Webmasters Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for webmasters. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
We distribute emails to customers about new upcoming courses. We would like to track how many users arrived on our web application from the emails and ordered a course.
Would Google Analytics help us with this requirement? Other than signing up,setting up the Google Analytics script on our pages, and setting up the campaign, do we need to do anything additional?
You can track that through Google Analytics. You would need to "tag" all the URLs in your emails with tracking parameters using the Google Analytics URL Builder.
Then Google Analytics would show you a campaign report similar to this: 
(image source)
Here is an article that has best practices for email newsletter tracking with Google Analytics with additional information about how to use the different fields available in the URL builder.
Google Analytics can also be used to track who has made purchases. To do so, you will have to set up "Goals" in Google Analytics. Goals can be based on visiting a certain page (such as the thank you page from the checkout process), or based on "Events" which are triggered by JavaScript in the page to let Google Analytics know that a user has completed a specific action.
Once you have set up goals, Google will display the number and percentage of users that have completed that goal right in the campaign tracking report.
