Key Marketing Metrics: Are your marketing strategies effective?

The importance of knowledge regarding key marketing metrics can't be denied by anyone who understands the concept of marketing theory.  Yet, many marketing people, particularly ecommerce marketers don't regularly obtain, study and learn from several of the most basic key marketing metrics.   In fact, a recent survey found that only ten percent of the companies surveyed had a budget intended specifically geared to measuring key marketing metrics.

Key marketing metrics are a relatively new role in the structure of a successful organization.  It is intended to measure the gap between the strategy for marketing the product or the business and its execution and the final results of that strategy, whether effective or not.

Key marketing metrics must have the characteristics of being quick response, even instant, because a marketing campaign doesn't stop while you measure the results so far.  You must be able to view such typical marketing key performance indicators (KPIs) as revenue per customer, average size of an order, and click to conversion rate for a campaign. 

The above KPIs are critical, but it's also important to learn more about the customers themselves to help in targeting the next campaign in a more precise way.

As with all metrics the purpose is to show how the activities of the marketing unit or department are contributing to the overall health of the organization in the pursuit of its stated objectives. 

It is undeniable that marketing for any of the company's products is critical, but the marketing in a hard-driven marketing world must be able to show not only the effectiveness or failure of a particular campaign, but perhaps more importantly that the marketing function itself is contributing to the profitability of the business.

In order to do that ROI calculation, you can use tactics to project performance based on customer response to particular performance measurements.  For example, you might work on improving a targeted mailing list.  The construction of the mailing list is intended to reach customers who have an interest in your particular niche product.  If your mailing list size increases, you would be reaching more people interested in the product and you would be expanding your opportunity for sales so the revenue would increase.  In this instance, the size of your email list or the leads which you have created has increased and that becomes the measure of how well your marketing campaign is doing.  The performance indicator is the size of the mailing list, not the amount of revenue generated.  From a point in time, by tracking the revenue from your original mailing list or contact list you know the average sales per customer,  If you use the average sales per customer times the number of new mailing list contacts, you have a dollars and cents projection of the effectiveness of the campaign.

When you compare the projection with the cost of the marketing required to conduct that campaign, you've arrived at a reasonable figure which can be used as proof for the Return on Investment.