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The importance of the email sender

Excerpted from ConvUrgency.com's Smart Email Marketing Guide

There's not too much I need to say about setting the sender of the email. Generally speaking, most marketers use the company name, and usually that is what works best. It builds trust that the email is valid if they recognize the business name.

Creating effective calls-to-action with email marketing

Excerpted from ConvUrgency.com's Smart Email Marketing Guide

So we’ve talked about general content enough, now I’d like to focus on a few specifics. First of all, let’s consider your calls-to-action. These are the images and links that people will click on to perform the intended action of your email, whether that's register for something, buying something, or anything else.

Use viral marketing in promotional emails

Excerpted from ConvUrgency.com's Smart Email Marketing Guide

To expand your reach, you’ll want to add a viral component to your emails. Most ESPs allow to easily insert a “forward to friend” tag somewhere in your email. This may seem unnecessary, as every email client has a ‘forward’ button. But remember - if you use a form of some sort to forward the email, you can track who forwards it, who the recipient is, and if the recipient opens/clicks on the email. This is another excellent way to grow your list!

Google Analytics - Visitor Loyalty

While there are a few exceptions to the rule, I can be pretty confident in stating that you want return visits to your website. Yes, it's always good to be driving more and more new visitors to your site, but most often the real value is derived from those that return to your site (beside you that is). These are your 'Loyal' visitors.

If you run an e-commerce website, your return visitors are extremely valuable, because they've either gone away and researched a product and are now ready to buy, or they're just returning to buy again because they were pleased with the previous experience. A B2B site needs loyal visitors because these people are there looking for support, or looking for news and events related to the company they've invested in. Blogs and forums live on loyal visitors. These serve to provide CGM (consumer generated media) and refer others to your site. Put simply, loyal visitors have higher levels of engagement, and measuring your visitor loyalty can provide you with great insight into how compelling/valuable your content is perceived as.

In Google Analytics, the first report under Visitor Loyalty is just the Loyalty report, and it's a simple bar graph:

As you can pretty easily see with this site, almost 80% of the visitors to this site have decided that it wasn't what they're looking for,or simply not worth returning to. This site happens to be a B2B website with a fantastic product offering, so they really need to examine their highest bounce pages to see why people are being turned off!

Now I have the same Loyalty report, but from a popular blog. Here's what a loyal reader base looks like in graph form!

This Loyalty report can be an excellent tool for setting goals for your website. Perhaps you have a rather steady flow of traffic, and it may be resource expensive to find new ways of driving traffic to your site. Why not instead set a goal of increasing your visitor loyalty, and get more value out of the people already visiting your site?

Here are a few ways to increase visitor loyalty on your website:

• Add a blog which people can subscribe to the RSS feed for
• Write content that's worth returning to read!
• All users to interact via comments - they'll return to see who's responded
• Add a forum to allow users to interact and get support
• Build free tools into your site that people will come back to use
• Feature a new game/special/user/widget on a regular basis, so that your visitors will return to see the latest feature
• Allow visitors to subscribe to your newsletter, which in turn will regularly drive them to your website

If you have any other ideas or methods that have worked for you, feel free to add them in the comment field below!

Visitor Recency

This graph provides a quick visual breakdown of the last time your visitors cames to your website. It looks like this:

My first idea of this report was a complete misconception. I initially thought this was a time chart who visited when. But then I realized that this information is already in the Visitor Trending report. Also, it just didn't make sense that 26,000 visitors were on my site only a day ago!

What the Visitor Recency report actually indicates is the number of days elapsed since a user's last visit, or a time-based measure of their loyalty. The '0 days ago' metric means that there's no past tracking cookie, therefore they haven't visited before (from that computer), and are most likely a new visitor. Quite often this will be a large portion of your visitors, but with forums and blogs you should have more in the 1-7 days ago range.

Though there's nothing directly actionable in this report, it still gives you an idea of the nature of your visitors.

Length of Visit

The Length of Visit report shows a breakdown of the amount of time that people are spending on your site, or at least how long they have the browser window open on your site.

