Measuring Your Online Marketing Success

Measuring Your Online Marketing Success WHAT TO LOOK AT, WHAT TO AIM FOR AND HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR RESULTS ALISA MEREDITH SCALABLE SOCIAL MEDIA

Unlocking the Secrets to Online Marketing Success We get it really. You scrounge out enough time to do some online marketing and hope it pays off, but the last thing you want to do is pour over endless reports full of numbers that mean nothing to you and get you no closer to knowing what s working and how to improve. That s why we created this ebook. We re not naturally numbers people either. We prefer words, stories and relationships to facts and figures and maybe you re the same way. We promise you you can tame the online marketing metrics beast! We ll look at some of the most important metrics and help you break it down. You might even want to print this out to look at alongside your monthly reports. Who should read this ebook and why? Anyone using online marketing for their business who is not sure which metrics to track, what they mean, or what to do with the information. There is so much information available that many business owners get overwhelmed and give up resorting to a random, hit or miss approach to online marketing. There are so many different sources for our data as well Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Pinterest Analytics and so on. This requires marketers to compile information from multiple sources before they can even begin to analyze it. What you ll know after you read this ebook What the important metrics are, what they mean and how to use them to improve your marketing efforts for better results. Why bother measuring? It might be tempting to spend all your time DOING rather than measuring. However, when you are effectively measuring, you ll take the guesswork out of what you do making your efforts much more efficient. You ll know: 1. What s working 2. What tactics to implement more often for more success 3. What isn t working 4. How to improve. Rather than blindly stabbing with your marketing efforts, you ll have the insight you need to make informed decisions, allowing you to spend more time on what works. You ll also be able to show your manager that what you re doing is working. What Should I Measure? Everything. So, let s get started. 1

Measuring the Success of Your Website Everything you do, everywhere on the web, should be with the aim of driving visitors to your website and landing pages. If your website isn t already using Google Analytics, HubSpot, or other program, get in touch with your website manager before you go any further. All set? Good. Let s look at some of the major metrics, what they mean, and what you can do with the information. 1. Unique Visitors The number of people who visited your site. This does not count repeat visits by the same person. Look for an upward trend over time and for spikes that coincide with marketing campaigns. When the number of unique visitors to your site is rising, your content and marketing efforts are driving visitors to your site. Also, check for trends during specific marketing campaigns to see what resonates best. If your count isn t rising, or you see no spikes during concentrated periods of marketing, it s time to reassess. Add more useful, unique and fresh content to draw in new visitors. Utilize social media to spread the word about your content and encourage people to visit for the first time. 2. New Visitors Vs. Returning Visitors Compares how many of your unique visitors are new and how many are coming back. What you Look For About 15% repeat visitors Up to a certain point, more repeat visitors mean your website contains valuable content that keeps people coming back. A repeat visitor rate around 30% means you are probably not getting enough new visitors to generate new leads and customers. Add more quality content and send subscribers a weekly or monthly blog recap to encourage them to return. 2

3. Traffic Sources How people found your site either directly (by entering your URL in a browser), organic search engine traffic or referral traffic from another website. Organic traffic around 40 50%. Referral traffic at about 20 30% Those healthy numbers mean your SEO and link building efforts are working. Anything else means you need to refocus some of your time and effort (or budget) on SEO and link building which may simply mean creating more relevant, sharable content. 4. Referring URLs Sites other than search engines that send traffic to your site. These are also known as inbound links and they give your site a boost in search engine rankings as well as bringing in targeted visitors from each link. Watch for your list of referring URLs to grow steadily over time. When people link to your site, it means your content is deemed worthy of a share by others. Look at what they re sharing so you ll know what kinds of content you should focus on and write more of it! 5. Most/Least Popular Pages Shows which pages are receiving the most and least traffic. What to look for Hey, you win some, you lose some. Some pages will be a hit. Some not so much. Also, it is normal that some posts will lose ground over time. Popular pages help you understand what your visitors and prospects find most interesting. They also tell you which pages you should make sure are really well optimized for lead generation. For instance, if one of your most popular page is on Pinterest, do you have a link to your Pinterest ebook landing page on it? 3

