Tag: marketing

Use Web Analytics to grow your business

Posted on by Richard Milton

There are numerous web analytics management platforms out there for you to use to monitor the performance of your website. Through them you can see where your website traffic is coming from, how many visitors you get, where they are going, and through which channels e.g. search, social and advertising they found your site.

One of the most popular is Google Analytics, used by many organisations to monitor and measure the impact of their website and other parts of their marketing mix. Here are just some of our top reasons why we at e-nexus think you should add Google Analytics or a similar system to your website and most importantly use the insight gained to boost your marketing.

• It provides key insights that can help you shape the strategy of your business.

• It’s easy to use. New users can quite easily grasp the basic principles of Google Analytics such as goals, conversions, visits, referrals etc.

• It’s free – Google doesn’t charge you for using this tool.

• Google Analytics is key when trying to understand where your website visitors are coming from. You’ll be much better able to see who they are and what they want.

• It will enable you to determine the impact of your related marketing activities outside of your website. Set up correctly you’ll have a huge amount of data around which adverting campaign or social media platform is working best for you.

• It provides real-time tracking. You can see who is visiting your website right now! This means that you will know amongst other things how many active users are on your site, which pages they’re looking at and where they are from.

• Automated data collection. Once you set up your account and copy a simple piece of code onto your site, Google Analytics will start collecting the data automatically. You can access a wide range of reports immediately whether they be set up by Google Analytics or custom reports created by yourself.

• Extensive help is available online. If you are a first-time user, Google’s documentation and videos on Youtube can help you get started quickly.

Google Analytics and tools like it can do wonders for your business. They provide you with easily accessible insights that can be used to improve the performance of your website and other areas of your marketing mix. Get set up and use the knowledge to enhance your marketing efforts.

Want to learn more?

For further tips and hints on how to connect data and insight to enhance your marketing impact visit our e-nexus blog at http://www.measure4success.wordpress.com

In addition we are running an e-nexus marketing evening seminar on 11th June in Southbourne, Bournemouth focused on web analytics.  Find out more and book your place by visiting our Eventbrite page.  Places are limited so book early to avoid disappointment.

 

e-nexus Ltd

Make the difference: Connect data and insight to transform your marketing

Posted on by Richard Milton

“Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.”
H James Harrington – author & international performance improvement guru

Given the scrutiny of numbers, metrics and KPIs within all organisations there has never been a more important time for you to begin to measure and understand the performance and impact of your marketing. By doing so you can identify what works, what could work better and what you should stop to ensure your marketing is being successful for your business.

Whether you are a business owner/ manager or employed to drive business for your organisation it is worth investing the time and brainpower in developing a measurement orientated approach. This will ensure you get the most out of your marketing resources (people, budgets, channels and creative) and help you demonstrate that your efforts are helping your business thrive.

Over the years we’ve seen many businesses and marketers invest heavily in carrying out and repeating creative activities but without being able to prove its value. Thus the question has always be raised about whether they’ve made the right choices and investment decisions.

So what’s the solution? In many cases simply planning ahead and identifying how you could go about tracking the impact of the activity (the metric you would put in place) before it starts. This allows you to think about what measurement actions you need to put in place before the activity commences e.g. UTM tracking on your digital ads, setting up events on Google Analytics or just recording how people heard about your current offer when you answer the phone call or talk to someone face to face.

So where should you start your measuring approach? What should you measure? Simply ask yourself these following questions?

Q1 – Does this metric help me make a decision
Q2 – When I view this metric does it help me understand how to get closer to my business goals?
Q3 – If you answer ‘No’ to both questions you are looking at a vanity metric and need to ignore it. Next repeat Q1 & Q2 to identify better metrics to monitor.

But why connect your data with insight?

A definition of insight is the capacity to gain an accurate and deep understanding of someone or something.

Data by itself doesn’t always give the complete picture. In fact on its own it can give you the wrong impression as to the impact of your marketing efforts as they can be affected by other factors.

For example we are starting to see companies report a drop off in engagement on Facebook compared to previous months. At first glance you may think by looking at your data that this may be down to the quality of the content that you are posting. However on January 11th, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would be changing its news feed algorithm to prioritise content from “friends, family and groups.” This means that people will see less public content like posts from businesses, brands and the media.

