Posts Tagged ‘Email reporting’
Posted by Nic Winters on February 17th, 2011
When collaborating with clients on their email marketing strategy, the team at SubscriberMail regularly focuses on different methods of testing email campaigns. However, testing can be fruitless without an understanding of your results!
After the deployment of a campaign, users can pull a bevy of data-rich reports that identify percentages related to clicks, renders, etc. But for users more involved in the reporting process and less involved in message creation, clearly interpreting the differences in results for A/B tests related to design or content changes can be difficult without a visual representation of the messages themselves.
To help assist those that have been outside of the in-depth design/construction of the email tests, we urge our clients to utilize our Click Overlay Report to help visualize which items in the message have generated the most click activity (as click data is displayed in callout bubbles over the actual design of the email).
Contact the SubscriberMail Client Support team at support@subscribermail.com for more information regarding how you can visualize email results with the SubscriberMail Click Overlay Report.
Posted by Nic Winters on December 6th, 2010
At SubscriberMail we often get asked by future clients if we have integration with X, Y, or Z web analytics packages. Instead of designing features solely related to one or a handful of web analytics packages, our Development team has designed with flexibility in mind. The SubscriberMail web analytics integration utility allows clients to specify the exact parameters for the appended code related to their web analytics package that should be inserted into each link related to their website’s domain. This additional code allows the analytics software to identify web traffic that is originating from a particular email campaign.
By integrating their email with a web analytics package, clients are able to follow click activity from their emails to website traffic patterns and potentially website purchase activity. This connection enables email marketers to relate sales directly to their emails and thus generating a value associated with email campaigns to help measure success and justify driving more resources toward their email efforts.
Contact the SubscriberMail Client Support team at support@subscribermail.com for more information regarding how you can relate your email campaigns to website activity via web analytics integration.
Posted by Dave McCue on March 26th, 2010
If you’re involved in email marketing, you’ve likely heard about the rising number of mobile users viewing emails, and the challenges in designing for such devices. A few years back, “optimizing for mobile” meant offering a text-only version of your emails, but the browsers used on today’s smart phones have made mobile users much more likely to receive HTML versions of your messages.
But before you panic at the prospect of designing for those tiny screens, it’s important to get a read on how your audience is using mobile. After all, just because one marketer’s list is heavy with mobile users doesn’t mean that your audience fits the same mold.
If you’re using SubscriberMail’s Google Analytics integration to track email visitors to your website, here is a quick way to see how many of those email visitors are using mobile devices. When viewing a site profile in Google Analytics, there are two options for Mobile under the Visitors menu—Mobile Devices (iPhone, Android, etc) and Mobile Carriers (Sprint, Verizon, etc). Either option should display the same visitor data, it’s just a matter of preference if you want it broken down by Device or Carrier. The data displayed will represent all Mobile traffic to your site, but by selecting Source from the dropdown menu directly above the first column of data, you can filter the results based on the traffic source. By default, the Source for your email traffic will be listed in Google Analytics as SubscriberMail. Just look for the SubscriberMail listing, and that will show you how much of your total mobile traffic is being referred from your SubscriberMail emails.
It should be noted that mobile users who viewed one of your emails without clicking any links will not be factored in to any Google Analytics traffic totals. That being said, getting an idea of how many of your engaged subscribers are using mobile devices can provide valuable insight into how high-priority of an item mobile optimization should be for your email program.
Posted by Dave McCue on November 16th, 2009
Evidence is the difference between theory and fact, and—as it relates to email—between saying email marketing is valuable and proving it. Any organization using email marketing is going to want to see evidence that results are being produced, and if you are the individual in charge of producing those results, your best friend in such situations is your data. If that word strikes fear into your heart, don’t worry, a term as all-encompassing as “data” can be intimidating in the big picture. But if you break it down, attaining the data you’re after is as simple as answering three questions:
1) What do I want to measure?
2) How am I going to measure it?
3) How can I make sure there is actually something to measure?
What do I want to measure?
