This essay is about the efficacy of your sales funnel and marketing analytics. If you haven’t yet built your sales funnel or need more information on how to automate your sales process online, check out this helpful marketing automation website. Let’s take a look at how a sales funnel works before we get into the five measurements you may use to determine funnel efficiency. So, let’s investigate!
Related: What is a sales funnel?
Sales Funnels On the Internet
Targeted prospects in marketing analytics are funneled into an inbound marketing funnel where they may be effectively converted into paying customers. The following is a diagram of the sales funnel.
The analysis of data to assess the success of a marketing effort is known as marketing analytics. Businesses can understand what drives customer behaviors, enhance their marketing strategies, and maximize their return on investment by applying technology and analytical processes to marketing-related data.
Attractive content promotes website traffic and attracts TOFU (Top-of-Funnel) prospects when doing marketing analytics. Marketing automation can then warm up and qualify these leads for the sales team by moving them through the three phases of the purchasing process, from awareness (TOFU) to consideration (MOFU) to decision (BOFU).
Nurturing prospects (moving leads through the sales funnel) may be examined and measured in a totally closed-loop marketing system. I’ll go through which tools to use and which metrics to pay attention to in the sections below.
Related: What is sales training?
What Are The Most Effective Techniques And Indicators For Measuring Sales Funnel Efficiency?
Transparency Alert: I use Google Analytics and HubSpot, a marketing platform tool. HubSpot is a leading closed-loop marketing automation platform. On a regular basis, I use HubSpot and its analytic tools to track the success of our own marketing efforts at 98toGo, as well as the performance of all of our clients.
Do you know how to evaluate success using metrics? The traffic source and particular interaction data are the most significant metrics to start with.
1) Statistics On Traffic And Interaction Depending On Content
First and foremost, track the results of your efforts to generate leads for your business.
Examine traffic (or views) and engagement from various sources of content to see where potential consumers are coming from and whether or not they are ready to buy.
To begin the flow into the funnel’s apex, each company must attract a significant number of visitors in marketing analytics. Over time, good content should assist to increase website visitors. It’s then up to that same website to engage and encourage those same visitors to take action. Visitors who do not take action do not become leads. It is difficult to advertise a product. Even the majority of marketers think they’re ineffective.
Analyze the amount of people who visit your blog’s pages. A good content marketing technique is to write blog entries on the company’s website on a regular basis. If your blog has a low number of page views, it’s probable that people aren’t connecting with it (usually due to a problem with the title or content) or that they can’t find it.
Take a look at HubSpot’s “page performance” graph below, which shows total blog post views as well as their engagement rate. CTA percent is what I’m referring to when I say “engagement” (Calls-To-Action click rate). This statistic evaluates the ability of a piece of information to persuade target customers (blog readers) to take a specified action. In this situation, the engaging action is to click on a CTA button that leads to an offer.
Other blog engagement metrics in marketing analytics (such as comments and links) exist, but the one I’m interested in is convincing readers to enter the sales funnel.
Simply simply, blogs with a high percentage of CTAs are more engaging.
A reasonable aim for every sales funnel is to capture more and more TOFU leads. It’s vital to present visitors with something of value in order to pique their attention; if they’re intrigued, they’ll interact with the website content and pursue opportunities by filling out contact forms and becoming leads.
Related: What Is Lead Nurturing And What Are The Right Tactics?
Tip: Include a CTA offer within the blog article that is really related to the blog topic content to enhance CTA percentage on blogs.
The following three Google Analytics engagement measures are also valuable for monitoring and changing content strategies:
2) The Call-To-Efficacy Action’s
For establishing sales funnel efficiency, explicitly measuring CTA click-through rates is crucial. The funnel isn’t getting enough leads if the conversion rates are poor. The core of efficient funnels is click happy websites, which include offerings that are so appealing that visitors can’t help but click.
