About Matraxis:
John Caiger is Director of Matraxis, a leading supplier of web and email campaign analytics solutions, a long standing WebTrends Premier Reseller and WIN Partner.  Matraxis assists a wide range of organisations to improve their web marketing through visitor acquisition, conversion and retention.

Understanding individuals: advanced email campaign analytics

In the previous article we looked at how integrating email marketing with web or email campaign analytics helps define a better picture of your customer base.  Tools like WebTrends allow you to analyse click through behaviour so you can optimise and get maximum return from your email campaign.

Analytics installed; what’s the next step?  Well, email reporting solutions can help you to understand the individual and even automate a response dependent upon their specific behaviour pattern.

For example, a visitor arriving to, say, a holiday web site from an email campaign may first review a specific area of interest, before bookmarking the site to return at another time.  When the visitor returns, even though this visit is through a bookmark, it is valuable to know that they originated from the email campaign. Analytics enables you to deliver accurate reporting against the original campaign and, importantly, allows a behaviour profile to be built over time, as each visit can be tied to the last with advanced analytics. 

Scoring Visitor Activity

90% of visitors will leave the site without converting. Who are they? What did they do? How likely are they to come back again? Email reporting solutions like WebTrends measure and report on which visitors provide the most potential value to your business by scoring on site behaviour. This gives you the power to target your messaging, improve your conversions and build long-term loyalty. 

Using the previous example of the returning holiday site visitor, you can now attribute value according to activity. A visitor downloading a brochure and watching the video attracts a higher weighting than a visitor who simply navigates the pages. 

Using email campaign analytics to build a measurable score against the individual means that we can now trigger an event such as an email specifically covering the high scoring holiday or a pop up chat session to run through the options or a special offer.

Therefore, over time, it is possible to build understanding to achieve the following;

Drive Customer Engagement

Using email campaign analytics to learn which web site activities and integrated campaigns drive the deepest website engagement. Create target segments based on visitor scores to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.

Start the Right Conversations with the Right Visitors

Create rich visitor segments based on the interactions visitors have on your site over time. Not all conversions happen on the first visit. With email reporting solutions like WebTrends Score, you can identify visitors with a high potential to convert, and then customise your scoring to create an accurate profile of a highly engaged customer.

Spend Money on Campaigns that Work… Lose the Ones that Don’t

Be ruthless if you’re not getting the most out of an email campaign. Analytics will help you understand the value and depth of engagement being driven by your marketing campaigns, the impact of your keyword placements and creatives as well as the value of referring sites. Optimise the campaigns that are driving visitor engagement and eliminate those that are not. Quantify the value of visitor actions driven by marketing activities, even if they aren’t associated with a monetary transaction.

Create and Test Scoring Rules that Provide the Most Insight

Experiment with scoring rules and test the results before applying the rule to all of your visitors. Optimise and refine your rule sets and only apply the rules that give you the most valuable insight. Isolate single segments to get a more granular view of the impact of the rule set. A simple drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to work efficiently.

By integrating WebTrends Marketing Lab Solutions with Pure360 it is possible to develop the most comprehensive understanding of visitor engagement for any web site with any set of business goals. Using these email reporting solutions you can determine which actions are most important to your business and reveal the untapped value of your web site visitors.

If you are using web analytics and would like more information on integrating email reporting solutions, please contact us at hello@emailmarketingmanual.com

In the next article…

The next article in this series will look at the integration of web and email campaign analytics results with third party data sources such as CRM.