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What metrics should I look at as part of marketing automation?
How can I get my marketing automation metrics? What should I be looking at?
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7 Answers
There's a multitude of metrics that you can use to measure the effectiveness of your marketing dollars. Most of them are really for marketers. If you are looking for the ones that matter the most to the company as a whole, I'd look at:
1. ROMI: Return on Marketing Investment. How much revenue does our marketing investment bring in, minus the investment you made. Most CMOs and CEOs would zoom in on that first.
2. Lead-to-Close: Measures the quality of your leads (to some extend, given that it assumes sales is giving it a fair chance to close)
3. CPL (Cost per Lead) trend and comparisons by campaign/medium. Shows which campaigns are the most cost effective and how they've been trending. Compared to revenue-per-lead trends, this intelligence is vital
4. Web unique visitors and web registrants....for all the obvious reasons
5. # of leads generated to show overall activity level
6. Lead Acceptance Rate trend (by sales) - indicates lead quality and alignment with sales
7. Registrant-to-Lead rate - trend - shows whether or not the people who register for "gimmes" end up turning into real leads - indicates to some degree your ability to effectively "nurture" hand raisers into real leads
Hope that helps
Nick
Mike,
a few areas to look into metrics on, many of them are covered in my blog in this piece (http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2009/09/marketing-dashboards.html) and a few others:
Lead handoff to sales - numbers of MQLs, quality of MQLs (A1s vs B3s), distribution (by geo/rep)
Lead follow-up - time to follow-up and response activity (got meeting, didn't connect, etc)
Marketing audience - measure your marketing database by both Fit and Engagement to understand what you really have as an audience
Data quality - completeness and consistency metrics to make sure your foundation is solid
There are many more areas, but those are the fundamentals that will get you started.
Steve
There are several kinds of metrics.
- activity, such as number of emails sent or campaigns executed.
- results, such as number of responses, downloads, landing page hits or completed forms.
- efficiency ratios, such as cost per qualified lead or email response rate.
- financial measures, such as return on investment and revenue generated.
Different measures serve different purposes. The main purposes are:
- show the value created by marketing (to justify the marketing budget to company management)
- show the relative performance of different marketing programs (to allocate budget to the most productive purposes)
- show the efficiency of marketing operations (to understand where improvements are possible)
I just wrote a blog post on the key financial measures and how to get them. See http://customerexperiencematrix.blogspot.com/2010/09/four-must-have-metrics-f...
Hope this helps.
The guy who just answered ahead of me, David Raab, is the guru in this field, so take his word as gospel. If you're doing comprehensive reporting (the kind that gives you valuable information and enables you to make changes), then you'll have to go outside your MA tool. Since marketing always comes down to how do I most effectively allocate my shrinking budget, I'd suggest you focus on performance of programs. For example, how effective are your lead gen programs at generating opportunities (and not just volume, but ones that convert into deals). But, again, we all sit in the shadow of Dr. Raab's brilliance in this area!
Malcolm, the check is in the mail.
What a great discussion and some good information above. I'd start with any of the postings and build upon those foundations.
One thing I'll add is that different functions in the organization require a different dashboard. I was working with a marketing director the other day whose job it was to ensure there was an adequate, continuous flow of leads to sales during the quarter. Her dashboard was going to focus on sources of leads, balance of the leads between their different segments, and velocity of the leads as they flow through to sales. Her boss was concerned that she was on top of those numbers, but also wanted to see how many leads met the SLA that marketing established with sales on number and quality, wanted to monitor cost per lead, and needed a forecast of what the lead input would be for the next quarter or so. And then we prepared a dashboard for the CMO that included a holistic view of the complete funnel, from awareness to engagement to opportunity to close that would enable her to use the same numbers at the executive meeting as the head of sales.
One caution, based on having gone through this experience a number of times: try to start with the minimum amount of information for each role in the organization. It's fairly easy to add more later (especially if you're using marketing automation software and collecting the data), but unless your reports are illuminating, you could have a challenge figuring out how to action on the metrics.
Make sure your SFA and MA systems are tied together and can provide insight into revenue data. We have quite a few resources posted in relation to this:
Just click the 'Increase Revenue' tab: http://leadmd.com/
Justin Gray, CEO
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