Join me on Thursday, February 8th at 11:00 AM PST when I'll be delivering the BtoB webcast 5 Insights from Online Marketing Experts.
In this webcast, you'll learn how to:
- Profitably acquire new customers through search marketing automation
- Develop a consistent marketing measurement framework
- Leverage KPI dashboards to keep your finger on the pulse of your performance
- Segment your customers and leverage cross channel data to target them effectively
- Build profitable, long-lasting relationships with your customers
Update: 2/14/2007
The webinar went very well. Most exciting was the fact that there were lots of good questions from the audience. Many of the questions centered around KPI's. I came away from that with a very clear picture of the lack of clarity that still exists about what KPI's are, let alone which ones we should be looking at as marketers and business owners.
Here's what you need to know about KPI's:
- They are KEY performance indicators, not just any-old-performance-indicators. Internalizing that distinction will help you weed out data that's good to have, but doesn't belong on a KPI scorecard or dashboard.
- They should reflect performance of the drivers of your business that you can influence. As an e-commerce marketer or business owner, I can influence the number of people arriving at my site, the quality of people arriving at my site, the % of those arriving who buy or transact, the average value of a transaction, the % of buyers who become repeat buyers, how many visits it takes before a shopper becomes a buyer, etc. And all of these things roll up to impact one number - revenue - the ultimate KPI. If you're not tracking revenue associated with your financial services products, you should be.
- If it measures something you can't influence, it isn't a KPI. For example, your business may be influenced by the weather. But you can' t influence the weather, so average daily temperature wouldn't be a KPI. It may be good supporting data that helps you make sense of of your business, but it isn't a KPI.
- KPIs will vary based on the model of your business, and what drivers influence your business. There are no universal KPI's, though there are many similarities across consumer products retailers and banking/financial retailers.
- KPIs shouldn't change unless your business model changes. Remember, they measure the drivers of your business. There aren't too many drivers when you boil it all down...we're talking 5 to 10 metrics.
- Everyone across the company should be looking at the same KPIs. Everyone has the ability to influence these 5 or 10 drivers of the company's business. That doesn't mean that a site producer won't have a scorecard tuned especially for his needs and his area of influence...he will. But his scorecard is subordinate to the corporate scorecard with the highest-order KPIs.
