Increase Email Marketing ROI with Web Analytics Integration

As I’ve written previously, online customers are increasingly demanding higher relevance from their Web experiences. And that certainly includes higher relevance from the email marketing offers they receive. By linking website behavior with email marketing campaigns, marketers can dramatically improve message relevance — and conversion results.

In fact, according to Jupiter Research, targeted emails that leverage Web site click stream data generate a nine times improvement in revenue, and as much as 32 times more in net profit, on average, over undifferentiated broadcast campaigns.

But despite that fact, roughly one in four marketers launch email campaigns without any targeting or differentiation — and only 11 percent actually send targeted campaigns based on key insights like purchase history or click stream activity.

Preserve your margins! Here’s another interesting fact: 60 percent of consumers who made immediate purchases from emails did so because the email contained products they were already considering. The importance of this is that you don’t have to offer discounts or free items to drive conversion.

Think about it: People are more likely to purchase products when they receive a targeted email that includes products they are already thinking about buying. This underscores the need to engage the customer at the right time with the correct offer – not the need to incent with discounts.

For example, say you’re an electronics retailer. By monitoring the click stream activity of a customer, you see that she has arrived at your home page and then traveled directly to the big screen TV category. She has browsed several different brands of televisions, on a few different visits, but has yet to make a purchase.

By sending a timely email showing the relevant products that she has considered, you can vastly improve your likelihood of a sale. Of course, none of us are mind readers, but armed with click stream behavior data, we can make well informed decisions about the desires of our customers.

In order to market in this way — to target and send more relevant messages — you must have the ability to collect customer click stream data with Web analytics and automate the sharing of the information with your email service provider.

Once you have these pieces in place, you’ll be able to deliver relevant email messages such as in the example above. You can target messages based on based on products that were viewed during a visit, products that were left in an abandoned shopping cart, or a partially completed subscription form, etc. Through Omniture Genesis you can target your email remarketing based upon any targeted customer segment you choose to create. You’ll see a dramatic impact on revenue with minimal impact on cost, since all you are doing is leveraging visitor information your site is already getting.

In future posts, I’ll share more about how to begin making this happen, and I’ll share real-world examples of targeted email marketing that works.