Every company is investing heavily in digital analytics – be it on implementing the right tool or hiring the best resources. According to a recent report, companies are planning to increase their spending on marketing analytics by 73% in the next three years. Marketing managers are expecting analytics to churn out incredible and timely insights that can help them in better targeting and optimize their digital marketing initiatives. Digital analytics, if done intelligently, can actually do just that, and much more. Here are some tactics that can help you optimize your digital assets to get more out of your investments:
1. Align analytics with financial goals
Digital marketers should have a clear understanding of the goals they want to accomplish and measure the ROI accordingly. Use historical data to get an insight on the ROI achieved in the past and with the use of analytics identify ways in which it could be increased further. Predictive analytics can play a vital role here. It would also help in conducting the lifetime value analysis in order to find out how much you can potentially earn from each customer. Aligning your analytical goals with your financial goals will increase efficiency of your marketing initiatives and give you a better understanding of KPIs.
2. Prioritize testing and experimentation
Testing multiple options to achieve your goals is vital for online growth. You cannot simply pick best practices and place them on your site. Since your business and customers are unique, you have to keep trying till you succeed, and then try some more. One organization realized, after using data analytics, that removing their drop-down menu and replacing it with a product page helped increase order conversion by 56.43% and revenues by $8,880 over a two-week period. The company realized that text-only links to products via the drop-down menu wasn’t intuitive enough and replacing it with visual product imagery created a better customer experience and more sales.
3. Implement conversion rate optimization tactics
Your website’s navigation plays a make or break role in determining online sales and website effectiveness. Is your site’s search functionality robust and intuitive enough? Do you have a clean layout that enables easy navigation? How should you deliver an engaging and memorable experience to the online visitors on the website or mobile app? How should you expedite the conversion process while maintaining visitor confidence in the brand, product or service? Conversion rate optimization is an independent field of analytics and requires deep study of customer behavior and journey, marketing strategy, site architecture, design and content, navigation and much more. Conversion rate optimization is not a onetime activity, but an ongoing effort that should be carried out for your entire digital footprint.
4. Utilize channel attribution modeling
Channel attribution analytics involves studying the various paid or free acquisition channels through which your visitors reach your digital property. Although, there has been a tremendous year-on-year growth of customer acquisition channels, but at the same time, the ROI from these channels is consistently decreasing. To keep your cost per acquisition under control, channel attribution analysis is highly recommended. It’s important for you to determine a relevant attribution model for your business so that you could give a fair share of credit to each marketing channel introducing, assisting or making the visitor convert on the website.
5. Integrate insights from multiple channels to get a coherent picture
One of the biggest challenges that marketers face today is to track their customers across channels. It is absolutely essential to know your customers and understand how they parse through various channels before converting or leaving you. Mapping of visitor journeys across channels such as mobile apps, mobile sites, smart devices, websites, social media, etc., and following them till completion will give you a clearer picture. Data from offline channels can also be added to the digital data to know how they impact each other. This will help you in identifying ways to engage your customers at each touch-point. Creating a digital marketing cloud for marketing execution and analytics can be explored.
6. Analyze customer behavior patterns on your digital properties
Once you understand customer purchase patterns and behaviors, tailoring your products and services to meet and exceed customer expectations is a cinch. The key here is an effective data collection strategy that fuels its feed from multiple channels including social media, mobile apps, surveys, sales, questionnaires and subscriptions. Continue to evolve and grow your data and you will soon find patterns that suggest, for example, which months are the best to run discounts/promotions and which customers are likely advocates of your brand. Find out what customers are searching for on your site through internal site search and make that info available. Also conduct churn analysis to find out where your customers are most likely to drop off, so that you can implement ways to retain them at that specific point.
7. Effective segmentation of market
Analyzing the demographics of your customer base can help you effectively segment them based on location, age, gender, past behavior on site, and so on. Segmentation is useful for effective targeting and sending the right message to the right segment of customers. Digital marketers should implement optimization techniques to create the most efficient segments to the point where business margins are maximized. Today, segmentation has evolved much beyond simple demographics, and it now includes a bit off-beat parameters like AOV, spend, channel, customer reviews and feedbacks, cohorts, social media engagement, and more.
8. Customer sentiment analytics
Lastly, your efforts should not only be limited to what is happening on your own digital properties, but also on what is happening on other channels that are not under your control. Social media can be a key driver in forming customer sentiments about your brand, service or product and hence it is mandatory for businesses to listen and analyze customer sentiment on these external channels. Through this, you can understand the reputation of your brand, the kind of frustrations faced by customers, attributes that are negatively impacting your brand and so on. This will enable you to target those specific issues and answer those questions through your own social media channels and increase customer confidence in your brand.
To conclude
Data analytics is a goldmine that promises rich dividends. These days, there is a wealth of data and customer information, especially with the proliferation of the web, social media, and mobile. The plethora of data sources means that you can mine this fertile data to truly accelerate your company’s revenues. There are plenty of software like Google Analytics, Adobe SiteCatalyst, and more that can help you do the job, taking the effort and guesswork out of the equation. Nabler can help you with deep-dive marketing analytics.