Segmenting Email With Web Analytics

mediapost – TRADITIONALLY, WEB ANALYTICS OF ON-SITE behavior and email metrics have peacefully co-existed in separate silos. Once a message gets its audience to a site, many email marketers believe their work is done. Stefan Pollard, director of email marketing best practices, and Dan Miller, manager of professional services, both of Lyris, Inc. argue for a real marriage of the two disciplines. Lyris, a combination of several recent acquisitions, tries to bring some of these metrics together in its own Lyris HQ dashboard. Pollard and Miller walked us through how email clickthroughs need to be followed and understood after users get to the site.

Behavioral Insider: How are email and Web analytics different?

Stefan Pollard: Segmentation from an email standpoint is really around identifying what group of consumers a particular message should be delivered to, and then what action you want that group to take. The only action from an email is to click through to the Web site. But the other half of that is getting the right message to the right audience. Often the information available to an email marketer is very restricted to information the consumer gives at the point of acquisition. With the addition of Web analytics, you get more in terms of the behavior that a person is taking. You sent them an email, you put them in a target audience and sent them a piece of creative that directed them to take an action with your Web site. Now they are performing a series of behaviors. Not only is one of their behaviors to not go at all, but another behavior is to visit and to not take the action you want — but to look at other things within the Web site.

Dan Miller: So Web analytics historically is based on server performance, quantity of traffic, and basic numbers like that. Basically visitors are a series of clicks. Web analytics currently is really taking all this data and session-izing it, looking across all the sessions and visitors to determine which clicks go together to form a session. And then we can start drawing some conclusions from that. We really parallel email without usually crossing paths. In email terms, segmentation means people having in common similar attributes when they signed up. In Web terms, it can be exhibiting similar behaviors. Let’s look at customers who reach a certain point in a conversion process but didn’t actually purchase.

Pollard: The opportunity is people who have visited the Web site taking a behavior and you feeding that information into your email application to trigger an event-based message. Someone downloaded a white paper. You want to pass that information back and send a transactional response message, and might want to use it as part of a drip campaign. People who downloaded this are also interested in that. And maybe three days later you follow up with them based on whether they clicked on any of those categories people click on. And you may see they haven’t responded to them, so you can present them with a different set of articles.

BI: How many site and publisher are actually integrating Web analytics and email?

Miller: The two separate pieces are common. Tying them together, I found, is rare. Traditionally, the Web analytics side works with blinders, focusing on one or two metrics that are common for that marketing channel. Customers who manage Google AdWords PPC campaigns focus on CTRs, and once the visitor reaches the site they might hope to tie a conversion rate back to that and at least know what percentage bought something. But they really don’t pay attention to what happens in between.

Likewise, email marketers are used to email metrics — open rates and CTRs. They judge success by how many people click through. But if a lot of them immediately leave the Web site then it is a false indicator of success. We are advocating tying these two tools together. Between those stated preferences [email] and implied preferences through behavior [on-site] we can fine tune a more targeted message.

BI: Do particular kinds of metrics come naturally from this marriage? Like users not staying long?

Miller: We call it a “short visit,” someone who views one page and doesn’t click on any links. That would be the starting point, at least finding out whether the landing page they were directed to from the email was a consistent enough message and a compelling enough call to action that the visitor felt they wanted to invest in clicking deeper.

Another common practice in Web analytics world is to assemble what we refer to as a funnel report. Often the data will take a shape similar to a funnel, in that you are assembling a series of pages or groups of pages that you would like the visitor to proceed towards conversion, and analyzing how many of them actually make it there and at what point they fall off.

To apply segmentation — to only look at email visitors from particular campaigns — can help tie these applications together. We can go back to the concept of follow-up messaging, possibly targeting specific visitors based on the point where they fell away from the process. A classic example would be, I added an item to my shopping cart, shipping was calculated, and I stopped. You might infer that I objected to the shipping prices. So maybe you follow up with a free shipping message.

