The discipline of measuring the impact of marketing programs and campaigns on lead generation, conversion to sales opportunities and ultimately revenue, in order to determine the effectiveness of marketing efforts.
Introduction to 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 revenue 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 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 program success 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 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.
One of the most commonly cited benefits of implementing a marketing automation system is the opportunity to improve your organization’s ability to analyze marketing effectiveness. This is indeed possible, and provides a powerful advantage to organizations who are successful. However the final outcome of great marketing dashboards rests on a strong foundation of data. Ensuring that the data you need is available, cleansed, and normalized is critical to generating the analysis you need.
The second annual Markies Awards were handed out in Las Vegas this week, recognizing innovative and visionary marketers in the field of demand generation. The awards were presented to winners in nine categories at Eloqua Experience ’08, with specific nods to ground-breaking campaigns and programs for sales and marketing effectiveness, lead scoring, lead management and campaign management.
NIIT is a global talent management company. Its U.S. unit, the Enterprise Learning Solutions business, created its first e-mail marketing campaign in January 2008. The company began by using e-mail marketing software but, looking to expand its lead-generation capability, thought leadership and brand awareness in a more automated manner, it switched to marketing automation provider Eloqua a few months later. Soon after that, NIIT's ELS marketing department, which supports four different brands, expanded its reach into international markets.
One of the persistent challenges in marketing: measuring and demonstrating its effectiveness in quantifiable ways. Although the value of marketing is generally accepted at a high level (few would accept the risks of under-investing in marketing, for instance), most business executives are unable to definitively articulate the precise contribution that marketing brings.
That becomes problematic in today’s business climate, where the pressure for accountability increases public and investor scrutiny. Simultaneously, the rapid proliferation of new media in which to invest has marketers struggling to understand which options can deliver the greatest return.
Marketing Effectiveness is the ability to impact and drive revenue. Plain and simple. This requires a conversation beyond mere execution best practices. We have a need to demonstrate impact beyond simple campaign engagement -- marketers must demonstrate impact on revenue. How do we know what our current ability is today? What would improvement look like? Where do we begin?
Eloqua has developed the Marketing Effectiveness Model (MEM) to help you benchmark where you are today and provide guidance on how to optimize campaign performance and improve your marketing effectiveness. Read More
