Welcome to Your Daily Concept, presented by Exclusive Concepts. Today is Email Thursday.
My name is Tim, I’m an internet marketing strategist here at Exclusive Concepts – and today I’ll be taking a look at how to track email marketing revenue.
After you’ve sent out an email, your email provider can offer up data telling you how many people received the email, how many people opened it, how many people clicked through to your site etc. This is all great data to have, and it helps modify future campaigns for improved success.
However, the most email providers don’t actually provide you with the revenue generated from your email efforts. This is work that has to be done through other means, and it’s important – because this is the only way to get an idea of what type of returns you’re seeing on your investment.

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There’s a few different ways to track email revenue, today we’ll be focusing on two– query string tracking, and email address match back.
With query string tracking, each of the links found within the email you send out has a unique URL ending (known as a query string). It usually looks like the normal URL for your landing page, but with a question mark at the end followed by some text to provide reference. I’ve given an example on the screen. After the email has gone out and some time has gone by, you can track the revenue generated by your email by going into your analytics and looking at all the revenue that has been generated by people who have originally landed on those query string URL’s that were uniquely created for your email.
The other method we’re looking at today, is email match back. This method takes every email address that received your email, and within a designated amount of time, will match up any recent sales where this email address was used in filling out the order pages. Essentially, if you sent someone an email, and let’s say 4 days later someone made a purchase using that email address, the sale would be considered a result of the email campaign.

So which method is better to use?
Each have some limitations, but at Exclusive Concepts – we prefer to use the email match back method. There’s a number of reasons why, but let me touch upon the major one.
The major reason we prefer to use email match back is that the tracking is not limited to traffic coming directly from the email itself. For example, if you use query string tracking, you’re only tracking sales that come from someone who got the email, clicked on a link and made a purchase immediately.
This type of tracking does not take into account any sales from people who got your email, clicked through, didn’t make a purchase, but later came back – let’s say a day later, and bought something. Or revenue generated from people who just saw your email, went to the site and made a purchase because you got your brand in front of their face again.
With email match back, you can set a time period that you feel is appropriate, and if they got an email from you then made a purchase during that time period, it’s very likely to be the result of the email you sent. Is it 100% accurate? No, but when you’re talking about email marketing – there’s no method that’s going to give you 100% visibility into the return you get out of it.
Overall, we feel email match back offers better visibility into the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.

If you’re interested in improving the effectiveness and tracking of your email marketing program, give us a call at 1-800-504-4324 and we’ll give you a free email marketing audit.
That’s it for today, but I hope you enjoyed your daily concept – keep an eye of for tomorrow’s wildcard Friday video.
Have a great day everyone.