There’s no denying that Google Analytics is popular. In fact, it’s the most widely used site traffic analysis software. So, it’s no surprise that we field a lot of queries about ways to combine email marketing and Google Analytics (GA).

While we’re still working on complete GA integration with our existing reporting tools, you’ll be happy to hear there are some things you can do now to put GA to work on your email campaigns. Adding GA tracking to your campaigns can give you great insight on what subscribers do after they’ve clicked on a campaign link and landed on your site. Combined with GA Goals, you’ll get a great perspective on just how effective your campaigns can be.

Getting started is simple in most cases, all you need is a GA account. Keep in mind that any page you want to track will need to include the analytics code, so if your email campaign landing pages don’t already include that code, add it before you start sending optimized traffic there.

Next, you’ll need to modify links in your mailing to include GA tracking codes. From here on, we’ll use a phony example to illustrate how your links change. Our dummy site is a1widgets.com, and this particular campaign is designed to drive traffic to /new_widget.html, a landing page with order form for the latest widget.

Normally, links in the campaign would look like http://a1widgets.com/new_widget.html. However, we’re going to add a few GA tracking codes, utm_campaign, utm_source, and utm_medium. There are other tracking codes available, but these three are sufficient to get started.

utm_campaign identifies the marketing campaign that this mailing is a part of. If it’s part of a larger strategy you may wish to align this value with that. In this example though, we’re going to say that the campaign is the monthly email ad, therefore utm_campaign=MonthlyEmailAd.

utm_medium describes how the message got to the site visitor. Simply using Email is usually enough. So utm_medium=Email.

utm_source is where things get interesting. Historically, “source” has always described “who” so this is a great place to push in any demographic information you have in your list, e.g. age, gender, geographic location. If you don’t have that information available to you (and why not?) it should suffice to use a general term. We’ll use ActiveCustomers, so we get utm_source=ActiveCustomers.

These three parameters need to be tacked on to our landing page URL as a query string. If you’re not familiar with query strings, they’re very simple, just extra information that you can add to a URL in the following format: ?parameter=value&parameter=value etc., etc. To keep things simple, don’t use spaces or special characters in your values unless you’re comfortable with URL encoding.

Ultimately, we get this as our new URL:
http://a1widgets.com/new_widget.html?utm_medium=Email&utm_source=ActiveCustomers&utm_campaign=MonthlyEmailAd

And that’s that. At this point, assuming that you’ve got the GA tracking code in your landing page, you’re ready to send. Remember that GA statistics will be delayed about 24 hours.

Once you do start to see some statistics roll in, you’ll be pleased at the insight into your campaigns. The image blow is a sample traffic report indicating visits by campaign and source. Remember in our example, campaign identified the specific marketing effort and the source indicated the source of the subscribers.

Here we have goal conversions by source and medium.

Soon we’ll be integrating this data directly with our standard reporting as well as providing automatic campaign tagging but until them don’t hesitate to get started applying GA tracking to your mailings. If you have any questions, contact Reachmail support at support@reachmail.com and keep an eye on the blog for more advanced examples.

Unlike other ESPs, ReachMail allows you to send attachments with your marketing emails. We realize that our clients know best how to market to their recipients and we try to give them the freedom to do so. If you’ve ever needed to send Outlook events to your recipients, for instance, you may have been stopped from doing so at other ESPs. Well not at ReachMail. You can attach a file up to 150k in size with the click of a button. Other ESPs don’t even give you the option.

As noted above, while we do provide the ability to attach files to your email campaigns, we do limit the size of attachments for good reason. Some mail servers will block any messages with attachments. And while not all mail servers block all messages with attachments, many will still block attachments over 2MB because of the time it takes to process those files.

That’s why we’ve provided an alternative method for delivering files to your recipients. If you are using images in your email, you can upload them to your ReachMail image library and source them from our stored location. If you instead want to send a PDF file, you can upload that to our contents and assets area. We’ll host the document for you, and you can email your recipients a link to download it at their convenience.

A major advantage of storing and sending links to your documents instead of attaching them, is that we can then provide tracking information on who downloaded your file and when: giving you a detailed picture of the interest your email is generating. With an attachment, this is simply not possible.

While in some cases, attaching small files will be necessary for your marketing strategy, not attaching files to your mailing allows us to deliver your messages quicker and with a greater inbox rate. Giving your recipients the choice to download your files from our location is the safest and most effective way to deliver files to your recipients without having to deal with the pitfalls of sending attachments.

Using the list sweeper to clean up your lists but not sure which boxes to check? Answer this simple question for specific instructions. If you’re still not sure, feel free to contact us at support@reachmail.com, or call us toll free at 1-888-947-3224, ext. 1 for Customer Service.

Do you use the same list for all email campaigns in ReachMail or do you import a list frequently?

If you use the same list each time, you can simply check Mark Pending Hard Records as Permanent. This step will deactivate records that have hard bounced once from the same list. After two hard bounces a record is deactivated for you automatically.

If you import a new list frequently, it’s best to err on the side of caution. In this case, Marking Pending Hard Records as Permanent will help to an extent, but only the next time you use the same list again. By checking the following option and sub-options you will add all hard bounce records to your account’s Global Opt Out list:
Mark Select Soft Bounces Records as Permanent Hard
Permanently Deactivate in any List
Hard Bounce

The goal here is to deactivate as many known invalid addresses as possible from all new lists before you send to them. Running these steps on existing lists prior to importing or sending to the new list will help catch as many known invalid addresses as possible.

For the basics, click here.