Ever wish you could track a visitor’s specific actions on your website after sending him an email marketing message? You can. Once the tracking is in place, the potential for converting visitors into new customers increases substantially. Here’s how we helped one client accomplish exactly this.
The client is a wholesale distributor of aircraft parts, with deep product knowledge and installation expertise. They’ve built a quality email list of about a thousand clients and prospects to whom they distribute information monthly via MailChimp –new product announcements, pricing promotions, installation tips, etc. The email service works well, but it’s not very useful for measuring results. What that means is there is no way to attribute downstream activity on the website – pages viewed, downloads, sales — to the specific emails which drove subsequent visitor action.
What we did is use features available in MailChimp and Google Analytics (GA) to link the two services so that data could pass back and forth. We assigned a unique ID to each email address in MailChimp, and we appended each URL in the email message with additional detail reflecting a specific email campaign (the URLs linked to the company’s website) . The purpose of doing this is so that the additional detail will feed into Google Analytics when an email recipient clicks a link. We can then tie this data in GA back to an individual person and see what he or she did each time visiting the site.
Here’s how these actions turned one email recipient into a new customer:
MailChimp’s report showed that [email protected] opened an email promoting a new product on a Tuesday but didn’t click any links contained in the email. The Google Analytics report showed this person (assigned ID 12345) using an Android phone to open the email.
John Smith then opened the same email again using a desktop computer on Thursday, and this time he clicked a link to a product description page. From there, he went to the “About Us” page and “Discounted Products” page before exiting.
One hour later, he returned to the site and clicked on the “Live Chat” button to reach customer service. A check of the Live Chat logs revealed he asked an installation question specific to the new product and was directed to a “How to install” page, where he clicked on the video link and watched the entire video.
The next day, he again returned to the site using his phone but only went to the About Us -> History page before exiting.
The following Tuesday, our client sent him an email (using MailChimp again) that promoted the product and this time included a discount code for 15% off if purchased before the end of the month. John Smith clicked the link to the discount offer and made the purchase.
New customer. One week. Minimal effort.
Adding tracking to your links in email messages can result in powerful insights. It will give you a more complete picture of your target market and how people are interacting with the website. This allows you to deliver carefully customized and perfectly timed messages in response to what someone does on your website after opening one of your emails.
Great example of leveraging the data you own in ways that are possible but not often thought of.