BI: What are the challenges for implementing integration in the organization?

Pollard: It becomes a different way of thinking about your market. Often you have a marketing department with five to 10 people each responsible for a small piece.

Miller: Not only do you have this siloed approach, but Web analytics historically has been looked at more as a technical application. So IT is running the tools. Even if the marketing people are consumers of the reports. they don’t have a real interactivity with the reports. They get numbers spit out with some pie charts. They don’t really use it to evaluate the individual campaigns — much less to potentially extract certain visitors based on their behaviors.

BI: With that in mind, who can best make use of the integrated data?

Pollard: Hopefully it starts more at the senior level, and you have someone who can at least wrap their head around the concept of a truly integrated campaign. It is not just gauging the success of the email on how many clicks it drove — but how the landing page converted, how we re-messaged people who didn’t do what we wanted them to do. I think the opportunity cost of not doing segmentation is starting to catch up with email marketers. Marketers who are still trying to focus on list size and one-message-fits-all strategies are having all sorts of problems. Those programs are not as successful as they were several years ago.

What’s the Best Frequency? Who Cares

mediapost.com – ONE QUESTION THAT EMAIL MARKETERS continue to ask all the time is “How often should I email my subscribers?”

If you are a publisher, this is still a reasonable question. But for most other businesses, it’s so last-century, so old-school, so Web-1.0, so… you get the picture.

The better, though more complicated, question might be: “What demographics, preferences and behaviors can I use to drive a continuous program that maximizes the lifetime value of my customers?”

In the old, direct mail world, you sent to a list until it didn’t make money anymore. With email, consumers tell you when you’ve gone postal on them by opting out or hitting the “This is Spam” button. But this paradigm is driven by sending regular, non-personalized “broadcast” emails.

If you can move to a system of emails fine-tuned to your customer relationships, you can likely email less often without sacrificing ROI, or even send more frequently and you won’t be penalized by ISPs. Most importantly, you’ll become even more valuable and relevant to your customers.

Email is the Swiss Army knife of marketing, giving you multiple tools to communicate with prospects and customers. I thought of 30 different kinds of email messaging that can be sent while I was listening to a session at the Email Evolution Conference recently: everything from welcomes to trigger-based messages to one-offs to confirmations to cross-sell/up-sell messages.

This vast array comprises “lifecycle marketing,” where the impetus for sending a message isn’t just the product or service you want to sell but a trigger, event, need or other factor of your customer’s, combined with your organization’s offerings and goals. Further, many of these messages can be automated (see David Baker’s MediaPost column on triggers http://blogs.mediapost.com/email_insider/?p=595), meaning you create the email, set the parameters, and let the technology take over. When you shift to this kind of customer-focused marketing, you turn the concept of frequency on its head.

How One Multichannel Marketer Missed the Boat

A few months ago, I bought a refrigerated wine cellar from a multichannel retailer whose catalogs I have been receiving for 15 years and emails for one or two years. This cataloger sells only wine-related items, from books to glassware to custom wine cellars. A wine unit like mine is one of the most expensive items it offers. Previously, I had made only a minor purchase. Now, I’ve vaulted myself into a high-value customer segment.

You wouldn’t know it from my inbox, though. After I purchased the cellar, I received a basic order confirmation along with an average nine emails a month, none of which acknowledged this significant purchase. At least one promoted the exact cellar unit I bought!

My purchase should have put me, and other high-end cellar buyers, into a lifecycle program. I was easily able to envision at least two dozen individual emails, all related to my purchase, persona and behavior, and all potentially able to drive more sales. Here are just seven types:

1. Order Follow Up/Customer Support: Besides the confirmation, send “It was shipped” and “Did you receive it/have any problems?” emails. Each could also include some upsell message for extended warranty, etc.

2. Cross-selling/up-selling: Next, a series of emails promoting related products such as Riedel glasses, decanters, wine inventory software, premium openers, books, or tasting kits.

