For both customer and B2B (business to business) companies, you first want to figure out what you are measuring and why?
Essentially, you want to break down the percentages at each stage of your marketing strategy so you can identify areas where you can improve.
This way, once you start setting up multiple channels; inbound vs. outbound emails, Facebook vs. paid SEM (google ads), email marketing vs. cold calling, you can measure the effectiveness based on conversion rates + costs to better plan/forecast your revenue numbers.
When handling a B2B company, you want to focus on measuring “cost per” information:
-Cost per Thousand Impressions (CPM)
-Cost per Click
-Cost per Lead
-Cost per MQL
-Cost per SQL
-Cost per Customer
Your costs to acquire customers cannot exceed how much the customer pays or the amount you gain from them. Otherwise, you operate at a loss.
A rule of thumb for this would be:
CAC: LTV
Meaning that the customer acquisition cost (CAC) to lifetime value (LTV) should be about 1:3.
In other words, only ⅓ of the revenue you make from a customer should be spent on gaining them.
OR
Your payback period should be 3 months based on ACV (average contract value)
An ACV is a measurement that represents the average annual value of a single customer's subscription. For example, if you have an ACV of $120,000, the amount you’re charging a business annually for your product, you can theoretically spend up to $30,000 to acquire that customer which you should then make back within the first 3 months of service.
Remember, you also need to take into consideration how much you are spending in TOTAL to gain this customer. That includes your Headcount, your employee's time spent on the customer. You’re not just focusing on marketing spend.
Other examples of areas you should measure include:
Email Newsletters
-Contacts: your total leads
-Opens: if you're sending emails
-Clicks: if CTA (call to action) is a landing page
-Visits: if you’re measuring the traffic on a page
-Lead Capture/ Form Conversion/ Sign-Up: if the CTA is a form on a website
Consumer Businesses
-Money Spent
-Impressions: number of ad views
-Clicks: effectiveness of ad content
-Conversions: lead capture, signup, download, installs, etc. - reflects the effectiveness of content/wording on each landing page
Example:
Ad A
1,000 Impressions
100 Clicks
10 Conversions
Ad B
1,000 Impressions
200 Clicks
5 Conversions
The most optimal from each ad would be:
Use the ads from Ad B, but the landing page from Ad A
Outbound Email Sales
-Contacts: how many emails are sent out
-Opens: reflects the subject line of the email
-Replies: reflects the body/ content of the email
-MQLs: reflects the wording of your call to action
-SQLs: reflects the importance/ priority/ urgency of your product-market fit
-Negotiation (optional): reflects the pricing and value of your product
-Customers: reflects successful pricing + value of the product
Your overall goal regardless of the sales method is to always create a predictable pipeline. You want to try and figure out “If I spend $X or reach out to X companies, I should get Y outcome.”
Using the outbound email example, say we send out 1,000 emails a week. You have a total of:
600 opens
100 replies
50 MQLs
25 SQLs
15 Negotiations
5 Customers
With these numbers, you should expect to earn around 5 new customers a week. But ultimately you could do better and using the data, you can figure out where to do better.
If you decide to try new initiatives, campaigns, or messaging, you know what’s working better because of the data you measured.
At each point of contact, anytime you are engaging with a lead; both direct (email, phone calls, meetings) and indirect (ads, landing pages), you have an opportunity to improve your delivery and thus conversion rate. Your goal is to always reach 100%. It’s not possible, but you should always try. AT EVERY STAGE.
The hardest and most time-consuming part of the marketing process is converting an MQL(interested customer) into an SQL (potential buyer), and in sales, the most time consuming is converting the SQL into an actual customer. This is why measuring your numbers is so important, so you can cut down on this process and see what works and what doesn't.
You want to spend most of your time figuring out how to generate traffic from the right audience to the landing page or site optimization. You also want to focus on reducing costs and experimenting with different channels to find that right audience.
Overall, measure what you can but be sure to keep track of these two important areas:
-Cost Per Click (cost for traffic)
-Cost Per Sign-Up (customer acquisition cost)
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