With web analytics integration, your email strategy can deliver more relevant content and help you increase completed transactions. iPost's CEO explains how.
In a search for greater distinction from the pack, top-tier email service providers (ESPs) have begun to move from deliverability -- and ROI-based marketing efforts to the sphere of web analytics.
Certainly there are still plenty of whitepapers about deliverability and ROI among the vendors, and the industry's talking heads are still putting out guidelines for topics like which morning is best to send email (depending upon who you read, it can be virtually any weekday). However, the rise of web analytics systems such as Omniture, Coremetrics, WebTrends, Google Analytics and more has provided e-commerce retailers with a level of insight that is virtually real-time and unprecedented in its detail.
The cost for these tools -- and the remarkable data they can provide -- runs from free to tens of thousands of dollars and, perhaps surprisingly, the difference in effectiveness along the cost spectrum is sometimes not all that remarkable. Regardless of the tool employed, integrating web analytics with email is an unquestionably good thing and is evidence of continued maturation in the email marketing industry.
Getting started
When considering the nexus of web analytics and email, I begin by dividing the topic into two sub-topics: statistical tracking and integrating actionable data. While everyone understandably wants to rush to achieve something "actionable," the first step in any integration with a web analytics package is to get that analytic tool to "see" the email as a trackable source. To cover the obvious, this means that only HTML emails are analyzed. In most cases the HTML email is seen by the analytics tool as an "entry page," comparable to the homepage of a website. HTML email tracked with a web analytics package can now report revenue directly generated by a mailing, so marketers can determine their ROI with greater precision.
In my experience, determining direct revenue strongly supports the oft-stated position of ESPs that a dollar's worth of their services results in significantly higher ROI than a dollar spent on print marketing or a dollar spent on search engine ad word campaigns. In a recent example I experienced at iPost, a single mailing for a well-known high-end retailer directly produced 5 percent of the total revenue generated in a month by that brand's website. I emphasize "directly" because the statistical tracking of a web analytics tool typically shows the additional indirect lift email marketing produces on e-commerce sites. By matching mailing dates with the overall website performance, most online retailers will see very obvious lifts, even adjusted for the mailing's direct revenue, coinciding with their mailing dates.
Understanding the value of each conversion and that there are ways to create more of them -- not all ESPs are created equal -- is why I've found that high-value prospects are those that de-emphasize CPM as a selection criterion, that know their average conversion value and that do the simple math that X number of additional conversions easily overcomes incremental differences in CPM pricing.
Statistical tracking of your HTML emails will also typically show paths through the site from entry via a mailing, giving email marketers guidance on optimizing their customers' experience with their email and their websites.
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