Marketing Automation and Lead Management Blog

A/B Testing and Multivariate Testing of Marketing Campaigns

I get asked frequently if Market2Lead supports A/B testing of email campaigns and the answer is “yes, of course,” but sometimes I wonder if the people have thought through the process.

You can dissect the average email campaign down into 6 broad areas that can influence the outcome as shown in the graphic above. In my August 28, 2009 post on effective campaigns I discussed the value of a high quality list as the primary determinant of the effectiveness of a campaign, so we won’t repeat that here. Instead I want to discuss how one would best go about A/B testing campaigns for the 5 remaining items.

Select the A/B Testing Outcome To Test

In B2B with long sales cycles, and multiple touch points, it would be silly to A/B test email campaigns for closed won opportunities, but in B2C this might be the perfect answer. In B2B email campaigns you are probably more likely to constrain yourself to opens, clicks, and offer downloads. In B2C with short sales cycles, you might consider “added to basket”, or purchases as the outcome you are testing.

A/B Testing Requires Random List Segmentation

To be an effective A/B test, the other factors beyond the one you are testing must be held constant or, in the case of segmented lists of people, be made random. So the first question should be, how does one produce random lists:

1. Allow the marketing automation system to randomly pick people from your segmented list for either the A or B treatment. To the best of my knowledge no marketing automation vendor offers this today.
2. Manually produce two lists (A and B) using some random mechanism; you could use the odd numbered contact ID numbers for the A list for instance. Trying to create random lists by selecting letters found in names or emails is not as random as you might think!  But if the contact ID numbers are assigned randomly when new leads are created or imported, it is a great way to go.

A/B Testing with One Program and Two Lists?

Some folks believe that it is simpler to use one program with two random lists, and have the functionality built in to apply the appropriate A/B subject line, or A/B email body, or A/B offer, or A/B Landing Page, or A/B Form to the A or B target list. In the reporting, the system would then have to be smart enough to produce two different reports on clicks, opens, downloads etc based on the A/B variable that was chosen. I find this too complicated.

I much prefer to create the program for A, copy it, point it to list B, change my one variable (subject line, or email body, or offer, or landing page, or form) and launch both programs. I can do this in two minutes and they each have their own results, it is easy to interpret, and easy to copy these programs for future tests.

You Don’t Need Dedicated Functionality for A/B Testing

The bottom line is that you can do some very creative A/B testing or multivariate testing as long as you have a means to create random lists. Everything else is easily done by copying the program and changing your one variable, and the reporting will make much more sense to you and everybody else.

So, an exercise for the reader: How would you do A/B/C testing since 3 does not divide evenly into 10, so our trick of using odd versus even contact IDs won't help...

-Kevin

Are your marketing assets generating demand?

Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are measurements that indicate the health of the business. We use them in dashboards to give status at a glance. As a continuation of my series of posts on Key Performance Indicators for Marketing, lets talk about measuring the effectiveness of Marketing assets and offers.

Marketing Offer Types for Demand Generation and Lead Nurturing

We invest a lot of our budget in creating them, we use them as bait for lead generation, educational fodder for lead nurturing campaigns, and ongoing loyalty marketing to our installed base. The assets we invest in generally include:

• Website pages
• Whitepapers
• Analyst reports
• Flash demos
• Data sheets and brochures
• Case studies, success stories
• Press Releases (maybe)
• Webcasts and podcasts
• Free trial offer
• Surveys
• Newsletters
• Training guides
• Best practices documents
• Online demo

To accurately report on them you will want to tag them with an "Offer Type", similar to the list I describe above. Next we need to decide the dimensions that we want to measure, some obvious, some perhaps not so obvious.

Measurements for marketing offer performance

1. Usage in a period of time
2. Form abandonment/completion rate by asset (if they have a form)
3. Age
4. Time to next interaction by prospects who registered for this offer

Usage is a no brainer. You will want to trend this out, and of course as you move the asset around on your website and offer it through other media, it will go up and down in popularity.

