A Different Kind of Feedback

Most of us would agree that feedback is generally a desirable thing and necessary for continuous improvement. Yet there seems to be a whole area of performance that gets ignored due to little or no feedback: internet marketing.

If you are ignoring your feedback (in the form of statistics), you’re missing two important things:

  1. Without a baseline to measure ongoing performance against, how will you know if you’re getting better or worse?
  2. Without feedback about your performance and information about people’s interests, how will you know what to do to improve?

Below are some suggestions to help you get the feedback you need. They can all be applied to an enewsletter campaign but certainly have broader applications.

Tracking codes
Online bulk email applications will have this built in. You can also use services like Bit.ly and other URL shorteners. Within the application you will be able to view overall statistics and trends. Plus you’ll get more useful things, like how many people clicked on a certain link.

Custom landing pages
You’ll need to have control of your website so you can set them up on the fly as needed for specific purposes, such as events or contests. Use your website tracking software, such as Google Analytics, to see the number of page views.

Links to different online locations
Providing links to specific website pages, blog posts, published articles, YouTube videos, etc., can indicate what people are interested in. You would measure this through the particular application’s tracking software or from within bulk email applications.

Distinct phone numbers or email addresses
This will highlight the response from a particular initiative. Staying on top of email and voicemail will be important.

Promo codes
This also helps to measure the response from a particular initiative and is usually part of a sales process.

Social sharing
As with tracking codes mentioned above, social sharing can now usually be tracked by bulk email software. You can also check statistics on each platform.

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