Three Ways to Determine Share of Website Visits from Email Marketing
Do you know how many unique visits per month your website gets from your email campaigns?
While you probably know how many sales and replies your emails generate every month and year, understanding unique visits from your email campaigns can sometimes be difficult.
And the difficulty meter goes up if you are a B2C seller. This is because visits from email clients that many consumers use — like Gmail and Yahoo — aren’t tracked in your analytics solution unless you set up links in your emails in a specific way.
Why is it important to measure visits from your emails?
In short, because it allows you to measure your email conversion rate. In your analytics solution — I and my clients use Google Analytics 4 (GA4), for example — you can look at both unique visitors, and at the percent of those visitors who converted through everything from button clicks and calls to form submissions and sales transactions.
As your business grows, you will likely have more customer or client segments — even multiple drip campaigns per segment. Setting up email conversion tracking that starts with the number of unique visitors from your emails allows you to understand the effectiveness of both individual campaign emails, and campaigns as a whole.
And when it comes to email as a marketing channel, compared to other marketing channels, it continues to be a leading avenue to acquire, engage, and sell to customers and clients due to its high engagement rate. Consider, for example, that the average email open rate across industries is close to 23% — while on social media, if you’re not doing pay-to-play by boosting your posts, then you can expect a “good” engagement rate of around 3%.
Here are three ways to measure your website visits from email, from low to high tech:
Low tech: Simply segment 15% of visits that show as Direct-source in your analytics solution, as coming from Email instead. Direct visits mostly come as a result of someone typing your website into a browser tab to pull it up, or copying and pasting it in from places like Instagram posts. However, in recent months Google’s AI Overview has noted that, depending on industry and the specific marketing strategy involved, anywhere from 10-20% of Direct visits are actually from email. That’s where I get 15% from. I did a fresh check of this question on Google while writing this post, and they’ve revised this stat down to 9%. However, in my experience working with clients, I think you’re safer for “back of the napkin” math to still go with 15%.
Medium tech: Use a major business email platform like ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, etc. It will automatically attribute email visits in your analytics solution, like GA4.
High tech: Many new businesses — and even more established ones that are small, some of which are intentionally small — use Gmail, Outlook, or other office suite solutions that aren't dedicated email platforms. If this sounds like your business, you can set up UTM parameters for your email campaign links so visits show as coming from email in your analytics solution. Here’s a free campaign URL builder you can bookmark and start using for this purpose.
Do you want to send more emails, but are limited by staffing constraints and/or budget?
I recently launched a suite of budget-friendly Digital Marketing Services that include email production for up to 2 emails per month. If you’re only interested in the email marketing piece for these plans, I can work with you to customize a plan for your business — which can include creating and sending up to 8 emails per month. All emails I develop for you include email-source link attribution for your analytics.
If you have any questions, reach out to me here.
