One of the main challenges in e-mail marketing is the integration with web analytics. Several surveys have shown that this is one of the top priorities of e-mail marketers and it’s yet another proof of the increasing importance of cross-channel and data-driven digital marketing.

The reason why it’s sometimes difficult to integrate both web analytics and e-mail is obviously that the data they provide are often in separate databases.

E-mail campaign reporting also largely differs from web analytics. The number of sent mails, received mails, opened e-mails, “bounced” e-mails, the number of clicks, which links in the e-mail were clicked most etc. are typical e-mail metrics. They all offer valuable information about the impact of your e-mail campaign, but if you can integrate them with your website information they become much more relevant. Post-click analysis is a must if you want to track the behaviour and life cycle of your e-mail recipients and web analytics, as well as CRM are key instruments to do so.
What really matters goes beyond the metrics of your e-mail campaigns themselves but also encompasses what subscribers do on your landing page and web site afterwards.
Landing pages, the web pages where recipients go after a click, on most occasions are focussed on direct action (sales, data collection, lead generation etc.) and so it is important to link conversion and acquisition to them.
You also want to know what happens to people who do not do what you wanted to achieve with your e-mails, even if they clicked a link in it. Which other pages did they possibly visit? Did they look at the “landing page” and immediately go? Did they start the required action but stop somewhere along the way?

An integration of these data is an important part of a richer campaign management where different segments of e-mail subscribers and/or their behaviour can be linked to automatic actions. For example: you could send an automatic and personalised e-mail to everyone that clicked on the link in your e-mail but suddenly stopped during the operation and define literally hundreds of similar automated scenarios.

In practice there are several possibilities to correlate the data from your e-mail marketing system with your web analytical solution.

Some examples:

• APIs: some providers of web-based e-mail marketing systems have an API (Application Programming Interface) for data integration. Most web analytics solutions also have an API. When choosing a web analytics platform you might want to check what platform suits your needs best but also how it enables you to easily connect it with your e-mail marketing or marketing automation solution.
• Custom made URLs: web analytics systems allow you to create special URLs for the “landing pages” to track the impact of your e-mails and set up ways to track the behaviour of your recipients as well as conversion.
  These are just a few simple solutions but if you select the proper marketing automation, lead management, CRM and customer analytics platforms that are integrated or can easily be integrated, you will have much more data to efficiently converse with your e-mail recipients, follow-up leads, improve the relevance of your messages and increase both customer satisfaction and ROI.
   

The author is an interactive marketing consultant and experienced blogger. You can connect with him via Twitter or visit his blog.