Let’s start with a little factoid; The average transaction amount increased by 15% over 2011 Christmas period.

So, great news for brands who offer online transactional capabilities to their users; due to seasonal trends your sales will soar. But also, with this in mind, it stands to reason why there is a correlation with sales organically increasing over holiday times and that months prior to these are when marketers starts focusing their attention on their brand presence, transaction rates and ROI.

Is this right though?

Isn’t this something that should be at the forefront of everyone’s mind all year round? For me the mid Year is a great time to review this process and ensure its perfect for the remaining year ahead.

With that in mind maybe our email brains need a lobotomy and our e-commerce ones need to see the light of day, because to have a truly balanced digital marketing strategy we need to ensure we are using all the information we have available to us to create one succinct marketing objective and ultimately guarantee our business makes money. What I’m talking about in this instance is integrating our web analytics with email marketing to help us gain a better understanding of our subscribers’ online habits and allowing that data to drive abandoned basket campaigns, in turn increasing website revenue generation.

Your ESPs reporting tool can only follow subscribers up to the point where they click off your email and land on a website.  After that click, web analytics takes over; however, an ESP platform that can integrate with your analytics package can give you the complete picture of your subscribers’ behaviour. This is why it is so important to intertwine these two as the more you know about your audience; the more likely you will be to turn them into customers.

Using your analytics to track the page views of the subscribers that clicked-through from your email you can learn which subscribers then added a product to their shopping cart but abandoned it before finalising the purchase. It’s this information you need to create specific remarketing campaigns directly targeted to those subscribers that have shown interest in your email offer but failed to transact.

Abandoned basket remarketing is another great step-by-step process that opens the lines of communication between brand and subscribers attempting to bridge that gap between the two.  As technology evolves, the complexities of segmenting, and managing your email lists and campaigns are becoming more sophisticated. The more data you have, the more accurate your trending reports will be across multiple campaigns and combining both your email tracking features and web analytics data, you’ll gain a complete understanding of your subscribers.  Once you know this information, you can use it to create relevant email campaigns that are essential to your subscribers’ needs.

The more you know about your audience; the more likely you will be to turn them into customers. – Samuel Reynolds