Analytics Tip: There Is No Secret Sauce

June 11, 2013 By Leave a Comment

skeleton keys

Analytics are kind of the elephant in the room when it comes to digital marketing. For a lot of people, opening up Google Analytics or their email service provider’s reporting presents them with a flood of numbers, and it can be difficult to make heads or tails of those numbers. Some marketers focus on their email open rate, some on their click rate, some on the click-to-open rate, so on and so forth.

One of the most frequent questions we hear at WhatCounts is, “What metrics should I be paying attention to? Which ones are most important?” The answer is both simple and complicated at the same time: Pay attention to the metrics which move the marketing needle for you. There is no be-all, end-all skeleton key of a metric that will unlock the secrets of your success.

If you are an Internet retailer, you might be tempted to go to your boss and show off your fantastic 30 percent open rates for your weekly promotional newsletter. But do those opens actually mean anything if those readers aren’t actually converting and making a purchase? (This assumes you have set up conversion tracking within WhatCounts Professional or Publicaster Edition; if you have not, do not pass Go, do not collect $200, and go back to step 1.)
Conversely, if you are a non-profit advocacy organization seeking to spread a message, conversion rates may not matter at all for you. After all, your ultimate goal is to get as many eyeballs on your content as possible, right?

There is no such thing as the general best time to launch an email. There is no such thing as the general best time to post to Facebook or Twitter. There is no one KPI in Google Analytics that tells you whether or not everything is proceeding as it should. The only thing you should be caring about is the best time to communicate with your audience. Every email list is different, every Facebook audience is different, every list of Twitter followers is different, and it’s incumbent upon you as a marketer to put in the time, energy and resources to testing the bejeezus out of those audience behaviors and figuring out what works best for the people who are actually in your network.

We have often talked about the importance of setting up goals and goal values in Google Analytics. In a holistic sense, this applies to all channels of your digital marketing mix. You need to know what your endgame is before you do anything, otherwise you’re just spinning your wheels. Ultimately, in all forms of digital marketing, you need to ask yourself three questions: Who am I talking to? What am I saying to them? And what do I want them to do as a result of seeing my message?

Once you have those questions answered, the metrics will fall into place.

Tim Brechlin
Inbound Marketing Manager, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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Filed Under: Metrics Tagged With: , , ,

Do Something About It: The Importance of Applied Analytics in your Email Marketing

March 4, 2013 By Leave a Comment

analytics thought bubble

Here at WhatCounts, we talk about and support analytics a lot. We’ve offered you a tutorial on email analytics and identifying email-driven website traffic. We also explained the process of pulling the data off of Google Analytics and converting it into segments in the Publicaster and Professional Editions of the WhatCounts platform. If you are collecting data using analytics, then you have a lot of valuable information on your hands.

But what are you doing with the data you collect?

Collecting is not enough. You should also be analyzing the information you accumulate so you can influence your email campaigns to be more personalized. One person, if not a team of people, should be dedicated to deciphering the analytics data you pull in and then applying it to email campaigns through creative, personalized messaging.

If the amount of your mobile users is on the rise, are you creating content and designing email templates that specifically speak to that segmentation and render correctly on their device? You should be. If some of your subscribers are from a certain state or city, are you writing emails and promoting information or discounts specific to that location? You should be. Evaluating and applying the information gathered from analytics is a key piece of the personalization puzzle.

We can also help you in person at our Summit in Atlanta. Chris Penn, VP of Marketing Technology at SHIFT Communications, will walk you through an intensive web analytics session designed to help you better understand and use Google Analytics. If you’re not already using the WhatCounts platform to segment data, we’d be happy to help you! Your account manager can show you where the segmentation rules are located in the Smart Marketing Engine, or you can email support@whatcounts.com.

Joy Ugi
Digital Marketing Coordinator, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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Filed Under: Metrics Tagged With: , , ,

It’s Time to Test

February 27, 2013 By Leave a Comment

test colors

Suppose you have two great subject line ideas for a new email you are preparing to send to your list. Want to find out which one your subscribers will respond to the most? A/B testing allows you to observe what content your audience responds to and then use only the content that they engage with the most. For example, A/B testing allows you to take two or more versions of your subject line and test them against each other to see which one gets the better response from recipients.