6. Indexed Pages The number of pages on your site that have received at least one visit from an organic search. A slow but steady increase. This number tells you how many of your pages are being indexed by search engines AND being visited by users. If this number is not increasing, are you adding quality content on a regular basis? Aim to blog at LEAST twice a week, and make sure you are utilizing basic SEO techniques and sharing your posts on social media. 7. Landing Page Conversion Rate The percentage of visitors to your site who take a desired action, such as purchasing a product or filling out a form. This type of tracking must be set up manually in Google Analytics. Speak with your website or SEO manager. Look at visitor to lead conversion, lead to customer conversion, and visitor to customer conversion rates. What to Look for The higher the better! A high conversion rate means that your content is attracting the right visitors to your site people who are interested in your products and services and are ready to act. If your rate is low, review your content and consider ways you can attract people who are further down in the buying funnel. For example, if you are a dog trainer, instead of creating more content on how to teach your dog to come, create content on what to look for in selecting a dog trainer. 8. Bounce Rate Bounce rate is the percentage of new visitors who leave your site pretty much as soon as they arrive. They don t visit more than one page and they don t stay long! The lower the better! Average bounce rates vary by industry, so watch your own rather than comparing. You should see it go down over time. High bounce rate means your pages are not compelling or useful to visitors. This can happen when your website is difficult to navigate, is slow to load, has low quality content or no calls to action. It can also happen if your campaigns are not well targeted. For instance, if your Facebook ad promised an ebook on 4

blogging but takes people to the home page of your site rather than a landing page to download the ebook, people will be frustrated and leave. Improve your bounce rate by making it very easy to get around your site. Also, link to related pages within your site to keep people browsing longer. A high bounce rate can hurt your search engine rankings, so try to get it as low as possible. If you have an extra long blog post, break it up into two separate posts, linking from the first to the second. That keeps people around longer and shows Google that visitors are finding good stuff on your site. 5

Measuring SEO Success 1. Keyword Success and Rankings First, perform keyword research for your site, or hire someone to do it for you (it takes a few hours or around $250). Keep those keywords handy and use them in your website pages, ads and blog posts. Google makes it impossible to see all the search terms that bring visitors to your site. So you may have to infer from your most popular pages the search terms that are working for you. You can also try Bing for keyword ranking information or use Google Webmaster tools. Once you re signed up, go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/top searchqueries?hl=en&siteurl= and add your URL to the end of the link to see search queries for your site. number one is tough! Keyword ranking shows you where your content appears in search engine results. You know how everyone wants to be #1 on Google? This is what they mean. They want their content to come up first when someone searches their keywords. PS Getting to number one and staying at Here, the lower the number the better! When you are ranking well for your keywords, your content and social media marketing are working well for you, returning your content to people high on the list of search engine results. Paid programs such as HubSpot (just Google keyword rank checker ) allow you to easily see your ranking for your keyword terms. If you re feeling ambitious, you can set Google Analytics up to track your keyword rankings for you for free. Creating a consistent stream of useful, relevant, unique content using your target keywords will help improve your rankings. Links from other sources (including social media) can also help. 2. Traffic from Organic Search The percentage of unique visitors who arrive at your site by clicking on a link on a search engine results page. 6

If 40 50% of your total traffic is from organic search, you are doing a great job with your content and onpage SEO. If you re counting on PPC for most of your traffic, step it up and create more content to target keywords that can be found by the search engines. This includes videos, podcasts, ebooks, webinars, and blog posts. 3. Branded and Non Branded Search Traffic This will tell you how much organic search traffic comes to your site from brand related keywords like your company or product name versus generic non branded keywords related to your industry. It s the difference between searching for LL Bean (branded) or Camping Supplies (non branded). Ideally, the bulk of your traffic will come from non branded search traffic. If you are getting the majority of your traffic from brand related searches, start generating more content for your non branded keywords. If a person already knows to search for your brand or product name, they already know about you. Strive to reach new people with your non branded content. 4. Unique Search Terms Driving Traffic Search phrases that visitors use to find your site. In Google Analytics, go to Traffic Sources>Search Engine Optimization>Queries. Sort by Average Position to see for which terms you are ranking well. In late September, it was announced that Google would no longer be providing this information. You could 7

