Web Analytics is often used by marketing staff members to determine their effectiveness. This is a real-life example of how I recently helped a company measure the effectiveness of their internally driven e-mail campaign.
A company I work provides training to their clients on the products they have purchased, as part of their on-going support.
Before I started working with this company, only basic analytics from the website was tracked. Not even all of the pages were being actively tracked. So I have been slowly working on adding a complete view of the website usage based upon analytics.
It recently started sending out targeted e-mail newsletters showcasing their latest course offerings based upon what classes the user has previously attended. However, the first e-mails required that the user manually enter the web address, and search for the class. While enrollments improved, it wasn’t as much as had been hopped.
To make things easier, I developed a method to allow the user to directly access the class. Given that a software vendor was used for the site, which has limited customization abilities, this was not as simple as one would think. However, with my web development background it was possible. By using a special link and modifying our analytics package, we were able to start tracking how many people followed the link from the e-mails that went out.
While it was always intuitive that they received more enrollments based upon the e-mails, they had no way to determine how many people were accessed the site based upon the e-mails. They could see that on a given day, enrollments went up – but how about the following days.
Often e-mail isn’t opened or acted upon in the first day due to people being out the office, having to get approval for the expenditure, etc. We can now prove this by seeing web hits from our clients 3 or 4 days after the initial e-mail goes out.
By tracking the information a little more closely, we can see the return on investment (ROI) of the internal e-mailing system and validate its continued use. This has the staff excited about continuing to use this new marketing system, as well as bringing in additional clients for the training.
About Walter Wimberly