The CTR or click through rate, is often regarded as one of the more important metrics of an email campaign. While its importance cannot be understated, giving it all your attention will not always result in higher conversions and more sales. In fact, there are several metrics beyond the click that can provide insight into performance. A few good examples are page views, purchases and ROI. These are just some of the measuring sticks post-click analytics provide to gauge the success of an email marketing campaign.

Value in Visit Time

Using analytics to look beyond the click can open up a realm of opportunities for email marketers. For instance, let us say that a subscriber is intrigued by the professionalism and personalization of your welcome message and decides to check out your site. After taking a look at your data, you notice that the visitor spent nearly 20 minutes browsing a certain product page. The time they spent on the page could indicate interest in that particular item, giving you the fuel needed to tailor your next email message around their interest. Visit time is a key post-click metric that makes it easy to customize your content and make better business decisions.

Advanced Post-Click Analytics

Analytics has advanced quickly, and is currently capable of providing email marketers with even more valuable post-click metrics. Demographics tracking is one of the latest features, offering the ability to track a subscribers activity on a website by gender, age, and other important criteria. Once the recipient clicks on a link and arrives at your landing page, these advanced metrics are able to reveal in depth information on how individual segments are interacting with your page, allowing for deeper segmentation while giving you the opportunity to get the most from your content. Combined with segmentation, the more sophisticated features of analytics can help you optimize both the email and web browsing experience for your audience.

The Importance of Analyzing After the Click

Post-click analytics is becoming increasingly important in the email marketing sector. Just a few years ago, marketers had no way of knowing what occurred once a subscriber clicked the link in a message and landed on their website. Sure, it was always possible to customize a landing page based on their preferences, but as far as the email relationship goes, things were put on hold until the next campaign. The evolution of web analytics brought forth much needed vision and clarity, enabling marketers to use a variety of different metrics to create highly relevant, personalized content based on the activity that occurred after the click.

Using post-click metrics effectively calls for extra work on part of the marketer. However, dedicated monitoring and efficient use of this data can give you a better view of your success from delivery to conversion and beyond. Focusing your efforts beyond the click benefits email marketing as a whole because while it helps you boost campaign performance, it also allows you to provide subscribers with relevant content that is customized to their preferences and experiences.

Gary San is a best practices activist and advocate for winery email marketing.