Email marketing is a powerful marketing channel used to drive sales and connect with your customers. According to Mckinsey, email is nearly 40 times more effective in acquiring a customer than Facebook and Twitter combined.

Unlike social media channels, which are mainly used to increase brand awareness and engagement, email marketing allows you to follow up and nurture your email leads with tailored messages, with the objective of increasing your conversion rates (e.g. sales) substantially.

The recent decline in organic reach on social media channels further augments the importance of email marketing. As your email messages reach your target groups directly in their inboxes, it enables you to build a more intimate connection with them. As a result, they will feel a stronger affinity with your brand and will be more responsive to your marketing efforts.

Nevertheless, never forget to keep your company background information clear as most of your customers run an email address search to get informed about the receiver of the email.

Why Track Conversions and Optimize Your Email Campaigns?

Your emails might be going out to thousands of people, but what percentage is actually converting into sales? Have you been struggling to get your subscribers to open your emails, but don’t have the insight required to solve this problem?

In order for email marketing to be effective, it is imperative to have proper analytics set up, coupled with a platform to perform split testing. Marketers who do not integrate their email marketing campaigns with their marketing funnels are allowing sales opportunities to slip through the cracks.

Email service providers such as Mailchimp, VerticalResponse, Constant contact or AWeber provide basic metrics such as open rates and page hits, which should suffice for a basic marketing funnel. You can then verify email addresses using a tool like Find Emails. However, in today’s complex marketing environment, marketers need more flexibility and control over their marketing links when handling an intricate funnel.

This is where ClickMeter can help.
ClickMeter allows you to measure the impact of your email marketing campaigns in relation to the metrics that matter to your marketing goals, as well as provide insights to optimize them.

Track Email Conversions with ClickMeter

Would you like to know if your email campaigns are generating any sales?
With ClickMeter, you can track conversions through the use of a conversion code (pixel) placed in the ‘Checkout’ or ‘Thank You’ page.

Video: how to track conversions
Tutorial: 5 ways to track your conversions

Track the entire email (opens)

Using the Tracking Pixel you can know how many times the email was opened.
The tracking pixel is a piece of code that can be inserted anywhere in your website, blog or within the emails you send. It is a transparent image that is only 1×1 pixels in dimension.

Tracking pixels just work with HTML email format. If you are sending (old stile) txt email you will not be able to use a tracking pixel. More info here: How to Create a Tracking Pixel (Video)

After implementing the pixel, it will notify you whenever your email has been opened or website/banner has been viewed to assess the performance (including conversion tracking when it is linked to the conversion pixel) of your email marketing campaign.

ClickMeter enables you to generate as many different tracking pixels as you need to track an unlimited number of websites and emails.
A professional runner who doesn’t keep track of his/her running metrics wouldn’t be able to improve his finishing time. Likewise, a marketer who doesn’t track the conversion rates is simply taking a shot in the dark. You can have the best open and click-through rates, but without knowing how they translate into conversions, it would be a set of vanity metrics.

Track a call to action (clicks)

By using a tracking link that is linked to a conversion pixel in your email, you can learn which email follow-up or broadcast is driving the most sales.

Email service providers (e.g. AWeber, Mailchimp, Vertical response, Constant contact) are cracking down on unethical marketers who abuse email marketing, resulting in the increase of domains being blacklisted – especially URL shortening services.
To prevent your account from getting banned for using a blacklisted link, you can personalize your tracking links by using a dedicated domain (e.g. www.yourdomain.com) instead. This increases brand visibility, as well as instilling trust which would increase the click-through rate.

Tip: associate the conversion code only to the tracking link or to the tracking pixel or you will have redundant data.

Who clicked your email and converted?

With ClickMeter you can see not only how many times your email converted but also who converted. This is very simple to setup and you just have to add a query parameter to the tracking link or pixel you are using in your email. Simply pass variables through the URL to see the email addresses of those who have opened your email. This allows you to spot any gaps or audiences that your campaign is not reaching.

Practically all mass emailing services like the ones we name in this article allow you to setup variables. The variable you need is the email recipient. This is the email of the customer that is receiving that specific email. Just add this variable to the ClickMeter tracking pixel or link.

eg.: pixel.watch/1234?[recipient]

After the pixel or the link just add a “?” question mark and the Variable for the recipient.
Each email service has his own variable syntax than you have to look in their knowledge base to find the right one.

MailChimp:
http://kb.mailchimp.com/merge-tags/all-the-merge-tags-cheatsheet
E.g. http://trackinglink.com/1234?*|URL:EMAIL|*

VerticalResponse:
http://partner.verticalresponse.com/downloads/VerticalResponse_APIManual_v4.pdf  (Pg.11)
E.g. http://trackinglink.com/1234?id={EMAIL_ADDRESS}

Constant Contact:
http://support2.constantcontact.com/articles/SupportFAQ/1789?q=dynamic&pnx=1
E.g. http://trackinglink.com/1234?$Subscriber.Email$

AWeber:
http://mydomain.com/?email={!email}

Optimizing your Email Campaigns

How can you improve your lead or sales conversion rate?
The concept of split testing is not new. It involves performing tweaks in order to find a version of an element which appeals to your target audience and increasing the possibility of them performing your desired action.

What are the common elements to split test in your email campaigns?

• Subject Line
• Call-to-Action (CTA)
• Positioning of links
• Format and structure of email body
• Images

People respond to marketing messages differently as they have different needs and pain points, and it largely depends on which stage of the buyer’s journey they are at. With this information, it’s vital that you treat each lead uniquely through segmentation.

Wrapping up

Marketers with unoptimized email campaigns are leaving tons of money on the table. By using a simple tracking tool like ClickMeter, marketers can take control of their email marketing campaigns and use this channel to achieve their marketing goals.

Start tracking your email campaigns using ClickMeter today!

Related Reading:

• Track Facebook Clicks, Views, and Conversions
• The Importance of Measuring Online Efforts
• Commission tracking and time to conversion

This blog post is about:

• Email conversion tracking
• Email conversions
• How to track email
• Email analytics
• How to track conversion rates
• What is conversion tracking

Originally published: July 12th, 2017.
Updated: March 6th, 2019.