Holistic Technology Enabled Internet Marketing Solutions

Campaign Tagging is a great way to track results of your your Email Marketing efforts within Google Analytics. By tagging your links, you gain a broader, more full picture of what people do on your site after they “clickthrough” a link in an email.

What are tagged links?

Tagged links are the links within your newsletter that have been assigned a unique “tag” that will register within your Google Analytics account. There are three required (*) unique parameters that you modify for each link within the email campaign, and two optional parameters that you can use to further filter the reports.

They are:

1. Campaign Name*
2. Campaign Source*
3. Campaign Medium*
4. Campaign Term
5. Campaign Content

* Required

The Campaign Name is the name of the email marketing campaign. This should be unique for every email that you deliver so that you can later review and compare the analytics data.

The Campaign Source identifies who distributed your email newsletter. You can use the name of your email newsletter or the name of the provider, depending on how complex your email marketing efforts are.

The Campaign Medium is simply ‘email.’

The Campaign Term can be used if you are targeting certain terms – if your Campaign Medium is PPC, for example.

The Campaign Content can be used to differentiate ads or links that point to the same URL.

So now that you have the basic understanding of what Campaign Tags are, here’s how to use them. Google has a URL Builder that generates the Campaign Tags for you. You then use these tags in place of the original URL’s within your email.

Example:

Say I wanted to link back to our home page from within a newsletter.  I would use the URL http://www.hallme.com/. In order to integrate this URL within analytics, we would use the URL Builder to generate the new link.

We’ll use “Campaign Tagging” as the Campaign Name, “Hall” as the Campaign Source and “Email” as the Campaign Medium.

This is how the new link appears:
http://www.hallme.com/?utm_source=HALL&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Campaign%2BTagging

Once this link has been added to the newsletter and delivered to an inbox, if it is clicked, it triggers a page view in Google Analytics and shows the referring source as HALL (the name of the campaign we selected).

This is important for a number of reasons. Without tagging your links, you may see a spike in visitors coming to your site after delivering a newsletter. But how do you distinguish which of those visitors are a result of your newsletter? You don’t.

Also, analytics treats links from within a newsletter as Direct Traffic. Direct Traffic is the number of times visitors came to your site using a link they have either saved in their favorites, bookmarks or from within a newsletter. Campaign Tagging is essentially segmenting this data so that you can better understand the performance of your newsletters.

In order to access this data from with Google Analytics, log into your account.

View Reports

View Traffic Sources

View Campaigns

View Dimensions

So now that you have the basics for integrating your email marketing campaigns with your analytics accounts, you’ll better understand the behaviors of your target audience and see actual data generated from your newsletters reflected within your website analytics.

I’ve seen it so many times, (well technically I didn’t “see” anything at all): a newsletter arrives in my inbox, and, since I don’t load HTML images automatically, all I is see is blank space or maybe a couple big red “X’s”… I know who the newsletter is from but without loading any of the images I have no idea what their offer is.

There are a lot of savvy people out there who like to take the wheel and direct their own Email Marketing initiatives. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if you don’t take the necessary steps you’re probably just wasting your time.

Here are three important steps one should consider when drafting up a newsletter:

1. Never use an image to deliver all your content: if your whole offer is drafted as an image and your recipient does not allow HTML emails, well you’re out of luck. The best advise is to “recreate” your image using an HTML editor so that any and all text elements render as text. (see fig. 1)
2. If images are necessary use ALT Tags: make sure you utilize ALT tags and don’t describe the image, describe the content you are promoting. If your images don’t display in your recipient’s inbox, they still see or “read” the content that was intended for them. (see fig. 2)
3. Test your newsletters in different email accounts: If you’re not testing your newsletters in different email accounts, i.e. Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, then as stated above, you’re out of luck. There are so many elements within a newsletter that look perfect when you’re drafting it but not so perfect when viewed in different accounts. The solution? Test test test…

Fig. 1

This is an example of an image only newsletter with NO ALT Text:

Fig. 2

Although this is an image only newsletter, the designers used ALT text in a very creative way.

Describing their offers so that you still get the details without loading any of the images:

If you absolutely have to take the wheel and create your own newsletters, following these simple steps will definitely give you a good start in the right direction.

For more helpful hints, or to talk about how Hall can help with your Email Marketing initiatives, leave a comment or contact me directly!

As I mentioned before, Inbound Marketing is the term for the types of marketing efforts where you are being found by consumers when they are researching information. With that said I have seen more than a few ears perk up when I mention email marketing as a part of one’s Inbound Marketing strategy. “But email is actually going OUT how is it a part of INbound marketing?”.

