• 5% increase in customer retention increases profits by 25% to 95% (Harvard Business Review)
• 6-7x more costly to acquire a new customer than retain a current one (Bain & Co.)
• Just 42% of companies are able to measure Customer Lifetime Value (Econsultancy)

There are many reason why customer retention is important. Perhaps most important is the value of retained customers over time.

Customer Lifetime Value is the dollar value of a customer relationship based on the present value of the projected future cash flows from the relationship.

It pays to calculate Customer Lifetime Value. It’s one of the most important metrics for a business.

To show why, here are 12 big business benefits of Customer Lifetime Value.

1. LARGEST BUSINESS ASSET: Customer Lifetime Value provides an exact figure for the company’s largest asset. The calculations enables you to follow the progress over time and to intervene if events start moving in the wrong direction.
2. CUSTOMER SEGMENTATION: Customer Lifetime Value enables your business to classify different customer groups and different potential customer groups by long term profitability. So you can decide whether it’s worth it to change market strategy or not.
3. EARLY WARNING SIGNS: Customer Lifetime Value can be used as an early warning system to detect defection rates. It identifies in which segments the problem originates so actions can be taken to correct the cause.
4. COMPLAINT MANAGEMENT: If a customer complains about a serious problem, Customer Lifetime Value can help front-line employees decide what action to take immediately and how much to invest to solve the problem.
5. WIN-BACK CUSTOMERS: A customer that a company wins back has a different Customer Lifetime Value before and after recovery (win-back). Often, second CLV is better than the first CLV.
6. UP-SELL AND CROSS-SELL: Two fundamental tactics in any marketing program are to up-sell and cross-sell. But which one should to do? When? And to what segment? Customer Lifetime Value can give you a good idea of the return to expect to guide decisions and investments on up-sell and cross-sell.
7. AUTOMATE INTERNAL PROCESSES: Ask a company what keeps them from maintaining better customer relationships, and their response will probably include something along the lines of “we don’t have enough time,” or “we’re too busy with daily tasks and processes.” Knowing Customer Lifetime Value can help a company determine if investments into Marketing Automation software are worthwhile.
8. BRAND LOYALTY: Products and services may be easy for competitors to copy, but a company that is good at creating customer loyalty is less vulnerable to attacks from competitors. Loyalty is much more difficult to copy.
9. BALANCE SHORT TERM RESULTS AND LONG-TERM GOALS: Customer Lifetime Value enables better decision making when having to weigh the competing needs of short-term profitability and longer term goals.
10. QUANTIFY CUSTOMER SATISFACTION: Many businesses rely on a customer satisfaction scores to guide interactions and explain business results. Customer Lifetime Value puts an amount to the increase or decrease the customer satisfaction scores represents.
11. LEAD GENERATION: Most CMOs really don’t know and even fewer CEOs know “what’s a lead worth”? When you know Customer Lifetime Value, you understand your lead-to-customer conversion rate and exactly how much a lead is worth. And how much you should be willing to spend on new leads.
12. RETURN ON INVESTMENT (ROI): Any company has only limited resources. It is natural to want to use them for customers that bring them maximum profits. If you know the cumulative cash flow a particular customer, Customer Lifetime Value helps determine how much should go into retaining a customer to maximize ROI.

These benefits show just how valuable the calculation of Customer Lifetime Value can be. But, in the end, it is a calculation. To put the business building benefits of Customer Lifetime Value to work, people have to take action.

Do these benefits prove the value of Customer Lifetime Value to you. How would you put Customer Lifetime Value to work on your business? Does your company help calculating Customer Lifetime Value?

U.S. advertisers’ spending on digital advertising will overtake TV in 2016 and hit $103 billion in 2019 to represent 36% of all ad spending, according to Forrester’s latest estimates based on its ForecastView model.

That means a lot more businesses are going to be in need of an effective digital marketing plan.

To guide you through the development, here are 10 essential inforgraphics to create a digital marketing plan.

1. WHAT IS DIGITAL MARKETING? Begin with an understanding of what is digital marketing. Make sure your audience knows what they’re getting. How it works. What are ways to achieve desired results. What tactics are going to be in the plan and what the measurement tools are. This infographic from Pixaal starts you on your way.

2. TOP 10 DIGITAL BRANDING TRENDS: Account for key developments. Take them into consideration in developing your plan. Know what to be aware of, what to avoid and what to expect. This infographic from the Borenstein Group provides good perspective and context.

3. SEO: EXPLAINED: 54% of people find a website through natural search results according to Forrester. Understand how to reach the majority of people who find your website and attract even more. Search Engine Optimization, the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine, is a primary requisite to every digital marketing plan. This infographic from NerdyFace explains what to enable on your site for effective SEO.

