Press Release: Pure and Rightmove show marketers the measure of email success

Pure and Rightmove show marketers the measure of email success

Release Date: 29 November 2007

The UK’s leading property web site Rightmove’s continued success in generating traffic and return on investment from email marketing was the talking point at an industry showcase earlier this week.

Rightmove, along with email marketing company Pure, presented a case study to brand marketers on creating successful email strategies.

Pure’s Account Director Marc Munier presented with Robin Wilson, Business Development Manager at Rightmove, on how the online property portal’s sophisticated use of the PureResponse email platform and Enterprise eMarketing Toolset has resulted in a huge uplift in the commercial value of Rightmove's email marketing strategy. The case study also demonstrated how improving relevancy of email marketing has provided a healthy return on investment for Rightmove.

“Rightmove puts a huge emphasis on account management and reporting, and continues to make effective use of Pure’s expertise,” said Marc Munier, Account Director at Pure. “The company is one of the top brands within our major accounts division.”

The talk focused on measuring consumer behaviour, and included tips on how to improve the content of email campaigns

Online publisher Mad.co.uk’s ‘Email Marketing for the Real World’ conference took place at London’s Kensington Close Hotel on Tuesday.



About Pure
Award-winning Pure (www.pure360.com) is one of the top email and SMS marketing companies in the UK*, and the eleventh fastest growing new media company in the country**. Founded in 2001 by Darren Fell, Pure provides big brands and small companies with the technology, know-how and support to run effective email marketing campaigns that have a measurable, positive impact on business. Pure’s email platform, PureResponse, was created by marketers for marketers – it’s used in 40 countries by over 1,200 people. Pure counts innocent drinks, Rightmove, Truprint, EMAP and the FT among its stable of over 700 clients. Brighton-based Pure also publishes the Email Marketing Manual (www.emailmarketingmanual.com); a best practice web site and newsletter featuring brand case studies and expert comment from high profile digital industry faces each month, including journalist and industry guru Mark Brownlow - author of Email Marketing Reports.

*As featured in respected online marketing publisher E-consultancy’s Email Marketing Platform Buyers Guide 2007

**GP Bullhound’s Media Momentum awards, March 2007.


About Rightmove.co.uk
Rightmove.co.uk is the UK’s number one property website, displaying details of homes for sale or rent in the UK and overseas to the largest online audience. It has around 80% of all properties for sale and at any time displays a stock of over 1,000,000 properties to buy or rent, worth around £170 billion. The Rightmove.co.uk site receives over 25 million visits every month and is regularly ranked in the Top Ten most viewed UK websites (source: Hitwise).


For further information please contact:
Claire Armitt
020 7754 5507
07985 297842
claire.armitt@no-flannel.com

comScore: Cyber Monday Sales to Top $700 Million



ComScore Media Metrix is predicting Cyber Monday sales of $700 million, far surpassing the $608 million from last year’s Monday following Thanksgiving.



More than 50 percent (54.5) of office workers with internet access - that’s 68.5 million people - will shop at work today, up from 50.7 percent in 2006, despite the increased prevalence of high-speed broadband connections at home, according to a BigResearch survey commissioned by Shop.org (via MediaPost).


Chad White, founder of the RetailEmail blog and director of retail insights for the Email Experience Council, an arm of the Direct Marketing Association, also believes that sales today will be significantly higher than last year. He points to retailers’ email marketing activities as an indication that retailers have been making a hard push to drive sales for Cyber Monday.


However, forecasts have predicted a certain amount of gloom for the holiday season, thanks to declining economic conditions. Marketing pushes began earlier in the season to try to boost holiday sales, and some believe shopping enthusiasm today will be dampened.


Cyber Monday is no longer considered the busiest online shopping day of the season. That day generally falls on a Monday two weeks before Christmas, and is this year predicted to land on Dec. 10.



Related topics: Research, Signs of What's to Come, Feature, Planning, List Marketing, Interactive, Email, Direct...

