E-Commerce Marketers and MarTech — What Should I Track?
By: Trapica Content Team
Tags: Marketing, Retail Technology, Advertising, Martech, Facebook Marketing

If MarTech makes you want to hide behind a sofa, the first thing to realize is that you aren’t alone. For the traditional marketers among us, you probably yearn for the old environment when you could just print a leaflet for the local community and be done with everything. Now, you’re worried about event tracking, metrics, and building stacks.

Today, we’re going to address these three very topics. Which user events are best for tracking? Which metrics are most valuable when making decisions? What is the best way to build a stack for this purpose?

In this guide, it’s important to note that the information applies to e-commerce brands. For example, we’re focusing on a responsive stack that attracts prospects and encourages them through the marketing funnel. With an effective system, people will mostly stay within the funnel rather than dropping out (a nightmare for any marketer!).

Defining Success as an E-Commerce Business

Before offering advice, you first need to define what success means to you. By doing this, you’ll know what we’re trying to achieve in the rest of the article. Primarily, success should mean helping marketing and sales team members to identify the leads with the most value. Then, the infrastructure should be in place to gently nudge these leads from one stage of the funnel to the next.

Of course, the goal is to get all leads to the bottom of the funnel and encourage them to spend money with your brand. To do this, you need to know what B2C events to track within your stack and the most valuable metrics to cover. Without further ado, let’s learn more!

Important Events for Tracking

Stacks don’t inherently offer value because you’ll need to implement them correctly first. When your stack is optimized, it’s possible to also optimize the customer experience with increased capabilities and tools. Soon enough, revenue increases, and the whole business benefits. Here are some valuable user events for 2021:

Feature Used — What is the relationship between customer retention and feature usage? For instance, is a certain feature keeping people engaged in the long term? Soon enough, you’ll identify relationships between long-term customer value and key features. Once you identify these trends, you can optimize your offering and encourage people to return time and time again.

Depending on the nature of your service, this event could be when the user completes a lesson, creates a note, or watches a video.

Lead Created — Essentially, this event is triggered whenever somebody goes from being a stranger to a lead for the business. Perhaps the most common example of this is when they provide contact information.

Order Completed — When a customer reaches this stage, they’ve traveled through the funnel and are now at the end. Since the individual has become a customer, you can use the event to learn more about ROAS, revenue, retention, conversion rates, and more.

User Created — Finally, another important event for e-commerce businesses is when visitors/leads create an account on your website. As they log into your platform, this event is triggered. With a closer relationship to your brand, they’re now more likely to spend money (if they haven’t already!).

Valuable Metrics

As an e-commerce business, you need to learn as much information as you can about the purchase cycle for customers. Where does the journey begin? Through which channels do they progress? What eventually encourages conversions?

Thankfully, it’s possible to analyze the audience through metrics. From here, you’ll learn about the most effective channels and how you can encourage conversions in the future.

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

If you use a subscription model for your business, this is an especially valuable metric because you learn both total recurring revenue from one month to the next as well as new recurring revenue. Soon enough, you’ll learn more about the product features and channels that contribute most to your strategy. Of course, you can also calculate annually recurring revenue (ARR) to assess how it changes from one year to the next.

Visitor-to-Purchase Conversion Rate

Next, we recommend calculating the number of people visiting your e-commerce pages and converting. Of all the people visiting your store, how many are spending money on products? As before, those who run a subscription e-commerce service will need to determine signups compared to website visits instead.

Once again, the goal is to find what makes people trigger the User Created event that we saw previously. Alternatively, you might want to learn what triggers the Order Completed event. Naturally, the one you prioritize will depend on your business model.

Monthly Churn

In any given month, how many customers choose to leave the business and go elsewhere? What inhibits the customer experience? What features of the business encourage people to stick around? If you’re just starting as an e-commerce service, you may choose to place more weight on retention than revenue. Why? Because retention is a sign of greater things to come.

Trial Subscription/Purchase Conversion Rate

Lastly, another metric that holds value for e-commerce businesses is trial subscription conversion rate. Why? Because it tells you the number of people who trigger the Order Completed event after sampling your products or services. If nobody converts after testing a product or service, you need to know why. If conversion rates are strong after consumers take advantage of a trial, you know that the system is working efficiently.

How Events and Metrics Help Your Business

Personalized Messaging and Recommendations

Firstly, learning about how your customers/leads act and behave enables the business to reach out to them more effectively. As we all know, personalization is the not-so-secret secret to success in 2021. Customers appreciate a business that understands them, and personalization is the way to show your understanding. You recommend the right products, the customers convert, and everybody wins.

Fix Problems

Next, you’ve seen already but the events and metrics above allow you to highlight potential problems. For example, you might notice that many customers don’t return from one month to the next. If this happens, you need to explore what might have caused this trend. Is the brand receiving some negative press? Did you post something that could have gotten a poor reaction on social media?

Likewise, you could also learn that nobody is converting after visiting your online store. If this is the case, you’ll need to learn the factors that are preventing people from converting. While you can’t expect everyone to convert, you probably have issues with your online store if no single visitor spent money.

Is the checkout process long and arduous? Does your landing page fail to fulfill expectations generated by the ad? Are you hiding delivery costs from customers until the very end? Is your website not optimized for certain devices?

Furthermore, another problem could be that nobody converts after trialing your products and services. In this case, it suggests that the products/services themselves are causing the problems. Or it could be that you aren’t offering customers enough access to test properly.

Improve Email Marketing Campaigns

Next, you may have thought that the days of email were all over, but this is far from the truth. In fact, they’re making a sensational comeback as consumers have more control over their inboxes. With GDPR and other privacy regulations, consumers don’t get as much spam these days, and this means they pay more attention to their inboxes again — every email they receive has value (unlike the days of endless spamming).

As you monitor these events and metrics, you learn more about the customer journey and the value of your email marketing campaigns. As always, the aim is to avoid churn while also boosting engagement. If you can reach out to your audience with more relevant messaging, this will lead to more clicks on your online store and conversions.

Summary

What should you track? We hope that you have more confidence in this area now. As well as listening to our advice, you should also think carefully about your e-commerce service. What events and metrics will provide the information that you need to improve the customer experience? What information will generate more conversions, revenue, retention, and growth?

If you’re following metrics just for the sake of it, you’ll soon find that the insights don’t apply to your business. Instead, you need to think about your goals and how metrics will push you towards them.

Soon enough, you’ll learn about User Created, Lead Created, and Order Completed events. You’ll learn about your audience and how you can plug gaps in your marketing strategy.

This year, don’t be afraid of MarTech because all solutions and platforms are designed to assist your business. Once you lose the fear, you can finally use these tools to progress the business in the ways described in this guide!