15 Essential Metrics for Marketing Automation Success

Data & Reporting | Marketing

by   Jen Ribble

Marketing automation technology is designed to perform repetitive marketing tasks automatically without the need for human intervention. By automating simple marketing activities—like sending email campaigns, building landing pages, segmenting lists, and scoring leads—marketing teams can spend their time on more strategic initiatives. 

There are countless benefits to implementing a marketing automation platform, including:

  • Improved efficiency
  • Cost savings
  • Less time spent on tedious manual tasks
  • Reduced potential for human error
  • More personalized marketing campaigns
  • Better alignment between sales and marketing

Perhaps most importantly, marketing automation provides deep insights into the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. That’s because marketing automation tools collect and analyze massive amounts of data about every marketing campaign so you can gauge the success of each tactic, identify opportunities for improvement, and focus more resources on the activities that generate the best results. 

Marketing automation software lets you track important metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) in a way that simply isn’t possible without it—leading to more informed, data-driven decision-making and faster business growth. Let’s take a look at some of those critical marketing automation metrics.

15 critical marketing automation metrics

Evaluating the success of your marketing automation efforts is a critical part of optimizing your overall marketing strategy. But marketing automation software generates a lot of data—and knowing what to measure isn’t always easy. 

So we’ve compiled this list of 15 essential marketing automation metrics, which can be divided into four distinct categories:

  • Engagement metrics
  • Conversion metrics
  • Customer metrics
  • Value metrics

Engagement metrics

Engagement metrics help you evaluate how customers and prospects respond to your marketing efforts and whether your content is resonating with them. There are dozens of standard engagement metrics, but here are some of the most important ones:

  • Open rate measures the percentage of users who open a given email campaign. This metric provides valuable insight into how well an email campaign—and especially the subject line—captures audience attention. If open rates are low, A/B testing can help to optimize factors like send time, subject line, and pre-header text.
  • Click-through rate (CTR) measures the percentage of people who click on a link or call to action (CTA) within an email, ad, social post, or other marketing campaign. This metric can help you understand whether your audience finds your content relevant and wants to learn more. Monitoring CTR can help to identify the types of content or campaigns that are most engaging and successful at driving a desired action. 
  • Bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate indicates that people are not finding what they want or expect on your site. This often occurs when your messaging doesn’t resonate with your audience or your CTA is misaligned with the actual content it’s linking to. 
  • Time on site measures the average length of time users spend on a page—which provides valuable insight into their level of interest and engagement. This metric is far more useful than site traffic, as it provides a qualitative view of website visitors rather than just a quantitative measure. 
  • Unsubscribe rate measures the percentage of subscribers who ask to be removed from your email list. A high unsubscribe rate may indicate any number of issues, including message relevancy, poor writing and/or design, or even send frequency. 
  • Social media engagement includes metrics like likes, shares, and comments, which relate to the interaction between your audience and your social media content. Measuring social media engagement can help to identify the types of content your audience prefers, and these insights can be used to inform your future social media strategy.

Conversion metrics

Engagement is an important first step, but conversion is the true goal of any campaign. These conversion metrics will help you assess how effectively your marketing automation efforts are moving potential customers through the sales funnel. 

  • Form completion rate: Most marketing campaigns direct users to a landing page, which typically includes some type of form (content download, demo request, etc.). By analyzing the conversion rate of various forms, you can identify which landing pages are performing best and which could be improved.
  • Average lead score: A key function of most marketing automation platforms, lead scoring assigns a numerical value to each lead based on their behaviors, demographics, and other qualifications. This score allows you to prioritize leads based on their likelihood of making a purchase. Average lead score is a useful metric for assessing the overall quality of your sales funnel.
  • Conversion rate: This metric measures the percentage of contacts who complete a specific desired action. For most businesses, making a sale is a multi-step endeavor, so conversion rate can help assess campaign performance at each phase in the process. Conversion rate may be calculated at any point in the sales funnel; for example, as a qualified lead converts to a prospect, a prospect converts to an opportunity, or an opportunity converts to a customer.

Customer metrics

Every business needs customers to survive—so it’s important to keep track of metrics related to both new customer acquisition and current customer retention. The following customer metrics can help to evaluate how you’re performing in both of these critical areas. 

  • Customer acquisition cost (CAC): One of the most critical metrics to monitor, CAC measures the expenditure required to turn a lead into a new customer. Tracking this metric can help you understand which of your campaigns deliver the most customers for the lowest price.  
  • Customer lifetime value (CLV): CLV measures the amount of revenue a customer generates over the course of their relationship with your company—including not only the initial sale but also any renewals or future purchases. CLV is useful in determining which marketing activities bring in the highest value customers. Measuring CLV can also help you make smarter decisions about how to invest in customer relationships. 
  • Customer retention rate (CRR):  Essentially a measure of loyalty, CRR is the percentage of customers that continue to do business with your company over time. Measuring CRR can help determine if you’re doing the right things to keep existing customers satisfied and identify opportunities for improving the customer experience.

Value metrics

The ultimate measure of campaign performance is the amount of revenue generated. These value metrics are used to evaluate how successful your marketing automation efforts are in improving the bottom line. 

  • Total revenue generated: This metric simply measures the amount of revenue that is directly attributable to marketing automation activities—including campaigns that influence the initial purchase, cross-sells, upsells, and renewals. It can help you understand the overall financial impact of your marketing automation strategy.
  • Return on investment (ROI): This is one of the most important metrics to track, as it tells you how much value you’re getting from your marketing automation activities. The return on marketing automation investment is calculated just like any other ROI: by subtracting the cost of running a campaign from the total campaign revenue. 
  • Repeat customer revenue: Also known as repurchase rate, RCR tracks how often customers come back after the initial sale to make a subsequent purchase. This metric is useful for measuring customer loyalty and understanding how effectively your marketing efforts are driving repeat business. 

Some common metrics have limited value

You may have noticed that we didn’t include several common metrics in our discussion of essential marketing automation KPIs. That’s because we believe the most important metrics are directly related to campaign performance and business results. Other metrics may be interesting or nice to have, but they fall short of being “essential.”

These secondary metrics tend to fall into two main categories:

  • Activity metrics—like the number of emails sent or the volume of social posts—can be useful for tracking progress toward internal goals and ensuring that you’re leveraging a variety of marketing tactics. However, they don’t provide any meaningful insights to help improve your overall strategy. While interesting, placing too much emphasis on quantitative activity may cause you to miss the bigger picture—because a successful marketing campaign ultimately requires more than just going through the motions. 
  • Pure vanity metrics—like customer count or number of social media followers—are another type of simplistic, quantitative measure that don’t reflect any meaningful business results. After all, a massive social media following isn’t worth much if they never engage with your content. Similarly, a large customer count has little value if their CAC outpaces their CLV. 

Ready to see marketing automation in action?

If you want to see some of these metrics at work within a marketing automation platform, you can watch this recorded demo of Insightly Marketing. For a more personalized look at Insightly Marketing, sign up for a one-on-one demo with a member of our team. You’ll also have a chance to see:

  • Insightly CRM, our powerful, scalable customer relationship management solution
  • Insightly Service, a unified customer service ticketing platform
  • AppConnect, a robust integration tool to connect key business applications

When you put all of these Insightly products to work for your business, you’ll finally have the ability to align cross-functional teams and create lasting customer relationships.

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