Cyber Monday post analysis

Week-End Trends: Retailers barely slow down to chew their turkey

Email activity and promotional trends during the past week:

The RetailEmail Index rose 10% to 246—a new year-to-date high—during the week ending Nov. 23, and is up 28% from where it was four weeks ago. The Index score indicates that on average the top 100 online retailers sent nearly 2.5 promotional emails each last week.

Click to view larger
*The RetailEmail Index is a general measure of the promotional email volume generated by 100 of the top online retailers.

Last week, 95% of the retailers in the RetailEmail Index send out at least one promotional email, up from 92% the week prior, and up from 87% during the 4-weeks-ago period.

Click to view larger

Christmas (Dec. 25): Just like last year, I’ve stopped counting holiday references because nearly every retail email has a holiday angle to it at this point.

Thanksgiving (Nov. 22): The retailers in the RetailEmail Index sent 50 emails referencing Thanksgiving last week, up from 28 the week before.

Black Friday (Nov. 23): There were 44 emails referencing to Black Friday last week, up from 3 the week prior.

Cyber Monday (Nov. 26): There was 1 email that referenced Cyber Monday last week, up from zero the week before.

Other things referenced by retailers: winter sports, holiday parties

RetailEmail.Blogspot: Week-End Trends: Retailers barely slow down to chew their turkey

RetailEmail.Blogspot: Week-End Trends: Retailers barely slow down to chew their turkey

CobWebs: 10 criteria for online fundraising

November 26, 2007

CobWebs: 10 criteria for online fundraising

By Herschell Gordon Lewis
Excepting political, of course, a great many veteran fundraisers question the effectiveness of email and a monolithic Web site in competing for the fundraising dollar, pound, euro, yen, and pledge.

Shakespeare anticipated this reaction when he wrote, "The fault, Dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves." Some of the accepted procedures for commercial online marketing fall flat when applied to eleemosynary online marketing (no, the terms "eleemosynary" and "marketing" aren't mutually-canceling).

The fundraiser who sequentially at10ds to 10 relatively simple criteria should find this newest -- and admittedly the most challenging -- medium responsive. If you've become disgusted with email as a lead generator or a resuscitator or even as a reminder, a suggestion: retest, with wording congruent to the Web mindset.

An online appeal has the benefit and the curse of fast acceptance/rejection. That's Step One. Holding at10tion and immediately converting at10tion to the first of these suggested criteria is an indication of fundraising professionalism.

Criterion no. 1: Rapport
Of all 10, this one is most crucial. Assumption of a relationship, real or invented, is the essential key to positive attention. That means starting the message with rapport-laden wording, whether in the subject line or the first sentence of text. It also means discarding trickiness, cleverness, and chest-thumping.

Criterion no. 2: Rationale
Saying to the message recipient, "I'm contacting you because you are who you are" adds octane, provided the first criterion has been established. The two are Siamese twins, tightly joined at the brain. Pretending you're getting the message instead of sending it is no great challenge. Ask: Why am I contacting this person? Is it because he or she gave us money before? Is it because the last contribution was long ago or because the demographic matches our best donors? Distilling the answers should result in a rationale.

Criterion no. 3: Heroism
We all deal with the truism that every nonprofit is competitive with every other nonprofit. The typical donor has a finite amount of money to contribute to all causes. So the library competes with the symphony orchestra, which competes with the hospital, which competes with the community foundation. Being able to tell a prospective or lapsed donor, "You can be a hero" -- in credible, digestible wording -- can jog that individual off the stump of apathy.

Criterion no. 4: Logic
"We need help" is half a century out of date. Everybody needs help, which automatically diminishes this ancient approach. Instead, the first three criteria should isolate our cause on a plateau above the phone calls from shadowy law enforcement sources and direct mail that claims worthiness without the rhetorical weaponry of rapport, rationale, or heroism. Projecting the concept of logic isn't wording that says to the recipient, "This matches you"; rather, it's wording that has the recipient saying to himself or herself, "This matches me."