try Bing s keyword tools, or just look at your most popular pages for the keywords used on each. That ll tell you which keywords you rank well for even if Google won t! A long list of terms driving traffic to your site means you are doing well creating content around the keywords that prospects are using to research your goods and services. The top phrases should be those you are working to target. If your targeted keywords aren t showing up high on the list (or at all), you need to create more relevant, valuable content around those phrases. If some of the keywords near the top of the list are not those you target, consider whether you might want to create more content using those keywords to capitalize on the progress you made accidentally. 5. Inbound Links or Backlinks This is the number of sites that link to yours. Find it in Google Analytics by going to Traffic Sources>Sources>Referrals. This shows you all sites that link to you that generate traffic to your site. A steadily growing list of sites sending referral traffic to your website. The more inbound links the better. Not simply in terms of direct traffic generation, but because Google sees links from other sites as votes for your usefulness. Look at what content is attracting links and write more on that subject. Check out each link to see what anchor text the author is using to link to you and consider adding that to your keyword list. 8

Measuring the Success of Paid Search Marketing With PPC, you re spending money on each click you generate, so you need to know how much you re spending to acquire each visitor as well as how much of a profit you re making on that ad spend. You can get some very specific tips on improving the ROI of your paid marketing from our blog. 1. Click Through Rate (CTR) The percentage of the audience that viewed your ad and actually clicked on the link provided, calculated by dividing total clicks by the number of impressions. As you become more skilled with paid search, your CTR will go up. Monitoring your CTRs over time will help you determine the quality and effectiveness of your ad. If you want to improve CTRs for specific keywords, you can test different ad headlines, copy treatments, and landing page URLs to see which combination boosts your CTR for a given term. 2. Cost Per Click (CPC) This is the amount you pay each time someone clicks on your ad. Obviously, lower is better here, but a good CPC is impossible to define, as average costs per click will vary widely from industry to industry. Optimizing your adgroups, ads and keywords will bring your CPC down, but really this number is only helpful in determining ROI if you are also tracking conversions (leads or sales generated). 3. Conversion Rate The percentage of visitors who completed a desired action (e.g., product purchase or lead generation form completion) after clicking on one of your PPC ads. 9

Conversion rates are a good measure of the quality of your PPC landing pages. If the landing page headline, copy, and offer are all relevant to the original PPC ad, then you should expect to see a higher conversion rate. If you have a good click through rate but low conversions on a specific ad, then you should carefully examine the landing page to determine why visitors aren t converting. Is the page relevant to the text of the ad and the original search phrase? Is the value proposition clear? Is the offer compelling? 4. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) A measurement of how much you are spending on PPC advertising for each conversion. Calculate your overall paid search CPA by dividing total ad spend by your total PPC conversion rate. Or, calculate it on a per campaign basis by dividing your average cost per click by your conversion rate for a specific ad/keyword combination. Obviously lower is better here, but, depending on what a conversion is worth to you, this could be a substantial number. Tracking your CPA can help you optimize your PPC bidding strategy. For example, Google AdWords now offers a conversion based bidding option that lets advertisers set their maximum ad bids according to a target CPA. If you know your historical CPAs from previously successful PPC campaigns, you can use that figure to help bid more efficiently on new keywords. 5. Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) ROAS measures the return on your PPC advertising investment, calculated by dividing your total ad spend by the total revenue generated from those PPC conversions. Look for any positive number here. Clicks and visits are all very nice, but unless you have an overall positive ROI here, PPC is not working for you. If you re not seeing a positive ROAS, consider investing in some training, hiring a PPC specialist to get more for your money, or think about using this part of your budget differently. 10

