It’s important for business owners to scaling their digital growth to understand that metrics only show symptoms and that those symptoms become clearer through metrics over time. Key Performance Indicators (KPI) represent the positive, trend-based outcomes that businesses want to achieve within their omnichannel customer experience using the marketing insight they gain from customer engagement-based metrics. Marketing and advertising experts can use KPIs to their advantage to determine how successful each touchpoint of their business’s omnichannel presence is at converting visitors into purchasing customers. Let’s take a look at three essential KPIs business owners need to focus on to accurately determine the success of their omnichannel experience for digital customers.
Efficient KPIs – Increased Email Engagement
Readers who open your newsletter emails month after month are all but telling you in written words that they enjoy learning more and more about where your business is headed next. Business owners, especially those who suddenly find themselves working remotely with the rest of their employees, can measure their subscribers’ rates of email engagement over time as a KPI that indicates how well their brand identity connects with their followers.
And why not take advantage of email as a communication channel to keep readers up-to-date, anyway? Improving your email messaging provides the proverbial low-hanging fruit that your marketing and advertising departments need to more accurately track whether what you’re saying is interesting to people who are part of your omnichannel customer experience. Considering businesses can experience a 25% response rate on average from the first email sent alone, it should be clear that email is one of the most effective ways to stay engaged with customers.
Businesses can further test how control groups respond to different email formats and templates with A/B testing to develop messages that movace many subscribers toward their products. Business owners who are suddenly eager to start using increased email engagement rates as KPIs for their success in brand identity and messaging need to overcome a significant challenge: obtaining a tool to organize their business’s emails, their recipients, dates sent, and of course, the percentage of readers who actually opened their mail, all under a single, digital roof.
Instead of just directing their marketing and advertising teams to send follow-up emails at arbitrary intervals, business owners should use a quality sales management tool that can track statistics and email open rates to make it easier to understand what continues to resonate with their readers, time after time. From there, their marketing teams can use quantitative insight to fine-tune their follow-up emails and identify which times and days overlap best with the highest trends in subscriber readership.
Improved Overall Customer Satisfaction
Speaking of making things easier to organize, there are fewer things more important to keep track of when it comes to measuring your business’s success than your customers’ overall rates of satisfaction with your products and services. Overall customer satisfaction numbers are like an index of all of your business’s increases and decreases in its rates of customer satisfaction across its entire omnichannel presence. But rather than try to identify and improve the health of each part of their omnichannel customer experience without a strategy, business owners and their marketing departments need a method to determine and organize benchmarks that are internal to their “index” of overall customer satisfaction.
Businesses that set internal benchmarks will set goals and target problem areas to make smarter improvements to their overall customer satisfaction. One of the single best and most time-trusted tools that business owners can use to organize their internal benchmarks of customer satisfaction quickly is a customer relationship management system (CRM). Business owners need their marketing departments to use a CRM strategy that can reduce the costs of acquiring new customers and increase the lifetime value of every single one of their business’s customers. Without a CRM strategy, business owners will struggle to ascertain which customer engagement opportunities are the most attractive to pursue. An efficient CRM strategy should help you prioritize internal benchmarks and determine how well each one correlates with overall customer satisfaction.
Micro and Macro Transactions
Businesses can think of micro-conversions as benchmarks they need to hit to achieve macro conversions. They can use cloud-based invoicing tools to help keep track of revenue, quotes, and free-trial requests. Micro conversions are important omnichannel customer touchpoints that help businesses assess friction points in their buyer’s journey and identify which products already have the most traction to convert macro transactions.
Tracking micro conversions allows business owners and their marketing experts to identify the online products or services that get the most clicks and convert the highest macro transaction rates. For instance, if you notice that certain pages on your business’s website convert many downloads for product brochures or additions to wishlists, you can track those pages’ micro-transactions over time to verify whether more microtransactions correlate with more macro transactions. Now that there are more remote employees than ever who need all of their work tools constantly available online, business owners need to have mechanisms ready to keep their websites up and run one-hundred-percent of the time to ensure that visitors always have access to micro and macro transaction touchpoints.
If your site goes down or faces technical issues, you risk a negative effect on user experience that can cost your business money. Business owners must choose a web host that guarantees one-hundred-percent uptime reliability, daily backups, and fast load times to maintain customer visibility into your microtransaction touchpoints. As London-based web developer Alex Williams of Hosting Data says, “Uptime is the amount of time that you are actually hosting a website live, and actually allowing visitors to visit if your business relies on on-site sales then it’s generally wise to pay for the best uptime you can find. Cheap might not be cheerful in that instance.” Businesses need to ensure their web hosting service provides constant uptime to obtain the most accurate number of microtransactions and macro transactions to improve page performance and optimize web page real estate for customer conversions.
Necessary KPIs for Customer Experience Assessment – Summary
Businesses that are rapidly conducting more and more of their operations online need to pay close attention to KPIs that forecast success in different areas of their omnichannel presence. Ensure that you use KPIs to accurately visualize customer behavior and learn why certain experiments succeeded while others may have fallen short, and ultimately obtain a reliable method to improve your omnichannel customer experience continuously.