CRM

CRM Metrics and KPIs

Top CRM Metrics and KPIs

So, you’ve been considering getting your CRM strategies off the ground and into action, but you are wondering what KPI’s and Metrics you should be looking at first.  Well, here is a list of some important metrics just in case they could at least be some fuel to get you going.

  1. Unique Active Registrants (UAR) 30 day Engagement:  How many unique customers do you have that have actually been active in the past 30 days.  Active could be counted as App Opens, Email Opens, Social Followers or Browser App clicks.
  2. Asset Engagement Ratio (Marketing Tools):  Do you have an Email channel, and maybe a Mobile App driving traffic to your site?  Add them up, and bounce them off of your total visits to the site, and you now have a KPI that shows if you Marketing Tools are providing a great benefit to your traffic.  Here is a hint, if its lower than 15%, you need to get optimizing.  It can also allow you to perform some smart ROI analysis on your asset traffic.
  3. Owned Media / Paid Media Ratio:  Similar to the Asset Engagement Ratio, take all your Paid Media Channel data (PPC, Display, Re-targeting, Blogger Channels, Video), and bounce them off of your Owned Media Channel data (SEO, Direct, Email, Blog Posts) to see how your brand is doing.  If your Paid ratio is dominant, it definitely will show you that you are either getting beaten by your competitors, or your “product” is not organically interesting enough.
  4. 90 & 180 Day Retention Rate:  Depending on if you have a strong acquisition strategy or a poor one, you have got to know how engaged you keep them in your on-boarding flows.  Find a way to count the amount of visits, opens and influences each of your new customers have within 90 and 180 days of account registration.  Notice, you are ONLY counting engagements with this one.  A 30 day Retention Rate will get you even closer to understanding if you loose them quickly or further down the line.
  5. Recency/Frequency of Buyers:  For you old school Marketeers out there, this is the closest to RFM that I am going to get.  This is similar to 90 & 180 Day Retention, but you are specifically looking for purchases and purchase behavior.  Understanding the average days between purchase and Frequency of purchase by channel will allow you to see which channels are underperforming
  6. LTV (Lifetime Value):  This one is similar to ARPU (Average Revenue Per Unit) with a little shift to it in the way that you count the value.  Grab total revenue over your customers rolling 12 or 18 months, then divide it by total customers.  Once you have the full value, then segment out the customers by frequency to see if your LTV of customers is moving between younger customers, and your true brand adapters for many years.  Most typical response is to take these numbers and apply them straight to ROI calculations for media spend, but I would suggest this shows your CRM efficiency even more so.
  7. Ave Influence per Order:  Every customer has a journey before they purchase or convert with you.  Some only have 1 digital channel that influences a purchase (customer comes Direct To Site), and some have over 10 (PPC gets them to your site, Email sends out a promotion, they actually convert on a mobile app notification, etc).  Find a way to count how many channels a customer has visited your site or your marketing assets by each individual ID.  You can then associate the average amount of channels it takes for customers to purchase with you.  You’d be surprised to see how many it usually takes.  I’ve managed sites that are as little as 3 influences per order, all the way up to 11.  Once you get up there, you definitely need to start considering if you are overspending to win customers to your site.
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Daily Digital Customer Device Journey

We all know what devices we personally use throughout the workday, but there is something really cool about being able to count it and watch it.  That is the beauty of digital marketing.  If you have been recently challenged with desktop/tablet/mobile conversion rates, or can’t seem to understand what your audience mindset is at a specific time of the day, hopefully the below can help whether you are retail, entertainment or information.

I used an index to find the variance of sessions by device (desktop/tablet/mobile) throughout the day, along with lining up the hour of the day.  The hour data in the below graph is in MST, but primary visitors are east/west coast …just like everybody else. The reality is this:

  • Devices to your site by time of dayMorning:  The majority of a customers digital journey starts at work (on a desktop) as they are either shopping/researching items that they thought about the night before, or during bathroom preparation.  You’ll notice a small blip in tablet in the morning thanks to commuters, or people reading up on news during preparation.  Stride Opportunity:  Delivery your promotional emails early, because the more emails read on a mobile device, the less the conversion and those come later in the morning.
  • Afternoon:  During the lunch hour, people are mobile.  Whether they are driving, sitting in a restaurant, or in a park watching the world pass by.  So it makes perfect sense that we would see a spike in mobile sessions.  Stride Opportunity:  Drive engagement with the intention of brand recognition.  You may not want to have big spend initiatives here, but rather viral or share-ability.  Also a great opportunity to pitch mobile app downloads to your viewers (by way of App Takeover) because viewers will likely not convert, so focus on getting your marketing assets in front of them.
  • Nighttime:  We all do it.  Netflix, Hulu, YouTube from your couch, dinner table, or bed on your favorite of 3 tablets in the house.    Stride Opportunity:  Make sure your promotions are clear, loud, and optimized here because these shoppers will either be tough to convince, or really easy due to laziness.  It depends on your audience and customer segments.

