How to track an email marketing campaign?

The Email marketing channel remains one of the most profitable channels among marketers. Whether email marketing is part of your omni-channel marketing strategy, or it's the core of your business, tracking beyond your open and click through rate, is key to your business growth.

Reminder: How AnyTrack works

Regardless the marketing channel that will drive traffic to your website, conversion tracking works according to the following steps:

1. A visitor lands on your website
2. AnyTrack will simultaneously
   1. track engagements such as `FormSubmit` and `OutboundClick` events
   2. Generate a `Click_id` and pass it to your form or product link
3. When the visitor converts (purchase, or register to your product, or funnel), your conversion source will send the conversion event to AnyTrack, along with the `click_id` that was initially passed to the form submission or product click.
4. AnyTrack will record the conversion

In order to track email marketing campaigns, you should:

• Create a clickID for the form submit in order to track this event.
• Use atclid parameter in the email links in order to capture the original clickID and not creating a new one.

As you can see in the chart, without using atclid we will miss the tracking of the form submit event.

Most email marketing platforms follow similar tracking methods, but in this case we're using Mailchimp to illustrate the email marketing tracking flow.

Step 1: Form Tracking

In order to track Email marketing, first  we would like to create a clickID for the form submit:

1. In MailChimp we will go to Audience -> signup forms -> Settings
2. Choose Audience fields and *|MERGE|* tags:
   
   
   
3. Click on "Add a field" -> text and fill it this way:
   
   
   
   * You can choose another name if you like ( the Click id on the left side).
4. The next step is to create a form, in this case, we will go on Embedded forms , and when we finish customize it we will copy the HTML code:
   
   

We will add the next part to the HTML code in the input part:

<input type="hidden" name="CLICK_ID" value="--CLICK-ID--">

<!-- Begin Mailchimp Signup Form -->
<link href="//cdn-images.mailchimp.com/embedcode/classic-10_7.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
<style type="text/css">
    #mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; }
    /* Add your own Mailchimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block.
       We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */
</style>
<div id="mc_embed_signup">
<form action="https://gmail.us5.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=f55344cd125f5750fa6c74774&amp;id=fd12406f4f" method="post" id="mc-embedded-subscribe-form" name="mc-embedded-subscribe-form" class="validate" target="_blank" novalidate>
    <div id="mc_embed_signup_scroll">
    <h2>Subscribe</h2>
<div class="indicates-required"><span class="asterisk">*</span> indicates required</div>
<div class="mc-field-group">
    <label for="mce-EMAIL">Email Address  <span class="asterisk">*</span></label>
    <input type="email" value="" name="EMAIL" class="required email" id="mce-EMAIL">
    <input type="hidden" name="CLICK_ID" value="--CLICK-ID--">
</div>
    <div id="mce-responses" class="clear">
        <div class="response" id="mce-error-response" style="display:none"></div>
        <div class="response" id="mce-success-response" style="display:none"></div>
    </div>    <!-- real people should not fill this in and expect good things - do not remove this or risk form bot signups-->
    <div style="position: absolute; left: -5000px;" aria-hidden="true"><input type="text" name="b_f55344cd125f5750fa6c74774_fd12406f4f" tabindex="-1" value=""></div>
    <div class="clear"><input type="submit" value="Subscribe" name="subscribe" id="mc-embedded-subscribe" class="button"></div>
    </div>
</form>
</div>
<script type='text/javascript' src='//s3.amazonaws.com/downloads.mailchimp.com/js/mc-validate.js'></script><script type='text/javascript'>(function($) {window.fnames = new Array(); window.ftypes = new Array();fnames[0]='EMAIL';ftypes[0]='email';fnames[1]='FNAME';ftypes[1]='text';fnames[2]='LNAME';ftypes[2]='text';fnames[3]='ADDRESS';ftypes[3]='address';fnames[4]='PHONE';ftypes[4]='phone';fnames[5]='BIRTHDAY';ftypes[5]='birthday';fnames[6]='CLICK_ID';ftypes[6]='text';}(jQuery));var $mcj = jQuery.noConflict(true);</script>
<!--End mc_embed_signup--></link>

📘 More about sending ClickID with a form submit here

Step 2: Email Links Tracking

After doing that we will add this code to our website to generate leads.

The last thing is to add to our links that we send in the email marketing the id placeholder of the ClickID.

In our case is *|CLICK_ID|* as we can see in Mailchimp:
*The ID placeholder might change from one platform to another.

So for example the next link: www.example.com
Will be changed to:https://www.example.com?atclid=*|CLICK_ID|*

💡 The reason to use the parameter atclid is to let AnyTrack know to capture all the attribution data from the original clickID (the one that was created when submitting the form) and add them to the current user session. Without using atclid, a new clickID will be created after clicking the links and we will have no connection between the two events. Therefore we will not be able to track the customer journey.

Verify your setup:

Now, if a user submits the form or clicks on a link on your newsletter, you will see it in AnyTrack along with the user journey. 

For example: