Mary Mcgroary - Digital Marketing & Design Executive

Mary McGroary

11th November 2013

Using Analytics to Track the Success of Your Email Marketing Campaign

You’ve been really good at staying in touch with your customers via email, using newsletters to inform them about events, offers and new products.

You have spent hours crafting a beautiful, well-written, well-branded newsletter but apart from open rate and clicks you have no idea how well it actually works - whether the money and hours you have spent have paid off and saw a return on investment.

Not to worry, however, this is easily fixed. And, once you know what’s selling you can optimize your newsletters and pick the best products and make even more money.

Set-up

Firstly you need an analytics account for your website. If you are an eCommerce website you will need to enable eCommerce tracking. Once this is sorted you are ready to track the performance of your newsletter.

Google Analytics Tracking Codes

All you need to do is add a simple piece of code (UTM parameter) to each link on your newsletter. Google has a helpful URL builder tool which makes it easy to work out what to add to each URL.

There are five UTM parameters you can add, three of which are required. The UTM parameters are how a visit will be tracked in Analytics. It will also be how the date is segmented in analytics, so bear this in mind when thinking about campaign names.

The first of the required UTM parameter to add is campaign source; you should use the newsletter name as this will allow you to differentiate between different newsletters you send out. This is important when you are trying to look at the data in Analytics - there's no need to make it complicated!

The next required UTM is the campaign medium this will be “email”

And the last required field is campaign name, the campaign name is whatever you want it to be, for example, if you have a promotion code it could be PromoCode, if your selling a top hat the campaign name could be TopHat, just make sure the name makes sense to you. The campaign name allows you to differentiate different sections or links within the same newsletter.

Reports

Once the newsletter is sent out and the URLs all have UTM tracking code on them there are several different reports you run in analytics.

Firstly if you want to see how all emails are performing compared to other mediums you can create a channels report; to create this go to acquisition, then to channels. This report shows you how all the different channels (medium) are performing.

If you want to see a report by campaign sources (newsletter name) you can run the same report, except you need to select source, this option shows below the graph above the table.

 

If you want a report for the individual campaign go to acquisition, then campaign.

The other very useful report is a product performance report which allows you to see which products you sold. This report is found in conversions, eCommerce, and then product performance. If you add a secondary dimension, source (email), medium (newsletter name) or campaign you will be able to work out which products sold as the result of an email.

If you want a hand, or some advice; on running a successful email campaign then we’d love to hear from you.

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