Want to know what gets people to click and open your emails? Look in your web analytics! Most web analytics packages provide some kind of report about what terms people used to search for your website and clicked on. It’s not much of a stretch of the imagination to take that information and make the inference that people might click on emails with those same search terms.
Let’s look at how you might do this. We’ll use Google Analytics as an example. We’ll also assume that you have it fully and correctly configured, including the built-in integration with Google Webmaster Tools. If you don’t have this set up, Google has provided instructions for doing so. It will take up to 30 days to get reliable data in Google Analytics for this particular report.
Start by navigating your way to Traffic Sources > Search Engine Optimization > Queries. Then set the view to the largest number possible, 500 and arrange by Impressions in descending order. I’d also suggest setting a reasonably long time frame, 60-90 days of reporting if you have the data.
From here, export the report as a CSV:
Now open it in the spreadsheet program of your choice. Trim off any lines in the spreadsheet where impressions are less than 10, because we want to find statistically valid clickthrough rates. Then sort the CTR rate in descending order:
What you’ve got here are the top 500 keywords people have typed into Google and clicked on to see your website, sorted by clickthrough rates. You definitely want to test out combinations of your top 10 keywords in your subject lines to see if your audience is as interested in your emails as they are in what’s bringing them to your website, and if you see a theme recurring over and over again, you may even want to do a newsletter series on that theme.
Try it out and see how it works for you!
Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts
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