Emarsys launches a new tool that delivers the next generation in benchmarking.

The need for a new kind of benchmarking

Benchmarking is not a new subject. The practice of looking at industry averages of key performance metrics is something all marketers have grown accustomed to over the course of our careers. We’ll download the latest report and check to see if our open, click-through, and unsubscribe rates match up.

If our metrics align with the industry average (or are even better), then we’re doing pretty great at our jobs, right? Unfortunately, no. When it comes to marketing results in the business, leadership doesn’t care how great our email channel is performing unless we can show how it is impacting the actual business objectives and results.

But every benchmarking report or tool focuses on these operational, channel-specific KPIs. They show the averages of how each channel is performing, but give us no way to connect the performance of these channels with business objectives.

As marketers, this should be unacceptable. As a department, marketing is constantly on the chopping block and constantly being scrutinized about the work we’re doing. Why? Because we report our success based on these operational metrics. We have trouble connecting what we’re doing everyday to the overall company objectives. And as mentioned above, if we can’t show leadership how our work is impacting business results, they don’t care. We need to find a way to make this connection or risk becoming obsolete.

It’s time for a benchmarking tool that gives marketers access to strategic KPIs and helps them show how the work they are doing day to day actually impacts the greater business objectives. Not only open rates or click-through rates, but customer growth, profitability, and revenue.

Enter Benchmaketing.io, a new free tool by Emarsys, that’s built on two decades of e-commerce and retail data from real customers who have achieved their goals with Emarsys.

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How Benchmarketing.io is different from other benchmarking tools

Benchmarketing.io is a new kind of benchmarking tool meant for strategic marketers, NOT just channel managers. Unlike other benchmarking tools that only give you access to operational and channel-specific KPIs, this tool gives you access to the strategic KPIs that make an immediate impact on your business.

Other benchmarking reports show you results like open, click-to-open, and conversion rates for individual email campaigns like welcome series, browse abandonment, and post-purchase. It’s great to compare those metrics to understand how your email channel is performing and how and when customers interact with you, but how are those results impacting your overall business goals?

Benchmarketing.io gives marketers access to the KPIs that actually impact the important growth goals of your business — like revenue growth and customer growth. This tool allows you to view different metrics like Active Buyers, Customer Lifetime Value, and Average Order Value and see how you compare with leaders in your industry.

More than just an index of metrics, the tool gives e-commerce marketers a view of what other strategic marketers are looking at when it comes to strategies and how they are performing and executing those strategies.

Now you can understand what KPIs align to business goals and how you can make an impact on your business by identifying opportunities for improvement on a strategic level.

How marketers can use Benchmarketing.io

Marketers know how important benchmarking can be for gauging their performance and identifying growth opportunities (if you didn’t, you wouldn’t be reading this article). But as we’ve mentioned, most benchmark reports and tools give you access to flat, one-sided data. This limits the opportunities you have to improve your performance.

Rather than making an impact strategically on the overarching business goals, you’re stuck improving your channel metrics with little insight into how you can connect your day-to-day work to the real business objectives.

With Benchmarketing.io, you can start to make those connections immediately with the ability to filter your benchmark results by industry within the e-commerce space. From there, marketers are presented with several options for how to look at the metrics that matter most to their business goals. These dashboards include Essential Metrics, Revenue Growth Strategies, Customer Growth Strategies, and Channel Metrics.

By breaking down metrics into these different dashboards, marketers are able to look at benchmarks on a strategic level. You’ll see the goals that are most important and the strategic metrics you should be measuring yourself against to grow your revenue and active customers.

This allows you to identify opportunities (low-hanging fruit) — things you aren’t doing and things you could be doing a whole lot better. You’ll also have the opportunity to start identifying the strategies that positively impact your business objectives and tie them to the tactics that can deliver those results and connect your day-to-day activities to company goals.

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Benchmarketing.io in action

Let’s break down how easy it is to use Benchmarketing.io and take a look inside the metrics and results provided in this new tool.

First, you’ll be asked to select your industry.

select your industry

As you can see in the graphic above, by selecting an industry, you get the option to break the benchmarks down further with even more strategic metrics specific to your business.

