowing your CTR is vital, as not only does it tell you how engaging your customers found your email content, but it will also show you want content they found the most or least engaging and if your calls-to-action worked.  This information is vital in making content improvements for future campaigns.

 

Unsubscribe rate

Unsubscribe rate measures how many people unsubscribed from your email list for a particular email or set of emails.  It’s expressed as a percentage (are you seeing a theme yet?) and is calculated by the amount of people who unsubscribed from your campaign divided by the amount of people who received it.  For example, a 2% unsubscribe rate would mean that for every 100 people who received your campaign, 2 people unsubscribed.

If your unsubscribe rate is below 2%, you’re within industry norms, however I’d always be looking to see an unsubscribe rate under 1% to truly know you’re sending the most relevant content to your customers. The only time I’d expect an unsubscribe rate to be higher is if you’re sending to a list you haven’t sent to in a while, or if the data is very new, as they tend to unsubscribe more if you haven’t been communicating with them regularly.

Now although no one like to think of people unsubscribing from their emails, it’s actually bad practice to not include an unsubscribe link – so best practice is to make it clearly visible (preferably at the top of your email).  Many email providers like Google could penalise your email domain for not having an unsubscribe link, and send (any future emails) to the junk folder – so always include the unsubscribe link.

 

Bounce rate

You might notice that sometimes when you send an email, the amount of people you send to isn’t always the same amount as the people who receive it. This is due to bounces. Bounce rate measures the percentage (here we go again) of email addresses you tried to send to, who didn’t receive your message.

Bounces can occur for any number of reasons, including the recipients email inbox being full, the email address no longer existing or because the recipients mail provider marked you as spam.  Generally speaking, a bounce rate is healthy if it’s less than 3%. Anything higher and I’d check your data for problems. If you’re an Enabler client you can see your bounce rate in the dashboard report.

 

Email Visits

Email visits will measure how many people visited your site by clicking through from your email marketing campaigns.  It’s a fantastic way of comparing how your email campaigns are performing against other channels like social media and search. It’s an especially important one if driving traffic to your website is important (and I’m going to go ahead and guess it is!).

Tracking your email visits helps you gauge how relevant the links from your emails were and how the site content performed.  The most important things to look at as well as tracking the number of visits is looking at Average Session Duration (time on site), Page/Session Views(how many pages they viewed) and Bounce Rate.  Bounce rate is especially important to note because if people are clicking through from your emails then leaving your site straight away, it could mean the page you’re linking to either isn’t engaging, relevant or isn’t correct.  Having a high bounce rate can affect how Google perceives and lists your site on search engines, so try to keep bounce rates to below 40% for all channels.

If you’re an Enabler client you can add Google Analytics tracking to each of your links in your campaign under the weblinks section. This will enable you to see each individual campaign and how it’s performing when you log into your Analytics and watch your stats build.

 

Email Conversions

Email conversions will measure the number of customers who converted, (e.g. made a purchase, signed up for a product, etc), that were directly driven by your email marketing campaign.  With the majority of marketers, the aim is ultimately to drive sales for your business – which makes this metric incredibly useful. It can give you quantifiable data with which to justify all your upcoming email marketing decisions. This very much goes back to the proof point of ‘why track?’.

 

So there you have it.  Three reasons to track and six metrics you should be tracking.

Each one of these metrics should help you to make decisions about the next campaign you do, and give you the data you need to make your campaigns as successful as they can be.

Happy tracking!

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Email marketing: back to basics

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Email marketing traditionally has the highest ROI of any digital channel and is one of the most effective tactics to use within an integrated marketing mix.

In an era when existing and potential customers are accessible 24/7 via a smartphone, not optimising your email campaigns for mobile devices could mean you might be missing out on some great opportunities.

You might be surprised to hear that the average adult spends over 20 hours online per week – more than doubling in a decade.  As well as having on average three social media profiles to maintain, your potential customers are browsing online for almost everything. From grocery shopping to booking flights, streaming their favourite programmes or making bank transfers – your customers are doing anything and everything online – so having a strong digital presence is vital.  Although I’d suggest using an integrated marketing mix to target your customers using at least three channels, I’d like to focus on the benefits of one of those core channels: Email Marketing.

Email campaigns are not only designed to generate sales but also to inform, increase brand awareness, advocacy and trust. The most common forms of email marketing are newsletters, lead nurturing, paid email and so called ‘triggered’ email to mention just a few. All of these campaign formats come down to creating content that is of interest to your target audience.
Simple!  Or is it?  It all depends how well you know your target audience.

