There are two main marketing objectives that can be achieved by integrating your email and web analytics platform. First, you can generate integrated campaign reporting by pulling email delivery and response data into your web analytics reports. This allows for a side-by-side comparison of your email campaigns with other marketing channels (paid search, organic search, display advertising, affiliate programs, etc). You will not only be able to look at impressions and response rates for individual campaigns and channels, but also what actions were taken and which products were purchased.
The second benefit is the ability to create segmented remarketing programs. This means being able to trigger email campaigns that are launched based on site activity -- including shopping cart abandonment, a stated interest in high value products, inactive users who can be re-activated -- or building out targeted and relevant content areas for customer segments.
Segmented remarketing programs are based on taking behavioral data (created by looking at your website), and using it to create customer segments. These can then be used for highly targeted and relevant email communications. This type of program can be enormously profitable, but it requires deep customer insight, accurate segmentation, a solid communication strategy, and ongoing measurement -- then optimization -- to be successful.
In order to make it happen, there are a few key steps you need to take:
Determine your business objectives and KPIs
The most important part of preparing your strategy for a segmented remarketing program is to understand your marketing environment. This will allow you to identify your marketing channels, develop a customer data strategy, and truly match it to business KPIs or objectives.
Ask yourself if you are attempting to increase your CPO regardless of customer segment or product, and by what percent? Or are you trying to build customer segments to send relevant, personalized products to increase ROI and retain customers at the same time?
Food for thought: It's important to remember that the data that makes it possible for remarketing campaigns to reach these KPIs must be available within your web analytics tool.
Spend time developing your upfront strategy
It is important to define which data will be collected and how customers will be targeted. Among these considerations are:
- Visitor segment definitions: Who will you target and why?
- Creative and offer management: What will you say/offer to the defined segments?
- Contact/frequency strategy: How often will you contact the segments?
- Testing and measurement: Benchmarking, testing, and proving the lift in performance
- Campaign evaluation process: How we will measure performance of the campaigns?
Food for thought: Look at what can be implemented in the near-, mid-, and long-term to ensure a quick start to your program with benefits, management buy-in, and continuation of results.
Program production
Build out the segments within your web analytics tool. Ensure that these are automated between your web analytics and email tool to deploy the remarketing trigger messages, to avoid creating additional manual work for your team.
Then build out your templates/content within your email tool for the remarketing messages. Coordinate efforts between your in-house and vendor teams, at both the email service and web analytics provider level. A brief call to determine roles and responsibilities across teams goes a long way to insure a quick and easy setup process. This also points towards a healthy relationship for ongoing support and maintenance.
Next, create reports in the analytics tool that measure email campaign performance. Likewise, define any custom reports or data exchanges that need to occur on each respective platform.
Finally, develop custom segment reports to understand specific campaign performance.
Food for thought: Automate as much as possible. Within your mid- or long-term strategy you may want to include dynamic content to be included within the remarketing email. This can be based on inventory or customer profiles, and by automating from the get go, testing and optimization can be easily plugged in.
Run programs, test, optimize, and refine
To ensure the maximum return from your web analytics and email remarketing strategy, ongoing optimization is key. What works during the first few months may not work after month three. It is therefore important to analyze the segments and the remarketing strategies on a monthly basis.
Metrics need to be customized according to your KPIs or strategy, and could include revenue, orders, conversion rates, message creative, or subject lines.
Food for thought: Create a testing strategy and follow it to the letter, so you can determine what is driving revenue increases or drop-off rates over time.
The bottom line is that there's no perfect strategy for online marketing. Different channels work for different products and customers. The best answer is usually test, test, and test even more. You'll meet short-term goals while ensuring online marketing efforts remain successful over the long term.
Lee-Ann Vermaak is VP of strategic services at Acceleration.
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