When measuring digital marketing campaigns, some statistics are easy to come by, such as opens and click-throughs from an email or the number of fans on a social media site. But to move your results from good to great, you need measurements that go beyond the static and provide insights into the behavior of your customers and advocates.

This month's eCRM Advisor will step you through some industry-leading methods of tracing your customers' movements through the digital world, revealing some unique ways that the eCRM and BI teams are looking at measurement.

Email Measurement–Looking Beyond the Click to Measure Your Email Success
By Whitney Hutchinson

Bogey and Bacall, Burt and Ernie, Laverne and Shirley – some of the great pairings of the 21st Century. As direct marketers, we too have a great pairing available to us, although many today are not taking sufficient advantage of it: email and Web analytics.

This partnership value is twofold.

1. Email and Web analytics allow for the best measurement of your email campaigns and your database as a whole.
2. Web analytics can allow for some of the best targeting available in the email space – targeting that can be harnessed to maximize your emails' effectiveness and longevity.

Let's look briefly at the benefits of this marriage.

Measurement: By overlaying your email messages with Web analytics (Google, Omniture, Atlas), you are able to follow a consumer after the open or click and tie site-side activity back to your email campaign. This allows you to track your email campaigns the same as you would your media and search campaigns, providing an apples to apples comparison and real insight into the value of your email program. Insight like:

• How much traffic is your email list driving?
• What parts of your site is your email database engaging with?
• How long are they staying on the site and how often are they visiting?
• What value, in terms of conversion, is email driving? Raw conversions, revenue, margin?

Targeting: With this data you are also able to target your messaging. You can understand not only who is engaging with your emails but who is engaging with your site and how, allowing you to craft even more targeted messages in the future. Targeting like:

• Category interests
• Shopping cart abandoners
• Form abandoners

"Marketers who are integrating Web analytics data (e.g. Web site behavior) with email marketing reported on average conversion rates of 7% on these programs."

Forrester also cites a case for Under Armour, who built an automated program around key consumer behaviors – specifically around browse and abandoned behavior. When compared to the control (campaigns targeted only off of rich profile data), the automated programs with the Web analytics overlay drove a 22% increase in conversion. A similar program for Eddie Bauer drove a fourfold increase in revenue per email.

The bottom line is that if you are only measuring your emails via opens and clicks, you're missing the boat. You don't know the real value of your campaign/programs and you're not maximizing that value via timely and targeted messages.

As the digital space continues to fragment and our ability to get consumers' attention wanes, it's vital that we lean on the relationships that we've established with our prospects and customers alike. Building relationships requires a clear understanding of your consumers' behaviors and the ability to continue conversations based on those behaviors. Web analytics helps in that understanding across digital channels. Make sure that email is one of the channels.

See a step-by-step guide to basic email measurement in the DMA's 2009 Essential Guide to E-Mail Marketing (to be published 10/26/09).

For additional information on email campaign tracking or targeting, contact Scott Rhodes or Whitney Hutchinson.

CASE STUDY: Measuring Success in Social Marketing

The digital marketing industry seems to be defined by and almost dependent upon change: banner advertising, search marketing, and now video and social are emerging as effective means with which to communicate with a core audience. Leveraging new and innovative ideas are necessary to remain competitive, but sometimes it's easy to get caught in the excitement around new technologies and lose sight of the pragmatic reasons for using them.

So Razorfish brought a new idea to one of our clients: let's utilize these new forms of media but also measure and understand the real value being generated.

For this client, Razorfish managed the creation, maintenance, and tracking of a widget that could be installed on nearly any social network. Nearly 50,000 widgets were installed – several thousand of those the result of the viral pass-along – resulting in brand exposure by nearly 100,000 unique users.

TECHNICAL CORNER: What Happens After the Click-Through?
By Ian McCollum

So you have been getting higher-than-average click-through rates on your promotional email campaigns. That is great. But do you have any idea what happens to that traffic once it gets to your Web site? Do the visitors stick around, research products and possibly convert? If they don't convert, do you know what they were trying to do before they bailed on your site? Finding out is easy, if you have simple conversion tracking and/or advance analytics set up on your site.

1. Place your ESP's conversion pixel on your site.

Most email service providers (ESPs) provide some basic conversion tracking ability. This is typically implemented with a tiny one-pixel image that you place on the "conversion" page of your Web site. Conversion is in quotes since you can really use the tracking pixel on any page of your site that you want to monitor for traffic from your email campaigns. It could be the "thank you for registering" page, the "order confirmation" page or the "contact us" page. Within your ESP's email campaign reports you will see a count of how many times a visitor from your email campaign viewed the page where you have placed the tracking pixel.

2. Install third-party analytics.

Third-party analytics tools range in price from free for Google Analytics, to tens of thousands of dollars for enterprise solutions, such as Coremetrics, Omniture and others. Which solution you choose will depend on your unique needs.

In its simplest form these solutions involve placing a few lines of Javascript at the bottom of every HTML page in your site that you wish to be tracked. Preferably this code will be on every page of your site so that traffic can be tracked no matter what path visitors navigate.

Once tracking is implemented on your site, you will be able to view where traffic on the site originated. For email campaigns, this will generally be indicated by a parameter appended to each URL within the email creative. For each destination URL or custom landing page, you will be able to see traffic in from your email as well as the successive pages that were visited. You will also be able to view click overlay reports that show you what content on your pages received the most clicks from your email campaign traffic.

Now that you have insight and quantifiable data as to what your site visitors are or are not doing on your site once they have clicked through from an email campaign, you can begin to form and test different hypotheses to ultimately help your campaigns achieve their goals.

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ABOUT US

Razorfish eCRM Solutions is a dedicated solutions group in the Razorfish Network, built to support the evolving needs of our clients in building best-in-class marketing programs. The team is a comprehensive set of experts in email marketing and relationship marketing that supports all forms of strategic services, including strategic planning, communication roadmaps, email delivery and technology, campaign management and optimization with an emphasis on experience and analytical optimization.