Age is important because too many asset choices on your website or in your delivery channel, will result in folks not finding the great assets and perhaps not choosing any asset at all. If you subscribe to the theory that too much choice results in less decisions to choose anything, read this article on the paradox of choice that throws doubt on that theory. Bottom line for me is that I would rather have 10 great offers, than hide the 10 in the middle of 40 mediocre offers.

I also have a fear that some assets are innoculating prospects. They read them, and never come back to your website. Hence the 4th metric, how long after an asset is downloaded until they interact with you again. This metric could help you weed out the weak offers by something other than usage and age.

There are a few other considerations in Asset performance measurement:

• Separate out "offers downloaded results" by net new leads versus existing prospects in your database versus installed base customers.
• Separate out proactive out reach of offers (email offers) from the results of folks finding your offers for themselves either on your website or through a third party.
• Your offers should have unique IDs so that they can be reused in multiple different programs/campaigns, and you can run the report based on the offer ID. If you change the form, fit, or function of the offer, give it a new ID.
• Also consider tracking all offers regardless if they have a gated form or not. This is an asset report, not a gated asset report! But in your reports you may want to highlight the difference.

What is the best KPI for Marketing offers?

So we have defined the types of offers, we have defined 4 dimensions of measurement, what would a single KPI for assets look like? We want a KPI that will set alarm bells going if it trends in the wrong direction, and we want that change to be obvious soon after it happens, not months later. Occam's razor tells us we should reach for the obvious one: look at total asset downloads per week or per month, and watch the trend. If you have 100 assets, at $3K each, isn't it worth keeping an eye on this $300K to see if it is working for you or against you?

-Kevin

Measuring Marketing Effectiveness

I read the recent post in the blog of Morgan Stewart, Director of Research and Strategy at ExactTarget, (a Market2Lead partner and all around good guys!) They just released a fascinating report they created with Econsultancy, on "Marketing Budgets 2010: Effectiveness, Measurement & Allocation". Great stuff and worth looking at the snapshot of the slides on Morgan's blog.  One slide in particular caught my attention:

So in their survey, 79% said increased Sales was a key metric for measuring marketing effectiveness, followed by traffic to the website at 71%. Wow. Yes I know increased sales is a goal of marketing, but it is a measure of the effectiveness of the entire company. Every other department could be doing awful, marketing is knocking the ball out of the park and gets a bloody nose because sales are down! And website visits - a measure of marketing effectiveness? So the increase in visits to Bank of America's website because of their notoriety over paying large bonuses after the bailout means Marketing is doing a good job (I hope they got bonuses for that).   My point is that an effective metric has to demonstrate a strong causal relationship to the thing it supposed to measure. Sales revenue is a good measure of the effectiveness of the channel, and the product/service. Website visits are a good measure of the brand awareness (both good and bad). Neither are good measures of overall marketing effectiveness.

Some good measures of marketing effectiveness

So what are some good measures of marketing effectiveness. Remember effectiveness is defined as doing the right things, and efficiency is doing things right. You combine both to get greater productivity. Let's measure effectiveness based on where you might allocate your marketing budget:

net new lead generation: Effectiveness measure is cost per "Sales Accepted" marketing lead

Notice that I am less interested in cost per "new" lead because anyone can drag in a bunch of garbage leads at a low price. A "sales accepted" marketing lead means that Sales is telling you that it is acceptable quality.

Lead nurturing: Effectiveness measure is velocity of leads through the funnel, or number of new opportunities from marketing leads. You can also look at your on going response rates to campaigns, how many open, clicked downloaded, although you have to be careful not to confuse this with the asset performance - A/B testing!

Awareness: Effectiveness measure could be brand recognition, website visits, social media mentions, traditional media mentions, etc

Loyalty marketing: Customer retention, satisfaction as mentioned in the report

Asset performance: Web pages per visit, asset downloads, form completion rates, event attendance.

A single measure of Marketing effectiveness?

