As marketeers we are all about improving ROI – but focussing on vanity metrics like OR, CTR, CTO and ROI may be negatively impacting your overall business revenue.

Here we explore why focussing on any one of these metrics in isolation may not only be bad for tomorrows revenue – but not the best decision to make for short term revenue either!

Whist this might sound counter intuitive, it is not the metrics themselves that are to blame. Moreover, it is how we are interpreting them and the measures we deploy to resolve them.

Take something as simple as your engagement measures – we need to ensure that our engagement levels are high, as this indicates a highly engaged and loyal customer database – right? There is nothing wrong with this statement – you should endeavour to make your marketing as engaging as you can, continually looking to test and learn to deploy the most responsive campaigns to maintain customer interest and keep your brand top of mind.

Where the logic becomes flawed however, is when you start to remove unresponsive customers from your campaigns because you think that this suggests they are no longer buying from your brand.

There are 2 problems with this approach:

1) Not all customers have the same purchase frequency

2) Not all purchases are trackable back to an individual

Purchase Frequency

How often a customer purchases from you is generally linked to how often they will engage with your content. If your average purchase frequency is 4 times a year (which obviously hides the spread of actual purchase frequency) then why would you expect that person to visit your retail store, website or open an email weekly? If this is the case – then removing these people from your regular campaigns will mean that you are not keeping your brand top of mind and not available to them when they next purchase – surely this will have more of an impact on your bottom line than the budget saving in not sending the communication? 

Purchase Trackability 

Unless you only sell through one purchase channel or have a truly integrated database and omnichannel customer experience; where you can recognise a customer in every channel and record this back to their profile (which many organisations don’t). It is probable that you are only seeing a snapshot of the engagements made with your organisation. Moreover, unless you have found a way to join these profiles up across sales channels – you are likely underestimating an omnichannel customer’s worth.

Conclusion

If you want to drive optimum value from your customers, we would suggest that you do not exclude them from your outbound programmes to save your vanity metrics. Rather that you ensure you are communicating with all your customers as often as you can afford, to ensure that you are present when they next choose to buy. If this means segmenting your audience by recency of engagement or channel and reducing comms frequency, or swapping channels for those less frequent responders to balance budgets – this is a far more cost-effective solution than losing the opportunity to influence future purchase revenue! 

Further Reading

If you would like some pointers on how to re-engage non responders then read this article which explains why you should never say goodbye and how to engage CRM marketing non responders.