 

Before you press send: Set your goals

I can’t stress strongly enough the importance of setting campaign specific goals. This helps you to keep your campaign on track, gain meaningful analytics and gauge return on investment.
Before you start planning your email campaign, ask yourself: what do you want to achieve? You may want to drive traffic to your website or social media channels, or promote a product or service. Whatever your goal, setting targets helps you to measure engagement and ROI, draw conclusions, and implement any necessary changes to help improve future campaign performance.
Once you have set clear goals for the campaign, you can start planning content. Although it seems that content is king, there are still many companies out there who do not target their content effectively. There’s nothing more off-putting than wasting a customer’s time by offering them content of no interest to them. It’s also the quickest and most effective way of losing some great prospects by prompting them to press the ‘unsubscribe’ button.

 

Content: Be relevant and be informative

‘What’s relevant content?’  I hear you ask… Well, it depends on factors such as industry, data available, creativity or the abilities of your agency. There are many ways of creating great content.
For the fashion industry it could be all about seasonal trends, latest collaborations or ‘dress to impress’ tips. A company that operates within the steel industry could send their customers a useful guide to different steel grades, examining steel’s strength, parameters and the heat resistance of steel components for relevant industries.  Other ideas for relevant content could be recent changes in legislation that could affect your customers or advising customers about your new products and services.

The simple rule is to do some research on your target audience, via customer satisfaction surveys, seminars, social media monitoring and so on, so they can tell you what content they are likely to engage with.

 

Testing, testing…

Once the email content is finished and the campaign is ready to be sent, it’s time for testing. There are two ways of testing and I suggest you use both methods. The first one is to enter preview mode from the menu to get an overall idea of what the campaign will look like. The second and most accurate method is to send a test email to yourself and your colleagues. You should ask them to proofread it and give feedback on:

•    Subject line
•    Images/ design/ font
•    Links and call to action

When testing, inbox rendering should also be taken into account and that doesn’t mean just sending a test to your smartphone and email. Most customers don’t use the same device as you and as so the HTML will display differently on their device. It is a good idea to send a test to an email rendering service website that enables you to preview how it will display with different email providers such as Outlook, Android, iPhone etc.

Other aspects of email testing are dynamic and personalised content. It’s a good idea to do test sends to ensure all the merge fields like firstname display correctly when sent, and even better to preview test the different data your dynamic content is centred on, i.e. gender, industry etc, to see how the template responds and if it requires adjustment. Once you are satisfied everything looks great, all the links and CTA work, and everything renders correctly, you’re good to go and send your campaign!

 

Time to send

Timing is everything they say and your email campaign is no exception. Depending on your customer base, industry and the time of year, there will be certain times when your email campaign should be sent out in order to be most effective in terms of open rates and responsiveness. There’s numerous blogs out there, each giving you different days and times of when you ‘should’ send your campaign, but the best practice is to track your own campaign data.  Send customers your emails on different days of the week and different times of day, track when the open and click through rates are at their highest – your own data will tell you when’s the best time to send your campaign.

 

Bounce Backs or Unsubscribes?  What to do next…

So you’ve created the right content, chosen the right software and sent the email campaign. But you received an ‘undelivered’ message and your email bounces back. If this happens, common practice is to investigate why the email address is not valid and update it.  The ‘unsubscribed’ list should also be updated after each email campaign. Although it is a shame to see a customer opting out of email communications, it’s essential to update our customers’ preferences after each campaign in line with their request.

 

Tracking is vital

Your email marketing software will have a tracking tool built into it so you can work out what happened once you hit the send button.  As with any other marketing activity, tracking is crucial for measuring campaign success. The most relevant data to capture is delivery rate, open rate and click-through rate.  If you’ve got trackable links, then you should also be recording the traffic and leads your email campaigns have generated to really gauge their ROI effectiveness. Consequently, the more attention you pay to tracking your current campaigns and implementing changes, the greater the chance of future campaign success.

 

Don’t leave it with an email – Follow up

Follow up activities are crucial, especially for product-related, sales-orientated campaigns. Some organisations will gather the list of customers who opened and engaged with the email and follow it up with an additional piece of comms via email, a phone call, snail mail etc to discuss if the customer would like some more information or place an order.

 By contacting those customers who engaged with your initial campaign content, you can start to build relationships with your potential customers and generate new leads.

Moreover, following up enables you to put a voice to your brand that reinforces your campaign message, which should give you more trust with your customers, making them more likely to respond to any future emails you send them and therefore less likely to unsubscribe.

Using these simple tools, you’re sure to build targeted campaigns with content that’s engaging.

Email is just one string in the digital marketer’s bow, but it is probably one of the most vital in helping you build and maintain relationships with your customers and generate revenue.

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