Criterion no. 5: Urgency
Urgency is implicit, and it also should be explicit. What makes the timing tight? Why are we in a hurry, which means you should be in a hurry to participate? What emergency exists? Careful, now: Our rapport-buddy has to accept what we regard as urgent on identical grounds. Don't sink too deeply into the overly dramatic. Panic not only isn't a sales weapon, it's a turnoff, and the rapport-switch can too quickly snap to "off." Urgency, too, becomes controversial because it's at odds with a venerable fundraising method. Note the next criterion.

Criterion no. 6: No pledges
Pledges and immediacy are at the antipodes of online appeals. You're using the "Right now" medium, and your call should stay in sync with the medium. No one can object to testing the pledge-option, but that's what it should be -- a test rather than a given. Inherent mutual speed is a characteristic that doesn't extend from the Web to standard-class direct mail. It does have a cousin -- public service space ads and broadcast commercials ... but they aren't the topic under dissection.

Criterion no. 7: Recognition
Any and every professional fundraiser knows how to stroke a donor. That's nothing new. Inclusion of publicized recognition, often decked with ribbons on a separate enclosure in a direct mail appeal, should be mentioned early on and exploited later on. The nature of online fundraising makes us wary of unexplained defections. Where did we lose that person? Immediately, because we just didn't connect? Was it halfway through the pitch? At the end, was it because we didn't convince? The early mention of recognition is a glue. It might be a weak glue, but certainly that's better than no glue.

Criterion no. 8: Guilt
Guilt is one of the great motivators of our time, and properly mounted it outweighs any of the others in fundraising. The acknowledged others are: fear, greed, exclusivity, need for approval. There are also two "soft" motivators, convenience and pleasure. In commercial online marketing, greed is the runaway winner. Being able to generate a guilt-reaction might well be the height of fundraising art. It becomes "If we fail, you fail," blended with a non-threa10ing but clear "It's up to you."

Criterion no. 9: Satisfaction
Satisfaction links itself to guilt, rewarded. Don't assume the person to whom you're communicating will complete this link without you. Hammer it home: "You'll sleep the sleep of the just tonight" is the effect. Is that specific wording too strong, too obvious, too forceful? That becomes an executive creative decision. Although all fundraising is competitive with all other fundraising, uniqueness is a mandatory component, and whether you enter the arena with guns blazing or roses tendered is a matter of intended projected image.

Criterion no. 10: Verisimilitude
Of all the criteria, verisimilitude -- the appearance of truth and validity -- is the most difficult to impose because without exquisite tuning, explanation inadvertently (or deliberately) gives way to what the reader too easily can interpret as supplication. That's all it takes to wipe out both rapport and guilt.

An absolute rule for online fundraising is that we don't have to justify our existence to those we're contacting. The salesperson who says, "I'll be honest with you," is immediately suspect.
It boils down to this: We've heard it throughout our professional careers: Direct mail doesn't work. Space ads don't work. Broadcast doesn't work. Handouts don't work. And now, online doesn't work.

Opinion: Each one works for some others. So it isn't the medium that doesn't work. It's the use or misuse of the medium that doesn't work. The fault, Dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

How Not to Deal With ISPs

Online political group Truthout.org cried foul recently after Hotmail and AOL blocked its e-mail. At the same time, Yahoo! apparently has been shunting Truthout's messages into subscribers' junk folders.

But rather than conducting an internal assessment of its e-mail program to find out why it's having delivery troubles at the three largest e-mail inbox providers, the organization's executive director Marc Ash called on subscribers to pressure the ISPs into delivering their mail.

“NOTHING works better than public pressure,” he said in a post on Truthout. “They can ignore us; they can't ignore you.”

There's a lesson here for marketers: Ash's approach couldn't be more wrong-headed.

Large ISPs don't block e-mail arbitrarily, and certainly not because of the messages' political content.

“In all my years at AOL, I can tell you that AOL never intentionally blocked an organization for their political views. I would not have allowed it,” wrote Carl Hutzler, the former head of AOL's anti-spam team, in a blog post commenting on the matter.

AOL, Hotmail and Yahoo! use spam-complaint rates — the number of people who press the “report spam” button — as the No. 1 gauge to determine whether to block incoming messages. By all accounts, a complaint rate of more than 0.5% will cause delivery problems.

