When you create an email marketing campaign you spend a lot of time on the logistics such as determining what the email’s goal is and which contacts should receive it, not to mention the hours spent developing the right creative, content and subject line. Then you watch your delivery reports to see if the recipients reach the goal of the email, which could simply be to open it or to click through to your website.

With so much time spent creating and monitoring the success of the email, the last thing you want is for your website to fail to support the campaign. But who has the time to do it all, right?

Regardless of whether or not your website's goal is for people to make a purchase, submit a form, refer your website or services to someone else, or even download your white paper, there are so many ways and reasons for visitors to fail to reach your website's goal.

In the world of Web analytics, reaching a goal is known as a "conversion" and the typical website conversion rate from most email marketing campaigns is less than 3%. That's right, three percent or less. Since the conversion rate is so small, you need to do everything you can to keep your email subscribers happy while increasing your overall conversion rate. The best way is to analyze your website to determine what is causing email and other visitors to fail to convert.

Traditional Segmentation

The practice of studying the successes and failures of websites has traditionally taken a holistic approach where marketers use a Web analytics tool to understand how all of their visitors enter, navigate and leave their website. These Web marketers often study a cross-section of visitors by grouping them together, similar to how email marketers segment email subscribers based on personal attributes such as demographics. The process is called “segmentation”, and segments identify visitors based on their behavior getting to, navigating around and exiting from a website. This includes identifying:

• all visitors from pay per click (PPC) or organic search
• new visitors and returning visitors
• visitors from all other online marketing campaigns, including but not limited to email, social media, banner ads, etc.

By focusing on each group of segmented visitors, Web marketers gain an understanding of how their website guides each visitor type to the website’s goal. The key is not only to determine how and why, for example, one campaign landing page works better for search engine visitors but fails for visitors from another campaign type, but how to tweak the website so that it can optimally guide each visitor type to the intended goal. Web analytics, therefore, is about studying groups of visitors and has never been about analyzing the individual visitor … until now.  

Behavior Tracking

Your email subscriber list is probably your best source of revenue, so the last thing you want is to lose contacts due to a poor performing website - this we know. But did you also know that you can retain more email contacts and encourage them to convert more often by understanding how and why they stay on your website, or more importantly, why they leave?

You can increase email subscribers’ website conversion rate by identifying and marketing accordingly to contacts who, for example:

• regularly enter your website during their lunch breaks but cannot convert at that time and then forget to come back
• abandon the shopping cart on the tax calculation page because it requires them to enter the zip code that is already stored in their contact record
• frequently enter your site and almost never convert

To accomplish this, you first need to select a Web analytics tool and be sure to apply a little email visitor tracking to the email’s landing page URLs in the form of URL tracking parameters.

URL Parameters

When shopping for a Web analytics solution, look for tools that automatically import email campaign data every time you launch an email. This will make it much easier to track an email’s success because all you need to do is ask it to segment the contacts from an email’s name such as “2010 Summer Newsletter”. If you can’t find a solution that automatically imports email marketing data, you should be able to find one that allows you to segment visitors based on a component of the landing page such as a URL tracking parameter (see example below). This will enable you to segment visitors who came in on a parameter whose value is the name of the campaign.

Here’s what I mean: Using the example above, let’s say that I sell seasonal products and I use Google Analytics or any other solution that allows me to segment to a URL parameter and its value. When I sent my 2010 Summer Newsletter, we can see in the example below that I added to its landing page URL a tracking parameter whose value equals the newsletter’s name:

This simple addition now enables my Web analytics tool to separate contacts who click the link within the email from all other visitors to the same page. More importantly, I can now determine if my 2010 Summer Newsletter email campaign visitors bought the summer products I had guided them towards based on their individual profile settings - and if not, why not.

I'm now able to identify which product-related pages are the most visited by my email contacts and which pages they visit the longest. I can even determine if I have used the most effective landing page by looking at how many email visitors exited immediately from the landing page. In other words, I can see how well my website is guiding my email contacts to the goal and where it is failing. But your use of Web analytics should not stop here.

Consumers tend to read their personal email during lunch, but shortly after they arrive on your website they remember they're not supposed to browse on company time. And business-to-business (B2B) subscribers tend to put off email if they get them too early or too late in their day. If you're lucky, some of these contacts may remember to visit your website, and a handful may even convert. Unfortunately the majority of contacts rarely remember to come back to your website when they get home or when it’s convenient.

What’s the solution? Well of course it’s Web analytics, but it also involves your email subscriber list.

Behavioral Targeting

Once you've determined that a large number of email subscribers visit your website during lunch and exit immediately or without converting, or who simply ignore your 9 AM sends, reach out to them. The next step is to sort and then segment your email contacts by their time zone. But the problem is that you may not want to exclude those B2B contacts whose job it is to surf and purchase. For this you need a solution that allows you to send email to a targeted subset of your contacts based on their specific website behavior.

Unfortunately these solutions tend to be in the form of a pricey piece of third-party software that enables a Web analytics tool to talk to an email marketing platform. For some this may not be an issue, but there is a hidden downside: Your analytics solution must be able to handle individual contacts. The issue here is that when a URL parameter is applied to identify an individual contact with the landing page of a campaign, most analytics tools deem this to be a separate campaign.

Let’s take our 2010 Summer Newsletter again for example - if you and I click the same link that leads back to the website and the landing page URLs contain a URL parameter whose value is unique to each of us, we technically land on different URLs:

Most Web analytics tools treat each of us as having entered via separate email campaigns and therefore we do not have a way to identify and remarket to individual visitors from the same campaign. Some marketers can afford to invest in third-party software to overcome the unique identifier problem, but what about those who cannot? That’s where Lyris HQ comes into play.

With a little bit of set up (one simple step more than Google Analytics and other Web analytics tools), you can segment contacts who entered your site from individual or multiple email campaigns and even cross-segment those who did or did not complete the desired call to action. And with this comes the ability to remarket to your contacts: reward them for being high-dollar customers, entice others to return to your website and make their conversion, and even to reach out to your contacts at the time that works best for them.

Ultimately, it's about sending the right message to the right people at the right time. This is the true value of knowing your customers: being able to market to them individually and effectively. The better you know your customers, the more targeted and relevant your messages will be, and the better you'll be able to provide what they need.

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About the Author

Chris Benkert is a training manager at Lyris. He is responsible for creating and delivering training and collateral for Lyris HQ search marketing, Web analytics, and Lyris HQ Agency Edition classes.

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