Setting up analytics on your website can be as easy as adding a free Google Analytics code to the pages of your website. And most e-mail service providers generate data and reports for each mailing that you send. The key is to get these analytics programs in place as early as you can so that you can use the data they generate to continually improve your online communications.

Fine-tune your website and SEO

Google Analytics is a free suite of analysis tools that’s widely used to capture and display information about how visitors are using your site. Using analytics, you can find out what’s appealing to your audience, pull them into your site, and get them to click.

From the Google Analytics dashboard, you can get a great overview of how your site is performing over time. Detailed reports let you drill down for more detailed information about every aspect of your site’s performance. And you can have Google Analytics e-mail you reports on a regular basis so you don’t forget.

Google Analytics will give you as much information as you want, or you can stick to the high-level analytics. To see more details on any report, just click the “view full report” link.

Reports that you should monitor regularly are the following:

• Dashboard – See whether the number of visits is going up or down, see a map of where your visitors come from, and see which pages are most popular.
• Visitors overview – See how many visitors you have and how much time they’re spending on your site, and see which browsers and connection speeds your visitors have to make sure your site is optimized for all your audiences.
• Traffic sources overview – See whether your visitors arrived at your site from searches, directly, or from links on other websites.
• Keywords – See which words visitors used on search engines to find your site, plus what they did once they landed on your site.
• Top content –  See which pages get the most traffic on your site.

Depending on your business, you may want to run additional Google Analytics reports. For example, you might want to know what country your visitors come from or what time they are visiting your site. Perhaps you’d want a visual representation of exactly where users are clicking on your web pages.

Improve your e-mail campaigns

After you send an e-mail blast, you should plan on analyzing the results using the analytics that most e-mail services provide to learn how your audience is responding to the communications you’ve sent.  You can see how many people opened your e-mail, and who they are.  You also can check which links generate the most interest, and which campaigns are most effective.

For each e-mail campaign, you should analyze the following:

• How many e-mails were sent, received, and bounced due to bad e-mail addresses
• How many people opened the e-mail, clicked on a link, forwarded your e-mail, and opted out or signed up
• Which links and graphics received clicks
• A comparison of this campaign and past campaigns to identify differences and the reasons for them

Taking a close look at e-mail analytics lets you spot trends that help you refine and improve your e-mail marketing plans. If you get too many unsubscribes, you might be sending your e-mails too often. If none of your graphics are getting clicked, many of your subscribers might have their images turned off and you should design your e-mails to rely less on images and more on text links. If your response rate for a particular e-mail was particularly good, you should see how it differs from less successful campaigns.

Test and refine

One of the great things about having a robust analytics solution in place is that you can test the results you get by updating your content or making multiple versions of your content. For example, you could take a look at which words are leading visitors to your site and create more content that concerns those keywords, and see whether that improves site traffic. You can create multiple versions of a single e-mail campaign and see which gets the most click-throughs. Or reorganize your site to remove pages that are rarely visited, or create stronger links to those pages.

The key is to take a look at analytics at least once a month, plus after every major website change or e-mail campaign.

When designing a website or online campaign, creativity is important. But for your project to be truly successful, you must create something that’s targeted to your audience. Before you jump into designing a new marketing piece, you must fully understand your market space, your goals, and your competitive concerns.

Using a three-phase approach, you can develop purposeful strategies, design on-target solutions, and get the results you seek.  This standardized approach to problem-solving provides a framework for a smoother process, better support for your brand, and the ability to routinely and systematically produce great work. The process can be driven by the client, but having an outsider—such as a design firm or web agency—oversee the process allows you to develop a better-balanced plan.

Phase 1: Discover

First, work with your team to discuss your goals, identify your audiences, analyze your brand, assess your competition, and refine your market position. Learn about the customers you want to attract, which competitors keep you up at night, and what makes your company unique. Get to know your business inside and out by including stakeholders from throughout your organization.

