Leverage the power of your CRM to deliver the goods
by Bob Neudecker
For many marketers, measuring the success of your campaigns and ultimately your ROI can be a somewhat daunting and time-consuming process. Not only can it be painful weeding through campaign metrics and making sense of the numbers exported in spreadsheets or reports from 3rd party email campaign engines, there is often a disconnect between measuring what you are responsible for (generating new leads and nurturing existing ones) and measuring what the sales team ultimately generates in terms of qualified opportunities and sales closed from those leads.
Leveraging the power of a robust CRM with integrated marketing and sales modules allows you to connect the dots between your campaigns and the sales leads and opportunities they generate. You need to be able to export your campaign metrics and generate lists of subscribers that clicked the links in your email. With this information, you know who is interested in what, which is invaluable for subsequent or future targeted campaigns to engage prospects further or build brand loyalty with existing customers.
For example, you send an email campaign to your list of prospects introducing them to your three latest product offerings. You include links to a specific landing page on your website for each product, with the call to action to view a demo. Your CRM should record how many people received the email, how many opened it, how many were unique opens (i.e. some people may click on it several times, so you need to know the actual number that took action), and who clicked on which links.
Your sales reps following up on the leads generated by the campaign can see which product(s) the prospect is interested in. Armed with this knowledge, the rep can engage the prospect further by contacting them, providing additional information and initiating a discussion to determine how best to address their needs. You can track how many of the leads you generated for the sales team become qualified opportunities in the pipeline and how many closed, allowing you to easily determine the ROI on your campaign.