If you happened to be a fly on the wall in our office the other day you would have heard me whining about the inability of our email marketing platform to capture more end-user information. As anyone that creates email campaigns for a living knows: if you thought it was bad having to build websites across multiple browsers you ain't seen nothing yet. We typically test across (at least) 14 email clients to make sure our outbound email consistently looks worthy of a click through.
So, wouldn't it make things a lot easier if we knew which clients were being used to view our outbound campaign content? Heck ya!
Now, to be honest there have been tools out there that provide some level of tracking in email campaigns. But they're expensive and not very flexible. Let's face it, most of these tools (for some reason or another) tend to be directed towards individual users with individual mail lists vs the service provider with many users and many lists. While our own platform integrates with the big daddy (Google Analytics), it doesn't offer any more insight other than help with tracking click throughs. And I don't need more help with click tracking.
What I want is something to help with efficiency. I want to stop wasting time on trying to address the rendering quirks exhibited by more email clients than I can shake a stick at. If my target list is made up of folks that run Outlook 2003 and few to none are running Lotus 6.5 (shudder) than I want to know that. Because then I won't spend any time on targetting Lotus 6.5, Hotmail, Outlook 2000, etc. Ya know what I mean?
Client budgets aren't getting any bigger these days. And agencies need all the help they can get in identifying potential efficiencies. Email analytics is the type of tool that can help cut costs--the type of costs that we often have to absorb when a particular browser or client just won't render things the, umm, right way. On the flip side, knowing more about our audiences can help us improve our creative and perhaps also our messaging.
Lucky for me, the timing of my gripe was spot on. Within 24hrs of having issued my complaint the super awesome team at Litmus announced that it was about to release a comprehensive email analytics toolset. Very cool!
