Exit page evaluation
Exit pages are another standard item for reporting, and they similarly reveal strengths and weaknesses in website design or email marketing strategy. For example, exit page analysis or click paths can give marketers strong guidance on where links within a piece of email should direct subscribers so that they get to the desired point with the greatest efficiency. Beyond the basics mentioned above, more detailed analysis can be created on a number of other variables, some vendor-determined and some custom-generated by the marketer. Custom variables differ significantly by web analytics tool, so this issue is often a determining factor in which tool to implement. Typically, these variables can be items such as customer geography, specific products or families of products viewed or purchased. No matter the details of your specific analytics integration, statistical tracking of your email's performance as a source of website traffic and (most importantly) conversions, while not directly actionable, is vital to creating and retaining customer interest in a website and/or brand. 

Nonetheless, it isn't surprising that the real sizzle happens when you take it a step further and use integration with your web analytics package to take action. With strong analytics integration, a retailer can segment more powerfully, place extremely relevant and/or timely content in front of its customers and even prod specific customers to buy that list of products that they just abandoned in an online shopping cart.

Foremost to accomplishing these amazing marketing feats is having data that are specific to a particular subscriber in your database. Not all tools do this, and it's worth considering your needs in this regard before deciding which one to use. Some web analytic companies, such as Omniture, have spent considerable time and effort making this kind of actionable integration a centerpiece of their solutions. (See this Omniture site for one of the more technically current and robust efforts.) 

With these kinds of data, the problem can quickly move to the marketer having too much information, which leads to surprising new challenges. An interesting concern such integration creates is the "creepiness" factor -- some customers can be unhappily surprised that their activities on a company's website can be so closely monitored and connected with their email account. Conversely, you can quickly train regular customers to never buy anything on the first pass: they instead load up a shopping cart, abandon it and then wait for the inevitable email offer to purchase that abandoned cart at a discount or with free shipping.

A more mundane issue, and also more common, is a company can lack the resources to craft enough quality content to send to all the potential segments the data allow. This is where a high-level ESP can be particularly valuable -- look for an ESP that has full production capabilities so that some or all of the content production can be offloaded from your own staff. But, bear in mind: you should expect to pay a reasonable amount for good content production. 

Another solution your ESP should be able to provide is the use of templates that support dynamic content insertion. Being able to integrate not just with a company's web analytics package but also with its inventory system or e-commerce platform can allow re-purposing of existing work by using automation to dynamically insert appropriate content into a template. For example, your web analytics tool records a "product view event," which it passes to your email marketing system. The event contains both a unique customer ID and a product SKU: the customer ID is used to find the appropriate subscriber record and queue it for individual mailing of a discounted offer. The SKU is used to query the inventory system or e-commerce site for a product image and other data that is dynamically inserted into the template. 

To thwart "gaming" of the system, a good ESP should be able to track when the last such offer was made to the subscriber and only send such a follow-up discount offer once a month or once a quarter. While the setup required to make such a solution is not trivial, the outcome can be outstanding and, in a relatively short amount of time, well worth the initial effort.

These emerging interoperabilities represent the first days of a new era of sophisticated email marketing based on analytical data, and I haven't yet touched on the possibilities with cross-channel data and the marketing opportunities they represent. If you're not yet using a web analytics tool to measure the performance of your HTML email marketing, there's no reason not to start -- Google Analytics, for example, is both robust and free, and if your current ESP doesn't support integration with it, get a new one that does. If you are integrating for tracking purposes but not yet automating direct actions based on the data, there's no reason not to make a modest start in that direction either. A good measure of your current ESP is if it can help you make that happen (hint: they should be able!).

Outstanding email marketing in the near future is going to be driven by the recipients' perception of value delivered via messages that are astonishingly personalized and timely, while fully automated for the marketer. Integrating with web analytics is a great place to start and is only the beginning.

<< Previous page

Russell McDonald is CEO of iPost. Read full bio.