Essential Guide to E-mail Marketing - Haymarket

38 ANALYTICS DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007
But there is an easier way. Tracking interactions and filling the gap
between broadcast marketing and sales activity is increasingly valuable.
Like most things in business, success relies upon execution. Yet
the e-mail interactions are already happening, right in Outlook. All
you need to do is supercharge them and capture the information,
turning your everyday inbox into a sales and marketing machine.
Michael DesRochers is CEO of Salestream Software. He can be reached at
info@politemail.com.
Understand and respond
to your customers through
analytics
BY JACK FELSHEIM
When you blast an e-mail campaign, you know the number of
visitors to your Web site will increase. But how much do
you know about the specific types of visitors you are attracting and
what triggered their clicks? Here is how you can use analytics to
understand the return frequency of your visitors and optimize your
messaging based on how they respond to your e-mails.
When you look at a typical unique visitor graph from an e-mail
blast, you will see a spike each time a message is sent. This allows
you to know with certainty that your e-mail efforts are driving
more customers to your site. But are the customers clicking
through because of the product offerings? Are they interested in
the special offers? Or are they simply responding to the e-mail as a
reminder that your site is out there?
ESSENTIAL GUIDE
To find the answer to these questions, we analyzed the click
activity for one of our b-to-c retail client’s e-mail campaigns. We
noticed that more users clicked on links directing them to the Web
site than clicked on the product links offered in the e-mail. Further
analysis confirmed that the products purchased as a result of the
campaign were not the featured products in the e-mail. We were
working hard to find the right products to feature and match them
to the particular segment of the list, but analysis of the click
reports showed that product did not matter. Most of the customers
simply used the e-mail as a trigger to visit the site.
We looked deeper into the daily Web analytics reports by return
frequency. Forty-eight percent of the traffic generated from the
e-mail was from visitors who had not been to the site in the past
30 days, while 34 percent of the traffic was generated from visitors
who had been away from 15 to 30 days.
Armed with this knowledge, we turned our focus from finding
the optimal product to feature in the e-mail to creating compelling
reasons or offers that would drive customers to the site — where
they are able to purchase many more products than can effectively
be displayed in an e-mail. We then focused subsequent creative
and marketing efforts on discovering ways to increase repeat visits,
increase order frequency, increase average orders and maximize
long-term customer value.
Watching your customers’ click and purchase behaviors will
allow you to fine-tune your e-mail messages and optimize both
your customers’ experiences and your campaign results.
Jack Felsheim is the marketing director at Ovation Marketing. He can be
reached at jackf@ovationmarketing.com.