.jpg?width=700&name=thumbnail-2%20(1).jpg)
Are you questioning the success of your latest marketing campaign? Successful campaigns boost sales, establish strong brand position or help grow market share, and there are a variety of behind-the-scenes statistics that may indicate that your campaign was worth the effort. Here are seven ways to determine if your campaign was successful.
Overall Website Traffic
Your company's website statistics provide a wealth of information about the success of your campaign. Ideally, you should notice an increase in both overall page views and views from new visitors. Though an increase in overall site traffic is important, it is also necessary to examine what specific pages were viewed and topics were searched to more accurately decide if your campaign was successful. For example, if your marketing message pushed your company’s TV repair services and that’s where you saw the most traffic and new visitors on your website, then your campaign was highly successful.
Other information that can be useful includes the typical length of time spent on your site per session and your bounce rate. A high bounce rate combined with low amounts of time spent on the site by visitors may not indicate a high level of success. However, website statistics that show that most visitors spent a significant amount of time exploring more than one page may mean that visitors found your site interesting and user-friendly. It is important to remember that increases or decreases in site traffic do not necessarily spell success or failure. In order to measure the achievements of your efforts, you have to first determine what success is for your business, and how it changes based on the specific goals that you’re trying to reach, what you’re trying to advertise, and a host of other factors. While growth and overall engagement are crucial matters, your success is dependent on how it is defined for your company.
Social Media Growth
Social media campaigns are a significant type of modern marketing. From creating eye-catching Instagram posts that showcase seasonal products to engaging with customers on Facebook and Twitter, there are a variety of ways to market campaigns on social media. Business Instagram accounts, YouTube profiles, and other elements of social media can provide statistics that capture a picture of your customers and how they reacted to your campaign. Recent total reach, views, likes, followers, shares/retweets, comments and other types of engagement are great metrics by which to gauge engagement. Savvy campaign planners should strive for increases in each of these areas, indicating success in both social media-specific campaigns and associated social growth as a result of other marketing avenues.
Overall ROI
ROI, or return on investment, involves the relationship between the amount of money that is invested in an advertising campaign and the amount of profit that comes as a direct result of the efforts. A high ROI ratio indicates that enough sales resulted from your marketing efforts to recoup costs invested in the campaign and earn a healthy profit.
Email Open Rates
Marketing emails can be effective, even if they are sometimes overlooked by your audience. Which is why it’s important to know which of your tactics are successful in engaging your audience. For this reason, knowing the open rates of your marketing emails can help you determine success and determine what you can rework. Approximately 82 percent of welcome emails are opened by new subscribers, but keeping your email list engaged is a must. Creating subject lines that grab your customers’ attention can lead to higher open rates driving higher engagement. Emails with personalized subject lines are opened around 50 percent more often than those containing generic ones.
Your click-through rate also provides valuable information. Getting customers to open your emails is only half the battle, as your ultimate goal is to encourage them to click on links within your marketing emails that lead to sale items, new content, or other information on your website or social platforms. A high click-through rate indicates that customers are interested in learning more about the promotion presented in the email, which may mean that your campaign successfully captured their attention.
Increase in Sales
An increase in sales correlating with the launch of your campaign is a strong indicator of success. While site traffic, views, and percentages provide useful statistics, boosting sales are usual key performance indicators of promotions and other campaigns. When you compare both overall sales and sales of specific items associated with your campaign to previous numbers you are able to provide a good indicator of whether your campaign led to your desired increase in sales of your selected items.
Both in-store and online sales should be considered when determining effectiveness. Redemption rates of traditional coupons and online coupon codes can provide important data on how well your marketing message was received. In addition, studying email click-through rates and increase in site traffic during your advertising flight can also provide important information about the percentage of campaign-related sales that were made as a result of your marketing email or other marketing touch points.
Lead Generation of SQLs
Lead generation involves narrowing the field to determine the best possible target audience. Once you’ve done that through marketing and interactions, it's important to take the necessary steps to determine if they are a sales qualified lead.
The SQL, or sales qualified lead, is the final step in obtaining new customers. Through this process you are able to connect with your audience in a number of ways that shows them how your product or service can benefit them, and why your business is the right fit for them. In this final phase, businesses can offer supplemental information or samples in the form of free trials and brief consultations that can show potential new customers an example of your services first-hand. If your free trials, samples, or other strategies have led to a significant number of new customers, your campaign was likely successful.
Your Goals and KPIs are Being Met
Finally, setting goals, or key performance indicators, before launch is a great way to decide exactly what you want your marketing campaign to accomplish. Instead of running a campaign with no end results in mind, you want to have specific goals and KPIs in place so that you are able to measure the established starting goals against the ending results to establish a benchmark.
You know your business best, but having definite goals and benchmarks in place before launching a campaign will give you a better understanding of its effectiveness, and can provide an opportunity to monitor analytics to determine growth as your campaign unfolds. Whether you’re looking to bring in new sales qualified leads, increase your website traffic, or see growth on your social media platforms, knowing what is relative to your brand in relation to your goals will help you to determine the success of your campaign.
