MAILFIRST INSIGHT: HOW AND WHY YOU SHOULD USE CAMPAIGN TAGGING

Campaign tagging is a relatively new feature in our email marketing platform, MailFirst, which allows you to use the analytics functionality of the software to a more precise degree. Here’s the rundown on how you can start using the functionality and what it will tell you in return.

By tagging your campaigns you can create analytical ‘groups’ within the reporting element of the software. These ‘groups’ can then be separated when you review your reports to give insight on which type of communications, to which audiences, work better than others.

For example, a simple experiment to carry out could be to tag your ‘prospects’ newsletters and your ‘client’ newsletters. You would always expect your client newsletter to outperform your prospect newsletter, but by using campaign tagging, you can easily confirm the results.

This also allows you to isolate your client newsletters, so that you are comparing like-for-like communications, rather than judging them against campaigns which have a different purpose and audience. This is also useful if you run surveys, for example, enabling you to see your survey mailer results in isolation to other, very different, campaigns.

A more advanced way to use the system could be with time-sensitive campaigns, to produce actionable marketing data with which you can improve your communications.

Let’s say you want to run a campaign on maximising an ISA allowance, for example. Is the right time for that January, February or March? By running a campaign each month, and tagging the campaigns ‘ISA January’, ‘ISA February’ etc, you can alter the reporting display to compare just those campaigns and decide on the correct timescales for next year. Marketing is, in many ways, a science. Campaign tagging helps you to carry out more scientific marketing!

How to do campaign tagging

When setting up a campaign, ensure that you have applied the right tags in the ‘Create’ section (stage 1 of creating a campaign). When applying a tag for the first time, you will need to type in your full tag name. When applying the tag in future, you can begin to type the name, then select the tag from the list that appears below the form.

To see the reporting from any tags you have applied, click on ‘reporting’ in the top menu. On the reporting screen, select the ‘filter’ option at the top. You can use the next screen to decide whether you just want to see one set of campaigns with one tag applied, or whether you would like to compare a set of campaigns with one tag against a set of campaigns with another. By clicking into each one of the four broad graphs on the reporting home page, you can see more detail on the tags you have selected.

Need more help with campaign tagging or want to understand how it could work to improve your firm’s marketing? Just send Jenny an email at jenny@clients-first.co.uk, or call Jenny on 03454 508363 and we’ll be happy to help further!