TRACKING

Tracking is an important pillar of the email process. Without tracking, it is difficult to measure the value of the asset and evaluate the effectiveness of the group managing it. Tracking is done at the campaign level and at the asset level. Campaign level tracking begins with the actual distribution. If a vendor is given 10,000 email addresses, only 7,000 might be delivered, due to bounces. This is important because the success of an email campaign is based upon the response rate, which uses the distribution number in its calculation. If the distribution number is lower than thought (actual vs. delivered) then the response rate will go up.

Emails Opened

Responses to an email start with a click, or in the case of HTML, opening of an email. With programming, an HTML email can notify the sender when the email has been opened. This is particularly helpful when a ‘white dot’ is sent with a plain text email that is opened with an HTML compliant, email client. As described early, this approach gives notification when a ‘plain text’ recipient can actually see HTML. This is important because the response rate of an HTML email is significantly greater than a plain text email. The percentage of opened email yields an indication of how intriguing the subject line is.

Click Throughs

The tracking of click throughs on an email is a direct indication of how compelling the copy is. Most emails have multiple links and each link should be tracked. To do this, each of the links must have a unique code embedded into the the URL (uniform resource locator). A typical example of a coded URL is Http://www.abccompanies.com/123?. In this hyperlink example, the recipient would be brought to somewhere on the ABC Company website. The 123? would identify that a person came from a specific link, on a specific panel and version of an email.

Tracking Sales

Tracking click throughs is valuable service offered by most email vendors. Unfortunately, it is difficult for a vendor to track the ‘click’ through the web site, to a purchase or subscription. To do this, the tracking code in the URL must be handed off to the tracking mechanism in place on the web site, requiring coordination with the web development team. One step further, the recipient’s ID (i.e. an email address) could also be passed from the email and carried through their web experience.

Response Curve

The frequency and duration of clicks to an email will reveal a response curve, or the life of the email. The typical response curve of an email will generate between 25% and 50% of the responses on the first day, 10% to 20% on the second day, with the ‘tail’ tapering off over the next week or two. The length of the ‘tail’ is dependent upon the type of email. For example, newsletters tend to have a very long tail with recipients clicking on it months after they have been sent.

Requests for Removal

Request for removals must also be tracked so that these individuals can be suppressed from future emails. It is also a good idea to closely monitor that removal rates because they can indicate if an asset is being used too much. Generally, the removal rate increases in direct proportion to the frequency of times that the recipient receives and email, within a set timeframe.

Bad Email Addresses

Tracking bad email addresses is important because they will need to be filtered or removed after a set number of failed attempts. Eighty percent of the time, emails will fail (bounce back) because the email address no longer exists. Ten percent of the time, and email will bounce because it has poor syntax or typographical errors. The remainder of the bounced emails can be attributed to busy servers or bad Internet connections. Unlike a mailing address or phone number, when an email address is changed, a forwarding address us not usually setup. As a result, the original email becomes non-functional and the mail server returns it to the sender. The typical error is “MAILER-DAEMON” or “Failure Notice”. If the number of email bounces increases at an unexpected rate, this may indicate that something (or someone) is corrupting the email addresses.

Asset Level Tracking

All email campaigns should be tracked individually, and at the asset level, as a group. All of the items tracked from a campaign level should be summarized at the asset level. This includes removal rates, bounces, the send attempts and HTML recipients in the plain text file. With greater sophistication, the ability to profile a customer across, all email campaigns, would be extremely desirable. That is, to be able to pull one customer’s global response rate to all emails, their average order value, the percent of emails opened, their replies and comments. To accomplish this, the details from each email campaign must be migrated back into the data warehouse that stores all of the customer information. Once the email campaign information is recorded in a central database, it then becomes possible to look across all marketing channels. That is, to be able to how well a product or service sold across all marketing venues, or how well a customer responded to each. This degree of asset tracking also lends support to the development of a universal contact strategy.

When looking at the asset view of an email an email program, the campaigns that did very good, or very bad, will tend to stand out. From here, the first question will be “What did the email say?” More specifically, what did the copy say in each panel of the email? For this reason, it is important to save exact copies of each email version, linking them back to the tracking file. Ideally, this is done electronically, but hard copies are better than nothing. The best place to capture this information is from the ‘seed’ file. This way, the exact copy that was distributed can be referenced.

A compliment to any tracking system is a program that sends our automated responses when certain thresholds are met. For example, a notification might be sent out to the asset manager when the set number of email removes occurs over any given week. Or, a notification might be sent when a response rate exceeds the historical average. In an active office, the management of an email asset should be augmented with automated alerts.

Next Section - ASSET MAINTENANCE


	Email Marketing

TRACKING