Marketing Automation Introduction
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With the many advances in automation technology, marketing has changed considerably from what it was a decade ago. Companies can now rely on machines to market, nurture and sell their products, costing companies significantly less money on fewer employees.
While this is excellent news for small companies, real human employees or owners must keep an eye on key marketing objectives. Automation can take much of the task work out, but what it can’t do is analyze, examine and come up with creative pivots; instead, this now should be a focus of your team.
To make the right decisions on your marketing automation strategy, you must start with a clear plan. This will include your current projects, ongoing campaigns, overall goals as well as the metrics by which you will measure each campaign’s automation effectiveness.
4 Key Marketing Metrics in Gauging Automation Strategy
Before setting the KPIs for each automated campaign, it’s important to know the four main metrics available for measurement. Most automation platforms have many of these built-in while some will require outside assessment.
Understanding these value, efficiency, response, and activity metrics is a great place to start as you begin to set goals and KPIs for each of your Marketing Automation strategies.
Marketing Automation Types
- Value Metrics: This category includes the main overall effectiveness of your bottom line. Specifically, you want to look at anything related to the money coming in. You can examine this directly by looking at how much money has been generated. Still, it is also essential to look at how much money was invested, called Return on Investment (ROI) as well as the percentage of closed sales (close rate) from each specific campaign. By knowing your ROI, you can determine if you are actually losing money on a campaign and need to pivot. While examining the close rate will tell you if that campaign bringing in tons of traffic is actually leading to dollars in your pocket.
- Efficiency Metrics: Is the traffic you are getting a good audience for potential sales? Are you nurturing leads effectively? Both of these questions should be asked by your marketing team. These can be answered by your efficiency metrics. They look specifically at the quality of the traffic your efforts are getting you. Knowing how many marketing leads you are receiving (marketing qualified leads) vs. how many are a good fit for your product (sales qualified leads) is a perfect example of an efficiency metric. If your sales team is spending time on the phone with leads that come from your marketing efforts, have them take the extra second to mark off if the lead is sales qualified. At the end of each month review the percentage of leads that were the right fit. You’ll then be able to analyze which lead sources are providing the best traffic and come to a hypothesis as to why.
- Response Metrics: When you are setting up new automated campaigns, you won’t know how they will be received. By keeping an eye on response metrics, you’ll know if your audience is positively receiving the new automated content, emails, and web pages. One of the most widely looked at response metrics has been email open rates. However, in 2021 new laws put in place have effectively eliminated this metric as the one you can rely on. The quick explanation is that automation systems register more opens than actually happen due to the technology updates now in place. We recommend that you keep an eye on these two response metrics: click-through rate and unsubscribe rate. The click-through rate will tell you how many people clicked a link from your content. Thus you know that it resonated with your audience enough for them to look into it further. With the unsubscribe rate you look at the exact opposite and see who doesn’t resonate with your content and opts out of receiving more content from you, called unsubscribing. There are other types of this metric, but these two alone will give you a good look at your automation health. The last one you should include in all of your marketing funnels is feedback, asking for the good, bad, and ugly honestly from your leads and clients. Just make sure your team is ready to hear it.
- Activity Metrics: These numbers should be reported weekly to make sure your automation is working properly. Automation is great, but it is still technology. You want to make sure your email campaigns are being sent, without blindly believing they are. You’ll want to report on the volume of emails being sent that week and how many of the boolean logic personalized campaigns were achieved. Without doing this (we’ve seen this with many clients) you could be spending money on marketing automation tools that aren’t even sending or working properly.
Utilizing Marketing Analytics Platforms to Analyze Full Campaigns
To determine which campaigns and strategies result in the best return on investment (ROI) and which need to be reworked, companies use Marketing Analytics platforms.
With this type of software, business owners can keep track of and interpret data related to their marketing campaigns. There are many digital marketing automation platforms that include reporting tools that will help you analyze your on-site content, as well as behavioral/engagement data of your leads, so you can see where to invest your time.
The most popular and free analytics platform is Google Analytics. Google Analytics allows you to track customer behavior, user experience, online content, and many other important metrics.
Marketing automation is necessary for business. However, many companies don’t analyze their automation enough. Start by outlining your metrics in each category and how you will report on them. Then once you get the hang of those metrics, check out a Marketing Analytics platform to bring your data to life in a full view of the campaign.
Getting started with Marketing Automation and need expert help?
Automated Dreams is here to help you create automated marketing processes that will increase your company’s productivity, while also saving time and money. Reach out to us for a free consultation and learn more about our strategy and implementation packages and retainers.
For more help with metrics and data analysis reports, be sure to reach out to us at Automated Dreams today.
