Knowing the impact your email marketing has on the bottom line is huge. It can help you to justify more money, more time, or more thought on what is most likely a crucial part of your marketing mix. So how can you do that? One word gets you there – Conversions.

Within Bronto you can quickly and easily track conversions, and today I’d like to talk about strategies for getting the most out of tracking multiple purchases on your site. Keep in mind that conversion tracking within email marketing can be powerful, but it is usually there for segmentation purposes. Conversion tracking allows for a great way to track email’s value add or engage in remarketing, but it’s not going to replace the reporting you get from your ecommerce system.

With that being said, when you are implementing conversion tracking, you should consider your needs first. For the details on how to implement the actual tracking code, see our recent blog post on Setting Up Conversion Tracking Within Bronto.

Show me the money

If you are looking primarily to understand the total amount of money that is driven in, then I’d suggest you go with ‘Purchase Total’ tracking. In this method you will be tracking just one thing, purchase total. In fact, I would recommend just using “purchase total” as the actual description.

This will allow you to have a simple report that quickly and easily displays the value you are realizing from your email marketing. You will be able to segment your contacts on purchase amounts as well. Are you excited about the prospects of a High Value Customers yet?

A Segmenter’s Dream

If you have loftier goals of segmenting and targeting buyers based on their behavior, I would suggest going with a more granular approach. You can actually track multiple conversions on one page, and I would suggest doing one for each department they purchase within. You could track at the product level, but that can quickly become unwieldy, and frankly, almost impossible to segment on.

The departmental method will require that your ecommerce system (or an add-on created by your team) be able to break purchases down by department. However, once you have conversions tracked by department (with their corresponding spend by department), you will be able to segment you contacts by department they have purchased from. Now you’ve just opened a door to more relevant emails!

As you can see, there is no single set way to track conversions. You will need to put some thought into what you want to do with the resulting data. But don’t be too concerned, if you find that you aren’t getting the data you need, you can always change your conversion tracking.

Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto

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The Parts Of A Segment

Segments are composed of one or more rules that define the contacts you want to include.

For each rule, a segment can have one or more Criteria. Criteria can be considered the sentence that defines the segment.

Similar to a sentence, Criteria are made up of various parts that, when combined, form the Criteria. These parts are the Subject, the Condition, and the Value. The Condition allows you to indicate how you want to compare the Subject to the Value you entered.

Making Sense Of It All

Defining all of this will, in a sense, create a sentence. For example, you may want to create a segment that includes contacts that use hotmail. To do this, you would select Email Address as your Subject, then select ends with for the Condition, and enter hotmail as the Value. This creates a segment which, when read as a sentence, is: “Contacts whose Email Address ends with hotmail.com”

Thinking of segments in terms of a sentence can makes things a lot easier. When you think about creating a segment, first write down your idea for the segment as a sentence. If you want to create a segment comprised of people who opened your Fall 2008 Sale message and clicked on the Buy link, but did not actually buy anything, begin by writing this down. Using the sentence, you can determine the Subjects (Fall 2008 Sale and Buy Link), the Conditions (opened and clicked on), and the Value (zero because nothing was purchased). Note that the previous example would have two criteria.

Segmentation is one of the most powerful tools you can use in email marketing. Like many new things you learn, segmentation is all about mastering the basics. Once you have those down, the rest is easy! Drop us a line in the comments section below if you have any additional segmentation questions.

John Gunther
Technical Writer/eLearning Specialist at Bronto
Editor of Brontoversity

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Alright, first don’t panic. We can still salvage this delivery and get you back on track. Some of your contacts may have already received the email, but we will focus on them later on in the post. Right now, the first priority is to stop that delivery from going to anyone else.

Stopping A Delivery

To stop a delivery:

1. Return to the Messages Dashboard by clicking the Messages tab. On the left side of the dashboard, click the Outgoing link to take you to your current outgoing messages.

2. Once you are on the Outgoing Messages page, check the message you wish to stop and press the Stop Delivery button. Click OK to confirm the stop. The delivery will cease and no further messages will be sent to your lists.

3. You can now go back into your message and make the necessary corrections. Once the changes are made, you are probably going to want to send a message to the remainder of the list that didn’t receive the correct version of the email. Here’s how to do it.

Re-Mailing The Corrected Message

First we need to determine which contacts have already received the message and only resend to the remaining contacts on your list. We can do this using a segment.

To access the segment builder:

1. Click the Contacts tab, and then the Segments link.

2. Once in the Segment area, click the Create Segment button.

3. Choose a name for your segment that you will recognize when you go to send your message again. In this example, I have named my segment, “May 2009 Newsletter Resend.”

Now you will want to create the rules that will pull the correct contacts from your original send list.

1. In the first rule you will want to select the list that you sent the message to. Select “On List” from the first drop down menu and select the list name from the second drop down menu.

2. Now click the Create New Rule button located below the first rule.

3. In the second rule, chose “Wasn’t Sent” from the first drop down menu and select the message name from the second drop down menu. This separates the contacts that weren’t sent the message from those who have already received it.

4. In plain English, the entire segment logic should now read, “Select the contacts who are on the list Main Newsletter List and weren’t sent the May 2009 Newsletter”.

5. Click the Save Segment button to save the changes.

Now that the segment has been created, you can choose it when you send the newly revised version of your original message. The contacts that have not yet received a copy of the message will get the correct version.

Reaching Out To Contacts Who Received The Incorrect Email

One decision you will need to make is how to handle the contacts that did receive the incorrect email. If the email contained incorrect information, you may want to send an apology email with the correct information. If it was a spelling error, you may not feel the need to resend the message, as many people may not even notice it. If you are thinking of sending an apology email, I would recommend reading Mistakes Happen. Are You Prepared? on the best practices of sending an apology email.

You can use Bronto to build a segment just like you did for the contacts who didn’t receive the original email. This time, instead of selecting those who weren’t sent the message, select “Was Sent” to grab those contacts. Use this segment as the recipient of your follow up message.

Even though a mistake was made and incorrect emails were sent out, you do have options in Bronto to help put out the fire. However, as the old saying goes, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”, so keep sending out those test messages and double check them before sending the final message.

Rob Slade
Client Support Specialist at Bronto

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If you aren’t doing any segmentation right now, I recommend starting small/simple. Of course, data is critical for segmentation, but most anything will do: Total Purchase Value, Gender, Region, or even Style Preference.

You probably have much of this data taking up space in your e-commerce database or any other data store. By importing that into your email marketing solution you’ll be opening up a world of opportunities. How easy is it to create a segment once you have that data? Dead simple.

For the Bronto Winter 2009 Release we’ve enhanced the functionality to ensure that our segmentation tool is even easier to use. So let’s look at creating a segment based off of style preference – the age old question of boxers or briefs.

Segmentation is as easy as building a sentence. In this case, we are choosing people whose field ’style’ is ‘boxers’. Done. Now I can easily customize content or mailings to those who prefer boxers. Something as simple as a recipient’s preferred undergarment may provide significant lift in conversions.

With on-the-fly calculations (133 in this case), you can see how each rule affects this size of your segment. Not only does this reduce errors and time spent tweaking, it also provides an easy way to gain insight into your contact database.

Once you’ve created a few simple segments you’ll be ready to start getting creative. Add a few rules together, see how they perform. You might get a few duds, but pretty soon you’ll be able to target whomever you want, and ROI will be on the rise.

This new segment builder, along with many other improved features, will be available next week as part of the Bronto Winter 2009 Release.

Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto

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