Email Marketing Tracking

Live Blog: Email+Video - Take 2

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 by Kevin Nuest

This is a live blog from Connections 09 in the Email Optimization Track

Email is not dead. People that use social media are actually high volume users of email.

History of email:
(present by Chris Studabaker of ExactTarget)
Text Based only 10 years ago
HTML is now being accented by Rich Media and Video

Advertisers continue to increase spending in online video. All the more reason to use video in email.

How and When to use video in email

Benefits:
-Emotion
-Highly engaging
-Personal, even user-generated
-Great demonstration medium (show, don’t tell)

Concerns:
-Development cost and time
-Production quality and the “uncanny valley”
-File size and bandwidth
-Frame rates
-Deliverability

Deliverability methods:
Streaming – video downloaded as it plays
Embedded – video data included in sent message
Linking – click through to externally hosted video

When using video in email, make sure your subscribers want to see the video you have. Knowing your subscribers’ expectations is very important. Also, remember the messages primary goal. Is the video the Call to Action or do you want your subscribers to click on something else in the email?

Linking with Button or Image?
Do you link to your video with a graphic button, a clip of the video with a play button superimposed, or a rotating animated gif with multiple clips from the video. It depends on your subscribers. Experiment with all three. One type may drive more total clicks but another may drive more conversions.

Streaming Video in Email:
(Peter Horan of GoodMail)

GoodMail is a CertifiedEmail partner with many ISPs so messages sent don’t end up in the spam filter.

CertifiedVideo will create an interactive experience via email.

Every time you ask a subscriber to do one more step, you loose some of them. If a subscriber has to click to turn on images in their emails, they may not view your email.

Daily Candy currently sends CertifiedVideo in their email.

Fandango also includes movie trailers inside their video, not just a static button that a subscriber has to click to see the video.

Target includes essentially video commercials inside their emails to represent their products and brand.

Thrillist allowed Canon to sponsor a video displaying a new camera inside one of their emails.

The Effects of including video in email:
Increases Brand awareness in important categories, such as increasing how Target is perceived as caring for their customers.

CertifiedVideo emails currently only works on web-based email, such as AOL, Yahoo, and Gmail, but not Outlook.

How Can I Link ExactTarget with My Web Analytics Provider?

Tuesday, September 15, 2009 by Dawn DeVirgilio

When looking for ways to drive successful email campaigns, clients often ask us, “What are the ways ExtactTarget can integrate with my web analytics provider?”

They’re in luck! By leveraging existing technology, ExactTarget is able to offer customized integrations through partnerships with leading analytics vendors.

Thanks to these partnerships, there are three ways for ExactTarget to integrate with your web analytics provider:

Web Analytics Connector
The Web Analytics Connector allows you to send information to your web analytics tool through links in the ExactTarget email application. If you are currently using a web analytics system, your web analytics tool stores the URL used to call individual pages whenever your website is displayed in a browser. To connect this data with ExactTarget, you can include attributes in the target URL of the links in your emails. For example, if you included a campaign ID in the target URL of your links, you could identify the web traffic generated by that campaign.

Exporting Tracking Data
A second way to integrate is by exporting tracking data from ExactTarget into your web analytics package. By extracting email tracking data - such as opens, clicks and bounces - and pushing the data back to your analytics package, you capture a 360-degree snapshot of email performance. Both link performance and overall email performance data can be extracted from ExactTarget. These extractions allow you to assess the impact of email campaigns with online activity, where you can facilitate data exchange to consolidate reporting.

Automating a Behavior Marketing Campaign
Segmenting messages based on email and web analytics data is possible through our third form of integration. ExactTarget has the capability to automate a behavior marketing campaign for you, which begins with importing web behavior data into the ExactTarget application. (Typically, the data you will be importing will relate to products viewed, products purchased and cart abandonment information.) This data can be queried to allow deeper segmentation, thereby allowing you to create more personalized and targeted email. By automating the daily feeds of individual web data to trigger emails, you ensure timely, relevant emails to your subscribers.

For more information on how you can integrate ExactTarget with your web analytics provider, contact us via email at info@exacttarget.com or at 1.866.558.9834.

Till next time,
Patty Rayl

What do you mean my tracking is phishing?

Monday, September 14, 2009 by Karen Balle

Click tracking. We all do it. It's a best email practice. We all want to see who is following our links, what draws our subscribers in. Was this targeted email marketing campaign effective? What was the most interesting part of the email? Where are my readers engaged? Was this email campaign better targeted than last week's?

