Measuring marketing performance and its impact to a company's bottom line is critical. In this post, we discuss which metrics should companies pay attention to and why.
We're going to take a look at two lead generation funnels. One funnel that can be used by B2B organizations and another one by mobile apps and web-based businesses.
By Marketing Qualified leads, as shown in the B2B funnel above, we refer to incoming leads that meet certain criteria as defined by your company's marketing department. These criteria may vary from company to company. The qualification may include criteria such as the person having the right title or role within a company and other criteria as defined by each company.
| A company's sales team, however, can have additional requirements before further engaging with a potential customer. After all, their interest is in progressing the interested party along the sales cycle and closing the sale. Their qualification criteria may be based on whether the person they are speaking with is a decision-maker, the company has an immediate need and actively looking to select a vendor to meets its needs, and/or other factors. If the potential customer meets the criteria, it becomes a Sales Accepted lead. Opportunities represent the number of prospects who are engaged with the company and represent the pipeline of potential sales in the future. The last two items in our funnel, Customer Wins and Retention, represent the number of people that became paying customers and number of people that were retained over the course of the year, in other words, they renew their subscription. It costs way more to gain new customers than to keep existing ones so a high retention rate is a good thing! |
Digital Businesses
If you're a web-based business or a mobile app development company, your lead generation funnel will look different. Through your marketing efforts you bring visitors to your website and/or app but until they signup for something they remain anonymous.
Your initial goal is to encourage your site visitors to engage with your company by signing up for something on your site such as a blog post, a free trial, create an account, etc. This turns unknown visitors into known entities where you can start building a relationship with them.
If you run a software business simply getting someone to sign up for an account on your site may not be enough. You want that person to activate her account so she can start using your product. And once a user is activated, you want to keep her to come back to use your product so she can see the value in it. This is why retention for a web based business is important. If users see the value in your product, they are more likely to buy it.
Your initial goal is to encourage your site visitors to engage with your company by signing up for something on your site such as a blog post, a free trial, create an account, etc. This turns unknown visitors into known entities where you can start building a relationship with them.
If you run a software business simply getting someone to sign up for an account on your site may not be enough. You want that person to activate her account so she can start using your product. And once a user is activated, you want to keep her to come back to use your product so she can see the value in it. This is why retention for a web based business is important. If users see the value in your product, they are more likely to buy it.
Keeping track of these metrics can help you evaluate where you need to focus your efforts. For some companies, it may be the need to acquire and grow their user base. For others, the focus might shift on retaining the users so they can become future customers.