Brands are increasingly recognizing metrics like email opens, web traffic and social media likes for what they are –Advanced Digital Marketing Strategy that fluctuate wildly and are directional. While it’s still important to track these higher-level metrics, optimizing for them often doesn’t result in deeper engagement. In fact, maximizing these metrics sometimes leads marketers to use clickbait headlines and other tactics that undermine customer trust and lead to fatigue, loss of audience, and poor performance.
To better align with both their customers and long-term business goals, more and more marketers are leveraging a range of advanced analytics and performance metrics. Let’s talk about some of them that our experts at Digital Marketing Agency In Lahore use most frequently with our clients.
Digital marketing strategy
Velocity
This is a measure of whether a person’s interaction with your email, SMS, loyalty or social media channel is speeding up or slowing down, indicating that they are likely to be in the market or withdrawing. Of course, depending on where the customer is in their lifecycle, this will fluctuate over time. However, being aware of this metric will help you respond effectively to these changes.
The trick is determining which ebbs are OK and which are warning signs of something else, says Clint Kaiser, head of analytic & strategic services at Oracle Digital Experience Agency.
“Immediately after registering for a promotion, for example, you would expect a certain acceleration – unless the registration took place during the checkout process,” he says.
“And after a purchase, it can slow down or speed up depending on the product purchased and the associated product mix that complements it.”
Marketers can use speed to drive segmented campaigns and select their active email audience. This allows them to place more campaigns in front of those with increasing speed and fewer in front of those with slower speed.
Average Weekly Frequency
Brands generally have a good sense of how many campaigns they send to their audience on average. However, if you track the average weekly frequency at an individual level, you can see the impact of sending segmented campaigns and setting up action-driven campaigns.
Specifically, examine the number of campaigns received by your most engaged customers.says Peter Briggs, Director of Analytic & Strategic Services, Digital Marketing Services in Lahore. “You’ll probably be surprised at how many communications they receive.”
While your most engaged viewers should get more touches, this shouldn’t get out of control because more isn’t necessarily better. Consider reviewing your messaging hierarchy to ensure your most valuable campaigns aren’t diluted by less valuable campaigns.
For example, if someone browses a product page and then leaves it, but soon returns, adds the product to their cart, and then leaves, that person should only receive a cart abandonment email, not an abandon browsing email. You should examine the behavior of your abandoners to determine how long it is appropriate to wait to send these emails after abandonment. In either case, subscribers shouldn’t receive them immediately.
You might also consider suppressing subscribers who receive cart abandonment from your promotional mailings so that these lower value campaigns may not distract those subscribers from the higher value abandonment campaign.
Click Reach
This is the percentage of your audience that clicked on at least one of your campaigns in a given time period. Brands often track this across multiple time windows, such as their click reach over the last 1, 6, and 12 months.
“I’ve been working with a number of clients lately on click reach, which they sometimes refer to as ‘engagement per contact,’” says Briggs. “This metric cuts through much of the campaign-level metric noise and allows you to see the engagement health of your list. Recently, the massive decline in interactions on individual customer channels has become clear
Revenue per Subscriber
This is the amount of revenue your email, SMS, loyalty program, or social media channel generates per subscriber. This metric controls the increase or decrease of your audience size and allows you to see audience productivity in terms of posts per subscriber that would otherwise be hidden by the revenue program revenue metrics.
Sales per subscriber could also be measured longitudinally like click reach, says Kaiser. “For example,”If you analyze the revenue per subscriber in Month 1, Year 1, Year 2, etc.,” he suggests, “you can gauge the trend pattern to assess your program’s effectiveness over various timeframes.”List and how they to change. You can then use the changes in these data points diagnostically. For example, if revenue/subscribers drop in the first month, that would be a signal to examine and reevaluate your onboarding and other program elements that would impact early engagement.
Lifetime Value (LTV)
This is the average overall profitability of a single subscriber. In the age of customer centricity, lifetime value is an increasingly important metric because it focuses on maximizing the value of your customers rather than maximizing the value of your campaigns. Just as maximizing opens doesn’t always maximize clicks and other down-funnel behaviors, maximizing campaign value doesn’t always maximize lifetime value.
When you increase lifetime value, you either get your customers to increase their spending, or you keep them loyal longer, or both. As it declines, customers invest less money or time in your brand – a trend you want to reverse.
“Also pay special attention to your high lifetime value segments,” says Kaiser. “Are they growing or declining? If the latter, examine the reasons why and then change your messaging, personalization, segmentation and other strategies to reverse the trend.” He adds, “You can also use this segment as input for look-alikes in customer acquisition efforts .
Acquisition Cost per Subscriber
This measures the average cost associated with acquiring a new email, SMS, loyalty, or social media subscriber. These may include costs for:
Content marketing and lead generation
Sign-up incentives such as discounts or free gifts
Advertising
If you compare your cost per subscriber to your revenue per subscriber, you can see your net revenue per subscriber. Obviously you want this number to be positive. And ideally, you also want it to expand by either reducing your acquisition costs per subscriber or increasing your revenue per subscriber, if not both.
By comparing your cost per subscriber to your lifetime value, you can see your net profit per subscriber. Beyond this top-level calculation, this calculation becomes particularly insightful when you use it to examine individual audience acquisition sources.
“Through this work, you can figure out which acquisition sources are attracting the subscribers with the highest net worth and which are not – or potentially costing you money, or potentially causing most of your hard bounces or spam complaints,” says Kaiti Gary, senior director of Analytical and Strategic Services , Digital Marketing Agency In Lahore. “Strategically speaking, this is golden information.
It shows you which productive sources you should invest in further optimization and which you should deemphasize or perhaps even abandon.”
Return on Investment
This is a measure of how profitable your email, SMS, loyalty, or social media marketing program has been over a period of time. ROI is also commonly used to measure the profitability of a project or initiative, such as a new automated campaign.
“An ideal ROI calculation at the campaign level would factor in all costs associated with creating and sending the campaign,” says Briggs. “This would include (1) platform costs, (2) average production costs (i.e., headcount, hours, etc.), and (3) the financial impact of opt-outs generated by the campaign.
If you’re trying to calculate the ROI of all of your channel efforts, you’ll want to mirror those calculations, but on a program-wide scale. Knowing the return you’re getting on your marketing investments across channels allows your company to make better decisions about where to invest next. It can also allow channel owners to make stronger arguments for larger budgets.
Marketers tend to overemphasize the metrics that are easy to measure. Typically that undermines their business goal by depriving them of the deep, impactful data they need to make wise strategic decisions. Get the audience insights you need by investing the resources needed to be able to measure some of these advanced metrics
Need help improving your analytics? Digital Marketing Services In Lahore has hundreds of marketing and communication experts ready to help customers create stronger connections with their customers, partners, and employes Handling everything from creative and strategy to content planning and project management, we consistently exceed our clients’ expectations, earning a customer satisfaction rate of 96%.
