1AutomationWiz offers a whole new set of easy to use but advance broadcast email link tracking features in the latest software release. In this video we’ll walk you though these new features and show you how to use them.
Email Link Tracking Interview:
Lee: Good afternoon and welcome to another Launch & Learn with product management. This afternoon we have Brian, Sharon, Jason, Cliff, and myself, Lee, and Cliff is going to be presenting our new Broadcast Link Tracking. Take it away, Cliff!
Cliff: Today we’re going to be talking about link tracking, as we indicated. It’s a really exciting enhancement to the broadcast system to allow you to actually track your emails and the activities that happen within your emails as well as follow up actions that you can take based the results of those emails.
This particular feature may not be readily apparent, but when you go to send a broadcast, go into the “Broadcast Email” section, you’re going to create a new broadcast by hitting “Send Broadcast”. You’ll notice right at the top of the menu we’ve added a new item called “Link Tracking”.
To enable link tracking within your email – and this work for both text emails as well as HTML emails, so on both sides if you’re using both you can track the links – check it off and it gives you two options. The two options are to track the clicks and to track and segment for follow up.
Tracking clicks will simply encode your links – now by that we just mean we’re going to take all of the URLs that you have in your email, we’re going to replace them with our own tracking links. And now when a customer clicks on – or your prospect clicks on it, they’ll be transferred to ultimately the destination that you originally put into your email but we’ll be able to track and see if it happens.
With “Track and Segment for Follow Up”, we’re going to go a little bit further. What we’ll do is that we’ll track those people coming through, and we’ll also relate it back to activities that happen on your website that – not website per se, but they add a product to the shopping cart, if they check out, if they add a product and abandon, if they don’t ever click a link, a whole bunch of things and we’ll show you that in just a second.
So again, to enable this new feature, it only works for broadcasts at this point in time. All you do is check off the box that says “Link Tracking” and then you choose whether you want to just track clicks, whether the links have been clicked or not; or if you want to track and segment for follow up.
Really straight-forward, really easy. We do all the work for you. There’s no replacement. You don’t have to do any tinkering with your emails. We just go and look for links and we replace them. Now the one proviso I will add there is when you’re creating a text message, you need to make sure that all of your links are fully qualified links.
Now what I mean by that is that you have to have the “http://www.mydomain.com”. If our system sees that “http” and the colon and the slashes and the fully qualified domain it will take that and it will replace it with our tracking links. If you just put “www.mydomain.com” we will not track that link. That link will appear as www.mydomain.com in the text message, and it will be up to the actual receiving outgoing client to decide whether or not it turns it into a link.
So once you’ve sent your email, had time to settle in with your customers and what have, you will get new results. The new results that you’ll see will be on your “Broadcasts Sent” page. And you can see that next to each email job that I sent there’s now a “Results” button.
When I click on this “Results” button, it takes you to a new report that’s just a link tracking report, a “Broadcast Results” as we call it here. So you’ll notice that it’ll reference the schedule ID when the email was sent and what time it was executed at, what the subject line is, what format you sent it in (HTML, text, or both), as well as its current status.
Now everything that’s in here should appear as complete, generally speaking you’re not going to check on a broadcast that you canceled in this report.
Lastly, we show you the recipients. Did you send it to your entire client base, did you send it to a specific autoresponder? Under “Broadcast Statistics” what we do is we summarize a lot of the same information but a lot of new information as well, as what was on the “Broadcast Sent’”tab.
So you can see that we tell you how many emails were sent in this particular broadcast, how many of them failed, how many of them were opened, and how many weren’t opened. What has changed with those statistics is that now that they’re clickable, you can see that they’re underlined in blue, and when you click on them this will go to a new report. But we’ll get to that report in a moment.
The next section we start tracking new things, things that we’ve never tracked before as far as link tracking goes. This sort of functionality does appear in the “Ad Tracker” section, but it’s a little more enhanced, a little more robust when it comes to tracking the results of your emails.