But connecting data with additional insight isn’t just a channel focus.  Your marketing efforts can also be impacted by a host of other factors including:

 

  • Changes to your customers situation, make-up or behaviours
  • Changes to how you are perceived in the market
  • Changes in your market position or operating environment
  • Activities and behaviours of other businesses in your market

Using insight around these factors will further enable you to have a clearer idea of what is happening in your environment and the impact on your own marketing efforts e.g. traffic to your website, responses to your direct mail, email open rates, click through rates from your digital ads, volume of phone calls to the sales team etc.

By connecting and responding to your data and insight you will be able to begin to transform your marketing impact and ensure your business is successful.

Want to learn more?

We are running our next e-nexus Marketing Hub event on 20th April at the Brewhouse and Kitchen in Southbourne. During our three hour workshop we’ll show you how best to connect data with some of the latest marketing insight and creativity to boost your efforts & ROI. During the session we’ll focus on:

  • The benefits of using data and insight to measure and monitor your marketing efforts
  • Identifying what marketing data you have access to and how you can begin to fill your data gaps
  • How you can turn your marketing data into meaningful insights for your business
  • How you can combine your data and insights with your creative approach to engage more of your customers successfully

For further information and to book your place via Eventbrite visit:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/e-nexus-marketing-hub-tickets-43833062871?utm-medium=discovery&utm-campaign=social&utm-content=attendeeshare&utm-source=strongmail&utm-term=listing

 

 

Grow your business: Understand your customer churn rate

Posted on by Richard Milton

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According to a study by Flowtown they found that maintaining existing customers costs six to seven times less than acquiring new customers. A further study by Bain and Company reported that by improving your customer churn rate/ customer retention rate by just five percent can lead to an increase in profits between 25 and 95 percent.

So what is customer churn rate?

Very simply your customer churn rate is the number of customers who cut ties with your company over a certain period of time.

The calculation of churn can be straightforward. Take the number of customers that you lost in a period of time and divide that by the number of customers that you started with in that period of time. The resulting percentage is your churn rate. For example, a company that started last quarter with 100 customers and lost 3 over the course of the quarter would have a churn rate of 3%. You can also calculate churn as a number of customers lost, the value of recurring business lost, or the percent of recurring value lost.

Regardless of how you choose to represent churn, tracking your customer churn rate is key. As mentioned above its almost always cheaper and easier to keep customers than it is to go through the process of acquiring new ones. Monitoring your churn rate is the first step in understanding how good you are at this and identifying the actions that you need to put in place to gain greater loyalty e.g. enhanced customer service, loyalty programmes, incentives or discounts or just amazing products.

So what’s the impact? Why bother?

To help make the point here’s an example to show the impact of improving your churn rate on a business over five years:

If you have monthly recurring revenue of £15000 and that every month you add another £2000 to that. However, you have a churn rate of 3%. If all of that persists for the next 5 years, you’ll end up generating almost £2.6 million. If you’re able to decrease your churn rate by 10%, to 2.7%, that gives you an extra £100,000 in revenue. If you’re able to reduce your churn by 30%, that’s even better. Your revenue goes up to £3 million!

Make sense? Don’t wait, crack on and start calculating those customer churn rates.

About the author

Richard is founder of e-nexus ltd – a new Marketing, Performance and Measurement agency based in Bournemouth. He is a career long marketer, holding numerous senior marketing positions throughout his 20 years in the profession. Describing himself as a marketing strategist, performance and measurement specialist, Richard spends time working with business owners, managers and marketers to help them improve their marketing decisions, investments and impact by combining the power of creativity, data and insights alongside his strategic experience.

Richard’s biggest passion is to help marketers show the value of their efforts and give them the confidence and skills to be able to share the story with their senior managers. Richard helps organisations understand the importance of measurement and metrics as well as appreciate the breadth of data available to them in todays marketing world. He also helps marketers bring together and interpret data coming from many different environments to make it meaningful and digestible at all levels of an organisation.

Richard holds a Bachelors degree from Bournemouth University and the CIM Diploma in Marketing. Richard has been a Chartered Marketer for over a decade and was also the Dorset Chair of the Chartered Institute of Marketing in 2010 – 11.

