Key Marketing Metrics for CMOs using Salesforce Marketing Cloud

More than ever, marketers realize the importance of tracking metrics to measure the performance of their campaigns. These values give an idea of how aligned the marketing efforts are with the business goals, be it customer experience, acquisition, lifetime value, or brand awareness. 

Today, when marketers have multiple channels and customer journey touchpoints to keep a track of, the metrics give quantifiable KPIs to measure what’s working and what’s not. Based on the insights received, the marketing efforts can be amplified or adjusted to get the best results from the campaigns. 

While we know that metrics have several advantages for the marketing teams, at different levels and departments; it comes out to be a hard fact that most marketers are not able to track these metrics efficiently. Do you know why? They don’t have an integrated channel to measure campaign performance and productivity. 

Digital Marketing happens through varied channels, by several teams- email, website, social media, paid advertisements, etc. Bringing these channels under one roof and measuring performance is an intricate task.  

The first step in measuring the marketing metrics is to identify what needs to be tracked. For example, if you’re leading the email marketing team, then the metrics to be tracked would be the email open rate, bounce rate, click-through rate, unsubscribe rate, new subscribers, unengaged subscribers, etc. 

No matter which marketing automation tool a business uses (Salesforce, Hubspot, or any other), these metrics remain unchanged. To have an idea of what these metrics help to track, let’s have a discussion on some of the key marketing metrics and what they help to measure. 

Common Marketing Metrics that every Marketer should Track 

 a) Impressions: This metric helps to measure the visibility that a brand is getting through any channel through which it’s trying to engage with the prospects/customers. The more the number of impressions, the more would be engagement rate, and therefore, the better would be lead numbers.  

 b) Click-through Rate: This is one of the crucial marketing metrics. It is the number of times a website page or an advertisement is viewed by the user vs the number of users who clicked the page or ad link. This gives marketers an idea about how engaging their content is that they are trying to sell to the users. 

 c) MQL to SQL Ratio: Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) are those where a prospect has shown interest in buying a product or a service. A Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) is the one where the sales team can work on converting leads into active customers. 

The MQL to SQL ratio helps to gauge the quality of leads received from different channels. It also shows that the marketing and sales team are well-aligned to achieve the business goals. 

 d) Cost per Lead: This marketing metric calculates the amount spent on acquiring a new lead. It measures campaigns’ ROI and helps budget allocation for better results. 

 e) Lead-to-Customer Conversion: Higher the number of leads, the more would be the conversion. But that depends solely on the quality of leads, i.e. leads that hold the potential to convert. Tracking these marketing metrics helps to determine if the sales team needs a greater number of leads or leads of better quality to convert the prospects to customers. 

 f) Cost per Acquisition: This metric measures the amount spent on acquiring a new customer. The CPA can either be calculated for all marketing efforts or for the individual marketing channels. If the CPA is less than the revenue, it means that the marketing efforts are on the right track. 

 g) Customer Lifetime Value: This metric measures the total revenue that a business can expect from the customer throughout their business relationship. This can be tracked with license renewals, product plan upgrades, product cross-selling, etc. These factors depend upon the type of offerings and pricing model. 

 h) Return on Investment: ROI is a marketing metric that helps to figure out if the marketing efforts are moving in the right direction. If the Cost per Acquisition is higher than the Customer Lifetime Value, it means the campaign strategy needs to be redefined. 

Customer Success Story: Daffodil helps India’s largest fashion & apparel retailer to increase customer acquisition using insights from Power BI. 

Website Metrics 

A successful website does three things: Attract visitors, guide them to the main services or products, and collect contact details for future relations. 

When prospects want to know a business, they first check its website to read blogs, watch videos, inspect products or services, etc. Measuring website metrics is important to determine how visitors engage with the website and move on to the next steps in the marketing funnel. Some of the significant website metrics are: 

 a) Pageviews: This is the total number of views that a webpage gets over a period. The pageviews include multiple views from the same visitor. 

 b) Retention Rate: If the users return to the webpage, it showcases their interest in the content, services, or products. 

 c) Average Page Time: This is the average time that a visitor spends on a page. A good engagement rate is 2-3 minutes because that indicates that the visitor has found value in the content. On the other hand, if the page time is too long, it indicates that visitors are either idle on the page or the page content is complex for them to understand. 

