You have learned the potential of marketing automation for your business and you have begun some deployment.
What’s next to use the intelligence from the data?
Know how-to review your marketing automation data periodically, because :
- Make the right corrections as you go along;
- Learn more about your clients’ needs;
- Optimize each marketing experiment with what you have learned from the previous one;
Audit marketing results
When and how often to evaluate marketing campaigns is a balancing practice.
- Often enough to identify trends and adjust your strategy before wasting time and money;
- Too often will mislead into identifying the wrong pattern;
A good rule of thumb to review your marketing results when :
- Switching to a new software tool. Because if you won’t be able to access the data from the previous marketing system.
- Trying a new strategy. Because you can compare your current marketing strategy to your previous marketing strategy to put your money in the one that works best.
- Doing quarterly reviews. The end of the quarter is a good enough reason to review marketing results.
What to look for in a marketing audit?
Return on investment
Return on investment is the mount of money you make after spending money. It is expressed as a percentage.
- Spend 500.00 $ on ads and make 3000.00 $ in sales as a direct source of sales from the ads, you ROi is :
- (3000- 500) / 3000 = 0,83 or 83 %
All you need is your marketing spend and your marketing results.
You may want to account for labor costs when calculating ROi. Something that is free but time-consuming may wind up being more expansive than something that costs money and runs on autopilot while doing so. After all, your time or your employees time is the only non-renewable ressource.
ROi by campaign and channel
Campaign-based ROi for multiple campaigns running at the same time. Tracking the ROi of those individual campaigns lets you know which was the most profitable.
Channel-based ROi for knowing which channels perform the best will help you to create more effective strategy in the future.
Marketing KPIs and metrics
KPIs are “key performance indicators’ or any other specific metrics of success, which will depend on your goals and priorities. At any given point, you will be tracking between 3 to 10 KPIs that are tailored to your current goals and activities.
Track broader metrics to give you a benchmark and help see overall growth or decline.
- Conversion rate refer to 2 types of conversion : from visitors to leads , and then from leads to sales. It is a percentage;
- Cost per lead is the average amount of money spent to acquire a new lead;
- Cost per Customer or customer acquisition cost is the average amount of money spent to acquire a client. The simple way would be to calculate the amount of money pent on marketing during a month/quarter/etc. and dividing it by how many new clients were acquired in that time.
- Customer lifetime value is the average amount of revenue from a client over time.
Channel-specific metrics
- For e-mail, the most commonly mentioned metrics are open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, and list the growth rate;
- For PPC ads, the common metrics include both CPC or CPL also include click-through rate and Cost per Mille or the cost per 1000 views of the ad.
- Sales
- Traffic
- Leads
- Conversions
- Create a hypothesis
- Tested the hypothesis
- Think about what you want to optimize
- Did you meet the goal?
- Does that prove any of your theories or does more investigation needs to be done?
- What did you learn?
- What kind of data were you able to gather as a result of trying to meet this goal?
- How are you going to incorporate what you learn into the next set of goals?
- Is this a realistic goal?
- What are the success metrics for this goal? Increase or decrease and by how much?
- What theory or assumption am I testing for this goal?
- How will you gather the information needed to test that theory?
