For those of you familiar with Soccer (or Fútbol for the rest of the world), there are few things as satisfying as hearing this: Goooooooooooal! (source: YouTube). It means we scored. Something good happened! Well, we want you to feel the same when you send an email and your subscribers show that they’re interested in your stuff. Today, we introduce to you Goooal, a new app from MailChimp Labs.
Goooal is a new way to segment your MailChimp list based on what people do on your website when they visit from an email campaign. Goooal works by installing a tracking pixel on your site, and then adding “Goooals” to the campaign that you want to track. A Goooal could be something like: “If a visitor from my campaign goes to the www.mailchimp.com/party page, then add them to the Party RSVP segment.”
Once a subscriber to your list lands on a page associated with a Goooal, the tracking code sees it and records the hit in our super-duper database. We’ve made a cool results page where you can view the hits to each of your Goooals in real time, so that you can witness the action play by play. Just as a note, the actual process that adds the users to a segment takes a bit longer, since we don’t want to melt down the API each time there’s a new match. Once you’re subscribers have surfed your site a bit and you’ve got some good segments built, you can send targeted content that’s more relevant to their interests.
The thought behind the app is to take something that’s traditionally pretty complicated (Think of Google Analytics funnels and goals) and simplify it enough so that it’s still useful, but within the reach of most mortal humans to operate. We built this app so that you can get some better insight as to what people are looking at on your site, and hopefully figure out what they are interested in. People like hearing about stuff they are interested in.
Goooal works with your existing MailChimp account login, so you won’t have to create yet another account and remember yet another password. It’s free to use, so go give it a try and learn something new about your crowd! If you want to learn more about it, check out the FAQs.
We’re releasing this app as Beta. It should not eat your small pets or your MailChimp data, but please make sure you test your campaigns thoroughly if you plan on using Goooal. As always, get in touch if you see anything funky.
PS: The only thing missing from this is some audio each time you score a Goooal. Don’t worry, we’re on it!
This is absolutely fantastic. This plus autoresponders is getting you guys closer to being a true marketing automation product. All for ridonculously low prices.
Very cool. Something I can use with my customers.
This is really great … but I don’t understand the data collection part and the need to add tags to our websites to track goals. I was wondering, why don’t you use Google Analytics goals? I mean, people have their goals setup in Google Analytics already (or other WA tools), and you already integrate with it, so you could just pull Goal data back into the mailchimp super duper database. Then use that to segment. What am I missing?
Xavier,
The issue with that is that Google Analytics tracking does not track the individual recipients. For this to work, you must know the email of the person that’s visiting your site! Does it make more sense now?
Ah, this is great news :)
And I didn’t think MC could get so much better when it just did. SCORE! GOOOAL!!
Great news. Thanks MailChimp.
Wow, that sound fantastic. I can imagine someone getting an email about some new feature on a site or product, and then clicking to check it out, and then using some particular aspect of it, and then a few days later getting an email — “what did you think of XYZ? We’d love your feedback! etc.” Something that wouldn’t make sense to the whole list, only the people that actually used XYZ. Awesome.
Very well put, does sound awesome. Time to start experimenting..
Sounds very cool – targeted newsletters would be an excellent marketing resource.
I’m assuming the app uses cookies? Do you know if it will be affected by the new EU cookie directive like Google Analytics will be?
The app uses cookies, yes. In the app’s TOS, we mention the need for users to make sure they comply with EU (and all other applicable) law: http://gooo.al/tos
Basically, you’ll want to make sure your own privacy policy tells EU users (heck, just tell all users) about how you’re tracking them.
This is fantastic. However I dont know where to install the tracking code in my magento store. Could you please provide me some help?
This sounds pretty cool – I would be interested to hear some more ideas for its use and best practices. Not sure exactly just yet how I would implement it (or for what purpose)
Just a few ideas:
- You’re hiring and you want to see who on your list might be interested in a job you posted.
- You need a user of an app to go to a certain page, and you can keep reminding people who haven’t visited the page to do so.
- You can create informal polls where you can segment people based on what page they navigate on your site.
So far, the most interesting uses have been the ones I have not come up with. Feel free to post some more suggestions!
Okay where do I place the tracking code (image), is it the Header, right after or before
This is a great feature. I would love to see, either in Goooal or in Hairball, the possibility to segment based on inclusion & exclusions of multiple rule conditions / activities. For example, add to segment people who visited this page, but did not visit the sale confirmation page. These features are a must for e-commerce websites. For example it would be a big insult to a customer who buys a product and few days later he/she gets a follow up email with a coupon incentive.
Hello Waseem, You can actually do that with Hairball right now. If the static segments are already created by Goooal or within Hairball you can create a new segment based on those segments. In your example you’d simply create a new segment that matches ALL criteria and choose “Hairball Segment” or “Static Segment” and then “Is a member of” visited page X segment and then a second condition that they’re “Not a member of” visited confirmation page segment. We’ve written a great guide that can be found here: http://mailchimp.com/resources/guides/how-to-use-hairball/ and provides some excellent examples of how to nest Hairball segments.
How do I add the Goooal tracking pixel on my joomla website?
Hi Angela, When you sign into Goooal and start to go through the setup process you’ll be asked for a URL to your site. At that step you’ll enter your URL and be given a piece of code that looks something like this:
The above piece of code will need installed onto your website. Often times the easiest option is to just install it in the header or the footer of the template so that you’d have the option of tracking any of your site’s pages. You can however install it just on specific pages as well. If your comfortable with HTML this should be a snap, but if you’re nervous you might want to get a local web nerd to help you out. Once you have the piece of code in place, we even have a button in Goooal for you to test it to make sure it’s installed correctly.
Thanks. The installation was successful.
This sounds like a great app! But it only tracks people currently on your list, right?
Any possibility for it to track people not yet subscribed, then say if they subscribe within the next 30 days then it will add them to the right segments based on past history? Or too much data? :)
Great feature! One question: you say it generates static segments, but if every time a reader who clicks on a campaign and go to a certain webpage is automatically added to the segment created, we’re talking of dynamic, not static segments, right? Thanks.
Hi Renato, Hah! I can certainly see what you’re saying. In this case I guess it’s a bit of misnomer, but essentially it’s “static” in the sense that the only way it’s created is via that specific tracking process. Meaning, within the app it will be a semi-permanent segment available for segmenting against as opposed to segments that you create on the fly (added after date or first name is Renato.) If you haven’t used static segments within MailChimp the following article has some good info as well: http://eepurl.com/hc0X