Marketing return on investment (ROI) is a measure of how much you gained or lost as a result of your marketing efforts, so increasing your ROI is crucial for marketing success. While every business wants to increase marketing ROI, figuring out how to do so can be tricky.

Whether your goal is to increase your sales, attract new customers or build brand awareness, you need the right strategies to maximize your return on investment (ROI).

There are several strategies to consider when you’re looking for methods to increase your marketing ROI, and this article will discuss many of them.

• What is ROI in Marketing?
• How do I Improve my Marketing ROI?
• What Type of Marketing has the Highest ROI?
• How do you Maximize ROI?
• What is a Good ROI for Marketing?
• How is Marketing ROI Used by Companies?
• What has the Biggest ROI?
• How can ROI be Improved in Digital Marketing?
• What Causes ROI to Increase?
• How do you Drive a ROI?
• Why is Marketing ROI Important?

What is ROI in Marketing?

ROI in marketing is a measure of the profit or losses resulting from your marketing efforts. You can calculate ROI by dividing your total costs by your net profit, which is your costs subtracted from your profit.

You can then multiply by 100 to get a percentage. The formula looks like this:

((Profit – Costs)/Costs) x 100 = ROI

So, for example, if you invested $1,000 into a marketing campaign, and you earned $2,000, your calculations would look like this:

(($2,000 – $1,000)/$1,000) x 100 = 100%

Your marketing ROI tells you how much money you’re making or losing due to your marketing efforts. It effectively shows you whether your marketing tactics are working.

How do I Improve my Marketing ROI?

To increase marketing ROI, you need to either increase your income or reduce your costs. If your marketing efforts are inefficient, you may want to work on reducing your costs. Otherwise, it’s a good idea to focus on increasing your income.

Read Also: How to Boost Engagement Rates

Keep reading for some specific tips on how to maximize ROI for your digital marketing efforts.

1. Determine Your Core Metrics

Core metrics for any marketing campaign include sales, leads and traffic. To determine how effective your marketing messages are, measure your conversion rate, bounce rate and unique visitors after every campaign to see how they behaved.

If your conversion rate is up or your bounce rate is down, you’ve likely executed a successful campaign. This information provides data on how to further improve your ROI, meaning you can refine your marketing tactics to continue appealing to your target audience.

2. Try Different Marketing Channels

Test different campaign channels to determine which ones work best for your business. Some key marketing channels to try include:

• Email
• Social media
• Direct mail
• Digital advertisements
• Video marketing
• Content marketing
• Mobile marketing

Once you know your most effective marketing channels, you can focus on them to increase your ROI.

3. Experiment

Experimentation helps you identify opportunities for growth. A simple test-and-learn approach can provide many valuable insights. For example, you can try taking one action with a target group and no action with a control group.

Then, compare the results from each group to determine how well the action worked. It’s a good idea to stay focused on one area of experimentation at a time to help ensure that your process and results are as clear as possible.

4. A/B Testing

A/B testing involves modifying one element of a campaign and comparing its performance to a previous campaign. This method allows you to see which campaign strategy works best so you can determine the ideal way to optimize your marketing efforts. Elements that could benefit from this testing include:

• Calls to action
• Headlines
• Fonts
• Website layout, design and copy
• Navigation links

5. Survey Sampling

One of the best ways to determine what your target market wants is by asking them directly. You can survey a sample of consumers to get answers to questions that inform your marketing efforts. There are many sampling methods to choose from, so you can select the one that works best for your specific needs.

6. Focus on Your Spending and Income

When determining how to improve your ROI, you must focus on how much you’re spending and bringing in. Analyze your spending and income at each stage of your campaign to discover areas where you’re spending a lot but getting poor returns. You can also compare your core metrics from each of your marketing channels to determine if you’re getting the results you want.

What Type of Marketing has the Highest ROI?

In the Neilson study, Email marketing has the highest ROI of 675% when compared with any of the other major marketing methods. An email marketing campaign with a business’s website can be utilized to great success in order to increase sales and profits.

With this as a baseline figure, and remember this number the highest compared to everything else. Thereafter within email marketing as a stand-alone science, there are entirely different applications to consider, which achieve varying degrees of success, starting at the lower end – all be it – of the highest returning sector.

