Email marketing is an essential channel in driving sales and building trust among your customers. According to a recent Econsultancy and Adestra report, the majority of marketers still identify email marketing as the most effective way of leveraging conversions - with 73% of survey respondents ranking the approach favorably.
(Image: SaleCycle)
Unlike social media channels, which are mostly utilized as a way of boosting brand awareness and engagement, email marketing offers marketers the opportunity to follow up and nurture their leads with personalized messages. When email campaigns are crafted with care, they can lead to substantial levels of conversions.
Due to recent declines in organic reach within social media channels, the value of email marketing has become clearer to marketers. As marketing emails appear directly in the inboxes of recipients, it’s possible to create more intimate connections with prospective customers. This aids the recipient to feel better valued by a brand and thus act more affirmatively in response to their marketing efforts.
The value of email marketing can’t be underestimated, but what about businesses looking to improve on their efforts in reaching customers?
Let’s take a look into the best ways in which marketers can track conversions and optimize the success of their email marketing efforts:
Understanding The Value of Conversion Tracking
You may be successfully sending emails out to 1,000, 2,000, or 10,000 recipients, but how many of them actually lead to sales taking place? Are your messages being ignored by potential customers? Have you been lacking the insights needed to know where to change up your email marketing approach?
To make email marketing efforts more effective, it’s vital for marketers to have a sufficient level of insight available, as well as a platform on hand to perform split tests to determine the right formula for success. Marketers who fail to successfully integrate their campaigns in with marketing funnels are running the risk of letting perfectly valid conversions fall out of their sales funnel.
Email services like MailChimp, VerticalResponse, and Constant Contact offer some useful insights for marketers to sink their teeth into regarding open rates, click-through rates, and various other metrics that can help to refine email marketing approaches while spending budgets in a wise manner.
However, analytics can help to provide far greater levels of optimization for businesses and their campaigns, and there are plenty of ways in which they can help to optimize a customer’s journey through various sales funnels.
Tracking Your Email Campaign Performance With Actionable Metrics
One of the most effective tools for marketers to implement is called ‘beyond the click tracking,’ which analyses the journey that visitors take once they’ve clicked through from an email onto a website.
It’s here that your web analytics tools can kick in and monitor the progress of users from specialist email landing pages, or your emailing system transfers its tracking depending on whether there are tracking codes embedded within the email system.
For businesses that are intent on comparing tools like Klaviyo vs. Mailchimp and tracking the quality of their marketing campaigns, it may be worth conducting a level of research before choosing an email service to see the level of beyond the click tracking that they utilize. For the best results, businesses should look for website visitor tracking, conversion points, and the automatic tagging of email campaigns along with plenty of analytical insights.
Some good platforms for tracking traffic and conversion sources are Google Analytics and Finteza - all feature heavy levels of traffic and UTM tracking.
How Analytics Platforms Can Provide Insights Into Email Traffic
Google Analytics can be great for tracking email traffic and gaining insights into the performance of your campaigns. It also provides embedded analytics capabilities. One of the most effective ways of monitoring your email sales performance is by creating a custom advanced segment where it’s possible to isolate visitors from email in order to understand how they behave once they arrive on your pages.
To add an advanced segment for an email marketing campaign within Google Analytics, marketers should select the advanced segment option using the down arrow at the top above the reports in Google Analytics. Once this process has been completed, choose ‘Create New Segment’ and set the medium to ‘Email.’
(Image: Smart Insights)
The advanced segment needs to be based on all visits to the site, as this is how you will have labeled your links by tagging them.
The Importance of Email Coding and Tagging
Email tracking is vital in allowing marketers to understand where their campaigns are successful in winning customers and what needs improvement. Moreover, it's also important for marketers to set up DMARC, use email verification tools, and take other appropriate measures to increase email deliverability for a more successful email campaign.
