SMarT Marketing

Using web analytics can help you better understand your customer’s needs and help you market to them more effectively. It has been found that emails generated from clickstream data saw a 9x improvement in revenue and 32x more in net profit versus undifferentiated broadcast emails (”The ROI of Email Relevance”, Jupiter Research). 

Who has not completed a transaction?

Use your web analytics to see which customers have abandon your shopping cart. After a few days send a reminder email encouraging customers to return and complete the process. You may even want to inform the recipient that their shopping cart will be expiring soon. Another tactic is the include an incentive to purchase the abandon items.

What pages do they visit?

Take a look at the your user’s site usage. Send an email on products or incentives related to the products or categories browsed. It has been found that consumers made an immediate purchase from emails when the email contained the products they were already considering.

When do they visit?

For frequent visitors to your site, invite them to participate in hidden promotions or sweepstakes not available to your other customers. For recent visitors, send a message on the latest products browsed.

From where are they arriving? 

Take a look at what referring domains and URLs visitors are coming from. Use this information to target visitors by sending them a message that asserts or reinforces your competitive or leadership position.

 Why do they do what they do?

Incorporate email demographics into your web anlytics program, you can then learn what products categories and pages are currently appealing to your demographic segment.

How?

You will need to connect a specific email recipient  to the browsing behavior associated with the visitor history or profile in your Web analytics program. You can also use email conversion tracking, in which a customer accesses the site by clicking a trackable link in an email.

There is a challege to using web site behavioral clickstream data as an email targeting tactic. Typically a relatively small portion of the email list lends itself to clickstream targeting.

Contact Sales & Marketing Technologies to learn how we can improve your web site’s success.

by Brent Nau

Internet Marketing Specialist

The Email Experience Council ( EEC ) released some preliminary results from their recent Deliverability Roundtable survey. The ECC is going to use this data to set some standards in the areas of bounce management and more. Here are some of those results:

• 20% of respondents are using a combination of internal email systems and ESPs with limited, to no coordination between the two platforms.
• 65% of respondents are not tracking whether their email is being delivered to the inbox or spam folder.
• 10% of respondents admit that they are not removing bouncebacks (hard or soft) from their list.

They hope to have the final results out in a few weeks.

Jeff Daniels, JupiterResearch, released a new report called, “The Connected Click-Through“. The report looked at how email marketers are using their web analytics program to imporve their behavioral targeting. The report found:

• 15% actively use Web sile click stream behavior as an audience segmentation attribute
• 21% of marketers are planning to implement this kind of behavioral targeting in the next 12 months

The report also notes that there are some obstacles in implementing behavioral study into email marketing.

• Lack of staff expertise
• Lack of resources
• Web analytics vendors do not provide integration for easy use and movement of data between applications

Derek Harding, clickz.com, released a new article, “RSS: The E-mail Marketing Killer?”. Derek explains how he is skeptical that RSS is an alternative to email for mass marketing.

I agree with him that RSS has not matured enough for mass marketing. But I definitely see that RSS can be used for niche marketing in its current form.

Derek also states, “It’s not useful or effective to take a quarterly newsletter or monthly promotional e-mail and publish it via RSS for the mass market.”

By no means would you want to stop emailing and only offer a RSS feed. You want to compliment your email marketing by putting RSS into your marketing mix. By publishing your newsletter via RSS you provide your users/customers another marketing channel to access your content.

In ChiefMarketers latest newsletter, E-Centric, they have a new article, “Tips for Dealing with Tough E-Zine Challenges”. The article had a good list of email marketing basics, until I got to the end. The last bullet point was:

“Only Outlook can accept a Flash e-mail, so do not use it across all e-mail clients.”

This bullet point peaked my interest because I just had a co-worker ask me about embedding Flash into an email. I did a little research on using Flash in email newsletters. I found a great resource at Campaign Monitor blog. They did a thorough test on the major PC, Mac and web-based email environments.

Campaign Monitor found that support for Flash was only found in Mac Mail. One blog comment noted that the ActiveX control needs to be enabled for Flash to work in Outlook and Outlook Express.

Bottom line…Do not use Flash in your email newsletter.