The same Nielsen report found that marketing effectiveness could be increased by 30-40% by taking a closer look at the specifics of each marketing method and adapting the strategy to focus on strengths and minimize weaknesses. Their guiding principles for maximizing ROI are:

1. Consider both the short and long term impact of a marketing campaign
   Different marketing methods excel in different campaign lengths. Some methods will take a few months to reach peak effectiveness while others will hit a peak immediately. Ensure you run and measure the campaigns for the right length of time, erroring on the side of measuring for too long a time period.
2. Choose the right portals and campaigns for online success
   Understand your target market on the web and focus on creating content and advertising to attract that specific demographic to your site.
3. Influence target groups with magazine advertising
   Magazines have a clearly segmented target group (unlike newspapers, which are read by a wide range of readers). If a magazine’s target group overlaps with your business’s target group consider advertising with that magazine.
4. Focus on campaigns that generate the greatest halo effect
   Marketing methods that increase sales are what really matters at the end of the day. Focus on methods that increase sales the most across the highest number of product lines.
5. Drive brand loyalty with TV advertising
   TV/video ads are the best way to communicate brand information and build brand loyalty. For small or very targeted budgets try Youtube video ads.
6. Create synergies across media to produce additional uplift
   The messages that your marketing is deploying must be consistent across all mediums. Implementing multiple media at the same time can cause a higher ROI.
7. Create brand awareness through in-store advertisements
   An excess of discounts and promotions erodes a brand’s quality over time. Focus on advertising your brand within your own store or website in order to continue to grow brand awareness instead of using discounts to drive sales
8. Invest in your customers with premium gift packs
   Investing in your most valued customers has a short term cost but can have a long-term gain. Increasing the perceived value of your services to your long term customers is essential to keeping those customers. This can be done easily by offering additional services for free with a purchase or just giving them a small gift like a box of chocolates just to say thanks for being a customer.

How do you Maximize ROI?

People are a business’s most valuable asset, and their efficient productivity, knowledge, expertise, and happiness are what drive profit. If you value them and have a human capital strategy that helps you appreciate and engage them, you’ll get a better return on investment. 

Everyone in your organization needs to be set up for success. This means aligning people around a common vision, giving them concrete goals to achieve, and rewarding and recognizing their achievements.

1. Hire the Right People

You must first hire the right people because hiring the wrong people will lead to high rates of turnover and diminished employee morale which can be detrimental to and expensive for your company. 

Look for individuals whose personalities align with your company culture, so you know they’ll fit right in, get along well with others, and be team players from the start.

Sometimes, this first step is asking good questions to better understand their personality and values. 

When you hire people who share your core values, you understand how they will contribute positively to your company with their behaviors, relationships, knowledge and expertise, and service.

If you invest in HR or a recruiter, having a human capital strategy and hiring great employees that want to stay will save money in turnover costs.

2. Align Everyone Around Common Goals

Have you thought about where you want your organization to be in one, three, or five years?

Although a lot can happen between now and then, and big-picture goals can change, you should still take the time to think about your company’s future and set long-term goals. You can then work backward from your goals to see how each employee fits in their role. 

Without a primary target, you’ll find it difficult to create a business strategy, develop an operating framework, and rally your employees around a common purpose. Without long-term goals, you’ll struggle when you try to determine what your short-term strategy should really be.

Employees with a clear line of sight and specific goals understand how their objectives directly affect their team, department, and the overall company goals.

Write it down. Written goals dramatically increase the chances of achieving those goals. According to a Harvard study, setting goals and writing down your objectives increases your likelihood of success by 80%. Moreover, companies that had written goals showed a 700% increase in growth versus those that didn’t.

3. Provide Specific, Short-Term Benchmarks That Contribute to Company Success

Now that you’ve looked past the challenges you’ll be facing in the upcoming quarter and have taken the time to consider the future of your organization, you can return to thinking about short-term goals on a monthly or quarterly basis.

Keeping your long-term goals in mind, take a look at your business at the department level to determine what each department and employee should be doing to move you closer to your lofty long-term goals. How can your whole company work as a team to execute your strategy and meet benchmarks that inch you closer and closer to the big picture?

