Can Google Analytics help my e-mail marketing?

btobonline - Answer: Marketing professionals know that careful, accurate and constant campaign tracking and analysis are just as important as delivery itself. Integrating Google Analytics into your e-mail marketing is an easy—and free—way to make this possible.Google Analytics has become one of the industry’s most powerful Internet marketing tools, helping advertisers, publishers and Web site owners improve their sales conversion, campaign targeting and marketing initiatives. It is a robust Web statistics software application provided by Google free of charge.

You can learn where your visitors come from, whether referred by search engines, ads, e-mails, blogs or affiliates. And you’ll know which cities, states and countries your primary visitor traffic resides in, so you can more carefully target future ad campaigns.

While hugely popular with webmasters and usability professionals, some marketers have yet to realize the value Google Analytics plays when used to monitor e-mail marketing campaigns.

Using Google Analytics, e-mail marketers can gain greater control over the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of each campaign, sending carefully targeted, relevant messages.

To get started, create a Google Analytics account by visiting www.google.com/analytics. Follow the directions provided to place tracking code onto the relevant Web site files, then add parameters to URLs in each e-mail marketing message, denoting which visitors arrive as a result of each e-mail marketing campaign.

Once an e-mail campaign is properly coded and delivered, Google Analytics automatically monitors resulting Web site traffic, telling you which links were most popular with your recipients, when they visited your Web site, how long they stayed and where they navigated following arrival. You can then adjust your campaign variables to improve results over time.

Campaign managers can also drill down using the Segments drop-down menu. This provides even greater detail on individual campaigns, keywords, geographic regions, browser types, operating systems and visitor activity, like the most popular landing and exit pages.

Google Analytics dramatically enhances the abilities e-commerce companies have in retaining and converting customers. Simply use the E-commerce tab to display purchase information to calculate ROI numbers for your campaigns.

Using Google Analytics, e-mail marketers can discover simple ways to more effectively tailor their promotional messages. They can design messages to their audience’s preferences, minimize steps in the purchase process, reduce shopping cart abandonment, improve landing page effectiveness and keep visitors on the Web site even longer by identifying and optimizing the weak links where most people exit. And it’s free.

E-mail marketing secrets & lies: transactional marketing

btobonline.com - A 2007 study from StrongMail and MarketingSherpa found that 60% of marketers surveyed didn’t include promotional offers in transactional e-mails such as customer service messages, registration confirmations and order confirmations. However, 90% of those surveyed said they were making plans for 2008 to improve those transactional e-mails. Tricia Robinson-Pridemore, StrongMail’s VP-market and product strategy, expands on the results of the survey and points out one little-known “secret” and one widely believed “lie” about transactional marketing.

Secret: Transactional e-mails affect your overall deliverability rates.

ISPs categorize all of a company’s e-mails the same way if they originate from the same IP address—regardless of whether the marketing department is sending them or they’re coming from an automated, triggered mailbox, Robinson-Pridemore said. If one e-mail list has a lot of bad addresses, it affects everyone sending e-mail from that IP address. Marketers don’t realize this and aren’t keeping track of their company’s overall reputation, she said.

“About 65% of marketers have no visibility into key delivery metrics for transactional e-mails,” she said.

Another issue is that most transactional messages are written by either an IT person or an automated template. Robinson-Pridemore’s advice: Marketers need to control the reputation of all e-mails coming off their e-mail server. This means taking responsibility for the creation of transactional messages, and asking for deliverability metrics for any messages that are sending over a shared server.

Lie: You can’t use transactional messages for marketing purposes.

Marketers assume that transactional e-mails with promotional messages aren’t CAN-SPAM compliant. But if you read the FTC’s Facts for Business (http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/canspam.shtm), you’ll quickly see that transactional or relationship messages are exempt from CAN-SPAM to some extent, Robinson-Pridemore said. “The main purpose of a transactional message must be about the transaction,” she said.

Because most transactional messages are generated by a template, Robinson-Pridemore suggested having your legal team approve that template, and when sending out cross- and up-sell offers, stick to some simple best practices. Offers should relate directly to a transaction; if you’re selling a software program, don’t cross-sell a hand truck, for example. This may be legal in the U.S. but may alienate customers. (This type of non-specific cross-sell is illegal in the European Union.)

“Your transactional e-mails can definitely give customers the idea that they are getting in on an inside deal, which can be very beneficial,” she said.