A/B testing is the fastest way to learn what content produces the best response from your subscribers and then send them the most relevant, applicable messages in the timeliest manner.

If you have not taken advantage of A/B testing yet, there’s no time like the present to start! There are several different items you can test in your emails, including the subject line, call-to-action, graphic buttons, navigation/footer links and recovery content. If you want the full how-to on testing all of these options, dig into our free white paper, Optimize Your Email Strategy. Right now, let’s walk through the steps of a simple, subject line A/B test.

First, you need to choose what metric you want to measure. Open rate is the metric on which subject line has direct impact; however, you could also test metrics such as click rate or click-to-open rate in case a subject line tempts people to click more. If you are testing the content of your email rather than the subject line, then the most important metrics to test are click rate and conversion rate.

Creating your test subject lines is the next step: Decide what your goal is for this message, and what messages you want your readers to understand. Then write two or more subject lines that take different approaches to the same message. For example, one could be a direct call to action, while the other could be a softer marketing pitch.

Another good idea with A/B testing is using a control email, especially if you send emails with similar subject lines and content on a regular basis. For example, if you are testing your monthly newsletter that is always sent with the subject line This Month’s Newsletter, you make this title your control when A/B testing.

Once you are satisfied with the subject lines you have created, always perform an internal test before releasing them to the public. This ensures the emails follow best practices and that the segmentation and test-list rules you’ve selected are working. Now you can deploy your A/B testing campaign!

Through the WhatCounts A/B testing feature, you can have the winner of your A/B test deployed after a certain amount of time has passed or you can manually select the winner after the testing period is complete. This scheduling depends on what type of content was in the email: if it was a time-sensitive request, then you may want to schedule the results to be deployed sooner.

Have more than one subject line you would like to test for the same email? WhatCounts offers the option of testing multiple subject lines for the same email. That’s right – you can test up to 10 slightly or completely different subject lines to pinpoint in even more detail what your readers want to hear about. Read another one of our recent blog posts. We’d love to hear from you!

Joy Ugi
Digital Marketing Coordinator, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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Filed Under: Metrics, Testing Tagged With: , ,

How to think critically about email marketing data

November 30, 2012 By

Tom WebsterThe following is a guest post from Tom Webster. Tom is the Vice President of Strategy for Edison Research, sole provider of U.S. National Election exit polling data for all major news networks. He’s also a renowned writer on his website, Brand Savant.

——————-

Today while browsing my blogs, I came across this provocative headline:

Email Usage Drops 28% in Past 12 Months!

As someone who makes their living interpreting data like this, I was struck by what I read to be a counter-intuitively steep decline (and, of course, by the exclamation point!) and decided to hunt down the source of this stat to see if it was a) credible and b) interpreted correctly (more on how I do that here, if you’re interested.)

It turns out that this 28% decline was reported by a recent Nielsen NetView report that delineated “Share Of Time” for online activities, as follows:

Sure enough, there it is, from a very credible panel-based tracking study. Taken at face value, the headline I led with would appear to be true – and both that article and some of the comments to the original Nielsen study seemed to draw the same conclusion: email is being usurped by social media. The only trouble with that conclusion is that it’s actually not true, and data from the same Nielsen article goes on to prove it.

What the Nielsen NetView data measures is not “online” activity, as many have reported, but Internet use from computers (desktops and laptops.) I don’t know about you, but ever since I got my first smartphone back in 2002, most of my email interactions have not been at my desk. That’s anecdotal evidence, of course, but luckily it is confirmed by data provided in the same Nielsen article.

A separate study of mobile Internet usage by Nielsen actually showed mobile email usage increasing over the same one-year period, from 37.4% of U.S. mobile Internet time to 41.6%. In fact, though email usage is in third place for “tethered” usage, it remains number one with a bullet for mobile users, as the graph below clearly shows:

So, what we have are two data points from two very credible sources: an apples-to-apples trend of desktop/laptop email usage, and an apples-to-apples trend of mobile email usage. What’s missing is the orange. It’s one thing to show that one pie slice is shrinking while another is growing – but the statistic that has fallen through the cracks here is this: which pie is growing?

