Marketing automation refers to the use of apps and software that execute marketing actions without manual effort. Automation is crucial for business scalability – empowering small businesses to focus on tasks that matter most and allowing automation to take over tasks like sending out emails, social media posts and publishing ads.
When done strategically, marketing automation allows you to work smarter, not harder. If your company has taken the steps to implement marketing automation, this blog will explain which metrics you should be measuring and what value they will add to your business.
Engagement Metrics
Engagement metrics can include your website metrics: page views, bounce rates and the time that someone spends on your site as well as email metrics. Marketing automation will pinpoint the factors that help improve both your website and email metrics. Your business can then replicate these factors to duplicate results across campaigns you run.
Website Metrics
- Bounce rate: The bounce rate measures how many people click on your website in the search engine results page and then exit out. Bounce rates higher than 70 percent mean the majority of users are leaving your website within seconds. If this is the case, it might be useful to add something eye-catching to the homepage to keep people interested.
- Time on site: Google Analytics can track the exact amount of time a user spends surfing your site as well as which pages they spent time on during their visit.
- Click-through rate: The click-through rate is how often someone clicks a certain call to action on your website. This is a great metric to measure to see what pages are the most eye-catching and which of your offers is the most compelling.
Email Metrics
When it comes to email metrics, it’s simple: your company should be able to easily track the amount of emails sent, their open rate and how many people clicked to your website or landing page from the email sent. Based on how your customers interact with the emails you are sending, you can adjust your wording and offers. Also, if there is an email that did extremely well your email metrics will give you a clear picture of why it did well and how you can replicate that success in future emails.
Performance Metrics
Automation can also help with conversions. Unlike page views that are straightforward, conversions are a bit more involved. You'll need to conceptualize where a customer first saw your company, what actions they completed to engage with you and what steps they took immediately before clicking the Buy button. For performance metrics, all marketing automation software will include dashboards where you can track and analyze this information, making your process simpler every step of the way.
Let’s look at two important metrics that track how well your small business is performing:
- Leads: A lead is a potential future customer. You can acquire leads from your website, ad campaigns, emails and more. The best way to measure how close your leads are to becoming customers is through automated lead nurturing. Automated lead nurturing helps to pinpoint a customer's stage in the sales cycle and provide them with relevant information for that stage. With automation, leads aren't forgotten and opportunities are never missed.
- Conversion rate: This is the rate that leads turn into customers. You should track this percentage to see if your current marketing efforts are working and leads are being nurtured enough to become customers.
Return-On-Investment Metrics
The last type of marketing automation metric your small business should measure is your return on investment (ROI) metrics. These will tell you if you are making money off the marketing tactics your company is using. Your small business could be spending a lot of money on customer acquisition, but is there any return? These are some ROI metrics to track:
- ROI: First things first, ROI is your return on investment. In other words, it is how much money you are gaining or losing based on the amount of money you invested. This can be measured for specific projects or for your business in general.
- Cost per lead: Every lead is going to cost a different amount based on how they were acquired. For example, you might gain a new lead through a Facebook ad you are running, so it is important to measure how much you are paying for this advertising and how many leads you are getting from it to decide if it is worth it to continue to run this ad.
- Cost per acquisition: Similar to cost per lead, cost per acquisition is how much it costs you to turn a lead into a customer. This will be the total cost of nurturing a lead into a customer and will typically be more expensive.
Final Thoughts
Marketing automation allows your small business to market smarter, not harder, and now you can use metrics to improve your company. By keeping up with these marketing automation metrics, you will be more in touch with your company and have solid numbers you can use strategically to grow your business. Tracking metrics gives you insight into what is and isn’t working so you can adjust accordingly, adding tremendous value to your small business!
