Blue Tent Marketing

“The only purpose of advertising is to make sales. It is profitable or unprofitable according to its actual sales.” – Claude Hopkins, “Scientific Advertising”

Would you invest $350 in an email marketing campaign for a $7,595 return on that investment? The answer is obvious! The graph below references a Google Analytics snapshot from one of our client’s recent email campaigns. And this figure only represents online orders, it doesn’t account for any additional orders that were completed by phone!

It’s widely touted that email marketing produces some of the highest R.O.I. of any online marketing channel. One statistic that is frequently referenced is, “Email R.O.I. per $1 spent equals $51.45″ 
(Source: Direct Marketing Association Power of Direct report October 2006). While, that sure sounds nice, it doesn’t mean much when it comes to measuring the effectiveness and value of your email marketing program.

Do you know exactly how many visits, leads, conversions, and sales are generated from your email campaigns? Can you accurately measure your return-on-investment? If your answer to these questions is no, then it’s time to integrate Google Analytics into your email marketing program.

A basic Google Analytics installation into your website and your email campaigns is easy to do. Not only will you have a more complete picture of how your site visitors are interacting with your site, but you’ll also have a clearer understanding of how your email programs compare to your other online marketing initiatives such as your Search Engine Marketing efforts. Establishing revenue goals for leads gained from form completions is easy to do. If your site includes an eCommerce component, then enabling eCommerce tracking within your GA account is a must.

Use the Google Analytics URL Builder to add a custom tag to every link with your email campaign that goes back to your site. Keep the “source” and “medium” consistent, but update the “campaign” variable with each send. In this way, you’ll easily be able to see which campaigns worked and which ones failed.

With every email campaign you should always be testing new ideas to find out what really works with your audience. Taking a scientific approach to your email marketing will not only help you improve each campaign’s effectiveness, but also help you create a road map of what works for future campaigns, and will help you make the case for allocating more of your marketing budget to your most productive marketing channels.

Remember, the ultimate goal is to measure the true R.O.I. for each email campaign, as well as for your email program as a whole. You’ll be able to measure revenue generated, average value per visitor, goals completed, conversion rate, and eCommerce transactions.

So whether you’re new to email marketing or have a current email marketing program in place – contact us today to take it to the next level, and remove the guess-work from your email marketing program!

- Josh Lewis & Ryan Austin

Email marketing is all about building and maintaining strong relationships. The email relationship starts when someone opts-in to receive information from your company or organization. Start simple and build the relationship from there. In the beginning, most people don’t want to give out much personal information. Asking for to much right away decreases your chance of getting that initial sign-up. Even just asking for the email address is a great start.

What happens after you get their email address is where the relationship starts to build, and first impressions are everything to building a good and trusting relationship. It is important that these next steps are done right and not overlooked. There are three key parts to this process that help create a great opt-in experience. First is the opt-in form itself. Second is the subscription confirmation page and the third is the subscription confirmation and welcome messages.

Start by creating a “quick subscribe” opt-in form. A true “quick subscribe” opt-in includes only a text box for email address. This allows you to capture only the most valuable piece of information and allows the subscriber to sign-up in seconds. Make sure to place the opt-in form on your homepage and also include a “subscribe” link on every page of your site. This can link to a slightly more detailed opt-in from that includes other non-mandatory fields such as name, city, state, zip, etc. This main “subscribe” page is also a good place to expand upon your email program – identify what information will be delivered and how often. This is also a good place to include an archive of past mailings so the potential subscriber can see an example of your campaigns. Once the prospect hits the “submit” button, they’re headed toward your subscription confirmation page.

The subscription confirmation page can and should do many things. First, this will give your new subscriber the confirmation that they successfully opted-in to your program. It’s a good idea to include the “reply-to email address” that you use in your campaigns and ask them to add it their address book or safe senders list to ensure deliverability to their inbox. Also, if you’re using a double opt-in process (considered to be best practice), be sure to emphasize that a confirmation email has been sent requiring that they click on the enclosed link to confirm their subscription. Lastly, this page is also a good place to include a link to your privacy policy.

Now that you have the essential piece of starting your email relationship, you can now start to ask for more information. This can be done on the subscription confirmation page or within the welcome message. Either way, the information you ask for here is the starting point to segmenting your campaigns. Whether it’s by state, gender, products or interests, make sure you ask for what pertains to your campaigns and make nothing required. Make sure your subscribers can easily update their profile, as their interests may change over time.

Like the confirmation page, the welcome message can and should do many things. This is where you start to give your subscribers what they asked to receive. If you are promising “special offers,” why not include one in the very first message that you send? This is a sure way to start the relationship off on the right foot. Also, it’s a good idea to again ask your new subscriber to add the “reply-to email” to their address book to ensure delivery to their inbox.

These are very important aspect of an effective opt-in experience. Once these steps are setup in the beginning, it’s all automated from there. Be sure to moderate your opt-ins on a monthly basis to gauge its effectiveness and to look for ways to constantly improve, add value and enhance the user experience.

7. Right Information – As experts in the field, it’s helpful to both your users and your ranking to provide quality information about the market. Whether you simply aggregate useful market summary news stories for your users in pdf format or podcast, blog or vlog about the local market–make market information prominent and accessible. Your users are looking at a big purchase. Arm them with current, relevant information that can help them make a decision. In this particular instance, users are more likely to trust a recent newspaper article than their realtor. Realtors are known for relentless market optimism about both buying and selling–so make sure your website provides balanced information that’s truthful. Evergreen odes to the enduring strength of a particular market (unless it’s the author’s home town of Carbondale) are not as helpful as pertinent recent information that takes a position on likely trends in the next quarter or two.

8. Right Transactions – Though budgets and software constraints may not allow it yet, it is likely that transacational paperwork for real estate will move to the web as digital signatures become more and more accepted. Begin to research software and intranet offerings from tech firms, title companies, financial houses, etc. Perhaps your site allows users to execute buyers and sellers agreements online, apply for financing from a local, reputable mortgage broker, or even go through the transactional paperwork and download as a pdf. I would post some links here, but by the time you Google it the market leaders may have changed. There isn’t anyone clearly out front in this area yet.