Getting Started with Metrics that Matter

January 18, 2022 Stan

The past year has come to a close. We exhale a big sigh of relief for pushing through the end of the year and begin looking toward what the next year will hold. But first, we have to answer the business questions: How did we do with our marketing efforts last year? What should our goals be for this coming year? Now is the perfect time to take a moment to look back on your marketing activity metrics and set your benchmarks for your upcoming marketing efforts.

So, what metrics matter? Of course, there will always be industry and even company-specific metrics that your business will be interested in tracking, but at a minimum, marketing should be able to accurately report:

Campaign performance, both at the campaign level and in aggregate
Asset performance
Channel performance
MQL/Conversions against goals
Marketing contribution to closed-won opportunities

Each of these measurement categories contain metrics that you’ll want to provide to your team and business leadership to ensure accurate evaluation of marketing’s performance against your company goals. Today we are going to focus on Campaign Performance metrics.

For Campaign Performance metrics, it is important to be able to accurately identify and track marketing activities back to the campaign that generated it. Many companies employ a query string parameter strategy to identify the clickthrough source, channel, and medium, along with a host of other potential variables pertaining to their company goals such as region, product of interest, or campaign type.

It is important that these query strings are uniformly applied to all links in emails, banner ads, and social media posts to ensure that activity is accurately tracked back to your marketing campaigns. Otherwise, your campaigns will be missing relevant attribution and make your marketing seem less effective. Additionally, creating and sharing a UTM/query string parameter dictionary with all content creators in your organization helps provide for consistent activity tracking across campaigns.

Once you have a solid campaign tracking strategy in place, the metrics that you minimally want to provide are:

Total Emails Sent
Total Emails Delivered
Total Bounceback Rate
Total Unsubscribe Rate
Total Clicks
Total Clickthrough Rate
Unique Clicks
Unique Clickthrough Rate
Click to Open Rate
Total Form Submissions from Campaign
Unique Form Submissions from Campaign

These metrics will ensure you are able to get a clear picture of your outbound campaign efforts – from your overall audience reach to your message reception and basic conversion numbers. Take the time to identify your best and worst performing campaigns across your yearly efforts and dig into them to understand the reasons behind the successes and where they missed the mark. Now is also the perfect time to benchmark your year-end results to set your campaign goals for the new year. It is just as important to measure against yourself as it is to measure against industry standard benchmarks.

As you’re aggregating those standard metrics, be sure to remove any transactional campaigns that will skew your true marketing results. Transactional emails, by their nature, will experience higher open, clickthrough, and conversion rates as they are expected interactions with your website, your content, and your business overall. You want to be sure you are not hyper-inflating your results and that you truly understand how your outbound campaigns are performing.

Once you have your metrics available, take the time to understand the story behind the numbers. What was your best performing campaign, and are you able to articulate why it was so successful? Conversely, what was your worst performing campaign and what caused it to miss the mark? With these details in mind, now you can work with your team to plan your campaign strategy for the new year, determine your benchmark goals, and set yourself up for success.

Stay tuned for a future blog post where we dive into more metrics that matter. In the meantime, if you need help with measuring your metrics, reach out! We’re here to help.

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