Email marketing campaigns are far from dead—and, in fact, they’re one of the most effective ways to not only deliver information and resources to your audience, but also boost sales. And although you likely pay attention to email analytics such as open and click-through rates, make sure you’re capturing and analyzing another critical piece of the equation: sales tracking.
Keeping a close eye on email marketing analytics like open and click-through rates tells you a lot about your message—and if your numbers are low, you know that’s a signal to change up your subject line, the time your message is sent and the content itself. But what about your sales? Knowing how your email marketing campaign directly impacts your sales is an important piece of data that can help you truly measure the effectiveness of your email strategy—and make adjustments if the numbers aren’t where they should be.
How to Install Sales Tracking in Email Campaigns
You probably manage your email campaign through a third-party service provider—and if that’s the case, the platform likely includes built-in sales tracking that you can apply to your campaigns. There is, however, a good chance that this sort of tracking isn’t automatically enabled (depending, of course, on your provider), but with a few clicks of a mouse, you can have this specific tracking up and running.
Once you have the sales tracking enabled, your email provider will attach a cookie to a subscriber once they go to your site. If the subscriber buys something during that visit, the cookie attributes the sale to your email—and that action is reflected in your analytics.
As you distribute email campaigns with embedded sales tracking, keep a close eye on your analytics and make adjustments accordingly. If you see a sudden spike in sales, take note of that particular campaign—you obviously did something that resonated with your audience. And if, on the flip side, you notice a sudden decline in sales, focus on that particular email and what you can change to help reverse those numbers. The tricky thing about email campaigns is that there are a number of variables that can impact your results—yet, at the same time, that’s the fun of email marketing, too. By continually testing and taking the time to analyze your data, you’ll soon find an approach that works for your audience—and you’ll likely see increased sales as a result.
Have you integrated sales tracking into your email marketing campaigns? What sort of results have you noticed so far?
