Prospective clients sometimes ask, “What ROI can we expect from our jewelry marketing efforts?” We understand the desire to want to know, but the answer can be complicated – and sometimes impossible to answer. In this blog post, we tackle it and explain how you can plan and budget accordingly.

One challenge in answering the question about ROI is that a jewelry brand’s digital marketing strategy often has many moving parts, including content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, search engine marketing, and more. To narrow things down even further, a jewelry brand may be running a number of campaigns, i.e. a blog, Facebook marketing, automated email marketing, and more. One could never predict the ROI that results from the sum of all these moving parts.

Comparing active campaigns – like the results of a jewelry brand’s blogging efforts vs. the results of an email marketing campaign, for example – is like comparing apples to oranges, not only because they are different marketing touchpoints but because they likely each have different goals. While the purpose of the blog may be to attract new customers via SEO and educate customers who are visiting the jewelry brand’s website for the first time, the purpose of an email marketing strategy may be to convert customers who are already familiar with the brand.

Furthermore, the modes of measuring these various campaigns are different. For a blog, a jewelry brand may use Google Analytics to measure stats like total visits, average length of stay, and pages per visit. A blog visitor may not become a customer for many months, and a jewelry brand will likely have a difficult time tracking that customer’s ultimate journey to purchase.

On the other hand, for email marketing, a jewelry brand will want to track stats like open rate, click-through rate, and unsubscribe count. If the goal of the email is to convert customers, a jewelry brand may also be able to see how many customers purchase something after clicking through an email.

If a jewelry brand would like to know exactly what it will get back from specific marketing efforts before investing in a comprehensive strategy or moving forward with full force, then it must approach marketing like a science experiment: make a hypothesis, conduct the experiment methodically, analyze the data, and adjust. This is best accomplished with small, well-planned projects.

A digital marketing specialist should never predict ROI based on past results, especially if the results are from another client. No two jewelry brands are alike, so what worked well for one may not perform well for another. Case studies and industry benchmarks can give a jewelry brand an idea of what other brands have experienced, but the results are not usually typical.

Before working with a digital marketing specialist, a jewelry brand should discuss and set realistic expectations regarding ROI. If the digital marketing specialist is promising a certain ROI, be wary, for all the reasons we discussed above. If you feel more comfortable knowing how well a digital marketing specialist will perform before committing to a long-term contract, then ask that specialist to run a test, like a low-budget Facebook ad campaign or one email marketing campaign, before you hire that person for the long term.