I don't believe there is a single good measure of marketing effectiveness. All the ones I mentioned measure specific areas of marketing. Marketing ROI you say? So everything marketing does fits into nice little programs that are time bound, produce revenue in the near future and can be measured easily...not! Marketing ROI is good for specific campaigns.  So, anyone out there have any ideas for a good single measure of marketing effectiveness?

-Kevin

Measuring The Influence of Marketing - ROMI

I am delighted to see the B2B industry move towards greater accountability and metrics for Marketing. But the use of marketing automation systems, email platforms, web analytics, and online advertising is flooding marketers with lots of raw data.  I suspect that many marketing folks who didn't have to worry so much about ROMI in the past are struggling to organize the mountain of data in a way that helps them make better decisions, and demonstrates their positive influence on the business results.

Over the coming weeks I want to focus on one marketing KPI (Key performance Indicator) in each post, and elucidate the benefits of it. I want to start with a KPI that shows total responses in the period.

What is Total Marketing Responses Per Period?

A few months ago Megan Heuer from Sirius Decisions gave an excellent presentation on Marketing KPIs, and in it she said "Never confuse activity with results." 

So whilst you may send lots of emails, and host webinars, and attend trade shows, counting the responses to these programs is a good measure of the results! Marketing is tasked with creating demand (lead generation is just a portion of this). An effective measure of demand, in addition to actually linking opportunities back to marketing, is to measure the program responses you are getting. With a marketing intelligence business intelligence database such as the one included with Market2Lead's enterprise edition, one can segment out all responses by contact type. In this way you can tell at a glance how much of your efforts are going to net new lead generation, versus lead nurturing, vs installed base loyalty marketing.

How do you measure it?

What constitutes a response? Is a website visit a response? Is a card swipe at  a trade show a response?  If I register for a webinar, and subsequently attend the webinar is that one response or two? Is downloading a case study which doesn't require an registration a response? The important point here is that you decide these things at the outset, and stick to the definitions, because you want to see the month to month trends. Here are my recommendations:

• A website visit is a single response independent of how many pages were viewed
• Registering for a webinar and subsequent attendance represents two responses
• Downloading "free" assets from your website are not additional responses beyond the website visit
• Downloading premium assets that require registration are each a response
• Every registration is a response, but not every response requires registration
• Card swipes at a trade show because people want to put their name in for a free iPod raffle is not worthy of a response
• Responses from anonymous visits to your website, are real responses.
• Importing a list of contacts who have had no inbound interaction with your company, does not constitute responses.
• Unsubscribes and profile updates are not responses
• Email opens are not responses, but email click throughs are responses
• Telemarketing "connects" are responses
• Incoming calls to telemarketing, and contact us form submissions, are responses
• Syndicated content downloads are responses
• Comments added to a company affiliated blog are responses
• Re-tweets of your twitter content are responses

Don't forget to tag all your contacts with a contact type (prospect, customer, analyst, media, competitor, ex-customer etc) so you can slice and dice the data and figure out who you are really marketing to!  I am interested to hear your responses!

-Kevin

Untangling B2B Marketing Campaigns ROI

I’ve been preparing content for a webinar next week with NetProspex – 4 steps to measure marketing success and “ROI”. The topic is on how to measure the marketing influence on the Sales Funnel.  Because of the difficulties inherent in measuring B2B marketing campaign ROI I recommend that people focus on measuring influence instead. Here is the issue with Campaign ROI in a nutshell.

Let’s start with a definition, and examine the challenges involved in measuring it. ROI for a single marketing campaign can be computed as:

Total share of all opportunity dollars that can be attributed to a campaign in a finite period

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Total costs of the marketing campaign within the same period

The first challenge is the definition of a finite time period.

