Marketing Automation and Lead Management Blog

A/B Testing and Multivariate Testing of Marketing Campaigns

Kevin Joyce — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 10:01:23 -0800

I get asked frequently if Market2Lead supports A/B testing of email campaigns and the answer is “yes, of course,” but sometimes I wonder if the people have thought through the process.

You can dissect the average email campaign down into 6 broad areas that can influence the outcome as shown in the graphic above. In my August 28, 2009 post on effective campaigns I discussed the value of a high quality list as the primary determinant of the effectiveness of a campaign, so we won’t repeat that here. Instead I want to discuss how one would best go about A/B testing campaigns for the 5 remaining items.

Select the A/B Testing Outcome To Test

In B2B with long sales cycles, and multiple touch points, it would be silly to A/B test email campaigns for closed won opportunities, but in B2C this might be the perfect answer. In B2B email campaigns you are probably more likely to constrain yourself to opens, clicks, and offer downloads. In B2C with short sales cycles, you might consider “added to basket”, or purchases as the outcome you are testing.

A/B Testing Requires Random List Segmentation

To be an effective A/B test, the other factors beyond the one you are testing must be held constant or, in the case of segmented lists of people, be made random. So the first question should be, how does one produce random lists:

Allow the marketing automation system to randomly pick people from your segmented list for either the A or B treatment. To the best of my knowledge no marketing automation vendor offers this today.
Manually produce two lists (A and B) using some random mechanism; you could use the odd numbered contact ID numbers for the A list for instance. Trying to create random lists by selecting letters found in names or emails is not as random as you might think! But if the contact ID numbers are assigned randomly when new leads are created or imported, it is a great way to go.

A/B Testing with One Program and Two Lists?

Some folks believe that it is simpler to use one program with two random lists, and have the functionality built in to apply the appropriate A/B subject line, or A/B email body, or A/B offer, or A/B Landing Page, or A/B Form to the A or B target list. In the reporting, the system would then have to be smart enough to produce two different reports on clicks, opens, downloads etc based on the A/B variable that was chosen. I find this too complicated.

I much prefer to create the program for A, copy it, point it to list B, change my one variable (subject line, or email body, or offer, or landing page, or form) and launch both programs. I can do this in two minutes and they each have their own results, it is easy to interpret, and easy to copy these programs for future tests.

You Don’t Need Dedicated Functionality for A/B Testing

The bottom line is that you can do some very creative A/B testing or multivariate testing as long as you have a means to create random lists. Everything else is easily done by copying the program and changing your one variable, and the reporting will make much more sense to you and everybody else.

So, an exercise for the reader: How would you do A/B/C testing since 3 does not divide evenly into 10, so our trick of using odd versus even contact IDs won't help...

-Kevin

Are your marketing assets generating demand?

Kevin Joyce — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:37:40 -0800

Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are measurements that indicate the health of the business. We use them in dashboards to give status at a glance. As a continuation of my series of posts on Key Performance Indicators for Marketing, lets talk about measuring the effectiveness of Marketing assets and offers.

Marketing Offer Types for Demand Generation and Lead Nurturing

We invest a lot of our budget in creating them, we use them as bait for lead generation, educational fodder for lead nurturing campaigns, and ongoing loyalty marketing to our installed base. The assets we invest in generally include:

Website pages
Whitepapers
Analyst reports
Flash demos
Data sheets and brochures
Case studies, success stories
Press Releases (maybe)
Webcasts and podcasts
Free trial offer
Surveys
Newsletters
Training guides
Best practices documents
Online demo

To accurately report on them you will want to tag them with an "Offer Type", similar to the list I describe above. Next we need to decide the dimensions that we want to measure, some obvious, some perhaps not so obvious.

Measurements for marketing offer performance

Usage in a period of time
Form abandonment/completion rate by asset (if they have a form)
Age
Time to next interaction by prospects who registered for this offer

Usage is a no brainer. You will want to trend this out, and of course as you move the asset around on your website and offer it through other media, it will go up and down in popularity.