E-mailers who send to too many bad addresses can also find their messages blocked. Sending to dead addresses is classic spamming behavior.

That two large ISPs are blocking Truthout's messages independently of one another is a sure indicator that Truthout's spam complaints are too high, that it's mailing too many bad addresses, or some combination of the two.

“These ISPs are competitors. They're not sharing this kind of data back and forth,” says Al Iverson, director, privacy and deliverability for e-mail service provider ExactTarget. “It's a technical issue. In the case of AOL and Hotmail, there's a big sign on the door that says if you want to come in here, you have to do ‘X,’ ‘Y’ and ‘Z.’ ”

According to Iverson, Truthout could easily clean up its act by doing the following:

  1. Sign up for feedback loops — programs that provide spam-complaint reports — at AOL and Hotmail.

  2. Make sure it unsubscribes people who complain.

  3. Ensure that bounced addresses get unsubscribed automatically.

  4. Apply for whitelist status at AOL.

Or, he said, Truthout could move to a service provider where these processes are handled automatically.

Ash didn't respond to an e-mail asking if he'd taken steps to clean up his group's e-mail practices.

W

Magilla Marketing, Ken Magill's weekly e-mail newsletter, is archived at http://directmag.com/magill/.

Videos in email: case studies and resources

Videos in email: case studies and resources

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on November 13, 2007

video screenOne of the long unanswered questions about email marketing is whether you can combine video and email in a way that works.

Like many interactive features, there are question marks over how reliably videos display when viewed within an email.

It now seems some best practices are emerging, given some recent posts and articles that crossed my desktop.

First, news of three separate companies claiming significant success with using videos in email campaigns.

Diana Dilworth reports on the results achieved by the Intercontinental Hotel Group and Wachovia. While MarketingSherpa has a case study on a video email campaign by Brighter Blooms Nursery.

The common factor in all three cases: the emails contain links to videos hosted at a website. Not videos embedded in the email itself.

If the sensible move is to use email to drive people to your video message, how do you best format the call to action?

A best practice might also be emerging here. eROI's Dylan Boyd and the folk at Emma Email Marketing both have blog posts and screenshots praising email which include both text links and image links to the online video.

The clever bit is that the images are snapshots of a video player showing a still from the video. So clicking on the player (as if you wanted to use it) will take you off to the website for online viewing.

Check the comments section on Dylan's post for discussion on the validity of the approach and an alternative.

Video looks to have a bright future among the YouTube generation and in a web world replete with enough high-speed broadband not to care about bandwidth issues anymore.

For more help on your video efforts, try this list of 150+ online video tools and resources from the folk at Mashable.

Bad design drives unsubscribes?

Bad design drives unsubscribes?

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on November 15, 2007

load images symbolMore tears were shed in 2007 over rendering problems than perhaps any other email marketing issue. Outlook 2007 broke some designer hearts and much ink has gone into suggesting ways to ensure your design works well wherever people look at it.

Not much actually gets said, though, about the consequences of emails that look ugly in particular clients or webmail services.

We kind of assume it hurts response rates, but is the reaction more extreme than just a missed click?

Buried deep within a small survey by StoneShot of the email habits of independent financial advisers (see press release) is this little gem...

When asked "What would cause you to unsubscribe from an email?", 73% said irrelevant content. (Another vote for relevancy and targeting there). But 8% said "Email does not display properly."

Leaving aside the statistical significance of that result, it's certainly a warning to those (ahem...like me) who thought a few ugly emails can't do too much harm.

Email has this nasty habit of inviting negative responses rather than just an absence of positive ones. A critical point.

Write a bad newspaper ad, people ignore it. Write a bad email, people report you as spam or unsubscribe from all future emails from you. Nobody can unsubscribe from your newspaper ads.

Just another reason to keep on chasing those best practices.

Talking of design and best practices...a couple of new links to help...

Mark Wyner tested various clients and webmail services to see how they handled image maps. Here are the results.

And Anna Billstrom has added another example to her one-woman crusade to bring home the importance of image blocking to email design.

More on design and blocked images | Tags: , ,

Do forms work in HTML emails?

