Presented by Mike Moran, Distinguished IBM Engineer
Yes, an engineer talking to you about marketing.
You need to watch what your customers are doing so you know what to do next. While there are a lot of things out there that you can’t measure – there are about 20% that you can measure that lead to a sale.
You have a website out there which probably eventually leads to a sale. What things do you do that lead to that sale? What things does the customer do that leads to that sale?
Measure ROI in terms of (Gain – cost)/cost. For transactional ROI look at how many transactions you have. What was the ROI for everything you had to do to make that transaction happen. For relational ROI, how much did it cost you to acquire this new customer.
Take a look a direct marketers. They understand what works and doesn’t. How? They create multiple versions of every marketing piece and analyze the results. They test the responses to multiple designs and adjust everything based on those results.
Apply this to your website. Define numeric objectives. Try different approaches. Get real feedback and constantly look at performance to see what’s working.
For example, you want to increase sales. For your website there may be two ways to accomplish this – get more people to come or to persuade more of the people that do come to buy. Measure based on the increase in traffic or the increase in conversions.
Sometimes it’s not clear what metric to use, so just choose one and stick with it. You’re looking for a trend so just consistently measure the same thing.
Conclusion – Respond to your customers. Change things until you see something start to work. Do it quickly. Instead of trying to figure out what to do, just do something. Let the market tell you what works and what doesn’t.
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