You can read more from Richard at his measure4success blog at http://www.measure4success.wordpress.com

Based on an article published on http://www.churn-rate.com

 

Measure for success: Using the right insight & data to boost your marketing ROI

Posted on by Richard Milton

Measuring your marketing performance

Our mantra as a business is simple – MEASURE, MEASURE, MEASURE. What you don’t measure you can’t understand, control or improve. But what does that mean? It certainly doesn’t mean measure everything but instead measure the right things so you can combine relevant data and insight to understand and if required amend your marketing activity.

However, before you consider measurement, you must be clear as to what your business goal is and how your marketing efforts will help achieve it. Depending on whether that is an increase in sales, lead generation or simply driving brand awareness, the marketing strategy and thus the approach you take to data capture, monitoring and measurement could differ enormously.

The revolution in digital marketing has meant that we as marketers now have access to more data and insight than ever. We however still meet companies that tell us they have no data but that is rarely the case. For many we go on a journey of discovery, helping them to think about and identify what data they have, how it is captured and where it’s stored – and yes at times that includes uncovering all the data and insight stored in numerous note books, diaries, excel spreadsheets, business card holders and even their own heads.

For some others they find themselves overwhelmed by the volume of data they have to hand. From website performance via Google Analytics, effectiveness of emails and digital advertising campaigns through to data and insight captured in CRM systems and market research. The focus here is to think about and map relevant data and insights to business goal so you can spend your time and efforts on monitoring the correct metrics whilst discarding the rest.

For example do you know what you spend on gaining new customers compared to keeping the customers that you already have? How effective are you at keeping your current customers? With all of the time, resources, and money put into acquiring customers it is important to know that your efforts aren’t wasted when customers don’t remain loyal.

Customer retention rate is a great way to measure how successfully you are maintaining customer relationships. On a more granular level, you also need to know which types of customer you are remaining loyal and at which point in the relationship a customer leaves, so that you can make the necessary adjustments.

According to a study by social media marketing software provider, Flowtown, they found that maintaining existing customers costs six to seven times less than acquiring new customers. A further study by Bain and Company reported that increasing your customer retention rates by just five percent led to an increase in profits between 25 and 95 percent.

Monitor others

Don’t forget to monitor the performance of other organisations be they competitors or great businesses you are aware of. For example social media engagement that your competitors are gaining can provide a useful benchmark over your social posts performance. Don’t just look at the posts but aim to delve deeper by for example splitting the monitoring of both organic and paid posts. If your competitors out perform you on their organic posts then it would suggest that their content resonates better with their audiences thus boosts their reach for ‘free’ and how a modification in your approach could provide real benefits.

And finally

Senior Managers don’t want numbers thrown in their faces, so marketers need to use data to tell a story. An endless stream of data, numbers and metrics are tough to digest and carries less meaning than visual methods of presenting data.

When telling your story, make clear, data-grounded recommendations. For example you may say “You’ve noticed that your business spends 20% of the marketing budget on social media, but you’re not seeing great results. I recommend cutting back and allocating money elsewhere.”

Efficient marketing requires data, but senior managers aren’t concerned with every scrap of it. They want a clear view of how your customers behave and how marketing projects impact the business. To keep your senior managers in the loop without wasting his time, present them with these metrics.


About the author

Richard is founder of e-nexus Ltd – a new Marketing, Performance and Measurement agency based in Bournemouth. He is a career long marketer, holding numerous senior marketing positions throughout his 20 years in the profession.  Describing himself as a marketing strategist, performance and measurement specialist, Richard spends time working with business owners, managers and marketers to help them improve their marketing decisions, investments and impact by harnessing the power of data and insights alongside his strategic experience.

Richard’s biggest passion is to help marketers show the value of their efforts and give them the confidence and skills to be able to share the story with their senior managers.  Richard helps organisations understand the importance of measurement and metrics as well as appreciate the breadth of data available to them in todays marketing world.  He also helps marketers bring together and interpret data coming from many different environments to make it meaningful and digestible at all levels of an organisation.

You can read more from Richard at his measure4success blog at www.measure4success.wordpress.com