From there, your benchmark reports are populated using real data from key businesses in your industry. But instead of just seeing the metrics for email or SMS campaigns, you get several dashboards that you can click between to get a breakdown of strategic KPIs that tie back into important business goals.

The Essentials Metrics dashboard (pictured below) helps you identify the most commonly used KPIs of the most successful companies in your industry. These can include a mix of strategies, giving you a picture of what others in your industry are doing.

Essentials Strategies

When talking about strategic business objectives, revenue is probably the first thing that comes to mind. Understanding how any facet of the business is affecting revenue is likely a huge priority for leadership — and it should be for you too. If marketing is driving a yearly 10% increase in revenue, wouldn’t you want to be able to identify and report on that success?

The Revenue Growth Strategies dashboard (below) identifies the KPIs that most improve revenue growth. This dashboard drills down into more strategic KPIs. You can view how businesses in your industry align to metrics like Average Order Value (AOV) and Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV). Are you seeing a yearly 10% increase YoY? Do you have access to the data that shows you what your CLTV is?

Seeing KPIs and strategies tied to revenue can help you begin to understand the metrics most important for growing your business — and help you show how valuable the work you are doing is to the business.

Revenue Growth Strategies

As marketers, we know customers are an important part of our business growth. But we tend to focus more on the acquisition of a customer than the retention of one. But that should change — customer retention should be a top focus in your marketing strategy.

The Customer Growth Strategies dashboard (below) identifies the KPIs that will help you improve customer growth and focus on retention. These metrics include things like First-Time Buyers to Repeat Buyers and Retaining Active Customers.

This view enables you to start thinking more in depth about what customer retention strategies you already have in place, which ones need improvement, and which new strategies could best fit your business.

Customer Growth Strategies

As I’ve already said, marketers need to focus more on strategic metrics, but that doesn’t mean operational metrics don’t have their place. It’s still important to have a snapshot of how your campaigns are performing (and how they are performing against others in your industry) to make improvements and identify areas of opportunity.

The Channels Metrics dashboard (below) helps you elevate each marketing channel’s performance so you can improve engagement with your customers. This view gives you the traditional KPIs many of us are used to seeing in a traditional benchmark report.

The benefit of seeing this view against the other strategic views is that you can start to identify what strategies can work and connect them with the channels where your audience responds best.

Channel Strategies

Outside of viewing the different strategic KPIs that marketers need to focus on, Benchmarketing.io also provides you with a methodology for planning your strategies. It gives you a framework for identifying the strategies that will make the most impact on high-level objectives by comparison with other e-commerce businesses performing with those strategies.

The Advisor tab within Benchmarketing.io is this methodology coming to life for marketers. After you pick a high-level objective, it connects you with the strategies that will have the most impact. From there, you can see which tactics can help improve the performance of those strategies.

Strategy

By seeing which strategies and tactics roll up into each objective, you can begin to understand how the work you’re doing (or not doing) affects real business results and identify actionable ideas and opportunities for your marketing plan.

Final Thoughts

If I haven’t said it enough, let me say it again. Marketers need to stop focusing on purely operational, channel-specific KPIs. These metrics are dated and only give us one small view of a very large picture.

We need to start uncovering the strategic KPIs that actually affect business results. Marketing leaders and marketers who embrace this new approach to measurement and benchmarking will become an invaluable, strategic asset to their organization. Those who continue to stick with operational KPIs will find it harder and harder to prove their success.

Benchmarketing.io provides you access to the right data that enables you to benchmark your business against the industry’s most strategic KPIs and uncover how these metrics impact your results and drive success. It also gives you the framework to build a foolproof marketing plan that connects your day-to-day marketing activities with the high-level business objectives your CEO cares about most.

To build Benchmarketing.io, Emarsys used two decades of e-commerce and retail data from real customers who have achieved their goals with Emarsys to identify the KPIs that impact businesses most. Our goal is to help marketers like you understand which KPIs are most important to your business, how you compare to others in your industry, and how you can connect them to your day-to-day activities.

Ready to learn more about the strategic KPIs that impact your business the most? Sign up for Benchmarketing.io. It’s free and only requires an email address!


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