4. SEO VS PPC: While 85% of clicks on a search engine page go to an organic search listing, if your site isn’t at a top listing, that click isn’t going to go to your business. PPC (Pay Per Click) allows a web owner a quick way to be listed in a top position by paying for ads. In addition to a high search rank, a PPC campaign is relatively easy to measure and manage through the accessible of measurement like CPC (Cost Per Click), CTR (Click Through Rate) and Conversions. The author of this infographic isn’t identified but has objectively explained the differences and benefits of each.

5.  THE ANATOMY OF CONTENT MARKETING: 70% of consumers prefer getting to know a company via articles rather than ads according to kapost. Content Marketing takes many forms and has many benefits. This infographic from Axonn explains the various forms Content Marketing takes, results it produces and why it is so important for effective digital marketing.

6. SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING: While Content Marketing is the primary ingredient of Social Media Marketing, there is an art and science to effectively using social network to accelerate, amplify and activate your audience. Social Media Marketing is a marketing discipline unto itself in any digital marketing plan. This infographic from Visual.ly created on PiktoChart puts the two in contest and the reasons to devote resources to both.

7. MOBILE MARKETING: US adults spent on average 34 hours per month using the mobile internet on smartphones. By comparison, they spend 27 hours on the PC internet. Of that smartphone internet time, apps capture 86 percent of usage. Only 14 percent of smartphone internet access time comes via the mobile web according to Marketing Land. This infographic from Milo shows how much of consumer behavior has gone mobile and the top tactics marketers should pursue.

8.EMAIL BEST PRACTICES: In 2014, email marketing was cited as the most effective digital marketing channel for customer retention in the United States according to the CMO Council. Email marketing requires discipline and steady attention. This infographic from eMerge gives best practice so you can carry on the due diligence that is required for email marketing.

9, MOST IMPORTANT DIGITAL MARKETING METRICS: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” said Peter Drucker. This infographic from Digital Marketing Philippines gives you the most important measurements to manage.

10. DIGITAL MARKETING ROI: Does digital marketing produce results? Here are 8 studies from an infographic BarnRaisers did for the IAB that proves it does, It also shows digital marketing works best when it is integrated into the overall marketing mix.

Do these infographics give you guidance for your digital marketing plan? Do you need help with a digital marketing plan that will build your business?

What good is data if you don’t know what to do with it?

Web Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for the purposes of understanding consumer behavior, improving user experience and optimizing web usage.

This might sound intimidating to some but the reason why companies do web analytics is simple: To find insights that help make better business decisions.

Who does it well?

Here are 10 case studies of companies that used insights from web analytics and drove ROI.

