As web analytics gains momentum, the question remains, “How do we make it actionable?”. An ongoing challenge of the email marketer is taking valuable web data and translating it into more relevant campaigns. Having the ability to take your email marketing/web analytics integration beyond the traffic analysis, and gather specific data in real-time on your prospects and customers creates true relationship email marketing.
So where do you start? A highly successful strategy is to use web analytics for gauging the effectiveness of your email marketing initiatives and determining optimization tactics to improve your overall campaign performance.
What analytics can provide you with:
- Audience segment identification - View your visitor traffic and create audience segments.
- Conversion Analysis - In depth view of your conversions by campaign as well as identification of abandonment.
- Path analysis - View your website’s most popular paths and leverage that powerful data in your email marketing.
- Closed-loop measurement of your email marketing initiatives - Analyze the effectiveness of your marketing initiatives and their impact on your website traffic.
How you can make that data actionable:
- Consider segmenting your opt-in audience to create campaigns based on their current visitor history and create dynamic content based on the products viewed or pages visited.
- Analyze your form abandonment to determine where you are missing opportunities to increase your conversion rate. Is there a specific field that is causing the majority of your abandonment? If so, is this a field that could easily be removed and grab additional low hanging fruit?
- Are there popular paths that you haven’t considered with your email marketing campaigns? Do many of your visitors travel from one specific path and you don’t include those links in your campaigns?
- See how your offline and online channels work together.
Remember, conversions don’t happen in a void and having the ability to create and provide the total customer experience throughout the customer lifecycle is essential to impactful email marketing.
Sally Lowery
Online Marketing Manager at Bronto
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As a strategist, analyst and SEO engineer this type of conversation always grates on my nerves a little. It’s the use of the word “analytics”. You can use “analytics’ to count, compare, and trend and eventually forecast. You can not use analytics to identify self subscribe preferences. As a real world example if I am in a helicopter hovering above a city: I can see where most of the traffic flows to. I can observe traffic patterns. But what I can not tell you is why the blue Oldsmobile in the south bound lane of Main Street decided to turn left. Even if I stalk the Oldsmobile to its final destination I still can not tell you why they went to that destination. Let’s say they went to a hardware store. Why are they there? To visit their spouse who works there? Maybe repainting their house or possibly looking for bird seed? I can not tell you where they will go next or why they will make that choice. You CAN use “why” question survey data, match back data and statistics to create a “reliable” email segments. But this is not “web analytics”. It is important to note that most segments that companies bucket people into have nothing to do with answering the “why” questions and are usually thus ineffective anyway. These types of emails are best known as ‘transactional emails. Lastly, I have been doing SEO since SEO began. I have yet to see a company capture an email address AND match it back to the leads original search query AND act upon that information with meaningful email segmentation. I have yet to see a company apply an RFM model to path analysis successfully because the RFM model was originally designed to up sell and cross sell “current customers” not frequent prospects or consistent path users. This is just simple misappropriation of math skills.
Thank you for your comments.
Web analytics is defined as the collection, analysis, and reporting of web site usage by visitors. This data allows you to better understand the overall effectiveness of your online and offline initiatives as well as define optimization tactics needed to achieve your business objectives with your web site.
Relevancy in email marketing is critical, and being truly relevant requires real-time information about individual profiles, preferences, and behaviors. In addition, of course, the marketing organization has to be able to make it actionable.
Email marketing and web analytics technologies, in recent years, have created partnerships that make integration seamless. So what does that mean? Well, for us, it means that we have integration not only with our CRM, but also our email solution and our web analytics solution. Our customer and prospect data flows throughout all three allowing us to gain deeper insight into our marketing strategy and therefore send more relevant campaigns. Email marketing services can pass vital information to web analytics based on an email recipients behavior when they receive a message, or your web analytics solution can manage a database that completely defines each customer’s contact information, messaging preferences, demographic, and explicit or implicit product interests.
There are quite a few other ways that we can discuss how you can leverage web analytics with email marketing and I enjoy the discussion.