Email Marketing: You’re (probably) doing it wrong
If you’ve ever sent out an email or a newsletter to your clients, I hope you tracked the links through Google Analytics!
This is the point where people usually say “no, but we tracked it using this other software we have” (Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, “some custom thing we have”).
However, only Google Analytics will track your revenue and goal conversions. Although “Opens” and “CTR” are important, they aren’t as good as revenue or ROI!
Tagging your email campaigns with your GA code is so important for measuring attribution of sales through your website. Without tagging, any sales that should be attributed to email will probably get incorrectly credited to “Direct” or “Referral” – which is just plain wrong.
Once you have your attribution mastered, you can work out the ROI of your email campaign, then use this new data to decide if it was profitable and if you will be sending out another.
Google Analytics campaign tracking code can be difficult to get your head around if you’re not technically minded (or even if you are).
Below are some snippets you can copy into your emails links to track your campaigns correctly! Easy.
The Anatomy of a Correctly Tracked Link
You can use Google’s own URL builder here – but people often put the wrong values in the wrong boxes, so it can all become a bit messy.
utm_source=newsletter
This is the list of people you are sending your email to, “newsletter” or “customers” or “prospects” or “facebook+users” (notice that instead of spaces we have to use pluses “+”)
utm_medium=email
We’re sending our email via email, so leave this as email. Make sure it ALWAYS says the same value, “Email”, “e-mail” use one way of spelling and stick to it!
utm_campaign=Summer+Sale
This is the unique identifier for this campaign – its name. The name of a campaign is the purpose of the email, what is the email about? Promoting a summer sale, in this example, or it could be a new product launch. Again, please note that spaces are replaced with pluses.
Listed below are some sensible options for how you could go about tagging your links:
Emails sent to existing customers
Monthly newsletter
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=January
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=February
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=March
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=April
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=May
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=June
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=July
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=August
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=September
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=October
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=November
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=December
Seasonal Sale Promotion
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Summer+Sale
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Autumn+Sale
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Winter+Sale
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Spring+Sale
Holiday Events
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Christmas
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=New+Years
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Bank+Holiday
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Valentines
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Easter
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Fathers+Day
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Mothers+Day
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Halloween
New Product Launch
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=New+Product
Discount Promotion
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Discount
Emails sent to existing customers
Monthly newsletter
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=January
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=February
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=March
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=April
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=May
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=June
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=July
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=August
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=September
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=October
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=November
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=December
Seasonal Sale Promotion
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Summer+Sale
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Autumn+Sale
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Winter+Sale
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Spring+Sale
Holiday Events
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Christmas
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=New+Years
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Bank+Holiday
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Valentines
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Easter
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Fathers+Day
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Mothers+Day
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Halloween
New Product Launch
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=New+Product
Discount Promotion
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Discount
A note about other parameters
There are also a few other parameters you can add on to a URL that aren’t required. The most important one we use is the utm_content parameter that lets you differentiate between different links in the same email, so if you are sending out a news bulletin with 5 different stories, you would add a unique utm_content string.
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=May&utm_content=article1
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=May&utm_content=article2
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=May&utm_content=article3
(Yours would be more meaningful names)
