Is Your Digital Marketing Working? 8 Must-Know Metrics

Welcome to Part 2 of our “Marketing Magic” series: a crash course in marketing your ophthalmology or optometry practice. In a previous post, we covered the elements you need to move potential patients  from your website to your practice. If you missed it, read it here.

So you’ve started to implement a basic digital marketing strategy, either in-house or thought a marketing firm. How do you know if it’s working? You need to measure the results. You can’t just go an a hunch. After all, you wouldn’t rely on a feeling to tell you if a patient’s medication was working, right? Think of these metrics as lab results, or imaging, for your practice’s digital marketing strategy.

Social Media Metrics

Social media—done right—is a great way to engage patients and boost your bottom line. But creating magic in your social media program doesn’t mean that you need a profile on every single platform—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Periscope, LinkedIn, Google+, and more. You must post relevant content on the platforms that your customers and prospects actually use and measure how well your content is converting followers.

When measuring the effectiveness of your practice’s social media, your digital marketer (or you, if you’re doing this in-house) should use these top three metrics, says HubSpot:

Reach

The number of people who actively follow you and receive your updates on social media platforms. This is the number of people you reach with a post at any given time.

Engagement

The number of people who have interacted with the content you post by commenting, liking, clicking a link, etc.

Leads

The number of people who have interacted with your content by doing something like clicking a link to your website and then converted into a new patient or returning patient. Remember, you define what conversion means on your social media platforms.

If you hear digital marketing candidates use these terms when discussing their strategy for you, that’s a good sign.

Email Marketing Metrics

These are the things that a good email marketer should measure, according to Eye Care Leaders’ own digital wizard, Jasaswi Mishra:

Open rate

According to data culled from hundreds of millions of emails sent by email marketing firm MailChimp, the average open rate for medical, dental, and healthcare businesses is 22.6 percent.

Click-thru rate (CTR)

This is the number of recipients who click on one or more links in an email. The same MailChimp data showed a CTR of 2.5 percent.

Conversion rate

What constitutes a conversion will be unique to your practice. It could be making an appointment in response to the email, clicking on a link in the email, or signing up for your mailing list, among other things.

Hard bounce rate

The more emails that bounce back, the poorer the quality of your email list. A good email marketer will recommend ways your practice can improve list quality.

Soft bounce rate

This means that the email address is valid, but the email couldn’t be delivered for temporary reasons, like a full inbox or downed server.

Unsubscribe rate

To calculate, take the number of people who unsubscribed from one of your emails and divide it by the number of people who received the email.

Email forwarding/share rate

This number is significant because it helps you generate new contacts—individuals who aren’t already on your email list. So you should track this rate to discover what email content gets shared the most, HubSpot says. And finally …

Contribution Margin

How much money do you spend to produce the emails and how much patient traffic do you get in return?