How Does Your Tracking Go?

Every month we do a tracking analysis for our enewsletter clients. It is interesting, and important, to watch for the trends. Are the "opens" increasing or decreasing? How many emails are coming from the letter? What parts of the letter are most interesting to readers (as seen in click-throughs). There are many more measurements we watch. Then we tell our clients what this data means.

But in doing these studies we come up with other observations about how enewsletter readers perform. For example, we changed the format of the letter for one client. At their request we ran the items of news sequentially down the page, instead of having them accessed only through links near the top of the letter. The click-through dropped and the reason was obvious. The readers were going deep into the page rather than clicking a link to bring up a specific item.

This made the point that long letters are not necessarily a bad thing. People will read on deep into the page if the material is interesting. However, we emphasize the point that the material had better be pretty attractive or the last items down the page will not be read by a lot of readers.

Each letter is different, it should be noted. What works for one, may not work as well for another. That is why we study the tracking data intensively and draw conclusions about what it is showing that will enable us to improve readership of the letter.

Prescott "Pete" Lustig
Senior Marketing Strategist
www.loopconsulting.com