How To Unlock The ROI of Your Marketing Efforts

4 min read
Dec 5, 2014 1:04:00 PM

Unlocking the ROI of your marketing efforts is on every business's mind. With data analysis coming off as a daunting task for those of us who are not the biggest fans of numbers and equations, it is something that often gets pushed to the wayside. But don't let the possibility of data overload stop you from using the tools available to you to increase your marketing effectiveness. Areas of your optimal marketing strategy can be determined through data-driven decision making. Which is why it is so important to focus even on a few of the crucial metrics that can start helping you today! 

Before we start diving into the metrics, there are four main takeaways that should come out of all of this:

1. What is working

2. What is not working

3. Finding areas of improvement

4. Implementing more of the tactics that are currently working 

Although metrics should be used to analyze all of the efforts your company is doing, today we are going to focus on your website, social media, business blogging, and email marketing. 

Your Website

Your website is the base from which everything else you post, publish, and do is built off of and depends on. As with a house, if the foundation is not sound, it can account for many of the other problems that are occurring within the structure, this theory applies to your website as well.  So it only makes sense that we analyze how well your foundation is doing. A metric that is universally used is unique visitor rate. Unique visitors are individual visitors coming to your site for a period of time, who have not visited your site before. If your data reflects that there is a good uptick in unique visitors coming to your site, this is a good indication that what you are currently doing is on the right track! If your count is not increasing, it might be time to rethink a few things and see how you can improve your website, here

Business Blogging

With the main goal of business blogging being to generate leads, we must measure what content and what tactics are currently working the best for your business. With that said, we will also be able to find out which are not so well. One of the top ways to gauge how well your business's blog is doing is with visitor-to-lead conversion rate. In simple terms, if your blog's traffic is up, but you are not gaining any leads from all of these visitors, your conversion rate is down and tells us that your blog is under performing. If you have the same amount of traffic and are generating more leads, this tells us that your conversion rate is good and that your tactics on content are working. 

Social Media
Social media is still a relatively new tactic when it comes to measuring ROI but can still be insightful. Many of the same blogging metrics can be used to measure your social media presence on sites such as Facebook or Twitter. One of the easiest ways to measure your performance is to look at the level of customer engagement. Based on how many followers, friends, etc., what is the ratio of that and how many likes, comments, shares, tweets, and so on your pages are getting. If your ratio shows that customers are highly engaged in your pages, there is nothing to worry about, you're clearly mastering social media. On the other hand, if you have followers/friends but no engagement, it is time to take a closer look and switch up the kind of content you are posting and possibly even the time of day you are posting. 

Email Marketing

For the businesses that are using email marketing, we have a few crucial metrics that you can be using to gauge performance of your campaigns. 

1. Bounce rate - Bounce rate is the measure of how many of the emails you sent, were unable to be delivered due to an incorrect, invalid, or non-existent email account. If you have any bounces, make sure that you comb through your email list, and remove or edit any invalid accounts so that it does not effect your other metrics. 


2. Delivery Rate - Directly connected to your bounce rate, if delivery rate is lower than 95%, you have some email list house keeping to do. You can find your DR by dividing the number of emails delivered by the number of emails you sent. 


3. List Growth - Pretty self explanatory, the measurement of how much your email list is growing each month. This can be found through subtracting the amount of opt-outs and invalid addresses and then dividing it by the listing number as a whole. List growth is so important because you want to be consistently engaging new customers as older subscribers are likely to be lost and disengage over time. Growth always ensures that there will continue to be an audience for the emails your business is sending out.


4. Click Through Rate - Defined as the portion of your audience that clicked on one or more links contained in the email. This can be computed by dividing unique clicks by the number of emails delivered. This is one of the most important metrics because it is clear validation that the content you are sending out is relevant and compels your recipients to want to know more. 

As you can see, unlocking the ROI of your marketing efforts is not a simple one part task. It is a compilation of everything that your business does with its online presence. We encourage your business to start using these simple tools to reach your full inbound marketing potential! 

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