When it comes to marketing and advertising it can be a daunting task to find the perfect way to make sure you get to your target audience. Between taking out ads on various websites, billboards and TV commercials all the way to email marketing, how do you know which is the best for you and your business? Did you know that less and less people are watching TV today, and even fewer pay attention to billboard ads? This makes email marketing a great idea when targeting specific customer bases. But which metrics will help identify the success of a campaign? Here are ten metrics every email marketer needs to track.
Email Open Rate
This is key to know just how many people bother to open your email and take a look at it. There’s no point sending an email to someone who won’t read it, right?
Click Through Rate
This measures how many people actually click on the links in the email and follow the links to services or products. Key to know so you know the marketing is working.
Bounce Rate
This is a metric to look out for to ensure that emails are being sent to “live” addresses. After all, there’s no point emailing addresses that are no longer in use!
Conversions
This metric measures the amount of people who clicked links and followed through with an action laid out in the email – either signing up for something, purchasing an item or service, etc.
Unsubscribers
This metric will show you the people who unsubscribed to your email marketing campaign. Key to understand its impact on potential customers as well as the relevance to your email list.
Forwards/Shares
This is a metric that can help you get an idea of potential word of mouth shares/new customers.
Spam Reporting
This, like unsubscribers and forwards/shares shows you the level of email addresses which are reporting your campaign as spam. This helps remove those emails which may not realise they’re subscribed. After all, you don’t want to continue sending mail to uninterested parties.
Return On Investment
Return on investment helps track how many conversions (ie: Sales) you had through a campaign to determine if you managed to break even or make a profit off the cost of the campaign.
Engagement Over Time
This metric will help you determine if your email list is reading your emails, understanding your services and products and ultimately purchasing them. Engagement is key to creating high conversions and keeping your customer base relevant and interested. So there you have several key metrics that are important to know about when creating email marketing campaigns and why they’re important to track. Good luck!
Entertaining clients has become standard practice for most corporations, whether those clients come to you from around the world, or you travel to them. Businesses tend to understand the value that can come with entertaining clients, including completing deals and fostering stronger relationships. At the same time, it can be tricky to master some of the ins and outs of these scenarios.
There are things to consider such as how to manage technicalities like business expense receipt submission, to what would be considered professional in an out-of-the-office situation.
The following is a general rundown of what to know about entertaining clients in any industry.
Documenting Expenses
While many large corporations do have a good deal of client entertainment and outside meals happening, they might also experience fraud or inefficiency when it comes to documenting expenses. This can be avoided with a modern expense management software solution, which will not just make it easier for employees to keep track of their expenses, but it will also simplify oversight and create visibility and transparency.
If anyone in your organization is responsible for entertaining clients, a comprehensive expense reporting solution should absolutely be in place.
This eliminates the gray area that can come with using company cards, submitting receipts and defining things such as the reason for the meeting.
It’s also important that along with using a software solution, corporations have a well-defined policy in place for managing expenses and entertaining clients.
Keep It On Track
When employees are entertaining, it’s important that they keep the conversation on track with the business at-hand. There are IRS guidelines in place stipulating that entertaining has to be directly related to business.
While this can get really murky, as an employer you have to be firm on this for your own tax-related purposes, and also to make sure you avoid fraud when your employees invite clients for meals.
In general, only 50 percent of an entertainment-based meal is deductible according to the IRS, although this might not always be the case.
Remain Professional
This might seem obvious, but all-too-often employees will start to think entertaining clients is synonymous with party time. They may be drinking too much or be too loose-lipped, and not only can that be problematic for your company’s reputation, but it can distract from the business that’s supposed to be going on, and can lead to even bigger problems for example if your employee starts to become inappropriate.
It’s important that you train employees on how to maintain a strict sense of professionalism so that lines don’t become blurred when they’re out with employees.
Above all else, your goals as a corporation when you have employees responsible for entertaining clients to ensure that a system is set up to prevent fraud and abuse, and also keep costs in check. There should be precisely defined guidelines for spending, and you should encourage employees to stick with policies through the use of expense reporting software. It’s also important that clients are well-trained on what’s appropriate and what isn’t, both regarding spending and reporting, and also behavior when they’re representing your company.
