Every business organization is bound to make New Year resolutions as well! This could be in terms of financial planning, brand promotion, market strategies and even in areas of research and development. Considering the fact that marketing is a huge component of every business strategy, and mobile marketing perhaps even more so, it is fitting to look into what the landscape of mobile marketing (both through apps and mobile browsers) metrics 2014 is going to look like.

It is relevant to look into these metrics because like most things in the business landscape, ways and means of analysing one’s performance is also changing rapidly. Keeping up with the times as far as measuring and generating actionable data is concerned is therefore a wise thing to do.

Closing the gap between marketing and business results

According to a recent Forrester report, Chief marketing officers should look at bringing marketing close to business results. 200 CMOs from around the world were surveyed and 80% stated that they wanted to prove their capabilities as business and strategy leaders. A great majority of the respondents also stated that technology gives them the greatest opportunity to become better.

Even though this report was generated a couple of years ago, the results and pointers given in this report holds good even this year. The metrics that you collect as far as marketing is concerned should be a pointer to close the gap between business plans and marketing plans. Simply put, every marketing plan should have activities aimed at fostering business results.

Marketing budgets in 2014

This year, marketing budgets are going to be largely about digital marketing expenditure. This was revealed in a report generated by Responsys and Econsultancy. Among other things, this report points to:

• 60% of companies planning to increase overall marketing expenditure
• 71% will be increasing digital marketing expenditure
• The planned increase for mobile marketing for acquisition is at 63% and at 60% for mobile marketing for engagement or retention.

As far as metrics for mobile marketing go, 2014 seems to be mostly about content marketing, search engine optimization, email marketing and mobile marketing for diverse goals.

User engagement

Considering that one of the biggest metrics for the year 2014 will be about mobile marketing for user engagement, it does become important for a business organization to look at measuring different aspects of user behaviour. Some of these aspects include:

• sessions - the frequency, the length of time for each session, the interval between successive sessions and even the number of times that the sessions are conducted each day
• loyalty - mobile marketers should also look at the intensity of loyalty of their users. Most people may uninstall an application or install an application and not use it frequently enough. With the right kind of content and relationship with the customer, this kind of loyalty can be generated and sustained.

It is also interesting that mobile marketers often bring together the right kind of emails to support their applications. For example, the physical fitness application called Nexercise is all about motivating the user to lose weight and become fitter. And if you fail to log in your activities for a few days, you get an interesting email from the developers of the game asking why you have forgotten about them!

Email metrics

A huge part of mobile marketing is email marketing as well. This year, it should be all about data driven metrics that will point to the success of your email marketing campaigns. Some of the metrics that you can use are:

• Open rate which simply indicates the number of subscribers who have actually opened your messages-·
• Click through rates which will tell you how many recipients clicked on the links
• Complaint rates that will indicate the number of people who have marked your email as spam and unsubscribed-·
  
• Conversion rate which is perhaps the most important and in-depth metric that will help you to identify the actual number of ‘paying customers’-·
  
• Revenues being generated as a direct result of your email marketing campaign
• Engagement rate which can include things like how many times your content is being shared, leads that are being generated because of customer referral and long term relationships with customers.

One of the biggest difficulties is retention or establishing a long-term relationship with customers.

Keeping an eye out for churn

Even as user retention is one of the most difficult metric to track, a mobile marketer should be able to predict user churn. This simply means that he needs to look at how his application is performing and whether his content is engaging.

Predicting churn of course is a very complicated task, and most models require extensive data mining and collecting statistical data about their behaviour demographics.

To minimize user churn it’s important for marketers to take proactive retention methods by ensuring that existing users have something to gain by staying associated with the business.

For example, app developers try to prevent user churn by introducing new content consistently, from new tools and levels in gaming apps, to premium features in utlity ones, there are various techniques to unleash new content and retain your users.

It is all about content

When one is talking about content as a part of mobile marketing then it is also important to develop a few metrics to look at content marketing.

Some of the most important ways of measurement are:

• Measuring the traffic that lines up at the end of the sales funnel. For this, you will need to have an accurate analysis and measurement of your page’s rankings in search engines. This is crucial as organic searches can bring in a lot of traffic. In order to enhance their organic search visibility, it’s important for marketers to optimize each page of their mobile website.
• Using various software and search engine tools to measure how well your content is showing up. For example using the analytics in WordPress or Google Analytics and so on. Depending on how intense you want your activities to be, it is well worth it to invest in a few good quality paid web analytics tools such as the very interesting heatmaps developed by Decibel Insight-- an innovative visual analytics tool.
  
  For instance, by laying dots all over the page, the tool creates a dot map so that marketers can understand which areas of the sites are getting the most clicks, it can also create value maps to indicate which parts of the site are leading to maximum conversions. Another interesting feature is what is called a ‘Reach Map’ that shows how far down a page visitors are scrolling.

• The social media impact of your content because the larger number of people who like your pages, retweet your content and share your content, the better it is for your mobile marketing campaign.

Finally, apart from looking at the metrics that are going to be useful in 2014, you also need to know what metrics are not useful anymore. One such metric is application store ranking simply because there are several applications that are doing pretty well even though they are not in the top few. Also, application store rankings change very frequently. Thus, going in for a few concrete and important mobile marketing metrics can indeed shape your campaign very effectively.