3. Product replenishment: The filter should be replaced every 12 months. Remind me early and around my purchase anniversary to change it with a link to the filter page on the Web site.

4. Special programs/offers: Send me a birthday reminder and gift-certificate program for my wine-loving friends. How about a special VIP invitation or discount to your regional wine-tastings and magazine?

5. Refer a friend, receive a gift: Most wine drinkers don’t do it in private. Some of my friends spend more than I do, too.

6. Check up: “How are we doing?” surveys, reminders to update preferences, post comments on the product.

7. Behavior-based: Where I click on the Web site or in the regular emails should trigger messages, especially if I abandon a cart.

Yours truly is a motivated buyer. But the nine-a-month, one-size-fits-all approach is not prompting me to pull out my credit card again. In fact, on average, I open only one or two out of the nine. Send me an email promoting the inventory software, and I’d likely pull the trigger.

So, the next time you are waiting for a plane or riding the train home from work, list all the email messages your company could be sending to add value to your customer relationships. I guarantee you can come up with 15 different ones, or I’ll eat this column!

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.

Why are our targeted weekly e-mails getting little response?

Ask the Expert – When a marketing program does not work, always go back to the basics of marketing 101: right target, right message, right timing, right channel. Despite advances in scenario-based Web design created to track customer online behavior and build profiles, or personas, for targeted marketing campaigns, your customers are still bombarded with tons of irrelevant messages—often the result of batch-and-blast campaigns sent by stove-piped e-mail applications and outsourced e-mail service providers—each day.

If you aren’t getting responses, it is quite likely that your customers view your correspondence as spam, rather than relevant or valuable information, regardless of whether or not they have opted to receive your e-mails. Relevance is key in e-mail.

Assuming your target audience, timing and channel are right, it’s time to step back and take a closer look at your message and its relevancy. What about your personalization capabilities? If you’re relying on customer profiles and Web behavior alone, it’s time to expand your approach and take into account all customer interaction: Have you met face to face at a trade show? Spoken on the phone? Engaged in preliminary sales discussions?

Often these data are stored in two different locations. Customer profiles are housed within your Web and e-mail system, and real-world customer interactions are stored in the sales force automation (SFA), or customer relationship management (CRM) system or a lead management database. What you need is an enterprise marketing platform that will link the two. Adding this technological infrastructure links online data accumulated through Web and e-mail tracking with offline data stored in SFA/CRM and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to automate the communication process.

There are a number of platforms out there, however the best solution will manage and gather data as well as support more personalized, tightly coordinated communications across multiples channels, not just e-mail. This technology should be able to handle sophisticated marketing automation work flows—especially those supporting highly personalized, large volume outbound communications, and should integrate with back-end transactional solutions.

At the same time, the technology should continuously and automatically monitor response rates and digital body language to provide you and your sales staff with up-to-the-minute details on campaign performance. With A/B testing and measurable results, you’ll be able to devise more targeted, impactful campaigns while integrating e-mail with new and existing communications channels to increase customer loyalty and drive sales—a far cry from the soulless batch-and-blast campaigns flooding your customers’ inboxes.

Tracking Email Campaigns Using Google Analytics

mediapost.com – GOOGLE ANALYTICS IS A free Web analytics tool that can be integrated with your email marketing campaigns to gain valuable information about the subscriber activity on your site. This data can be used to increase the effectiveness of future campaigns, and thus boost sales conversions, subscribers, or other campaign goals. In fact, according to a 2005 JupiterResearch report, using Web analytics to target email campaigns can produce nine times the revenues and 18 times the profits compared to regular mass email campaigns.

Today I am going to talk about how you can easily tag your email links in Google Analytics so you can better track your email marketing campaigns. Before we begin, make sure you have a Google Analytics account for your Web site, and verify that it is set up to track conversions. This involves placing a piece of code on every page you want to track on your site, including each conversion or order confirmation page.