Do forms work in HTML emails?

Posted by Mark Wyner on November 7, 2007

Over the years we've received loads of inquiries about the use of forms in emails, such as newsletter subscribe forms, event registration and surveys. So we decided to run some tests to get to the bottom of just how well forms are supported in all the major email environments.

Is it okay to use forms in emails? It’s not the best idea. But what do you say when your client asks you to put one in an email? You can either tell them “no” for reasons which may not make sense to them, or you can back up your defiance with some hard evidence.

The short of it is that email clients consider email forms to be a security risk. While some email clients simply warn you of potential danger, others outright disable the forms. So if your client wants to send out a form, they should know that most of their recipients will never be able to use it. And for those who can, they’ll think twice about submitting data when they see a warning from their email client.

Results Summary

Common email clients share a propensity to distrust forms in email messages. But they differed greatly in how they handled the intruding forms. Following are some notable oddities.

External data submission

Upon submitting a form in many webmail clients, a JavaScript alert announces that the form is submitting data to an external page and asks if you want to continue:

[Gmail screenshot: You are submitting information to an external page. Are you sure?]

[Yahoo! Mail screenshot: Warning! You are about to send information to someone other than Yahoo! If you do not want anyone outside of Yahoo! to have this information, click Cancel now. Remember Yahoo! will NEVER ask you for your password in an unsolicited phone call or an unsolicited email. Please change your preferences if you do not want to see this message again.]

Scam alerts

Thunderbird recognizes that the form may be malicious but doesn’t strip its functionality. Instead, it warns you of potential danger:

[Thunderbird screenshot: Thunderbird thinks this message might be an email scam.]

Odd behavior

Windows Live Hotmail shows the form. However, the form functions in an odd way; and certainly not correctly. If the form is submitted by keying the “return” key, the page is refreshed but no data is sent and the process is not completed. If the form is submitted by clicking the submit button, nothing happens. Outlook 2007 also exhibits some unique behavior in that it custom renders the form. Inputs are replaced with brackets and the submit button is replaced with the button’s value enveloped in brackets. So it's a plain-text version of what the form would look like, even though the HTML is being displayed.

Complete Results

How Forms Perform in HTML Emails
Client Form is displayed Form is functional
.Mac Yes No
Yahoo! Mail Yes Yes
Yahoo! Mail Classic Yes No
AOL Webmail Yes No
Gmail Yes Yes
Windows Live Hotmail Yes No
Apple Mail Yes Yes
Thunderbird Yes Yes
Penelope (Eudora 8) Yes Yes
Outlook 2007 No No
Outlook 2003 Yes No
Outlook Express Yes Yes
Windows Live Mail Yes Yes
Lotus Notes 8 Yes Yes
Entourage Yes Yes

The Recommendation

Given the sporadic support for forms in emails, we recommend linking to a form on a website in an email rather than embedding it therein. This is the safest, most reliable solution to pairing an email message with a form. More people will see it and be able to use it, and as a result participation will increase.

7 comments so far

Stormy

wrote on November 8, 2007 2:26 AM

Hmm, have to differ with at least one of your results here I'm afraid, as we have received and submitted forms using Outlook 2003 SP2, and it appeared to function fine.

That aside, I completely agree on leaving forms out of email. If an email is generating enough interest that someone fills in a form, then it is enough for them to click a link to a webpage before they fill it out.

Mark Wyner

wrote on November 8, 2007 6:26 AM

Thanks for sharing, Stormy. It's interesting that we experienced different results because we, too, tested Outlook 2003 on XP with SP2. Maybe the types of forms we used differ?

We probably should have pointed out that we tested the POST which performed very poorly, and then proceeded with a GET form which worked much better. Our chart exhibits results from the latter. Also, our form comprised a single text input with a button. Very simple to see if the most basic form would function.

All said, even if some forms function in Outlook 2003 they continue to be unreliable in many other clients. But know that your feedback is still valuable and we appreciate it very much.

Danny Foo

wrote on November 9, 2007 3:26 PM

I'm curious, by form does it also mean the polls some people include in their newsletters?

