Email is more effective at driving business results when it’s paired with social media — so why do so many marketers stop their measurement at traditional metrics like deliverability and open and click-through rates? The only way to get a big-picture look at the reach of your email campaign is to track its viral reach beyond the inbox and throughout the Web.?
Marketers can implement Web analytics and social media monitoring with email for increased ROI for their campaigns using these best practices:?
- Apply Web-behavior analytics to landing pages. Marketers need to understand how users interact with the brand’s content on a granular level, and introducing behavior analytics enables testing and optimization. Behavior analytics can provide insight into what works and, just as importantly, what doesn’t. ?
- Add share buttons for each social channel. Subscribers may want to share your email — particularly timely deals or educational information — over social media, so make it easy for them by embedding links to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google +1 and any other worthwhile media for all your online content.?
- Encourage people to share via social media, and tailor the content to each platform. Beyond obvious limitations like length of message, think of who subscribers will be sharing content with. Facebook posts have a more casual tone than LinkedIn posts, for example. ?
- Segment the content for measurement. Include a separate tracking link for each social network in order for you to measure the sharing effect separately, and construct a new landing page for each email campaign for better tracking. Likewise, use different links for your direct distribution list and social networks.?
- Analyze the campaign’s viral reach. A big-picture view ?of the campaign’s reach means looking at how many people outside of your subscriber list had access to your message. This sharing comes in many forms — social sharing, copying and pasting the content itself, featuring the message in a blog, and posting links on social networks. ?
An increase in ROI comes from calculated adjustments to the offering and the messaging used in the campaign. By tracking consumer interactions every step of the way, you can determine the number of sales, sign-ups or other interactions completed based on the total number of subscribers. Tracking the email campaign all the way through to the end is the only way to truly prove the impact of your email marketing program.