When to measure the ROI of a Marketing Campaign
So the campaign has been running a month, you sum up all the costs, add up your share of all the closed deals, and find that you have a negative ROI (at t=1 above). No surprise there, your sales cycle is 6 months or more! So you wait a year, do the same calculation at t=2, and the ROI is 10x. High fives all around. And you wait another year, and now the ROI is 25x. Pop the champagne. How do you ever decide what the real number is?  You can decide when the campaign ends, but its influence could extend out a year or two thereafter, depending on some deals in the sales pipeline. The best approach is to establish a rule for your firm and follow it for all campaigns. Something along the lines of: the final Campaign ROI will be established at 2x the average sales cycle duration after a campaign has ended. After that, no share of the opportunity dollars are attributed back to that campaign. This brings us to the second challenge - share of opportunity dollars.

Share of opportunity dollars

So if a closed won $100K opportunity can be shown to link back to 100 marketing campaigns, trade shows, white paper downloads, and website visits, do they all get an equal share of the opportunity value? Each gets $1000 credit in this case. Or are some campaigns considered more important than others (unequal weighting)? Perhaps tradeshows are worth 10x more than website visits but only 2x the value of a webinar attendance. And are webinar registrations worth less if the contact failed to attend?  This could get messy very quickly. My advice, start simple, give all incoming responses an equal share. Out-going touches (such as sent an email) get nothing. Some CRMs assign 100% of the opportunity to each campaign in their campaign influence reports – how messy is that?

Attributing opportunity dollars to Marketing Campaigns

How do you attribute opportunity dollars back to a marketing campaign? Perhaps you have gone down the path of trying to specify a primary campaign source for each new opportunity. You will probably discover, as many have, that this method is fraught with problems and is unreliable.  Most importantly, in the case of ROI, it vastly under represents all of the marketing campaigns involved in any one opportunity. So let’s start at the other end: link all campaigns to contacts and then link the contacts back to opportunities. Your marketing automation system links contacts to campaigns. Linking the contacts to the opportunities is not as straight forward. You want to be able to link all the relevant contacts on an account back to opportunities.  Some folks may choose to only link back contacts associated with the opportunity, whereas others, recognizing that Sales folks often do not associate any contacts with an opportunity, may grab at all the contacts on an account. To pull this off accurately, you will need a marketing BI engine, because for every opportunity you have to be able to connect back to every relevant contact, and attribute a share of the opportunity dollars to every campaign they responded to. The BI engine relieves you from depending on good Sales behavior for connecting marketing campaigns with opportunities.

So the top line of the ROI equation has its challenges, and we haven’t even started the conversation about cost allocation to marketing campaigns. Let’s save that for a future conversation.  In the webinar next week, I will discuss a better, more expedient method of measuring marketing influence on the Sales funnel.  Chances are good this webinar will be available as a webcast in our resource center shortly thereafter!

-Kevin

Marketing Accountability is NOT a new concept

I have seen several blog posts recently that practically suggest that Marketing Accountability is a new concept. It is not new. Marketers have measured, and were held accountable for their results for decades! Primarily B2C marketers. Marketing accountability may however be new for some B2B marketers. Why?

B2C companies have used radio, TV, print advertising, and in store promotions, for many years, and measure the costs, impact to consumer behavior, and the cash register. The investment and the reward metrics are well beyond what many B2B marketing firms can imagine. $500K for software databases and associated campaign management tools, millions for the actual media, and tens of millions in returns within weeks of the campaign launch. By golly these marketers are accountable, and they must be laughing at the B2B marketers who think they are inventing marketing accountability!

Why has it taken so long for B2B marketing metrics to achieve the same level of sophistication as B2C? I believe there were several significant hurdles to B@B marketing accountability that marketers are now surmounting with the help of marketing automation.

B2B has multiple people involved in a single sale

In B2C you segment, target your list of consumers, launch, and measure results all within weeks in most cases. In B2B there can be many people involved in a single purchase. There can be a committee of decision makers. Different people can be involved in the sales cycle at different times; did purchasing ever elbow their way into your negotiations at the last minute and delay the contract a month? So if you are to successfully deploy marketing metrics you have to be able to gauge the aggregated marketing influence on all the stakeholders as it relates to the single final outcome. This is not as easily done as one promotion to one individual to drive one result.

