Do you Track Past the Click?

Social media is huge now, but that doesn’t mean email marketing is dead. Email marketing is necessary and works well with social media and other marketing initiatives. Email campaigns are a cost-effective way of attracting quality return visitors to your site. It’s important that you tag your email campaigns with campaign tags and link tracking systems so you can track how well your emails perform. This enables you optimize your efforts and track your conversion rate and return on investment.

Most all email service providers (ESP’s) give users great data on open, click rates etc. All this is good info that can provide you with a good understanding of how well you email marketing campaigns are doing. However, even though these stats are great, they don’t tell you the whole story. They don’t tell you what the user does after they click your link.

Put a system in place

Unless you use RhinoSEO (shameless plug, I know), your ESP won’t provide you stats after the user clicks the link. Many however will help you put a system in place to help track this data. The important thing to do is to set-up a system so you can tag your links to make it easier to see user behavior from your emails.

Track past the click

There are several ways to add a simple tracking system to the links in you emails. You can use link trackers from Google or even keep it simple by using something like bit.ly. Either way, tag your links so you can easily determine which links are coming from your email campaigns.

Tracking past the click will help you see how your users behave after they click the links in your email. This can shed insight such as how relevant your links are to the content in the email and even what people are interested in once they hit your site. If your email content is about “widget a” but users going 3 pages deep on your site and spending 5 minutes on pages about “widget b,” then you know that your customers are more interested in “widget b.” Now you can adjust your content to reflect what your customers are actually interested in, which can help increase your conversion rate.

Look, analyze and tweak

Now, don’t just set all this stuff up, USE IT! Make it a habit to go back after your campaign to look at your open and click through rates as well as the user behavior on your landing pages/website. This data can give you a sneak peak into what your customers/prospects are thinking so you can tweak your campaigns and increase conversion rates.