ROI, ROI, ROI: Marketing Analytics That Matter

By Lisa Cramer

Everyone knows that marketing analytics are important. However, we find that most organizations are only scratching the surface when it comes to measuring their marketing efforts. Website hits, email opens and clicks are no longer adequate metrics – they are merely a starting point. Real marketing analytics provide visibility into how your campaigns are impacting revenue and ROI. In this article, we'll explore how to get started, what metrics to measure, and what data to interpret.

Going beyond opens & clicks
In addition to anonymous visitor tracking on websites, email opens and clicks have traditionally been the primary measure of campaign success for marketers. But what do such actions really indicate about the prospect's interest? Does it constitute their readiness to engage in a sales discussion? How interested they really are? For years, opens and clicks were the only metrics available and so we made the best use of them.

Today, many companies still have limited expectations or measurements for their marketing departments. We often hear marketers discuss how they are evaluated based on the number of "leads" generated and sent to sales. But are these all really leads? More than likely, they're not – instead they are typically a mix of inquiries, suspects and leads, many of which won't convert into sales. With the newer technology available today for gaining specific insights, marketers can start to get visibility into how real leads are and their intent.

Optimizing marketing's value
Marketers must find new metrics that span the lifecycle of a lead. They also need to find ways to track and manage those leads through their lifecycle. And they must be given visibility to stages within the cycle so decisions can be made and insights gained. This should include the ability to track a lead's origin and intent over time. Marketing needs to be able to evaluate leads based on what those leads have shown interest in and where they might be in their buy cycle, in order to determine if they are "sales ready" or not. And finally, marketers need to gain visibility through the sales funnel, so they can compare the leads they generated against those that actually closed, enabling them to truly measure the effectiveness of their efforts and its impact on the company's bottom line.

Systems and processes are now available to marketers to enable this kind of tracking and visibility for real marketing analytics – those connected to the fundamentals of the business.

Some examples of new metrics to track:
Beyond simple opens and clicks, what should marketers be tracking? What metrics other than the ultimate resulting revenue would help determine success along the way? Let's walk through a basic example of a campaign and the metrics that should be gathered.

Suppose an email was sent to a list of prospects that linked to a landing page. The landing page had links to other pages of interest. What are some of the metrics that should be measured at this point to get to the next level of marketing analytics? We want to understand:

• How many people clicked.
• If there were multiple links in the email, which links were the most popular.
• How many of the clicks that went to the landing page actually converted. This assumes the landing page had a form to fill in. Since you sent an email out to your prospects, it's also assumed that you have their email addresses. Maybe you are offering to provide additional valuable content and require that the prospect fill in a company name and title before receiving it.

Make sure that you have other calls to action – other links – on your landing page, as well. The content of the links will be dependent on where the buyer is in within your nurturing sequence. For instance, you could introduce content with links off the landing page to an online demonstration of your product, pricing or implementation information - things that might help to indicate the prospect's buying interest. If the prospect navigates to some of these links and spends some time on them, this will indicate interest and confirm that the prospect is moving through the nurturing sequence.

Importantly, make sure you view just how much time the prospect spends on web pages that indicate buying intent. Are they taking a quick look and then leaving or does it appear they are spending time reading what you have to offer? Again, this is an indicator of interest and where the prospect is in the buy cycle and your marketing automation system should do this for you automatically.

Determining the sales readiness of leads
The next phase of gathering marketing insight depends on your lead management process and your ability to manage and track each component. If you manage your leads and score them based on their behavior and/or demographic information, you are in a much better position to determine which leads are "sales ready" and which aren't.

Let's say you've implemented a lead management process and system that automatically scores leads on demographic and/or behavioral criteria. Continuing with the aforementioned example, of the leads that filled in the form (conversions) how were they scored? Were they passed on to sales for further qualification and then converted into opportunities? Or did they not show enough interest and therefore remained with marketing for further nurturing? This could tell you how well targeted your email campaign was, as well as how effective it was overall with regard to engagement, content, timing and more.

Below are some of the additional metrics to gather:

• How many leads in the nurturing program hit the scoring threshold or performed a behavior that triggered their promotion to "sales ready" status (thus moving them to the CRM system)?
• How many leads stayed in the nurturing program and were never promoted – what percentage of the leads per campaign never became "sales ready"?
• How many leads were promoted to the sales force over what period of time?
• How many of the "sales ready" leads became opportunities?
• How many of these opportunities became closed business and for how much revenue?

Finally, there needs to be a round trip between the CRM system and lead management system – how many sales and how much revenue were attributed to that campaign? What's the campaign ROI? Were leads sent back from sales for more nurturing?

You should now be able to analyze the effectiveness of each campaign while also gaining specific marketing insights such as:

• Channel effectiveness – Examples: online, offline (e.g., trade shows)
• Lead sources – Examples: social media, email, AdWords, banner ads
• Prospect profile/targeting – Examples: industry or vertical, company size, title and much more

Marketing can and should directly impact a company's bottom line. With new systems and processes, marketers are now given access to new metrics that will help them do a better job and measure their impact on actual revenue. It's time to go beyond the simple metrics of opens and clicks to more meaningful metrics that truly give marketers a glimpse into campaign effectiveness and the quality of leads.

About the Author
Lisa Cramer is president and co-founder of LeadLife Solutions, a provider of an on-demand lead management solution that helps drive revenue by bundling a state of the art marketing automation platform with highly-experienced marketing and sales specialists. In 2009 and 2010, Lisa was recognized as one of the top five "Most Influential People" in sales lead management, and in 2011 was named one of the Top 20 Women to Watch in sales lead management. For more information, visit lead management

SOURCE: LeadLife Solutions