B2B has a longer sales cycle
Length of the sales cycle is probably the most significant difference between B2B and B2C marketing. In B2C typically the purchase price is less than $100, so a single promotion can alter their perception of the brand and motivate the potential buyer into action next time the need arises. In B2B the sales price is probably in the thousands and the product or service is more complex and requires a human to consummate the deal. The length of the sales cycle can vary from weeks to years for the same product. ie you can have a "long tail" with a significant number of deals taking more than twice as long as the average. So if you are to calculate the Marketing ROI for some campaigns, how long do you wait for the deals to come in? The average sales cycle period, or twice that period? That could be 2 years!

The common fruit fly is very popular with geneticists because it can go from egg to an adult ready to breed in less than 10 days. So they can do lots of tests in a single year. The same applies to B2C. With a short sales cycle, marketers can test a campaign, wait a few weeks for results, adjust, test again, adjust, and then roll it out to a much larger region. For B2B with the longer sale cycle this is often not possible. They get one shot, and the real results based on revenue won't be known for a year, or two. One common error you see in B2B is with some marketers getting impatient for results and switching tactics before the long term effect of a campaign can be measured.

Multiple interactions with multiple media
Another challenge with B2B marketing is that we tend to have many interactions with prospects before we get to a sale. There can be trade show interactions, web site visits, direct mail, email offers, webinars and so on. So the final revenue won has to be credited to multiple interactions, to multiple stakeholders, all using multiple media and varying offers. Phew.

B2C marketing metrics are better suited for statistical analysis
Another item that works for the benefit of B2Cs is having big numbers for statistical analysis. If we want to measure something with a 95% confidence level, +/- 5% on a population of 10000 or more, we would need 400 in our sample size. With B2C they can do tests on one or two metropolitan areas, with a few million consumers and get statistically valid results. For B2B, 400 closed deals could be 100% of our annual sales! So it is much harder to apply statistics to smaller sample sizes and draw believable conclusions.

B2B Marketing Metrics for Marketing Accountability
The B2C marketers amongst you are now saying, "stop whining and do something about it". Okay so what can we B2B marketers do to increase our marketing accountability.
Create reports that aggregate all marketing influence per opportunity from all prospects related to that account. Get around the long sales cycle issue by measuring marketing influence on the shorter time period steps that make up the sales cycle.

• Measure the aggregated marketing influence on every closed won opportunity
• Measure the marketing influence on every opportunity in the funnel
• Measure the Lead conversion rate at every step (from Open, to MQL, from MQL to SAL, from SAL to SQL) based on marketing influence and lead source
• Measure the performance of each offer as it relates to opportunities.
• Measure the duration time of leads in each state (measures nurturing effectiveness)

B2B marketers are now getting sofware and database tools in the form of Marketing Automation that can measure their influence on the sales funnel and help drive marketing accountability. B2B are ready for a transition to data driven marketing. And the good news is that instead of costing $500K like the B2C software products, they are less than 10% of that number! So there is no excuse anymore!  Direct Sales has traditionally been the most accountable organization in the company with up to a third of its members turned over every year for not meeting plan. B2B marketing may have been the least accountable organization, but no more. The sales and marketing divide can be bridged with shared accountability for results.Don't expect what you don't inspect.

For those of you attending the CRM Evolution conference next week be sure to check out "B2C lessons for B2B Marketing" by Patric Timmermans.

-Kevin

Top 10 Marketing Reports To Be Viewed Weekly

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.

1. 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!
2. 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.
   
3. 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).
4. 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!
5. 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!
6. 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.
7. 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. 
8. Basic web statistics - weekly trend on visits, duration, bounce rates etc
9. Out going marketing campaign statistics - weekly trendlines. All the usual quantity targeted, open rates, click throughs, card swipes from shows,  etc
10. 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

Lead Source - A Blessing or A Curse?

