Are you on the ROI Journey?

In a meeting today with a Marketing Manager the “ROI” question came up. “How do we measure ROI on these campaigns?”. Great question I said.

As we constantly look at ways to measure ROI we can be creative about how to do it. However, at the end of the day we need to measure and we need to measure constantly. Each step in the sales process is a connection point to understand how well a campaign performs.

Do you have a clear line of sight?

If you can’t see how a name progresses from a list, to a marketing qualified lead all the way through to a “closed won” or “closed lost” opportunity in your CRM, you’re behind the eight ball to begin with. A campaign can serve multiple purposes, some will be informational only, others will provide an offer – the offer may be monetary or not.

Being in a position to measure ROI is generally connected to something of monetary value. e.g. your offer could be a 20% discount on specific products within a set period of time. In a B2C world these may not be captured in a CRM, so the only measure you have is to look at those who have purchased since the campaign launched, check this against the recipients of an email campaign and then do the numbers.

In the B2B world where your sales process may be a little more complex, stages of the sales process are captured as an opportunity. Through reporting you can look at where opportunities drop out of the sales process and those that make it all the way through to the keeper i.e. “closed won”. In this scenario you should be able to look at the opportunities that started life as a “marketing qualified lead” from specific campaigns.

Combining this data will help you develop a real and very tangible ROI report by campaign.

But where to start?

For Eloqua clients, you have access to a range of reports that can help. The basics have to do with email opens, click-throughs etc. You may apply some A/B testing to measure campaigns. If you don’t, you should start.

The insight you need to measure ROI begins with your reporting and understanding campaign performance.

Aligning your sales and marketing teams is key. Does your Sales team have access to the rich set of data Eloqua provides for a Contact’s digital footprint? Eloqua Prospect Profiler is the essential plugin you need to have. Nothing helps sales and marketing alignment more that improved communication between marketing and sales.

A planned approach when implementing new software is critical

…we took a handful of our inside sales reps and had them use Prospect Profiler for three weeks. We kicked it of with a training/Q&A session – we showed them how to use Prospect Profiler (pretty simple) and reviewed use cases. We then met weekly and got feedback, successes, challenges, etc. from the group.

My beta group really liked Prospect Profiler and they voted to keep it, so when we rolled it out to the entire group, we actually had them do the kick-off and training! I think it helped significantly with the roll out to the entire Sales team, as they tend to have a unified outlook on most things from Marketing.

Measuring ROI requires many moving parts to align

You can see from the various points above, there are a number of ways you can measure ROI. Reporting and analysis is a big part, knowing what you want to measure is also key. Eloqua clients have a huge range of options to help them.

While Eloqua Prospect Profiler is not an ROI tool in and of itself, it’s certainly key to help achieve alignment between marketing and sales. When you have the trust of the sales team, you can hopefully expect better participation in data quality from their opportunity management in the CRM.