One of the biggest differences between a mail merge and a true E-marketing campaign is the ability to track results. You’ll be able to see who opened—or didn’t open—your email transmissions. In addition you can also track other results such as opt-outs and bounces.
Once you’ve sent out an email campaign there’s not much left to do except wait for the recipients to open (and hopefully read) your message. Your results will begin to appear within 24 hours of your initial send.
- In ACT!, click Write, point to Sage E-marketing for ACT!, and then select E-mail Marketing to open the ACT! E-marketing dialog window.
- Click the Results tab.
- Click on Reports.
- Select the email that you wish to see results from.
- Click View Report. A summary of your campaign will open similar to the one you see in the following figure:
- Observe the name of the campaign and the Opened rate percentage at the top of the screen.
- View the following statistics:
- Submitted: Lists the total number of emails that you included in your e-blast.
- Sent: Lists the total number of emails that were actually sent.
- Unsent: Lists the total number of email addresses that were not sent because the email address was a duplicate, invalid, belonged to someone who had previously opted-out, or had bounced on three previous occasions.
- Bounced: Lists the number of emails that bounced.
- Unique Opens: Lists the number of individuals that actually opened the message.
- Unique Clicks: List the number of links that recipients clicked on.
- Total Clicks: Lists the total number of times any of the links were clicked.
- Forwarded by SPE: Shows the number of times recipients clicked on the "Forward to a Friend" link at the bottom your template.
- Viewed as Web Page: Shows the number of times recipients clicked on the "View as a Web page" link at the bottom of your template.
- Select from one of the following reports (optional):
- Create Call List: provides you with a ranked list of your most interested recipients based on the number of times they opened the message and the number of times they clicked on links
- Opens and Clicks: lists all the recipients and how many times they opened the message, clicked on links, and forwarded the message
- Opens: shows you pie charts depicting the percentage of people that read your email
- Opens over Time: displays a graph showing the time of day recipients opened your email
- Clicks: displays a graph showing you which links were the most popular
- Clicks over time: displays a graph showing you the time of day the various links were clicked on
- Select one of the Detail Reports to see the list of recipients that corresponds to the details of the statistics listed in step 7 (optional).
Statistics can only be measured when a recipient actually clicks one of the links in your message. For example, messages that are forwarded using the email client’s forwarding mechanism rather than the forward button that appears in your templates will not be counted.
With ACT’s E-marketing module you’ll be able to find out who’s really interested in your products and services, who never opened your email, and who never even received your email. You might even experiment by sending different templates to different portions of your database so that you can measure the effectiveness of each one.
In the next recipe you’ll learn how to create lookups in ACT! of the various results of your campaigns. However, you might also like to see the results of your campaigns in the form of a spreadsheet. For example, you might want to share this information with non-ACT! users. If you scroll down to the bottom of any of the Detail Reports you’ll notice the Send .csv file to field. Simply fill in the email address you’d like the report sent to and click Send and within minutes a copy of the report will arrive in your Inbox.