Evolve Your Marketing: Understand Your Audience

[Nick_S]

Evolve Your Marketing

Because digital marketing is constantly evolving and developing, small business marketers are presented with a unique opportunity — the opportunity to level up their marketing game and add new, impactful strategies to the mix. Solid, ongoing email, social, and text messaging strategies can help build relationships and create success — but what’s out there to help you understand your customers, personalize your messaging even further, and reach them in their preferred online locations?

In this three-part series, we’ll be hitting on three big ways small business marketers can take their marketing efforts from status quo to something truly spectacular through automation, personalization, and more.

 

Understand Your Audience

Business owners of all experience levels have one key thing in common: it’s absolutely critical that they understand their audience in order to attract them, engage them, and nurture a valuable relationship with them. Reporting and analytics tools that provide insight into metrics like opens, sends, and clicks allowed marketers to see how their outreach was working, and to improve when it wasn’t.

But understanding the customer has come a long way since then, allowing for deeper insights into customer engagement and behavior. You might be keeping an eye out on basic metrics, but here are helpful tools to dig deeper that you should be using to give your campaigns (and your business) that extra edge.

Heat Map Reporting

What is heat map and how does it work?

Just like a meteorological heat map that shows "hot spots" in the hottest part of the area, a heat map for web or email will show you where users clicked the most.

For emails, this means seeing at a glance the top links that your readers engaged with. With a quick scroll, you can follow your readers' footsteps and see where they stopped to click into your images, calls to action (CTAs), and even footer links.

How does this help me?

Obviously, if you put links in your email, they’re there for your readers to click, right? But not all links are created equally, and understanding what your readers gravitate toward can tell you a lot about your email content and how to improve it.

• Are the majority of your clicks somewhere other than where you really wanted them? Your CTAs may not be clear enough or compelling enough.
• Is there no clear pattern of clicks? You may have too many links in your email, creating confusion, or too few links, driving no action at all.
• Are all your clicks occurring too early in the email, well above where the real content is? Your copy and design may be too long, making your readers stop scrolling.
• Are most of your clicks in the footer, on links like “unsubscribe” or “privacy policy”? The content you are sending may not be what your customers expect, or your emails may be occurring too frequently.

 

Checking these often and comparing them from email to email (in addition to using features like email comparison reporting and A/B testing) can help you to fine-tune your approach to fit what truly delights and engages your customers.

Revenue Reporting

What is revenue reporting and how does it work?

If you run an ecommerce business, you already closely monitor your sales and revenue. But do you know where your sales are coming from? This can be key to understanding customer behavior. With revenue reporting tied to your digital marketing, sales that can be attributed to your campaigns are automatically reflected in your analytics with their respective emails. This attribution accounts for activities like direct clicks to your storefront from a campaign, or purchases in a set time period after communications are opened.

How does this help me?

Greater visibility into your revenue streams is always a good thing for a retailer. But by looking at which campaigns generate revenue, and comparing them to one another, you can begin to see a bigger picture about what communications are effective and how to expand on that success.

By evaluating your campaigns through a revenue reporting lens, you can begin to take a closer look at things like:

• Content. Evaluating your copy, photo links, coupons and other content from a revenue lens can help you determine efficacy and improve for the future.
• Timing. Everything from time of day to time of year can influence shoppers and their wallets.
• Template and design. As you experiment with templates and designs, you may start to see emergent trends in the revenue generation tied to these aesthetic changes.

Regardless of where you see positive or negative trends, these things can and should inform how you craft and send your sales-driving communications to your customers. Lean into what’s working and try something new for what’s not!

We want to hear from you! What are some takeaways you've gotten from reviewing your reporting?