Testing Gmail Open and Click Through Rates

Image courtesy of digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Email is a great tool to use in traffic acquisition; it's a way to get existing customers to come back, as well as providing a way to communicate with your market.

However, to make sure that your effort is being rewarded, you do need to make sure that you are measuring its effectiveness.

There are two key measures for this:

• Open rates
• CTR

Of course, you'll want to add conversion to this, as well, but since that requires tracking more than just the email, it's outside the scope of this article.

How to Measure Open Rates

The classic way to measure open rates is to track the number of times an image included in the mail is downloaded from your server. To try this out, create an image and upload it to a specific folder, and give it a specific name.

Then, send yourself an email, with the image linked to (i.e. not sent with the email, but provided as part of an HTML message), and open it in your email client.

What you should see is that the image is downloaded from the web site, and subsequently, since you know how many emails you sent (1) and how many times the image was viewed (1), the open rate is 100%.

On the other hand, if you send the email to someone and they delete it without opening it, then the open rate will begin to fall.

What is it testing? Your subject line. If it's not compelling, the email won't be opened.

Of course, this also only works for HTML email. If the receiver only ever reads plain text, then it isn't going to work; which is where the CTR comes in.

How to Measure Click Through Rates

The CTR, or Click Through Rate, measures how compelling the email was that someone actually bothered to click on a link to follow through to the web site being advertised or offer being made.

The simplest way to measure it is to use a bitmark (from Bitly.com, or a Goo.gl link) and simply track the number of clicks.

Of course, there's going to be a confusion for people with text only email clients, who will likely see the "Can't read this email, click here" text and then use that to show the original email. So, it's important to have two pages set up on the web server:

• the original email
• the offer itself

The first page should, of course, link to the offer page. While the results might be a bit skewed, it's better than nothing.

Gmail Changes Complicate Matters

Now, Gmail has introduced image caching for email. This means that although email users will be able to see images in their email faster, and without specifically asking for them, it's going to play havoc for measuring traffic acquisition through email.

For a start, the open rates are going to be so unreliable that you should disregard gmail recipients from the open rate calculations.

Then, you will need to pay a lot more attention to the CTR and display rates, probably by adding counters on the two pages mentioned above, and adding them specifically to custom Experiments and Goals in Analytics.

It's not the disaster that many seem to be suggesting, but it does make testing and tracking traffic acquisition through email marketing a little more complex for list managers with a large number of gmail recipients.

Traffic Acquisition and The Comparative Cost of Customer Acquisition

Traffic acquisition is only part of the equation; another important part is customer acquisition. It's all very well to have the traffic, but how much of it actually converts into customers? If you can't answer that question, then you're in even more trouble!

Let's start at the beginning.

Traffic acquisition in web site terms is the act of getting eyeballs to a specific web property (page, video, blog post, etc.) It can be achieved through PPC campaigns, paid search placement, SEO techniques, social marketing, and so on - all of which have a cost.

Knowing that cost (essentially the price paid divided by the number of visits) enables you to work out the TAC. But there's also been a lot of talk recently of something else - the CAC, or Customer Acquisition Cost.

That's the cost of acquiring a single customer, on average, and needs to compare favorably with the average lifetime value of your customer base, if you are to remain solvent.

If your CAC exceeds the revenue generated by the customer base, you will begin to lose money. Typically, your CAC is equal to the TAC plus the cost of any additional resources that have been used to convert the visitor into a customer.

This is usually where the trouble starts. How do you know what your conversion rate is? How do you increase your conversion rate? How do you get inside your visitors mindset to work out why they do or don't choose to buy from you?

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Why Bit.ly is the New 1-800

Domain names are in hot demand - and the chances are good that your personal favorite is already taken - so how do you get your keywords into your URL? Read on...

Enter URL shortening services.

If you're not familiar with them, they take a long URL, and reduce it to something that can be tweeted, quoted, texted, or just scribbled on the back of a napkin with more accuracy than a regular URL.

There are a number of services that you can use:

• bit.ly
• goo.gl
• ow.ly
• is.gd
• ... and many more!

There are so many to choose from, that it can be difficult to make sure you're using the most appropriate, and useful service. Whichever you choose, your URL will look something like:

• http://bit.ly/keywordcracker

Notice how, even if the top level domain is taken, you can still have a (shorter) TLD with your web site name or marketing message in it!

So, why use a URL shortening service? Easy - they can be easier to remember, less ambiguous to communicate, and come with some extra benefits.

To learn about the key hidden extras, see why you should be using URL shorteners as part of your next traffic acquisition project, and, importantly which service to choose just join the Insiders Club:

Join Now! Traffic Acquisition Insiders
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You'll get the free URL Shortener Traffic Acquisition Report, as well as hints and tips on a regular basis to help you generate traffic, and make the most of it!