This concept is called Cascading Goals: assigning smaller (but related) goals to departments, teams, and individuals that all contribute to achieving the overall operational goals.

Driving alignment between an organization’s goals and employees’ roles, Cascading goals are a crucial part of a lean business model and help ignite employee engagement and productivity.

Work with your department leaders to establish short-term goals for each department and employee to work toward. These goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely (SMART) so that they provide a clear objective for your employees and cohesively move your company in the right direction.

4. Track Your Progress and Measure ROI

If you can’t measure and track your progress, then you won’t even know when your company and employees are moving in the right or wrong direction. While business leaders need to keep an eye on a variety of financial reports, trends, and key performance indicators (KPIs), there are some that can be used specifically to track the progress and ROI of your human capital strategy.

On your company’s People Scorecard, you’ll find a variety of charts and key performance indicators that will help you create policies, goals, and reward/compensation/recognition systems that actively engage your employees.

To measure your ROI on human capital, track the following KPIs:

• Revenue Per Hour Paid – Reveals the total revenue generated by your people. This can also reveal your cost of turnover and onboarding efficiency.
• Labor Cost Per Hour Paid – Reveals total labor costs, including “hidden” expenses.
• ROI on Total Labor Cost – Shows how much revenue labor costs generate.

Additionally, with the right accounting and time tracking systems in place, you can answer questions including:

• Net Income Per Employee – How healthy is the ratio of your people to your profits?
• Compensation Per Employee – Watch how this number shifts when you begin directly rewarding people for the profits they generate.
• Compensation as a % of Revenue – How much income does each $1 of salary generate? How do your compensation standards compare with others in the industry and are they in line with your organization’s goals?

Over a longer period, you can observe trends in each of these metrics to determine whether your organization is moving in the right direction in terms of its people. Use the information to improve your human capital strategy and measure the quality of changes as they’re implemented.

5. Reward and Recognize High-Performers

When your KPIs reveal exceptional performance and achievement from individuals in your company, never miss the opportunity to exercise positive reinforcement.

The best way to encourage high productivity is with a combination of monetary compensation or bonuses and public recognition among the employee’s peers.

The numbers speak for themselves: a study from the Society of Human Resource Managers about workplace engagement found that companies with employee recognition programs and good career development guidance saw a 63 % increase in employee productivity and a 58% percent return on their profit margins. [3]

Implementing this kind of recognition and reward system as an integral component of your human capital strategy not only encourages high-performing employees to continue working hard but also motivates their peers to step up their efforts as well. 

When your employees constantly feel motivated to increase their productivity and do the best they can during their billable hours, you’ll see an uptick in your ROI (even if you spend a little more on bonuses).

6. Learn How to Strengthen Lower Performers (and Do It)

When you can identify the top performers in your company, you can also see who could be doing better. Take a look at exactly what your most productive employees do during the day. What’s their process? What’s their schedule like? What strategies do they use to meet their goals?

The impact will be seen on your bottom line. Research shows that on average, U.S. employees in small businesses waste more than 2 hours a day at work. That amounts to almost $700 billion per year in lost productivity! Keeping them motivated and adding even as little as 15 minutes of productivity per day can add thousands of dollars to your profits. 

With the model put forward by your top performers, you can transform your just-okay employees into good employees and your good employees into super-star employees. Then you can watch your ROI improve.

What is a Good ROI for Marketing?

The rule of thumb for marketing ROI is typically a 5:1 ratio, with exceptional ROI being considered at around a 10:1 ratio. Anything below a 2:1 ratio is considered not profitable, as the costs to produce and distribute goods/services often mean organizations will break even with their spend and returns.

However, costs and overhead lower than 50 percent of the sales price can see profits on their efforts at lower ratios. Because every organization is different, it’s important to consider the unique overhead costs, margins, and industry factors and standards unique to the sector.

How is Marketing ROI Used by Companies?

At an organizational level, calculating return on marketing investment can help guide business decisions and optimize marketing efforts. For marketers, understanding the ROI generated by a campaign helps:

Justify Marketing Spend

CMOs consistently list allocating resources and budgets for marketing efforts as a top priority. However, in order to secure budget and resources for future campaigns, it’s crucial that current marketing spending and budget be justified at the executive level.

