How to Track Your Emails using Google Analytics

When used properly, email marketing is widely considered to be the most effective marketing channel — above social media platforms and even physical mailers. This is primarily because email has a very high return on investment; compared to the amount of time, effort, and cost an email marketing campaign involves, it yields the best results. But the only way to achieve the best results is through hard data. Data, such as the data provided through Google Analytics, provides a solid foundation upon which an email marketing campaign can be built. 

The Advantages of Tracking Emails through Google Analytics

Depending on your industry, your emails likely have a click through rate of anywhere between 1.25% to 5.13%. While this may sound low, it’s really not; with services such as MassMailer.io, it takes no work at all to send out thousands of emails. Each thousand emails is a potential 12 to 51 customers. But because companies are dealing with such large volumes of customers and customer interactions, data becomes incredibly important. here are some of the chief benefits of Google Analytics:

How are customers interacting with your emails? Google Analytics tells you how many customers open your email and how many of them click through to your site — this is incredibly important information for tracking how effective your campaign is. If you are below industry average, then your campaign needs to be fine-tuned.

Are customers receiving your emails? A significant portion of email marketing is in determining which means are “live” and which emails are used specifically for spam accounts or are abandoned. Google Analytics can help you determine which email accounts have the most interest and activity.

Which customers are receiving your emails? Google Analytics can give you basic demographic information, such as where customers are when they open your emails. This can tell you whether the customers you are targeting are paying attention, or whether you may need to target your emails better.

Tracking Emails With Google Analytics

Though it may sound complex, tracking emails with Google Analytics is actually very simple. There are two methods that are used, once a Google Analytics account has been established:

Downloadable content. A single pixel is often introduced into the body of an email for the purposes of tracking who opened the email. When the email is opened, this pixel will usually be automatically downloaded even if the user doesn’t click on any links.

Clickable links. A link is used to track who actually clicked through from the email. This is by far the most important metric, but it’s used in conjunction with opens: a high amount of opens and a low amount of clicks means that the email doesn’t deliver what was promised. Similarly, a low amount of opens and a high amount of clicks means the email’s subject line may not be compelling enough.

Each of these options (downloadable content and clickable links) use automatically generated target URLs in order to track which email was opened or clicked on. When integrated with a system such as MassMailer.io, these pixels and links can be automatically inserted into email marketing and the information can be tracked, consolidated, and reported on.

MassMailer.io can be used in conjunction with Google Analytics to create a fully-developed, effective, and responsive email marketing campaign; Through the data provided by Google analytics, businesses will be able to track how responsive their customers are to their campaign, how effective their campaigns are overall, and which campaigns are most effective. Contact us today for more information!