Year End: so it’s time for review emails.​

The world of marketing is obsessed with end of the year review or new year resolutions emails. While I’ll admit I am quite interested in getting a peak behind that data it seems you are too little too late and too crowded.

This tired end of the year lack of content ideas often gets crowded out with all the other company shipping their end of the year stats. Do all the regular content marketers go on holiday at the same time so we are left with the leftover staff to ship the holiday emails? There’s plenty of problems with this approach; the main one being that these stats are useful when you are actually using the products you are reporting on.

Too many of these products and services wait until the end of the year to tell me how I’m doing (just like those employee reviews… am I right?). Compiling the performance and activity over the course of the year to compare against the entire field of use. This data can be insightful to gauge your performance against the field but really only when we are making those decisions 6 months ago and not when my team is heading out for vacay.

Why provide running metrics?

We love video. For our product, Lost & Found, data can tell some really good stories but video beats you over the head with how important it really can be (see our most recent one below). But in the meantime we always have a running “dashboard” showing core KPIs against our historical numbers. This gives the staff and users benchmarks for how they are currently doing and what the expect based on past operations.