To do so, marketers need to accurately calculate the ROI their marketing efforts are delivering for the organization. For example, they should know if native ads are driving conversions and ROI, while display ads fall flat. From there, budgets can be properly allocated. 

Distribute Marketing Budgets

Across online and offline channels, there’s a myriad of possible marketing mix combinations. However, any combination of campaign initiatives requires funding. That’s why understanding which online and offline efforts drive the most revenue is a must for properly distributing the marketing budget.

Measure Campaign Success and Establish Baselines

A crucial part of any successful marketing team is the ability to measure campaign success and establish baselines that can serve as a reference for future efforts. With this in mind, accurately measuring ROI helps marketers do both.

By understanding the impact of individual campaigns on overall revenue growth, marketers can better identify the right mix of offline and online campaign efforts. Moreover, measuring ROI consistently allows marketers to establish baselines to quickly gauge their success and adjust efforts in order to maximize impact.

Competitive Analysis

Tracking the marketing ROI of competitors allows marketers to accurately understand how their organization is performing within their specific industry. For example, marketers tracking publicly available financial data can estimate the ROI of competitors and adjust baselines to reflect these estimates—helping to keep efforts consistently competitive. 

What has the Biggest ROI?

When investing, everyone wants maximum returns. Weighing in only to make 1% to 2% on your money just isn’t as exciting as getting back 8%, 10% or more, and during periods of inflation, high returns become even more essential (as it will make that 1% to 2% a net negative).

The question, of course, is which investments with high returns are the best? In my experience, after analyzing the data, there are five you should consider. (It’s worth imparting the disclaimer here that past performance is no guarantee of future returns. All investing involves risk of loss.)

1. Real estate syndications

A strategy in which a number of investors pool resources to purchase a property, real estate syndications are arguably one of the best ways of achieving high returns. Investors typically get about 8% to 10% per year, plus they enjoy appreciation as the building increases in value (while appreciation varies, it’s not uncommon to see increases of 30% to 50%).

Since the investment period is five years, these instruments have the potential to double your money or more: A $100,000 investment may make $50,000 over five years in rental income, plus $50,000 in appreciation.

2. Rental real estate

Another way investors can get into real estate, and which also has substantial ROI potential, is through rental properties. People often buy single-family homes or condos and rent them out; some will even rent out rooms or floors in their primary homes. The ROI depends heavily on the market, but typically you’re looking at somewhere between 5% to 10% per year.

3. Real estate investment trusts

Another excellent way to start investing in real estate, REIT companies trade on the major stock exchanges and typically have various real estate assets. They tend to pay reasonably good dividends, with yields that can rise as high as 5%.

4. Cryptocurrencies

People seem to love or hate cryptos, with little emotional space in between. Those who believe in them have driven up the prices substantially, to the point where Bitcoin — at least as at May 2021 BuyShares article was published — had outperformed major indices by 70 times. And some still believe crypto has a long way to go, so there remains a significant profit potential even though prices have gone up substantially.

5. Startups

If you love the thought of taking a chance on awe-inspiring ideas and new technology, investing in startups is both a risky and potentially profitable activity. There are plenty of new ones forming every day tackling some of the world’s gravest challenges, and most need funding and guidance to achieve success. If they work out, these companies can result in substantial equity gains.

How can ROI be Improved in Digital Marketing?

As a metric, ROI is simple; it is the cost of carrying out an activity versus the resulting outcomes. While the theory of ROI is straightforward, measuring it – and knowing how to grow it – pose an altogether different challenge. In this blog, we’ll explore some important ways marketers can boost ROI from their digital marketing efforts.

Know the Value of Data

Understanding the value of the data you collect is the foundation to figuring out how to use it for analysis and planning. However, many organizations underutilize analytics with regard to digital marketing.

According to research by Forbes, only half of the marketers regularly practice data-driven marketing to individualize marketing messages and offers while just 39% of organizations capture the business benefits realized from taking action based on customer data. When it comes to company executives, only 3% view proving the effectiveness of marketing to be a top priority.