Age is important because too many asset choices on your website or in your delivery channel, will result in folks not finding the great assets and perhaps not choosing any asset at all. If you subscribe to the theory that too much choice results in less decisions to choose anything, read this article on the paradox of choice that throws doubt on that theory. Bottom line for me is that I would rather have 10 great offers, than hide the 10 in the middle of 40 mediocre offers.

I also have a fear that some assets are innoculating prospects. They read them, and never come back to your website. Hence the 4th metric, how long after an asset is downloaded until they interact with you again. This metric could help you weed out the weak offers by something other than usage and age.

There are a few other considerations in Asset performance measurement:

Separate out "offers downloaded results" by net new leads versus existing prospects in your database versus installed base customers.
Separate out proactive out reach of offers (email offers) from the results of folks finding your offers for themselves either on your website or through a third party.
Your offers should have unique IDs so that they can be reused in multiple different programs/campaigns, and you can run the report based on the offer ID. If you change the form, fit, or function of the offer, give it a new ID.
Also consider tracking all offers regardless if they have a gated form or not. This is an asset report, not a gated asset report! But in your reports you may want to highlight the difference.

What is the best KPI for Marketing offers?

So we have defined the types of offers, we have defined 4 dimensions of measurement, what would a single KPI for assets look like? We want a KPI that will set alarm bells going if it trends in the wrong direction, and we want that change to be obvious soon after it happens, not months later. Occam's razor tells us we should reach for the obvious one: look at total asset downloads per week or per month, and watch the trend. If you have 100 assets, at $3K each, isn't it worth keeping an eye on this $300K to see if it is working for you or against you?

-Kevin

Measuring Marketing Effectiveness

Kevin Joyce — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:06:48 -0800

I read the recent post in the blog of Morgan Stewart, Director of Research and Strategy at ExactTarget, (a Market2Lead partner and all around good guys!) They just released a fascinating report they created with Econsultancy, on "Marketing Budgets 2010: Effectiveness, Measurement & Allocation". Great stuff and worth looking at the snapshot of the slides on Morgan's blog. One slide in particular caught my attention:

So in their survey, 79% said increased Sales was a key metric for measuring marketing effectiveness, followed by traffic to the website at 71%. Wow. Yes I know increased sales is a goal of marketing, but it is a measure of the effectiveness of the entire company. Every other department could be doing awful, marketing is knocking the ball out of the park and gets a bloody nose because sales are down! And website visits - a measure of marketing effectiveness? So the increase in visits to Bank of America's website because of their notoriety over paying large bonuses after the bailout means Marketing is doing a good job (I hope they got bonuses for that). My point is that an effective metric has to demonstrate a strong causal relationship to the thing it supposed to measure. Sales revenue is a good measure of the effectiveness of the channel, and the product/service. Website visits are a good measure of the brand awareness (both good and bad). Neither are good measures of overall marketing effectiveness.

Some good measures of marketing effectiveness

So what are some good measures of marketing effectiveness. Remember effectiveness is defined as doing the right things, and efficiency is doing things right. You combine both to get greater productivity. Let's measure effectiveness based on where you might allocate your marketing budget:

net new lead generation: Effectiveness measure is cost per "Sales Accepted" marketing lead

Notice that I am less interested in cost per "new" lead because anyone can drag in a bunch of garbage leads at a low price. A "sales accepted" marketing lead means that Sales is telling you that it is acceptable quality.

Lead nurturing: Effectiveness measure is velocity of leads through the funnel, or number of new opportunities from marketing leads. You can also look at your on going response rates to campaigns, how many open, clicked downloaded, although you have to be careful not to confuse this with the asset performance - A/B testing!

Awareness: Effectiveness measure could be brand recognition, website visits, social media mentions, traditional media mentions, etc

Loyalty marketing: Customer retention, satisfaction as mentioned in the report

Asset performance: Web pages per visit, asset downloads, form completion rates, event attendance.

