Are You Marketing Blindly? By Abbie Drew May 25, 2006

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Do you feel like you're throwing money away with your email promotions? You keep investing in ads and sending out email messages but your budget is slowly dwindling away.

Yes, you make a few sales, but honestly, you’re not sure where they’re coming from. You have no idea what promotions are working or which of your email are profitable.

Again and again, I read studies and statistics indicating email marketers are not tracking their promotions. In addition to these reports, I can see first hand that email marketers fail to track. I review ads and receive emails regularly which have no tracking.

All too often, marketers make excuses for themselves about why they’re not tracking. It’s too complicated. Or, I don’t have the time. Or it costs to much money to do it.

The fact is without tracking you’re losing time and money. You’re marketing blindly, often throwing money away. You are unable to know the ROI (return on investment) for your email campaigns and/or your ads. As a result when you spend more money for ads, or when you take the time to change your email copy, you do not know if you’re investing in the right places or if your copy improvements help or hurt!

Just for a minute, think what it would be like to cut your marketing expenses by 50% and at the same time increase your sales by 50%. Can you imagine the money your business would make if you could regularly run profitable promotions. You’d finally have the success you’ve always dreamed about!

If you’re skeptical that the guess work can be taken out of marketing. The fact is . . . It can. The old saying in advertising that "I know half my advertising dollars are wasted - I just don't know which half!" is no longer a reality.

With Internet marketing, and in particular email marketing, you can know exactly what ads work, what emails work and how much money you make from every prospect and customer. What’s more when you know what’s working and what isn’t you can focus on improving your marketing. And as you improve your sales will soar!

So how do you do it? How do you track your emails and ads? Where do you begin? What do you look at?

Let’s review some basic email statistics, every marketer should consider. Plus you’ll find some simple, free ways you can start tracking.

Before we begin, the first key to tracking is having some statistics available for your web site. Most web hosting accounts, do include statistics about who is visiting your site. Even a free Yahoo web account from geocities.com has statistics. So check with your web host about the stats available and start looking at them.

1) Open Rate

Is any one opening the emails you send?

You calculate the open rate by looking at the number of emails you sent compared to the number of email messages opened. Open rates can only be calculated if you send an HTML message.

If you are sending plain text email, there is no way to track open rates. Your only option is to track click through rates on the URLs you have included in the body of your email. (More on this below.)

When you send HTML email, a simple way to track your open rates is to include an image in the email. Each time a reader opens the email, the image file is loaded from your web host into the email. You can then check your server logs or web statistics and see how many times was the image loaded.

Each time the image is loaded, it indicates that a person opened the email.

Most people use a clear GIF as the image, which is an invisible graphic. If you have MS Paint on your computer you can create a clear GIF. Just open up Paint, make the white box as small as possible and save it as a .gif file. That’s it. Then upload it to your web host. Be sure to create a new image file with a new name for each emailing so when reviewing your web reports you can compare how many hits there are to the GIF for each mailing. The hits will tell you the open rates of each emailing.

Yes the issues of text emails, multiple opens from the same user and email programs that don’t load in images will prevent your stats from being completely accurate. However, calculating the open rate for your emails consistently will tell you roughly how any of your subscribers are opening your email. You’ll also then know if some emails have higher open rates than others.

2) Click-through rate (CTR)

Is any one responding to the emails you send?

You calculate the CTR by looking at the total number of clicks divided by the number of emails you sent out. CTR can be calculated if you send text or HTML email, it does not matter. CTR is an essential number to know for your email promotions. If people are not clicking on the links in your email then you need to work on your copy.

The easiest way to track your CTR is to look at the web statistics for the page URL you included in your email. How many visits did the URL get? Divide visits by emails sent and that’s your CTR.

The key to knowing your CTR is to make sure when you send out a new campaign you use a unique URL for the campaign. If you use the same URL in all your promotions you will not know where the clicks are coming from.

What you can do is create a new landing page file for each of your email promotions. For the first promotion give the landing page the name – promo1.htm . Then in your email link to this promo1.htm page. In your second promotion, create a copy of the landing page and give it the name – promo2.htm . Then in your second email promotion, link to promo2.htm.

You can then compare the clicks to promo1 vs. promo2 and you’ll know which promotion worked more effectively.

As you run additional promotions simply create landing page files, named promo3.htm, promo4.htm, etc..

Yes, you can use tracking software packages or services that will help you to create these URLs for your promotions. Investing in these tools can save you time and give you more detailed analysis.

However, if you’re just starting out with your tracking, before investing in tracking tools, try out this simple approach of creating duplicate landing pages and looking at your web stats. Once you see the benefits of tracking and want to start tracking all your promotions, then you’ll be ready for the more advanced tracking tools.

Please do not use the excuse that you are an affiliate and therefore you do not have the ability to create landing pages. You should have your own web site. Even a free one will do for starters. Then create a landing page on your site and have the page redirect people to your affiliate page.

You can create a redirect page for your site with the following code:

HTML>
HEAD>
TITLE>Offer
META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" Content= "0; URL=Your affiliate URL here ">
/HEAD>
BODY>
/BODY>
/HTML>’

By using this code in your landing page, any one who goes to your site, will then be redirected to your affiliate site.


3) Conversion

Is any one taking you up on your offer?

To calculate conversion take a look at the number of completed actions (completed form or sale) divided by the number of click throughs. Or you can calculate conversion on the number of completed actions versus the total number of emails sent.

Note, that you’re evaluating action, not necessarily sales. As your conversion depends upon what your site is calling for - are you requesting information or a purchase? Some promotions may simply be to drive traffic to a site to request information and then you later try to convert them into buyers. Other promotions simply drive traffic to buy.

Conversion is not as easily calculated as CTR. But there are some rudimentary techniques you can use when sending email promotions to your list that will tell you which promotion worked. Here are a few to consider.

a) When emailing to your list, look in your database for the email address of the individual who took action and see which promotion he / she received.

b) In your promotion tell you reader to enter a promo code for a special offer on the form. Have the promo codes different for each of your promotions. Evaluate the promotion codes entered on your form and you’ll know which promotion worked more effectively.

c) Create unique purchase and thank you pages for each promotion in addition to the landing pages. Thus promo1 will link to purchase1 which will lead to thank you1 and promo2 will link to purchase2 which will lead to thank you2.

You’ll then know how many individuals from promo1 purchased and how many individuals from promo2 purchased by evaluating your web statistics for thank you1 and thank you2. How many people got to the thank you1 page? That number is the number who took action on promo1. Similarly how many people got to the thank you12 page? That number is the number who took action on promo2.

d) Lastly, you can do a rough calculation of conversion by sending your promotions at different times. If you send promo1 this week you’ll know any one who converts this week is from promo1. And then when you send promo2 the next week you’ll estimate that any one who converts is likely from promo2.


Knowing these 3 basic tracking statistics for your email marketing will dramatically effect your results. Because once you know how your promotions are doing, you can start testing.

And online marketers will tell you Testing, Testing, Testing is the key to marketing success. By testing different elements of your promotions you’ll improve your conversions and make more money.

What are some aspects of your promotion to test?

1) Subject lines of your email.
2) Offer you use.
3) Email list you send to.
4) Landing page you link to.
5) Headline on your landing page.

Of course the key to testing is to only change one component at a time and measure the results. If you change everything at once, you won’t know which aspect made a difference.

Once you start testing and tracking your promotions you’ll discover a whole new element of marketing. No longer will it seem the mysterious magic of the experts. Rather you’ll find there is a duplicateable science any one can follow to improve their marketing and sales results.

###
Abbie Drew
DEMC Editor

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