These are sobering statistics to consider given the volume of data generated in a single minute and are counterintuitive to the finding that individualized marketing is a priority for 92% of executives as determined in the same research. In addition, the majority of marketers today (87%) consider data the most underutilized asset in marketing organizations compared to 46% in 2013.

So the question is, how do we reconcile the desire for individualized marketing with the need to collect the right data, analyze it for business benefits, and measure its effectiveness in the pursuit of better ROI?

Be a Marketing-Driven Organization

It’s no secret that today’s digital technologies enable marketers to explore customer data in greater detail than ever before – not only for prospecting but for ongoing customer engagement.

That’s why forward-thinking executives across the enterprise support data-driven processes that emphasize marketing principles throughout the sales pipeline. Unlike the outdated view of marketing is a luxury add-on, these efforts will facilitate the growth of personalized interactions that many views as a hallmark of tomorrow’s marketing-driven companies.

Establish ROI Goals

When establishing a business goal, it helps to keep the acronym “SMART” in mind, a reminder to make sure the goal is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Setting an ROI goal is no different, yet it can be difficult to determine.

In general, a good marketing ROI is 5:1, meaning $5 in sales for every $1 spent. A ratio of more than 5:1 is considered strong in most industries, and 10:1 is exceptionally high. Achieving a ratio higher than 10:1 is possible but rarely anticipated.

Remember, your target ratio depends on many factors, including your industry, cost structure, and other variables. It is best for organizations to aim for success without setting unrealistic expectations and ensure the analytics chosen focus on the impact of your company’s marketing efforts on achieving or exceeding the target ratio.

Beware of Overvalued (or Undervalued) Metrics

Some metrics tend to be overvalued, particularly when it comes to social networks. While it is easy to measure ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ on Facebook, they have no direct impact on revenue.

However, it is also a mistake to discount them entirely as likes, shares, and comments can improve your brand’s standing in Google and other search engines and result in more users finding your site. This is particularly true for nascent content teams, who must often rely on non-traditional metrics to determine what factors contribute to their success.

Identify and Seize Opportunities

Once numbers are crunched and tools are in place, recognizing and acting on opportunities is key. A case in point is Kraft Foods, which set out to reinvent its marketing strategy after splitting from Mondelēz International in 2013.

According to Bob Rupczynski, Vice President of media, data, and CRM: “We knew back then that data was going to be the backbone of how we were going to move forward … We had a tremendous amount of data, but yet we weren’t leveraging the information that consumers had entrusted to us to make the relationship deeper.”

By leveraging more than 34,000 attributes across 100 million online visitors each year, Kraft identified more than 800 consumer marketing segments to use as a guide when purchasing ads. The returns proved to be amazing not only in sales, but also in click-through rates, interaction rates, and search behavior.

Use Predictive Modeling

Predictive modeling is an important tool for both measuring and increasing ROI. Once used only to project conversions or sales prior to launching a marketing campaign, these analytical tools enable marketers to use internal, website, and social data to interpret specific and contextual information about individuals and companies. This enables the development of appropriate marketing activities based on these insights.

Add Marketing Automation

As digital channels multiply and data gets more unwieldy, CMOs increasingly look to marketing automation tools to stretch their marketing budgets. With a predicted market worth $5.5 billion by 2019, these tools can boost ROI by enabling marketing teams to use every dollar wisely.

By performing repetitive tasks, managing email lists, housing documents and images, and performing a wide variety of functions, marketing automation helps organizations carry out complex marketing campaigns even with limited resources.

Experiment and Make Adjustments

As with all marketing activities, ongoing measurements are important to determine what is effective and when changes are needed. Did the revenue jump following the last marketing campaign, or did it remain stagnant? What other factors might be at play? Are there unique website visitors, qualified leads, or other important data points following the latest promotion? All these factors play a huge role in the success of campaigns and ultimately ROI.

For Lenovo experienced similar success by harnessing data as they recognized the need to leverage the volumes of data collected on a daily basis. To that end, the company formed an analytics team in the e-commerce unit to analyze marketing data from more than 60 sources worldwide.

By analyzing the perceived quality of online interactions, Lenovo was able to meet promised shipment dates and leverage feedback about products through direct contact and social media. This way the organization can identify where customers find value.