1. BT FINANCIAL GROUP: Is a leading provider of superannuation, investment and insurance products. The BT website focuses on service and usability with an online application form as one of the key conversion points. Landing pages with different combinations of the design elements for testing are created to optimize the user experience and maximize conversions. With conversion testing, BT increases form completions by more than 60%.
2. BUILDDIRECT: Does business in more than 100 countries with an expanding portfolio of building materials. Though the company is growing rapidly, management is eager to improve the efficiency of its online spending. Through web analytics, BuildDirect finds home buyers who purchase a sample have a 60% likelihood of returning to the site within the next 30 days and placing a full order,  BuildDirect uses GA’s A/B testing capabilities to perfect its marketing approach. With insights from web analytics, BuildDirect increases sales by 50%.
3. HARVARD UNIVERSITY: To expand the digital reach of two established schools, Harvard Summer School and Harvard Extension School, Harvard ran a 12-month SEO and PPC campaign. They use web analytics as an audit to identify technical setbacks, content positioning, to create new landing pages for search traffic, and top-of-funnel paid search awareness campaigns. The result are: 1) 89% increase in visits from organic search, 2) 75% increase in registrations from organic search, 3) 30% increase in CTR with AdWords and 4) 124% increase in ROAS with AdWords.
4. KEEN FOOTWEAR: Is an outdoor shoe manufacturing company based in Portland, Oregon. The company needs a better way to measure, analyze, understand metrics that mattered on their social network provide meaningful insight. A framework involving reach, engagement, influence, sentiment and effect is developed. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) within each area are established. Using the metrics: 1) Page Likes increase by 92%, 2) Post Reach increase by 342%, 3) Post Engagement increase by 137% and Active Users increase by 213%.
5. MOTOREASY: Is a company that sells extended auto warranties. Motoreasy’s Web site is re-designed to give you a quote for an extended auto warranty on your car. This involves: 1) Tell people what you want them to do (fill in the form) and 2) tell them the benefits of doing so(you’ll get a quote which could save you money). The telephone number is featured prominently at the top, making it easy for them to call if they found filling out the online form too tedious.  These changes reduce the drop out rate from 65 percent to 29 percent overnight. This increases the completion rate of the sign up page from 31% to 69%.
6. NIKE GOLF: Is the golf-specific retail branch of Nike. Although there is the benefit of the Nike brand, there is also the lack of a focused keyword strategy on the Nike Golf website. It is very difficult for search engines to crawl for content. Research helps make decisions like whether target keywords should be “golf apparel”, “golf clothing”, “golf clothes” or “golf sportswear.” As a result of the research, Nike Golf sees a 169% in total increase in organic search traffic.
7. ON THE BEACH: Offers value for money flights and hotels to the world’s most popular beach holiday destinations, providing consumers with a huge selection of travel products, including 50 million airplane seats and more than 30,000 hotels. On the Beach finds that their generic search is undervalued under last click reporting, a discovery that allows the company to build a custom attribution model and increase budget on generic campaigns. This helps drive a higher volume of site traffic, holiday sales and market share in the travel sector, which in turn led to a 25% increase in ROI.
8. PBS: Helps individual PBS producers and local PBS stations create and promote each section within PBS.org. PBS wants to develop a coordinated approach to analysis and reporting that would inform their future strategic decisions. Analysis of search engine trends leads to an increase in PBS traffic by 30%. Web analytics is set up to allow PBS to evaluate the way users consumed video. As a result, PBS increases both conversions and visits by 30%.
9. PUMA: Has rich, dynamic web site; but, just as PUMA constantly improves its products, it also believes in making site changes that help visitors easily achieve their goals. While testing its web site header, it finds a variation that increases online orders by 7.1%. Puma more than doubles the amount of time visitors spend interacting with PUMA brand content, such as news, videos, and photos. It results in 47% more traffic.
10. RYANAIR: Is Europe’s largest low fare airline. 99% of Ryanair’s bookings are made through its website making it the company’s single most important marketing tool. Web Analytics helps understand email and visitor behaviour. Ryanir is able to increase click-through rates by 200%, decrease bounce rate by 18%, increase visitor traffic by 16% to strategic pages and double revenue generated from their email campaigns.

We, at BarnRaisers, are big believers in how data-driven results helps make better business decisions. Helping companies connect the dots between strategy, execution and results is a big part of what we do.

To these case studies help you see how insights from web anlaytics can drive your businsess’ ROI?

• 64% of traffic to a website comes from Organic Search (source: Conductor)
• $750/month to $8,000/month is the range  for retainers companies pay for SEO (source: Search Engine Watch)
• $100/hour to $300/hour is the range on an hourly basis

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” search results on search engines.

These facts show:

• An understanding of Organic Search is necessary for businesses to succeed on the internet
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is big business and costs vary widely
• SEO should be tracked and measured to know its return on investment (ROI)..

With 5 data-driven metrics, you can prove the ROI of SEO. We’ll show you based on the SEO we do for our company, BarnRaisers.

• WEBSITE VISITS FROM ORGANIC SEARCH: SEO that works drives more visitors to a website. For our business, we know 83% of traffic comes from organic search (more than average). We know it attracts over 11,000+ visits/month and over 85% are new. We get this information from Google Analytics. We work at SEO largely by providing relevant content (like this blog) to our visitors using priority “keywords” (metric #4). We track it every month.

• LINKS: When search engines crawl your site, they look to see if you are an “authority.” This is determined by other sites that refer visitors through “inbound links.” If you’re providing relevant content on a regular basis, “authoritative links” should increase and the search engine raise your rank. We know we have 289 inbound links. We monitor them regularly and watch where they come from. Guest blog posts have served us well from increasing our inbound and authoritative links. There are many services that track links. These are tracked from Marketing.Grader.

• INDEXED PAGES: Search engine catalog search pages for every query a user makes. The number of search engine pages your website is cataloged on are your “indexed pages.” More is better than less and, if your SEO is working, indexed pages increase. From the same source above, we have 1,100 indexed pages and are glad it has grown and continue to grow.
• KEYWORD RANK: 32.5% of people click on the website in the first position in Organic Search from their search query; 90% click on a listing from the first page (source: Chitika). Understanding what keywords your business ranks high and how they match with what you do in very important. In our case, we achieve first page rank for keywords that reflect analytic expertise like “Key Performance Indicators,” “kpis” and “crm.” Since this is what we do, we’re glad about it. We also see how must value our efforts in Organic Search provide compared to paying for these keyworks on a CPC (cost-per-click) basis. The figures below come from SEMRush.

