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Analytics have come a long way and helped fine tune the smallest details in a company’s marketing and lead generation process. Scruitinizing what you know about an email marketing campaign and its results and asking “what could we have done better?” keeps marketers on that constant path for improving results. The question is “how do you measure results?” “How do you know where the changes need to be made?”

This is where lead nurturing software has an edge over traditional email marketing applications. When you send out a simple email campaign, the key metrics you get are how many emails were delivered, opened and how many replied. If the reply rate is poor, you assume the email campaign wasn’t sucessful and there must be something wrong with the subject line. How did the email fare in invoking action after it was opened? The “lead activity stream” or “activity tracking” however it may be referred to, is the feature of lead nurturing technology which lets you analyze this. By tracking how the prospect interacts with the email and responds to your messages and analyzing this information, you can pin point where there is a possible break in the loop.

For example: if you send out an email with links to various products on your site and then directs the reader to a landing page with a “free subscription” sign up, lead nurturing would let you track the readers activity through this process. You can measure which leads opened the email, which were the most popular links clicked on, how many clicked through to the landing page and finally how many finally signed up. In a traditional email campaign scenario, if you found out :

1. 80%% of the emails were delivered
2. There was not a single sign up on the landing page

You would assume the email copy needs to be scrapped and re-written. However when you have an activity stream and you know:

1. 70% of your emails were opened
2. 40% clicked through to the landing page
3. Not one of them signed up

You now know

1. your subject line was sucessful in getting opens
2. your email copy was sucessful in getting readers to the landing page
3. your landing page didn’t convert them into sign ups

Its most likely your landing page that needs tweaking and not the email itself. Observing patterns of what links in your email get clicked and what doesn’t helps in identifying whats working and incorporating them in future campaigns. Activity streams and prospect behaviour patterns are invaluable in tweaking your marketing efforts. A little more information can go a long way.