Can you imagine your car not coming with a built-in radio? How about your refrigerator, can you imagine having to purchase the freezer separately? How about your house not having a bathroom? As funny as these may sound, there was a time when these items did not come together. In fact, many of you might still have living relatives who can attest to these facts! Simple integrations that we take for granted are everywhere.

Someday in the not so distant future, I believe marketers will feel the same way about some of the tools that they use. I can hear marketers a few years from now saying “can you believe we used to buy email marketing and web analytics software separately? How did we survive!” I think those tools provide a great example. Just like the radio is to the car, for the email marketer, web analytics are a natural extension of the product they use. For the savvy marketer, it’s already hard to imagine one without the other. It’s really a required feature.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the most important success metrics for most email marketers are found in what happens after the click through. Reading a message is one thing, acting on it is another. For most, the important action is not just that they left the email and were guided to where you wanted them to go, but that they actually did what you wanted them to do once they got there. In other words, conversion.

Without web analytics, tracking email marketing conversion is not possible. To measure campaign effectiveness in an online world, you have to have integrated analytics tools measuring and reporting back Web site activity. Like bread and butter, they go together (though I prefer a little olive oil myself). Someday, we’ll have a good laugh that once upon a time they didn’t!

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