Don’t Look Away: Your Email Data Is A Hidden Gem

Often overlooked as “dull” or “simple” – email data should significantly enhance your targeting game.

Segmenting your users and sending email campaigns based on each segment’s unique characteristics and goals can help you send more relevant and successful emails.

There are many ways you can use data to segment your users. Brands can ask their new subscribers for information such as gender, country, preferences, and other demographic details during signup. They can track post-website activity or measure product behavior (number of purchases, purchase amount, etc.) to define their segments. However, Using email analytics data to leverage segmentation is often overlooked.

Here are a few ways to use email analytics to send higher-quality emails.

Geolocation

Many ESPs today offer geo-location data for open and click events based on the user IP. This data can be beneficial to understand your engaged users’ distribution by country and for leveraging this to a marketing action based on the last location.

Travel companies can use this for “during your trip” campaigns and dynamically show relevant content or promotions for local activities.

E-commerce companies can show relevant items and promotions by your location – Europe might not have the same sales as the US, may feature different products, and other small yet significant differences.

Know Their Devices

Knowing which devices your customers use can also help you better personalize campaigns. Some content types can fit specific devices or operating systems, while others can “break” the email template badly.

Know where to put your efforts. Videos, for example, work great on iOS devices. You’ll only be able to see a short gif on Androids, but your computer will most likely show a static image of that video. Consider what you want the recipient to see and how it’ll appear on the screen; you might choose another idea for that specific device.

You can pull this data from the ESP via an API call.

To enhance brand stickiness, you could also send users who open your emails from their desktops or laptops a CTA asking them to download your mobile app.

Parsing URLs

Although web tracking is commonplace today, email engagement analysis can provide an alternative view and give additional insights into users’ behavior.

To better understand what readers expect in their emails, parse the URLs users click on and follow their sub-categories to the exact item. From here, you can examine the latest trends and hot products people want from you.

http://yourwebsite.com/main_category/sub_category/item/

Here at Optimove, we can generate a process where we break down every URL and create different attributes for segmentation (country, page name, and other demographic data points.). Enterprises can then segment all people who clicked on a specific feature in a certain period. For example, all the users who clicked on the UK during the past four weeks.

Bonus – anonymous email stitching

Many companies today need help to connect between activity made by anonymous visitors and registered users. For instance, if users register once and provide their email, they can browse the site without logging in. Once they register, we receive their cookie ID and can stitch the two together.

Brands may deem customers inactive if they’re browsing in incognito or don’t log in, but that’s not the case. In Optimove, we can make the connection between anonymous visitors and registered visitors.

Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Create a personalization tag containing an encrypted ID of your identified user

Step 2: Add a custom UTM to the links in your email templates
https://your-website.com/product/subproduct/items?utm_cid=[%encrypted_cid_tag%]

Step 3: Loop backtracked visitor ID (usually the cookie ID)

Step 4: Manage mapping table of visitor ID to user ID, based on encrypted ID connection

Next-level targeting can begin by examining your email data. By making the most of user-provided information, you could track how they navigate your site and which products interest them most from knowing which devices they’re using to read your emails to parsing their URLs, digging into the data to get the most out of your communications continuously, and send increasingly impactful mailers.

Our friends initially published this article at PostFunnel.