SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Email Marketing and SEO from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

When built correctly, an eNewsletter offers a wide array of tracking features which can help you to maximise your ROI. The statistics described below are those that are available using our own eNewsletter Software.

Recipient Activity:

After sending an eNewsletter to your customers you can further track their actions to see many aspects:

Opens:

See who has opened the eNewletter, how many times they have opened it, and which links they have clicked on. From these stats you can determine who is the most interested in your eNewsletter by the number of times they have opened your eNewsletter. You can also see what topics they are interested in from the links that they have clicked on.

Subscribers:

By following best practices and providing an unsubscribe link in your eNewsletter (by law in Hong Kong you must provide this link in all your eNewsletters), you can see who is the least interested and subsequently remove them from your further mailings. In Hong Kong, it is very important that you do remove these subscribers. If you do not, they may report you and consequently further emails from you may be placed on a list whereby none of your clients will receive any of your eNewsletters ever again.

Subscriber Snapshot:

Diving deeper into the statistics, you can further check out each individual subscriber to see what links they clicked on which date and and what time. You can further see at what dates and times they opened your eNewsletter. From this breakdown you can monitor their activity thereby gaining an insight into their activity both on your website (through the links clicked) and on your eNewsletter (by the time in between views of the email).

Link Click Activity:

Looking at the link click activity we can see how many people clicked links and your subsequent Click Through Rate (CTR), the total number of clicks, the average amount of clicks per person and the number of people who didn’t click.

Link URL:

Looking at the link URL we can see a tally of how many clicks were gathered on each page that was clicked upon. Further we can see who clicked on these links and how many times they clicked on the link.

Opens and Clicks Over Time:

Here we can see a timeline of how many people opened the eNewsletter as well as the number of clicks people made each day after the eNewsletter was sent out. We can also see the number of unique opens and unique clicks.

Day Range:

By selecting a specific day, we can see further the total opens, total clicks, unique opens and unique clicks that were generated for each hour of the day.

Minute Range:

We can once again break this down into the minutes of any hour to see total opens, total clicks, unique opens and unique clicks of any minute during any hour of any day. 

Unique Opens & Unique Clicks:

Of any minute, hour or day we can see who specifically opened their eNewsletter at that point in time.

Email Client Usage

These stats are great because you can see which email clients most of your visitors are using and therefore make sure that your eNewsletter will be properly displayed in future eNewsletters that you wish to send out. For example if 60% of your subscribers are opening their eNewletters on the iPhone or other mobile device, you want to be sure that your eNewsletter opens and displays correctly so that they can view it in its entirety.

Most popular email clients:

Here we can see the popularity in percentage of the email client (eg. Microsoft Outlook, Hotmail, Apple Mail, GMail) that your subscribers are using to view their eNewsletter. You can also see the specific number of subscribers that have opened their eNewsletter in each email client.

Bounce Summary

This section can help you to clean up your subscriber list as you can see which people did not receive the eNewsletter and why. It can also help you to see which email clients may be treating your eNewsletter as spam and placing it in the junk email folder. You can then take appropriate action by sending emails to all those subscribers where the emails bounced (they didn’t get through possibly due to being treated as junk email) explaining that the email did not get through and requesting them to add your email to their safe list. If you get another bounce-back however, then perhaps the email you have is no longer valid, and you can follow up by contacting them by another means in order to get an updated email address.

Soft Bounces:

Here you can view which subscriber emails resulted in a soft bounce. Soft Bounces refer to a temporary problem with the subscribers email account. Their email account may either be temporarily unavailable (general failure – SB), there may be a temporary failure in reaching the address (DNS failure – SBDF), their mailbox may be full (mailbox full failure – SBMF), or your eNewsletter size may be too large for their account (message size too large failure – SBMS).  

Hard Bounces:

View which subscriber emails resulted in a hard bounce. A hard bounce is a message that is considered permanently undeliverable. Hard Bounces are usually the result of an email address which is no longer active. This is commonly seen in large organisations where the person has left their position and their email account has been terminated as a result.

Bounce Domains:

See which domains (eg. hotmail.com, yahoo.com.hk etc.) resulted in the most bounces, either soft or hard. This may give you insight into a possible block on this domain for the email you are sending from, or it could be that your eNewsletter may not be filtered properly and is ending up in the junk email folder instead. As a result you can look into this further by sending a test email to various email clients or domains to be sure that your enewsletters arrive in the inbox and that they display correctly. This can help you to save money in the long run by minimizing the number of emails sent out to addresses where the client cannot view the email or did not receive it in the first place.

For all of the above statistics, you may also export the information to an excel spreadsheet for further examination if necessary.

To increase people coming to your site you may need to carry out Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in order to make your website rank higher on the natural search results in search engine results listings.

If your website has a conflict with SEO perhaps due to design issues, then you may have to opt for sponsored listings in a search engine. This is where you pay to get listed, usually across the top or down the right hand side of search results.

Now these are all well and good to get new traffic to your website, but what about your existing clients? How do they know if you have added a new product or service? If you have added a new feature to your website that may be of benefit to them? If you are offering a special discount this month? Well unless there is a reason or reminder to check out your website once again, then they may not revisit it.

You can do something about this. The answer? eNewsletters.

eNewsletters are a great way to keep your existing clients informed of new products or services. You can entice them to re-visit your website, check out your products, and perhaps purchase that product or service that they didn’t buy the first time around.

To get their interest, you can offer special promotions or offers to them only, or you can inform them of special offers that you currently offer on your website or in your store.

Giving existing client a gentle reminder to re-visit your website or blog, or drop into your shop is a sure fire way to engage and renew their thoughts about your company. It is one of the most effective form of marketing and communication as you are targeting those visitors that have already purchased your product or used your service in the past.