Insight Analytics Part 3 - Why You Can't Rely on Email Alone for Lead Identification

But do you really know who it is that your emails reach?

Can you rely on the analytics that email campaigns return as a genuine measure of lead response?

Take this classic B2B marketing example:

• You’ve built up a mailing list for prospects (or you’ve bought one to get a head start).
• You draft an email with a compelling offer - promoting a white paper, eBook or discount.
• You link back to a web landing page from the email.

Now when you send the email out you’re going to get three sets of data:

• The analytics from the email platform
• The responses from your landing page form
• The analytics from your website

**Clearly the responses to the form are easy to analyse: you know when someone is interested.

Standard analytics won’t tell you much about the specific individuals.**

But what about the email analytics?

Limitations of Email Analytics

Most email platforms will tell you ‘who’ has opened and even clicked through from your email. But have you ever tried reconciling these numbers with your web analytics?

They rarely match. We’ve tested multiple email platforms and there is inevitably a black hole into which some clickthroughs disappear. If you’ve ever tried following up with prospects based on apparent clickthroughs, you’ll know how difficult this can be. How often have you been told, “I don’t remember that email”? Or, “I never clicked through”?

Now some more advanced email platforms aim to combat this by providing on-site tracking code. This should - in theory - allow you to reconcile clickthroughs with actual onsite activity and conversions. But again this lacks accuracy.

Why?

Imagine I forward the email I received to my colleague Fred. Fred clicks through but the email analytics register it as me. Error. Which leads to more of the issues above.

Confidence is King

So how does CANDDi help us overcome this?

CANDDi tracks all three different data types: email clickthroughs, conversion data from forms, AND browsing activity. And uniquely it registers browsing activity against specific individuals. Pulling all of this data allows us to smartly determine whether someone who has clicked through from an email you sent really was your intended recipient or someone completely new.

So, here’s the example run again, this time with CANDDi in play.

You send your email out to your list and people click through.

By looking at one data stream you can see who clicked through, whether they have been on your site before, and what they do on visiting - even if they don’t enquire. Instantly you have a much clearer picture of each prospect’s level of engagement.

BUT CANDDi doesn’t assume that your new web visitors are the people to whom the original email was sent.

Instead it shows you a level of confidence in any assumption. ONLY when CANDDi is convinced that the person browsing really is the original recipient will it merge this identity into the visitor’s profile.

Simplifying Sales

With this smart approach to analysing data we can dramatically streamline the workload and cut the pain of sales in two ways.

You only have to look in ONE place to get a clear picture of how prospects have responded to your campaign. When you follow-up you can do so with confidence that you’re calling the right people about REAL responses

Here’s what one of our clients said about using CANDDi this way:

“The classic email and landing page remains very effective for us, even though we have seen diminishing returns in recent years. What has proved problematic is keeping a consistent record of how our 10,000 prospects have responded to different campaigns.

For a long time we manually updated the CRM system with feedback from the sales team after they had followed up email clickthroughs but this had two problems. It wasn’t very consistent, and it didn’t produce data we could easily search and filter - we like our email platform but it’s much better at campaign-level data than lifetime prospect information. We also got a lot of complaints from the sales team about the quality of the email data: “too many wild goose chases” one said.

Now with CANDDi we have a searchable record of prospect responses so that we can easily use to tailor and filter campaigns. And we have much greater confidence in the quality of the profiles before we hand them off to sales to follow up. I get a lot fewer complaints and - to my shock - even some thanks from the telesales team.” Marketing Manager, B2B financial services provider.