Some marketing folks get very hung up on identifying the best lead source. I would much rather know the sequence of all the marketing touches and responses, to all of the contacts, at an account where an opportunity closed won. Be that as it may, I want to discuss the connection of lead source to opportunities in a CRM such as Salesforce.com. The marketing automation system can certainly help this process but since many leads are entered by Sales (CSO Insights figures it is up to 52% in 2008) into the SFA/CRM, the Lead Management process has to be defined in such a way that it plugs the holes and helps marketing get credit for opportunity dollars they helped put in the funnel.

So what is the problem you may be wondering? Lead comes in to website, registers for something; hot lead that marketing passes to Sales as a marketing qualified lead, sales likes it, moves it to sales accepted lead status, and later on after a few calls they become a sales qualified lead (Using the Sirius Decisions vernacular here as it seems to be getting wide acceptance). At this point the lead has been converted into a contact, and the lead source value passed along to the contact object in your SFA. IF you do not choose to force the creation of an opportunity at the time of conversion because you recognize that although the person is qualified (they and their company could represent an opportunity at some future time) but isn't actively in their buying cycle, then you have no guarantee that your lovely lead source value will ever get attached to the opportunity at some future date. The sales guys goes out to the account meets 5 more people, enters them into the SFA with a lead source of "sales prospecting" and when the opportunity comes along 6 months from now the chances are 5/6 that she will pick one of those 5 as the primary contact for the opportunity - that is if you are lucky enough to have them attach at least one person to the opportunity. As a result the opportunity lead source = "Sales Prospecting". Marketing gets no credit for bringing in the new account!

Yes, you tell me, 'that is why my company insists that an opportunity has to be created when you convert a lead to a contact/account. QED problem solved. Kevin, get a life.' Not so fast...What you have now done is forced Sales folks to put crap data into the system. Most of the time when they are excited enough to convert the lead (because contacts/accounts are simply easier to handle than leads) they really don't know enough to put anything intelligent in about opportunities. So you end up with Sales folks putting in very small opportunity values so management won't look over their shoulders, and pushing the expected close dates way out into the future. Your opportunity funnel will fill up with junk that seems to take forever to close - strange that, and you'll notice that the deals that do close are the ones that have only been in the system a short while.  You'll look at your opportunity funnel for the quarter and say, 'wow we have 3x our required revenues for the quarter in here, are we in good shape or what', and then wonder why 90% of them are fossils that didn't close this quarter...either.

And what happens when the first opportunity is closed lost but there is a second and a third opportunity added? How do those get connected back to marketing investments?  Forcing the creation of an opportunity during conversion can work in some situations but you still need to think this through in your lead management process... that is if you still believe knowing the original lead source is important. At market2lead our Client Services chaps have come up with some novel ways to help solve this issue and give marketing credit when it is due, but we are always interested in hearing more if you care to share.
-Kevin

Designing Marketing Dashboards

Nowadays, there is so much attention being paid to the "M" word in Marketing – “Measurement”. The goal is to have real-time access to reliable, relevant and actionable information. Standard Reporting solutions are being replaced with robust Marketing Dashboards to meet such demands. Here are a few tips to take into consideration while embarking on such an initiative:

1. Consistent operational processes: The most expensive mistake an organization can make is to start thinking about Dashboards after operational process is set in place. Thinking through and formalizing KPIs and supporting metrics that need to be tracked and measured upfront is extremely critical and will help make the right design decisions in the operational system. For example, if we need to track Responses by channel like web or email we can make sure that the right tracking codes are in place for landing pages that are shared. Otherwise, Marketing Operations team will be tied up with manual methods to break up the Response metric after the fact.

