||| July 6, 2025 by Lara Goetsch

TimeLine Theatre’s ROI: Email Marketing Optimization

As I’ve spoken on behalf of Americans for the Arts about Return on Investment (ROI) over the past few months, I have been sure to highlight email-marketing optimization. You can find slides from one recent presentation posted in my previous AEE article published at the end of last year (reference slide 10 and 11 here). AEE asked me to go into a little more detail on this particular topic.

Measuring the ROI of email marketing can go beyond the open rate and click-through results that are track-able through your email system. Ensure that your emails are connected to the Google Analytics of your website, and you can see how each email (and even each link within an email) performs related to specific goals being measured.

Now I can see which of my emails had the biggest impact — what content attracted the most visitors

The major tool that I use to make this connection is Google URL Builder. To find it:

Go to google.com/support/googleanalytics
Under “Common Tasks” choose “tagging links”
Under “Overview” you’ll see “Tool: URL Builder”

There’s a tutorial there, but in a nutshell this tool allows you to turn any link to your website into a link track-able through Google Analytics. Instantly, you add an additional dimension to tracking the results of your email marketing efforts.

Reference Slide 10 to see what the tool looks like:

Enter the Website URL you want to track
Provide a Campaign Source — here “NAMPConf09”
Since it’s an email, the Campaign Medium is “Email”
Campaign Content allows you to narrow down even further. Here, I can indicate that this particular link to our home page was in the header of the email.
Campaign Name is the broad bucket that indicates your various ongoing campaigns. Here I’ve used “TimeLine General,” but I might also use a specific production title.

Once you start coding individual links in this way, you have given yourself countless variations to review within Google Analytics.

Refernce slide 11

Now I can see which of my emails had the biggest impact — what content attracted the most visitors, generated the most traffic to ticket sales, and more. Digging deeper, I can even see which links within a given email were clicked on the most — perhaps discovering that a picture link generated more traffic than a link within text.

I have also used the Goals function within Google Analytics to assign value to the various actions patrons can take on our site, which then provides me a way of measuring the ROI of email marketing. The values we assigned are somewhat random estimates of the relative value of the different actions: $1 for signing up for our mailing list; $10 for clicking through to visit (and presumably buy from) our third-party ticketing site.

In this example, patrons visiting TimeLine’s website during this time period took actions that totaled $3,113.31 in estimated value. Comparing that to the $512.40 we spent on our email system during that time period yields a potential ROI of 508%. This is simplified — because the Goal values are estimated rather than tied to actual revenue — but it is an indication of the return on investment! You are obtaining actual numbers to show the extent to which each email link produces results.

Now the fun part — making adjustments to email campaigns and reviewing — apples to apples within Google Analytics — what achieves shifts in these results. Test. Adjust. Repeat. And enjoy ever-improving results.

Tags: Return on Investment

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