How to Measure Marketing Automation Success?
Gleansight has conducted a research by asking marketers which part of the marketing automation platform they find the most challenging. About 54% of marketers have reported that selection of the right metrics to measure the efficacy of marketing automation has been more challenging than other aspects of marketing automation platforms.
But some metrics are proven to be more meaningful in tracking the success of marketing automation, but you need to be careful about a few things that may misguide your measurement process. It includes the following:
- Incorrect segmentation
- The content strategy and arsenal
- Ineffective sales and marketing alignment or SMarketing
- The data your marketing automation platform generates
- The functionality of your marketing automation software
Once you know that you have eradicated pitfalls which could flaw measuring your marketing automation performance, you can start measuring effectively.
Types of Metrics
There are four key types of metrics that can cover most of your marketing activities and implementation activities. These four types of metrics are explained below. Also, check out how to examine different types of metrics that fall into these four main categories that can help you measure marketing automation success:
Activity Metrics –
The Activity Metrics refer to metrics that measure activities you carry out at the initial stage of implementing your marketing automation software. These activity metrics will help you by identifying if your investment is bringing you any positive results. Hence, these metrics are highly useful to examine if your marketing automation investment is worth your time and money and whether you are using the software profusely or as much as you should be using to perform various marketing activities.
You can also determine how useful the software is or whether it is complex or time-consuming which takes longer to notice significant revenue over your investment.
See how these activity metrics can help you determine if your marketing team is making the most of the software or if there are any challenges preventing them from getting the optimum performance from your automation investment.
Number of Emails Sent
When you are trying to measure if your marketing team is making the utmost use of the marketing automation platform tool and your investment, then this metric can be a great indicator. This is the simplest activity metric to look into to identify if the automation investment is a solution or there is a performance barrier.
Configuration of Quality Behavioral Triggers
Even when your team engaged in actively sending emails using the marketing automation software, you still need to check if your team also set up quality behavioral triggers in the marketing automation software.
This is because marketers often use the automation software to accelerate and facilitate their simple email sending activities, irrespective of any specific customer behaviors or lead segmentation. If your team is also using the automation software in a similar fashion, then your automation investment is over-investment.
To determine if your team is using for such a simplistic email delivery purpose, then check out for quality behavioral triggers which are targeting marketing campaigns to specific lead segments or customer behavior.
Response Metrics –
The response metrics come in handy to determine how and what your prospects and customers feel on receiving your emails and newsletters. Response metrics can help you by indicating if your marketing automation is effective in establishing a connection with your targeted audience.
You can conduct a feedback survey to seek feedback from prospects and customers on your business communications, content and offers. Then, you can examine your marketing automation by these response metrics.
Site Traffic
If your email campaigns are already increasing conversions, then there will be an upsurge in your website traffic. Look for analytics that track the sources of your website traffic to measure the traffic which is augmented by your emails, before and after implementing the marketing automation software.
Email Open and Click-Through Rate
These email open and click-through rate metrics play a crucial role by indicating if your emails are well-designed starting from the template, subject lines, headers and preheaders, email copy, product offers and other aspects of your emails.
When your email campaign receives lesser open rates and lower click-through rates than usual or earlier, you need to perform A/B tests to improve email optimization to targeted lead segments and increase these response metrics.
Unsubscribe Rate
Your email list health can start diminishing if you are not practicing periodical lead database health checks to maintain good email list hygiene. At that, this unsubscribe rate can indicate how well your subscribers are receiving and responding to your emails sent through the marketing automation software.
Make sure the unsubscribe rate is not exceeding 1% at any cost. If the unsubscribe rate exceeds 1% now and not earlier when you had not implemented a marketing automation solution, then this metric is a good reminder that email copy and content are not relevant or useful to your subscribers. You may need to focus on revising your lead segmentation practices.
Efficiency Metrics –
Efficiency metrics indicate if your marketing automation is making any significant impact in your sales and marketing metrics. If the marketing automation is implemented effectively, then you will notice positive impacts in these following efficiency metrics.
MQLs Generated Through Lead Nurturing
Marketing qualified leads or MQLs are the leads that are likely to get converted into customers depending on the pre-close lead activities. If your marketing team is effectively nurturing leads by leveraging the marketing automation software, then this number of MQLs will also rise.
Sales-Accepted Leads
As reconversions increase, the lead intelligence which informs the sales team about the funnel will also improve. Reconversion also creates better quality, well-nurtured and well-informed leads that are added to the funnel and more sales-ready.
If your number of sales-ready leads is heightening, it indicates that your marketing automation software is enabling your team to create better quality leads. If the MQL is diminishing, you should check if the lead scoring model is effectively set up or if there is an issue with the sales and marketing alignment.
Cost Per Customer
Your sales and marketing team may notice that the funnel is loaded with leads when using a good marketing automation system. By using marketing automation in nurturing your leads based on their responses and behaviors, you can witness decreasing cost per customer and the top of the funnel leads are not being wasted. Instead, leads in funnels are qualified to be sales-ready and get converted into customers.
Value Metrics –
In addition to these three metrics mentioned above to measure your marketing automation platform’s success, you need to consider value metrics that indicate if the marketing automation implementation can impact the ROI. Following are the value metrics that measure the value attainable from the automation implementation.
Revenue Generated
This is a great indicator of how much revenue is attributed to the marketing automation system. By looking at the revenue growth, you can measure the number of closed deals and the average sale price, which increases along with the number of conversions.
Cost of Investment vs. Revenue Generated
After you have figured out the revenue growth to be attributed to leads nurtured with your marketing automation software, you need to compare the cost of ownership of the software. If you are producing more revenue using a marketing automation software, then consider analyzing the marketing automation expenses required to generate that revenue. Take account of both the staff overhead costs of running the software and the cost of the software – make sure the sum of these two costs is not exceeding the revenue generated using the software.
Conclusion
You can consider the close rate on marketing-sourced leads metric to measure the value received from your investment in the marketing automation software. So, what types of measurement metrics are you implementing to track success and effectiveness of your marketing automation implementation?
In case you need our marketing automation assistance or solutions to build your measurement metrics, then reach out to our certified marketing automation experts via the chat box below, the contact us page, email info@marrinadecisions.com or simply DM our social channels: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn.
All it takes is a simple ‘Hi’ to take you a long way in scaling your marketing process and targeting thousands of people while saving tons of resources and money in manual processes.