I've always been wondering how they achieved this. :S

Dave Greiner

wrote on November 9, 2007 6:06 PM

Danny, yes, this refers to any kind of form element in emails, including polls and surveys. Basically, they are very hit and miss and not recommended.

Jonathan Sweet

wrote on November 10, 2007 2:22 AM

Something that we've noticed is that forms work in Outlook (pre 2007), but not in the preview pane (they won't post to the server).

Sully

wrote on November 17, 2007 12:19 PM

The presumption that participation will increase by using a landing page is open to debate. Users are lazy -- make them click, and that's another commitment. If it's possible to present simple survey queries in an e-mail, you'd likely see more responses. After all, they've already opened the e-mail -- all they have to do is tick a few boxes, or fill out some info, and click. But if they have to take another step, they might be more likely to abandon.

Mathew Patterson

wrote on November 19, 2007 6:12 PM

You are right Sully - it is an extra click, and you would expect to lose some people because of that. Unfortunately though, forms just don't reliably work in email, and it is worse for someone to fill out a form and then see it fail.

The raw number of participants may fall by having a landing page, but the number of successful forms lodged would be expected to increase.

Google analytics in email

Analyzing Your Holiday Email Marketing Campaigns Using Google Analytics

Analyzing Holiday Email Campaigns with Google AnalyticsAs the holidays approach, chances are you will be launching several email marketing campaigns. Busy holiday marketing schedules heavily rely on email to connect with customers, promote holiday sales and offers, and to drive revenue. With the flurry of emails you’ll be sending out, analyzing your campaigns is critical to improving their effectiveness. Utilizing a robust web analytics package is a great way to scientifically determine what works best for your specific customer segments, and maybe more importantly, what doesn’t work. So, I decided to write a post that covers analyzing your email marketing campaigns by properly tagging your email links (for analysis in Google Analytics). Then you can break down and analyze your email creative at a granular level in your analytics reporting.

First let's define "tagging your online ads":
Tagging is the process of adding querystring variables to links in your online ads so your analytics package can detect and then associate each link with a campaign. Then you can access reporting based on visitor activity. For example, tagging a banner so you your analytics package knows which website the banner was placed on and which version of the banner led to a click through. The reporting will also provide important metrics for your campaigns such as site activity, sales, conversions, bounce rate, etc. Tagging is critical to understanding how your marketing campaigns are performing.

Breaking Down Your Email Marketing Creative
Let’s start with a wireframe for our sample email marketing creative. As you can see below, we have the following areas that we want to track:

1. header with branding
2. product image
3. headline next to product image with product info
4. special offer
5. footer with company links

Breaking down your email creative and tagging links.

Tag, You’re It! Tagging Your Email Creative:
In Google Analytics, you need to tag your campaigns so you can properly analyze each campaign in your reporting. You achieve this by tagging each link that you want to track. The four variables that you will utilize in Google Analytics for this example are:

1. utm_source
2. utm_campaign
3. utm_medium
4. utm_content

utm_source
This is the source of your marketing campaign, so for our purposes "InternalEmailList" will work just fine. Just remember to keep this consistent for future campaigns to your internal email list so you can easily segment and aggregate your reporting data in Google Analytics. Other examples of Campaign Source are websites you are advertising with, shopping engines, a search engine like Google or Yahoo, PRWeb, etc. It’s basically the source of your campaign traffic.

utm_campaign
This is simply the name of your campaign. Note, you should use a descriptive name here, since it will show up in Google Analytics under the Traffic Sources tab in Campaigns.

utm_medium
Medium identifies the marketing channel you are utilizing for your campaign, such as email, banners, search, pr, etc. Obviously for our example, we’ll use email.

utm_content
I saved this for last, since it’s what we'll be focusing on for tracking your email marketing creative. You should use a different value for utm_content for each section or specific link in your creative. This enables you to view reporting based on the content breakdown in your email creative (which will help you determine the value of each element in your email). More on this later.

