So if you only have time Monday morning to scan the top 10 reports from your marketing demand creation team, what would be on your list of things to view and why. Here is my take, in no particular order. Most of these reports should be weekly trend lines with 56 (sic) weeks of history if you have it so you can view year over year trends too.
- Form completion rates by unique form. One chart showing the weekly historical trend for all your major forms on the website (info request, newsletter sign-up, free trial, download, partner sign-up, PPC form, etc). Web leads can be very economical, and are usually a good indicator of interest. I find it fascinating that so many people focus so much attention on getting more visitors to the website and so little attention on the "last mile" - getting the visitors to complete a registration form. Form completion rates can vary depending on the offer, but in many cases it will be a lot easier to double the form completion rate than it is to double the number of visitors to a website!
- Form completion rates by offer name or offer type. This is a pretty good measure of the content, especially when the same form is used for many different offers. It can be an early indicator of when content is getting stale, or which topics are hot.
- Unknown visitor - company name from IP address. A report that lists all the companies that visited the website in the past week but the visitors were unknown to the Marketing Automation system. Sorted by highest number of visits first, and filtered to remove ISPs, this report can be very useful to ISRs (telemarketing).
- Total marketing leads added into the SFA. You can run this one from your SFA or from your Marketing Automation (MA) system. A VERY important measure of the output of the demand creation group. Notice that I said leads added into the SFA. By this I meant leads that have been handed off to the sales team. This weekly trend line should be moving up and to the right!
- Marketing lead conversion rate in the SFA. This report is simply the number marketing leads converted to contacts/accounts last week divided by the total new leads added by marketing that week. The leads converted may have been added 6 months ago, that doesn't matter. You are simply keeping track of the ongoing sales perceived quality of leads given to them by marketing. It should be used as an early warning indicator of declining lead quality if the number trends down over time. If the number trends up over time that could be perceived as a good thing (better quality leads) but it could also be viewed as marketing holding back too many leads for further nurturing. Sometimes quantity has a quality all of its own!
- Leads by Lead Source. A simple trend chart that shows the number of leads by lead source. If you have a defined lead management process, and set up your lead source optimally, it will have no more than 10 or 12 possible values (all the details go into another field - lead source details or specific lead source). As such it should be easy to plot out the numbers for these 10 different lead sources week after week.
- Marketing conversion rate by lead source. This one might produce results that will freak people out but it is very important. What is it we all want to do in hard economic times? Cut the 20% of marketing programs that are NOT working. It is usually easy to recognize the campaigns that are pulling their weight, harder to determine what is the bottom 20%. One way to really measure the efficacy of campaigns is to figure out the lead conversion rate by lead source. If you really want to go crazy on this, you can do the same for "specific lead source" or campaign name. Just remember that you will want to have a good handle on your average lead age before it converts, when you look at the results so that "young" campaigns don't get dinged simply because the leads haven't had time to mature to a conversion ready state.
- Basic web statistics - weekly trend on visits, duration, bounce rates etc
- Out going marketing campaign statistics - weekly trendlines. All the usual quantity targeted, open rates, click throughs, card swipes from shows, etc
- Responses by contact/lead type. Marketing spends a lot of the budget on generating out going touches, it is nice to be able to measure the incoming responses and codify them based on the type of person: Net new lead, existing lead in system, existing contact but not a customer yet, and lastly customers. By graphing the responses by contact type you have a rough idea of how much you are spending on marketing to your installed base (loyalty marketing), on nurturing, or on net new lead generation!
What are your favorite weekly reports?
-Kevin
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