What’s On Your Marketing Dashboard?

With the rise of marketing automation and easy reporting templates, marketing leaders have more customer data than ever to track, synthesize and leverage. Instead of drowning in data, focused leaders identify a handful of key metrics that keep them tied to the pulse of their business.

Revenue, orders, AOV and item counts per order are all great standard items for an eCommerce dashboard. What other metrics can you add to quickly assess your catalog business health?

Consider these five potential marketing metrics. Do you need to add one or two to your dashboard?
1) Acquisition Metrics – For consumer-driven eCommerce companies and catalogers, customer acquisition represents a critical key measure of health. Quantity and quality matter.

Count – Do you keep an eye on how many new customers you add Weekly? Monthly? How does it compare to the same time last year?

AOV – Are newly acquired customers buying at the same level as they did before? Consider tracking AOV or basket size for newly acquired customers to focus on the value of your incoming pipeline.

2) Engaged Customers – For B2B retailers with long buying cycles, it can be difficult to know if non-buying customers are considering you for this cycle’s purchase. How can you know if you are in trouble before it is too late? Add a metric related to the behaviors that let you know your customers are considering you: browse activity, call activity and/or email engagement can give you a quick read on your customer base.

3) Clearance/Full price trends – Is your newest merchandise appealing to your customers? Add a dashboard metric to track the % inventory sold that is full price versus clearance. Catching a merchandising issue by quickly noticing a decline in the full price mix of your sales can be critical to addressing the issue.

4) Retention rate – Compared to the same period last year, have your steady customers come back to purchase from you again? Are your customer retention rates growing or slipping?

5) Rating and Review Trends – How are your online ratings versus this time last year? Do you track positive ratings as a % to total sales? Consider adding a dashboard metric that lets you know how customers are experiencing your offering – and how that perception has changed over time.

Hansel Group Marketing helped one eCommerce retailer identify an alarming trend in their data. Despite revenues looking healthy year-over-year, the mix of merchandise was changing. Newly acquired customers were more likely to be loading up on clearance inventory than the great new products coming to market. Adding a dashboard metric about the sales mix gave an important clue to the merchants that the new merchandise was not delighting the customers, even though overall revenue and items per order were healthy.

If you’re interested in turning your marketing data into actionable insight, contact us today to learn how Hansel Group Marketing can scrub your data and create a marketing database and custom dashboard for your online or direct marketing business.

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