Marketing campaigns are crucial to any business’s growth and success. When starting a business, it’s important to have a marketing strategy as this will help you push your brand out to the public. However, successfully boosting brand awareness and getting loyal customers is not as easy as it seems.
While it’s easy to put up advertisements and push out content, growing an audience and increasing traffic is not at all simple. Marketing on online platforms involves a lot of factors. Competition is high and getting people to visit your website is not easy. Presence and visibility are also hard to achieve, especially for small online stores and startup businesses.
That is why eCommerce businesses should take close attention to the performance of their marketing campaign. This is crucial as it can help you determine whether your business is growing or slowly fading in the background. But, how do you gauge the success of your marketing team’s efforts exactly?
Importance of Digital Marketing Campaigns for Ecommerce Businesses
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Before we go through some of the success metrics for different marketing strategies, it’s important to understand the importance of marketing in the ecommerce industry.
If you’re a small business or a startup company, your marketing team plays a huge role in drawing in an audience. This is the first step to breaking into the market in order to create a sale. In the world of online stores and ecommerce websites, marketing focuses on promoting your brand on every platform or channel that you can.
There are millions of ecommerce websites globally and the number continues to grow each day. And since the ecommerce industry transcends geographical boundaries, competition among online stores is as tight as it could be. In this case, it’s up to your marketing strategy to:
- Increase traffic.
- Boost brand awareness.
- Establish presence and visibility.
- Generate and identify leads.
- Reach the target audience.
- Provide valuable content.
- Drive sales.
Popular Ecommerce Marketing Strategies
Digital marketing is complex. There are a lot of factors involved in order to come up with an effective marketing plan. Because of the competitive nature of ecommerce and online businesses, it’s important for marketers to be creative and strategic. Here are some of the most popular and effective marketing tools and strategies used for digital marketing:
- Search engine optimization
- Search engine marketing
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
- Content marketing
- Pay-per-click advertising
- Affiliate marketing
- Inbound marketing
Different Ways To Gauge Your Marketing Performance
Website Traffic
One of the primary goals of a marketing campaign is to draw people to your website. Therefore, an increase in website traffic can be used as an indicator of the success of your marketing efforts. However, the success of your marketing campaign is not solely based on sheer numbers.
While it’s good that your website is drawing in visitors, it’s important to identify quality site visits. Let’s say that you’re online store is getting thousands of visitors each day. However, only a small percentage of these visits lead to further transactions and actual sales. Audience engagement is crucial in identifying quality leads, more than just traffic.
In addition to this, marketing campaigns often use a variety of channels to advertise and promote their brand. When there’s an increase in website traffic, your marketing team can identify which marketing channel is doing the most work.
For example, you may be drawing in traffic with your marketing campaign on social media platforms. However, you are failing to bring in numbers through SEO and email marketing. Knowing this can either direct your marketing team to focus on social media marketing or to change marketing tactics on other channels.
Audience Engagement
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When starting a marketing campaign, one of the most important goals is to engage your community. This is whether you’re trying to boost your current audience’s engagement or you’re breaking into a different market or group. Audience engagement is one clear indicator that your marketing efforts are making an impact on your target audience. This can be a form of knowledge sharing, entertainment, or support.
In social media marketing, it’s easy to see whether your post is engaging your audience. All you have to do is look into the number of likes, comments, and shares. From there, you can get an idea of how your content is valued and received by your target audience. A higher level of engagement with your audience can help boost visibility and interest in your brand.
Newsletter Sign-Ups
Another way to gauge the performance of your marketing campaign is through newsletter sign-ups. Newsletters are subscription-based emails. This often features important announcements, relevant news, or other valuable information. When someone subscribes to your website’s newsletter, this shows that you are providing them with relevant and valuable content.
In addition to this, newsletter sign-ups are also an indication of the audience’s brand loyalty. When a member of your community subscribes to your newsletter, this means that you’re successful in providing relevant and valuable content.
The weekly or monthly newsletter sent out to your subscribers will ensure that they are informed and up to date about your brand. One perk of newsletter subscriptions is that companies can send out sale announcements and promos that people in your community will know about. Through this, you can make your customers feel even more valued.
Sales Opportunities
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Every marketing team’s end goal is to make a sale. It’s the clearest sign that your efforts are bringing in revenue for the company. However, even sales opportunities can serve as an indicator of a successful marketing campaign.
Sales opportunities refer to transactions that progressed through the buyer’s journey but did not completely end on an actual sale. This can be someone diligently browsing through your website’s catalog or someone who already added digital products to their shopping carts but didn’t proceed to check out.
Initially, these transactions are considered lost leads. However, your marketing team can then direct their efforts in pursuing these quality leads to turn them into actual sales. They can push out content that will guide customers throughout their buyer journey. Your marketing team can also offer support and promotions that prompt them to buy your products or services.
Customer Referrals
Aside from actual sales, one indicator of a successful marketing campaign is customer referrals. A customer would only refer your product or service to other people when they are satisfied with their experience. Therefore, a customer referral is a testament to your brand’s quality as well as good customer service. While this is a sign of a successful marketing campaign, customer referrals can also be used as a marketing tool to reach more people and boost sales.
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