Digital marketing campaigns offer a number of tactics to help organizations relay their message, services and brand promise to prospects and clients. However, the abundance of metrics that come from these campaigns can quickly become overwhelming.
As with any campaign, an accurate, reliable way to measure success is imperative. Email marketing platforms keep track of many metrics, including number of emails sent, number of bounce backs, open rates and click through rates (or how many people completed the CTA,) all metrics that are easy to find and break down. To simplify, let’s look at four key metrics that are the most relevant to judging how successful your campaigns are.
Tracking the open rate of an email or series of emails is one of the easiest ways to measure success. Simple things such as subject lines and preview text impact open rates. Before launching an email marketing campaign, ask yourself, would I want to open this message? Industry standard for email open rate is 3-5%. If you are within this range, your emails are effective. If they are not, try a different subject line and A/B test the messages. In addition, asking for feedback from team members and clients is another way to ensure email marketing success.
The click through rate of an email message is important as it tracks engagement and interest in what you are offering. Working through a call to action strategy and identifying what it is you want your audience to do will help identify a successful CTA or next step for the prospect to take. It may be to continue reading a blog post, learn more or download a piece of content such as a white paper. Successful click through rates lie between 10 and 15%. If the CTR is not within this range or where you want it to be, editing the copy to be more compelling, driving recipients to take the next step may be necessary.
All digital marketing campaigns should drive prospects to a landing page or specific page on your website. By monitoring the overall traffic or visitors to your site, you are given a simple and effective way of measuring the effectiveness of a digital campaign. Google Analytics provides behavior tracking, enabling you to see where a user entered your website and the actions they take once they get there. Benchmarking should begin before the launch of the campaign so you and your team know where you started and any progress or success that comes from the campaign. In addition, new and returning user sessions can be monitored, furthering your reporting on the success of the campaign.
Conversion rates are often confused with click through rates, as they begin with the same request for action. However, a conversion rate is the number of people who completed a desired action- whether it be signing up for your email list, asking for more information or buying a product or service. As an example, if you had 100 visitors to your website and 20 people chose to subscribe to your email list, then you would have a conversion rate of 20%. Historically, conversion rates are measured by someone who makes a purchase or commits to a service, but digital marketing has changed that. Conversion rates are not just measured by amount of money spent by a client but more importantly as engagement, identifying the prospect as a strong lead.
Although tracking the success of any marketing campaign can be complicated, digital campaigns offer a number of ways to track engagement that are easy to monitor. Understanding your email marketing software, marketing automation platforms and Google Analytics account will put you on your way to effective and concise reporting.