Email marketing is very important for generating business.
Being a very efficient and cost-effective way of strengthening customer relationships, creating brand awareness and increasing sales, it has become an indispensable tool for every marketer.
But how to measure and optimize your email marketing campaigns remains a major concern for most businesses.
The answer is fairly straightforward: You should use a free but robust tool called Google Analytics for email marketing measurement.
There are many benefits of measuring email marketing through Google Analytics. Here are a few.
- Know the leads and sales your email campaigns have produced.
- Find out which links in your campaigns performed successfully and which of your web pages were viewed more.
- Helps you in comparing the results of your email marketing with other marketing channels.
- By setting goals, running A/B tests and automatic link tagging you can track the success of your campaigns.
When you use Google Analytics for email marketing, an important consideration for you is to decide the goal of your email campaigns.
Is it for lead generation, increasing your email subscribers or converting more leads into paying customers? Having clarity on questions such as these will help you decide which metrics you should track and how you perform against those goals.
Google Analytics for Email Marketing: How to Set It Up
When you have set up Google Analytics for your website, you can track the source your website visitors are coming. If you go a step further and set up email campaign tracking also with Google Analytics, further segmentation of the email traffic is possible.
This is possible when you create trackable URLs by setting up UTM parameters. These UTM parameters or tags are small pieces of information that are added at the end of any link that you include in your emails.
The steps involved in setting this up are:
- Open a free Google Analytics account for your website.
- Add the Google Analytics tracking to your website to connect it.
- To set up tracking for email campaigns, create your trackable URLs by setting up the UTM parameters.
Creating UTM parameters for Email Campaign Tracking Using Google URL Builder
When you create the UTM variables, Google Analytics will be able to track many email marketing metrics. Without adding these parameters, traffic coming to your website from email campaigns will be clumped under ‘Direct’ and you will never be able to measure and optimize your email marketing.
The UTM variables are added at the end of your links and they tell Google Analytics which link the person is coming from.
The URL builder has some fields that you need to fill out for every link in your campaign. Once you have filled out the fields, this tool provides you with a trackable link which you are required to use in your email campaigns.
Creating Advanced Segments in Google Analytics
Advanced segments are filters in Google Analytics. With these, you are able to generate reports that show visitors from specific sources like those from search engines or emails.
How to create segments
- Add the Segment box above your standard reports and name it Campaign Medium: email.
- From the left menu under Traffic Sources and Medium field, select ‘exactly matches’ and choose ‘email’ type.
- Click Save.
- You can apply this to your reports.
Now, you will be able to see your email visitors along with your usual metrics.
With everything set up in Google Analytics for email marketing, let’s review the reports.
Reviewing Google Analytics’ Powerful Reports
With campaign tracking enabled and having set up email traffic as an advanced segment, let us analyze the four most important reports.
Real-Time Report
This is an interesting report that shows in real-time the click-throughs of your recently sent email campaign. You can see the people on your site right now and the campaigns they have landed from. Access it by clicking ‘Real-Time’ from the left menu, then select ’traffic sources’ and ‘email.’
Overview Report
This report gives an overview of the traffic coming from emails in comparison to the total website traffic. It tells how many total visitors (also called sessions) and unique visitors (called users) were from email campaigns. The number of pages per visit and bounce rate can also be seen.
To access it, enable ‘Campaign Medium: Email,’ turn on the advanced segment, from the left menu select ‘Audience,’ and finally, select ‘Overview.’
Campaign Report
This report lets you compare the results of all of your email campaigns in one go. To access it, select the ‘Campaign Medium: Email,’ turn on the advanced segment, select ‘Acquisition’ and then click ‘Campaigns.’
Behavior Flow Report
Are you curious to know what people do on your website and which pages they visit? This report lets you know their behavior.
On the left menu, select ‘Behavior’ and then ‘Campaigns’ to view all the campaigns. To check out one campaign, choose it and click on ‘View only this segment.’
Some Important Metrics
Some important metrics that should form part of all reports, irrespective of your goals, are given below.
- Click-through rate (CTR) – This denotes the percentage of people who clicked on at least one link in an email. Through this, you can easily calculate the performance of every email sent and how CTR changes over time.
- Conversion Rate – This is the percentage of recipients who clicked on at least one link within an email and completed the call-to-action like filling out a form or downloading a free ebook.
- Bounce Rate – This percentage denotes the emails that could not be successfully delivered to the email addresses.
- List Growth Rate – This simply means the rate at which your email list is increasing. A healthy growth rate means your reach and audience is expanding.
- Forwarding and Sharing Emails – The percentage of recipients who shared the emails to any social platform by clicking on the sharing buttons or forwarded to acquaintances through the ‘forward to a friend’ button.
- Return on Investment (ROI) – You should be able to calculate the ROI of your email campaigns.
Conclusion
If you want some incredible reporting features at no cost, then go for Google Analytics to track the metrics of your email marketing campaigns.
This efficient reporting will help you in email optimization and increasing your ROI.
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