An example of this was evolving to offer Lenovo’s tablet using a Microsoft operating system in addition to its Android version. By identifying the customer’s desire for a Microsoft version, Lenovo was well placed to act on the data and reap the rewards of a version they may not have considered otherwise.

What Causes ROI to Increase?

A number of factors can affect and even completely determine the results of your return on investment. The largest of these is market share, because the higher the share of the market, the higher your profit margin tends to be.

As an average, companies that have a market share above 36% earn more than three times as much as businesses with less than a 7% share of their market. At least three contributing factors come from high market share; economies of scale, market power and better access to quality management and talent. The latter can increase your ROI as high-performing managers are most often successful at achieving large portions of their respective markets. 

The second largest factor that will determine your company’s ROI is the quality of your product or service. When customers are satisfied with what is being provided, they are more likely to return and use your company again. The ideal outcome is for a company to have both a high market share and to supply a superior product or service. 

Improving your return on investments can be achieved in several ways, from generating more sales to raising prices. Also, improving your overall customer experience can go a long way to increasing your ROI on any investment your business may need to make to increase sales.

When you choose to begin a plan for improving your company’s ROI, it is important you have clearly defined outcomes you wish to reach first. It is also recommended that there are milestone goals in place, in order to help you increase the payback on the different initiatives you have set up and to keep you working towards the end result you have planned.

How do you Drive a ROI?

Let’s dig into 6 ways you can use your engagement program to drive ROI.

1. Use unique customer profiles to understand customers and alter behavior

A high-performing customer engagement platform builds unique customer profiles tailored for individual customers. It uses heaps of real data that allows you to get to know your customers and their behavior across multiple business locations.

Data captured in an individual’s profile will tell you:

• Lifetime value. What their individual long-term worth is to your business.
• Average spend. How much they spend each visit.
• Visit frequency. How often they are purchasing at each location.
• Competitor benchmarks. How the customer interacts with and purchases from your competition.
• Itemized purchases. What they purchase down to SKU level detail and when they buy it.
• Comparative insights. How your customer is interacting with your competitors.

You can use this data to increase check sizes and keep customers coming back. A powerful customer engagement platform allows you to instantly send automated, personal, targeted specials and rewards based on customer spending habits.

A platform like Thanx automates personalized rewards to help turn a coffee-only sale into a breakfast order. It can send real-time mobile offers to help convenience store owners get customers from the gas pump into the store and any other specific use case you can imagine.

Additionally, data living in customer’s profiles can help implement the home stretch effect to grow revenue. The home stretch effect occurs when a user knows they are close to a reward and spend more as a result. This effect is proven to boost revenue for businesses of all kinds.

2. Reward VIP customers to drive ROI

20% of a business’ customers drive about 80% of revenue. Let that sink in. Understanding your customers also means understanding which customers make the most impact. Your most important customers, or VIPs, are the customers that:

• Come in the most
• Spend the most
• Are the easiest to get to return
• Are the easiest to change their behavior

You want to thank and engage your VIP customers by rewarding them.  A data-driven platform like Thanx will identify your VIP customers for you and allow you to reward them based on spend thresholds. Spend thresholds capture your most loyal, highest-spending customers tracked across multiple months. VIP programs based on spend thresholds increase average check size by an average of 17%.

3. Use winback campaigns to engage customers and reduce churn

One of the most complicated realities offline merchants face is identifying and battling churn. And since its 50% easier to sell to existing customers, you want to make sure your customers are having positive experiences and coming back to your locations.

Maybe you have a weekly customer that hasn’t purchased in months or a daily regular who hasn’t spent any money in over a week. Without data-driven customer engagement and loyalty, you’d have no way to identify, understand, and alter that customer’s behavior.

There’s a solution. Implementing a data-driven winback campaign pieces together the churn puzzle. Winback campaigns can automatically reach out to churning consumersand provide a special offer that encourages them to come back.

By tracking engagement data, we use AI to automatically recognize behavior anomalies, identify churning customers, and offer them value that keeps your business top of mind.

Winback campaigns:

• Generate 6x more ROI for your business
• Drive 49% of lapsed customers back into your store

You can reach out to churning customers through the Thanx app or an email campaign to give a personalized offer that entices them to return.

