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As a B2C marketer, what’s your number one goal?
According to a report by Content Marketing Institute, 3 most cited goals by B2C marketers are:
This is where a B2C marketing report and marketing meetings come in. They help you meet your business and marketing goals and keep you on track for success.
Because, like every other business, if you’re trying to get a slice of the $3.53 trillion global e-commerce industry, it’s more important than ever to track, analyze, and improve your marketing campaigns and activities.
In this comprehensive guide, we’re going to discuss,
Ready? Let’s dig in.
Netflix.
Amazon.
Walmart.
Warby Parker.
Sephora.
Businesses that sell their products or services to consumers directly are B2C businesses.
B2C businesses usually have a broader audience, but their audience is a little fickle and can change brands and businesses based on price and better deals, etc.
As per Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer report, 79 percent of consumers say the quality of customer experience offered by a B2C brand is just as important as its services and products. B2C businesses need to ensure they’re on their best behavior and constantly improve their services to retain their customers.
Email, organic social media, paid advertisement, and SEO are some of the top marketing channels for B2C businesses.
A good number of B2C marketers are also investing in content marketing to reach their target audience. According to a study, 60% of the most effective B2C marketers have a documented content strategy and that number is only bound to increase with the passage of time.
Related: B2C Lead Generation Strategy: Key Differences and Best Approaches
Every B2C marketer needs to invest in marketing tools that’ll help them not just save time and energy, but also drive sales. Some of the important marketing tools that need to be a part of every marketer’s arsenal are:
Related: 80 of The Best, Easiest-to-Use, and Most Valuable Marketing Tools from 2018
In today’s digital world, marketing reports are crucial. According to Databox’s state of business reporting, marketing is the most monitored and reported operation.
“Reports are essential to track your performance and progress over time”. Says Dennis Bell of Byblos Coffee. “It helps you assess your activity and evaluate the results. It will ensure that you understand your marketing activities better and improve your future performance.”
And how often should you track and analyze these marketing reports?
53.7% of our survey respondents mentioned sharing and analyzing these reports on a monthly basis with their companies.
So if you’re confused what to include in your B2C marketing reports, read on. 22 marketing pros weigh in on the most essential things to include in a B2C marketing report.
If you want to discover how visitors engage with your website, and which content drives the most engagement and conversions, there are several on-page events and metrics you can track from Google Analytics 4 that will get you started:
And more…
Now you can benefit from the experience of our Google Analytics 4 experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template showing the most important KPIs for monitoring visitor engagement on your website. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in marketing reports, and best of all, it’s free!
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your Google Analytics account with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
Editor’s note: Are you tired of sharing links and documents containing performance updates back-and-forth? With Databox, you can display beautiful dashboards on your TV so that performance is visible, easy to understand, and actionable for everyone.
“One of the top metrics that will matter to you and your client is the ROAS (Return on Ad Spend).” Says Meara McNitt of Online Optimism. “It’s important to make sure that you’re making actual value with your campaign, plus that you are reaching consistent numbers and not seeing a drop in results.”
Joe Czarniecki of Efferent Media agrees and shares his experience as a Social Media Strategist and Ad Buyer. “Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) is a highly important metric to include in a high-level B2C marketing report. ROAS is measured by calculating the total revenue generated from your ads (your return) divided by your total ad spend.
First, you’ll need to set up your Facebook pixel properly for conversion tracking. Then, you’ll need to make sure you have access to certain sales data and how much revenue can be attributed to your ads.
If you work in-house at a business, this shouldn’t be a problem. On the other hand, you are an agency that’s running ads for another business, it is vital to have a system in place for your client to report back to you on sales. This is because you need to know whether your ads are responsible for revenue to measure against ad spend. Overall, when ROAS is used correctly, it can give you the best idea if your ad campaigns are profitable.”
Related: 18 Ways to Optimize Your Facebook Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
Alexandra Zamolo of Beekeeper explains, “One important thing to pay attention to is social engagement. It’s imperative to get a conversation going with your customers, preferably about your products or services. And the more engagement you receive, the more likely more people will see your post, information or other content.”
Top Vouchers Code’s Catriona Jasica agrees and says, “Different social media indicators such as likes, comments, follows, and shares play a vital role in making up a certain brand image and attracting customers towards the brand and its products. And so, optimization of the social engagement of consumers with the brand pages is extremely important as a marketing strategy for a company, which in turn, can drive colossal sales.”
Valentina Lopez of Happiness Without stresses the top one important metric to include in high-level B2C marketing reports is, “social engagement”.
Lopez says, “Nothing speaks louder about how your customers see your brand than social engagement. Recommendations, likes, comments, shares, and overall social media presence are key metrics to track in your marketing dashboard.
