Email Campaign Tracking Codes

Some tracking codes in the footer of a commercially sent email are easier to decipher than others. It's like geek speak for marketers. With these, and appropriate ecommerce tracking with Google Analytics 360, companies can see how much, if any, revenue is generated by campaigns. It's usually paired with the assumption of "last touch" revenue source, where the last marketing activity a customer takes before a purchase is how credit is applied to a specific inbound or outbound methodology, be it from SEO, email, a product page on a website, a direct mail catalog SKU number, etc.

Here is an example. This comes from the Starbucks Rewards program, and their tracking code is just below the body of the email and above the footer; though many organizations place this tracking code in the AMP Script (if using a Salesforce product) and some place this below the footer/disclaimer text.

The tracking code text reads: Ref: 21-15-ANO-1-0-0-EM-SR-NA-ALL

Loosely, this reference translates to: ?? - ?? - ?? - 1 - 0 - 0 - Email - Starbucks Rewards - North America - All

I thought that the first two digits were the year of the broadcast, but Starbucks Rewards emails from 2020 also have this 21-15 starter tag. And, it's not sequential to time-order. There are campaigns that ran in January 2020 with the starter tag of 21-14 and emails that were sent in October 2020 with the starter tag of 21-13. So, maybe a campaign type? 

The middle "1-0-0" I think a null code placeholder. Here is a tracking example from their "Starbucks for Life" rewards campaign: Ref: 21-13-SFL21-1-0-0-EM-SR-NA-US

The easiest way would be to just ask someone who works for Starbucks marketing. But this is more fun. These tracking codes aren't meant to be memorable; but they are a good way for marketers to attribute sales revenue and customer engagement through email-to-store or email-to-mobile-order sales.

In contrast, retail stores with ecommerce websites often use coupon codes as tracking codes that are static and can be used by anyone whether or not they are a rewards customer; and as such, the coupon code variations reflect a simple code (e.g., holiday20, welcome10).

Vanity Metrics

Vanity metrics are metrics that are easy to track but don't necessarily tell you anything about the performance of your business. Here are some examples of vanity web metrics:

• Pageviews: The number of times a page on your website is viewed. This metric doesn't tell you anything about how engaged visitors are with your content.
• Unique visitors: The number of different people who visit your website. This metric doesn't tell you anything about how often visitors come back to your website.
• Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page. This metric doesn't tell you anything about why visitors are leaving your website.
• Social media followers: The number of people who follow you on social media. This metric doesn't tell you anything about how engaged your followers are with your content.
• Likes and shares: The number of times your content is liked or shared on social media. This metric doesn't tell you anything about how people are interacting with your content.

It's important to note that vanity metrics can be misleading. For example, a high number of pageviews could simply mean that your website is easy to find, not that people are actually interested in your content. Similarly, a high number of unique visitors could simply mean that people are visiting your website once and then never coming back.

Examples of vanity metrics for email marketing:

• Number of subscribers: This is the total number of people who have opted in to receive your emails. While this is an important metric to track, it doesn't tell you anything about how engaged your subscribers are with your emails.
• Open rate: This is the percentage of subscribers who open your emails. This metric is often used as a measure of the success of your email campaigns, but it can be misleading. For example, a high open rate could simply mean that your subject lines are eye-catching, not that your subscribers are actually interested in the content of your emails.
• Click-through rate: This is the percentage of subscribers who click on a link in your email. This metric is also often used as a measure of the success of your email campaigns, but it can be misleading as well. For example, a high click-through rate could simply mean that your links are well-placed, not that your subscribers are actually interested in the content of your emails.
• Conversion rate: This is the percentage of subscribers who take a desired action, such as making a purchase, after reading your email. This is a much more important metric to track than open rate or click-through rate, as it tells you how effective your emails are at driving results.
• Unsubscribe rate: This is the percentage of subscribers who unsubscribe from your email list. A high unsubscribe rate could be a sign that your emails are not relevant to your subscribers or that they are being sent too frequently.

It's important to note that vanity metrics can be misleading. For example, a high open rate or click-through rate could simply mean that your subject lines are eye-catching or that your links are well-placed, not that your subscribers are actually interested in the content of your emails.

Have Data, Will Target

Coremetrics, featuring a real world case study with Estee Lauder, hosted a webinar today on retargeting emails based on behavioral triggers. Beauty products are a tactile product, meaning customers like to touch and feel the product at a store counter before purchasing; and one might assume that customers would rather do that at a brick-and-mortar place than online.

