Making the most of marketing metrics

As the end of the year quickly approaches, we find ourselves once again looking forward to all of the exciting opportunities and projects we can approach in the coming year. While you’re planning out your marketing calendar and activities for 2019, take some time to consider how you’re using your metrics to track your success. After all, what gets measured gets our attention, and there’s plenty of insight to be gained from the things we’re measuring.

You can do your future-self a lot of favors by making sure your metrics make sense for your marketing goals and those for the credit union as a whole. When you focus on the things that truly matter, you and your department move the vision forward.

Here are some ideas for leveraging your metrics to gain useful insights.

Looking for Growth

Membership growth is on plenty of minds right now and there are ways to help you understand your unique situation better.

  • New target member: Your target member is the person who is the best-fit for your credit union based on its purpose and offering. When you look at your new member numbers, you can also identify how many of those new members fall within your target group.

This can be a more meaningful identifier for longer-term success than just new members for two reasons. One, your target member is most likely to be satisfied with your partnership and become advocates for you. Two, you can add poor-fit members (say, through indirect lending) and you may never make them advocates, even with lots of costly onboarding activities.

Keeping track of how many new members fall into this category is helpful because it can also confirm whether or not awareness and branding activities are reaching the right audience. Then, seeing their engagement and product mix over time gives you an idea if you’re adequately serving their needs.

  • Attrition: It doesn’t help to bring in 10 new accounts when you lose 20 in the same time frame. Get to know the ins-and-outs of closed accounts. That includes how long they’ve been a member, what kinds of accounts they had, and their reason for closing.

    With some more information about your recently closed membership, you can piece together what it would take to keep more of them at the credit union. It may be as simple as educating members about convenience products when they are in the process of moving.

Looking for Engagement

Engagement also feeds into the growth of your credit union. Not only can you add more members, but you can also ask for a larger share of wallet from the members that you already have.

  • Product and Service Adoption: Knowing the percentage of members using your products helps you identify which ones are popular and which ones would be improved with more marketing activities.

In addition to looking at the penetration for a product or service, get to know how they

are related within a membership. Some products and services are clearly complimentary

– like your bill pay with your checking accounts. Try to find connections that may not have been as intuitive.

Maybe you have a specialty product that acts as a gateway. You gain enough trust with the member through that products that they want to bring over more of their business. That’s where you want to pay attention and use the knowledge to drive additional business with both current and potential members.

Looking for Efficiency and Efficacy

  • Channel Performance: Knowing how your channels perform can help you in a few ways. For example, you can see how effective you are with your email campaigns by looking at opens, click throughs, and resulting new accounts or services.

Additionally, you can see where you are getting the most activity within your membership. As you identify a best-fit member, you’ll also want to know where you can reach them. Seeing your channel performance can help you more easily choose the right channels when you’re creating campaigns. You’ll also be able to see where you should invest time, resources, and technology.

  • Sales Conversions: Especially when you’re using multiple channels or when you have hand-off points in our process, tracking the flow of the member or potential member is key.

    Look beyond the number of leads successfully converted and you can find out where your process can be improved. You may find simple adjustments – like the fields in a form or the layout for a landing page – make a huge difference in your outcomes.

Traps to Avoid

Don’t waste your time tracking things that don’t matter or that don’t give you valuable information.

  • Skip Vanity Metrics. It can feel good to see likes to your Facebook page or that an event was well-attended, but what did it do for your business? Instead, look for results, not activity. Engagement and conversions tell you whether or not the activity is working and is worth the effort that you put in.
  • Don’t Settle for What’s Easy. It can be tempting to track the things that are easy to track, even if they don’t tell us what we want to know. Whether it’s a high-level metric or something short-term for a specific campaign, identify what you really care about. There’s always a way to get the data, you just need to design it.
  • Quality Over Quantity. It takes time to manage data, so go for quality rather than quantity. Just as you don’t want to settle for the easy things, know what you want to determine and keep your focus on that data.

Metrics can be fun and they most definitely can be useful. Be smart and selective to make the most of your time, get the information you need, and be more impactful with your marketing.

Jennifer Laud

Jennifer Laud

Jennifer is a credit union marketing consultant and the owner of Jennifer Laud Consulting. She has a background in strategy and a passion for positioning credit unions to find their ... Web: www.jlaud.com Details