2. Design Role based Dashboards: One of the key drivers for adoption of dashboards is the ability to setup role-based dashboards. Let’s take executive dashboards as an example. Executives are always trying to measure the performance of their organizations against their MBOs. Make sure executive dashboards are aligned with their MBOs. Setup gauges on the dashboard that can help an executive track progress weekly or monthly and take appropriate actions. Typical KPIs could be:
a.    Qualified Leads per Quarter
b.    Qualified Opportunities per Quarter
c.    Marketing Responders per Quarter
d.    Number of Campaigns per employee
e.    Cost per Lead
f.    Cost per Response
Similarly mid-management might be interested in understanding the performance of key initiatives and tactics. Create a matrix of the different roles within the department and metrics relevant to each role. This will help design effective Dashboards by role.

3. Setup Dashboards to track “areas of improvement”: We would all love to be in a situation where the initiatives we undertake deliver results as expected and we are able to consistently meet or exceed our goals. The reality is we have a mixed bag of Campaigns that provide expected results and campaigns that don’t. Every quarter pick an “area of improvement” that you want to focus on and setup Dashboards to help you analyze the results of the tests you conduct to improve yield from the tactics within this initiative. For example, one of my customers recently mentioned that they were getting steady improvement in their web traffic but the number of soft offer downloads was stagnant. We are now setting up a dashboard to measure tracking on pages that drive traffic to the whitepapers and measure conversions. This requires side-by-side views of “web traffic” & “form downloads”, understand where the drop-offs are happening and optimize appropriately.

4. Incorporate best practices into Dashboards: There is lot of great research being produced by organizations like Sirius Decisions, Marketing Sherpa among others. Incorporate benchmark data relevant for your organization into your dashboards. This is a great way to peg your results against industry standards and also set the bar within the organization.

5. Constant Tuning: Dashboards need to be agile and need to be tweaked based on changing business needs and goals. As priorities change appropriate metrics and KPIs need to emphasized/de-emphasized on Dashboards. Reading dashboards and gleaning knowledge is a non-trivial skill and requires some ramp up. Regular knowledge sharing sessions within the organization is a great way to help Marketers share tips about how to recognize patters in the data, understand what the patterns suggest and make appropriate decisions.

Economic Downturn - A chance to leapfrog your competition

It is interesting to listen to the economic pundits talk about whether we are already in a recession or whether we are heading towards one. While the popular definition is 2 continuous quarters of negative economic growth there are other interesting views about this definition. Here is an interesting blog post by two economic professors at UC San Diego and University of Wisconsin, Madison where the authors espouse that "recessions represent distinct and objectively identifiable episodes in which the usual dynamic factors that drive economic growth-- technological progress, population growth, and capital accumulation-- are replaced by a distinctly different dynamic in which lost income in some sectors feeds back into declines in output for others".

While economists fight out the technicalities of a recession what are B2B Marketers doing to brace for a period of sluggish growth (at best)? Here are a few areas that we at Market2Lead think Marketers should focus on in the near future so that they can emerge more effective and efficient when the economy turns around.

1. Consolidation & Automation - Eliminate rote work: Most businesses are extremely sensitive to cash investments vis-a-vis resource investments. Many potential clients that we talk to have a hodge-podge of systems/resources to manage their Marketing efforts. A typical mix includes email tools, data scrubbing tools, landing page tools or web masters, webinar registration tools among others. Some of these tools tie into the client's CRM system while others don't. A significant amount of operations resource time is spent in moving data between the tools, scrubbing data files and manually building reports by collating data from these tools. During recessionary times companies are forced to not just cut back budgets but are also forced to either cut back or extract more efficiencies from existing
resources. At the same time, work load typically goes up. The best way to work within these constraints and still maintain throughput is to consolidate systems. Now is the time to invest in a comprehensive Marketing Automation solution that will help automate/eliminate manual tasks. Another big benefit is Marketing departments will be able to spend time on strategic initiatives that can have a direct impact on top line revenue.