Estee Lauder's toolbox includes:

• Coremetrics for enterprise web analytics
• Coremetrics LIVEmail (not to be confused with Windows Live email)
• Experian's CheetahMail for email delivery metrics (opens, clicks, opt outs) and automated email campaigns
• Online display ads paired with cookies and search keywords with select ad networks
• A network of more than 250 websites, 50 of which are e-commerce sites
• An in-house list (does not use 3rd party lists at all)

EL's approach for retargeting emails:

• Determine segments and top performing product categories
• Customer service-oriented messages to customers
• Free shipping plus samples; call-to-action embedded in the ad itself
• Use registration confirmation, cart abandonment, and cookies that track categories browsed
• Segmentations based on visitor engagement, category affinities (serves up specific ad displays), referral sources (Google, Facebook), site tools (product reviews), level of engagement, and customer value

The results:

• Remarketing email open rates were 3-5x higher than broadcast emails
• Revenue per email was 6x higher than broadcast emails

When asked in the Q&A section about the open rates for broadcast emails, Estee Lauder commented they were average for the industry. This suggested that for the beauty and personal care segment, open rates were roughly 15% with a 3% click-through rate. Open rates this low usually means that the data hasn't been cleansed in a few years, there's plenty of duplicate customer records, fake customer records from users wanting to take advantage of single-use offers multiple times, or there's simply GIGO in their database. But, I digress. Back to the webinar... 

Re-messaging for online display ads looked at customer behavior while visiting EL's website(s) or partner websites, specifically targeting customers who interacted with the site but did not purchase which triggered an ad to appear via browse cookie on the ad networks used.

In context, ad serving in the example of Clinique ads went like this:

• skin care shopper gets a skin care ad
• make up shopper gets a make up ad
• abandoned cart shopper receives and offer ad

Re-messaging (targeting specific tailored ads to specific product interests) for display ads resulted with significant ROI improvements such as more impressions and click-based revenues. 

On the whole, EL has few challenges and they are common to just about everyone who transacts and tracks marketing spends online such as privacy concerns, measuring ROI, or determining the number of touch points within a 24-hour period.

If you're getting higher quality responses (more clicks, higher revenues) from your customers because you've now sent them a targeted email specific to their interests instead of one intended for all audiences, of course you'll get a higher response rate.

EL has either a really good design team or a great ad agency that can produce color-rich imagery that sticks to each product's brand. They aren't really challenged with lack of content like the rest of us. This chart shows some of the challenges faced by content marketers in the US:

Don't let the lack of content stop you from setting up parts of the process for demand generation or automated email follow-ups. Estee Lauder uses one creative per branding ad campaign and rotates it with fresh content every few months. This insight didn't happen overnight and takes careful market planning for budgetary spends and execution.

Google Analytics: Annotations

At the end of an online campaign or for month-end reporting, I bet you've wondered where all the traffic spikes should be attributed to. Rather than shuffle through piles of paper lurking about, Google Analytics makes it easy to keep track of what happened by allowing users to add data point notes (annotations) to one's traffic feed. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way for marketers to download or export just a timeline of the annotations. Maybe someone will write an API to compensate for this undersight.

TheFoodening blog - a bump in referral traffic from a niche food site

The above image shows a steep bump in new visitors and is an example of a cross-posted recipe that I did (pizza balls) between my food blog and a popular food community on LiveJournal, food_porn. It doesn't have to be a direct post to gain residual traffic among an audience with similar interests. I still get long-tail hits from recipes x-posted years ago.

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)

Attended an Amazon webinar today that covered their Simple Email Service. I have yet to test it out. Initial impressions suggest that you should stick with your existing email service provider for basic email marketing broadcasts because there aren't a whole lot of tools nor analytics built yet for SES. It is a basic as basic gets.

A few things to note:

• Supported APIs
• Built-in Features
• Sending Limits
• Access Levels
• Pricing

Via Simple API, SES supports Java, .NET, PHP, Perl, and HTTPs, and is AWS compatible, meaning if you already use Amazon EC2 or Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk, you can "migrate" over to SES easily.

There are two types of email sending options: formatted or raw message; both of which are also supported by API functions (SendEmail, SendRawEmail). The basic feedback analytics are reminiscent of basic web stats (GetSendStatistics API) which will tell you about delivery attempts, rejected messages, hard bounces, and spam complaints. And, everyone's lists are served up separately, so even if you have an overlap of customers with another business that also uses Amazon SES, their spam complaints do not affect your broadcasts (unlike how Gmail blocks spam).

