Compared to direct mail, email marketing is much easier and far less expensive. However, observe the time it takes you to open a direct mail credit card piece from a major hotel (pictured above)… our guess is at least 10-15 seconds to find the letter opener and open the envelope, 5 seconds to flatten out the letter i.e about 15-20 seconds if you decide not to junk the envelope based on the outer messages on the envelope. Now think how many emails you would have dealt with in those 20 seconds… so many that we could find only one unopened email from Amazon Local for the picture above….
Email marketing campaigns can be very effective particularly at the later parts of the sales funnel. The people on your list already know you or even better, have done business with your brand. Email marketing campaigns are not for the top of the sales funnel where the prospect does not know you. In email marketing the prospect must opt in to receive email from you. Opt-in includes being friends on social media, having met and exchanged business cards at an event or conference, signed up for a newsletter online or during a store visit etc.In the US you must remind your email recipient how they got on to your marketing list to avoid being seen as spam by the email marketing platform and the recipient.
This brings us to the question of why you need to go beyond the data your email campaign management software gives you. Unlike direct mail (you do not know who opens), email marketing platforms allow you to see who opened the email. Direct mail does not allow you to see if someone actually looked at the action piece (for example: order form) and you only get to only know who placed the order.
On the other hand email platforms allow you to see the who clicked on the order form in the email. It is after that click that customers arrive at your website and the email platform loses track of them.
This is where Google Analytics comes in. For every email containing different content or sent on you can tag the email at the action button like the “order now” button. If you have an “order now” button that takes them to the product you want them to order you can generate a URL using the Google Analytics URL Builder tool. Use words in the Campaign Content section that reflect the main purpose of the email campaign that you are tracking like “EarlySpringOffer1”, this way you’ll know how your email campaign around “EarlySpringOffer1” was doing from Google Analytics information. Although Google Analytics collects anonymous information it gives you key insights by email content after they arrive at your website including time spent,pages seen, orders placed etc. About StratoServe Digital Marketing Services.