193. Email Marketing › how it works › getting started (appending tracking parameters to a URL in your newsletter). These parameters are then identified by the Google Analytics of your website, registering that the user has come to the site through your email. Google Analytics will then take the information in the tag and store it in a cookie, from which it can track the user’s interactions with the site after they arrived at the landing page. Here is a link to the Quirk website as it might appear in a Quirk email campaign: http://www.quirk.biz/?utm_source=dec01&utm_medium=email&utm_ campaign=digital marketing2010 The tracking parameters are: ?utm_source=dec01&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=digital marketing2010 note These can then be used to report on traffic from that email using Google You can only do this Analytics.provided you have Google Analytics set up for your website. Email benchmarks can be used as a guide to see how well your campaigns are performing, but the best way to monitor performance is to benchmark your own campaign. Smaller lists tend to have a higher open rate, but this is most probably because they’re more targeted. The overall average open rate is considered 11.2%, while the overall click rate is considered 1.6%. Overall rates are quite low due to far too many ignorant or lazy email marketers which bring down the average. It’s best to look at the average open rate for your industry, rather than the overall rates. You can do this by checking the Email Stat Centre website (http://emailstatcenter.com/). Once the reports have been generated, it is time to work out what the numbers are revealing, and to then use this information to improve the next email sent out. With email marketing, split testing across a host of factors will enable campaign optimisation. Some factors to test include: • Open rates across different subject lines and delivery times. • Optimal number of links in an email for clickthrough rates and conversions. • Different copy styles and copy length. • The effect of video on delivery rates, open rates and conversions. • Balance of text and image ratio. Many email marketers neglect testing their campaigns, but in order to make sure your email marketing efforts are continually improving it’s important to test variables in your campaign.190