Most ESPs have sending limits built into their pricing contracts. Amazon is no different. Every SES user is assigned a quota (max number of emails that can be sent in 24 hours) and an access level (everyone starts out in the sandbox to test SES features and can send up to 200 recipients a day), which is tiered. However, you can only send to and from a verified email address.

Pricing. ESPs that support small to medium sized businesses such as iContact, Bronto, Vertical Response, or ConstantContact, shouldn't fret about Amazon's pricing structure. Pricing is tiered and is based on the combination of two elements: data transfer and CPM per email message.

Current CPM is $0.10 per thousand messages sent. Data transfer pricing is as follows:

Data Amt	Cost
First GB	Free
up to 10 TB	$0.15/GB
next 40 TB	$0.11/GB
next 100 TB	$0.09/GB
150+ TB	$0.08/GB

Pricing examples:

1000 email messages to one recipient per day with content size 10kb
= 31,000 recipients sent per month
= 3.1 GB in/out data transfer
= $3.73 for the month

1000 email messages outbound to one recipient per day with content size 100kb
= 31,000 recipients sent per month
= 31 GB in/out data transfer
= $10.70 for the month

Amazon EC2 users are already subscribed to the free pricing tier and are capped at 2000 messages for free each day.

To get started with Amazon SES:

Subscribe
Verify email addresses / create your own whitelist of verified addresses
Send Email
Request production access
Get Feedback

Limits on sandbox accounts: 100 whitelisted verified addresses, up to 10MB per message (because most popular email readers cannot handle more than that).

Limits on all accounts: Does not support SOAP or file attachments

Secret Sauce

The flavor of the year is web intelligence.

While web analytics companies had fallen out of favor with their burdensome plethora of datasets and a marketer's inability to spare the time to digest it all, the latest trend is to provide integrated dashboards that marries most of the online and offline transactions together so that marketers can make meaningful purchase decisions with respect to advertising and campaign spends. This is a snake eating its tail. But, what purveyors of web analytics do not tell you is that there isn't a single solution available that is an actual standalone single solution.

By standalone, I mean to say that there isn't a single dashboard entity that has all the necessary tools under its own dashboard. It may show up in the UI as a single utility, but it is the merger of several tools from different providers each of whom you have to purchase to use.

The secret sauce that has everyone whispering about at conferences and marketing webinars this year is how to combine online data transactions with offline data transactions so that marketers can better understand online marketing, retention efforts, create more targeted advertising, and ultimately generate higher conversions.

Customers interact with your company and its brands everywhere:

• Twitter, Facebook
• Via mobile phone, Skype, or call centers
• In-store kiosks (Starbucks, bank branches, photo duplication, etc.)
• Brick and mortar stores
• Print publications (magazines, newspapers, flyers, postcards, POS)
• On the web

MMO Revenue Methods

Strategy Analytics estimates that revenues from online games will reach $11.5 billion by 2011, a 25.2 percent compound annual growth rate (source: arstechnica news). In 2006, the North American subscription market hit $576 million, and Europe rose to $299 million. Europe has seen the fastest growth over the last few years, rising from $74 million in 2004, and is expected to see the most growth over the next few, as well (source: IGN).

There are two main methods that game developing software companies use to create revenue. These two methods aren't exclusive to graphic-based online games, the second option is also used by text-based online games such as MUDs.

Method 1. Retail the game client program for $30-60 per user account, and
1a. Either elect to have server game play for free: Guild Wars, NWN, etc.
1b. Or, have users also pay for a monthly subscription: WoW, City of Heroes/Villans

Method 2. Allow users to download the game client for free, and
1a. Have an in-game "store" that users use real world money to buy items for their in-game characters
1b. Exclusive use of special items and character equippables that greatly enhance playability for a fee
1c. Examples

MMOs aren't immune from the 4 (or 5, depending on who you consult) P's of marketing, otherwise known as the marketing mix: Product, Price, Place (distribution), Promotion, and entrepreneurship. Customer acquisitions and retention are key issues for MMOs, just as with any for-profit business. The MMO facet of the gaming industry is beginning to see the emergence of a high barrier to entry: Price, and I'm not talking about standard purchase fees, but rather how much it will cost a game developer and its VC investors to bring an MMO to market.

Who would have thought that when games made it to the online realm that bringing a game to market would cost $25+ million?

Read more?
Wikipedia definition of MMORPG
MMO Profitability
Games with strong online components outsell the competition
Why the MMORPG subscription based business model is broken
Free-To-Play MMO Creators Should 'Show Us The Money'

Blog Stats

I manage a few sites with varying degrees of slackerdom (what one does when not at work). Of the ones where I have embedded with Google Analytics code, I can see that the general audience would rather goof off than read content that's applicable to B2B/B2C marketing.