For that, I present the orange to these apples-to-apples comparisons, recent Pew data on the growth in smartphone adoption (which I can tell you is confirmed by both the publicly-available data and private client data we’ve collected at my day job at Edison Research.) What this data shows is that over roughly the same time period as the Nielsen studies, smartphone usage has surged from 32% of adults to 40% of adults. In other words, not only has email’s slice of the mobile pie grown, the pie has gotten much larger.

So what do you do with this information? Well, I can tell you what we are going to do with it. Certainly, my next call to our WhatCounts account manager is going to be to help us build a mobile template for our email marketing efforts. I’m going to think twice about graphs or images we include in our emails (which may mean using more data tables, and fewer screenshots). I’m also going to try and be more diligent about third-party links in our messaging – do they go to a big, honkin’ flash-heavy site somewhere, or do they link directly to the mobile version? Finally, will our mobile “call to action” differ from our desktop call to action?

All good questions. For me, deciphering data like this is a process that I like to describe as hunting for information vs. hunting for “evidence.” For you, the message is pretty clear – if you take your time and get to the bottom of all of the data you see about email, you’ll be left with two inescapable conclusions: email remains a critical channel for business, and email usage is changing. Adapt, improvise and overcome.

- Tom Webster
Edison Research

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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Filed Under: Guest Post, Metrics, Strategy Tagged With: , , ,

Facebook Page Reach & Engagement Falls Below Email Marketing

November 16, 2012 By

With the recent changes by Facebook to push companies into paying not only to reach new audiences through advertising but also to reach existing audiences through promoted posts and stories, we noted with interest at We Are Social’s latest analysis of Facebook Page reach for companies.

What percentage of Facebook fans are company brand pages reaching?

What level of engagement are company brand pages generating?

With these recent changes, companies using Facebook to reach their audiences and inspire actions are looking at roughly 10% “open” (reach) rates and 0.4% “click” (engagement) rates. While not a perfect analogy, these metrics put Facebook below many email marketing campaigns with higher open and click/action rates. (many B2C email marketers see 10% open rates and 1% click rates, while B2B marketers can see open rates as high as 25% and click rates as high as 10%)

If it weren’t already obvious from your own metrics, Facebook Pages’ ability to mobilize audiences for you is on the decline unless you have stellar engagement. If your engagement is anything short of that, there’s a very good chance that 10% or less of your audience is even seeing your updates, much less taking action on them.

If you want to put some juice back in your Facebook Page to drive up engagement, you can accomplish that by paying Facebook for each post with their promoted posts feature… or, you can use your email marketing list to point loyal subscribers to Facebook posts on your Page. For example, this is a Facebook Page post that is set up to collect comments from a newsletter:

This is the...

Email and social work best when they work together. As individual social networks try to figure out how to become profitable, there will be fewer opportunities for free audience building, unless you’re using email marketing to reinforce your social efforts.

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

Share this page:

Filed Under: Metrics, Social media, Strategy

How to measure email marketing engagement with Google Analytics

November 13, 2012 By

In today’s tutorial, we look at email marketing engagement – how engaged are your email subscribers in the rest of your digital marketing?

For example, do you know if your email subscribers view more pages than the average website visitor? Do you know if they convert better? In this short 3 minute video, we’ll look at setting up an email traffic custom segment in Google Analytics and then analyzing these different engagement metrics to compare your email traffic with your regular site traffic to see if email subscribers are more engaged.

Try it out with your own email marketing and Google Analytics!

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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Filed Under: Best Practices, Metrics, Video

How to measure the value of subject lines with Google Analytics

October 25, 2012 By

If you’ve been a WhatCounts user of either of our platforms, you’ve likely seen the option to turn on Google Analytics in your platform. Sometimes you do, sometimes you don’t. I’m hopeful by the end of this post that you turn it on and leave it on all the time. Why? Because today we’re going to look at the value of subject lines.

I’m going to assume that you’ve determined and set goals and goal values in your Google Analytics account, assigning real monetary values to the actions people take in your digital channels. If you haven’t done that, then go read this first. I’m also going to assume you’ve got at least one email campaign already sent that’s had Google Analytics on.

Got that? Let’s start setting up a subject line report.

