Tool Box
Issue No. 13 - October/November 2003
Why Tracking is Critical On—line
Suggestions for Measuring Email Marketing Results
by Lee Hopkins
One of the keys to effective marketing, online or offline, is tracking your marketing, testing what works and what doesn’t, and revising accordingly. But many businesses don’t feel like using expensive tracking services, and are unsure of how exactly they can start to manage the tracking their online marketing efforts.
Here’s some simple ideas to get you started:
1. Have your staff use different email ‘signatures’ with different tag lines or offers, and send those links to different pages.
For example, one signature offers a free report ‘XYZ’; the link sends any clicks through to ‘freereportxyz.html’ on your website. Another signature offers the same report but with a slightly differently worded advert in the signature — that url sends the person to ‘freereportxyz2.html’. You can manage the tracking through simply checking the stats on your pages (either through simple page counters or via the stats package you probably have bundled with your hosting package).
2. Want to take it further and see how each link converted to sales of a product? Simple!
Firstly set up a product code for each page. So page e1.html uses product 1. Page e2.html uses product 2. Now, products 1 and 2 are the same production fact, they can both use the same download page if your product is one you can deliver digitally. The only difference is that you set up two different products (hence two different codes) in PayPal or your shopping cart. That...