A single measure of Marketing effectiveness?

I don't believe there is a single good measure of marketing effectiveness. All the ones I mentioned measure specific areas of marketing. Marketing ROI you say? So everything marketing does fits into nice little programs that are time bound, produce revenue in the near future and can be measured easily...not! Marketing ROI is good for specific campaigns. So, anyone out there have any ideas for a good single measure of marketing effectiveness?

-Kevin

The Sales and Marketing Chasm

Kevin Joyce — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 09:19:54 -0800

It appears that every Marketing and Sales product vendor has a panacea for the chasm between marketing and sales. They don't. So let's get an agreement on the forms the chasm takes, and list the areas of improvement that can bridge the gap.

Lead Generation is fundamental to marketing performance

The purpose of the marketing demand generation group(s) is to:

Generate many new high quality leads
Nurturing the in-house database to drive more opportunities out of it sooner
Increase the velocity of opportunities in the funnel
Maintain the loyalty of the installed base

To accomplish these we leverage a mix of awareness, assets, and programs through a variety of media: web, events, webinars, partners, in house database emails to opt-ins. We need to balance awareness and brand building against lead generation. We need to create training materials and sales collateral for multiple channels. The output from marketing from a Sales perspective, and by which they measure marketing, is:

Marketing Qualified Leads
Assets (collateral, Website)
Lead nurturing programs
Brand equity (awareness, attributes, loyalty, perceived quality)
Channel training (competitive info, product info, target market info)
Partner relationships

Whilst the relative priority of these things may vary from firm to firm, most sales folks would put leads at the top of the list. The 2009 CSO report indicates that Sales generate 52% of their own leads ( a significant increase in the past few years) and that marketing contributes just 24% (a significant decrease). If you want to align marketing and sales, first and foremost measure your marketing team on that number. If you are producing lots of high quality leads for Sales, many of your other weaknesses can be overlooked. If you are failing to produce leads, or nurture leads into opportunities, the chasm from a sales perspective is that marketing does not understand what Sales needs - warm qualified leads.

Marketing has a finite budget to spend on these 6 areas. It behooves the VP of marketing to win agreement with the Sales peers on the relative importance of these marketing deliverables in the coming year. Sales and marketing alignment starts at the top. But this is only half of the bridge over the chasm.

What does Sales need to deliver to Marketing?

Marketing wants:

Follow up to all marketing qualified leads
A feedback mechanism that gives a measure on where the best and worst leads are coming from
Support and attendance at prospect events and training
Persistence with regard to prospects who are not quite ready to buy
Adherence to process
Clean and complete contact and account data in the CRM
Behavior that aligns with the brand
Accurate forecasts

As with the marketing list, the first one is very important. Lead generation can consume a large portion of the marketing budget, and the idea that Sales ignores 80% of these leads drives marketing crazy. This problem is resolved with a rock solid lead management process, an agreement of what a Marketing Qualified Lead is, and a process in the CRM/SFA to track timely sales followup to new marketing qualified leads (typically <2 business days). It also requires that Sales management step up and hold their team accountable for lead follow-ups.

Sales is arguably the most accountable organization in a company. Where else are up to half of the team turned over every year if they don't meet their goals? Marketing in B2B companies has probably been the least accountable, with the exception that the VP of marketing gets ejected after 22 months. My point is this. Don't expect what you don't inspect. Sales is very accountable because we have put systems in place to measure everything they do as it relates to closing business. Following up on marketing leads, quality and completeness of the data in CRM, accurate forecasting are important Sales metrics too and need more scrutiny from Sales management.

On the marketing side, Marketing Automation provides the measurability tools required to measure net new leads, lead quality, asset quality and usage, and efficacy of lead nurturing. So start measuring them, and holding marketing accountable for their deliverables to Sales. The facts will crush the finger pointers.

