One of the traditional ways to measure the effectiveness of an email marketing campaign is to look at open and click-through rates. In this blog post, however, we take a look at another performance measurement that you might not have considered before: conversion rate.

What is a conversion rate?

When we talk here about conversion rates, we are talking about what percentage of your email subscribers have taken some kind of action that (1) can be tracked and (2) goes beyond opening or clicking a link in your email. Common examples might include:

• what percentage of your email subscribers purchased something from your website, or
• filled out a form or survey on your website, or
• downloaded something from your website, or
• scheduled an appointment with you, or
• signed up for your event online

When one of those actions takes place, we say that the person has converted. You may have noticed that the above examples are all actions that take place on your website. If you use a website analytics service (like Google Analytics) you can collect data on how many of your visitors convert, and learn what brought those visitors to your site. By combining Direct Mail’s email reporting with your website analytics, you can find out how effective your email campaigns are at driving conversions on your website—in other words, what your email campaign’s conversion rate is.

Using Google Analytics

The rest of this blog will make two assumptions:

1. You are using Google Analytics on your website
2. You have already set up one or more conversion “goals” on your website that you’d like Google Analytics to track

If you haven’t done those things yet, we recommend taking a look at one of these great Intro to Google Analytics courses:

• Google Analytics for Beginners by Google
• The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Google Analytics by Moz

Tagging your campaigns

Let’s say one of your email campaign goals is to get subscribers to click on a link in your email that takes them to your website. Once they’ve landed on your website, one of your goals may be for them to take an action that will convert them into a paying customer (or a repeat customer). Google Analytics can show you what percentage of your website visitors have converted, and, with an extra 5 seconds of work on your part, it can also show you which email campaigns those website visitors came from.

To get these extra insights, you need to tell Direct Mail to “tag” the links in your email campaign. This is done by checking the “Tag for Google Analytics” checkbox that appears when you send a campaign. You can also optionally enter a custom campaign name (e.g. “Fall 2018”). If you do not enter a campaign name, it defaults to the subject line of your message. The campaign name will be shown in Google Analytics—it is not visible to your recipients.

 

When you send your message, Direct Mail appends some extra information to the links in your email. When someone clicks a link in your email, this extra information tells Google Analytics that the visitor came from your email campaign. This is what allows Google Analytics to attribute that visitor’s conversion (if they convert) to your email campaign.

Viewing the results in Google Analytics

After you have sent your email campaign, you can view open and click reports in Direct Mail like normal. To access the extra Google Analytics conversion data, you’ll want to sign in to your Google Analytics account in your browser.

Once you’ve signed in, click on the “Acquisition” link on the left-hand side, then click “Campaigns”, then click “All Campaigns”

You will see a list of all of the campaigns that Google Analytics is tracking. These campaigns include not only email campaigns sent by Direct Mail, but also other ad campaigns that you may be running to drive traffic to your site (like Google AdWords, Facebook ads, etc.). Find and click on the email campaign that you sent with Direct Mail—remember to look for the “campaign name” that you used above when clicking the “Tag for Google Analytics” button.

Viewing the columns left-to-right, you can see the metrics that Google Analytics is tracking: number of users, bounce rate, session duration, etc. The right-most group of columns may be the most interesting. These columns show the performance for the selected goal.

In this screenshot, we can see that the “Fall 2018” campaign resulted in 27 conversions for “Goal 1: Purchase”. This means that 27 people who received my “Fall 2018” email campaign clicked a link in the email and eventually went on to purchase something from my website—either right away or several days later. I originally sent this email campaign to 950 subscribers, so that makes my conversion rate 27 ÷ 950 = 2.8%. Nice!

If you want to see the combined conversion rate for all of your Direct Mail campaigns (instead of just one of them), click on “Acquisition”, then “Campaigns”, then “All Campaigns”, then click on “Source”. A list of all the campaign sources will appear—look for the one labeled “directmailmac”.

Conclusion

Open and click-through rates are not the only way to track campaign performance. Taking a look at conversion rates can yield additional insight. Direct Mail’s “Tag for Google Analytics” feature can help you uncover additional insights into how effective your campaigns are at converting leads into customers. If you have any questions about anything discussed in this blog post, or want to give feedback, please let us know!