But how you do it makes a huge difference with spam and virus filters. What do I mean? I'll tell you a secret. Phishers and spammers like to use IP addresses and URIs of popular websites in the text of their emails and then put in HTML that makes it look like the recipient is clicking on http://www.bank.com. But you don't do that, right? What you might do is use http://www.partnercompany.com or even http://www.yourbusinesssite.com in the email that you're sending out through your favorite ESP, ExactTarget.

That's a no-no. Definitely not an email deliverability best practice. Why not? Because you want us to track email clicks in those targeted emails. You have a domain set aside just for us and that's the domain that we use for your email campaigns. Your subscribers see http://www.yourbusinesssite.com, but they click on a link to http://email-yourbusinesssite.com.

And that, my friends, looks like you're trying to be tricksy.
"So what do we do, email guru?" you cry in despair. Let me give you a little email design tip that will make a huge difference with filters like Postini and MessageLabs (both of which are used frequently in B2B email), or email providers like Gmail and Hotmail.

Use your words. Wow your targeted opt-in audience with your awesome descriptive powers.

What's more appealing to you anyway? I know which one I'd click on.

Look how we've grown! or http://www.exacttarget.co.uk/
Come party with us! or http://www.connections09.com

New Email Marketing Tracking Software In iLab

Thursday, August 20, 2009 by Jeff Cunning

Improve your email marketing strategy with us! One of the newest innovations coming through ExactTarget's iLab is Impression Tracking - a new feature that allows users to track the effectiveness of different content regions generated by AMPscript or Dynamic Content. The ability to track this data has long since been desired and has now manifested into two separate and useful reports: 1) Impression Tracking by Job and 2) Region Performance Over Time. The first, Impression Tracking by Job, is shown below and displays the tracking information for a specific job (single email send) and the regions included within that job. The second, Region Performance Over Time, allows clients to view the performance of a specific region across multiple jobs.

Clients can now see the statistics that confirm the importance of segmenting emails based on different subscriber attributes with AMPscript or Dynamic Content. With Impression Tracking, clients can track and compare link activity within a specific region or across multiple regions. Furthermore, if one content region is used over and over, its effectiveness (and that of each link within) is available for your information. And the best part is how easy it is to use--requiring hardly any setup!

Check out iLab today in ExactTarget 3sixty to take advantage of remaining openings, or search iLab to test out other new innovations.

Do Social Media Efforts Require Too Much Time?

Wednesday, July 8, 2009 by Kyle Schroeder

If you’re like me, the amount of social networking tools and programs out there can seem overwhelming, especially in the middle of a busy work day.

In a recent article I came across (ironically, through a Twitter feed) titled, “Don’t Let Twitter Keep You in Time Debt” discusses the challenges to investing time in social media efforts.

In addition to their recommendations that include 1) dedicating set time in your workday for Twitter, 2) following people judiciously, 3) utilizing the un-follow feature, and 4) going offline every once in a while, I would like to throw out a few more suggestions.

5) Determine your desired outcome for using Twitter (and any social media). It’s important to keep in mind why you are spending time on Twitter:

· Are you using it for personal reasons?

· Is it a corporate initiative?

· Do you follow clients and customers?

· Are you job searching?

· Are you looking for a new employee?

· Do you keep up on industry trends?

Each of these answers has implications on how seriously you should take social media on a day-to-day basis.

6) Determine how many social media tools you want to invest time into and the function of each one. Twitter is very different from Facebook which is very different from LinkedIn. Each of these has its place but may not be right for everyone.

7) Consider using a desktop or iPhone application. There are a ton out there that all have different features and tools attached to them. Many of them can link together multiple social media sites into one—allowing you to track everything in one place. For example, I am giving Digsby a try this week (so far, so good). (ExactTarget has an iPhone application that allows you to stay connected to your marketing program where ever you are.)

8) Look for ways to streamline other functions of your day. ExactTarget provides a great targeted email marketing application that allows you to arrange for automatic triggered email sends and easy email tracking. Taking advantage of a tool like this could save you the 15-30 minutes you need to get connected on social media.

Kyle Schroeder

Slingshot Summer Intern

Email Marketing Term of the Day: Conversion

Wednesday, June 3, 2009 by Amanda Cross

Conversions occur when subscribers take some action that you intended for them to take. The specific action that results in a conversion is defined by you, and might be clicking a link, making a purchase, or completing a form to request more information.