What is Link Tagging?
Link tagging involves adding additional information (i.e., variables) to the destination URLs used in your online ads so Google Analytics can detect and associate each link with a specific campaign.
You can tag any number of online activities, including banner ads, paid search ads, or emails. Once a visitor responds to the ad, Google stores a cookie on his or her machine and is able to connect her ongoing actions with the original ad.

How to Tag Your Links
Tagging your links is very easy using Google’s  URL Builder.You merely need to identify the proper information to place into each of the following variables:

·    Source

·    Medium

·    Term

·    Content

·    Campaign

Source
The source identifies who is delivering your message to the customer. It also defines the origin of your message. Examples include Google, Yahoo, a Web site you are advertising with, or the name of your newsletter.

Medium
The medium is the means that is used to deliver the message to the recipient (i.e., CPC, banner, email). For an email marketing campaign, you will use “email.”

Term
This is the term or keyword you purchased and is only used in paid search tracking. Therefore, it will not be included in an email marketing campaign.

Content
The content variable can be used to perform A/B testing on two versions of an ad. For instance, you can send out two email newsletters and determine which one performs better for you by tracking them separately. You can also assign different content attributes to different parts of a single email. For instance, you may want to tag your header, special offer, footer, and product links. When you use a different content variable for each specific link in your creative, you are able to determine the effectiveness of each part of your email.

Campaign
This is the name of your campaign. You can be running one campaign on several different mediums. Use a descriptive term or slogan like “February Promotions” or “Get in Shape for Spring.”

Once you have identified your specific campaign variables, simply enter them into the Google URL Builder, and click on “Generate URL.” Then replace the original URL of the link in your email with the new one. You’ll need to repeat this for each link in the message you’re working on, as well as every future email broadcast you send.

How Is My Email Performing?
Now that you’re successfully tracking email campaigns, it’s important to know how to access the data. To begin, log into Google Analytics and click the “Traffic Sources” tab. Then click “Campaigns.” All of your campaigns will be listed here for the time period you selected. You can click on a specific campaign (i.e., February Promotions) to see the full campaign summary. The “Segment” drop-down box has a long list of options, including “Source,” “Medium,” and “Content.” You can use this feature to track the origin of your traffic, the specific email it’s coming from, and the call-to-action that’s generating the traffic.

Spend some time exploring Google Analytics and learning how to use the technology. The program’s full capabilities surpass the scope of this article.

Integrating Google Analytics with your current email marketing reporting tools helps you understand how customers and prospects respond to your ads and interact with your web site. You will have instant access to all of the clickstream data users generate as they move from page to page across your site. This means you can find out who left your site after previewing your landing page, and who started the process of purchasing a product but strayed to another part of the site. You can see who reviewed product or service information, and who didn’t. Essentially, this will allow you to identify what is working in your campaigns and what is not. Then you can tweak future campaigns to see an improvement in performance and ultimately, an increase in sales conversions.

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.

Email Marketing and Small Businesses: Waste of Time or Worth The Effort?

marketingprofs.com – Stop me if you’ve had this conversation before with a small-business owner:

You: “So that’s a broad overview of what we do. We can definitely help you out with whatever you might need in the email marketing space.”

Them: “Well… how much do you cost?”

You: “It really depends on what you use us for, whether it’s software, creative or something else. Do you have a budget set aside for this type of thing?”

Them: “Not really.”

You: “OK. How much money do you invest in marketing?”

Them: “We don’t really have any money set aside for that.”

You: “Oh.”

“You” are the email marketing person. You’ve made your pitch, given the 10,000-foot view of your assortment of services, and provided a cost-effective and much more financially sensible way to spend marketing dollars. “They” are the small business owner (SBO), who either has no idea about what email marketing is all about or has only a rudimentary knowledge. They have heard of email and figure they should be doing something, but they’re not sure where to start.

