Using measurement to ensure you never lose a customer
Getting the measurements right can help your agency prove marketing ROI on everything it does - meaning you need never l
Proving You’re Worth It
With the amount of marketing data and tools around today that measure everything from the time it took the first contact to click through to where they went and what they did after that (yes, it is a bit scary if you really stop to think about it), then there really is no excuse not to be providing the evidence that justifies your retainer. In fact, marketing professionals who ignore the advances in analytics software that can prove ROI on marketing campaigns will probably find a large number of their long-standing clients hotfooting it out the door to the agencies that are keeping up with digital advances.
By not tracking what audiences like and what they don’t your campaigns are not going to be getting the results they should. So how can you ensure they do?
You need to measure the right things then use the right techniques to improve the results you get.
The Metrics that Matter
There’s no getting away from the fact that the ‘Big Data’ world can feel a little mind-blowing for marketers. With so much information out there, what exactly should you be measuring to prove marketing ROI? And once you’ve measured it, how can you use what you find to improve your results?
Let’s break it down into the different aspects of digital marketing:
1. Email Campaigns
In its 2012 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study, Silverpop included the following traditional and lesser-known measurements:
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Open Rates – both Unique Open Rates (UOR) and Gross Open Rates (GOR) by country and industry. This can be adapted to suit the audience you target – for example, by county or London Borough and industry. Improvements come through the use of alternative subject lines and continual tweaking, so eventually you see patterns of what works and what doesn’t work so well.
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Click to Open Rate (COTR) – also known as the effective rate, this measurement is the ratio of unique clicks as a percentage of unique opens. It measures click-through rates as a percentage of messages opened, instead of messages delivered.
2. Social Media
According to socialmediatoday, some of the social media metrics that matter are below. Some of them are obvious – others not so:
3. Website
According to Mashable, web metrics you need to concentrate on include:
Use a combination of all the marketing data above to reveal your digital marketing ROI and prove to all your existing customers that you really are worth that retainer they are paying you; and to prospective ones that you can deliver what you say you can.
Suzanne Stock is a founding Director of Marketscan, a company that provides marketing data and database services. During this time she has experienced many changes within the data industry and played a strategic role within the management team creating development opportunities.
Suzanne oversees the Communications, Facilities, Web, Social Media and Recruitment areas of the business that keep Marketscan alive and kicking. Suzanne likes interior design (second home HomeSense), fashion (odd purchases on Ebay) and badminton (ends up in A & E).