Newsletters are the most common form of digital marketing I have seen in the past years. I really don’t know any website that doesn’t send at least 1 newsletter a month, whether it’s an ecommerce website, news website or a B2B presentation website. There are a lot of email marketing platforms, but the question is how profitable are these newsletters?
Most platforms provide some form or analysis on the performance of each newsletter. Most providers can show you the numbers of emails sent, the number of users that opened your newsletter and the number of clicks in the email. Along with Google Analytics, you can see how impactful these newsletters are.
I want to show you some hacks to dive deeper in analysing each part of your newsletter and improve your newsletter marketing.
Analyse each section in the newsletter separate
Most of the newsletter that I saw had several links in them so the best way to track them is to tag each link in a distinctive way using the Campaign Content parameter (utm_content). If you do not know what UTM parameters are, please take a moment to read this article: Why should you tag your campaigns?
Using the blog post above create your tagged link and add the &utm_content=link1 OR &utm_content=second banner OR &utm_content=Discount banner (whatever works best for you when analysing the data) at the end.
Here is an example:
http://www.littledata.ro/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20%25off&utm_content=banner1
Here is a newsletter as part of a campaign named: “black friday2” with 3 banners in it. You can see from the data bellow that the top banner had the most clicks, but, in fact, the second banner is the only one that converted. This means that in the future we should move the second banner as a primary banner to have a higher visibility and in this way increase the number of transactions.
You can tag all your links in the newsletter (the logo, banners, hyperlinks, products and so on) And see how each section is performing and what is driving the customers to click in the email.
In a real email marketing platform, I strongly recommend searching the provider blog to see if they already support this in any way. Here is MailChimp solution for tracking the newsletter performance in Analytics.
If the platform you are using does not support Google Analytics at the moment you can just build the URL with Google’s URL builder or our simple Littledata URL builder and add it as you normal do in the newsletter.
Track users on how they get on your website from a particular newsletter
We’ve tested some hypotheses and the first one is to make a group of users in Google Analytics that come from a newsletter. The standard way is just to tag the newsletter with UTM parameters and create an audience based on that traffic. But to be more precise and go further with the analysis, we can add a new UTM parameter to all the links in the newsletter that contained the User ID. So now this traffic is not random but it’s from a customer we’ve engaged with already and I do have historical data.
The benefit of doing so is that, in an era of mobile devices and cross-device interactions, people read newsletters on the move and react or buy on different devices at different times as a result of the same campaign.
You, as a marketer need to understand the cross-device movement and so I recommend that you read about this in the blog post: User Tracking
To be able to track the activity of each individual user in your newsletter, you need to build a URL with a User ID parameter in it. This step is similar to the one before so you can add on to the URL you already built for your banners and add the unique identifier number of each client like this:
http://www.mywebsite.com/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20%25off&userID=3D12345
The User ID is generated by the platform you’re using, so please take your time and find out if your email marketing solution supports this, along with the email address you’ve imported and the User Id from your back end.
We use Intercom, where you can just add it into the link with a simple click, like this:
The platform you’re using might be different but if there is an option to import the User Id along with the email address then it is likely that your platform supports this in some way.
Once you’ve added this to the URL, you can then set up a URL variable in Google Tag Manager to pick it up and set up a field with the pageview that will be sent to Google Analytics. For more information, here’s how to set a field in Google Tag Manager.
Be sure to check back next week for part 2! If you have any questions or would like more help, please get in touch with one of our experts!
