The ROI Calculator - maximising ROI on digital campaigns
With real estate now marrying the worlds of traditional and digital together to see business results and gain a competitive advantage, it may be difficult to understand at first why something like ROI would matter.
The reason why it matters for digital agents is because it’s a way for them to really see if their marketing strategy is working. We know that,
simply put, return-on-investment means looking at what an activity will cost and comparing it to the results.
What to measure
The good news for digital agents is that with tech, it’s never been easier to keep track of metrics, most of which will be available on the same back-end dashboard. This simply wasn’t possible back with traditional methods (how do you track back a landline call or a registration form?) A few examples of important ROI metrics that agents can calculate are:
Conversion rate
studying this metric will let an agent know which channels are performing better in moving visitors down the funnel and which are garnering the most traffic.
Cost per lead
the easiest way to do this is by simple formula: divide the total marketing spend by total number of new leads, (marketing spend can also include ad spend, third party expenses etc).
Cost per acquisition
this is an important metric to calculate because it will reveal whether or not a certain tool is costing too much to acquire a client that is showing little to no business value, which in turn will affect ROI negatively.
Follow the customer journey
Attributing where buyers/sellers are coming from is very, very important. Was it from a particular campaign sent out? Was it several? Taking the time to see what this really looks like in the back-end will help agents become better at crafting better-worded search campaigns or re-allocating resources to the channels that are better populated.
At the same time, even attributing buyer source to which kind of device is increasingly valuable, because so many people are now searching on mobile devices - yet this high traffic of mobile users is still very difficult to convert for many agents (and even brands of other industries). It means there is much room for professionals to revamp and keep testing their mobile digital marketing campaigns.
Social Media
Social media marketing has its own set of ROI that need monitoring. For example:
Email
Open rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rates, click-through.
Website
landing page traffic, unique and returning visitors, total time spent on pages, page views.
Social media platforms
click-through rates, subscriptions, unfollows, conversions.
Putting this into practice
However, while all these are ways to track and measure those all-important metrics, it’s equally if not more crucial to understand not all digital campaigns are the same. Campaigns are versatile - they can aim to convert, or build following, or progress visitors down the customer journey or simply create brand awareness.
But these campaigns and the ROI they will eventually (inevitably) influence, will depend on how closely they align to the agent’s overall business goals.
So, digital agents who hope to maximize ROI on their digital campaigns should:
- Outline their business goals clearly, with each point not only having actionable steps assigned, but also have at least one form of measurement that can be applied to each of them.
- Identify the correct KPI metrics for each business goal. This is crucial because the metrics needing to be tracked for search engine ranking are not going to be the same as those tracking lead generation etc.
- Log ‘before’ and ‘after’ data points, as this will help reveal trends and patterns of how a campaign approach is going. Undesirable patterns will be easier to spot sooner than later, and agents can then quickly adjust what’s not working for them.
- Don’t be afraid to apply new trends. For example, more and more professionals are starting to embed video in their email campaigns, and seeing positive outcomes. Experian reported that embedded video email resulted in increased conversion rates by 21%. According to 2020 statistics, video in email led increased open rates by 19%, click rates by 65%, improved subscriber engagement by 41%, and even just having the term ‘video’ in the subject line alone led to increased click rates by 6%.
- Testing, testing, testing.
It may seem like there are countless moving parts when it comes to balancing the ROI/digital campaign conundrum - and there are. But fortunately for today’s digital agent, it is an area that professionals and brands of all industries are having to constantly monitor and evolve with, just as the tech keeps evolving as well.