Measuring The Influence of Marketing - ROMI

Kevin Joyce — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 11:54:41 -0800

I am delighted to see the B2B industry move towards greater accountability and metrics for Marketing. But the use of marketing automation systems, email platforms, web analytics, and online advertising is flooding marketers with lots of raw data. I suspect that many marketing folks who didn't have to worry so much about ROMI in the past are struggling to organize the mountain of data in a way that helps them make better decisions, and demonstrates their positive influence on the business results.

Over the coming weeks I want to focus on one marketing KPI (Key performance Indicator) in each post, and elucidate the benefits of it. I want to start with a KPI that shows total responses in the period.

What is Total Marketing Responses Per Period?

A few months ago Megan Heuer from Sirius Decisions gave an excellent presentation on Marketing KPIs, and in it she said "Never confuse activity with results."

So whilst you may send lots of emails, and host webinars, and attend trade shows, counting the responses to these programs is a good measure of the results! Marketing is tasked with creating demand (lead generation is just a portion of this). An effective measure of demand, in addition to actually linking opportunities back to marketing, is to measure the program responses you are getting. With a marketing intelligence business intelligence database such as the one included with Market2Lead's enterprise edition, one can segment out all responses by contact type. In this way you can tell at a glance how much of your efforts are going to net new lead generation, versus lead nurturing, vs installed base loyalty marketing.

How do you measure it?

What constitutes a response? Is a website visit a response? Is a card swipe at a trade show a response? If I register for a webinar, and subsequently attend the webinar is that one response or two? Is downloading a case study which doesn't require an registration a response? The important point here is that you decide these things at the outset, and stick to the definitions, because you want to see the month to month trends. Here are my recommendations:

A website visit is a single response independent of how many pages were viewed
Registering for a webinar and subsequent attendance represents two responses
Downloading "free" assets from your website are not additional responses beyond the website visit
Downloading premium assets that require registration are each a response
Every registration is a response, but not every response requires registration
Card swipes at a trade show because people want to put their name in for a free iPod raffle is not worthy of a response
Responses from anonymous visits to your website, are real responses.
Importing a list of contacts who have had no inbound interaction with your company, does not constitute responses.
Unsubscribes and profile updates are not responses
Email opens are not responses, but email click throughs are responses
Telemarketing "connects" are responses
Incoming calls to telemarketing, and contact us form submissions, are responses
Syndicated content downloads are responses
Comments added to a company affiliated blog are responses
Re-tweets of your twitter content are responses

Don't forget to tag all your contacts with a contact type (prospect, customer, analyst, media, competitor, ex-customer etc) so you can slice and dice the data and figure out who you are really marketing to! I am interested to hear your responses!

-Kevin

Why is supporting duplicate contacts based on email address important?

Kevin Joyce — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 10:54:00 -0800

Recently, in a conversation with Marketing Automation analyst David Raab, we discussed why anyone would actually want to support multiple prospect records with the same email address in their marketing automation system. This may be a religious war right up there with Captain Kirk vs Captain Picard or Emacs versus VI (ok, maybe I'm a nerd...).

Some marketing automation systems do not support multiple contacts with the same email address. As a marketing purest I agree with the concept, but unfortunately the buying public does not! Here are three reasons why you will benefit from supporting multiple contacts with the same email address in you marketing automation system.

3 reasons why marketing automation systems should support duplicate email addresses

Salesforce.com is notorious for permitting duplicates. Sales people simply add new contacts and leads without hitting the link to check to see if the person already exists in the database. Why is this a problem? Consider this scenario.
Lead exists in database, synched between Marketing Automation and CRM. Sales gal adds a duplicate contact, same email address.Marketing automation system that only supports one contact per email address cannot synch the duplicate over. Marketing continues to record interactions with the original contact whilst sales records their interactions in the duplicate copy. At some point thecontact tells the rep they want to unsubscribe. Sales gal unsubscribes the non-synching duplicate in CRM.Trouble looms.
Many companies think of Leads, not as people, but as early stage opportunities for products. So one person, may represent several leads (interested in several products). In my naive marketing state some years ago I attempted to tell customers what abad idea this was. Telling billion dollar firms to rewire their sales process and CRM, and re-train the global sales team, to accommodate purest marketing concepts...ahhh not such a good idea. This is one of the leading reasons marketing automation systems that cannot support multiple contacts with same email address are often not integrated with a CRM!
A slightly different twist on #2 is when different divisions of the same firm, may have contacts who are interested in different products, and have different contact owners. If a person expresses a different product interest by registering for a document or event for a different product, the marketing automation system should be able to create a new contact record for that person, because the CRM will assign ownership to a different individual in a different division. You can still create "fatigue" rules to ensure that the person doesn't get overloaded with email from multiple divisions, but their contact records for each division can be unique. This is considered a very cool feature by some of our Market2Lead enterprise accounts.