• KEY TRANSACTION ACTIVITIES (CONVERSIONS): People like to do business with people they know, If you like what you’ve read, you can: 1) Subscribe to our newsletter, 2) Download our free eBook, 3) Buy a book we’ve helped author or 4) View our process for working on SlideShare. We track all these activities and know a certain percentage of people who do their activities become customers. We also know what percent come from Organic Search because we’ve set up “goals” in Google Analytics. Through all these measures, we are able to determine if and how our efforts in SEO generate ROI.

If you need more information on the cost of SEO, below in an infographic.

Do these 5 metrics prove the ROI of SEO to you? Did it help to show you how to measure SEO based on what we do? Does your business need help with SEO?

• 91% of marketing leaders believe successful brands use customer data to drive business decisions (source: BRITE/NYAMA)
• 90% of the world’s total data has been created just within the past two years (source: IBM)
• 87% agree capturing and sharing the right data is important to effectively measuring ROI in their own company (BRITE/NYAMA)

These facts say loud and clear companies believe data helps them make better business decisions.

Big Data is a broad term for data that comes from places like web browsers, social networks, census, surveillance and sensors. It’s stored in computer clouds, and searched for patterns, predictive analytics and insights.

According to IDS, in the next 12-18 months, organizations plan to invest in skill sets necessary for big data deployments, including data scientists (27%), data architects (24%), data analysts (24%), data visualizers (23%), research analysts (21%), and business analysts (21%).

But is bigger better?

Here are 10 data experts who explain why little data is the new big data.

1.  “Big data has been hyped so heavily that companies are expecting it to deliver more value than it actually can. The exception. Companies that have a culture of evidence-based decision making, tend to be more profitable than companies that don’t have that kind of culture.” – Jeanne W. Ross, Cynthia M. Beath and Anne Quaadgras, Harvard Business Review
2. “What we track determines where we focus and what we are motivated to improve. Why do people obsess over LinkedIn Connections or Twitter followers?  SAT scores, golf handicaps, or even gas mileage? Because they are observable metrics that are easy to compare. Before you obsess over a particular metric, make sure it’s the right metric to obsess over.” – Johan Berger
3. “How to beat the big data giant? Start by thinking little data, as in David vs. Goliath. The first step in the little data process is to identify key business objectives that your organization would like to have data solve. Make big decisions and eliminate the need to capture and manage the irrelevant data within the 2.4 quintillion bits of digital data generated each day from the big data stream.” – Gary Drenik, Forbes
4. “Size in itself doesn’t matter – what matters is having the data, of whatever size, that helps us solve a problem or address the question we have. For many problems and questions, small data in itself is enough. The data on household energy use, the times of local buses, government spending – these are all small data.” – Rufus Pollock, Open Knowledge Foundation
5. “Corporate decision-makers often would be better served if they rely on tried-and-true tools and systems from the world of Little Data, rather than illusions from Big Data. Sampling theory teaches that if the sample is random, one can measure the behavior or mood of the whole by talking to very few people. A sample of 1,500 is sufficient to predict who will win a presidential election. A sample of 200-300 respondents is generally sufficient to predict how much the whole population will like a new product or service.” – Jerry W. Thomas, Decision Analyst
6. “Big Data is what organizations know about people — be they customers, citizens, employees, or voters. Data is aggregated from a large number of sources. Little Data is what we know about ourselves. What we buy. Who we know. Where we go. How we spend our time. Without Little Data, Big Data has a tendency to become Big Brother. We’ve all experienced that unsettling feeling when ads follow us on the web.” – Mark Bronchek, Harvard Business Review
7. “Log daily. Reflect quarterly. Plan yearly. This simple model can provide the data and structure you need to take control. Your yearly reflection will provide you the insight needed to make clear, data-driven decisions.” – John Caddell, author The Mistake Bank
8. “Big data’s little brother is ‘small data’ or traditional KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that help to measure success in companies. Any data, and in particular ‘big data’, only becomes meaningful and relevant in the context of the business success, measured by KPIs.” – Bernard Marr, Advanced Performance Institute
9. “Little data constitutes the nuts and bolts metrics of running a business. For a Web property, that means getting a handle on issues such as the bounce rate, SEO session starts, social session starts, funnels of how users flow through a property, and page views per session. Too many people lose sight of these simple but critical metrics.” – Peter Varad, Cnet
10. “So if you’re wondering whether to use big or little data, fuhgetaboutit. Instead you should be wondering whether your company is good at using data period. If it isn’t, then that’s the battle you should fight.” – Pam Baker, Fierce Big Data

Is your company good with data? Let us help your company get there. Or consider taking a Digital Marketing or Social Media Mini-MBA at the Rutgers Business School Executive Education where I teach Web Analytics and ROI for Better Decision Making.

Do you think little data is the new big data? Which is going to help you company make better decisions?