With 90 percent of Americans online, marketing through the Internet has become a necessity. From your website, email marketing, social media, and pay-per-click ads, there are many avenues to promote your business. How do you know your efforts are the best and most effective? Marketing analytics simply means measuring and evaluating the performance of your online marketing to make sure you are getting the best return on your investment. Without analytics, tracking your efforts and money spent would be a guess. With the best marketing analytics, improving your ROI becomes much simpler as you can track leads and conversions.
For example, let’s say your business is spending money to market via emails, Facebook, and Google Ads. Do you know which of these approaches is bringing in the most leads and conversions? Do you know how to time these outreach efforts to get the best results? Marketing analytics can help you see what works best and plan your future marketing accordingly.
Marketing analytics will help you evaluate how your web traffic is translating into sales. A website that generates a ton of traffic but no sales or sales leads is a huge missed opportunity. Taking a closer look at how your design is working could be an enormous boost to your business. On the other hand, if your web traffic is consistently low, marketing analytics can help you increase traffic by improving your search engine ranking and making the most of your local listings.
Here’s how analytics can make sure you are getting the most out of your marketing efforts:
Email Marketing
With an average ROI of over $44 per $1 spent, email is the most cost effective way to communicate with customers. Email marketing is a powerful way to build awareness of your brand and reach out to customers.
Segmenting and targeting your marketing by demographics or customer loyalty can make email marketing even more profitable. You might design a special email for customers who have made a purchase within the last month or send a special offer to customers who have not yet made a purchase. Marketing analytics will help you monitor how personalizing emails works and which approaches are most successful.
Growing your email list is a great way to increase your outreach, too. Your POS system may even have integration with your email management system. For example, ShopKeep integrates with MailChimp, an inexpensive tool for managing email lists that integrates with websites and social media. Clover integrates with MailChimp and ConstantContact with apps you can add to your system. Check to see if you can add contacts to your email list as you process transactions and capture the information you need to customize your emails later.
Marketing analytics can also help you time your email marketing most effectively. Watch for peak open times to keep your open rates, click-throughs, and conversions high.
Landing Pages
Landing pages are a place where you can make a focused sales pitch designed to get customers to take a specific action like filling out a form, redeeming a coupon, or purchasing a targeted product. Because landing pages can be very specific, streamlining your call to action can drive leads and conversions. Not a computer whiz? Don’t worry – there are great, low-cost tools available that allow even novices to build great looking landing pages that work, like Unbounce.
While conversion rates for landing pages vary by industry and purpose, keeping the focus on your call to action with a simple, clear, and responsive design will help get the best results. Responsive design means that your layout is mobile-friendly, an increasingly important way to reach customers as smartphones become universal.
Watching your analytics will let you know how your landing pages are performing and how changes in layout or text impact your results.
Review Tracking
What are your customers saying about you? Word-of-mouth is online and travels faster than ever. 88% of customers form an opinion of your business based upon online review sites. If you’re not monitoring your reviews, your business could be missing opportunities to connect with customers and make sales.
Review tracking allows you to promote positive reviews. It also allows you to quickly respond to negative reviews with an apology. We understand that immediate reaction to reviews is increasingly important, so Integrity Insights includes a tool that will email you alerts when a review comes in.
Local Listings
Online directories are extremely important, especially if your marketing efforts exist to drive customers to your physical location as well as your website. Building your online presence through these directories and optimizing your website make it easier for customers to find your business.
According to a study by Google, 4 out of 5 consumers search for local businesses and services through search engines. Furthermore, the study found “50 percent of consumers who conduct a local search on their smartphone visit a store within a day, and 18% of those searches lead to a purchase within a day.” Keep your location, phone number, and store hours posted clearly on your website to connect with ‘in-the-moment’ shoppers.
As a business owner, you might not have the time to keep up with dozens of online directories. Streamline this task with Integrity Insights’ Local Listings management to keep your business information updated and available to customers. Update your information one time, then watch as Integrity Insights updates listings across the web.To learn more about creating a marketing analytics platform check out Integrity Insights. (Republished with permission from AmSpa.)