At the end of your discussions, produce a strategic brief that defines the scope of the campaign, including the results of your findings, definition of roles, a schedule of milestones, and content recommendations. This strategic brief guides your team or agency as they develop marketing pieces. It is the measurement by which you should judge any creative solutions your team develops.

Phase 2: Design

Once you have defined your marketing challenges and objectives, begin the exploration of visual concepts and designs with a personality and style that support your brand. Designers and project managers should collaborate with your team to develop a design solution that meets your unique needs.

With the strategic brief to guide the process, make sure the designs are on-target in terms of your audiences and your marketing goals. You can then discuss the choices with your team, determine which will meet your objectives with the most impact, and then refine the creative work. When this phase of the design process is complete, you should have the creative framework and assets you need to implement your design solution.

Phase 3: Deliver

In the final phase of the process, you should develop the tactical marketing pieces to launch your design across all appropriate media. The visual concept may be applied to your website, e-mail, web banners, collateral, direct mail, advertising, and more. Whether an online marketing firm develops your marketing pieces or you create everything in-house, you should create templates for each type of marketing piece—and make sure you have someone to turn to when technical and creative issues come up.

Be sure to include tools for tracking results and providing feedback on your marketing. And plan for refinement and maintenance of the all of the pieces to ensure that your integrated campaign is a success.

Results: Success

Your marketing team’s job is to create solutions that produce optimal results. Whether you measure your success through visits to your website, leads generated from your e-mail campaign, direct mail response, or click-through rate from your banner ads, a proven process helps to ensure you get the results you seek.

Scott Design received a Silver Award for the Camp Adobe NECC Tradeshow Event Materials in the B2B Media Campaign category and a Bronze Award in the B2B Media Campaign category for the Adobe Digital School Collection Online Campaign.

The Summit Creative Award was created to recognize and celebrate the creative accomplishments of small and medium sized advertising agencies and other creative companies throughout the world with annual billings of under $30 million. Over the last decade, the competition has established itself as the premier arbiter of creative excellence for firms of this size.Using rigorous evaluative criteria, it is the only competition rewarding those firms truly deserving of top recognition for creativity. Submissions are evaluated based on the strength of their big idea, the quality of execution and their ability to communicate and persuade.

The Camp Adobe campaign also won a Silver ADDY Award and a Silver Davey Award.

The Adobe Digital School Collection online campaign also won a Bronze ADDY Award.

For the latest information on recent awards, visit the Design Awards page.

The Summit Emerging Media Award was created to identify the world’s communication pioneers. Those pushing the bounds of the communication badlands. All forms of emerging media are explored, examined and awarded. Developing and engaging in emerging media technologies, along with creative messaging and market awareness, is often a difficult criterion which makes earning a Summit EMA a significant achievement.

The DFJ website also earned an Interactive Media Best in Class Award, a Gold International Marcom Award, a Communicator Award of Distinction, a Silver ADDY Award, a Silver W3 Award, and two Silver Davey Awards.

For the latest information on recent awards, visit the Design Awards page.

The International Academy of the Visual Arts has awarded Scott Design four Silver Awards in the 2008 W3 Awards competition that recognizes outstanding websites, web marketing, and web video worldwide. The competition included more than 3,000 entries from leading interactive agencies, designers, and other creative professionals.

Scott Design received Silver W3 Awards in the Best Structure/Navigation and Computer Hardware Industry categories for its redesign of the LogLogic website.

For its redesign of venture capital leader Draper Fisher Jurvetson’s website, Scott Design received a Silver W3 Award in the Professional Services Industry category.

Scott Design’s Holiday E-mail and Snowbash Game garnered a Silver W3 Award in the Self-Promotion  category.

The DFJ website also earned an Interactive Media Best in Class Award, a Summit Emerging Media Leader Award, a Gold International Marcom Award, a Communicator Award of Distinction, a Silver ADDY Award, and two Silver Davey Awards.

The LogLogic website also received a Silver ADDY Award, a Bronze Horizon Award, and a Communicator Award of Distinction.

For the latest information on recent awards, visit the Design Awards page.