We have already said it many times, but we will repeat it: Email Marketing has not died, indeed, it is more alive than ever. Sending newsletters to a well-kept database, with a good strategy behind it, can do wonders.
With a well-planned Email Marketing campaign you can achieve the communication and Marketing objectives that you have set for yourself. We can really assure you that. And if you don’t believe us, contact us and we will teach you how to do it 😉
Once the campaign has been sent, it is time to analyze how it has worked to correct mistakes and improve, always improve. Today we will tell you, briefly, how to analyze Email Marketing campaigns with Google Analytics, the essential web analytics tool.
The metrics you should analyze from your email provider
Before we start talking about GA (Google Analytics), we want to briefly review the metrics that you should analyze from your newsletter sending tool (MailChimp, MailRelay, AcumbaMail, etc).
These email service providers offer you a series of statistics with very interesting metrics that you should analyze every time you send a newsletter.
The most important ones are:
- Number of shipments
- Percentage of successful shipments
- Bounced (number of bounced emails)
- Number of people who have unsubscribed from your newsletters
- Number of open emails
- Open rate
- Number of clicks
- Click rate
- Unique click rate
- The subscribers who have opened your newsletter the most times.
We recommend that you create an Excel file with all this data and fill it in each time you send your newsletters. Only then will you be able to discover which ones work the most (Always carry out A / B tests with the subject of your emails, images or body text, etc.) and replicate them.
Discover how your Newsletters work with Google Analytics
However, there are other metrics that we cannot analyze with email service providers. If you want to know how many conversions your subscribers have made, or if they are very interested in what you send them, for example, you need to use our beloved Google Analytics.
Only with GA will you be able to know in detail the behavior of your subscribers when you send them your newsletters. And this is PURE GOLD. It’s the best way to find out if your efforts in Email Marketing are paying off – ROI – and to learn more about what your subscribers do – your greatest treasure – on your website.
Configure Google Analytics
First of all, to be able to analyze your Email Marketing campaigns in Google Analytics, you must configure it well to collect the data. You have to tag each of your campaigns. But how? EASY!
There are two ways: From the Email Marketing tool (like MailChimp). Most of them can be integrated with Google Analytics in a simple way and this is how all the campaigns you send appear in the Google Analytics reports. They will always give you the option to rewrite the name with which you want it to appear in your control panel.
Through the UTM tags offered by Google Analytics. It is a tool with which you can add parameters to your URLs to track them.
The URL structure must have:
- Website URL (our domain “oinkmygod.com”)
- Campaign source (for example, newsletter023)
- Campaign medium (emailing)
- Campaign name (for example, gift_mayo)
- Campaign term (not mandatory)
- Campaign content (not mandatory)
It seems a bit difficult but it is not at all. You just have to get used to it
Define and configure goals
In order to correctly analyze the success of an Email Marketing campaign –and of any other medium, of course-, first of all we have to define the objectives that we want to be achieved.
To sell? What do you download a free eBook? What are three posts on our blog? What do you see a full video? Any goal works. Once we have it defined, we will have to configure it in Google Analytics to later be able to see how many times it has been fulfilled.
It is useless to know if 98 people have clicked on your newsletter if you don’t know if they ended up buying the offer you sent them or not, right?
To create a new objective, we will go to Google Analytics> Administrator> View> Objectives> New objective. You can create a goal from a template or custom design.
Once the necessary objective (s) have been created, we are ready to send the newsletter and start collecting data and analyze it – do you notice that we really like this about digital analytics? -.
Analyze, measure and compare!
Good good good. You have sent your newsletter (or several of them) and you go to GA to see how they have worked. Where to find this data?
Lets go: Acquisition> Campaigns> All campaigns. Here you will find your newsletters –and more things that we are not interested in right now– with the name you have given them (on the labels or in the emailing service provider).
So that only Email Marketing campaigns appear, make a filter with the word (s) that always appear in your newsletters (if you put the name from the emailing tool) or with the word that you have put in the tag “Utm_medium =”.
This way, only the campaigns you have sent will appear and you can analyze them easily.
We can start to analyze NOW. What? WHAT YOU WANT.
We will compare campaigns to find out which one has worked best and thus be able to replicate it or get ideas for the next ones.
- Know how many objectives have been met with each campaign.
- Know the conversion rate / percentage of each campaign.
- See how many products –and which ones– have been sold thanks to our newsletter (go to Conversions> E-commerce>
- Product performance and filter by Medium = emailing, for example).
- See the number of pages / views of our subscribers.
- Follow the path that your subscribers make on your website when they enter from your newsletter.
- Know the length of stay of our subscribers.
- Know whether or not they are interested in what you are sending them by analyzing the bounce rate.
- ONE BILLION AND MORE THINGS.
Everything that you normally analyze with your organic visits or those that come from social media can also be analyzed with the visits from your newsletters. Isn’t it fantastic? It is the ideal way to improve your Email Marketing campaigns more and more and achieve more and more set goals.
How about? Did you already use Google Analyics to analyze your email campaigns? Or did you just make reports with the data of your email service provider?
Tell us about your experiences below, we want to hear from you!