While your business may not have a crystal ball to predict the success of future campaigns, you can leverage something even more powerful—data-driven decision-making.
By utilizing data to drive decisions for your business, you can create more informed strategies, improve metrics, lower costs, and establish greater transparency and accountability for your team. Leverage data to fuel your company’s growth with this four-step process.
Begin with the end in mind. Before diving into the data, determine what your business hopes to achieve. From driving conversions to maximizing your ROI and retaining existing customers, defining your objectives will uncover which data points will be most relevant when measuring success.
For example, if your business is searching for ways to drive conversions, valuable metrics could be the click-through rate on a landing page, time spent on site, and cost per acquisition. On the other hand, if your business focuses on customer retention, important metrics may be the time between purchases, product return rate, and engagement metrics such as email open rate and click-through rate.
By establishing your objectives and defining success for your team, you can start your data-driven decision-making process knowing you’re on the right track!
Your business may be already collecting a fair amount of data; however, it’s difficult to interpret data accurately because it’s scattered across various platforms within your MarTech stack. Data integration is taking data from two or more sources to provide a more unified and easily sharable overview.
Consider how you can combine analytics tools to produce a unique dashboard and source of truth to pull insights from. Integration solutions connect your software ecosystem by syncing information from two or more inputs. Products such as Hubspot’s Operations Software lets you easily sync, clean, and curate customer data and automate business processes in a way that’s easily digestible for your entire team.
By utilizing data integrations and custom reporting, your team can save time and avoid frustration by increasing confidence in their reporting and decision-making. By allowing everyone to access information, team members will be able to collaborate more effectively, see opportunities and risks on the horizon, and understand why decisions are made.
Once you’ve identified key metrics, it’s easier to work toward optimizing your approach actively. By demonstrating how your data-driven decisions impact objectives, you can demonstrate value and establish a baseline for continuous improvement.
Utilize visual representations such as charts and graphs that can easily be shared with key stakeholders. Graphical representations and easy-to-read dashboards will help you demonstrate why you’ve chosen to make certain decisions and how those decisions impact your objectives.
As you begin to understand how your decisions impact the data and the overall success of your campaigns, don’t be afraid to test variables to what performs best continually. A/B testing can allow you to quickly uncover insights and make decisions with your initial goal in mind. Setting up an A/B test to begin testing variables can be a great way to understand what decisions will improve your overall metrics quickly. Set up an A/B test to evaluate subject lines, landing pages, button placement, headlines, etc. When conducting A/B testing, isolate a single variable to test; testing numerous variables at one time will skew results, hindering growth.
Save time and increase efficiency by utilizing data to inform future campaigns. After collecting your data, spend time evaluating metrics and comparing them to your initial hypothesis. By comparing your data to previous metrics, you can begin identifying patterns that may provide valuable insights into the direction of future campaigns.
Having a robust and organized data source that your team can quickly and easily pull insights from will allow you to continue crushing your goals by improving your metrics and lowering costs. Need help understanding how to use data to drive success for your business? Contact the GROWL team today