Answering the first question is a good exercise, because it requires you to step back and define exactly what sort of results you need to see in order to consider your email program a success. Are you using email as a way to drive sales? If so, you’ll want to track visitors who arrive at your site via email to see what percentage of that traffic results in conversions. If your emails function mainly as a vehicle to sell advertising, keep close tabs on any factors that could contribute to higher/lower response to those ads—day of week, ad format, newsletter content, time of day, etc—and adjust accordingly to drive the results that will keep advertisers coming back.
How am I going to measure it?
How you measure your data is largely dependent on the resources available to you. Using an email service provider such as SubscriberMail will provide you with a reporting toolset that makes it easy to track and organize your email performance data. However, the data provided by your ESP can only tell the story up until a recipient clicks one of the links within your email. From that point, you’ll need to rely on your web analytics platform (whether a paid platform or a free service such as Google Analytics) to track visitors’ activity on your website. By adding the proper parameters to the links within your emails, you can make sure email traffic is tracked separately from regular web traffic in your web analytics platform. Once both of these systems are in place, and working in tandem, you’ll be able to create a variety of filters and funnels that make it easy to track the data that is most important to measuring the success of your program.
How can I make sure there is actually something to measure?
There are a few things you can do to make sure you have data to measure. First of all, don’t be so excited about the idea of running reports and seeing the results of your hard work that you forget to spend the necessary time on the “nuts ‘n bolts” beforehand. Assuming you are using both an ESP and a web analytics platform, take time to double-check (and test!) that the steps have been taken to enable proper tracking. Are the right parameters being added to all links within your emails that you want to track? Do all pages of your site have the appropriate web analytics tracking code installed (including any sub-domains)?
Once you are sure that data from your campaigns will be tracked the way you would like, optimize your emails to give recipients a “nudge” in the most important direction. If your goal is for recipients to fill out a registration form on a page of your site, make sure an enticing link to that page is the main call-to-action of your message. Include a link to the page in your pre-header. Some recipients will have your images blocked, so use ALT text behind images to persuade these recipients to visit your page as well. Point email links directly to the page with the registration form (i.e. not your homepage), and try to design the landing page in such a way that it is easy for visitors to take the next desired action—why add a hurdle so close to the finish line? Lastly, be sure to set up some sort of confirmation/thank you page that displays once visitors submit the registration form—it’s this confirmation page that represents the point of conversion you’ll want to measure in your analytics platform. Give your “goal” the best chance to be realized by making the conversion process as quick and easy as possible for visitors.
Check out Part 2 of “Email as a Data Source”
Posted by Rob Ropars on June 26th, 2009
In 1594, Shakespeare wrote: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet…”. Although some words may be better than others to convey the meaning of a marketing term, resistance to change can keep lesser-qualified words in place. Take for example the word “open.”
It would seem to be an easy thing to understand. A door is open or closed (unless it’s ajar-sorry old joke), accounts are open or not, etc. When it comes to email marketing, “open” doesn’t manage to fully define what we’re trying to say. Marketers (and those they report to) look to their Email Service Provider’s reporting data to quantify the success of a campaign.
This includes various metrics including: delivery, opens, clicks, bounces and unsubscribes. Savvy marketers know to review not only the immediate results, but performance over time, against similar prior campaigns, and web analytic/ROI data. This provides a fuller measure of how an email performed during its life.
One statistic in the email realm has always tended to raise eyebrows-the open rate. For an ESP, this is currently measured by someone viewing messages in an HTML email. This sounds like a simple process, but there is a catch. It has become commonplace for email clients to have images off by default. Your recipients must take an action to enable images in order to see them. This not only impacts how you should be designing campaigns, but how you interpret the results.
Industry figures vary, but the average “open” rate is often in the 20-25% range. I’ve spoken to several clients over the years needing to reconfirm the meaning of their results after they had presented campaign data internally. If you’re open rate was 20%, an assumption is made that 80% of your list didn’t open the email (i.e. the opposite). Nothing could be further from the truth, but as they say perception is reality.
