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This week on the Marketing Update, Mike and Karen talked about different ways to measure your marketing efforts, and why it's important.
1. Fewer Emails = More Conversions
Earlier last week, MarketingSherpa published a case study outlining Lumension's approach to improving its lead nurturing efforts. The company's goal was to "identify contacts or prospects that had the greatest propensity to purchase, and put them through more of an accelerated nurture program" in the hopes of turning them into customers more quickly. The company ran a series of different test programs, and ultimately learned that by moving from sending 9 emails over 4 months to sending "three emails every two weeks for six weeks," they were able to increase sales-ready leads by 225%. They were also able to determine that "text-based emails from an account manager generated 10-times greater a response than nurturing emails that used more HTML."
Marketing Takeaway: Your prospects don't want to receive endless programmed marketing automation emails. Instead, focus your efforts on sending fewer, more targeted/personalized emails to increase email marketing results.
2. Romney Offers Ebook for the Price of a Tweet
For this past week's Republican debate, presidential candidate Mitt Romney offered his just-published Believe in America: Mitt Romney's Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth ebook for the price of a tweet. The ebook has been climbing the charts this week on Amazon.com, and Romney's team was hoping to "generate social buzz around the former Massachusetts governor's ebook" in anticipation of the debate."
Romney's campaign has also been experimenting with other forms of social media engagement, and the team plans to continue to do so. Their goal is to "get it in front of voters where they are, rather than driving them to visit the campaign site." In the future, they might continue to test Facebook Sponsored Stories ads "to push the book" as well as use the short-form video platform Tout, which enables 15-second video updates for Twitter and Facebook.
Marketing Takeaway: There are a couple of notable takeaways here: 1) Market to your audience using the platforms they already populate, and 2) don't be afraid to try new things in your marketing -- they make you stand out from your competitors. (Just make sure you can measure them!)
3. Click-Throughs: The Most Commonly Used Marketing Metric
A recent study by Chief Marketer revealed that the metric most used by marketers to measure campaign success is click-throughs, with 58.7% of marketers relying on it. Geoff Ramsey, CEO of eMarketer, observed that while "click-through is the most commonly used metric by online advertisers...it is still relied on too heavily and in inappropriate ways. Click-through rate (CTR) should continue to be used as a diagnostic metric for direct response initiatives; however, it should not be used as a primary metric."
While click-throughs might be easy to measure, they don't help you understand the bottom line. The only thing that does is sales -- or marketing metrics that either directly impact sales or are leading indicators of sales to come.
Marketing Takeaway: Measure sales. While it shouldn't be the only thing you measure, make sure you're only focusing on metrics that are forward indicators of sales (e.g. leads).
What other lessons have you learned from measuring your marketing? Have you improved your results based on changes you've made from reviewing your data?
