Find the metrics that are right for your company

Marketing is part art and part science -- with the metrics providing the scientific proof of success. How do you know which metrics are right for your company to be measuring? Daniel Cotlar, chief marketing officer at Blinds.com, shares how they determine which numbers to measure against.

Robin: Hello and welcome to this edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies. I’m Robin Tooms, vice president of strategy at Savage, and my guest again today is Daniel Cotlar, chief marketing officer at Blinds.com. So Daniel, welcome back to Brandonomics.

Daniel: Thank you, Robin.

Robin: Well I am so glad to talk to you about marketing. So marketing obviously is kind of part art and part science, but the science part comes in with metrics. So how do you use metrics to drive some of your decisions?

Daniel: People say metrics and they think a lot of times very broad looking backwards, how many visits did I get or things that are broad. You really have to take some time to identify the KPIs, the key performance indicators, what matters to you, and it’s gonna be different for any business. So ours we look at things like people proceeding through the funnel of conversion into becoming buyers, or we look at the gross margin per visitor. So every business is gonna be different. Another thing about metrics is sometimes you can be scared off of looking at things that can’t neatly fit into a spreadsheet like customer feedback. What we do for that is we get thousands of emails every week from customers explaining what went well or what went poorly, and in our marketing meeting every week somebody’s tasked with going through all of them, finding a pattern and talking about things that he’s hearing or she’s hearing. So don’t be afraid of anecdotal data that you hear from customer service and putting it together into kind of a pattern.

Robin: So you mentioned kind of finding out things that are important to you, so what would be an example of a task that you would follow and measure to find out what’s important in the process?

Daniel: You don’t expect to get married on the first date and you shouldn’t expect and you shouldn’t only measure the entire conversion rate of your website, how many people bought. There’s a lot of micro conversions, things that are “How well did that date go?” It might be, if you’re a business-to-business company, did they download a white paper? Measure your conversion rate of that small micro conversion, and continually improve the experience there. For us, it’s things like, did they schedule an appointment for a face-to-face meeting? Did they order a sample, free sample? How about signing up for a newsletter or reading a review or watching a video? All those things are micro conversions and you want to measure those, and together that makes a good experience.

Robin: Thank you for reminding all of us of the things that we should be paying attention to on our website. Appreciate it.

Daniel: Thank you.

Robin: This has been another edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies.

 

Blinds.com is the largest online window covering store in the world. At its heart, it is a passionate customer service and marketing company that connects the community to home décor trends and high quality window coverings. It’s been featured in numerous magazine, newspaper and radio publications.

https://www.blinds.com/