How Much Do You Know About Your Campaign Results?

Marketing campaign results of any scope take time, effort and money. Once you have some analytical results in your hand about the effectiveness of your campaign, do you know what to do with them?

The primary focus for most businesses is sales. After all, sales are relatively easy to measure – all you need is the total revenue.

Believe it or not, “sales” are not the be-all, end-all when it comes to understanding the results of running a marketing campaign. 

Here are some other points of focus you should be diving into:

How’s Your Engagement?

The easiest way to track engagement is through email engagement. Here you want to look at three main factors:

• Opens
• Click rates
• Unsubscribes

If your emails have a high open-rate, this should tell your company that you have enticing emails that encourage your readership to open them. This is probably due to your emails having a catchy and relevant subject line. If you have a low open rate, you may need to work on your subject lines, your topics, or your call-to-action closings.

Having a high click rate relates to how many customers are clicking and taking action after scrolling through your email. This result will tell you how timely or attractive your offer was to your readership.

Then there are the “unsubscribes”. While it may sting a bit, remember that there will always be a number of unsubscribers (perhaps they initially subscribed for free eBook, or maybe the product/service they used is something they no longer need). The key here is to look into if there is an increase in the number of unsubscribes. If there is, you may be either sending too many emails or the emails you are sending aren’t relevant to many readers.

Apart from email marketing, there are other ways to try to track engagement levels on social media (including YouTube) are good ways to gauge how well you are using these channels.

If you have Facebook Ads or create a group on Facebook, for example, you should expect a gradual increase in people who are following or who have joined your company or visited your website. If it levels out or if there is a steep decrease in members, this is a clear indication that something is amiss.

The same rings true for channels like YouTube. If you see a decline in subscribers, views, comments and “thumbs ups,” you may need to revisit the topics of your videos, video production quality and so on.

The great thing about social media is that your audiences here are more likely to be vocal about why they love (or hate) what you’re doing. Take the comments with a grain of salt, thank them, and then seriously consider what they’re saying.

How Are Your Leads Looking?

Leads are obviously an important part of any marketing campaign. There are a number of metrics you should be keeping track of and analyzing when it comes to leads, including:

• Where a lead is sitting in your sales funnel (leads stuck in the beginning stages and who haven’t taken action in some time are less likely to convert)
• Your lead conversion rate for your campaign (this may be sales, filling out a form, clicking a call-to-action button, etc.)
• How long it takes for a lead to convert at each stage of the sales funnel and overall
• Your return on investment (ROI)
• The sales opportunities created by leads via specific segments/channels/etc.

How you interpret the effectiveness of your marketing campaign results will boil down to what your campaign objective was. Not every campaign you create will be sales-focused. Some may be to increase awareness while others may be to educate the public about your products. Understanding this, and the results of your campaign, will drastically help you improve the quality of future leads.

What Were the End Campaign Results?

Did the end results come close to your initial objective? Or were they way off-base? This includes if the results led to a positive outcome in another area, which again would be something to look deeply into.

When looking through your campaign data, you have to be able to measure how much of an increase in website traffic and an increase in revenue can be credited to your marketing campaigns. Again, sales and leads aren’t the only indications of a marketing campaign’s success. Brand awareness, brand reach, and product education are all examples of other worthy campaign goals.

Where to Go Next

A good rule of thumb is to test, measure, tweak and test again.

The best-laid marketing campaign plans rely on the behavior of the customer you’re trying to attract and motivate to take action. With every marketing campaign being different every time and your company constantly evolving, it’s important to change the way you measure and perceive what a “successful” marketing campaign is with each and every new objective.