Klaviyo and UTM Tracking: Understanding the World of Email Campaigns

The eCommerce market continues to be relevant as the years go by. Whether through independent online stores or more significant, widely known eCommerce sites, the market shows no sign of stopping its growth. 

This fact leads us to the next crucial step: no matter what your client wants, chances are that your eCommerce client is using —or wants to use — email marketing. 

Email marketing has become an effective tool for this digital era. Almost everything can be done online, so taking advantage of the resources the Internet offers is crucial to ensure the success of an online business or the growth of a company’s brand. 

Here, we will give you insights into the email campaign world and what platforms like Klaviyo can do for your email and SMS strategies. Furthermore, you’ll get an introduction to UTM Tracking parameters so you take your strategies and their tracking to the next level. 

UTM Tracking: What Is It?

UTM, which stands for Urchin Tracking Module, known as Urchin Traffic Monitor too, are snippet codes you can use to track how a campaign or content performs. You add these codes to the end of a URL.

These codes allow you to track five parameters (source, campaign, medium, content, and term). When you add one of these codes to a URL, it will look similar to this:

http://yourwebpage.com/your-post-title/?utm_source=google

As you can tell, everything after the question mark is a UTM code (utm_source=google). Likewise, you can see that the code is used when you want to know who was in charge of generating traffic to the page (source=google). 

These codes have two elements: 

• UTM parameters: These parameters are the ones we just saw above. Source, campaign, medium, content, and term, are the five trackable standard parameters. Let’s take a further look into the role each of these parameters plays in UTM:

1. Source: As seen before, the UTM parameter tracks where the traffic of a page is coming from. Some traffic sources can be search engines like Google or Bing or social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter. The source can also be an email list. 
2. Campaign: This parameter allows you to follow the performance of a specific campaign. Similar to the previous parameter, you can track the performance of campaigns on Google Ads, Facebook, or email campaigns. 
3. Medium: This parameter will determine what type of traffic the visitor originated from. Whether through CPC, emails, referrals, etc.
4. Content: There are situations in which you might have numerous links in one campaign (e.g.: multiple CTA buttons or social media links). It is then that you use the UTM tracking code for content. 
5. Term: This parameter will allow you to track which keyword conducted a visitor to a website. This code is helpful when analyzing paid ads and their performance-generating website visits. 

• Tracking variables: This allows you to determine the dimension being tracked. This variable is preceded by the “=” symbol. Likewise, symbols like hyphens, +, letters, signs, and periods represent this variable, too. 

These parameters can be long and complex at first, as they might not look like the example above. If you add or delete a UTM tracking code, you will see the page will load normally. 

Klaviyo Introduction

Now that we know what UTM tracking is, what about Klaviyo? This email marketing platform allows businesses to manage their customer data effectively. 

It works to ensure a client has timely points of contact throughout the customer journey. This system enables the possibility to make sure not to miss any opportunities. 

As seen on their page, Klaviyo has 100,000+ clients on its platform. This metric helps you gain an insight into how beneficial this platform can be for businesses. 

Furthermore, Klaviyo offers some attractive features such as: 

• Email templates. 
• Integrations with marketing platforms such as Google Analytics or Shopify. 
• Audience segmentation. 

Additionally, this audience segmentation is based on factors like: 

• Predictive behavior: the possibility of a client completing an online transaction.
• Data consent: if a client agrees to receive SMS, for example. 
• User actions: purchasing a product or completing a specific action through email. 

Similarly, it is vital to note that Klaviyo comes in handy in sensitive stages of the customer journey, for example, it can help a client remember an order they might have left unattended or to help send recommendations to recurring customers. 

Important Klaviyo Metrics

When using Klaviyo, consider tracking the following metrics. 

Conversion Metrics

This item might be one of the most relevant metrics for many Klaviyo email clients, as it reflects the ability an email has to generate sales and revenue. Your clients likely have conversion goals, and that’s where analytics join the game. Understanding what your emails’ conversion rates are and what said conversion is generating is crucial to increasing performance and overall results. 

