How phone call metrics improve email performance

Category: Data and analytics
42% of emails are now opened on smartphones. Mobile conversion is increasingly more important than the desktop message.

Mobile is well and truly disrupting the marketing ecosystem. But how does this affect your conversion rates?

Email marketing software, web analytics tools and CRM systems provide retail marketers with a wealth of data on email performance. But senior management want more than clicks, deliverability and conversions from emails.

They want to know how much ROI your email campaigns have delivered.

The black hole in email marketing response

Conversions.

You can track traffic and online conversions through your existing reports easily enough.

But what happens if customer calls you as a result of your email – and the conversion happens offline?

An increasing number of emails opened on smartphones makes offline conversions more probable. Consumers don’t have time to waste with unresponsive websites, fiddly forms, and laborious registration. Their phone is in their hand and they can simply click to call.

This response isn’t captured by web analytics. That phone call could have resulted in a substantial amount of revenue. We already know that inbound telephone calls are the highest quality leads for retailers. Without tracking, the data from that call disappears into a black hole.

Capturing phone call data generated by each email campaign allows you to understand your true conversion rate.

Link your emails directly to conversions and revenue

Web analytics tools often attribute email clicks to ‘Direct’ or ‘Referral’ sources. This means that another marketing campaign is getting the credit for all your hard work!

Tagging email links helps web analytic tools assign email traffic to the correct source. This is great – but it’s not enough. You also need to see how many phone calls you received – and how much revenue these calls generated.

Mediahawk’s tagging feature lets you create your own tags for your email links. This enables you to track visits and calls from your emails in the reporting portal. If your subscriber clicks through to your website and then makes a call, you can link the phone call and visit to the email campaign.

What’s more, you can directly attribute sales data to specific email campaigns.

You might think that 20% of your total sales are via your email channel. By tracking your inbound calls, you’ll find that this figure could be significantly higher.

Test your emails and improve your conversion rates

A captivating email can cut through the noise of busy news feeds better than any other channel. For retailers, a compelling message and strong call to action are critical.

Split testing all aspects of your email is vital to improving performance. Small changes made to copy, images – even the colour of a button – can dramatically affect your email performance metrics.

Validate your A/B and multi-variate tests by tagging them. The report will allow you to see which of your tests is more effective at generating response and, crucially, how this affects revenue.

Accurate, data-driven email marketing improves performance

Your ability to use and analyse data is critical to achieving commercial growth.

Improvements to the conversion rate of your emails make a bigger difference to your bottom line – more so than many other marketing activities.

Knowing which campaigns are generating calls and driving sales allows you to focus your marketing spend on the areas you know will lead to increased revenue.

[Free download] Learn how call tracking delivers greater returns for retailers

About the author - Natalia Selby

Marketing Executive at Mediahawk, with 20 years experience in analytics and content management.