Tracking conversions--and in some cases putting a dollar value to them--can give you valuable insight into the effectiveness of your marketing message. However, the definition of a "good" conversion rate can vary from industry-to-industry, season-to-season, or campaign-to-campaign. You can consult industry averages for basic guidelines, and should create your own benchmarks to monitor conversion rates over time.

Within ExactTarget you can track customer traffic to your website driven from links in your email. When a subscriber visits your landing page from an email link, ExactTarget passes your site data about the subscriber and the email so that you can track the information in your web analytics package. You can then pass the data back to ExactTarget to be displayed along with the standard email tracking data.

Email Campaign Programs: Fantastic New Ways to Track Email Success!

Monday, March 30, 2009 by Angela Khan

Well, spring is finally here despite the snow we received yesterday afternoon. And what better way to start with a fresh approach to tracking the success of email marketing campaigns than with our new enhanced tracking features from our Winter 2009 Release. My personal favorites are the tabular navigation settings and ability to quickly export data to merge with other external system data or present in impromptu meetings.

Effective, May 1st, 2009 all clients will be moved over to enhanced tracking. So, if you haven't checked it out yet, now is the time to do a little spring cleaning when it comes to your email tracking success. Below is a snapshot of some of the great features included:

Overview Tab: This tab provides a 10,000 foot aggregate view of an email campaign providing insight into behavioral patterns of all subscribers. Data is represented in pie and graph formats and can also be exported to Excel or printed to PDF.

Click Activity Tab: This tab includes unique click-through of URLs and images within email. Users can select between Overlay View and Link View. Overlay View tracks links as an overlay on top of email creative while Link View provides a more analytical view of link performance.

Email Overlay View

Email Link View

Surveys Tab: Great for marketers looking to gain valuable customer insight for future marketing campaigns! Quickly scan for patterns and build automated re-marketing campaigns based on this data.

Conversions Tab: Provides behavioral driven data tied to eCommerce conversions either from landing pages and/or eCommerce websites.

For more information, check out the Enhanced Tracking Landing Page on 3Sixty. We'll be updating this page ongoing through the month of April.

Let me know what you think and have a great week!

Angela Khan,
Product Marketing, ExactTarget

Optimize Your Reality

Wednesday, March 11, 2009 by Amanda Cross

Tri-Auto Enterprises is a marketing company in Indianapolis that serves auto-dealerships. Their differentiating offering is a kiosk that stands in their clients' show rooms that works together with direct mail campaigns. The direct mailer directs customers to the kiosk where they fill out a survey for an incentive, such as being entered in a drawing.

Because the people who are using the kiosk can be tracked back to the mailer that they received, Tri-Auto is able to get a much better sense of response rates on mailers, and optimize the mailers themselves by tweaking the graphics or text and seeing what gets the best response.

This sort of optimization is common in email marketing, and even more traditional in website design. I mean, where would email marketing tracking be without conversion tracking? But the idea of applying the same concept to a physical mailer--a real-life piece of matter--is sort of a thrilling thought.

I envision a department store, its shelves constantly shifting and rearranging themselves, Rubik's cube-like, according to up-to-the-minute feedback from customers shopping and your person preferences. I imagine the impulse rack at the grocery store moving its own candy around like a slider puzzle to satisfy impression agreements with vendors and to optimize sales.

OK, it may not be as right around the corner as I make it sound, but in the meantime it's awesome that Tri-Auto is laying some groundwork for a one-to-one platform for direct mail. Just like relevant email isn't spam, relevant mailers aren't junk, and everyone can get excited about that.

Strategy Tip of the Week: Do You Know Your Render Rate?

Sunday, February 8, 2009 by Brett Brewer

A key component of staying on top of your email program is understanding email marketing tracking and performance metrics. Sometimes those metrics, while valuable, aren't as consistently calculated or predictive as we'd like. One example of this is the open rate--it doesn't always accurately measure whether an email is "opened" or not, and is the subject of much debate in the email marketing industry.

In response to the ongoing debate, our friends at the Email Experience Council (EEC) have formed a round table (one that includes our own Morgan Stewart) to refine and standardize metrics for email performance. The round table has recently launched a new metric that you should learn more about--the render rate. You can learn more about the render rate, and offer feedback on the formulas, terms and definitions that the round table has developed. The EEC is encouraging email marketers, email marketing software developers and anyone who has a vested interest in moving email measurement and analytics forward to offer feedback.

Regardless of whether you agree with the render rate as a better way of consistently tracking email performance or not, there are two key "tips" to take away from this week's posting:

Understand the performance metrics that best measure how your email program is doing, and track them regularly.
Get familiar with organizations that are dedicated to advancing the causes of great email and one to one communications and become an active participant. There's lots to learn, and lots to contribute, by being interacting regularly with other email marketers.

