Is Your Email Marketing Working?

Email marketing is often the easiest way to drive targeted traffic, but is often overlooked because of all the other areas of marketing that your organization must do. Email is significantly growing, Gmail alone has 1 Billion users. So, how can effectively utilize the power of your list? If you only look at opens and clicks, you aren't getting the full story. Learn how to understand the ROI of your email marketing campaigns by effectively using Google Analytics to track and analyze your data.

What Is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a robust web traffic and analytics solution that offers a range of reports designed to give you deep insights into your performance. You have access to overviews that provide you a top-level view of your traffic and reports that you can drill down into with many parameters.

Since Google Analytics is such a feature-rich platform with deep integration to Google AdWords and third-party services, it's flexible enough to work with many campaign types. Click here to learn more about Google Analytics and sign up for an account.

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Make Sure Your Email URLs Are Properly Tagged

The first step in learning more about your email marketing campaigns is tagging your email URLs. When you tag inbound links with specific campaign names and other parameters, you can track the traffic coming in from that marketing effort. Adding these tags is a straightforward process, as many third-party email marketing platforms automatically build the links for you.

HubSpot's marketing automation solution automatically does everything for you when you select the associated campaign.

MailChimp integrates with Google Analytics. After you connect the tow, you'll have an option in the Campaign Builder to setup Google Analytics link tracking. Then, all you need to do is put in the campaign name in, and you're all set.

Constant Contact is another popular email marketing tool that supports Google Analytics tracking. When you are creating your next email campaign, simply check the Google Analytics box when you are selecting the delivery options for your next email. Then add a Google Analytics Campaign Title and that is it, you're now tracking.

View Your Campaign Data in Google Analytics

Now that you've set up your campaign URLs and tracking parameters, you can view this data in Google Analytics. You can access the All Campaigns Screen by clicking Acquisition > Campaigns > All Campaigns from the Google Analytics dashboard.

You have access to important insights about your email campaigns on this panel. The data is broken down into three broad categories: Acquisition, Behavior and Conversions. Here's a brief overview of each section and how you benefit from that information.

• Acquisition: You can learn how many people ended up on your site and how many of these visitors are new. Both forms of traffic are valuable, but repeat visitors can indicate highly engaged users.

• Behavior: This category dives into what visitors do after they click from your email to your website. You can see how many people immediately left the page without clicking further into your site, how many pages per sessions users have and how long they spend on your site. If you see poor performance in this area, people may not think that the content matches their expectations when they click the links, or you may have a technical problem with the landing page.

• Conversions: You can discover how many goal completions you have, the goal conversion rate and the goal value. This section is important when you want to check campaign performance and calculate the ROI.

Analyze the Effectiveness of Your Marketing Efforts

The last category in your campaign tracking report, conversions, requires additional setup before you can use it. You need to identify conversion parameters for each advertising campaign and set them up so you can ensure your ads are truly driving the actions you want on your site.

Some examples of conversion goals include file downloads, online store purchases, donations, event registration or webinar sign-ups. Spend some time considering what conversions you're looking for from your email campaign.

When you're ready to set these parameters up in Google Analytics, use this guide so you can accurately track your performance. Your goals may change over time and that's perfectly fine. You can always go back to your configuration and change the monitored goals to reflect your company's needs down the road.

Make Changes to Your Emails to Drive More Conversions

Now you can determine how much traffic your emails are driving, how effective each email is in driving traffic and how many conversions you're getting. These objective numbers give you the visibility you need to understand what's going on when you hit send on your marketing campaigns.

If your emails fail to perform to your expectations, you can use this data as the foundation for making changes. A few ways that you can experiment with your campaigns and try to drive more conversions include:

• A/B testing

• Better audience segmentation

• Adding a call to action

• Changing your email send rate

• Experimenting with the email design and format

• Changing the marketing messaging in the email

• Personalizing the information in the email, such as names or past product purchases

Repeat the steps in this post once you've made the changes, so you have a consistent testing method. Keep any of the elements that work well, and incrementally improve the areas that are holding your email campaigns back.