A few things:

• How did you build your email list?
  If someone is searching for an answer, solution or product online and they stumble across your website (due to your website’s original content and Search Engine Optimization),  decide you are a thought leader in this field and sign up for your newsletter using the user conversion piece on said landing page – then that is Inbound Marketing.If you build your list at conferences, meetings, your show room etc. with genuine people who are interested in receiving more information about your products and value those emails from you, that is also Inbound Marketing.
• Do you segment your lists? Are your loyal customers in one group, prospects in another, those who have previously forwarded your email to a friend in yet another? If so, you show that you care about each group and the specific things they bring to your business. For example 5-10% of Lego’s are sold to adults or AFOLs (adult fans of Legos). As a company, Lego’s has segmented information for this group and promoted brand evangelists to spread the message of this group. How would this group feel if they were lumped in with the millions of generic Legos fans? Probably not as passionate as they are now.
  By segmenting your lists you can tailor your content to reach each group accordingly promoting that conversational tone of each email piece.
• What content do you deliver in your email marketing campaign?
  Are your newsletters strictly about your products and maybe a few sales and specials you are offering? Then maybe that isn’t Inbound Marketing. But, if you are delivering engaging content on content that your subscriber is looking for and pushing that lead back to your website, that is considered Inbound Marketing.
• What results do you want from an email marketing campaign?
  If you are hoping your emails will start a conversation, provoke a question or a follow up email then you are participating in Inbound Marketing. If you just hope to shout out your latest and greatest product and you feel burdened by any responses to your email then perhaps this isn’t a part of an Inbound Marketing initiative.

Those are a few examples of how email marketing is a part of your overall Inbound Marketing plan. The main thing is that it isn’t about the tool (Twitter, email, Facebook, LinkedIn) as much is it is about the tone, the content, the relationship and how that information is shared with your audience. Inbound Marketing is producing good quality content that consumers will be able to find when they are looking for more information, products, services etc.

Inbound Marketing is the term for the types of marketing efforts where you are being found by consumers when they are researching information.

Outbound marketing is the term for interruption based marketing like television commercials, radio ads, newspaper articles, telemarketing etc. All of these marketing methods are built to interrupt people while they are trying to do something else, like watch their favorite TV program. Humans, as clever as we are, have found different ways to ignore these outbound marketing efforts:

• TV commercials – Meet the DVR Fast forward please
• Radio Ads – Satellite radio, Internet radio, portable music devices like iPods Turn it up!
• Newspaper ads – Our eyes are trained to look at the content not the side bars or full page ads Who still reads the paper?
• Telemarketing – Caller ID Unknown caller – no thank you
• Direct Mail – aka Junk Mail is promptly thrown away. Mine doesn’t even make it in our house Recycle bin right next to mailbox

Why are you wasting your marketing dollars on suffering marketing mediums?

Because it is safe and what we have always done. STOP. The power has shifted back to the customer you can either hop on now or be left behind. Your customers are researching products and services before they contact you. They know about your company, your competitor, maybe even your employees (a website’s About Us page is usually the second most viewed page on a website). They want a conversation, not to have someone shouting at them through traditional marketing channels.

Be found when your customers are looking!

Inbound Marketing efforts focus on you being found when your potential clients or customers are looking for answers or more information. There are lots of places to reach people but here are the biggest examples of Inbound Marketing tools:

• Blogging – Blogs are a great way to constantly be adding targeted new information to your website. You can easily add a blog to your current website or have it separate from your site. Blogs can tackle difficult questions, discuss industry news and so much more. Blogs are also very share-able and many people bookmark good blogs to refer black to.
• SEO and SEM – Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing and Organic Search are all positioning your website to be found for relevant searches. We live in Google’s world. People online search for everything under the sun. By doing a little research, some measurement and producing good content targeted correctly you can make sure your site is found when that search query is entered.
• Social Media – The Internet has gone social. People all over the world are participating in Social Networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and more. While on the sites they are discussing problems, solutions, products, services and more. If you are not participating and being able to contribute, you are missing out on an opportunity. There are thousands of online social networks. It is your job to find the communities that matter to your business and participate in them accordingly.
• Online Videos – Why tell people in words what you can show them in video? How to Videos, viral videos, and video blogs are very popular and a great way to reach out to consumers. Video production no longer takes a huge studio and camera crew. If you have a little bit of time, talent, and the will to do it, you too can produce good video content! Once your videos are online they are easy to share, comment on and ask for more information

Stay a part of the conversation after the purchase

One of my favorite aspects of Inbound Marketing is that you can also be a part of the conversation with your customers after the point of purchase. Lots of companies are using Social Media, Blogs etc. to tackle Customer Service requests, promote their brand, build trust and more. For this purpose I also like to add email marketing to the Inbound Marketing mix:

• Email Marketing – A well executed email marketing campaign can be one of the best ways to build trust and stay top of mind with your customers. A content rich, well targeted email can be sent to your customers’ Inbox and many people save them for future reference and share them with friends that they think will find them useful.

Let’s chat some more

I hope this was a good review on what Inbound Marketing is. I will tackle a little more in depth each of the topics I went over quickly here in the next few weeks. If you have any specific questions or feedback on a topic you would like to see discussed please comment below!