Why is Marketing Analytics Important?
Marketing analytics measures the effectiveness of marketing functions. The adage goes: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Marketing needs to sow seeds on fertile ground to get a return. Throwing money away is not sustainable and potentially a career-limiting approach for all involved.
Product-led companies are under the assumption that customers will flock to a product when they hear about it. This is one of the main reasons why 1 in 11 startups don’t survive very long. Companies that allocate a small percent of revenues to marketing or that waste money by not measuring marketing performance often become zombie businesses, surviving quarter to quarter until they fold or are sold off by their investors at a loss.
What Marketing Analytics Do Businesses Use?
Companies that care about the effectiveness of marketing expenditure, such as sales or growth-focused businesses, leverage many of the following analytics.
Lead Scores
The buyer’s journey and sales stages create a set of criteria to analyze the progress of leads down the funnel.
Form Fill Rates
Digital ads often feature a downloadable asset. Ad clicks are frequently backed by landing pages with gated content that requires a short form fill. A daunting form with too many fields often results in a low fill rate. It’s wise only to collect the information needed for the stage of the visitor’s journey. Organizations that use incremental profiling of visitors tend to get the best fill rates.
Email Open Rate Analytics
Marketing automation software provides analytics on email campaigns. High open rates show that your marketing content is relevant to the audience and that you used a good subject line to create engagement. Most marketing automation software, such as HubSpot or Marketo, allows senders to A-B test two subject lines, choosing the one that tests best for most recipients.
Email Click-Through Rates
Good marketing emails contain a handful of hyperlinks to compelling content on the company website or marketing microsite. Analysis of the click rates of each link can inform the creation of future emails. Campaign-specific emails tend to have a single call-to-action link that provides a measure of engagement for that email.
Email Opt-Out in Marketing Analytics
High opt-out rates imply the email is poorly targeted. Segmenting email marketing lists is an essential activity.
Email Delivery Metrics
A sure sign of a poorly maintained email list is a high number of undelivered or bounced marketing emails. Compliance with laws and regulations such as California Consumer Privacy Act (CCP) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has forced businesses to trim lists to only active prospects and customers. Reports of unsolicited emails can result in significant fines to the sending organization if proven.
Website Visitor Analytics
Organic visitors are valuable as they come to be educated by the content on the website. Paid visitors from ads and purchased search terms indicate the effectiveness of your digital marketing investments. Google Analytics provides visitor counts to a webpage and bounce rates for those who abandon their visit. Marketing needs to monitor the number of broken links on a site to maintain a high-quality user experience.
Backlinks and Marketing Analytics
Google Analytics uses backlinks to weigh the authoritativeness of a website, so having many links to your site from third parties can be helpful.
Social Media Analytics
Depending on the social media platform, engagement metrics can include the number of followers, retweets, comments, and likes.
Marketing Analytics and New Contacts
Account based marketing (ABM) programs can resolve IP addresses to see if a company is being targeted. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) with contact details demonstrate top-of-funnel success. As prospects continue their journey down the funnel, they become Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) that sales can engage. Analyzing MQL and SQL analytics identifies areas for improving lead generation and nurturing processes. Live and virtual events contribute to the pool of new contacts, and their cost per lead help justify sponsorships.
Conversion Analytics in Marketing Analytics
Converting leads into customers is a critical metric for sales. Related to this are measures of average deal size and average sales cycle time.
Win-Loss Analysis in Marketing Analytics
There are vital facts to be learned by monitoring why deals are won or lost, as this helps to tune future tactics and drives elements of the product roadmap. Looking at win-loss ratios tells you little without drilling down to understand the underlying reasons. Win rate is helpful for organizations that calculate the marketing budget starting with the planned sales revenue goal.
Churn Analysis and Marketing Analytics
Through frequent interactions, sales and marketing can help retain customers by keeping them engaged. These same tactics help with driving adoption and cross-selling.
Using Marketing Analytics
Analytics help set marketing budgets and choose the most effective strategies and tactics. Using consistent measures across periodic reviews helps chart the progress toward business goals and objectives.
Marketing Analytics With Actian
The Actian Data Platform provides a unified experience for ingesting, transforming, analyzing, and storing data. Built-in connectors to marketing and salesforce automation systems make building and accessing data for marketing analytics easy.
