How to Measure Marketing Effectiveness

Marketing departments today are under more pressure than ever to deliver results that can be tangibly measured. While creative or brand marketing still exists as a subset of the marketing profession, today’s marketers are charged with filling the sales pipeline and demonstrating that outbound marketing efforts have an undisputable impact on the deals that are won and the marketing ROI generated by a company.



While a business will consider a marketing program successful for different reasons, there are a few core metrics that most organizations assess and value when it comes to determining the impact of online and content marketing programs.



Most organizations today measure the following:

• Email opens: how many recipients of an email campaign actually opened the email.


• Click through rate: how many of the recipients actually clicked through from the email to the associated asset in order to take advantage of the offer.


• Form conversion: how many of those people who clicked through actually took advantage of the offer by completing a form.

The process of tracking marketing effectiveness by analyzing email opens, click-through rates (CTR) and form conversions helps marketing departments understand if their campaigns are successful in compelling a prospect to take the desired action. Marketers can discern several things by looking at these metrics in an effort to fine tune their strategies and report back to executive management on how marketing is helping to fill the sales pipeline. However, only form conversions provide any insight into how many leads are actually being generated and none of these metrics provide a view of how marketing campaigns impact revenue.



As the practice of online marketing evolves, the measuring of marketing effectiveness becomes more sophisticated. "Closed loop marketing" refers to the practice of analyzing the chain of events that influences a prospect to ultimately purchase a product. To truly understand the effectiveness of a marketing campaign, one must be able to track what happens after marketing has touched the leads generated by a campaign. Closed loop marketing examines the impact a specific campaign or many campaigns have on the sales funnel and ultimately on closed business or revenue.



By tracking all the campaigns that influenced a deal that is won, marketing can take credit for its share of the revenue that is generated and can ultimately determine the marketin ROI of specific programs. To do so, marketing must have visibility into where the leads they have touched end up in the sales funnel and must be able to tie their campaigns to specific individuals or companies in order to know when a deal is closed. In “closing the loop” from a prospect filling out a form associated with a marketing campaign to ultimately becoming a customer – marketing can report with confidence on the ROI of marketing campaigns and can demonstrate with confidence, their impact on revenue.