Why should you track link clicks in email signatures?

Think of a corporate email signature as a free marketing tool that drives traffic to your website and social media channels. Tracking link clicks in email signatures can be done easily by using linked social media icons, promotional banners, and hyperlinks.

Companies that send emails by the thousand every day will no doubt have many recipients clicking the links in the sender’s email signature. If these link clicks in email signatures aren’t tracked, it’s hard to determine which banners and links are most effective.

Promotional banners used in email signatures as part of a marketing campaign are just as important to track as any other advertising channel. This is particularly true if you are A/B testing different designs. Adding a tracking link to your email signature marketing campaigns allows you to evaluate how successful the campaign is. It also informs you as to whether or not you should continue to use a specific banner or test a new creative.

How can you track link clicks in email signatures?

Depending on the analytics platform you are using, there will be the ability to create custom campaign tracking URLs. In Google Analytics, for example, you can create a campaign URL with their Campaign URL Builder.

Within Google’s Campaign URL Builder, you will choose custom parameters, often known as UTM tags. The UTM tags are what you will use to identify the traffic source within Google Analytics.

The different parameters are:

• utm_source: Use this to define where the traffic came from, e.g. email_signature_banner

• utm_medium: This identifies the medium, e.g. email

• utm_campaign: Typically the name of the campaign, such as a product promotion, e.g. exclaimer_cloud_demo

• utm_term: Use this for paid ads to define the keyword, e.g. email_signature_trial (optional)

• utm_content: Use this for A/B testing and content-targeted ads, e.g. link1 (optional)

We advise keeping the same UTM source and medium tags the same across all email signature marketing campaigns. This is to make it easy to track and measure results consistently so it’s easy to track the link clicks in email signatures effectively.

Seeing the data in Google Analytics

Once the campaign is over, you can analyze the data in Google Analytics. Login to your account and go to Acquisition > Campaigns > All Campaigns.

Choosing an email signature solution for marketing purposes

Exclaimer Signature Marketing Cloud is the perfect solution for eliminating the burden of email signature updates on IT and handing control over to marketers.

This allows email signatures to be transformed into new opportunities for promoting messages, engaging across social media, sharing awards, and establishing your brand’s personality. You can then use analytics dashboards to ascertain which link clicks in email signatures are the most effective and optimize your campaigns accordingly.

This means you can finally take full advantage of the opportunity the real estate within emails represents.

Capturing data is a key part of any marketing communications activity. Exclaimer Signature Marketing Cloud lets you glean as much insight from your signature as you do from other marketing activities. Equally, you can add a tracking pixel on every email signature component. You can then effectively track link clicks in email signatures with minimal effort on your part.

By integrating with your performance and analytics platform, you can start drawing some insights on click-through rates, downstream traffic, user experience, and so on. This in turn helps get closer integration with your CRM and marketing automation platforms and refine your contact strategy. With the right approach, you can go a step further and personalize landing pages for customers and prospects, run A/B testing, and track customer experience, engagement, and conversion.