Measuring the Success of Your Business Blog Measuring your business blog can be a great way to identify ways to improve its performance. If the primary goal of your business blog is to generate leads, for example, you ll want to gauge how well it s generating leads today and discover which articles and specific tactics are particularly working toward achieving that goal. Once you can identify the key factors that make your blog successful, you can incorporate more of those tactics into future blog posts to improve your blog s overall performance. Here s what you should be measuring 1. Blog Traffic & Referral Sources How much traffic you re generating to your blog and where that traffic is coming from (e.g. social media, referrals, direct traffic, organic search, etc.). Knowing where your blog traffic is coming from and how much traffic can be attributed to individual sources can reveal valuable insights into how effective you are at promoting your blog content in certain channels. Is most of your traffic coming from organic search? If so, you re likely doing a great job of optimizing your content with the right keywords for search engines. Are you lacking in social media traffic? Then you might want to put more effort into promoting your content in social media or increasing your social reach so more people can find and share your content in those channels. Consider from which sources you re lacking in traffic, and double down on generating more exposure for your blog there. 2. Individual Post Views How many views each post receives. Trends in which articles are more popular than others. Over time, try to notice commonalities and patterns in the data. Is there something each title has in common? Or maybe blog posts on a particular topic resonate better with your blog s target audience than other topics. 11

Make a list of some of the top lessons you ve learned from your blog analytics, and incorporate those tactics into more of your future blog articles. Also, consider whether you could combine similar popular posts into an ebook. 3. Visitor to Lead Conversion Rate The rate at which your blog is converting visitors into leads. The higher the conversion rate, the better! If your goal is to generate leads with your blog, you not only want to know how many leads you re generating, but also how effective you are at converting visitors into leads. If you start generating more traffic but your conversion rate is declining, you might want to focus more of your efforts on optimizing your blog for lead generation (including Calls to action, links to landing pages). If you re generating the same amount of blog traffic but your conversion rates are increasing, this means you re getting better at converting visitors into leads. While the ultimate goal is to increase traffic and your conversion rate so your leads increase, your blog s conversion rate can be a great indicator of how effective your blog lead generation efforts are in general. 4. Call to Action Performance How effective your blog s individual calls to action (CTAs) are at converting blog visitors into leads Each and every one of your blog posts (as well as the sidebar of your blog itself) should include a CTA for an offer available via a lead generation form. This is the main way a blog generates leads for your business. That said, the best websites have more than one offer, and some offers will perform better than others. If you find that some CTAs are better than others at converting visitors into leads, you might want to consider using them more frequently on your blog. You might also look at the pages and posts on your blogs with the most visitors and use your most effective CTAs on those. 5. Leads from the Blog The number of leads generated that can be attributed to your blog. This is one of the most important metrics to use in measuring your blog s performance. While your conversion rates can be a good indicator of leads, at the end of the day, your manager will likely just be 12

looking at your leads number. Creating a monthly leads goal and committing yourself to reaching that goal can be a great way to keep your blog on the right path. If you re not hitting your goals, consider how you can use your analytics to guide you back in the right direction. Perhaps you need to do more blog promotion to increase the traffic you generate. Or maybe you just need to get better at optimizing your blog content with more appropriate keywords to get better found in search. Maybe it s a conversion problem. Use your blog analytics in tandem to diagnose your leads problem, and you ll find it easier to identify problems and come up with solutions. 13

Measuring the Success of Social Media Marketing You can t measure the ROI of social media! If you ve heard (and believed) that one, you re not alone, but it simply isn t true. Measuring the success of your social media marketing is not so different from measuring the success of other marketing efforts. You still need to understand: How large your audience is, How fast it is growing and, How much traffic social media efforts drives, and, most importantly, how many leads or customers are generated by that traffic. 1. Social Audience Growth and Reach The total number of people engaging with your brand in social media channels, such as Facebook Likes, Twitter followers, LinkedIn Group members, blog subscribers, YouTube channel subscribers, etc. Watch for a steady increase in the number of followers or fans you have, but don t look to expand just for the sake of numbers. Your overall goal is to get your audience to share your content, visit your website, sign up for your newsletter or fill out a form and become a lead. Don t get too caught up in the numbers. It s better to have 25 fans who take action than 25,000 who ignore you. There are some simple steps you can take to increase your follower/fan count: Add links to your social platforms to your email signature. Make it easy to follow you and share content from your website with links and widgets. Post great content that people will share. If you re just getting started, ask friends, family, employees and business connections to like or follow you. Consider running some ads to get the word out. 2. Social Media Engagement Engagement shows how often people are interacting with your social media accounts. For example: Facebook likes (new fans), likes, comments and shares on updates. Twitter replies and retweets. Blog post comments. YouTube video views. Pinterest repins and likes. 14

