Marketing automation is gradually being adopted by large, medium and small-scale organizations in different industries due to the myriad benefits it offers. Marketers use automation to perform daily, repetitive tasks as well as create customized marketing campaigns for prospective customers. In order to understand what is and isn’t working for a business, it is very important to outline some marketing automation metrics which can measure the success of automation. Here are 6 important marketing automation metrics that will help to measure the results of automation:
1. Open Rate, Click Through Rate & Unsubscribes: Marketing automation is generally used by marketers to automate and personalize emails sent to prospective customers. After spending time to customize email marketing campaigns, it is important to measure the success of such campaigns. Open rate, click-through-rate & unsubscribes are some metrics which can effectively measure the success of email marketing automation. Open rate refers to the percentage of recipients who have opened the email. An email is considered to be opened only when HTML and images have been displayed. Click-through-rate is the percentage of people who are clicking on and opening links included in the content of the email. The open rate and the click-through rate are important marketing automation metrics because they indicate that the email body and the subject line have been well crafted, making them interesting and relevant to the prospective customers, such that they felt the need to open the email and know more about the content. A higher open rate and click-through-rate indicate that email marketing campaigns are having positive results. Unsubscribes, as the name suggests, refers to the people who are unsubscribing from your mailing list. The unsubscribe rate should always remain under 1%. Anything above 1% indicates that the email marketing content isn’t relevant and interesting to the prospective customers. In such a case, list segmentation must be done in order to categorize the types of emails that should be sent to different customers.
2. Site Traffic: The ultimate objective of every email marketing campaign is to drive traffic from the email to the company website and ultimately generate sales. A well designed and executed email will lead to an increase in site traffic. This marketing automation metric is an indicator of the effectiveness and efficiency of the emails sent to prospective customers. Marketing automation is used by marketers to create customized emails that will be relevant and interesting to customers. These emails usually contain links to different parts of the company website, to help interested customers navigate to relevant parts of the website. Marketers should compare site traffic from emails before marketing automation and after marketing automation, to understand whether email marketing automation is working or not.
3. Sales Accepted Leads: Sales accepted leads refers to those leads which have been qualified by the marketing department before being passed along to the sales team. This marketing automation metric indicates the health of lead scoring techniques. It also shows how well the sales and marketing teams are aligned with one another. An increase in sales accepted leads indicates that marketing automation techniques are working. More leads being accepted by the sales team also shows that marketing and sales goals and requirements are aligned, thus ensuring better efficiency and productivity within the organization.
4. Conversion Rate: The conversion rate is one of the most effective marketing automation metrics for both the sales and marketing teams in an organization. The conversion rate in marketing automation is a metric that is used by marketers to compare the total number of visitors to a website with the number of visitors that convert into paying customers. Visitors to a website are prospective leads. Marketing teams nurture and score leads, before handing over the leads to the sales teams. A high conversion rate shows that the lead nurturing and lead scoring techniques are working. Marketers set up conversion goals which are aligned with organizational objectives and values. These conversion goals can be anything – signing up to a newsletter, filling a form, purchasing a product/service etc. The conversion rate helps in comparing the lead acquisition investment with lead generation efforts.
5. Cost per customer: The cost per customer is the entire cost incurred in procuring a lead. Leads can be procured via various methods, thus creating a huge database of leads which may or may not convert. Most leads are not nurtured properly, thus reducing the chances of conversion. Leads which have been procured but do not convert are a loss. Marketing automation allows customization, lead nurturing, lead scoring etc which helps in identifying hot leads as well as assisting in the lead conversion process. As a result, a greater number of leads are converted into buying customers. Effective utilization of marketing automation techniques will ensure that this marketing automation metric is at a minimum, increasing revenue and ROI.
6. Revenue generated: Revenue generated is a marketing automation metric that relates to the amount of money generated from a customer. The amount of revenue generated by each customer indicates the quality of leads generated via marketing automation. High-quality leads generate greater amounts of profits. Revenue generated can be used to identify inefficiencies in the marketing automation system and rectify the same. Moreover, this marketing automation metric can be used to track how much revenue is being generated from marketing automation particularly. Accordingly, the marketing strategy can be realigned and redesigned. Marketing automation allows marketers to measure and analyse every single step of the customer’s lifecycle. While implementing automation in your business, it is very important to keep in mind the above marketing automation metrics. Proper execution of marketing automation can help in saving a lot of time and money, thereby increasing revenue and efficiency.