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Email Marketing Tracking

Accurate and complete email campaign tracking is essential to evaluate results for sales lead and e-commerce revenue generation, and to continuously improve email effectiveness. Key items to track within the email campaign monitoring platform include the following.

Key Email Marketing Tracking Items

  • Opens. An email has zero impact — or perhaps even a negative impact — if it is not opened. Tracking opens provides insights on subject line effectiveness. Due to quirks in various email applications, opens cannot be tracked with perfection; however, they can help establish a client and evaluate patterns in open rates over time to a given mailing list segment.
  • Clickthrough Rate. When a recipient clicks on an email call-to-action link, this is usually considered a conversion, an extremely important action to track. Clickthrough rate improvement is a main objective of many email split tests, and can lead to improvements in content, design and the offers themselves. Email campaign tracking systems provide code to track clickthroughs with a fair amount of precision.
  • Marked as Spam. When a recipient marks an email as spam, this is a strong indicator that the person is not a viable prospect and should probably be removed from the mailing list. If a high (or growing) number of recipients are marking email as spam, this indicates serious flaws in the messaging, audience selection or list itself.
  • Unsubscribes. Unsubscribing from an email is less conclusive than a "marked as spam" action, but concerning nevertheless. A certain amount of unsubscribe actions is normal for just about any email campaign, and may indicate people are tired of repetitive information, have moved to a different area of responsibility, etc., but have not changed their favorable attitude toward the company's products or brands. Still, if unsubscribes continually rise or exceed 1%-2%, review of the campaign is merited.
  • Social Shares. When recipients forward the email, tweet it, like it or share it on any social media network, this is a strong indicator of effective, persuasive messaging. In addition, a high frequency of social shares extends brand awareness and brand affinity, two important secondary goals of any email campaign.
  • Clicked Links. Some emails contain links other than calls to action. Tracking clicks on these links, such as to the company About page, or even to an off-site Web page, is important, because clicks indicate user involvement. When users become involved by clicking links, they are seeing information that offers value. Detecting the popularity of certain links helps to shape content and calls to action for future emails.
  • Hard Bounces. A hard bounce indicates the email cannot be delivered for some reason that cannot be overcome, such as the email address or domain no longer exists, or the recipient has completely blocked delivery. Hard bounces are removed from the mailing lists, usually automatically, by the campaign management platform system.
  • Soft Bounces. A soft bounce is one resulting from a temporary type of issue, such as the recipient's email server being down, or the recipient's mailbox is full. After a specified number of attempts over a specified amount of time, these soft bounces may be permanently deleted from the mailing list.
  • Phone Tracking. Phone tracking is usually handled outside the email campaign management platform, but is extremely important. Phone leads are often the hottest types of leads, and can produce great results that will be completely overlooked if they are not tracked. Proper phone tracking enables clients to evaluate their campaigns fully, and should be set up for every campaign.

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Our email campaign has been a great success. Patients definitely enjoy hearing about our special offers and new services. Thanks in part to these emails, we’re busier than ever.

Darla Scheidt
Director of Marketing

Make sure the agency you select to manage your email marketing campaigns has the ability to track all key data, including phone conversions. Expert agencies are able to show you a documented process for their email marketing campaign tracking system, and explain the significance of the data in everyday terms. Complete and accurate tracking is essential for ongoing testing in addition to evaluating results, so be sure the agency is strong in this area.

Make sure your email marketing tracking is setup correctly. Give us a call today at 855-779-7675 or request a quote online.