As a business owner and chief marketing officer who’s tried different marketing strategies, I learned that investing in social engagement returns good results for the company and its brand.
In fact, our customers’ buying decisions went 76% higher when I started monitoring their recommendation rates from family and friends. Optimizing and measuring our social engagement has brought us 45% higher website traffic, 87% higher conversion rate, and 90% customer retention.
Social media shouldn’t be the sole indicator of a business success, but turning a blind eye to it, especially in this digital time, would be a mistake. I share a monthly marketing report within our company as it delivers more insights and a steady connection with sales.”
Dan Hunter of AuthorityTattoo shares, “Followers, likes, comments, shares, etc. are social engagement indicators that can play a huge role in how your brand is perceived by first time viewers. Higher engagement usually gives the idea of high quality and authenticity which impacts the decision of the buyer.
Every social media platform has different indicators that need to be measured, but you can use them to find your combined social engagement rate as well as an individual rate for each platform. This will help you understand which platform is more effective for your business as well as how much of your audience is responsive on each platform.”
Hunter adds, “Once you know your weaknesses, you’ll have an idea about what you need to improve.”
“In a high-level B2C marketing report, you don’t just want to focus on vanity metrics such as followers, engagement or visits”. Says Jonathan Aufray of Growth Hackers Marketing. “What you want is to show that the marketing campaigns you’re running help the company move forward, move the needle.
Don’t just highlight the number of sales, highlight the growth in terms of sales. For example, the number of sales this month compared to last month, this quarter compared to last quarter, this month compared to the same month last year or this year compared to last year.”
According to Paige Arnof-Fenn of Mavens & Moguls, customer satisfaction and specifically net promoter score are essential metrics to include in a B2C marketing report.
Why?
“Because repeat customers and referrals are key, the most cost-efficient way to build any business and scale your brand in my experience. Would they recommend it to others? This is important to understand for insights into why your brand matters.” Explains Arnof-Fenn.
Andrea Loubier of Mailbird recommends business owners to ask themselves, “What are the conversion rates from site traffic? It is fantastic to see your site traffic begin to rise, but are you actually experiencing conversions from this? If not, then you’ll want to take a look at your page content and how you are presenting your services or products.”
Melanie Musson of Veterans Auto Insurance also adds, “A high volume of traffic is a great indicator of your SEO success, but a low conversion rate may indicate that you’re failing to clearly offer what your audience needs.” So you need to track and analyze your website’s traffic conversion rate in your B2C marketing reports.
Daniel Snow of The Snow Agency is of the same opinion and shares, “Traffic is extremely important without it, you have no way of knowing whether a website user wanted to buy something or whether their visit was accidental. By monitoring website traffic you know which promotions have generated the most traffic back to your website, how engaged visitors are with your content, and what routes they have taken through your website with a tight attribution system. Attribution transforms traffic into people and provides you with the insight you need to improve your brand experience. That is why most businesses will profit from tracking at least simple metrics on their pages, such as traffic and conversions using a marketing automation dashboard.”
“While there are many metrics that are key to any business’ success that are key to any business’ success, customer lifetime value is perhaps the most critical lever every business owner has to assess and optimize the health of their business.” Says David Kolodny of Wilbur Labs.
“It is critical because any company’s growth is directly limited by how much they are willing to spend to acquire a new customer. If your customer lifetime value is $100, you should never acquire a customer for $101 – and because your customer lifetime value is the defining limit on how much you can spend to acquire a customer, it should be top of mind for every business looking for ways to grow.”
Steven Lord of Digital Next believes that customer retention scores are often overlooked by businesses.
“Unlike B2B where successful marketing is typically rewarded with lengthy retainers or monthly contracts, B2C companies face much shorter relationships with customers.
When broken down by acquisition channels (e.g. SEO, PPC, Social) reporting on customer retention becomes extremely powerful. For example, you might acquire the most customers from Google Ads campaigns. However, at the same time, these customers may be the most fickle. As such, you can now look at your Google Ads campaigns from a different lens. What can you do to retain the quantity but increase the quality of new customers?
Retention metrics are measured with a simple formula. Let’s say you start the month with 100 customers acquired from previous Google Ads campaigns. During this month you gain 10 new customers and lose 20 customers. As such, you finish the month with 90 net customers who engaged with your business via Google Ads.
This results with the following retention rate: ((90-10)/100) * 100 = 80%.
Since returning customers are typically more valuable than new customers, this is an essential metric to track for any company. Through a birds-eye understanding of customer lifetime value, filtered by marketing channels, your business becomes well prepared to make informed decisions about where to budget future investments.” Explains Lord.
