How can you track the number of new prospects and customers each month?
Once the configuration of your marketing automation strategy is complete, and the first campaigns are in place, the next task will be to make sure that your marketing automation software meets your expectations:
- How many prospects (or leads) are added to the database each month?
- Is this email or campaign generating good results?
- How many customer conversions have been generated with marketing automation scenarios?
The answers to these questions will depend heavily on your setup. For example, do you identify your customers because they are in a “Customer” segment or because a “Contact type” field has the value “customer”?
Defining the KPIs to track
A KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is not just a statistic. In our pursuit of performance, it is a change of state. What distinguishes an unknown contact from a newly added prospect? What distinguishes a prospect from a customer? etc.
Here are some examples of KPIs that may be useful to track for each of the questions raised in the introduction:
Number of prospects added to the database each month
- Number of contacts who submitted a form (intended for prospects?) during the month
- Number of contacts added to the “Prospects” segment during the month
- Number of contacts that went through a campaign intended for prospects each month
- Number of sends of the first email intended for prospects each month (for example: “Your guide” + “Creation of your account” excluding emails sent to non-prospects).
Campaign results
Nurturing
Are your contacts interested?
- Open rate of your emails
- Number of opens / Number of sends (and not number of contacts). Remember to take your follow-ups into account: Number of opens A + Abis / Number of sends of A
- Download rate of your resources / Number of contacts
Qualification
Have you collected information about your contacts?
- Click-through rate of your emails
- Rate of contacts that went through the campaign AND through an event such as “Update contact” / “Update contact segment”
- Rate of website visitors among campaign members
Customer conversions
- Number of customers and former customers with a field “ Has been a prospect = YES”
- The recipe for this tip:
- A “Prospects” segment with a filter “Contact type = Prospect”
- A boolean field “Has been a prospect”
- A campaign that modifies contacts in the “Prospect” segment with “Has been a prospect” = Yes
- A “Prospects turned customers” segment with filters “Contact type = Customer or Former Customer” AND “Has been a prospect = YES”
- Number of customers and former customers who went through a prospect campaign when they were prospects
All these statistics are reliable and fairly easy to find in your marketing automation software when you use it regularly. Be careful, however: some of the examples presented may not work with the way you manage your database and your campaigns.