Bottom line, life is much better, and data quality is higher if you have a marketing automation system that lets you deduplicate on any combination of fields you choose, but still maintains a separate master opt-out database so that if any of the duplicate contacts opts out at a global level, no email goes to any of the contacts with that email address. It goes without saying that our global customers drove us to develop Market2Lead this way, and we thank them for it! Marketing listening to Sales.

-Kevin

PS sorry I neglected my blogging for a few weeks we were finishing up our new website. Check it out! Lots of lovely new short video demos of the application.

When marketing automation goes awry

Kevin Joyce — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:23:28 -0700

Some time ago I reviewed an RFP for Marketing Automation. It included items which immediately signaled to me that the company in question may be headed down a path that would drive them crazy. Here are some of the sample questions from the RFP:

Must provide the capability to identify all the lists a given contact is on
Requires list permission management
Must be able to set time based usage limits for a list. For example, maximum usage is once every 2 months

Do you recognize the pain this company will face if they go down this road? What they want is data entitlement and fatigue management functionality, but they are going after it by looking for a vendor that accomplishes this via static lists. "That's gonna hurt!" An example will help explain why (or perhaps you already know the pain). Let's start with how it should work.

Effective Marketing Automation System:

Let's say you are going to roll out a webinar program. You will email an invitation to a list, have the webinar, and update your database. In the process you create a production list for folks you want to invite, a seed list of internal people, and an exclusion list of people you always want to exclude (all competitors, leads marked as junk or disqualified etc). The list segmentation to build these lists only has to draw on contact records for all the information needed to build lists. And if you want to set up a fatigue rule to control how often someone can be emailed, you simply build a dynamic exclusion list that excludes everyone in a chosen segment who got a alternative offer in the past 10 days.

The registrations for the webinar automatically update the contact record, so a reminder email to registrants, and a last minute 2nd invitation to non-registrants can be sent automatically. After the webinar the attendees are flagged as having attended in the contact record. And you are ready to start all over again in another program! This is how Market2Lead works for instance. There is NO behavioral data (such as attended or registered) stored in static lists, because that would create pockets of behavioral data outside the contact record in static lists that have to be searched every time you build a new production list.

Ineffective Marketing Automation System structure:

For the same webinar, you had to create new static lists containing the people who registered or attended. This is where their behavioral information is stored for this event, instead of in the contact record itself. As a result, when you need to make production lists for new programs you have to segment based on the demographic data in the contact record and know all the static lists (data pockets) that need to be invoked to see what behaviors they include. Pretty soon you are going to have thousands of lists. What happens if someone accidentally deletes a list? How do you organize and maintain all these lists so you can find them? Is there any way to know what lists a contact is in? How do new people in the organization know which existing lists to add new registrants to when they have a new response?

What the Marketing Automation RFP should have said:
The headaches would be much less for this company if the RFP read:

Must be able to see all contact activity in the contact record including web visits, registrations, attendance etc
Must include data entitlement to restrict marketers in one division from marketing to contacts from another division
Must provide facility for fatigue rules so that contacts are not "over marketed"

Behavioral data, such as campaign responses, belongs in the contact’s record, not in static lists or data cards or anywhere else. One database please. One place to look for data! FYI Market2Lead's contact record looks like this:

-Kevin

Who cares what you're selling, what are customers buying

Kevin Joyce — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:01:00 -0700

Too often we get so wrapped up in what we are selling that we don’t pay enough attention to what people are actually buying. Sales people do this constantly. It is a useful exercise for your marketing team to compare what your website (and those of your competitors) says you are selling, to a list you create on what you believe your prospects are buying. The differences may surprise you.

