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When Metrics And Marketing Marry, Making More Customers

– Contributed content –

7 August 2017. It might seem like a romantic notion — put your metrics together with your next marketing campaign, and you’ll have new customers running toward you with their arms wide open. Unfortunately, the real world doesn’t work like that. No matter what the figures tell you, sometimes external influences (and wayward customers) deliver a different result than expected.

Behave

Customers don’t always behave in the same way. Some of your customers may need a lot more convincing to part with their cash than others that share that demographic. Metrics go a long way toward developing a campaign plan based on past behaviors. But if you misinterpret the stats, you might be heading in the wrong direction from the very beginning.

Tablet screen

(Photo Mix, Pexels)

Filter

All of your customers started out as non-customers. They were then carefully filtered, funneled, and channeled into your sales process. You probably developed a number of campaigns to steer those customers through that journey. Each would answer a question, provide a ladder over an objection obstacle, and build trust to speed that journey all the way to the shopping cart.

Metrics

Metrics can be used at every step to help you identify what you need to do. Once you’ve analyzed those figures, you can instruct your campaign copywriter to develop the next ad, letter, or web page. As these are viewed and digested by your potential customers or leads, some will fall out of the funnel altogether. This is called the conversion fallout. So where is your copywriter or campaign designer going wrong? What are you doing to catch those losses and get them back on track?

Behavioral science

Behavioral sciences have been employed by the sales and marketing industries for decades. We all want to understand our customers so new customers can be easily converted into sales. Of course, technology has suddenly changed. And buying habits and attitudes have dramatically changed with them! Unfortunately, not all industries have yet caught up.

Technology

Those technologies can, of course, be a huge help in understanding the customer’s behavior on their journey. With more web-based buying, it is much easier to use systems like eye tracking to identify items of interest on the page. You might also identify the items that lose the customer. Every copywriter should have access to that data too. If they know which terms, and which parts of the page are not appealing, these can be changed in edit.

Eyes looking at laptop

(Tookapic, Pexels)

Eye tracking, like other metrics, provides hard numbers and data. It is up to the person running the analysis to develop a workable action plan that can improve the outcome next time round. So how far should you go with this? How long can you invest in marketing campaign tweaking, rewrites, and redesigns? And how narrow should you go with your targeting?

Customer behaviors are as unique as their attitudes. What every marketer and business strategists hope to achieve is a broad manipulation of these to garner a sale. Many businesses are enjoying higher conversion rates than ever before. There must come a time when there is no more time to invest in the finer details. It’s about the return on investment.

Picking the metric and the technology you wish to invest in should always be about the bottom line. What costs more? The time your team spends setting up and analyzing the metric? Or the cost of the technology that can automate the process for you? Don’t forget — what works for today’s group won’t necessarily work in the same way next year. This must be an ongoing test and application cycle.

Application

So where should you be seeking metrics? Focus groups are always useful in the development stage of any new campaign. They can give you qualitative data that you may not be able to gather when the campaign is live. Chances are they’ll give you a lot of ideas about your product, campaign, and approach you hadn’t thought of! Many businesses leave this phase out. But if you want to see for yourself how customers behave, then this is the best way to do it.

Credit card, keyboard

(Negative Space, Pexels)

You can integrate other metrics to gather useful journey data like eye movement tracking systems. You can use this to test everything from your website to your packaging. Set up a number of landing pages that test different ideas. Monitor the web analytics to determine which campaign is generating the most quality leads. You can even test shortening the customer journey or extend it by removing or adding campaigns.

Marketing should be predictable, yet there will always be surprise results in the mix. There are simply too many external factors and one or two internal factors to be able to make accurate predictions. How do you test your marketing campaigns?

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