If you’re not carefully tracking user interactions, you may be leaving more conversions on the table than you think.

Every business, brand, and website is different.  Your products and services, user experience and visual style all impact how users perceive and interact with you online.  Websites that seem very similar superficially may face very different problems from a marketing perspective.  A confusing navigation experience, missing call to action, or unclear page objectives can all be hidden problems draining your marketing budgets and ROI.  Everyone’s got problems, and sometimes the hardest ones to diagnose are your own.

Analytics and targeting are the key to finding and fixing the hard-to-find issues plaguing your digital brand.

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Really making the most of analytics and targeting is about events.  Since every website’s user experience is different, defining which events are significant, and why they’re significant, is a little different for everyone.  Every page on your website has a conversion rate of some kind, whether that’s buying a product, subscribing to a newsletter, or even just engaging with web content rather than bouncing immediately.  Each user experience involves choices between trackable events, whether that’s what product to click on, or simply tracking what piece of content or site element they engage with next.  All these conversions present a goal to optimize towards, and all these choices present an opportunity for you to better understand what users are (or aren’t) interested in.

Just like a detective, you should optimize your website by starting with a hunch.  How can you drive a higher on-page conversion rate? Maybe it’s something as simple as increasing the size of a button or the placement of a call to action, but maybe it’s something as deep as presenting the user with different options all together, like a different product list or web content.  In these cases, targeted email lists can be a great way to make sure you put your best foot forward with every user.  By bucketing users into engagement groups, you can present them with a more targeted and optimized experience through email marketing. 

Once you’ve identified user groups through analytics, transactional email platforms become your precision targeting engine. Services like SendGrid, Mailchimp, and HubSpot let you connect behavioral data directly to your email campaigns, so you’re not just sending messages, you’re sending responses to specific actions users take on your site. If someone visits a pricing page but doesn’t convert, they can automatically be placed in a “high-interest” segment that receives a follow-up email with testimonials or limited-time offers. If another user frequently engages with a certain product category, you can move them into a “loyalist” bucket and nurture them with content tailored to that interest.  Similarly, you can display custom product lists, content categories, offers, or calls to action dynamically.  This allows you to put the right forward with each sub-group of users you’ve created.

Tools like ContentBuilder are great for linking your analytics-based user segments to automated email workflows.  Draft custom emails for different segments, using merge tags and content to dynamically serve the content that users want to see. Over time, this approach builds a highly optimized ecosystem where engagement data continually improves your targeting, and targeting continually improves engagement.  It’s the perfect example of analytics and automation working hand-in-hand.

AI is driving a new wave in Email Marketing, allowing advanced marketers to generate targeted emails at a whole new scale.  Are you using the most advanced technology and methods to make the most from your email campaigns?

Find out in the next edition of The Content Marketer’s Guide to AI - The Email Marketing Comeback