Did you know that American Girl’s newest collection of character dolls comes with a full wardrobe of winter gear to keep them cozy and warm? Or that Squeeze has a new single entitled ‘Winter’? Or that the soundtrack from NBC’s hit show This Is Us features an iconic Kate Winslet duet ‘I Feel Good’ with acclaimed vocalist Jimi Hendrix?
For marketers, winter is a season of reflection. After months of hustling to get impressions and clicks during the busy summer season, marketers are now trying to work out what worked and what didn’t in terms of ROI. As part of this reflection process, we’ve put together a few marketing metrics that you might want to look out for this winter.
1. Open Rates And Click-Through Rates
With the exception of email marketing itself, all other forms of digital marketing (including paid search, display advertising, and social media) can be considered forms of outreach. As a result, open rates (the percentage of people who opened your email, on a scale of 0% to 100%) and click-through rates (the number of people who clicked on a link in your email, on a scale of 0% to 100%) are two important metrics to track.
Open rates and click-through rates are simply the conversion rates for your email marketing. In other words, if you send out an email with a link to a product and you track the click-through rate for that email, you’ll know the effectiveness of your email in terms of driving people to a specific action.
This metric will be particularly important to track if you use email marketing to follow up after a customer or potential customer purchases something from your site. Did they find what they were looking for? Were they successful in solving their problem? Were they simply bored and opened your email to check out what’s new?
2. Basket Testing
The next metric to track is basket testing. This is an important metric for any online store that sells a lot of products, as it indicates whether or not your customers are truly loyal to your brand and are finding your site to purchase your products. The only difference between basket testing and online store conversion is that with basket testing, you’re measuring interactions with a retailer rather than a consumer.
If you’re running an e-commerce store with a lot of products, you can measure the total dollar amount of all the products that a given customer bought. When you track this number, you’ll be able to see how well your site is performing and whether or not you should be pursuing additional marketing efforts, such as paid search, which can drive more traffic to your site.
3. Website Visits
The last metric to track is website visits. Just as with basket testing, this metric can be applied to measure the effectiveness of a marketing campaign or a specific piece of content, such as an article or video.
In order to track website visits, you’ll need to set up Google Analytics. Once you’ve set this up, you can create as many custom views as you like, based on how you want to split your analysis between different websites, projects, and platforms. For example, you might decide to track website visits for your personal blog, your company’s blog, and your product websites in order to get a clear view of which blog posts perform the best, which products website visitors are most interested in, and so on.
Creating a custom view in Google Analytics is quite easy. Just go to the home tab, and then to the Behavior section. From here, you can either choose to set a new goal for one of your existing metrics (for example, if you’re trying to increase the number of people who purchase a specific product, you could set a goal for the product’s conversion rate), or you can create a new goal, like ‘New website visitor’.
When you reach this goal, you’ll see a pop-up showing you the stats for this metric.
Email Marketing Deliverability
One of the things that makes email marketing so effective is its ability to stay fresh. Even after you send out an email, you can still update it with new content or call-to-action items and see if your audience continues to engage. If you haven’t heard of click-through rates for email marketing, you should consider themselves a testament to its effectiveness.
Did you know that American Girl’s newest collection of character dolls comes with a full wardrobe of winter gear to keep them cozy and warm? Or that Squeeze has a new single entitled ‘Winter’? Or that the soundtrack from NBC’s hit show This Is Us features an iconic Kate Winslet duet ‘I Feel Good’ with acclaimed vocalist Jimi Hendrix?
For marketers, winter is a season of reflection. After months of hustling to get impressions and clicks during the busy summer season, marketers are now trying to work out what worked and what didn’t in terms of ROI. As part of this reflection process, we’ve put together a few marketing metrics that you might want to look out for this winter.