Create an iContact Custom Field
The first thing we need to do is create the custom field we are going to use for our eventual segment. Go to you SETTINGS (top right) and create a checkbox custom field.
Create Clicked Segment from Email Tracking Stats
Next we need to go to an email, lets start with our most recent (I assume, like me you are going back over old emails here). Open the email in tracking and click View Details at the bottom.
Now we can see expanded details. make sure we have "click" selected as the report type and click Save as Segment.
If we go to our segments, we can now see that we have everyone that clicked on links in this email saved as a segment.
In the screenshot below you can see I have made segments from several of my most recent emails.
Combining iContact Segments
As you can see, we have created one of these segments for each email, so we need a way to combine them. We’ll have to use a workaround to do this. We could just use a new list and save a few of these steps, but iContact charges by email so we might end up with duplicates and get double charged :(.
- Copy each segment into a new list
- Export the list
- Manually add the custom field checkbox in excel
- Re-import back into list (this will update the custom field)
- Create a new segment on that custom field
- Move subscribers BACK into our main list
- Delete the temporary list we had made
So first we copy the first segment we just made into a new list. I made one called "clicks."
After we have done this for all those emails, we can see in the My Lists screen the final count of users.
You can see here that its 2476 users. There was a delay while iContact caught up, the final number was 4719. You’ll note that this is still less than the combined total of the segments, which was 6166. This is telling us that alot of the same people are "repeat clickers".
Now we can click on our list and export the users into a CSV file.
We only need to export 2 fields, the email and the custom one we created earlier.
In Excel we need to manually add into the "clicked" column (or whatever you called it) 1’s to signify that the checkbox field is true. Once we have copied that all the way through the list, we can re-import back into our "clicked" list.
We can then create a new segment, one which matches a true value for the "clicked" custom field. We can also delete the segments we created from the emails as we don’t need them any more.
The last step would be to move allo the contacts from our "clicked" list back into our main one, again, to avoid the double pay penalty that iContact happens to have.
Next Steps
Rinse and repeat for opens 🙂
Conclusion
Obviously this is something worth doing every time you send an email rather than trying to go back and do it for old ones, its a fiddly process. I’d recommend waiting a week after you send out an email so you can be sure the majority of your subscribers have read/opened/clicked.
There is, of course, the next question of what to do with these newly created segments, but I’ll leave that to another post 🙂
Do you use iContact in any different ways to help your email marketing?