The real effects of two quite different buttons over time are depicted in this graph from our HubSpot platform. [“Calls to Action”] is a phrase that means “calls to action.” More textual information was available on Button B [ “This is how you make a call to action. Now is the time to learn how to convert “], and data reveals that it attracted more attention and resulted in two lead submissions:
Tip: Start by looking into TOFU activities like CTA offers, which are designed to entice information seekers into the sales funnel. Compare the results of A/B split testing with different CTA button versions to determine which ones convert at a greater rate. Then pick a winner and repeat the procedure.
3) Landing Page Submission Rates
The next step in establishing a sales funnel’s performance is to make sure that dedicated landing pages are receiving form submissions. Any friction between the button click and the landing page’s target fulfillment results in lower submission rates.
Setting up target conversions on Google for marketing analytics takes a little more work, but in HubSpot it’s simple. Below are the views that resulted in a form submission for seven separate TOFU offers and one MOFU & BOFU offer.
Two offers fell short of our 35 percent internal landing page submission rate criterion. These sites are likely to have form friction, and they should be tweaked:
4) Click-Through-Rates On Email
Warming up leads to the point where they are more likely to become customers is the goal of effective email sequences. A cost-effective marketing method is to set up “nurturing” emails to be sent to potential customers on a regular basis.
Emails sent to leads in the sales funnel should do two things: 1) remind these prospects of your company’s products/services at a time that MAY coincide with their consideration or purchase decision; and 2) stimulate further with useful content that moves prospects through the sales funnel efficiently.
Well-crafted emails boost the likelihood of progressing farther down the sales funnel and, eventually, generating revenue for the organization. The goal is to educate people about your service/product and how it can assist them solve their unique problems or difficulties as they progress through your sales funnel from top to bottom.
The efficiency of email marketing strategies is often overlooked by business owners and would-be marketers.
Some marketers in marketing analytics also make the mistake of focusing on trivial or difficult-to-control email analytics. Delivery rates and bounce rates are important metrics because they attempt to evaluate “deliverability.” Delivery and bounce rates, on the other hand, are difficult to control because they are frequently signs of problems with the recipient’s server or email provider.
Open rates, click rates, and, more importantly, click-to-open rates are all efficiency measures (CTOR).
Higher open rates suggest that the subject line’s headline and relevancy drew your lead in (prospect). Open rates of greater than 30% are outstanding. Email open rates in the United States averaged 19.7% in 2013, according to the 2013 Silverpop Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study, although Epsilon’s Q4 2013 study found an overall open rate of 30.9 percent.
The click rate indicates how many times the prospect clicked on a link inside the email. A high click-through rate denotes the following:
- Subscribers are interested in reading your emails because they include interesting content.
- Your emails provide engaging material that motivates readers to act.
- The calls-to-action in your emails are straightforward.
- The two studies cited previously offered click-through rates as a standard.
Good news for email nurturing campaigns: automatically triggered emails (nurturing sequences) have considerably greater open and click rates than “business as usual” emails.
5) Measuring Email Marketing Automation’s Effectiveness
Marketing automation aims to shorten the sales cycle with marketing analytics. It achieves this by providing touchpoints that guide a prospect through the purchasing process.
HubSpot’s response to enhanced marketing automation is workflows. Workflows are a versatile tool. It’s used to build an email nurturing sequence, define criteria and triggers to qualify users, schedule email delivery, and measure progress.
Set a goal for your marketing automation and keep track of how you’re doing.
The first aim is to convert someone from a Lead to a Sales Qualified Lead. [Or, to put it another way, traveling from the top of the sales funnel to the bottom.] The second goal is to turn leads into customers.
The screenshot below displays how to measure the efficacy of your marketing automation using HubSpot’s Workflow product in marketing analytics. This is a snapshot of the “Summary” panel in an actual workflow, which provides a high-level overview of overall performance: A total of 156 leads were generated, with 41 of them fulfilling the conversion goal (becoming customers), resulting in a conversion rate of 26.2 percent. Bam! The most crucial performance is this one.
When deciding if marketing automation is functioning or needs to be changed in marketing analytics , this is a great place to start. HubSpot’s Workflow tool also gives more granular information on each stage of the email sequence, such as click rates.
For more information on calculating ROI, download our free eBook that explains how to measure your ROI using analytics.
Related: Lead Generation: Can It Be Useful For Your Products?
