E-mail Tracking: Precisely Measure The Punch of Any E-mail Campaign

by Joe Dysart

What's New

October 2006

No matter how you're using marketing e-mails - soliciting alumni donations, reaching out to prospective students, generating news media coverage - you'll do a much better job with e-mail campaigns that can be tracked and analyzed.

Joe Dysart

The latest generation of higher end e-mail services enables university marketers to track every point-and-click that occurs within every e-mail - and much more.

These "smart e-mails" assume the role of electronic emissaries, carefully monitoring who is opening your e-mails, tracking what people are doing once they're inside an e-mail, and then offering suggestions on how to improve the "opens" of your e-mails based on that behavior.

Even the most basic smart e-mail analytics can tell you how many subscribers actually opened an e-mail, and which links they clicked on as they read through your message. Plus, basic programs will also track how many of your subscribers forwarded your e-newsletter to a friend and how many of those referrals ended up clicking back to your site.

Some analytic services and packages will even analyze what portions of a newsletter are read by which group of people — and then automatically make recommendations to how to customize the content of your newsletter so that it better appeals to the various demographic categories on your mailing list.

Alumni on both coasts, for example, may respond more favorably to newsletter content that heartlanders completely ignore.

Moreover, the resolution of the analytics can get as granular as you'd like. Some packages will also report how many AOL 12.0 users opened your e-mails, as compared to users of older versions of AOL; which users prefer plain text format and which prefer HTML.

So if you can imagine a metric you want studied, sliced and diced, chances are there's a smart e-mail program out there already programmed to do so or one that can be easily customized to deliver insights in easy-to-read reports.

One caveat: you may want to consider informing recipients you are sending them smart e-mail, and that you will be able to monitor their every interaction with those messages. Generally, if you offer subscribers the logic behind your use of such programs, backlash over privacy concerns is very minimal, or even nonexistent.

Some of the more sophisticated e-mail analytics services to check out include:

• IMPACT, by Digital Impact
• KANA iCARE, from KANA Marketing
• GotMarketing.com

For entry level tracking, check out:

• MailWorkz' EzTrackz
• Arial Software's Campaign Enterprise

Joe Dysart is an internet speaker and business consultant based in Thousand Oaks, California. Reach him on the web or by e-mail at joe@joedysart.com.