2. Lead Nurturing - Extract more from past investments: Sirius Decisions published a study that mentions 80% of Leads generated by B2B marketing are not followed up by sales. Also in times of slow economy growth most companies either delay buying decisions or are extremely picky in their buying decisions. This basically means that a slowdown in sales cycle time. The smart thing to do at this time is to shift focus from campaigns that drive new demand to campaigns that can nurture existing Leads. With cost effective tactics like emails, webinars, online syndication etc. lead nurturing campaigns are a lot more cost effective than demand generation campaigns. Marketing Automation solutions can help Marketers design and automate nurture campaigns that can extract more revenue from Leads that did not convert. A study published in Marketing Management V3 #2 suggests that 45% of Marketing Respondents buy in 12 months, not necessarily from companies that initially marketed to them. This is popularly called the "Marketing rule of 45" and has held the test of time for 3 decades. In this day and age, with a plethora of cost effective technologies and related processes, most companies barely manage to get a 5% yield from their campaigns. Now is the time to shift focus from Demand Generation to Lead Nurturing and extract more value from existing spend.

3. Funnel Optimization - Plug leaks: Marketing organizations need to scrutinize every stage of the integrated marketing and sales funnel and look for opportunities to increase throughput. Now is the time to look at conversion rates, qualification rates, sales follow-up rates and win/loss rates. Look at campaigns that demonstrate "Spray and Pray" symptoms. Figure out ways to optimize existing segmentation strategies and move towards an "Aim and Shoot" stage. In my observation, most organizations still lock and load a significant portion of their databases hoping for larger conversion numbers. Instead, focus on conversion ratios. You might get the same numbers by targeting a smaller audience segment. Next, talk to your sales organization and find out if there is a change in their capacity to handle Leads. Sales might be happier with fewer Leads if they are better qualified. You can positively impact sales morale and productivity. Recessions impact some industries more than the other. For example, in the current economic climate, it's a bad idea to go after the financial services market to meet revenue goals for the immediate future. Align your demand generation campaigns with industries that are relatively healthy when compared with the others. To facilitate this level of analysis your Marketing Automation system should give you visibility into the extended funnel and sales stages like lead promotion, opportunity management and forecasting.

4. Increase throughput - Implement best practices: This is a fantastic opportunity to take action on those creative ideas you had in mind to improve throughput from your campaigns. When the economy is roaring companies lay more emphasis on velocity to grow revenue aggressively. Inefficiencies are hidden or ignored when companies are in "order taking mode". When the economy slows down companies are forced to change behavior and become smarter. Budgets accommodate fewer campaigns and expect better results. Now is the time to wipe the dust off the best practice guides that you really wanted to implement but never got the time to. Try and micro-segment your campaigns and try different variations for emails, landing pages, microsites among others. MarketingSherpa is a great resource for case studies and best practices. Look for technologies that support A/B testing for emails, multi-variate testing for Landing pages, recommendation techniques for offers on microsites, progressive profiling techniques to improve form completion rates.

5. Measure, measure, measure - justify your spend: Marketer's are always under pressure to demonstrate return on their investments. The scrutiny is all the more pronounced during tough times. Every penny has to be justified and every campaign has to be measured. This job is relatively easy for demand generation campaigns since these campaigns are optimized for generating Leads. But demand generation campaigns always need support from awareness campaigns to build brand equity and buy mind share. As a Marketer, you know that you need to invest in PR and SEO to drive traffic to the website. How do you quantify the value from such investments to a CFO or a CEO who is trying to connect the dots between spend and revenue. The only way you can accomplish this is to be able to correlate data and trends from different initiatives and draw trends that can be quantified. This requires a robust Business Intelligence solution that will give you the flexibility to slice and dice data in different ways and look for interesting trends and patterns that can be used to justify spend. Imagine if you can view web traffic trends and marketing funnel trends side by side on the same dashboard and have the capability to analyze the impact of one on the other. It's a much easier argument to show your boss that by keeping the constraints constant on the demand generation side the quantifiable impact a dip in PR and SEO effort has on the funnel.

Recessions can be looked at with caution and skepticism or can be looked at as an opportunity to get lean, smart and more efficient. History tells us that smart companies emerge from down cycles much stronger and fitter and the weaker companies lose out.