Sales and marketing departments often have a difficult alliance. They will talk to each other, but marketing rarely gets the credit it deserves for a sale. The tools we use fuel that separation. Marketing analytics show the number of leads they generate, such as website interactions and form submissions. Meanwhile, CRM data helps the sales team track the progress of their prospects throughout the sales cycle. These tools are typically not connected, so marketing analytics doesn’t collect information about whether website visitors turn into customers, and the CRM doesn’t record the marketing activity that attracted each prospect.
Leadfeeder is part of the solution. CRM integrations help the marketing team keep the sales team aware of the people who visit your site. But it’s still hard to measure how cutting edge tactics like posting white papers affect sales. In this article, I show how to measure the success of lead magnets even if you have long sales cycles, another requirement for getting the big picture.
Match lead generation activities to actual offers
If you’ve built a lead generation funnel, you probably have two key metrics:
- How many people have downloaded each main magnet
- How many leads turn into deals
There are many analytics tools that we recommend, but it can be difficult to match these two steps to find out which main magnet attracted leads that turned into closed deals. Closing that gap would allow you to claim the kudos you deserve for your hard work, as well as provide an effective way to compare the top source you should be putting the most effort into promoting. Tools like Google Analytics can measure how many people download your flyer, whitepaper, or guide, but not whether those leads turned into offers weeks or months later. During this time, your CRM will measure the number of MQLs that turn into customers, but will not record data on the marketing activity that created the lead. You can generate this data by comparing your subscriber list to the sales team’s customer list.
Two steps to see which lead magnet worked the best
Simply put, you’ll need to enrich your email automation platform data first and then match it to CRM or payment data. The key is to use email addresses to match data, which I’ll talk about in two steps:
- Mark contacts with how they entered your funnel
Most of the major messaging platforms will allow you to tag subscribers with additional information. This can be the URL of the registration page or the name of the downloaded file. So set up an automation to identify the subscribers with which master magnet they downloaded. The goal is to be able to identify how people enter your funnel instead of just showing them up in your subscriber list out of nowhere.
- Find each contact’s income or transaction status
The second step is to see which contacts are progressing through follow-up emails or sales calls to eventually sign up for your service. There are two main options for doing this, each requiring a bit of Excel manipulation.
- Export and merge the lists of your CRM and email platforms
The goal is to match the email addresses of people on your subscriber list with customers in your CRM. To do this, you must:
- Export the list of subscribers, then tidy it up so that it’s just email addresses and source tags.
- Export the prospect list from the CRM and store it again in a single email address and transaction status
- Use a VLookup to attach the sale to their subscriber entry
- Integrate your messaging platform with your payment processor
Alternatively, if your business collects payments through an online gateway, it is often possible to send this income information to your messaging platform. These integrations are commonly used to monitor revenue per email sending, but they can also allow you to view revenue by tag. To measure this you need to:
- Export the list of subscribers, then tidy it up so that it’s just email addresses, source tags, and revenue.
- To see how many deals are coming from each primary magnet, create a pivot table between the label applied for each primary magnet and the number of leads and revenue generated by those contacts.
- Use a funnel analysis tool like SegMetrics
There are funnel analytics tools designed to bridge these data silos and examine performance across the marketing-to-sales cycles. SegMetrics will collect information directly from multiple sources, such as advertising campaign data and email subscriber tags, to enable businesses to analyze their entire customer journeys.