The Future of Marketing is in the Palm of Your Hand and on Your Phone

As one business owner to another, I know what it’s like to run a marketing campaign, to invest money in marketing tactics and then have to ask your team if it’s working. Did we get any leads from it? Was it worth it? Should we do it again? Only to get blank stares back or even worse, people who say, “Yes we should do it again because we don’t know what else to do.”

If this sounds like your company, it has to stop. Take a stand against marketing tactics that don’t have quantitative and measureable expectations before, during and after rollout. Inbound marketing provides a variety of highly trackable marketing tactics that deliver results.

Below are 11 of the most powerful inbound marketing metrics in the future of marketing that you can track today, right from your laptop, tablet, or smart phone.

1.      Website Visitors

Forget about unique visits, return visits, etc. Just worry about how many people are coming to your site on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. After all, do you really care if people come back 2, 3 or 4 times? Wouldn’t people returning to your site be positive?

One consideration is to set a visitors goal. How many people do you need to come to your site to hit your marketing goals? Set it and measure it monthly.

2.      Conversion Rate

This is a key number and it represents the number of people who turn from anonymous visitors into identified leads. Historically this number is between 1% and 3% across your entire site, but we have seen companies with conversion rates in the sub 1% range regularly.

If you want to drive this number up you have to create new educational content and publish it on your site monthly. This can drive a .5% conversion rate to a 2% conversion rate in a day.

3.      Leads

Again, we can argue about what defines a lead but if someone gives you their email address and downloads or signs up for your content, they are a lead. They might not be a bottom of the funnel lead, but they are interested in you, none the less.

Just like website visitors, set goals and track this daily.

4.      Cumulative Email Addresses

Every time you execute an email campaign, your list will be changing. Opt-outs, non-deliverables are automatically removed and you are adding (or at least you should be) to your list daily. All the leads you generate are automatically added to your email database.

But, you have to know whether you are growing that list or not. Keep tabs on it monthly and make sure it’s going up month over month.

5.      Social Media Reach Metrics

The same thinking holds true for all your social media sites. People will drop off and pop on every single day, but you have to make sure you have more Twitter followers, Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections, and Google Plus people in your circles month over month.

The more expansive your social media reach, the more people will be able to share your content as you create it, expanding your ability to connect with new clients and prospects.

6.      Email Open Rate

So perhaps one of the less critical but still important metrics is email open rate. Email has become a challenging marketing tactic. Open rates are down to historic lows with some research showing 10% open rates now being the industry norm.

Make sure your open rates are around 20% that indicates that you are at least sending educational content and not sales promotions. Open rate is entirely about the subject line, so don’t skimp on this and default to January Newsletter or Free Whatever Inside.

7.      Email Click Through Rate

If they open your email, that’s only half the battle. You really want them to click back to your website. Email open rates are typically around 3% to 5%. Click through rates have everything to do with the content in the email, the format, the writing, and the stories the email tells.

If they are compelling and creative, people will want the rest of the details and will visit your website. If the email lacks depth or even worse, doesn’t even include links, then you might as well not even send it.

8.      Opt Out Rate

Every email has to include an opt-out feature for people who just don’t want to get your content anymore. Keep an eye on this number quarterly, it might bump up one month and then come down again. If your opt-out rate is anywhere below 1%, you are probably doing fine.

9.      Blog Subscribers

This should be a number you are actively tracking week over week. You want this number to be going up as fast as possible. Remember, the people subscribed to your blog are hearing from you almost every single day. Eventually, you should want more blog subscribers than email addresses.

Blog subscribers regularly share content with their friends and colleagues. The blog genre does wonders for all your key metrics. It generates website traffic and leads. The more people you blog, to the more people the more leads you get.

10.   Blog Views

A related metrics is blog views. This gives you direct insight into what your prospects and customers care about. If you do a blog post and no one reads it, don’t do that topic again. On the contrary, if you do a blog post and 100 people read it, 20 people share it and you get 2 comments, you hit the jackpot. Keep writing about that topic and expand that topic to include related information.

Blog views also give you insight into what kind of educational material you need on your site. Instead of producing a 30 page eBook, do a single 600 word blog post. The blog posts that are most popular can then be turned into more detailed, long form content like an eBook or whitepaper.

11.   Top 5 Landing Page Conversion Rates

High performing landing pages typically convert around 30% with some very successful pages converting at 50% or even higher. Keep an eye on your 5 most trafficked pages and make sure those are converting at a very high rate.

Don’t worry about your Contact Us page. People often stop by that page to get information, but rarely fill that out, so if that page is converting at 2%, that is actually quite common. You want to focus more on content oriented landing pages; those should be converting at much higher rates.

If you really want to get good at this, consider marketing automation that provides an app for your phone. HubSpot gives me instant access to the performance of our own program and with the swipe of my fingers I get access to every single client’s program so I know these numbers for all of our clients anytime of the day or night.

To learn more about inbound marketing metrics, marketing analytics, reporting and tracking tools, check out our newest infographic, Comparing The Top Marketing Automation Software.

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