Everyone knows that the bigger their email list, the better, but when it comes to email marketing, the quality of that list is just as important. What do we mean by quality? Engagement. The best mailing lists are filled with subscribers that open and act on the emails that they receive. Our friends at Return Path recently compiled a list of tips for building a larger, more engaged email list. You can check out the entire guide here, but we’ve highlighted some of our favorite tips below.

Before we begin, don’t forget that Direct Mail makes managing your email list sign-up process easy! You can create a subscribe form in Direct Mail, connect it to your website or Facebook page, and even integrate it into the other services and apps your company already uses.

Experience Your Customer’s Point of View

Take a step back and view your mailing list sign-up process through the eyes of your customers. For example:

• Is your email list sign-up form easy to find locate on your website?
• What about on a mobile device?
• Have you clearly spelled out the benefits to signing up for your list?
• Have you set the right expectations for how frequently you will email them?
• Have you removed as much friction from the process as possible? For example, if you have a lot of required fields on your subscribe form, consider making some of them optional.

Get Your Relationship Started on the Right Foot

What do your subscribers see after they’ve signed up for your list? Creating a custom “thanks for subscribing” page or a welcome email can help get the relationship started off on the right foot. See this help article for how to configure Direct Mail to send a welcome email to your new subscribers. Or click here to learn how to set up a custom web page that new subscribers will see after they sign up.

Also, it’s great to entice new subscribers with promises of special discounts, exclusive content, early access, etc.—just be sure you follow through. Be sure that your email newsletter delivers on any promises you may have made during the sign-up process.

Promote Your List

Don’t be satisfied to let your sign-up form hide away in the footer of your website. There are lots of places you can promote your mailing list:

• Make signing up for your list part of your online store. You can use our Zapier integration to connect Direct Mail to Shopify, Magento, Gumroad, and other online stores. Check our API for building custom integrations.
• Do you send out email receipts or other transactional email? Consider including a link to your email list sign-up form in those emails, too!
• Include an email sign-up form on your Facebook page. Direct Mail makes it easy.
• If you have a physical retail location, use our iOS app to turn any iPad into a email list sign-up kiosk.

Leverage Social Media

You can give your email list a boost by promoting it from other social media channels that you may already operate. For example:

• On occasion, promote the benefits of your email list to your followers on Facebook or Twitter and include a link to sign up
• Purchase a “promoted tweet” that advertises the benefits of your email list and includes a sign-up call-to-action button
• Annotate your YouTube videos so that viewers can click-through to your website or email list sign-up form
• Purchase a sponsored post on Instagram that entices your followers to sign up

Here We Grow!

If you found some of the above tips useful, we encourage you to check out Return Path’s full guide of 50+ tips at this link. These suggestions can help you grow the size of your email list and improve subscriber engagement, building the foundation for a powerful email marketing channel. If you have any questions or comments, please get in touch and tell us what you think. We love to hear from you!

One of things that I look forward to every December is the parade of year-in-review specials that pop up on TV. It’s always fun to see where we have been and to look forward to where are going. In that spirit, here’s a brief look at some of the 2012 highlights for us here at e3 Software.

Direct Mail 3

January was an exciting month for us as we launched our all-new Direct Mail version 3. The result of nearly a year’s worth of intense development, it packed over 100 new enhancements, including a beautiful template editor, in-depth email campaign reports, and blazing-fast performance. Even better, we launched all-new pricing plans to deliver great value for all types of senders. We said goodbye to our old website and launched a fresh, usable, and fast redesign. To help keep our awesome customers in the loop, we started this blog and brought back our monthly newsletter.

Stamps

Our next milestone was the launch of our iPhone application, Stamps, in May! Stamps makes it easy to keep tabs on your email campaign reports while you are away from your Mac. We had a blast putting together our first mobile application and have continued to improve the app in response to your feedback!

Design Testing

July saw the release of a great update to Direct Mail. We introduced retina-quality graphics to make sure Direct Mail looked stunning on the new MacBook Pro that Apple had just unveiled one month prior (and now the new 13-inch model). We also unveiled a new Design Testing feature for viewing full-size screenshots of your email in over 30 different email clients. This has become a most-loved feature, with thousands of design tests processed thus far.

