Revamp Your Marketing Strategy with Data Analytics
By Geness Gilkey
Data analytics can seem daunting to even the most seasoned marketers. Data is what drives marketing strategies and influences how we make decisions. According to Forbes, those that use data analytics are more profitable by 5 – 6 percent and see a marketing return on investment of 15 – 20 percent than their peers. However, according to data, 80% of data isn’t used to make improvements or changes.
So how can you use your data to help your current marketing strategy? Here are 3 ways how:
1. Rethink and make changes to your customer journey
You understand your customer journey, but are you still not finding success in your marketing efforts? Maybe it’s time to rethink and make changes to your customer journey. Data analytics can tell you where your customers are losing interest in your brand.
While rethinking and making changes to your customer journey may seem like a tall task, it’s relatively simple. Keeping these metrics in mind can greatly impact your marketing strategy:
Bounce rate: knowing your bounce rate is a key component to understanding your customers. Are they leaving your website after just one page? According to Google Analytics, these single-page sessions have a session duration of 0 seconds since there are no subsequent hits after the first one that would let Analytics calculate the length of the session. Taking a deeper look into the content on the page, the channels in which customers are coming from, and the tracking-code implementation can resolve a high bounce rate.
Content: speaking of content, how relevant is your content to your customers? While your bounce rate will give you an idea of how relevant your content is, it’s important to look further into the type of content you’re publishing. Do your customers want to see more infographics? Do they want to see a wider variety of content? Asking yourself these types questions will help not only with your bounce rate, but the amount of content a customer is willing to digest.
Attribution: have you wondered which channel is generating the most sales? Monitoring attribution can tell you exactly what’s working and what’s not. Checking your various channels frequently and making changes will help understand where your customers are converting.
2. Get personal
Have you ever received a promotional email that had a generic greeting like, “Hey there!”? How did it make you feel? If you’re like me, it made me feel like an email on a list, not anyone special. Personalizing your campaigns to better target each of your customer segments will improve your ROI. Here are a few reasons why you need to personalize your campaigns:
Create better content: with personalization, you can tailor your email marketing campaigns to each customer segment. For example, a customer who only purchases men's clothing from you likely doesn’t want to hear about your women’s clothing promotions.
Make recommendations: making personalized recommendations will show customers you’re listening to them. Think of how Netflix recommends movies and TV shows to you. They’re constantly gathering data from your viewing habits to better understand you and your interests.
Keep in touch: you likely have tons of data on your customers. Keeping in touch with them, not pitching sales, will help create better relationships. Chewy, an online pet supply retailer, sends hand-written birthday cards to their customers’ pets. They’re not sending an ad or talking about their current promotions, they send a note from the Chewy team wishing pets a happy birthday.
3. Empower your team
Your marketing team has a deep understanding of your customers. They are constantly monitoring data and reporting on their findings. Empowering them to draw from insights and make changes will benefit you and your customers. Entrepreneur suggests you reinforce the confidence you have in them based on previous accomplishments, skills and behaviors if your team is getting stuck. Your marketing and sales teams are closest with your customers and are likely to know them on a more personal level. Placing trust in your employees will allow them to think outside of the box to give your customers what they want. While it may seem scary to hand over the reins, instilling confidence in your employees will benefit your company and your customers.
With an abundance of data available to you, using it to your advantage will help you revamp your current marketing strategy and see more revenue.