Community Measurement – Community Messages
December 17 2009 by Jason Peck ~ 0 CommentsThis is Part 7 of a 9-part series on what to measure and how to determine ROI of your community website.
Last week, as part of this community measurement series, I discussed some things relating to sales that you should be measuring as you think about the ROI of your community website and what is working/not working. Obviously community does not just exist on a website, but if you do have your own community website, you should be analyzing it to see how it’s working for your members and for you.
Last week was general sales information–what community members are buying, how much they’re spending, etc. Let’s take it up a notch this week.
Many branded communities have a built-in internal messaging system. Members can share content with each other (one-to-one or one-to-many) and companies can send messages to individual members and groups. Some examples of messages companies may send include:
- welcome messages
- messages introducing members to new features/functionality
- exclusive deals, discounts and member-only offers
- surveys
Measuring the effectiveness of community messages
Just like email, these messages should me analyzed and measured, so you can see what is/isn’t working. Please see below for some ideas for things to measure and track back to the most recent message sent. This isn’t a perfect system, but there’s really no such thing, as there are many, many factors that affect what actions people may take or what they may buy. Nothing exists in a vacuum but tracking things back to the most recent message received should at least give you some data to work with.
Opens and Clicks
Successful actions (it may not always be sales. Ex: message prompting people to invite friends)
Total sales (resulting from community messages)
Total orders
Number of messages and campaigns sent
Sales per campaign and per message
**Compare these numbers with sales from your email campaigns.
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These are just a few things to track when analyzing the success of a company’s messages to its community members. What else would you add to this list?
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