So what we do calculate, and by choosing “Track Clicks and Segment” we get all this extra information such as how many raw clicks happened, how many of those were uniques – so you know, one customer can click on several different links within an email but we just want to know which individual customers actually clicked.
The number of carts, shopping carts of people who have added something to their cart that were created or not created. By that we simply mean did somebody add a product to the cart as result of clicking on a link to this email?
Carts converted, obviously somebody added a product and they’ve made an order. Carts abandoned, added the product and then never checked out.
Lastly, we attribute sales. So any sale that appears to be a direct result of clicking on a link tracking link and checking out through your shopping cart will, again, be tallied. So you can effectively see how much money is passing through the cart as a result of your last email blast. Assuming you used the link tracking.
Lastly what we look at is we do a breakdown of all the links that appear in your email. Remember them for your reference’s sake, but we also show you the URL that they’re being sent to. In each link we break down how many times that link was clicked, how many unique merchants have clicked that link, resulting customers that have created a cart or not created a cart. Those that have converted, abandoned, and of course, sales attributed.
So you could see which links are actually converting orders for you, which ones aren’t working for you. Many times you’ll, you know, have many different buttons or links in an email and it really is important to see any contrast that there might be with placement. You know, something above the fold will convert better, something below the fold, you know, everybody ignores, nobody clicks kind of deal.
Moving right along. Let’s get to the reports side. So we’ve always showed you who has opened a given email. So we’ll start there.
This new report, the tracking details, again it reiterates some things from the previous page so you have a point of reference which, you know, broadcast you’re working on you’re looking at. So because I clicked in from the opens report, I get to see all of the clients who opened that particular email. I get to see some extra results in that will show me if any carts were spawned because of those opens and any carts that converted because of those opens.
The most important and really amazing change that we’ve done here is you can always also act on these. Export the list of people, I could send a broadcast to that list of people, I can subscribe them to a specific autoresponder, unsubscribe them from an autoresponder, or delete them all right in a batch.
And again, this report stays relatively the same for each single category and you can preform these same actions. This really allows you to target very closely your customers and the results of the email blast.
So basically speaking if you want to look at all of the people who didn’t open your email to do a re-send, you simply click on the number for the unopened emails, scroll down to the bottom, choose “Send a Broadcast” and hit “Submit”. That will take you right into the broadcast page where you can re-broadcast those people to try and get their attention with, let’s say new copy, new subject line, you know, something that’s going to grab them.
And again, you can target right down to abandoned carts. Hey, we noticed that you added a product to your cart and you didn’t check out, did you run into any problems? Here’s our customer service number. So I don’t have to tell you there’s a ton of applications for having this kind of information and I think that this is one huge step forward in really understanding our customers and their reactions to the emails we send.
Sharon: So Cliff, is there anything that we can tell by looking at an order as far as what the result of a broadcast was? If an order was actually placed by somebody that received that broadcast?
Cliff: That’s a great question, Sharon. As a matter of fact I was remiss in not mentioning that. So within the details of the order we mark, right where the order ID, date, using the broadcast link tracking of course, we’ve added this new section where it tells you exactly what email broadcast and the schedule ID. And actually the subject line as well, for where this particular order came from as far as how we track. Great question.
So again, I guess as a quick point I’ll just reiterate that currently this technology is applied to the broadcast system. Probably many people will wonder why it’s only the broadcast system. Logically and logistically this is our starting point, this is where we wanted to implement this functionality, this first. Broadcasts are easy to apply it to because it is one large group of people.
Autoresponders, they kind of work on a timeline, it’s event-driven, it’s random people brought together in a group simply because of the fact that they have autoresponder messages going to them that day but there’s not necessarily any correlation between what day in the autoresponder series or even what autoresponder series they’re on at that point.
As well keep in mind that text messaging you have to put a fully qualified link into your text version of the email with the “http” to ensure that the link tracking is encoded.