The Foodening, a food blog about cooking for one, making mistakes in the kitchen, and blathering about food. This site is advertised through my profiles on: LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Facebook, ResearchInfo.com, and Experts-Exchange.com.

Jul-Aug 2008 stats
visits: 150
absolute unique visits: 147
pageviews: 232
pages per visit: 1.55
avg time on site: 53 sec
bounce rate: 78%

Bounce rate is normal, after all, the posts are just recipes with kitchen notes. If you hit this site from an organic web search and don't find what you're looking for, would you stick around? Nearly all users come from the US, other countries that show up on the site usage report are Canada, Philippines, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, S. Korea, Bahamas, Romania, and Taiwan.

Ramblings of a Marketing Gurl (this site), a personal blogging site about marketing. It is advertised on my profiles at: LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Facebook, Experts-Exchange.com, my portfolio website, and just about every potential employer that I've applied to. Goal conversions are setup for this site and I am primarily seeing if visitors hit my marketing portfolio; of course this doesn't always track that well since I give the direct url to my work samples and visitors aren't funneled in from the top index level. Majority of visitors are from the US, but there are people from the UK, India, Germany, New Zealand, Pakistan, Sweden and Venezuela who also visit. This site isn't indexed with Google's Blogger.com.

Jul-Aug 2008 stats
visits: 27
absolute unique visits: 27
pageviews: 44
pages per visit: 1.63
avg time on site: 1 min, 22 sec
bounce rate: 62.96%

And, last of all, my personal/portfolio website on Googlepages. This site is not advertised at all, contains anti-spider code, isn't indexed on Google, and basically, the only visitors are those that I know personally whether by social group, networking, or job hunting. Why? I like my privacy even though I am on at least a half dozen personal and business social networking sites.

Jul-Aug 2008 stats
visits: 26
absolute unique visits: 17
pageviews: 90
pages per visit: 1.63
avg time on site: 4 min, 53 sec
bounce rate: 38.46%

Similar stats to my marketing blog? The two are usually packaged together. The biggest difference is average time on site where visitors are definitely spending a lot of time reading on my portfolio site. I've only recently discovered that my name isn't visible in large bold type on my personal/portfolio website nor on my marketing blog. Hmm, I shall have to fix that.

Organic Traffic

For the first time, my other blog has received organic traffic from AOL. This is both interesting and significant because I don't advertise at all through any of AOL's networks. I don't get a whole lot of traffic, but it's steady and worthy of consideration to monetize the blog. I haven't done so in the past because it doesn't cost me anything to keep the site up.

I really don't see why people are so obsessed about keyword ad buys and bidding on short- and long-tails for that 15% or so paid search traffic that will get them placed higher up on the food chain. SEO is a concept, a lot like modern day IT practices, where the concept has to adapt so rapidly to changing technologies that you have to have employ specialists to cope with such trends to stay ahead of competitors. I don't feel that it adds any value to a company's business model and it detracts from the resources necessary to generate positive net income. I can have this opinion because of the 89 visits (83 absolute unique visitors) to the food blog in the last 30 days (May 10 - June 9), 72 visits (80% of total traffic) were Google organic.

This means that people got to my site through natural means. Either because they saw a recipe I posted to a large recipe swapping/journalling community, or they had typed in keywords that match the keyword tagging that I use on my food site. I might have mentioned in a previous post that I dislike tags; it is only because people mistag articles, blogs, and RSS feeds all the time to redirect traffic to a misrepresentation of a tag's keywords.

For all the sites that I manage (2 blogs, 1 personal site, 1 game info site), I use Google Analytics, but I also have Stat Counter and ClusterMap on the ones where I know I will have international traffic. ClusterMap provides a wonderful display of frequency by location, representing website hit population by a visitor's IP address but at a bird's eye view.

This is where my international visitors came from (June '07 - May '08):


My two largest visitor populations are located in Florida and California. I have two recipes that generate consistent monthly traffic. Can you guess which ones? I'll give you a hint. One is a Cuban dessert recipe (majority of hits) that I was inspired to make from scratch after tasting it from Portos Bakery; the other is a Chinese appetizer (2nd most frequently visited posting) that is probably one of the priciest items you could order at a restaurant that has it. Both of these are made from basic (to that food culture) ingredients.

So, why do you suppose I have so much traffic from these two US states for that one Cuban recipe?