For email marketers, how to deal with the SBO is an ongoing challenge. I always try to be optimistic in the early stages of these talks, since it takes a lot of small pebbles to fit around the giant rocks in the sales bottle I’m trying to fill. You never know when the person on the other end of the line has the next big idea that will catch fire and, as a result, create a fanbase of information-seeking consumers.

Obstacles

In my experience, there are three main obstacles to introducing email marketing to a small business.

1. Budget

No matter who you’re dealing with, the question of cost will always be a factor. Every dollar counts when it comes to a small business, from pens to water to benefits to that arcade game you buy from the pizza shop going out of business. So the SBO often worries about the expense before the benefits.

2. Education and Experience

There is a chart that a coworker and I designed to help us classify prospects and how much of an educational investment we’d have to make in bringing them on. Featured on one axis was experience and on the other education. Some people were very experienced with email, but had no real education on what a successful campaign was. Some people were well educated, having done research on the subject, but had never deployed a campaign themselves.

For the most part, the SBO falls low on both counts, simply because email doesn’t fall high on the priority chart when you’re opening up the doors to a new restaurant. Email marketing is one of those deals that come after a Web site, unfortunately months after people have already become consumers of the product—and, with the right offer, could be easily enticed to come back. This leads to direct mail and, then, a colossal waste of money and resources.

So when you’re trying to explain paying for something that traditionally is understood as free (Hotmail, AOL, etc.), it can become difficult to get the SBO to understand the next step. In addition, when you try something new and don’t have experience, it can be a bit scary. You don’t want to err so badly that you suddenly alienate your client base, but you also don’t have to the time to fully commit to doing things the right way. How can you win?

3. Desire

The best marketers are those who want to do a great job, rather than feel like they have to do a great job. Desire will turn a good marketer into a great one, and a lackluster campaign into an award-winning one. However, most SBOs don’t desire to do great email, but feel they should be doing something because “everyone else is.”

If SBOs don’t embrace the concept, how can we expect them to pull off successful campaigns?

Surmounting the Obstacles

Have no fear, though. There are ways to get around those obstacles.

Sing to their stinginess

One of the easiest selling points of email marketing is its cost-effectiveness. Pay by the month, pay by the campaign, do whatever makes you comfortable. If they’re saying they have no money, tell them that email is the stopgap in flushing money down the marketing drain, and that if done right email will help their sink overflow. (Note: The overflowing sink isn’t a great analogy with plumbers… so try something else.)

It’s the metrics, baby!

Are they going to do ads in the local paper? Stop them. Running a series of :30 jingles on a radio station? Stop them. Letting their crazy nephew walk around town in a sandwich board? Stop… well, let them do it—and then stop them.

Paint a simple analogy: If you put an ad in the paper/TV/radio, will you know whether people keep going back to it, point to it, or tell other friends about it? With email, you can track all that and more. Know your prospects’ actions, and then cater your marketing around it. Feel free to add in the cost/benefit again, too!

Be honest

I’ve told several potential SBOs, “Just so you know, this might not work out.” Some are stunned, while others appreciate the honesty. Quite simply, there are some smaller companies that we just don’t have the bandwidth to work with… because of time, budgetary resources, or needs. They need more than we can offer at a price we can’t justify. But that’s OK. We’ll refer them to one of our partner email consultants who has more one-on-one time available.

If you’re honest and upfront with every prospect you come in touch with, that’ll alleviate any potential trust issues down the road. And trust is a huge part of any partnership that a small business encounters.

***

Helping the little guy win some battles can be a great feeling, especially when it means that you’re helping make their dreams come true.

The email marketing business is more effective and targetable than any other mass medium. And it is relatively easy to get started. So the small business owner can spend more time thinking about all these new revenues he has and less time banging his head against a wall trying to figure out why his radio ad isn’t working.

The tricky part is getting them to understand that.