When it comes to the ecommerce industry, marketing plays a crucial role in the growth and success of a business. Since there are millions of ecommerce websites worldwide, marketing is a key tool used to draw in customers and increase sales.
However, digital marketing trends are fast changing. Strategies that were drawing attention and traffic months ago may not be as effective a couple of months later. Therefore, digital marketers need to be creative and efficient in the way they conduct their marketing campaigns. Knowing the different metrics and key performance indicators of your digital marketing strategies can help you change and adjust your marketing tactics accordingly. At the same time, this allows you to understand your customer base’s behavior and marketing preferences. With that, here is a brief overview of the different marketing key performance indicators for your ecommerce business.
Digital Marketing Key Performance Indicators
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There is a wide range of digital marketing strategies businesses use to attract customers and promote their digital products, goods, or services. And while there is a general framework for how these strategies should be implemented effectively, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all marketing solution for every ecommerce business in the world. Taking this into consideration, it is important for business owners to know and understand how to gauge their ecommerce store’s marketing efforts.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
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Understanding your business finances is an important factor in its potential for growth and success. Since marketing is an important element of business operations. It’s crucial to know how your money is exactly spent on these marketing efforts. The customer acquisition cost (CAC) calculates an estimated amount needed to turn leads into customers.
The CAC metric provides accurate details and information necessary to make important budgetary decisions that can make or break your business. The customer acquisition cost identifies all marketing expenditures used to gain a new customer which includes manpower, digital technology and software, equipment, and general overhead. The basic formula for calculating the CAC involves summing the total marketing and sales expenses and dividing it by the number of customers acquired over a particular period of time.
Marketing Revenue Attribution
The marketing revenue attribution details the total revenue brought to the company by your marketing efforts and campaigns. This metric is typically used to identify which specific campaigns are bringing in the most revenue. It also helps identify which marketing strategies whether it’s content marketing, email marketing, etc., are positively or negatively affecting the company. Through this, business owners can make decisions such as diverting funds to certain marketing campaigns to bring in more revenue or even discontinuing a particular marketing effort to avoid significant loss.
Lifetime Value of a Customer (LVC)
The lifetime value of a customer (LVC) is another important marketing performance metric that identifies the potential total amount of revenue that can be expected from a particular customer. This is a long-term metric that is typically used hand-in-hand with the customer acquisition cost (CAC). The general idea is that the LVC should be greater than the CAC for the campaign to be considered profitable in the long run.
Providing good customer support, amazing customer service, and ensuring a positive customer experience can help increase a customer’s lifetime value. The goal is to boost customer loyalty and increase retention as it is generally easier to sell to repeat or existing customers. Increasing LVC can provide less demand and pressure to consistently up the number of new customers. The LVC also shifts the focus to customer experience from mere web traffic or exposure.
Organic Traffic and Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Ranking
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Boosting organic traffic is one of the most cost-efficient ways to improve an online store’s marketing performance. Organic traffic refers to website visitors generated from unpaid sources primarily through search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Generally, the primary goal of any inbound marketing campaign is to boost website traffic coming from organic search. To do this, marketers need to learn how search engine optimization works.
An increasing number of organic website traffic is highly valuable in the electronic commerce industry because it is traffic that businesses do not directly pay for. This also means that their ecommerce website has a great online presence and visibility for web users to find and click on.
Your marketing search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is the primary tool for boosting organic traffic. It is also through SEO that your website would receive a high search engine results page (SERP) ranking, thus, improving visibility to the millions of users online.
Social Media Traffic and Engagement
Social media is undoubtedly one of the most utilized and effective marketing tools used to interact and engage with potential customers. Online businesses all over the world use a variety of social media platforms to better and conveniently connect with their target markets and audiences.
While social media may not be the best ecommerce platform, it is very effective in terms of boosting online visibility and extending reach to different audiences. It can also educate, entertain, and interact with diverse people which helps build trust and increase awareness across different demographics.
Some of the social media key performance indicators can be your follower or subscriber count, the number of likes and comments, as well as the content reach through the number of shares on each post. Generally, the level of social media engagement your online business has can be used as the basis for how your content and brand resonate with your target audience. It reflects the level of authority, loyalty, and trust that your customers have for your business.
Bottomline
Marketing strategies can make or break your business. If you’re doing it right, customers and traffic would come pouring in. However, if you’re not paying attention, not only will you not be generating any leads, but you will also be losing money on marketing campaigns that are building up costs but aren’t generating enough revenue.
Is your email marketing efforts bringing in as many sales as your influencer marketing campaign? What about the conversion rates for your landing pages and content marketing? Knowing the key performance indicators (KPIs) of your marketing campaigns can help you gauge whether your efforts are worth it or not. From there, you can further analyze your marketing situation and make the necessary adjustments to improve your business’s overall performance.
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