Furthermore, if you find that your emails are not meeting the conversion goals your clients have, look into these aspects to see what could be happening: 

• CTA buttons are not strategically placed, or there are not enough CTA buttons. For example, if the email regards an ebook, add a CTA button to let the reader download it easily. 
• The content isn’t engaging enough. Think about it this way: if you want to lead customers to buy a product or hire a service, add phrases that can help effectively promote them. 
• There might be problems with your client’s website. If their website has CTA button errors, chances are the website isn’t optimized for conversion. Issues with links or any other conversion-related areas of the webpage can affect the numbers of your metrics. 

Clickthrough Metrics

Simply put, successful emails are those that spark action. If the reader is compelled to click on it when they see it in their inbox, that is a considerable win. Furthermore, if they click on any of the links you add to the client’s email, that will boost your CTR metrics. 

By learning what makes email subscribers click on your links and lead to another action, you have better chances of optimizing your content and providing a higher quality email as time goes by. 

Unsubscribe Metrics

The name explains this metric. It lets you know how many people choose to unsubscribe from your email marketing campaigns. 

Klaviyo’s website offers an insight into what your unsubscribe rate should look like, and according to the platform, it shouldn’t be higher than 0.2%. If you find your numbers are higher than this, here are some reasons why it could be happening: 

• Your emails are not landing on their target audience. Verify you keep your clients’ target audience updated, as this is what ensures the campaigns reach the right crowd. 
• Your subscribers are getting unwanted emails. That’s not to say your emails are spam, but rather that your readers didn’t permit you to receive any content in their inboxes. To avoid this, always ask for the required permissions. 
• Your emails need optimization. Maybe they aren’t loading correctly, or the images don’t look as good as they should. Make sure you customize your messages as best as possible and run tests before setting up the campaign. 

Delivery Metrics

After setting up Klaviyo campaigns, you must guarantee those emails are getting delivered. To do that, check the receive rate of it and see what those numbers look like. This item will help you identify whether the delivery metric meets your clients’ goals. However, if you find your receive rate is not meeting the goals, look into these factors: 

• Your client’s email is received as spam. To avoid this, make sure the domain is authenticated. 
• There are faulty email addresses on your delivery list. You can rely on email verification tools to ensure you have a working address list. 
• Your client’s emails are being marked as spam by the readers. To prevent this from happening, make sure you are creating valuable content for a targeted audience.

Open Metrics

Let’s say you complete the previous step and confirm you have a long list of validated emails. But what does this mean if you send 200 newsletters and only 20 of your client’s readers open them?

Here is where this metric comes in handy. You must confirm your client’s readers are engaging with the content, starting from one of the most vital steps related to this activity: opening the email. 

Of course, some things could be preventing your metric from having a high percentage: 

• Sending frequent emails isn’t as beneficial as you might think. This action could lead to readers not opening the items at all. 
• If your content isn’t optimized, it will reflect on this metric too. If you are sending wordy subject lines or not saying anything relevant in it, chances are the reader won’t be inclined to open the message.
• Maybe you are trying to reach this audience at the wrong time. Let’s look at it like this: imagine you are talking to marketers. Sending newsletters at 10:00 a.m. on a Monday might not be the best tactic, as they will most likely be busy at meetings and other work-related events. 

Where Klaviyo and UTM Tracking Meet

As you saw above, adding UTM parameters to search engines like Google is possible. Similarly, you can add UTM parameters to your tracking configurations on Klaviyo.

Two parameters come ready for use (Campaign and ID), and you have to set up the ones you wish to include in your SMS or email campaign. 

To set up UTM tracking for your Klaviyo email and SMS campaigns, follow these steps:

1. Start from your Klaviyo account. 
2. Head to Settings. You will see this option in a drop-down menu after clicking on your name in the top right corner of the screen. 
3. Click Others, and next go to UTM tracking. 
4. Choose the parameter you wish to include for your campaign. 
5. You will find the Campaign Value and Flow Value options. Select the ones that fit your campaign.
6. Click on Automatically Add UTM Parameters to Links to set up these parameters for your campaign. 
7.  Finally, click Update UTM Tracking Settings, and you will track Klaviyo metrics through UTM parameters. 

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

Klaviyo tracking can be helpful for your client’s email and SMS campaigns. Adding UTM parameters could help you have sufficient insights into the campaigns’ performance. Consider using these tools if you want to provide a high-quality service to your clients when it comes to understanding their content’s rendition.