To set up tracking, the links from your emails to landing pages should be tagged with standard campaign tracking parameters. These tend to consist of up to five ‘name-value’ pairs that are part of the query string for the URL - these tend to consist of everything that follows the ‘?’ in the web address - as we will soon see in the examples listed.
Below we can see an example of a URL that’s been tagged:
http://www.website.com/landing_page.htm?
utm_campaign=EupdateOct20
&utm_medium=email
&utm_source=HouseList
&utm_term=editorial-link
&utm_content=header
If you’re unsure what the significance of the inclusion of ‘utm’ is, it refers to Urchin Tracking Module - the system that Google uses in order to track pages. If you’re using Google Analytics to monitor your email marketing campaigns, it may be worth utilizing Google’s Campaign URL Builder tool that allows users to add the parameters for specific pages redirected from email campaigns. The parameters are listed below:
For marketers who aren’t familiar with this method of tracking arrivals from email campaigns, the process is easy to pick up, and once a level of competence has been built up it will become easier to set up spreadsheets for creating links.
When creating recurring newsletters, it’s a good idea to write a script that creates an HTML page with tagged links already included.
Tracking Customer Behaviour
It’s worth remembering that you should always explore the full lists of features available before choosing software that promises to help your business to keep track of the actions of email recipients on your pages. Premium solutions like Vero aim to facilitate this need by generating comprehensive reports concerning customer conversions that have been directly prompted by emails.
As opposed to simply tracking email open rates and click-throughs, it’s possible to effectively monitor conversions, which can be particularly helpful in working out the true ROI associated with an email campaign. Another way to help manage your campaigns is through creating an AI email assistant. They can ease the burden of organizing, editing, and composing emails, making your job to track ROI a lot easier.
Fundamentally, while some marketers can opt to use more rudimentary data to check how many recipients are taking the time to read emails and act on them, the stats can’t properly be converted into tangible insights unless the customer’s on-site behaviour is monitored.
For example, click-through-rates may indicate that recipients are bothering to go to the effort of opening email marketing from your business, but the link that’s commonly being clicked on may not lead to a conversion - and could in fact be an ‘unsubscribe button. Differentiating between the behavior of recipients is key to gaining an understanding of whether your money is well invested or thrown away on misleading figures.
(Image: GetVero)
Attribution stats help to take marketers one step further in uncovering where campaigns fit inside of a marketing mix. One of the most significant reasons why this approach is so effective in tracking the performance of email marketing campaigns is because it takes into consideration the context in which your messages are distributed. Email campaigns can be set up in a series, an ongoing campaign, or simply an educational piece.
As with blogging and various other forms of content marketing, it won’t always be the case that a customer receives an email and immediately feels compelled to buy a product as a direct result. In many cases, there are campaigns that are specifically designed to peddle sales, but there can also be more wholesome, trust-building content, too.
Consider your priorities surrounding a more educational email campaign. In this case, a customer may find a blog post via an organic search, subsequently register for a month-long email marketing course, and eventually, make a purchase after receiving six weeks worth of emails but instead of clicking through from the email actually enters the sales funnel after entering the company name into a search engine.
With less adaptable marketing programs, it may appear that the customer made the purchase directly as a result of an organic search, when in fact, the sale was almost entirely driven by the emailing campaign. Applying your budget where it’s set to be most effective is vital, so investing in more adaptive analytical engines could pay dividends in ensuring that your money is spent on the most effective ways of encouraging users to enter your sales funnel.
The world of marketing is becoming ever-stronger, with more avenues than ever to explore in a bid to win new customers and generate more sales.
Despite being relatively long-in-the-tooth in terms of modern marketing, email still remains one of the most effective ways to build a successful campaign, but only if businesses are willing to invest in software that can accurately monitor the performance of each email they send.
When time quite literally means money, it’s imperative that each newsletter, personalized offer, educational piece, or value-adding content makes an impact.
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Written by DesignCrowd on Monday, November 2, 2020
DesignCrowd is an online marketplace providing logo, website, print and graphic design services by providing access to freelance graphic designers and design studios around the world.
