Email Marketing by the Numbers: How to Use the World’s Greatest Marketing Tool to Take Any Organization to the Next Level

Multichannel Analytics

So far, we’ve touched on metrics directly related to the email itself. Guess what? There are several important metrics outside of your email. While a click-through is an indication of initial success, you must determine whether the desired action was actually accomplished. Did 772,000 people click to download your new white paper, but only 50 finished registration. Uh-oh. Red alert. Your form may have been too long, or your website could have been experiencing problems during the peak click time frame. Without knowledge of the conversion metric, you’d be giving your boss a big, silly grin and saying, “Yes, we had over 700,000 people download the white paper. We’re doing great.” Correction: 772,000 people took a step toward the download, which is great. Fifty actually received access to it, which probably isn’t so great.

That’s why it’s so important for you to measure both performance of the email and the website or landing page. Again, you have a goal for your constituents to do something. If the interest (click-throughs) appears high, but the conversion is low, you need to figure out why. Perhaps the call to action in the email was misleading. Perhaps the audience had too many choices on the landing page and veered off the path. Without conversion analytics, you would never have a reason to determine the cause of a completed step, or the obstacle that prevented it.

The great news is that email marketing and web analytics can be fully integrated now. Many ...