You feel like you are a one-person marketing team, you have revenue targets (hopefully) for the year that you have deemed to be near impossible, and you have fifty programs to execute and no bodies to do the work. How the bleep are you going to make reporting a priority?
Does this calamity sound familiar?
Here’s my answer: Just do it.
You know why the answer is so easy? Because if you aren’t tracking your progress in a timely manner, there is a very good chance you are wasting a % of your time and even more importantly, missing revenue opportunity.
Here are a few tips to getting reporting into your routine:
- When you design each program, make sure you build into the schedule 2 hours of “must do” work within 5 days of every campaign launch. That breaks down to:
- 60 minutes to analyze the report data
- 30 minutes to make modifications to the next round of campaign delivery. Use this time to make only 1 or 2 changes to the campaign content or data definitions – anything more and you won’t know what to attribute the impact to.
- 30 minutes of additional testing
- Include metrics as a part of your weekly revenue reporting (or campaign success reporting) to your supervisor. This does three things for you:
- Makes sure you actually look at your reports
- Allows you to see trending over time on a weekly level
- Gives you an understanding of what your campaign cutoff should be based on an actual vs guesstimate slowdown on week over week trends
- Make Opt-Out Trending a part of your Quarterly MBO targets. Opt-out growth is an indication that your content is not relevant. It’s also an indication that you may not be targeting the right people in general. Negative or no growth are the best metrics here.
I hope I’ve convinced you to become a reporting maniac. If not, well… good luck?
Annie Tsai 