Look for a healthy and growing number of interactions. A good engagement figure will vary by goal and industry, so mainly look for progress over time. When you get interaction, take note of the subjects and kinds of content that motivate people to engage. Do more of that! If people aren t talking about you, could it be because you re not covering the topics that really matter to your viewers? If you re getting at least SOME interaction, go ahead and ask directly, What can we help you with today? What s your biggest (subject) challenge right now? and be prepared to give your fans what they want. Try a Twitter search for how do I combined with your subject specialty. See what people in general are asking. You can also start typing in to Google search, How do I or another good question starter. Autofill will tell you what people are looking for answers to right now. 3. Visibility and Brand Perception What are people saying about you on social media? Is it good? Bad? Neutral? Do you know? Monitor mentions of your brand to see who is talking about you and why. Keep track of social mentions by monitoring your social accounts for comments, mentions, etc. and by using a tool such as HubSpot, or a free service such as SocialMention or Google Alerts to catch those you could easily miss. If it s too early to see much brand specific conversation, look for industry talk (what people are saying about your line of work). Obviously, we all want to read complimentary comments about our brand or products. Look for content or items that produced the most buzz, and watch for customer service issues that may surface in customer comments online. Reach out to those talking about you for good or bad! Show appreciation for the fact that they mentioned you. Take a cue from buzz producers you re on to something. Seeing complaints? Obviously you ll want to take care of that! 15

4. Traffic from Social Media Measures how many people are visiting your site from social media channels. The simplest way to measure this is to use Google Analytics and look at Sources > Referrals. Watch for traffic from social media sources to rise over time. Keep an eye on which platforms perform best for you and concentrate your time there. If you re not happy with your results, make sure your tweets, Facebook updates, Pins, etc. often include relevant links back to your website. Don t just send people to your home page, either. Select a page that compliments the update. 5. Conversion Rate from Social Media This is the percentage of website visitors who become leads or customers. This is the ultimate measure of your social media success! Your conversion rate should go up over time as you get to know your audience better. Look at which platforms send the most leads and spend more time there. Share links to landing pages that are well optimized for lead generation. Make sure all your pages and blog posts have lead conversion opportunities on them. 16

Measuring the Success of Email Marketing Your email service provider should provide the important email metrics you need to measure. We ll take a look at each and provide tips on how you can use them to improve the performance of your email marketing. 1. Bounce Rate The percentage of total emails sent that could not be delivered to the recipient s inbox, either because there is a temporary issue with the email address (full inbox, etc.) or because of an invalid or nonexistent email address. Keep this number as low as possible. Immediately remove hard bounce addresses from your email list, because internet service providers (ISPs) use bounce rates as one of the key factors to determine an email sender s reputation. Having too many hard bounces can make your organization look like a spammer in the eyes of an ISP. 2. Delivery Rate The percentage of emails that were actually delivered to recipients inboxes, calculated by subtracting hard and soft bounces from the gross number of emails sent, then dividing that number by gross emails sent. Your delivery rate sets the stage for email success or failure. To have any chance of engaging a customer or prospect with an email campaign, that message has to get delivered to their inbox. Look for a delivery rate of 95% or higher. If your delivery rate is slipping over time, you may have problems with your list (e.g. too many invalid addresses). If one particular campaign has a lower than average delivery rate, examine the subject line and content 17

