Are You Reporting Ready?
You’ve been planning all year for this moment. The largest retail shopping event of the year is right around the corner. Black Friday & Cyber Monday is always big for your brand, but with a pandemic keeping most people out of the malls and behind their screens, it’s expected to be even bigger!
Your promotions are locked in. Your Facebook ads are tee’d up. Your affiliates are ready with their early access deals. You. Are. Ready.
But are you prepared to track all of the KPIs necessary to optimize your campaigns on the fly and ensure that you’re gaining insights for future enhancements? With all of the additional budget that you’re pouring into the holidays, it’s important to be set up to effectively track downstream customer metrics such as lifetime value in relation to their acquisition channel.
THE CHECKLIST
1. UTM Parameter Check
Confirm that all of your paid media ads are setup with cohesive UTM parameters to track acquisition source, medium, campaign and ad details back to your analytics platform. This will ensure that you can effectively assign customers and orders back to their appropriate promotional channel and ad strategy. Be sure that you are also tracking details such as promo code and landing page if you are testing different strategies.
2. Connect Ad Spend to Ad ID
Be sure that you are dynamically passing any key parameters through your tracking links that will allow your analytics platform to tie ad spend back to granular ad details. For example, we are able to connect Facebook Ad Spend and Customer Lifetime Value back to the Campaign, Ad Group and Ad if the destination URLs are set up to share Facebook’s Ad ID.
3. Dig Deep - Go Beyond ROAS
Ensure that you have a clear way to track the most important metrics back to the acquisition details, such as UTM Parameters, Promo Codes, Ad Spend and Initial Product Purchased. This will allow you to gain deep, meaningful insights into what marketing strategies drive the greatest impact for your brand.
For example, you may drive a large volume of high ROAS customers through deep discounts on a deal site; however if these customers are only in it for the deal and churn out after their first month, they may be much less meaningful to your business than those who cost you a little more to acquire up front, but were more aligned with your brand’s value proposition and drove a greater CLV.
A few of the most important metrics for subscription companies to consider are:
- Customer Lifetime Value – How much revenue are these customers driving for your brand over time?
- Retention – How long are customers from different cohorts sticking around?
- Churn – When and why are customers leaving?
- CAC – How much does it cost you to acquire a new customer?
- CLV/CAC Ratio – Are your acquisition strategies profitable?
4. Know Your Attribution Model
Leverage attribution insights to help understand the true customer journey. Deal and Loyalty sites may drive a lot of your volume during BFCM, but can you really give them 100% credit for introducing your brand to the customer?
Many brands have found that it can take up to 15 different touch points to convert a customer in today’s landscape. Without insight into first and last click attribution models, you will not have the tools needed to understand which partners were instrumental in introducing and then ultimately closing the deal with the customer. These insights are incredibly valuable to help assign a realistic value and return against the ad spend invested during Q4.
5. Identify Gift Givers vs Receivers
Develop a re-engagement plan for gift givers and receivers. Since the holidays is all about sharing the love through gifting, these customers can easily become one and done purchasers. Be sure that you have a clear way to track both gift givers and gift receivers in order to remarket to them after the holiday season.
Understanding their motivation and role in the gifting is also important when developing this strategy. For example, your follow-up messaging to a loving aunt buying a kid’s subscription product for her niece will need to be very different than your messaging to the mother of the child who is genuinely enjoying the ongoing value that your gift delivers to her kiddo.
Feeling Ready?
If you don’t have a tool that allows you to easily measure these critical KPIs for your business to drive actionable insights and strategies, Sublytics can help. We plug directly into your eCommerce platforms and paid marketing channels to present pre and post-sale data and marketing specifics, such as ad spend into one easy to use platform. This way, you can identify your most valuable customers and optimize your efforts accordingly. The best part? Integration takes less than 5 minutes.
Don’t just take our word for it, checkout what our customers are saying:
Using the Sublytics CLV reporting, we’ve been able to deploy new promotions and upsells focusing on driving more subscriptions, which has increased the ratio of new subscribers to 65% from 50% within two months. All the while making sure that our customer acquisition costs are aligned with the overall lifetime value of the average customer.
We’re wishing you happy, healthy and successful holiday season!
