Now that you know when to send your email messages, and how to read your delivery rates, open rates, read rates and click-through rates, let’s turn to the final and most important metric: the conversion rate. This is the one metric that is most commonly NOT measured, simply because it’s a little harder to do technically. All the previous metrics are generally available from your email marketing provider, but conversion rates require you to build landing pages or find some other technical way to track how people are coming to your site and what they do once they are there, and then if they are converting to a sale or a specific action.
The very simplest method is to track the activity on the page/pages you specified in your email. If you assume most people read their email within 24 hours, it’s usually fairly obvious where the blip in traffic came from for that page (assuming you have a regular traffic report) or in sales. If you don’t have a regular traffic report, get one for several week prior to your email and then the week you send out your newsletter.
Ideally, you can build a separate landing page to receive the traffic from your various offers and then have your IT person track the activity, all the way through to the purchase. This combination of web analytics and email metrics will give you the most accurate view of your conversions.
Either way you choose, be sure you’re monitoring the actual conversion rate as this is the most important email metric of all!
Jenn