Check out the render rate here and let the EEC know what you think!

Feeling Over-Extended?

Thursday, January 29, 2009 by Lauren Hertler

Aren’t we all? Let’s face it – with the current state of the economy, marketers are experiencing increased pressure to do more with less. Less budget, less resources and most of all less time. You’re beginning to wonder how you’ll ever be able to create and execute a successful email marketing campaign, especially before your afternoon lunch break!

Relax and take a deep breath – ExactTarget has you covered! The ExactTarget Extensions Network was created with the busy marketer in mind. The Extensions Network contains information on certified partner integrations built to simplify your life.

Looking for a way to get email tracking data into your CRM system? Need to show ROI on an email campaign driving website traffic? Or perhaps you’d like to find a way to incentivize customers to complete a satisfaction survey?

Solutions to these problems and more can be found on the Extensions Network. Browse through the listings and take advantage of our partner integrations. You’ll quickly learn many ways ExactTarget’s platform can be extended, so you don't have to be.

Feature Feature: Tracking

Friday, January 23, 2009 by Amanda Cross

ExactTarget introduces powerful features with every single release, and lately, we've been having 3-5 major releases per year. With all these new and powerful features, it's easy to forget some of the great stuff that's available to you, the ExactTarget user.

Heck, sometimes even we forget. I might be looking through some old release notes for a technical detail when I'm writing a new document, see something, and think, "I forgot all about that--and I'm the one who wrote it!"

So today I'd like to start what I hope will be a recurring type of post that features a particularly awesome feature in the ExactTarget suite.

Today's Feature Feature is the Tracking information.

If you became an ExactTarget customer after the release, you access this information just by clicking the Tracking tab in your navigation bar, probably on the left side of your screen, and clicking the name of a job. If you've been using ExactTarget longer than that, you have to click the Enhanced Tracking button on the tracking screen.

Of course, ExactTarget has always provided email marketing tracking information about your sends, but before the Fall 2008 Release in December, it was much less appealing to look at. Now, the character-based data has been replaced with a colorful, graphical peek into the performance of your sends.

This view into tracking has four tabs:

Overview - Most of the regular job-based values.
Overlay - A preview of the email with data about how much each link was clicked.
Conversions - Conversion statistics.
Surveys - Survey statistics.

What are my options when integrating CRM and web analytics with ExactTarget?

Monday, July 14, 2008 by Integration Team

This is a common question I receive from clients who are implementing CRM and web analytics into their email program. Regardless of how well-planned their integration strategy is, taking the first step towards integrating “the big three” can be a bit overwhelming. I always reassure clients that ExactTarget has different levels of integration with both CRM and web analytics packages, which allows the customer to integrate at their own pace.

Getting Started

On the simple end of the integration scale, the option to push email tracking data into a CRM and/or web analytics package is a great place to start. This allows for email information to be housed in the same location as all other contact information, essentially creating a “single database.” It provides the visibility into what emails were sent, opened or clicked, and what web traffic resulted from your email campaign.

The Next Step

In the middle of the integration scale, there’s an option to act upon this email and web traffic data as needed. For example, once an ExactTarget client is comfortable with the information being tracked in their database, the next step is to take action with this information. This means slicing and dicing the tracking information, which is usually done in the CRM or analytics system by using segmentation or reporting options.

Raising the Bar

On the complex end of the integration scale is the option to automate complex “closed-loop” marketing campaigns. With closed-loop marketing, everything is automated and complex business scenarios have been planned out. There can also be several programs or campaigns running simultaneously.

When the business logic and email triggers have been properly set up, campaigns can happen automatically. While the actual integration is not that complicated, the business process usually is. Closed-loop marketing requires that you have a plan and know exactly each step it takes to complete your campaign. Often the biggest hurdle to achieve closed-loop marketing is planning – it requires for the entire process to be planned and the proper triggers to be in place for the automation. In my experience, this is often not the way one-to-one marketing programs operate. However, getting out of the “reaction” mode to the planning mode is a huge step towards closed-loop marketing.

This is a quick overview of Email + Web Analytics + CRM integrations. Keep your eyes open for our latest whitepaper, Integrating Email + CRM + Web Analytics: How to Build a One-to-One Marketing Machine, to learn more (and to see where you stack up). The good news is that we’re ready to help you no matter what stage is next for you!

Jessica Koch
Integration Consultant

The ExactTarget Blog

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