How To Measure the Effectiveness Of Your Personalization Campaigns

3 steps to selecting the right KPIs to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns

is that well-known saying we all keep hearing? What gets measured gets done.

To optimize your marketing personalization campaigns, you need to make sure you’re measuring the effectiveness of your efforts.

Measurements help inform key decisions, align everyone in the organization with a common goal, and indicate that you’re making meaningful progress.

The question is, what should you be measuring?

Gathering and analyzing the wrong metrics is not only a waste of time and resources but it may also paint a wrong picture of the performance of your campaigns, preventing you from making the right adjustments.

Here’s how to make sure you’re gathering and analyzing the right metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs):

How to define personalization KPIs and measure the effectiveness of your campaigns

Step 1: Identify your objectives

Marketing personalization is a powerful strategy that can deliver a lot of benefits to a business.

However, you should limit the number of goals so you can focus your efforts and gather meaningful data.

Your objectives will depend on your industry, your business model, and the stage of growth of the business. Here are some examples:

  • Improve sales performance
  • Increase repeat purchases and brand loyalty (e.g., customer lifetime value)
  • Drive traffic that converts
  • Strengthen brand recognition and engagement
  • Increase the number and quality of generated leads
  • Increase content ROI
  • Increase average order value
  • Increase customer lifetime value

Step 2: Define your KPIs

Based on your marketing objectives, you must define which metrics can best indicate the progress of these goals.

Your metrics need to be quantifiable. In addition, you must also distinguish between leading KPIs and lagging KPIs so that you can extract appropriate insights from the metrics.

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For most marketing personalization campaigns, KPIs often measure the performance of the sales funnels or the effectiveness of the customized content or offers. Some of these include:

  • Conversion rate
  • New vs. returning visitors
  • Customer/visitor loyalty
  • Bounce rate
  • Website traffic to lead ratio
  • Top traffic sources
  • Click-through rate
  • Engagement score
  • Average session duration
  • Average page views per visit
  • Average order value
  • Revenue per visit

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Make sure to select metrics from which you can extract actionable insights. Otherwise, you’ll be crunching a lot of numbers without being able to take impactful actions.

Step 3: Measure and analyze

Before you start any campaign, establish benchmarks so you know whether you’re indeed making improvements. These are your baseline metrics from which to start the personalization efforts.

Make sure you’re integrating metrics from all the systems you use, such as eCommerce and CRM platforms. Whenever possible, send all information to one centralized dashboard so that you can gain a holistic view of your personalization campaign performance.

Last but not least, metrics need to be measured consistently over time and across segments so you can extract accurate and meaningful insights.

I’ve got the insights, now what?

The ability to gather and analyze customer data to extract insights is the first step to running effective personalization campaigns.

Next, you have to put the information into action by applying the insights to improve your personalization strategies.

NectarOm’s Decision Engine helps you identify individual customers who are most likely to respond to a particular strategy or campaign, so you can increase your marketing ROI by matching your content and offers to each customer’s preferences, brand interactions, and habits.

3 Marketing Trends of 2014

Mobile Personalization

Marketing is just like any other tradition here in the United States: as time progresses it begins to change and adapt to new trends that emerge. In 2014, the marketing world has had a lot of new developments thanks to the innovations such as mobile apps, social media, big data breakthroughs, and other discoveries. As a result, there has been a noticeable shift in how marketers create their strategies to promote products and services. Today, we will discuss 3 of these new marketing trends that have emerged in 2014.

1. Don’t Just Personalize, Hyper-Personalize In 2013, personalization was the name of the marketing game. How was this accomplished exactly? By tracking spending habits and recording clicks while signed in to their website. Then the companies would take that information and use it to send personalized offers via email, text or through the website. Hyperpersonalization takes this one step further. By integrating various existing data sets such as personal information and social media data, companies are able to know more about their customers than just their spending data. For example, utilizing information from Susan’s Facebook page, a company might be able to learn that Susan is expecting a baby in a few months and to send her offers for baby clothes. Hyperpersonalization is like knowing what the customer wants before they actually want it

2. Measure Social Media ROI Accurately Measuring ROI from social media in the past has been anything but exact. Every company that has invested in social media has had a different method of measuring the effectiveness of their social media efforts with varied results. In the past, companies measured their social media success by how much revenue it directly generated for them. While this may work for other marketing avenues, it may not necessarily work for social media. In 2014, measuring social media ROI has evolved from looking at revenue generated to the buzz that is created from the efforts put in. Creating buzz around a company will increase a company’s audience and engagement by increasing word of mouth; hence the word “viral”. Understanding how to optimize content to go viral is key in the success of social media implementation.

Mobile Personalization

3. Real Time Geographic Marketing Geographic marketing is not a new innovation. It has been around since the early days albeit in a more primitive fashion; for example, a large billboard perched above a building has an arrow which points down, indicating it is a restaurant to stop at while driving. Over the past few years email has been the primary source of geographic marketing by sending offers to customers within certain distances from companies. In 2014 this will be taken one step further. With the rise in mobile device usage, real-time geographic marketing will be employed by sending SMS messages or emails to customers’ mobile devices when they are certain distance from a company. So if I am in a mall looking for a gift, I might get an SMS on my phone alerting me that a clothing store in the same mall has a sale. That is the power and convenience or geographic marketing.

Marketing will always have a place in any business strategy because it is the most basic form of communicating with potential customers. The best way to look at is summed up in the expression: “The players haven’t changed, but the game has.” By staying on top of the newest developments one can expect to enjoy the benefits of being top of mind.