BtoB magazine and the Sales Lead Management Association report that 45.4% of the 273 corporate marketers they surveyed in May plan to increase spending on lead-generation programs in the second half of 2008.
Marketingcharts.com reports,
The biggest obstacles for increasing spend on such programs, the majority of respondents (47.2%) reported, was that they do not have reports to show the ROI for what they are spending.
Meeting the challenge: reporting marketing ROI
It’s no small task to manually project and measure your return on a marketing campaign or new hire – especially when you may be touching prospects in several ways (in person, with nurture emails, via website downloads, through social networking sites, etc).
If you have a webhost like Earthlink, Comcast, or Register.com, you probably have website statistics by Urchin or SmarterStats included in your hosting package.
Google Analytics goes a crucial step further, helping to link marketing goals with business goals. It’s a hosted app, meaning your data and interface is completely online. It doesn’t cost to establish an account, but the tool requires that you enter accurate detailed information about the value of prospect interactions. It also takes some know-how to add Google Analytics code to your website so that the program can tell who’s done what at your site.
Urchin 6 is a web analytics solution similar in scope to Google Analytics – but it’s installed locally on your company’s network. It carries a price tag of $2,995.
Still, these tools only tell you about what’s happening at your website. Your email service provider tells you only about what’s happening with newsletter activity. If you use a telemarketing firm, they’ll report their success rate for setting appointments.
For the tear file: sample metrics for an ROI report
Here’s an example of metrics I think are important to track.
- Response rate
- Percentage of responses that become qualified leads
- Close rate
- Time to close (length of sales cycle)
- Percentage of new business from marketing touches
- Email click-through rates
- Publicity value of articles published
- Amount of time spent on your website
- Number of return visitors to your website
I’m not quite ready to post examples of our Client ROI Calculator reports… but hopefully I’ll be able to make that accessible in B2B Central this summer.
