Message with Meaning

One of the goals of your email marketing campaign should be to engage your subscriber and make them feel like the message was written just for them. By integrating web analytics into your messages, you have the ability to message with meaning.

According to JupiterResearch 41 percent of email marketers are making plans to use clickstream behavior data as an email targeting tactic. In the past the lack of resources and some difficulty integrating web analytics with email have been cited as the most common reasons why email marketers have not used clickstream data to target their campaigns.

There is the potential for considerable benefits of using clickstream behavior as a part of your overall email marketing strategy. A May 2005 study conducted by JupiterResearch showed that targeted emails that use clickstream data on average generate nine times the improvement in revenue and 32 times more in net profit over untargeted email blast campaigns.

As you start planning the web analytics integration, begin looking at customer behavior - as you understand their needs you will be able to market more effectively to them. Consider the following:

1. Who has abandoned you?

When one of your subscribers visits your site and fails to complete a process, weather it is abandoning a shopping cart, failure to complete registration or any other process that is left incomplete, you have an opportunity to reach out and re-engage your customer. Send a reminder encouraging them to return and complete the process.

2. Where have they been?

When you know someone is searching specifically for a product on your site, you are that much closer to a sale if you reach out to your subscriber with an e-mail message that includes additional product information, or discounts to related products or categories browsed.

3. When are they visiting?

When customers stop checking your site on a regular basis or, at the other end of the spectrum, do so more often, it may be time to change your messaging strategy. Consider the offering of rewards to devoted clients who visit often, and persuade those who haven't stopped by in a while to come back for a visit.

4. Where have they been?

Depending on the implementation of your Web analytics, you may be able to tell what site an e-mail customer visited just before coming to yours. Were they looking at your competition? If so, be ready to respond with your most salient sales message. Customers who come to you from a partner's site can be sent messages that support the value they receive from the affiliation.

5. Why do they do what they do?

By pushing the e-mail demographics such as age, gender, occupation, income and geographic data you already have into your Web analytics program, you can learn what product categories and what pages are currently appealing to your demographic segments rather than relying on past response and well-informed deductive reasoning.

In order for these tactics to work, your e-mail and Web analytics programs must be able to seamlessly pass data between applications. At one time, companies were forced to coax together the relationship. Now, more e-mail service providers and Web analytics vendors are teaming up to make integrations an easier process so marketers can focus on campaign design and strategy. Because of this, the ability to develop highly-relevant e-mail messages integrating web site data has never been easier.