VerticalResponse offers a wide range of poewerful analytics tools to help you determine how deeply engaged your customers are with your email marketing campaigns. Out of the box, you can easily see who has opened your campaigns, which links within the campaign they’ve clicked on and whether their email address bounced or they chose to unsubscribe from your mailing list. With a small amount of additional work, you can even see at a glance how much money each campaign earned for you and integrate Google Analytics to track each user as they click through from your email to your website.
The best part – all of this information can also be accessed using our robust set of API methods, allowing you easily integrate your email campaign statistics with any other commercial or custom analytics packages you may have.
Detailed Email Campaign Reporting
The most detailed reports can be pulled using the downloadCampaignRecipientResults() method, which returns detailed results per list member for each specified campaign as a link to a CSV. The format of this file is similar to the format of the file you get when you choose the “Download Lists” link on the campaign reporting page. You can restrict the output to just a handful of activities – such as clicks and opens – or you can grab all of the data at once. Either way, you get a complete picture of the activities your recipients complete within your campaign. With this data, you not only see who is most engaged, you can also begin to build a model of when they are most engaged, answering the frequently asked question of when is the best time to send to your audience.
Simple Conversion and ROI Tracking
By adding the conversion tracking code to confirmation pages and assigning a dollar amount to it, you can also quickly see who converted to a customer and how much that conversion earned. The conversion setup tool, which can be found under the Account Tab under the Analytics submenu of your VerticalResponse account, requires you to paste a single line of code on your conversion pages – typically the confirmation page following a purchase or a successful subscription sign up. This code calls our servers, which gather the appropriate information about the user to record the conversion and generate a transparent 1×1 gif beacon. If you want to track the revenue from each conversion, you will need to provide the price each customer paid as part of the string that calls that beacon. In many cases, that price will depend on the final total of their purchase, which can be dynamic. In that case, you’ll need to add that variable to the string. A PHP example might look like this:
<img src="https://cts.vresp.com/s.gif?h=a4f561b675&amount=<?php echo($purchase_total); ?>" height="1" width="1"/>
Google Analytics Completes the Picture
VerticalResponse already provides an integration with Google Analytics. For each campaign, you can select the custom field you prefer to use to distinguish each user in your Google Analytics tracking, email address being the most common one used. Within Google Analytics, you’ll see a new source of traffic – Campaigns. You can dive down on a per-campaign basis to see how many visits you received and where many of them led to throughout your site. This data – which can also be accessed through the set of Google Analytics APIs – can provide a richer picture of your campaign’s influence by capturing not only recipient click data, but also any click data that resulted either from Social Sharing or from users simply forwarding your campaign on to others.
With the holidays upon us and the rush of email campaigns going out to announce holiday deals, now is the time to get you analytics set up and recording your data. Capturing this information is a gift to yourself that will keep on giving by providing timely, actionable data you can use to make confident business decisions throughout the next year.