Stephanie Donelson

I’ve been in many marketing meetings where we go around the room and report on our prospective channels. Someone reports on social media and content marketing performance, someone else tells us how email marketing is performing, we take a closer look at website metrics, and so on.

But what if we took that data and looked beyond the channel that’s reporting it? Because, that data might not just be relevant to the channel that reports it.

We can learn a lot about our customers or prospects by combining our marketing data and analysis and looking at the bigger picture instead of smaller pieces of the puzzle.

In this post, I’m diving into how we marketers can be better at understanding our own data and figuring out how we can use website metrics to improve email performance, or if we can improve social media posts based on email data.

Let’s look at the different buckets of data we typically pull and identify ways to use that data more creatively.

How to strategically use your omnichannel marketing data

Website

These metrics and data points can be found in Google Analytics.

• Bounce rate: Bounce rate is always a metric that should be tracked by referral source so you know if your emails or social media posts match the page you’re sending people to. Does the intent match? Does the CTA match what the user finds on the page? Bounce rate can also help you better understand if your content is engaging enough or if you’re grouping related content well enough to keep people clicking onto new pages.
• Time on site: How long is your audience’s attention span? Is your content holding their interest? If it is, this could help you test new formats in email marketing or social media, or even testing new formats on your website like more video content.
• Referrals: Are your emails really good at sending traffic to your site but your social media isn’t getting clicks? Study your email copy, subject lines, and CTAs to see what you can replicate over on social media.
• Geography: Your website visitors’ geography can help you craft better messaging by localizing it. You could even segment your email marketing lists for those located in certain areas (especially if you’re eCommerce) and run localized sales that catch their attention. For example, if I ran an online store and found most of my people were in my own state of Colorado, I’d run special 303 sales or Colorado Gives offers, and so on.
• Time of day: Like the point above, this metric can help you know when your audience is active online and when you should be hitting their mailbox, when you should be posting on social, and when you should be actively running paid ads.
• Keywords: Chances are you know what your keywords are that you’re optimizing your site for, but by seeing what website visitors are using to find your site on their own, you can start working those words into your emails and social media to reaffirm they’ve found the right brand for those needs.
• Audience interests: Lastly, having a broader understanding of your audience can help you be more creative with your content. Say you’re noticing that your audience is really in DIY. You could create a whole series of content around how super users are using your product and how others can learn to do it too. Or, maybe your audience is really into entertainment, like movies and TV. Create new content that capitalizes on a recent release or trending TV show but that’s about your product, service, or brand.

Email

These metrics can be found in any email marketing platform you use.

• Open rate: By studying your open rate, you can better understand what copy engages people or piques their interest. You can learn if your H1s or H2s should be question-based, stat-based, or plain messaging. Subject line studies can also help you craft more engaging social media posts by copying the best performing subject lines into social posts or ads.
• CTR: The click-through rate (CTR) can help you understand what CTAs work or how the verbiage drives people to click which can be translated to paid opportunities and social media.
• Clicks: Narrow down your email click data to buttons or images to better understand how to optimize your social and web content. Are people clicking the first available thing? Maybe your web content’s CTAs need to be more visual.
• Unsubscribe: Unsubscribe rates can help you understand if your content is missing the mark or your content is viewed as valuable. If people are choosing to un-engage with you on this channel, chances are they might start leaving others as well or be harder to win back. See if there was a shift in tone, messaging, or offers that forced people to unsubscribe.

Social

These metrics can be found in each social media channel’s analytics section or is part of reporting through a marketing automation tool.

• Engagement rate: Take a look at your best performing content on social media and see how you can replicate that in an email or through paid channels.
• CTR: What wording or CTAs made people click? Think that would also work in blog content, emails, or paid ads? I think it’s worth testing!
• Day of the week & time of day: I already mentioned time of day in the website metrics, but many social reports include day of the week too. That data can be great when figuring out when to do mass email sends that will have the best open rates or when you should be publishing new content to your website.
• Follower growth rate: Contrary to unsubscriber rates, you can track your follower growth and the type of content you’re posting to see what’s driving this increase and offer similar content in an email format to grow that list.

Paid

These metrics can be found in any paid platform’s analytics section.

• Impressions: While clicks is a much better metric for seeing if your ads are working, impressions shouldn’t be ignored. Impressions tell you what keywords are being searched for (meaning your ad was shown) and what extra content you could create for your site or share on social media.
• Clicks/CTR: Same as the other channels, by disseminating what encourages clicks on paid should translate well on other channels.
• Conversions: What ads lead to a conversion through paid? Those CTAs or copy belong in nurture emails! Or that ad should be recreated on social channels!

Do you have any tips for using your marketing data across different channels? Sound off in the comments below!