So, for our example, the utm_content values would look like this:

Header: utm_content=HeaderBranding
Product Photo: utm_content=ProductPhoto
Headline: utm_content=Headline
Offer: utm_content=Offer
Footer Links: utm_content= FooterLinks

Note, this is a simplified example, and you may choose to get more granular in your own email creative. For example, you may choose to tag each specific link in the footer versus tagging all of the links in your footer as "FooterLinks".

The Full Picture (or should I say "The Full URL")
I just explained how to set the utm_content variable in your link, but I also mentioned 3 other variables that you should set. Here is what your link would look like for the header element in your email creative using all 4 variables:

http://www.hmtweb.com/blog/?utm_source=InternalEmailList&utm_medium=Email
&utm_content=HeaderBranding&utm_campaign=PreThanksGiving

Each of the links in your email should contain this querystring using all 4 of the Google Analytics tracking variables I listed above. You can also utilize Google's URL Builder to help build your links.

Blast Away!
At this point, you should fully test your creative to ensure everything looks the way it should across email clients, ensure all of the links work properly, ensure you tagged each link correctly, etc. Then blast away and wait for data to come in (and revenue!)

Tracking Your Email Campaign in Google Analytics
OK, so you blasted out your email campaign yesterday and you are eager to see how it’s performing. Log into Google Analytics and click the Traffic Sources tab. Then click Campaigns. You should see all of your campaigns listed here for the time period you selected. For our example, you would see a listing for PreThanksGiving, since this is the name we gave our campaign earlier. Simply click this listing to view reporting specific to this campaign.

At this point you can see the summary for your email campaign. You can see the number of visitors, avg time on site, bounce rate, etc. You can click the Goal Conversion tab to view the number of conversions from your campaign, and you can also click the E-Commerce tab to view revenue, number of transactions, etc. But you shouldn’t stop there… You can drill in further to view which elements are performing well in your email creative.

Click the image to view a larger version:

Viewing email campaign data in Google Analytics

View the Breakdown:
Click the Site Usage tab again in your report. Now, click the Segment dropdown and select Ad Content. You will now see each of the links you tagged in your email creative. Cool, right? Now you can view detailed reporting based on each element in your email. Why is this important? You may find interesting customer behavior that will enable you to drive better performance in future blasts. You might see that 75% of visitors clicked the product photo versus the offer. Based on that piece of data, maybe you expand your imaging in the email to include other views of the product to see if it increases your click through rate and sales. Or, you might find that a headline next to the photo draws more visitors than a headline above the photo. So on and so forth... You get the picture! When you break it down, your customers are unique and you might find that certain elements perform extremely well and others fall flat.

Click the image to view a larger version:

Analyzing email content using Google Analytics.


Back to your reporting… A sample analysis:
Now click the E-Commerce tab and view sales data for each element. You might find the product photo generated 70% of the revenue from the campaign. You might also see 10% of the revenue coming from the footer links. Why? Maybe customers aren’t sure who you are! Most people receive dozens of emails per day from companies they have purchased from. If you are a smaller company that is still building your brand, it might take customers a second or two to remember who you are… If you see trending that shows people clicking through your About Us link, you might want to promote your company and/or brand more in the email creative. i.e. Provide an About Us paragraph in the right sidebar of the email. This is obviously just an example, but you might find some important data from reviewing reporting like this... Back to our analysis, if you click the Goal Conversion tab, you can view conversions from each element in your email. Now you can track sales, newsletter signups, RSS subscriptions, etc. for each element in your creative. You might find certain email campaigns generate a lot of newsletter signups but only a few sales. You would obviously want to dig deeper and find out why that is...but you wouldn't know unless you track it!

In closing…
Using this technique, you can break down your creative and tag each link so you can view detailed reporting for your email campaigns. During and after each campaign, you should check your reporting for trends in customer behavior. Then test out new ideas and drive elements that perform well. Over time, you can refine your campaigns to maximize your email marketing efforts.

So, if I’ve done my job well, your next move is to run down the hall and grab your email marketing coordinator screaming, “Hold That Blast!” so you can tag all of your links! ;-) Then you can enter meetings armed with data versus opinion!

GG

Related Posts:
Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Now Gobble Thursday - More Holiday Tips for Web Marketers

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