Recently I attended a Google Engage Master Class where I learned a lot of new and interesting things about online marketing.
One of the topics presented by David Booth of Cardinal Path covered how to set a KPI Framework for your Customer Lifecycle. The content of this article comes from and was inspired by that presentation.
Your website can play an influential role at each stage of the Customer Lifecycle:
- attracting new prospects
- getting them engaged with your business
- converting them to customers
- retaining customers
- turning customers into advocates.
Some of the ways that you can measure the impact of your website at each stage of the Customer Lifecycle are detailed below.
Attraction
You can measure the number of visits to your website from different sources of traffic including:
- Offline marketing that promotes your website address or encourages people to search for your business
- Search engine marketing (pay-per-click advertising)
- Search engine optimisation
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
- Referral traffic from links on other websites.
Once visitors have arrived at your website, the design, copy, images, offers and other factors impact whether or not people stick around to keep reading, or if they bounce away. The percentage of people who leave without clicking on anything is measured as Bounce Rate.
Engagement
Once you’ve attracted the visitors, in order to get results you need them to get engaged, otherwise they abandon your site and bounce away, as mentioned above.
Here are some of the ways you can measure engagement:
- Video Views
- Number of views of key product / category pages
- Social Shares
- Downloads of documents.
Conversion
Once your web visitors are engaged with your business, aim to get them to Convert by taking a key action such as:
- Buying a product
- Submitting a Contact Us form
- Calling with an enquiry
- Downloading a whitepaper
- Signing up for a demo.
Retention
Once you’ve acquired new web visitors, aim to retain them by encouraging them to visit your website and convert again in future.
Retention can be measured by:
- Newsletter subscribers and unsubscribers
- Repeat purchasers
- % Returning Visitors.
Advocacy
The ultimate relationship with your web visitors and customers is when they become Advocates, recommending your business to others.
You can measure Advocacy by:
- Number of reviews and the rating received in the review
- Number of social media shares
- Offsite social mentions
- Sentiment/ brand analysis.
Consider how your website performs in these areas.
Are there changes you can make to your online marketing plan to improve the way your web visitors respond at each stage of the Customer Lifecycle?
Until next time
Melinda
Melinda aka Mel is a Premier Google Partner, AdWords & Analytics Consultant, Speaker and Trainer and co-owner of Click-Winning Content.
Mel provides results-driven services to Australian businesses and is committed to never using an acronym without explaining it first. She also likes grand slam tennis, cracked pepper and Melbourne sunsets.
Please connect at the links below.
