It's All Geek To Me - June 29th 2005

Email Marketing, the Best Tracking there is. Are you using it?
by Ross Lasley

Most of you probably are familiar with website statistics – those reports that tell you how many people came to your site, where they came from, and what they did when they got there. (not sure how many of you are using that data as effectively as you should be, but that's for another issue of this newsletter)

What you may not be aware of is that email marketing has all of those features as well as the most critical piece of information for “stats marketers” - who did the clicking.

Since email marketing is sent to a specific individual, the statistics generated are about those individuals – powerful data when properly applied.

There are several ways you can use this information. Generally, you are looking to segment your list into related chunks.

Let's say you have a list of potential customers to whom you send email marketing pieces. For our purposes here, let's assume you have five distinct products or services, and you'd like to know who's interested in which one.

You'd begin by sending one piece per week for a month. Each email needs to contain a link related to the 5 distinct products – typically this is done with a sentence or two on the product, with a 'read more' link leading to the rest of the info on what we call a “jump page” on your website.

Once you've sent the weekly piece for a month, it's time to fire up that spreadsheet and process your data. You'd begin by copying the list of addresses you emailed to into the sheet. Then you'd make your columns across the top – issue 1 link 1, issue 1 link 2, and so on. In each cell you'd either put a “1” (yes they clicked) or a “0” (no they didn't click) – the actual data for this comes from your click-through reports.

With the use of a few simple formulas you'll be able to generate a “Score” on each of your 5 products – it'll range from zero to five. Just add together the cells that are your first product, then the cells that are your second, and so on. (don't worry if this sounds hard - it isn't, and anyone who uses spreadsheets regularly would have no trouble giving you some help here).

Once you've generated a “Score” for each of your 5 products, you can sort by that score – this will give you the segment of your list that always clicks on a particular type of product information.

The uses for this information are not hard to envision – if you know a particular customer group is interested in a specific type of product, that's what you'd focus on in future marketing communications. You might even call some of these folks to pitch it directly – you already know they're very interested.

The enewsletter service bureau KISS uses is Constant Contact, and they recently added a feature to make this even simpler. On the click-through report for every email sent, it will show you who clicked on which links – that list now has a new button entitled “Save as Interest Category”. That new feature, and the ability to merge different categories, make this entire process much easier.

As this channel becomes more and more effective, you should be using this type of tracking. It will improve your email marketing efforts and help you remain competitive.