Great article.

Coming from someone who works at a data center provider which is very focused on metrics, these tips are pretty much spot on. A blog post from our CEO can be found here (http://resource.onlinetech.com/how-do-you-measure-your-managed-data-center-business/) on how he measures the success of each of our departments.

Doing almost solely online marketing, metrics are very important in not only showing ROI but improvement and efficiency of efforts.

The only thing I would like to add is that while “Simplify by combining multiple metrics” is a good idea to get a good overall picture of our marketing efforts. If you really want to identify the bottlenecks within the marketing department it can be a good idea to track the source of your leads by campaign.

While time consuming and online marketing can be tracked fairly well when set up right. Our marketing team has been able to definitely match up a campaign to a lead upwards of 70% of the time. That is without relying on the lead to tell us where they came from.

This has made our campaign by campaign ROI analysis very reliable and has enabled us to sharpen our marketing strategy to drive down the cost of a lead.

Thanks for the great post!

I share your view on this topic 100 %, in fact we have build our business around a very similar model assisting software companies in creating efficient GTM programs. We do also operate the sales and marketing programs for our clients and use a process metrics like the one you describe to control our business.

We do not rely completely on online marketing to generate awareness and interest and use internal sales resources at our offshore facility in Chennai, India.

You are welcome to have a look at our service model (metrics) described at our website http://www.proaxismarketing.com/Proaxis/Services.html

Kind Regards,
Morten Sorensen
CEO at Proaxis Marketing A/S

Click for a larger image.

The example given in the post is the purchase process at its highest level,
so the metrics involved are those that would interest an executive,
but the purchase process can be drilled down on/peeled back like an onion.
An email campaign fits nicely inside the awareness (to a cold list) or education (nurturing) segments of the purchase process.

The only requirement of the model is that a process be a set of ordered/dependent activities for the model to apply, i.e., 1 leads to 2 leads to 3, etc. Given any process/level…some metrics are more/less important. WRT email, the time element is not so important, because it all happens in seconds/minutes/days….unless you are exploring the psychology or visual cues.

Cheers,

JY

Very nice post. Simple and easily registered in my long term memory. Look forward to reading more of your work.

Suresh