Analyze Your Marketing Program

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Identify metrics and key performance indicators.
  
• Track metrics in Marketing Cloud Engagement.
  
• Calculate your program’s return on investment.
  

Left Brain or Right Brain?

In the 1960s, neuropsychologist Roger Sperry studied the left and right sides of the brain. He believed that everyone had a dominant side—meaning, you’d be more creative if you favored the right brain, and more analytical if you favored the left. However, recent studies show this might not be entirely true, because many tasks require you to use both sides equally. The four elements of marketing strategy (introduced in the Personalized Email Marketing module) are a great example. 

• Know your audience.
  
• Create great content.
  
• Analyze results.
  
• Evolve your strategy.
  

These elements—along with ever-evolving technology, channels, and strategies—require a successful marketer to be both creative and analytical. In this module, we dig deeper into the analysis and evolution of your marketing strategy. So, fire up your left brain, and let’s take a closer look at how to track your performance.

Measure Your Success

Before you decide where to go, you need to know where you are. That’s why it’s important to measure your campaign success using key performance indicators (KPIs). These goals or metrics should be tailored to your particular campaign, organization, or industry.

Let’s check in as Yasmin Ahmad, digital marketer for the shoe retailer Cloud Kicks, reviews some common email KPIs. 

She wants to know what she should include as part of her marketing overview and 6-month roadmap at a company meeting in 2 weeks.

Opens

Email opens are recorded when images render in an email (based on a transparent pixel). All opens include any open from any recipient (even if the same person opens multiple times), and unique opens tracks only the first open from each unique recipient.

Clicks

Email clicks are recorded when a recipient clicks any URL in an email. Similar to opens, you can measure all clicks or just unique clicks.

List Size

Another great way to gauge your email program’s success is to track the rate at which your list is growing.

Bounces, Unsubscribes, and Complaints

We covered the metrics that track activity that you do want, and it’s equally important to track activity that you don’t want. Bounces are emails that are unable to be delivered to the intended address. They are labeled as permanent (hard bounces) or temporary (soft or block bounces). Unsubscribes are the users that click on the unsubscribe link in an email. Finally complaints refer to the number of spam complaints identified by an ISP. 

Track Your Performance

Now that Yasmin has a good grasp on what KPIs she’ll include, it’s time to see how they can be tracked within Marketing Cloud Engagement. 

Learn more about how you can use Google Analytics and other data tools, like Marketing Cloud Intelligence, in the Measure Your Marketing Impact trail.

It’s All About That Baseline

Now you know what you’re measuring and how to measure it. High five! Next, to truly understand what your KPIs are telling you, you should establish a baseline. A baseline is just a point of reference to help you judge your success and determine areas of improvement. Once you’re consistently tracking engagement metrics over time, you can compare to your baseline and gain valuable information to help you evolve your strategy.

Curious about industry standards? Many marketers consult eMarketer’s email marketing performance benchmarks.

Return on Investment (ROI)

Return on investment, or ROI, measures the all-important cost-effectiveness of campaigns—that is, how much a campaign earns compared to how much it costs. And while ROI can seem tricky to calculate, it is key to helping you define the value marketing brings to your company. Let’s break it down.

How to Calculate ROI

1. Determine the value of sales from a campaign (translate to your industry; for example, value of the number of new accounts, new donors, or whatever you are trying to achieve).
   
2. Subtract campaign costs (include the platform, super messages, human resources, and time put in).
   
3. Divide by campaign costs.
   
4. Multiply by 100.
   

Example

A new product email journey resulted in $12,000 in new sales for Cloud Kicks. With platform costs, super messages, and resource time, they estimate the campaign cost $3,250. Here’s how Cloud Kicks calculated their ROI for the campaign.

($12,000- $3,250) / $3,250 = 2.69 or 269% ROI.

Spoiler alert: Email marketing still boasts one of the best ROIs of any marketing effort. Want to go a step further? Learn how to measure your return on digital experience (ROX).

Learn how to track sales associated with campaigns in Salesforce in the Campaign Basics module.

Yasmin does some quick math and adds Cloud Kicks’s ROI and email metrics to her presentation. She’s sure she’ll get some questions from the team, so she wants to dig in to fully understand how Cloud Kicks’s campaigns stack up in the digital world. In the next unit, we do just that with the digital maturity assessment.  

Resources

• Salesforce Help: Analytics Builder
  
• Salesforce Help: Journey Analytics Dashboard
  
• Salesforce Help: Account Send Summary
  
• Salesforce Help: View Tracking Results for an Email Send
  
• External: Email Marketing Performance Benchmarks
  
• Trailhead: Measure Your Marketing Impact
  
• Salesforce Blog: Calculating ROX: Measure Your Returns on Digital Experience Investments
  
• Trailhead: Campaign Basics