Bradley Keys of PatchMD explains, “The CPA indicates how many new customers we get in relation to our marketing efforts. This metric gives valuable insights that help us shift our marketing budget in the right direction and determine if our current campaigns are costing more than we expected.
As such, this metric not only tells us the results of our current strategies. It also helps us figure out our next step, optimize our efforts, and plan for the future.”
Tyler Burch of Samaritan recommends tracking Customer Acquisition Cost as it helps your brand determine if the marketing channels being used are effective. Burch shares, “There are countless brands generating millions in revenue that are not profitable because they can’t figure out how to market cost-effectively.”
Darren Litt of Hiya Health believes it’s all about cost-per-acquisition (CPA).
“And while it’s best not to overreact if you see daily jumps in your CPA, you definitely need to track it every day.” Explains Litt.
Andrei Vasilescu of DontPayFull agrees with the three and adds that Cost Per Acquisition(CPA) must be included in a B2C marketing report.
“CPA or Cost Per Acquisition is one of the most important key performance indicators in B2C marketing reports. It is calculated by dividing the total cost of a specific marketing campaign by the new customers gained from the same campaign. The investment of any marketing campaign is wasted, if you fail to attract new customers. CPA tells you how effective your marketing efforts are. If your CPA is too high, your marketing investment is not producing many results. In other words, you should take immediate action to alter your marketing strategy to get more new customers.”
Easily track this metric with the help of a marketing dashboard software.
Ashley Monk of It Media shares, “Though sometimes overlooked, this universal metric is essential regardless of campaign objective.”
According to Matt Erickson of National Positions, one of the most important metrics to include (or request) in a marketing report are conversion metrics.
“At a high (and granular) level, ‘conversion’ is a high-impact metric for measuring the effectiveness of marketing activities.
Investing in SEO?
How many new conversions is your web traffic resulting in?
Running email campaigns?
Open rates are great – but are they resulting in any additional conversions for your brand?
If you are an agency that wants to promote your strategies’ effectiveness – be sure to include conversion metrics.” Explains Erickson.
ResumeLab’s Bart Turczynski believes CPL to CLTV ratio trumps all other metrics when B2C sales are concerned.
“This is of paramount importance to us, as we always want to ensure the quality and longevity of our leads. Ideally, we strive to see this ratio (between Cost Per Lead and Customer Lifetime Value) continuously decrease.
Because it means that either the CPL is going down or the CLTV is going up, both being wonderful news for us and our business. So although this metric might seem atypical and unique, we highly recommend it to all organizations, as it gives a high-level purview into the lower end of your funnel and encapsulates the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.”
Related: 18 Tips for Increasing Your Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)
For Dmitry Suponau of Number For Live Person, repeat purchases rate is one of the most important metrics for B2C sales. That’s just the number of customers who bought more than once divided by the overall number of customers.
“A significant portion of the sales is generated by second-time purchases. Tracking this metric allows me to see how effective my marketing campaigns that target current customers are. I put a lot of pressure on those marketing activities, as they seem to be the most reliable methods of generating sales.” Says Supanau.
He further explains that to increase that rate, he frequently does “drip email campaigns, try to re-engage my customers and reward them for frequent purchases with promotions, discounts, free content, etc.”
Jane Flanagan of Tacuna Systems believes funnel conversion rate is a grand summary of a number of other variables and an important part of a B2C marketing report.
“Each of the different variables at different levels of the funnel is important and broad, and so, have to be independently measured, analyzed, and worked on. The different metrics include click-through rates, lead conversion rates, add to cart rates and many others.
These rates have to be worked on individually if there’s to be an overall increase in the funnel conversion rate.” Opines Flanagan.
And as Jane Franklin of F&G Funnel Mechanics aptly says, “High-level reports should be short and focused. The board needs fast, to the point of insight to help them take the business’ temperature and decide the course they are plotting. It really depends on the B2C business model as to which is the most important metric and the time frame of that report. The marketing team will have daily reports to manage live campaigns, but high level reports are more likely to be monthly to show progress.”
Gathering all data in one place manually for a B2C report can be overwhelming and time-consuming. If you need to create comprehensive business reports, we recommend trying out a dashboard reporting software like Databox.
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Maham S. Chappal is a content writer for SaaS and marketing brands in B2B. She’s been published in several leading publications including Social Media Examiner. She loves writing in-depth, research-backed content that drives traffic, increases brand awareness, and boosts ROI. When she’s not writing, you’ll find her engrossed in the latest John Grisham novel. You can find her on LinkedIn or on mahamschappal.com
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