The first thing you’ll need to do is create a custom report:
Google Analytics

Next, in your custom report, you’ll want to track goals, goal values, and campaigns:
Google Analytics

Finally, we want to restrict this report down to our email marketing. Create a filter, specify include by Regex, and type in WhatCountsEmail|Publicaster. This covers both of the WhatCounts platforms:
Google Analytics

What you end up with is a wonderful report of email performance by subject line:
Dollar value of subject lines - Google Analytics

Now we see the value of subject lines – not by opens, not by clicks, but by potential or actual economic value generated. This is a quantum shift in what you can learn about your email marketing. By creating this sort of analysis, you can see what’s gotten people to open, click, consume, and ultimately purchase or perform some activity that is economically valuable to you.

I hope this report is useful, and provides you with some interesting and valuable insights!

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

Share this page:

Filed Under: Best Practices, Metrics

Download our free 2012 Holiday Email Marketing Guide!

September 13, 2012 By

Snow and Christmas Lights in HDR

WhatCounts is all about helping you find and grow your email marketing ROI. We recently looked at our system-wide email marketing data from Q4 2011 and pored over 343 million email messages to see if there were any useful insights we could offer to help you through the 2012 holiday season, and we were quite surprised at what we found.

We’ve taken our findings and compiled them into our new 2012 Holiday Email Marketing Guide.

Some of the things you’ll learn:

- The “best day to email” isn’t what you think it is
- What your staff does (and when) has a huge impact on your overall success
- There can be too much of a good thing
- Which is more important, open rate or clickthrough rate, for holiday email marketing

We’re giving our guide away totally free, no strings attached, so that you can share it with your colleagues at businesses big and small and help them have a successful holiday marketing season. All we ask is that you link back here if you choose to share it, and of course, if you need email marketing services, to please consider WhatCounts.

Download the PDF now, 11.5 MB file.

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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Filed Under: Best Practices, eCommerce, Email Marketing ROI, Metrics

How to integrate Google Analytics campaign data into email lists

July 31, 2012 By

We’re huge fans and advocates of using Google Analytics for your website as part of understanding your digital marketing and email marketing ROI. Most of the time, we use Google Analytics to track what happens after you use email to send customers back to your website. But what if we could use Google Analytics’ tracking codes a little earlier in the process and segment your list with them?

It turns out, this is not only possible, but relatively straightforward. If you have developers or an IT department to help you with some of the coding, please share this post with them.

Google Analytics passes 3 snippets of text along using its URL builder: source, medium, and campaign. When you’re creating trackable URLs for marketing campaigns (via any channel), you assign values to these. For example, if we advertised in the NY Times online edition, we’d specify the source as NY Times, the medium as Advertising, and the campaign would likely be the date the ad ran. Here’s another example, using Facebook ads:

Tool: URL Builder - Analytics Help

This is an important step to take for any campaign where you want to generate trackable URLs that will show up in Google Analytics, and many of you already do this.

The next step is to add these three custom fields to your mailing list. You can do this in the WhatCounts Publicaster or Professional editions with ease by adding fields to your list, as shown below:

WhatCounts Publicaster Edition: Create/Edit List

The third step, and the part that you may need to have your developers help you with, is to copy Google Analytics’ fields into your subscription forms. Use the programming language of your choice to grab the tracking codes from your website’s URLs and assign them to your mailing list’s fields. Here’s an example using the PHP language:

pub example.php

Update your subscription forms using this code (it’s invisible to the subscriber). Congratulations! You’re now collecting Google Analytics data in your mailing list. So what can you do with that information? Segment your list and send highly targeted email, of course!

WhatCounts Publicaster Edition: Segmentation Manager

You can and should send separate email campaigns to people who come in via PPC or social media, or track the action rate of different audiences. Any segmentation, tracking, or reporting that you’d do on a piece of custom data, you can do with your newly-tracked Google Analytics data.

I emphasize that this works with both the Publicaster and Professional Editions of the WhatCounts platform; I used Publicaster in this instance since my mailing list runs on it. If you need help implementing this advanced tracking method, please contact our Strategic Services team today. If you’re not a WhatCounts customer, consider contacting us now!

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

Share this page:

Filed Under: Best Practices, Metrics, Strategy
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