 d) Bounce Rate: A ‘bounce’ happens when a visitor exists on the webpage without taking any action, i.e. clicking any CTA, filling a form, etc. The bounce rate of the website should be less than 40%. A low bounce rate indicates that the website has engaging content that the visitor finds that he/she is looking for. 

 e) Pages/Session: A session is an interval between the visitor’s arrival on the website and when they leave. The website metric, pages/session is the count of the number of pages that a visitor views in a session. A higher rate indicates that visitors are likely to progress to the next stage. 

 f) Website Conversion Rate: To make the most of marketing efforts put into the website, it is essential to track the number of visitors, their behavior, and their actions on the website. Along with this, it is crucial to track how many visitors are actually completing the intended activities, such as subscribing to a service, making a purchase, trying the demo, requesting a quote, etc. The website conversion rate gives a percentage of the number of visitors vs the converting ones. 

Social Media Metrics

Social media is one of the powerful tools for building brand awareness, user engagement, and bringing conversions. If done well, you can even monetize Reels and other content you create, turning your social media presence into a revenue-generating channel. Shares, likes, pins, comments, etc. are the key indicators of an audience engagement with a brand. Some of the significant marketing metrics to be tracked through social media channels include: 

 a) Impressions: This is the number of times content or a post on social media platform is shown to or seen by the audience.

 b) Reach: This is the number of people who sees the content or a post on social media and choose to engage with it through likes, comments, or shares. 

 c) New Follower or Growth Rate: This is the increase in the number of followers during a specific time period. It indicates the audience on social media is interested in a brand or engaging with it. 

 d) Brand Mentions: These are the references to the brand- positive and negative. Brand mentions generally happen on social media posts and can directly impact the online reputation of the brand or product. 

Email Marketing Metrics

When it comes to connecting with the audience and nurturing them, there is no other platform than email. For an email campaign, these are the key marketing metrics that should be tracked: 

 a) Open Rate: It is the ratio of the number of recipients who open an email to the total number of recipients. 

 b) Bounce Rate: This is the number of email addresses that an email didn’t get delivered to. The email marketer, in this case, should measure the hard bounces (that happen because of on-operational addresses) and soft bounces (that happen because of temporary issues) in order to refine the subscriber list. 

 c) Click-through Rate: A Click-through rate is the number of subscribers who click on at least one link in the email. 

 d) Unsubscribe Rate: This email marketing metric is a measure that indicates the percentage of recipients who opted out of the mailing list after an email campaign. 

 e) Unengaged Subscribers: These are the email subscribers who are not engaging with the email campaigns in any way. It is important to remove these subscribers from the list as they give a false notion of successful brand engagement. 

How to Analyze Marketing Metrics for a Profitable ROI? 

The marketing metrics shared above are just a few. There are hundreds of more metrics that are derived from paid campaigns or other marketing platforms. They can differ from company to company. To illustrate, a SAAS marketing agency can have a different set of metrics at hand than a SAAS link-building agency, depending on their priorities. How to calculate business ROI from all of them? 

Well, looking at all the metrics and optimizing the marketing channels to achieve the targeted ROI is a tough job for any CMO. Thus, it is important to synchronize customer communication across all channels.

There are several tools and CRM applications that can make this possible. However, to keep the process simple, one CRM that can be trusted by businesses of almost every size is Salesforce. Many teams use Salesforce–Google Sheets integrations to efficiently analyze marketing data in a familiar, spreadsheet-friendly format.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a platform that has the capabilities to support various aspects of marketing such as automating multi-channel campaigns, building dynamic customer journeys, pre and post-campaign analytics, social media engagement, and more. This can be achieved through the following: 

• Building customer journeys across marketing channels such as email, advertising, mobile, website, etc. to build connected customer experiences. 
• Creating a single view dashboard for each customer with information fetched from different sources. This allows targeting customers according to their journey in the marketing or sales funnel. 
• Tracking and measuring the performance of marketing campaigns. Figure out new insights about customers through predictive analysis (happening through machine learning algorithms).

ALSO READ: Busting The Top 5 Myths About Customer Journey Mapping

There is more to what Salesforce Marketing Cloud can do. To explore the opportunities, how about having a brainstorming session with our Salesforce expert team? This free session can help your business realize the growth that the marketing and sales team can have with Salesforce. Here is your way to set up Salesforce Consultation with Daffodil.