Track Your Return on Investment

The goal of just about any email marketing campaign - or regular marketing campaign - is to generate revenue so you can become well-to-do and retire to a private island.  But how can you track the money you’re generating to be sure your email marketing is producing the kind of cash flow necessary to purchase an island in today’s economy?

Why, you can use our free ROI tracker / calculator of course!

Return on Investment tracking allows you to see how much revenue is generated from people who click a link in one of your marketing emails and then make a purchase on your site.  You can also use the included calculator to compare revenue vs. the amount you spent on the campaign and see the ROI  %.

To activate ROI tracking within your account:

• Go to VR Email > Account Information > Analytics Setting > Click-to-Conversion
• Use the “Enable” drop-down menu to select the Click-to-Conversion + ROI Calculator option.
• This generates a short snippet of HTML that you’ll need to add to the thank you / confirmation page that follows a purchase on your site.
• Be sure to click the Submit button on this page after you copy the snippet, as tracking will not be activated until that button is pressed.

The provided snippet of HTML will look like this:

img src="https://cts.vresp.com/s.gif?h=e8bad6dc67&amount=PURCHASE_AMOUNT" height="1" width="1"/

The “PURCHASE_AMOUNT” text in the HTML code is a placeholder and will need to be replaced by the actual purchase amount of each individual sale.  This will need to be coded by your website designer.  The actual implementation can and will vary, but if you are already noting the total purchase amount somewhere on the thank you / confirmation page then it will be very simple to note this amount within our provided snippet of code.  Note that the “PURCHASE_AMOUNT” number can be in any floating point format like 30, 29.95, 9,95, etc.

After you finish setting everything up, you’ll see two additional columns under VR Statistics and Recently Sent Emails called “Conversions” and “Revenue.”  The Conversion column will display the percentage of your recipients who “converted” by making a purchase and the Revenue column will display the amount of revenue generated by the email. 

You’ll also find a ROI Calculator on the main reporting dashboard of every sent email.  This calculator will display the total amount of money you spent on the email and the total amount of money that was made from recipients who clicked a link and made a purchase.  In addition, you can enter any additional money spent on the campaign outside of the cost of sending the email through VerticalResponse.  The tool will then calculate your ROI percentage based on total amount spent divided by total revenue.

There are a couple of other things to note when working with the ROI tracker:

The reporting will not be 100% accurate as some of your recipients may have their browser or networking settings configured to block third party cookies.  Such a setting would make it impossible for our system to receive any data past the initial click-through made within the email itself.

There will also be some recipients who will read your email and visit your site directly (without clicking a link) in order to make a purchase.  These folks will not be tracked as it is necessary for them to click a link within your email for our system to be able to see that they then went on to make a purchase on your site.

Note too that the cookies we use to track the activity are set as soon as the recipient clicks a link within your email.  These cookies expire immediately after a purchase is made or 30 days later if no purchase is made.  The cookies will also disappear if the recipient clears their browser’s cookies.

Let us know if you have any thoughts or questions in the comments!

Comments

[A]

Question: If a visitor clicks on link from Email-A without purchasing and then the next day clicks on a link from Email-B. When they make a purchase, which email will count the revenue?