of that message. Perhaps there was some element that may have been flagged as spam by corporate firewalls or major ISPs, causing many more message than usual to be blocked. 3. List Growth Rate A measurement of how fast your email list is growing. Calculate your growth rate by subtracting optouts and hard bounces from the number of new email subscribers gained in a given month. Then, divide that number by the original list size. Email list growth rate is important because a healthy email marketing program needs to be continually refreshed with new names. Many of the addresses on your email list will naturally go bad over time, as people change jobs, switch ISPs or email programs, or just forget their passwords and create new accounts. According to the popular marketing resource MarketingSherpa, the natural churn rate of an email list can be 25% annually or higher. Continually work to add new contacts to your email database by adding great content and opt in forms. 4. Click Through Rate The proportion of the audience who clicked on one more links contained in an email message. Organizations can calculate CTR either by dividing unique clicks by the number of emails delivered, or by dividing total clicks including multiple clicks by the same recipient by the number of emails delivered. Either method works, as long as you use the same approach consistently. Monitoring email CTR is a cornerstone of email marketing analytics, because the CTR indicates whether the message was relevant and the offer compelling enough to encourage recipients to action. But CTR can vary widely by the type of message sent. For example, email newsletters often have higher CTRs than promotional messages, and transactional messages such as emailed purchase receipts often have the highest CTR of all the messages your business sends. For that reason, it s best to benchmark your CTRs according to the different types of emails you send. Try including several links to the same content. Research suggests that more opportunities to click = more clicks. Always tell people what they ll get when they click. For example, For more leads and sales now, get your email success ebook here! rather than click here. 5. Email Sharing/Forwarding Rate The percentage of recipients who clicked on a share this button to post email content to a social network and/or who clicked on the forward to a friend button. 18

Sharing rates are another indicator of the value and relevance of your email messages. For example, if your subscribers find your email newsletter articles compelling enough to share with their peers, you ve likely hit on a hot topic for your audience. Likewise, email offers that get shared or forwarded outside of your own house list can end up being your best performing campaigns, because you ve drastically increased the reach of that message by tapping into the viral nature of your subscribers social networks. and Watch your sharing rates carefully to discover which types of articles and offers tend to get shared the most, and use that knowledge when planning future campaigns. 6. Conversion Rate The percentage of recipients who clicked on a link within an email and completed a desired action, such as filling out a lead generation form or purchasing a product. Conversion rate is the ultimate measure of an email campaign s effectiveness. The higher your conversion rate, the more relevant and compelling the offer was for your audience. However, conversion rates are dependent on factors beyond the original email message, such as the quality of your landing page. If a campaign underperforms based on your targeted conversion rate, take a close look at the landing page you linked to for reasons why recipients who clicked on a link might not have completed the process. You may find the landing page s headline or copy needs improvement, or that a registration form or checkout process was too confusing or clunky, causing many visitors to abandon the process. Measuring conversion rate requires integration between your email platform and your web analytics. You can perform this integration by creating unique tracking URLs for your email links that identify the source of the click as coming from a specific email campaign. 7. Revenue Per Email Sent A measure of the ROI of a particular email campaign, calculated by dividing the total revenue generated from the campaign by the number of emails sent. This metric is ideal for ecommerce marketers who generate a lot of direct sales from email campaigns. Again, it requires integration between your ESP and your ecommerce or web analytics platform. If you 19

are already tracking conversion rates, you also can collect the order value for each conversion to perform this calculation. More money, of course!!! If you are not seeing the return you want, review your calls to action, your landing pages and your website. 20

Measuring the Success of Lead Nurturing and Marketing Automation Marketing automation can simplify your inbound marketing, allowing you to make better use of marketing and reach a more engaged audience. The term marketing automation is most commonly used to describe software marketers use to manage leads from first contact to purchase. Marketing automation tools can be used to trigger a series of introductory emails to educate leads about what you offer. They can also help you segment your leads and deliver intelligence about leads to your sales team. 1. Segmentation Intelligence Segmentation intelligence includes visitor behaviors, personas, demographics, etc. that can be used to segment your audience in order to send more targeted content and offers based on their individual wants and needs at a given point in the sales process Marketing automation helps you to be a smarter marketer by enabling you to identify and differentiate between segments of leads. Marketing automation tools can help you to identify these points of differentiation, such as various pages your leads visit, the specific topics they re interested in, their previous activity on your site, their demographic information, how they re engaging with you, etc. Use this intelligence to segment your leads into different lead nurturing campaigns. In other words, the person who downloaded your ebook on What is social media should not automatically receive all the same communications as the existing customer who enjoys reading about the latest in lead generation techniques and PPC. If leads are spending time on your product pages, you might consider entering them into a campaign that nurtures them with more product focused content like a free trial or information to help them evaluate your solutions compared with others they may be considering. 21