Social Sharing, Notifications, and More!

We welcomed fall with round of updates to Direct Mail and Stamps in September that brought some awesome new features:

• Live mobile previews of your email pushed to your iPhone
• One-click publishing of your subscribe form to your Facebook page
• Email campaign sharing on Facebook and Twitter
• Delivery status notifications on your iPhone and Mac
• An ever-expanding template library

Stamps Comes to iPad!

We didn’t want to coast into the end of the year (plus we were having so much fun delivering great new features), so we pushed hard to finish 2012 with a bang. November brought our iOS app, Stamps, to the iPad. While we were at it, we added support for a handy subscribe form kiosk mode on the iPad, making it easy to collect new signups for your mailing lists on the go.

Finishing Strong

We finished up this year by introducing fantastic new integration with Marketcircle’s Daylite 4 application. We were very happy to deliver this feature, as it had become one of our most-requested enhancements. We also introduced a new web-based API that opens the door for Direct Mail integration with a host of other web-based products. Lastly, we shipped a Forward to a Friend feature that is the easiest-to-use and best-looking feature of its kind that I’ve ever seen.

Thank You!

It’s been a tremendous year for us and we owe it all to our amazing customers. Thank you for allowing us to serve you. We are very grateful for your support and look forward to surprising and delighting you with a series of new improvements in 2013!

With the back-to-school rush behind us, the email marketer’s attention now turns to the fast-approaching holiday season. We consulted Responsys’ yearly Retail Email Guide to the Holiday Season for some great suggestions on how to maximize your email marketing efforts as we head into prime retailing months. In this blog post, we’ll share some of the highlights that apply to businesses both large and small.

Start Early

Consumers start their holiday shopping early. According to the National Retail Federation, 40% of consumers begin gift shopping before Halloween (October 31), another 40% begin in November, and the remaining 20% in December. As a result, many of the top retailers start their email campaigns early to capitalize on these shoppers.

Black Friday is often recognized as the “official” start of the holiday shopping season, but data from Responsys shows that increasing numbers of retailers are kicking off the season on Thanksgiving Day itself:

This move to Thanksgiving Day is driven, in part, by the rise of mobile email.

Focus on Mobile

Ubiquitous mobile devices (smartphones, iPads, etc.) mean that more people are checking their email more often. The holiday season affords mobile device users plenty of opportunities to kill time checking email. For example:

• Airport-related or other delays while traveling on the day before Thanksgiving (the busiest travel day of the year)
• Watching a football game on Thanksgiving with the remote control in one hand and phone in the other
• Standing in line at the register on Black Friday

Since odds are your email will be read on a mobile device, take the time to make sure it looks good on the small screen. Email templates that come with Direct Mail are designed to look great no matter what device they are read on, but take advantage of our Design Test and Send to iPhone features to make sure your content (and subject lines) work great on mobile.

Pre-Holiday Messaging

Getting an early start to holiday marketing does not mean barraging your customers with calls to buy right away. Since we’re still on the leading edge of the holiday season, use this time to send email campaigns that will set you up for success during peak buying time. Here are some ideas:

• Offer loyalty or other incentive programs that will increase the chance of repeat sales later. Consider something as simple as offering discounts to fans of your Facebook page.
• Request reviews of your products. Large numbers of positive reviews for your product will drive later sales.
• Survey customers in order to gather valuable data for targeted campaigns later on.
• Encourage opt-ins for other marketing channels like Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. Messaging the same customers over multiple channels can help drive sales.
• Announce a website relaunch or a new feature.

Use the above mentioned ideas during this preseason time to set up a successful buying season down the road.

Conclusion

Responsys’ 2012 Retail Email Guide to the Holiday Season is full of great information and suggestions for email marketers. Smart retailers are learning to match consumers move to shopping earlier in the year with early email campaigns. The exponential growth of iPhone, Android, and other mobile devices is signaling to email marketers the importance of making sure their designs look great on a small screen. Lastly, appropriate messaging during the holiday preseason can pay off big during the final two months of the year. Take advantage of this knowledge, these tips, and Direct Mail to make the most of your email marketing this holiday season!