A good goal is to lower the percentage of people in the first two rows. These people are on your site less than 30 seconds, and there's really not much you can do in 30 seconds on a site! So you may need to refine your design and content to engage your visitors better, keep them on the site long enough to consider buying, registering, etc.

Though you generally want people on your site longer, there is one case where lowering the time people spend on your site is actually a good thing. This would be if you're improving your navigation system, perhaps implementing fly-out menus, providing links for people to get to desired information faster. If you can effectively lower the time spent on your site without increasing abandonment, there's a good chance you'll increase visitor loyalty and conversion, as it means you're enabling visitors to get to the information they want faster!

Depth of Visit

The depth of visit report shows a breakdown of the number of pages viewed by your visitors.

Those that viewed only one page are the ones that constitute your bounce rate. Those that are viewing 5 pages or more are very actively engaged in your content. The same principles apply as with Length of Visit. It's in your best interest to lower the number of those viewing only one or two pages, but optimizing your site navigation can result in a desirable lessening of the average visit depth. Obviously, getting a visitor to the checkout pages in 3 steps is highly preferable to it requiring 6 steps, which would mean 3 additional funnel abandonment opportunities!

Summary

Some people may view these reports as mere "wow stats", that they provide a few interesting details to which you can say "wow", but nothing more. Well, as you've seen, they can provide valuable insight into how engaging your content is, whether or not it's worth returning for or investigating further. It can also help you set goals, and measure the effectiveness of new content and navigation.

Create value perception in your emails

Excerpted from ConvUrgency.com's Smart Email Marketing Guide

You need to make sure that every email your subscribers receive can clearly create a perception of value. Your message may explain why your product uniquely meets the needs of your subscribers. Even better, you can explain how your product, research report, course, whitepaper, etc can help the subscriber perform their job better, or give them a competitive advantage. If your subscribers only perceive that you’re trying to sell them something, they will not continue to subscribe.

Improve your click-through rate with Personalization

Excerpted from ConvUrgency.com's Smart Email Marketing Guide

I mentioned a degree of personalization within the subject line. However, you can personalize your content to a much higher degree. At its simplest, it means adding the person’s name to the greeting. But you could go well beyond that, perhaps adding a special offer depending on their location. Really, the degree to which you customize the content depends on your time, creativity, and available data to add to your list. The more personalized the message, the higher it will perform.

Google Analytics - Visitor Trending

The next set of reports in Google Analytics is the Visitor Trending section. This is a fairly straightforward set of reports, but useful nonetheless (these reports remind me of Webalizer somewhat). Basically, this is a visual representation of your visitor trends over time - by day or by hour. You can obtain the following trend reports:

• Visits
• Absolute Unique Visitors
• Pageviews
• Average Pageviews
• Time On Site
• Bounce Rate

The default "Daily" report looks like this:

The "Hourly" trending report looks like this:

So essentially, you see a bar chart breakdown of the line graph at the top. Above the bar charts you see either a total or average data value for the chosen metric (total visitors, average time on site, etc). Perhaps not the most insightful reports, but they can still certainly be useful.

With daily Visitors for example, you can look back at specific days and see if there was any significant traffic increase on the days that you ran a certain promotion. Or as you can see in the Daily chart above, you can read the trending to see that weekend traffic is substantially lower. This would tell you that it's unwise to plan any specific promotion to occur over a weekend!

Hourly trending can also give you these little tidbits of insight. For example, you can see when your lowest traffic volume occurs, and use that time to perform major upgrades to your website. That way, if something goes wrong it affects the least number of visitors.

Hourly trending can also help you plan your promotions. The computer company Dell often promotes "12 Days of Deals" on their website. Each deal only launches at a set time each day. It would be wisest to choose that time based on your visitor trends, when you're able to create the most business based on the most traffic volume.

Anyhow, these reports are somewhat basic compared to the others, but they're still necessary!

Google Analytics - Visitor Trending

Excerpted from ConvUrgency.com's Smart Email Marketing Guide

Here are some additional tips for excellent subject lines. They are fairly self explanatory, so it’s easiest to just put them in bullet form rather than write a section for each.