Gone are the days of marketers having to walk around their offices pondering ideas and waiting for inspiration to hit them in a golden, epiphanous moment. The modern marketer (and the successful one, at that) looks at data to know their next move. The catch, however, is that there is a lot of data, and making sense of it isn’t always an easy process. This can often lead to companies investing in the right kind of marketing with the wrong approach, which is where many businesses lose faith in their digital marketing efforts. But tracking the right metrics can show you the right path to fine-tune your demand generation, lead conversion, and social media campaigns to your advantage. Here are 5 key marketing metrics you’re probably not aware you should be paying attention to:
1. Where you are getting opt-in email addresses from
You likely have a list of prospect email addresses somewhere. Do you how you specifically obtained them? Did they come organically from your website, or were they shared as a reference? How long ago did you get the email address? When is the last time you updated your mailing list? The answers to these questions will help you decide where you should be focusing your efforts; an outdated list calls for new lead-capturing efforts, while a good amount of recent organic leads could set you up for a successful email marketing campaign.
Read more: Why email marketing is still relevant.
2. Number of people who are sent emails vs opened emails
This is another statistic that will help you determine the health of your current mailing list. If you are only getting 20 opens out of 100 emails sent, your list needs to be updated, and lead-capturing efforts are likely due, especially if you’re getting many opt-out requests. If you are getting many opens but not a lot of replies or conversions to whatever goal the campaign had, you probably need to improve your messaging and content.
3. Online leads converted, sales closed from leads, and avg revenue from campaigns
Getting a lead is a great start, and leads converted are a great metric for us marketers. Getting information from leads through online marketing campaigns means we’re doing our job right when it comes to bringing potential customers through the door, but following through and turning that lead into a sale is ultimately where the ROI comes from. If your marketing team is delivering plenty of leads, but your sales team isn’t closing deals, you need to analyze either the quality of your leads or the abilities of your salespeople. Additionally, identifying average revenue from sales closed from online leads will help you gauge the value of your digital marketing efforts.
Read more: Improving PPC advertising for B2B companies.
4. Average session time and bounce rate
Sure, getting thousands of visits may look nice on paper, but visits don’t mean much if your average session time is below a minute with a bounce rate of 90%. When it comes to your web assets, you’re not just looking for people to visit them; you want them to stay, consume your content and possibly provide you with some contact information at the end of their experience. Low sessions times and high bounce rates point at a pressing need to improve your content, navigation, readability, and overall user experience on your website and landing pages. You can find out more about bounce rate here.
5. Blog and article readership
So you’ve started a blog with insightful, important information that you are sure your potential audiences will find relevant and interesting. You’re putting in at least 3 hours a week to make sure it’s constantly updated, but you’re not really sure if anyone is reading this stuff. Tracking readership can help you determine many things, including what headlines are getting more attention and if you need to invest more time and effort in sharing this content to make sure it reaches more audiences. Don’t waste great content on poor readership; promote it more on social media, use more images, use SEO and link-building tactics, and use relevant hashtags whenever possible.
Pay attention to these metrics for some valuable insight you might be missing out on. And remember, digital content marketing is a constantly evolving science. You can learn a bit more about improving your content development process here.