I’ll go first, with the product being marketing automation.

What are people really buying with Marketing Automation?

Here is what prospects tell us they need, and what we find in marketing automation vendor websites:

Save time, do more with less (productivity)
An ability to execute effective automated drip campaigns (efficiency)
A means to focus marketing budget and measure ROI (measurability)
A way to improve the quality of leads passed to sales (quality)
Ability to generate more leads with better response management (productivity)

And here is a perspective on what many are probably buying with Marketing Automation software in addition to the things listed above:

Marketing accountability
A way to justify their marketing budgets
Job security, personal career success, recognition
A way out of the chaos of trying to manage campaigns manually
A way to ensure sales are following up on marketing leads
An improved relationship with Sales
A way to keep their data cleaner
Early adopter credentials
A boost for their resume and future career prospects
Less overtime, no more working on weekends
Best practices in lead nurturing and demand generation
More revenue or profit
A competitive edge
A smart partner that will help them through a rough patch
Buying better teamwork for geographically dispersed team members
Buying down risk in achieving annual goals
Head room to grow

Here are a few more thoughts, not germane to Marketing Automation. Perhaps your customers are buying peace of mind, an outside firm to blame if something goes wrong, a get out of jail free card (they are following the law – SarBox), or they are buying a better world for their children.

You could take this down to the next level and break it out by each of the four buying influence roles – economic buyer, technical buyer, user and coach. Okay, your turn, what are your customers buying? Is that how you and your sales people communicate with them?

-Kevin

How to budget For Marketing Automation Software in 2010

Kevin Joyce — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 14:57:13 -0700

You know its October when the mornings get darker and damper, and the halls echo with whispered budget conversations. The budget debates in marketing invariably settle into two areas:

Disagreement over budget allocation between marketing groups
Disagreement over where the budget cut line should rest

There is never disagreement on the things that clearly have to be done, nor the things that are outrageous “nice to haves” destined for the circular filing cabinet in the corner of your office. Many of us are facing flat budgets or even reduced budgets in 2010 over 2009, and at the same time there is an expectation that the company can grow next year. This means that in order to add something new, like Marketing Automation Software, above the cut line, something else may have to move below the cut line. It is not sufficient to prove that Marketing Automation is worthy of being considered, you have to prove it is more worthy than something else! In addition, you have to posit that it can help you increase your results over prior years’ performance.

Which Marketing Automation results will drive company growth in 2010

Mature marketing automation systems offer plenty of functionality for Inbound Marketing and for Outbound Marketing. If the bulk of the outbound marketing is in automated lead nurturing campaigns then consider that:

CSO Insights reported that more deals closes faster, and more reps made quota when lead nurturing was involved
Aberdeen reported that best in class companies who nurtured leads increased revenues by 28%
Sirius Decisions’ finding that currently only 20% of Marketing leads receive Sales follow-up

So did last year’s budget spend of gazillions on awareness and lead generation, result in Sales ignoring 80% of the leads? This is something you can measure and prove for yourself if your company has a CRM. If Sales reps are ignoring many of the leads, then you have a case for automated lead nurturing. If you shift a little budget away from lead generation and stick it in automated lead nurturing, and give the Sales folks better quality leads, the cash register will ring more often.

B2B leads typically cost $50-$150 each to generate, whilst automated lead nurturing typically costs less than $1 per lead per year. So it is not going to take much of a decrease in the lead generation budget to add in some automated lead nurturing. One trade show, or one direct mail campaign is all it takes.

