How to track the number of new prospects and customers each month?
Once you’ve finished configuring your marketing automation strategy, and the first campaigns are up and running, the next task is to make sure that your marketing automation software meets your expectations:
- How many prospects (or leads) are added to your database each month?
- Which email or which campaign delivers good results?
- How many customer conversions have been generated with your marketing automation scenarios?
The answers to these questions will depend heavily on your configuration. For example, do you recognize customers because they are in a “Customer” segment, or because a field “Contact type” has the value “customer”?
Define the KPIs to track
A KPI (Key Performance Indicator) isn’t just a statistic. In our pursuit of performance, it’s a change of status. What distinguishes an unknown contact from a prospect that has just been added? What distinguishes a prospect from a customer? etc.
Here are a few examples of KPIs you can 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?) within the month
- Number of contacts added to the “Prospects” segment within the month
- Number of contacts moved into a campaign intended for prospects each month
- Number of sends of the first email intended for prospects each month (e.g., “Your guide” + “Create your account” by subtracting emails sent to non-prospects).
Campaign results
Nurturing
Are your contacts interested?
- Open rate of your emails
- Number of opens / Number of sends (not number of contacts). Be sure to account for your follow-ups: Number of opens A + Abis / Number of sends of A
- Resource download rate / Number of contacts
Qualification
Have you gathered information about your contacts?
- Click-through rate of your emails
- Rate of contacts moved into the campaign AND into an event such as “Update contact” / “Update contact segment”
- Rate of website visitors among members of the campaign
Customer conversions
- Number of customers and former customers with a field “Was a prospect = YES”
- The recipe for this tip:
- A “Prospects” segment with a filter “Contact type = Prospect”
- A boolean field “Was a prospect”
- A campaign that modifies the contacts in the “Prospect” segment with “Was a prospect” = Yes
- A “Prospects turned into customers” segment with filters “Contact type = Customer or Former Customer” AND “Was a prospect = YES”
- Number of customers and former customers who were moved into a prospects campaign while they were prospects
All of these statistics are reliable and fairly easy to find in your marketing automation software when you use it regularly. However, note that some of the examples shown may not work with the way you manage your database and your campaigns.
