How Metrics Can Bring Your Marketing To New Heights

When enacting a marketing strategy, it is of considerable benefit to pay attention to metrics—key data and measurements that can provide you with invaluable insights. However, not all data qualifies as a metric, and not all metrics will make sense for all of your initiatives. As a result, it is crucial that you identify the metrics and key performance indicators that apply to each initiative.

Selecting Your Metrics 

Not all of your initiatives will be the same, so there will be some metrics that will do you no good to track in one initiative while the same metrics are key to another. The easiest way to decide which metrics to track is to consider the purpose behind each initiative and select metrics on a case-by-case basis.

For example, consider blog content. The reason that blogs are posted is not to convert the readers, they are meant to foster trust and commitment in an audience so they will be willing to take the next steps down the marketing funnel. Therefore, it makes the most sense to track metrics that focus on engagement and repeat visitors in this case. Again, in this case—you should focus on different metrics, say, pay-per-click activities. PPC metrics should focus on conversions and return on investment, as a campaign that may have otherwise seemed ineffective based solely on traffic may have been the most valuable in terms of ROI.

It is worth mentioning that you should be tracking the necessary metrics to determine your ROI for all of your initiatives so that you may optimize your efforts to be most effective and cost-efficient.

Email Metrics

This is especially apparent in email campaigns, as there are plenty of metrics to track and adjust in order to optimize your use of this marketing outlet. You should be tracking your deliverability, as well as your open rate, click-through rate, and disengagement rate.

• Deliverability - Your deliverability rate can be calculated by dividing your number of delivered emails by your total number of sent emails. If you aren’t utilizing practices that could be considered spammy, you should see a deliverability rate of around 90%.
• Open Rate - You can establish your open rate by dividing the number of unique email opens by the total number of received emails. This can be greatly influenced by the subject line of the email.
• Click-Through Rate - By dividing the total number of unique clicks by the number of unique opens, you can both track the level of engagement with your email and establish if your emails are having the desired effect upon your audience, as these clicks will drive engagement which in turn drives sales.
• Disengagement Rate - The hard truth is that you will always experience some level of disengagement—the trick is to have more engagement than disengagement. You can measure this by combining your received complaints with the number of unsubscribes you see, and dividing the total by your number of unique opens.

It also helps to compile and compare your historical data to evaluate your performance. The first thing you should do is establish which metrics you plan to focus on and collect the associated data. Then set a schedule to track and record them in your preferred spreadsheet-creation program.

Potential Issues

However, you should also be careful, as there are a few easy mistakes that you could make that could skew your metrics—not a good thing, especially considering they will be informing your business decisions.

For instance, you should neither ignore nor pay too much attention to outliers in your data sets. A sudden dip in your data values could indicate a problem like a broken link or misspelled content, which you would need to identify and resolve. On the other hand, a sudden uptick in your data values could be a fluke. Your best bet, in this case, would be to wait for a pattern to present itself before increasing your investment into that effort.

Another way you could find your metrics to be skewed is to focus on the wrong ones. After all, there will be an incredible amount of data to sort through, so you’ll need to prioritize what data applies the most to your business goals. Ask yourself, does this metric have an impact on the future of my business? This is a key consideration, as focusing on the less important metrics will result in your disregarding the important ones. In order for your metrics to be valuable, they have to deliver clear and useful insights that assist you.

It is also important to remember that seasons will impact your metrics, as they influence the focus and needs of your target market’s industry. As a result, the time of year can skew your metrics and provide false conclusions. In light of this, you need to be careful to consider if your metrics might have been influenced by external factors.

In conclusion, your metrics can provide you with the information that can give great benefits to your marketing, but only if you are consistent with it. Otherwise, your will be unable to tell if what you are doing is actually working—and if it isn’t, what can be done to improve it.