Perhaps last year you spent 50K or 100K on a data append and cleanup. Mature Marketing Automation software has data validation and standardization in the Inbound Marketing functionality. Perhaps you wouldn’t have to budget so much for data hygiene projects if only clean data got into the system in the first place.

The Inbound Marketing functionality with dynamic progressive profiling forms and landing pages can also result in higher productivity for your website - ie generate more web leads. So you can consider budgeting for Marketing Automation shifting dollars to more web lead generation.

Happy budgeting.

-Kevin

Untangling B2B Marketing Campaigns ROI

Kevin Joyce — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 11:45:39 -0700

I’ve been preparing content for a webinar next week with NetProspex – 4 steps to measure marketing success and “ROI”. The topic is on how to measure the marketing influence on the Sales Funnel. Because of the difficulties inherent in measuring B2B marketing campaign ROI I recommend that people focus on measuring influence instead. Here is the issue with Campaign ROI in a nutshell.

Let’s start with a definition, and examine the challenges involved in measuring it. ROI for a single marketing campaign can be computed as:

Total share of all opportunity dollars that can be attributed to a campaign in a finite period

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Total costs of the marketing campaign within the same period

The first challenge is the definition of a finite time period.

When to measure the ROI of a Marketing Campaign
So the campaign has been running a month, you sum up all the costs, add up your share of all the closed deals, and find that you have a negative ROI (at t=1 above). No surprise there, your sales cycle is 6 months or more! So you wait a year, do the same calculation at t=2, and the ROI is 10x. High fives all around. And you wait another year, and now the ROI is 25x. Pop the champagne. How do you ever decide what the real number is? You can decide when the campaign ends, but its influence could extend out a year or two thereafter, depending on some deals in the sales pipeline. The best approach is to establish a rule for your firm and follow it for all campaigns. Something along the lines of: the final Campaign ROI will be established at 2x the average sales cycle duration after a campaign has ended. After that, no share of the opportunity dollars are attributed back to that campaign. This brings us to the second challenge - share of opportunity dollars.

Share of opportunity dollars

So if a closed won $100K opportunity can be shown to link back to 100 marketing campaigns, trade shows, white paper downloads, and website visits, do they all get an equal share of the opportunity value? Each gets $1000 credit in this case. Or are some campaigns considered more important than others (unequal weighting)? Perhaps tradeshows are worth 10x more than website visits but only 2x the value of a webinar attendance. And are webinar registrations worth less if the contact failed to attend? This could get messy very quickly. My advice, start simple, give all incoming responses an equal share. Out-going touches (such as sent an email) get nothing. Some CRMs assign 100% of the opportunity to each campaign in their campaign influence reports – how messy is that?

Attributing opportunity dollars to Marketing Campaigns

How do you attribute opportunity dollars back to a marketing campaign? Perhaps you have gone down the path of trying to specify a primary campaign source for each new opportunity. You will probably discover, as many have, that this method is fraught with problems and is unreliable. Most importantly, in the case of ROI, it vastly under represents all of the marketing campaigns involved in any one opportunity. So let’s start at the other end: link all campaigns to contacts and then link the contacts back to opportunities. Your marketing automation system links contacts to campaigns. Linking the contacts to the opportunities is not as straight forward. You want to be able to link all the relevant contacts on an account back to opportunities. Some folks may choose to only link back contacts associated with the opportunity, whereas others, recognizing that Sales folks often do not associate any contacts with an opportunity, may grab at all the contacts on an account. To pull this off accurately, you will need a marketing BI engine, because for every opportunity you have to be able to connect back to every relevant contact, and attribute a share of the opportunity dollars to every campaign they responded to. The BI engine relieves you from depending on good Sales behavior for connecting marketing campaigns with opportunities.

So the top line of the ROI equation has its challenges, and we haven’t even started the conversation about cost allocation to marketing campaigns. Let’s save that for a future conversation. In the webinar next week, I will discuss a better, more expedient method of measuring marketing influence on the Sales funnel. Chances are good this webinar will be available as a webcast in our resource center shortly thereafter!

-Kevin