ROI Roadmap: Response Marketing

There’s a process to making progress. The journey between setting goals and achieving them must be filled with checkpoints to ensure you’re moving in the right direction. In marketing, we call these key performance indicators, or KPIs. The best way to keep track of your marketing’s results or return on investment (ROI) is by identifying and analyzing these KPIs along the way. That’s why we’ve created a roadmap of the most important KPIs in response marketing.

Five Common KPIs for Response Marketing

For a bird’s eye view of our roadmap, here are five of the most common response marketing KPIs that Orange Label Marketing Services Director Michelle Komala recommends monitoring.

1. New Customer Growth: The number of first-time customers your marketing is attracting.
2. Leads and Conversions: A lead is a potential customer or prospect and a conversion is what occurs when that person takes the desired action and “converts” from a prospect to a customer.
3. Conversion Rate: The conversion rate is the number of conversions divided by the total number of visitors.
4. Cost Per Lead (CPL): Total cost of the campaign divided by the number of leads generated.
5. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): This marketing metric measures the cumulative costs of a customer taking an action that leads to a conversion, typically in the form of a registration, activation or signup. To calculate, take the total advertising spend or cost of a campaign divided by the number of acquisitions generated.

Just like traveling, there are different routes to take to get to your destination. Here are a few different routes to take and KPI “lookouts” to stop at if you want to boost sales, increase social engagement and improve customers’ online experience.

Sales KPIs  

The driving factor behind organizations, sales KPIs help gauge how your marketing is performing. From your sales team’s response time to marketing to qualified leads, these KPIs help fuel your sales performance.

1. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The total sales and marketing cost associated with convincing a prospective customer or lead to buy your company’s product or service over a specific time period. This can be calculated by dividing the cost of sales and marketing by the number of new customers acquired.
2. Sales Team Response Time: In today’s fast-paced marketplace, every minute matters and fast responses are key. How fast does your sales team respond to leads? How fast does your competition’s sales team respond? Proactively providing fast and efficient response times can help turn inquiries into sales and prospects into clients.
3. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL): A lead that is more likely to become a customer compared to others, based on lead intelligence. This includes individuals that have identified themselves as deeply engaged and more sales-ready than other leads.
4. Sales Qualified Leads (SQL): Leads that are ready for direct sales follow-up. This can include those that fill out a contact form with an inquiry about a product or service.

Social Media KPIs

Another avenue for building sales, social media allows organizations to establish a connection with their audience by growing brand awareness, sharing their brand story, engaging with customers and remaining part of individuals’ day-to-day lives.

Key insights for calculating this data include:

1. Reach: Just as it sounds, your reach reveals how far your message is actually traveling. Indicators of reach include the total number of followers your brand has on social and your impressions, or how many times someone had a chance to view your post. Another key factor is traffic data, which tells you how effective your boosted social media posts and call to actions (CTAs) are in getting people to head to your website
2. Engagement: What’s better? Mass amounts of followers and a minimum number of likes, or a reasonable following and engagement to match? The former indicates that you have a high reach and your posts aren’t resonating with your audience, while the latter is illustrative of an engaged and dedicated following. When gathering social engagement KPIs, likes, comments, follows, clicks, brand mentions/tagged posts, and profile visits are six essential aspects to analyze.

Website KPIs

With digital marketing, you’re directing potential and returning customers to your website. Whether customers have ended up on your website through social media, a Google search or word of mouth, these KPIs take a closer look at how well-received your website is with your audience.

1. Session: As defined by Google Analytics, sessions are a group of user interactions with your website, that take place within a given time frame. This can include multiple page views and ecommerce transactions.
2. Page Views Per Session: The average number of pages viewed during a visit on your site. This indicates the level of engagement that users have with your content.
3. Average Session Duration: Used hand-in-hand with page views per session, the average session duration signals how long an individual spends on your site.
4. Bounce Rate: The percentage of single-page site visits before an individual “bounces” or leaves your site. These numbers can be used to help identify potential factors, such as slow page loads, confusing navigation or layout, and frequent popups that lead users to click out of your page.
5. Unique Website Visitors: This refers to the number of first-time visitors to your site for a defined period of time.

Tied to both website and social marketing, email newsletter performance should also be analyzed, when applicable. Tools to look for with emailed campaigns include:

• Delivery Rate
• Unsubscribe Rate
• Open Rate
• Click Through Rate
• Conversion Rate
• Forward/Shares
• Landing Page Conversions
• Blog Post Visits

How to Keep Track of Your KPIs

With your ROI roadmap knowledge intact, two major questions remain: how do you keep track of your KPIs and how often should you measure them? Custom KPI dashboards are ideal if there’s someone on your team who can program them, Michelle shares. Otherwise, Tableau and Klipfolio are two popular KPI dashboards. “If resources are not available,” Michelle says, “You can also create something in Google Data Studio or even Google Sheets.”

How often you measure KPIs is dependent on your resources and your industry. “Monitoring how campaigns are progressing daily is especially important in ecommerce,” Michelle says. A month is an appropriate amount of time to check in on benchmarks and make changes that will optimize campaigns. For an all-encompassing view, “Ensuring you review KPIs from a holistic level every quarter and every year will help paint the picture of what’s working and what’s not in terms of internal and external factors,” Michelle says.

There are many routes to take to capture the big picture of your marketing ROI. From monitoring sales to managing sales channels, tracking a variety of KPIs will help you forge the most efficient path to achieve your goals. Take a closer look at how we translate fact-finding research and KPIs into data-driven strategies and results-driven marketing: orangelabelmarketing.com/work/