You go to great effort to interview teams and create networks to capture the latest news and events across your division or business. Content is carefully copy written and packaged into a beautiful digital newsletter distributed every month at the same time for consistency. You’re doing everything right, right?
But what happens after you hit send? Do you cross your fingers and hope your target audience receive it with excitement and read all the stories you’ve poured so much love into?
There are ways to track ROI that provide you with insights to take a lot of the guess work out of the process and ensure your newsletter is effect. Your options depend on the type of digital newsletter you’re using and if you have links to more content on a website or intranet. Some options offer more statistics reporting than others.
Here’s an overview:
Outlook
If you’re sending an Outlook newsletter, like our custom solution where images are embedded directly into the mail message, you can’t track email and click through to stories directly from Outlook. You have to use Google Analytics. We set this up for you and input your story link into our Google Account and, with a few steps, we create a Google tracking link. When we hyperlink articles in the newsletter we use the extended tracking link instead of the regular URL for your news story. Every time a user clicks on the story link it’s tracked in Google Analytics which we can then report on after each newsletter is distributed.
EMS Systems
There are many Email Messaging Systems (EMS). The most common ones are Mail Chimp, Campaign Monitor and Newsweaver. Each has built in reporting which is great. The EMS tracks mail opens, something you can’t do with Outlook newsletters, as well as click throughs to all links in the newsletter.
Tracking usage of your newsletter provides important insights into trends. You’ll be able to quickly see which stories are more popular which helps with shaping content from a copy, graphic and content perspective.
Tip:
No matter the audience we’ve found competitions and interactive elements included every few months to be very successful. So, think about including a survey or competition in your next issue.
And if you aren’t using an EMS yet we can set this up for you.