Marketing ROI – Understand your true profit margin

Adopting a fully integrated web analytics and CRM approach, is the only way organisations can truly understand Marketing ROI.

The overall objective here is to easily understand what’s working and what isn’t, so that marketers can better allocate marketing budget towards those keywords, channels and platforms that achieve a more realistic and useful Key Performance Indicator.

• Is the number of web leads a good KPI to work from?
• Is the number of qualified opportunities and ultimately sales revenue a more helpful measurement?

Harmonious interaction between sales and marketing within an organisation is crucial, and bottom-line sales performance reflects how well sales and marketing work together, but this isn’t true of just departments, it is also true of information management.

The First Steps in identifying marketing ROI

At it’s most basic, what we need to do is append accurate marketing data to an opportunity or lead. For example, ‘Website’ as a source in a CRM solution isn’t accurate enough if you have several channels contributing towards website traffic.

Most CRMs will have ‘web to lead’ functionality, whereby a web form can post information directly into your CRM solution. However this doesn’t wholly achieve what’s needed as it wouldmean always being reliant on the customer filling out the ‘how did you find us’ form, which let’s be honest, isn’t always going to happen. Furthermore, capturing data in such a way doesn’t capture data to the level of detail that’s of real use.

Full Web Data Integration

Achieving 100% accurate visibility on marketing ROI is easy when selling products online, as ‘Goals’ (purchases) can be tracked by Google’s analytical software. Google can give you full visibility and insight into what clicks, keywords, adverts or emails have lead to a direct online Goal or conversion.

Getting this same level of accuracy when the goal is lead capture rather than an immediate purchase isn’t so straight forward, as tracking the rest of the sales cycle through to a lead becoming a customer stretches far beyond Google’s visibility. Moreover, customers aren’t exactly going to let you know what keyword they entered, or have any idea how much they cost you in click spend.

Full Web Data Integration is the automatic collection of all campaign details associated with a lead and then having the tools to report to the penny the cost per lead, per sale. Imagine having the data within your CRM on what advert produces the best opportunities? Or what keywords produce the enquires that are most likely to convert to sale, rather than just settling with what keywords produce the most leads, qualified or otherwise.

Full visibility

This is all achievable with Workbooks CRM. Within Workbooks, you have the tools at your fingertips to examine and interrogate all advertising channels, including full visibility of any Google or Online Advertising spend per converted customer, not just per lead.

Say for example, your website collects 50 leads over the course of a month after a £2,000 advertising campaign. 10 of these leads convert to customers. That’s a pretty good conversion rate, and at £200 per sale, the return appears positive.

However, Workbooks will give you the visibility that perhaps 8 of those customers came from the visitor initially searching for your brand name in Google after a tradeshow, and only 2 of the converted leads came direct from the online advertising campaign, the other 40 leads generated from the advertising campaign didn’t convert – suddenly that £2k advertising budget isn’t looking like such a good investment. This level of valuable feedback isn’t possible with separate web analytic and CRM tools.

Without full marketing ROI visibility, that may have looked like £2k of web advertising equated to 50 leads and 10 sales, and the campaign would be run again. However, a complete view of the sales funnel shows the true and realistic cost of £1,000 per lead. Time to rethink the Marketing Campaign, perhaps those keywords are attracting the wrong type of traffic!

To learn more about how Workbooks can help you reduce operational costs and give full visibility on marketing spend, please get in touch or visit our contact us page for more information.