Email Tracking - 3 Common Misconceptions

There is one major difference between email marketing and general website marketing, and this is cost. Email marketing generally costs more money to implement. As a result, proper email tracking becomes a necessity. To explain this a bit more, when we refer to general website marketing, we are talking about adding an advert to our website, or adding a post to highlight some of the features of a product, along with an appropriate link to allow the user to visit the product page and make a purchase. The other types of work typically involve acquiring backlinks, and maybe submitting articles to article directories. Very often there is little or no cost associated with these, just the underlying hosting account fees which are usually very small, often less than $10 per month for a hosting account which allows you to have multiple websites. With email marketing, the costs are typically higher. If you have your own mailing list, then you may be using the services of an email company such as Aweber, where the fees are usually starting at $20 per month, and increase depending on the size of your mailing list. If you buy solo ads, or email adverts that are run for you by other marketers on their lists, these usually have a set fee. Thus email tracking, recording information about the behaviour of your emails, becomes essential. Every time you run an email campaign, you must make use of your email tracking reports to see how they are performing. When analysing the data that is delivered from your email tracking program, beware of the following points, which are common misconceptions. 1 - All of your emails will not get opened. Everyone has their own set routine when it comes to reading emails. Some people are online during the day and will read each email as it arrives. Others only collect their email at intervals, and may receive several emails in a group each time. Very often in these cases, some of the emails will go un-read. 2 – Email marketing is seen to be better than postal marketing. The phrase ‘responsiveness’ is often used when describing how people react to marketing campaigns. With postal marketing, this is the number of people who go to the trouble of actually reading and following up your letter or postcard. With emails and email tracking, we are referring to the percentage of people that read the email, and click the link included. The costs involved in sending emails as opposed to sending postal mail are usually higher. Generally speaking, marketers do not send the same volume of messages in each case. For example, emails might get sent on a weekly or even a daily basis, thousands at a time. It is usually impossible to send similar quantities using regular mail. So overall, there is generally a greater return from emails just because there are so many of them. But it is often wrong to assume that that the responsiveness via postal mail is less than email. Take not that a proper marketing campaign should try to incorporate both methods. 3 – That the most responsive email is the right one to use. Be careful when it come to analysing your email tracking data. If you do just one brief test, perhaps by sending two different but similar emails and then analysing the results, then naturally they will not be the same. One will almost definitely perform better than the other. It would be a mistake in that case to assume that the better-performing one is the one to use. Instead, you should continue to test or even repeat the test at a later stage with a different segment of your mailing list. Experienced marketers never stop email tracking and analysis. rnRyan King helps people to discover the benefits of using email tracking software to your online business. As an experienced marketer with number of websites on the first page of Google, he would like to share his email marketing journey.