Bottomline, know your audience, try to understand thier journey, and deliver the right message to them knowing what device they might be on for the best opportunity of conversion.

CRM explained

What is CRM? Simplified Version

What is CRM? 

In the world of digital marketing there is a very popular acronym known as CRM. We’ve all heard it.  It’s an acronym that all executive leaders like to talk about, all managers act like they know how to use, and analysts feel the right way to quantify it.  Well, before you step into a world of high cost software packages, or massive agency budgets, I’d like to recommend a simplified view of what it really is.  Wikipedia defines it as:

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a system for managing a company’s interactions with current and future customers. It often involves using technology to organize, automate and synchronize sales, marketing, customer service, and technical support.

…but I would like to simplify it a bit and suggest that we rename it to be Count, Relate, and Monetize.  When simplified like this, it may actually seem like a task you could actually accomplish rather than dream about it for a long time and never do anything about it.

Count

Starting with the basics, do you really have visibility as to how many assets or existing customers you have to make your Digital Marketing efforts do well?  Assets?  …Examples of assets are:

  • Registered customers
  • Active 180 day email open subscribers
  • Active mobile apps
  • Active browser apps
  • Social followers
  • Mailing list
  • SMS lists

Understanding the trending and volumes of these assets is critical as you start the planning of your marketing by realizing the biggest area of opportunity of assets to engage with your customer base in the first place.  Spoiler alert …CRM is all about building audiences for your promotions, and communicating the promotions to your valuable customers through your assets. You will not do it well without the growth and optimization of assets like these.

Relate

The goal of relating with your existing and potential customers is to engage with them.  Engagement with your customers means that you are that much closer to a potential conversion with the most valuable customers in your business, BUT if you don’t have the means to communicate with them, it will not be very easy.  This is why asset “Count” is so important to the “Relate” piece of CRM.  You can’t rely on PPC, Organic, and Radio spots alone to drive engagement from your existing customers, but they need to be a piece of the overall omni-channel communication experience.

The difficult part about relating with your customers is that you have to figure out WHAT topics or content to engage your customers with.  Well, just like you would bring up topics that your friends would have interest in, you need to find implicit ways (unless you have explicit questions in your account signup) to understand what they would like to receive from you.  Some implicit examples might be:

  • What has the customer put in the cart?
  • What categories did they visit on your site?
  • What have they clicked in previous emails?
  • What have they purchased in the past?
  • Do you have a social login?  Grab the Social Interests from it.
  • What have they looked at in your mobile app?

Once you are able to start capturing these Implicit actions, this is where you are able to start building audiences.  Audiences are critical to understand before you start doing any marketing as this is the most significant form of personalization that you can give your customer.  Deliver messages to your customers that are in tune with what matters to them.  This matches perfectly with the studies of Implicit Egotism that shows that customers are organically prideful, love to be catered to, they love the fact that companies are listening to them, and ultimately this will help with a conversion decision of the journey.  Counting and trending your audiences segments will also help form future products or promotions as well.

Monetize

Now that you have found simple ways to count your assets, and build audiences to relate well with your customers, now you need to find which combinations will bring in the best profitability and engagements for your efforts. You need to COUNT which combination of asset and communication…

  • brings in customers with the highest LTV (life time value)
  • acquires New Customers the most effectively
  • re-engages with your ageing customers
  • influences the highest omni-channel engagers
  • cross promotes other assets
  • promotes your most frequent visitors

If you can answer these questions with your reporting, then you now have the knowledge to go do some profitable communications and  build beneficial relationships. For some of you conservative marketers out there, yes, RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetization) is secretly captured in this model, but I dare not suggest that RFM is fit for every company out there.  It needs to be tweaked to fit the specific benchmarking needs for each company goal.

Bottom line, if you are able to COUNT, RELATE, and MONETIZE in these simplest of forms, you can do CRM.  For some, the right answer might be to install big software packages that integrate with every system that you have based on the volumes you are working on, but you don’t always have to go that route.  Regardless, the goal should always be:  The right product, the right channel, for the right customer, and you will continue to win with engagement in a profitable way.