The data metrics to assess to increase your ecommerce marketing ROI

Creating marketing strategies is just a small part of maximising the return on investment (ROI) that you achieve. Technology means you have invaluable data right at your fingertips to assess marketing activity and guide your future decisions. These five metrics should be considered essential for optimising every aspect of your marketing campaigns and improving the returns you see.

1. Reach

From your email campaigns through to your social media, reach is a vital measurement. It should form the basis of your success evaluation and indicate the size of the audience that you have a potential to connect with. Combined with other metrics, it gives you an opportunity to identify how your sales funnel shrinks and create refined, engaging forms of communication. Any investor will want to know the size of the potential market you can serve so you should really know (realistically) how many potential people there are, who you can serve. 

2. Average Order Value / Average Transaction Value

It’s about quality not just quantity when your aim is to maximise your return on marketing spending. Assessing what your average order or transaction value looks like from different streams puts you in a position to choose those that perform best for your business, optimising your marketing budget to improve returns. In some businesses, that could mean reducing spending that typically generates higher traffic to divert it towards channels that perform generally worse in volume of visitors but better when you factor in revenue.

3. Volume of good quality leads

When it comes to building your ROI up, lead generation is an essential activity. While your reach could be huge, it’s only of a limited importance if just a small percentage of that reach become qualified leads (with a big emphasis on qualified). Understanding how this happens and the value of information you’re capturing can provide support to increase the amount of good leads you gather. We've helped a number of our customers understand the ROI on certain events where they capture email addresses. So they know which ones to attend again in the future. 

4. Leads to customer ratio

Even a large leads database will have little impact if you’re communication isn’t converting those leads into paying customers. Looking at how many of your leads convert and why gives you an idea of the methods that will encourage your leads to part with their cash, whether that’s following an exclusive offer or a personalised email. This really goes hand in hand with the metric above. 

5. Revenue

Of course, your ROI is directly linked to the revenue you create; it’s the ultimate measure of success for your marketing team. Linking marketing campaigns with how revenue is progressing towards your aims, gives you an opportunity to rectify weaknesses and build on those activities that are delivering tangible results. That's why it's crucial to have an accurate picture on how your email marketing campaigns, in particular are generating transactions and revenue for you. Many email marketing platforms don't give you this insight, so it's not always that easy if you can't join up all your customer data.