Real Marketing Analytics for Lead Generation

WHITEPAPER Real Marketing Analytics for Lead Generation







Real Marketing Analytics for
Lead Generation Tips on how a lead management system can help you track, score, nurture leads and give you visibility to real marketing analytics.



Lisa Cramer President LeadLife Solutions, Inc. lcramer@leadlife.com 770-670-6702
©2008 Copyright. LeadLife Solutions, Inc. www.leadlife.com 1 WHITEPAPER Real Marketing Analytics for Lead Generation Real Marketing Analytics for Lead Generation
Marketing analytics has always been the buzzword for insight about the success of your marketing programs. But it actually has multiple meanings and can take marketing departments in many different directions. For the purpose of this whitepaper, we are going to stay very practical and therefore very simple. Marketing analytics really encompasses two main themes - What should I measure? and How do I easily gain visibility into program success?
Marketing analytics used to be about measuring hits on your website, and opens and clicks on emails. But as marketers, we know that the times are changing. The current business climate, as well as the fact that the buy cycle (how your prospects buy) has changed because of the vast amount of information available on the Internet, are forcing us to change the way we market products and services. Therefore, the analytics and metrics that we use to track and evaluate marketing programs must change, too. This is not to say that analytics regarding the hits on your website are unimportant or that you shouldn't track clicks on an email. However, those metrics are no longer the end point, instead they are merely the beginning of real marketing analytics.
It's time to adjust to the way prospects are buying. For instance, we know for fact that most prospects that come to your website are not yet ready to buy. These days, prospective customers are out on the Internet researching what they need, what is happening in the market and who offers what long before they are ready to purchase. For this reason, as marketers we must change how we track and score prospect behavior in order to determine when a lead is truly a lead and is ready to be passed on to sales. As part of this, we must also identify ways to nurture these early leads into "sales ready" buyers.
Once again, we aren't suggesting that clicks, hits and inquiries are not important metrics. But what we are saying is that for marketing departments to truly perform their jobs with lead generation, they need to account for so much more. It's fairly easy (even free) to get an application hooked up to your website that gives you the statistics on visitors, pages visited, duration, etc. Most email programs will provide the basics of opens and clicks. So these metrics can and should be tracked today. However, pressures are mounting on every company to maximize their marketing ROI and increase their ability to pass "sales ready" leads over to the sales force. Below, we will evaluate some of the metrics needed in order to effectively measure the success of your lead generation dollars.
It really all comes down to maximizing the money that marketers are using for lead generation. The money spent should show a return and yield a very strong ROI - related to sales and revenue. This money should be evaluated so it is continually applied to the
©2008 Copyright. LeadLife Solutions, Inc. www.leadlife.com 2 WHITEPAPER Real Marketing Analytics for Lead Generation highest yielding program(s). Marketing should look for every way possible to maximize their lead generation dollars. Similarly, they should look to continually increase the amount of revenue generated per campaign. To do this, they must gain visibility into individual programs to determine the numbe... [download for more]