2. Click Through Rates The proportion of the audience who clicked on one more links contained in a lead nurturing email message. See Measuring the Success of Email Marketing. Calculate CTR either by dividing unique clicks by the number of emails delivered, or by dividing total clicks including multiple clicks by the same recipient by the number of emails delivered. Either method works, as long as you use the same approach consistently. Most email providers such as HubSpot, MailChimp, AWeber and Constant Contact will figure it for you. See the help file of each to learn which method they use. Click through rates can help you determine whether the content you re offering in your lead nurturing campaigns is appropriate both for the audience you re segmenting as well as their point in the sales process. The higher the better! If you re offering product focused content such as a free product trial and your click through rates are low, this may mean they aren t ready for this type of content and may still need to be nurtured with more top of the funnel content like educational ebooks, webinars, or blog posts. On the other hand, if your recipients are still opening your messages, but are no longer clicking on topof the funnel offers, you might conclude that they re ready for more product focused offers. 3. Conversion Rates The percentage of recipients who clicked on a link within an email and completed a desired action such as filling out an offer form or purchasing a product. See Measuring the Success of Email Marketing. Like click through rates, conversion rates can also be an indication of the effectiveness of the offer you re sending compared to a lead s point in the sales process. Look for higher numbers, and for this rate to increase as you become more skilled at properly targeting your leads. Review your workflows. Do you need to adjust the types of offers you re sending at different points in the nurturing process? 4. Timing and Frequency of Lead Nurturing Email Sends The length of time between one lead nurturing email and another, and how many emails to include in a given campaign. Review your click through rate and conversion rates. If things seem stagnant. It may be time to adjust this aspect of your lead nurturing plan. 22

There are no hard and fast rules for how many total emails should be included in a nurturing campaign and how long you should wait between email campaign sends. The best way to determine your optimal timing and frequency is to test it. One segment of your audience may prefer more content over a longer period of time. While those interested in a particular topic may tend to have a shorter sales cycle and require fewer messages but more product focused offers. Some of this can be logically inferred. For example, if you are offering a product or service that costs $99 one time, that lead nurturing campaign might reasonably be shorter than another of your products or services that costs $2000/month. Still, your best bet is to test! 5. Sales Cycle Length The length of time it takes for a lead to become a customer. As you become more skilled in lead nurturing and sales, your sales cycle should decrease in length. Figure out how long it usually takes for a lead to become a customer after his or her first inquiry. Does the sales cycle vary for different types of purchases? Lead nurturing is all about understanding your own leads timing and needs. Watch your analytics, and talk to your sales team. If it typically takes your leads a month to make a purchasing decision, then make sure you re spreading out your communications to keep them engaged throughout the month. Monitor what s working, test different methods, and analyze and optimize their campaigns based on what works for them individually. Make sure you keep your sales people involved. Their insights will be invaluable in improving this metric. 23

Now That You Know How Things Are Working (Or Not) Take a look at the big picture of your marketing. Compare results from each channel against the others to learn which have the biggest impact on your bottom line. An easy way to start is to examine website visitors per channel over the previous six months to see which channels typically generate the most traffic as well as which channels contributions are growing or shrinking. Next, examine leads and customers per channel to determine how valuable that traffic is to your company. The number of customers you generate from each channel should be your ultimate measure of marketing success. Identifying the channels that generate the most leads and sales can help you decide where to spend more of the marketing dollars in your budget in the future. Be sure to consider what you re currently investing in to each channel by way of time and money so you re making fair comparisons. It could be that one relatively neglected channel is actually returning a proportionately higher percentage of leads than one receiving more attention. By tracking how much revenue is generated from each channel, you can identify which of your marketing tactics are delivering the best return on investment. This information helps you make smart use of your marketing budget, but it s only available once you ve begun tracking and analyzing the metrics generated through your analytics programs. Finally, because measuring and comparing results from different marketing channels using different analytics platforms can be tedious and challenging, consider using an integrated inbound marketing platform to consolidate your analytics efforts and easily compare cross channel metrics to one another. We like HubSpot for the job. Hope this has been helpful to you. Please let us know if we can help you with your online marketing. And, don t forget to download the Online Marketing ROI Spreadsheet it will help you easily find and keep track of all the numbers we just discussed. 24