Digital marketing is flush with optimization opportunities, but only if you have a highly organized program. A central key to that is having a solid taxonomy, where you use tagging to keep track of various program elements. This kind of tagging system is key to easily and regularly optimizing your:

  • Audience acquisition sources
  • Calls-to-actions
  • Content types
  • Campaign performance

 Let’s talk about how tagging helps with each of those.

1. Tracking acquisition source performance

All subscribers aren’t created equal. Some know your brand well, have purchased from you before, and love your brand. Others are only passingly familiar with your brand and haven’t bought from you—and may never do so.

Where on the value spectrum a subscriber falls is heavily influenced by the acquisition source through which they became a subscriber. For example, customers who opt-in during checkout tend to be great subscribers, who engage with your emails, make purchases, and rarely complain. On the other hand, sweepstakes tend to attract much lower-quality subscribers who are far more prone to complain. That first example is among the low-risk sources discussed in our Audience Acquisition Source Ideas checklist, while the second is among our high-risk sources.

However, given how acquisition tactics can vary—in terms of messaging, incentives, safeguards, permissioning, and more—how a particular source performs for your brand can vary significantly. The best way to measure the performance of your acquisition sources is to tag the subscribers who come in through each source.

That allows you to look at all of the subscribers that come through each source and see their average performance. It can help you identify the sources that generate subscribers with the highest open rates, click rates, conversion rates, revenue generation, and other positive engagement. It also helps you identify the sources that attract subscribers with the highest complaint and bounce rates, the shortest time on list, and other negative behaviors. Often, one or two acquisition sources are responsible for most of your hard bounces and spam complaints.

Once you have a clear view of which sources are helping your business, you can try to optimize them so you gain even more high-quality subscribers. And for those that are hurting your business, you can decide whether to put more safeguards in place—such as double opt-in and CAPTCHA—or to discontinue the acquisition source.

Take an inventory of your list building efforts by getting our Audience Acquisition Source Ideas checklist for free via a no-form download.

2. Tracking call-to-action performance

With Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection obscuring opens, getting clicks is more important than ever. That has more email marketers focusing on analyzing the performance of their calls-to-action, and then using the results to inform CTA A/B testing.

However, a CTA analysis is unlikely to yield reliable insights unless you put smart controls in place that allow you to compare apples to apples. For instance, in addition to controlling for how targeted the campaign is that includes a CTA, you’ll also want to control for the placement of CTAs. After all, the CTA in your hero or primary message block should perform better than the CTA in a secondary block.

While you can manually go campaign by campaign and sort out where each CTA is situated within a campaign, tagging makes this dramatically easier. For example, you could include mod1_ in the CTA link for your primary message block, mod2_ for your secondary message blocks, nav2_ for your bottom navigation bar, and so on.

A strong CTA taxonomy like this makes annual CTA performance reviews much more feasible than they would otherwise be, and allows you to eliminate low-performing CTAs and put high-performing CTAs up against new challengers to verify that they’re keepers.

3. Tracking content types

In addition to seeing which CTAs perform best, also watch what kinds of content generate the highest click rates. Depending on your brand, content types might include:

  • Product categories (retailers, DTC brands, etc.)
  • Manufacturer brands (retailers, wholesalers, B2B sellers, etc.)
  • Subject areas and topics (media companies, B2B brands, etc.)
  • User generated content (all brands)
  • Interactive content, such as polls and surveys (all brands)
  • Charity-, PR-, and values-related content (all brands)

Tagging by content type allows you to understand seasonal trends, which topics are popular overall, and which subscribers have an affinity for certain kinds of content, among other things. Those kinds of insights can enable you to finetune your overall messaging mix, as well as personalize your messaging for individual subscribers.

4. Tracking campaign performance

The most extensive use of tagging (and filtering) is recommended for creating internal digital marketing benchmarks that truly compare like to like. We routinely see brands using their internal marketing benchmarks in an overly broad way that can cause them to make strategic missteps.

For example, comparing a shopping cart abandonment campaign to a campaign touting your charity work makes little sense. Those campaigns are going to perform very differently because their audience and goal are wildly different.

To avoid comparing apples and oranges, we recommend separating campaigns out according to five key characteristics:

  • A campaign’s target audience engagement level (e.g., general audience, low-engagement audience)
  • A campaign’s target audience size (e.g., large, small)
  • The campaign’s goal (e.g., high-, mid-, or low-funnel)
  • The campaign’s content stream (e.g., line of business, product category, business region)
  • The seasonality of the campaign (e.g., holiday, back to school, Valentine’s Day)

For each, you’ll likely have two to four tags by which you’ll sort your campaigns to facilitate accurate comparisons. This level of taxonomy takes a bit of effort to establish, but pays huge dividends down the road.

The truth is that without this kind of tagging, you’re stuck with lots of data, but few insights. Taxonomy brings structure and granularity to your data that allows insights to crystallize so you can take the right actions to boost your business results.

—————

Need help optimizing the performance of your digital marketing? Oracle Digital Experience Agency has hundreds of marketing and communication experts ready to help Responsys, Eloqua, Unity, and other Oracle customers create stronger connections with their customers and employees—even if they’re not using an Oracle platform as the foundation of that experience. With a 94% satisfaction rate, our clients are thrilled with the award-winning work our creative, strategy, and other specialists do for them, giving us an outstanding NPS of 82.

For help overcoming your challenges or seizing your opportunities, talk to your Oracle account manager, visit us online, or email us at OracleAgency_US@Oracle.com.

To stay up to date on customer experience best practices and news, subscribe to Oracle Digital Experience Agency’s award-winning, twice-monthly newsletter. View archive and subscribe →