4. Collect real-time customer feedback

Every customer experience counts, and there’s no better way to allow your customers’ voices to be heard than asking them about their experience in real-time. Not only does feedback surface real business issues, but we’ve found that customers who take the time to write feedback spend more.

Collecting customer feedback and replying to critical responses have been proven to grow incremental revenue by 21%. Use a platform that allows you to:

• Collect customer real-time, in-app
• Respond personally and privately to feedback instantly through the app
• Collect Net Promoter Score (NPS) feedback to manage customer satisfaction
• Reward users that give feedback

Not only does instant feedback give customers a way to connect directly and privately with you after their experience, it keeps negative responses away from social and feedback sites like Yelp that have the ability to impact your brand. Allowing a customer’s voice be listened to strengthens their relationship with your business.

5. Utilize Timeshift to help alter customer behaviors

All businesses experience slow times. What if you could drive more traffic to your least busy business hours? Using Timeshift, you can.

Timeshift drives traffic to slow business hours by sending targeted offers to members. It can increase spend at all times of day and impacts long-term behavior and customer lifetime value. Timeshift incentivizes revenue-generating behavior from loyal customers. You can track the campaign in real-time, monitor how behavior is changing, and drive valuable, incremental traffic.

To give you an example, imagine you are a full-service restaurant and bar. Bill with the Sacramento Kings hat and laptop always comes in on Tuesday and Thursday for a 5 pm happy hour IPA- and you know this information from data collected in your engagement platform.

Time shift allows you to send Bill a reward for $5 off of an appetizer while he is physically sitting in your bar. Bill is thrilled about the deal and heads to the dining room for an appetizer, entree, and second brew.

Time shift users experience 18% more traffic during days that used to be considered slow. Driving traffic to off-peak hours is just another way your customer engagement program can truly transform your business.

6. Integrate customer engagement with your email marketing

Email marketing is another impressive channel that you’re likely already using to connect with your customers. Email marketing brings an impressive ROI of $40 for every $1 spent – so seamlessly integrating email with your customer engagement data is a fantastic way to efficiently drive revenue.

Emails targeted to loyalty program members generate:

• 40% higher open rates
• 22% higher click-through rates
• 29% higher transaction rates
• 11% higher revenue per email
• Up to 50% higher response rates than regular promotional emails

There are different loyalty powered email campaigns that offer personalized, targeted rewards to customers. Using email, you can offer a member double progress toward their next loyalty reward for any purchase they make this week. You’re able to put out targeted campaigns that offer rewards for a customer coming in 6x during a slow business month.

Why is Marketing ROI Important?

Marketing ROI is the return on your investment from your marketing strategies. It measures the money received minus the initial investment and is used as a barometer for how well a marketing tactic performs. Use marketing ROI to determine the success of your marketing efforts as it relates to your overall goals whether driving sales, gaining leads, increasing engagement or any other growth-driven marketing tactic.

Read Also: Fostering Increased Business Visitors

Measuring marketing ROI is essential, as it provides insights into the effectiveness of your marketing. It defines (with real numbers) the success of each campaign and empowers you with data to help you steer your marketing campaigns in a forward direction. Knowing your marketing ROI also places accountability on you to drive the company toward growth and not waste even one dollar. 

If you know your marketing numbers, it will also help you make key marketing decisions like determining how much marketing budget to allocate to each strategy. Calculating this blindly will set you up for failure. Tracking your marketing ROI shows you which strategies are working, and this information can inform your marketing budget allocation so you can re-invest in the tactics that are bringing you a return and pull back on the weaker strategies.

Finally

Note that marketing ROI should also include increase in engagement, brand awareness and customer satisfaction. True marketing ROI looks beyond just revenue numbers and considers long-term benefits as well. Identify the metrics you will measure before you execute each marketing strategy. This way, when you launch your tactics, you will have an idea of what constitutes a positive return, as it may be different for each company.

One low-cost, highly effective marketing strategy that often yields a positive marketing ROI is voice broadcast. Use voice broadcast to call all of your customers simultaneously with your promotional and engagement messages, and cut costs by saving time and resources on manual calls.