"New Feature: Measure Your Marketing Results" by smeade

Thu, 8 Mar 2007 14:47:00 EST

Today we release a lead measurement report as a part of new tools to help you will gain additional insight into indicators of your company’s marketing success.

By managing leads in LeadsOnRails lead management software, you are not only building a consistent marketing system, you are also capturing valuable information that will help you tune marketing and lead management efforts over time.

Starting with the very first release, LeadsOnRails has provided a “Pipeline Overview” that shows users the number of leads at each step of each track (a LeadsOnRails “track” is a treatment, or series of steps your lead goes through).

The Pipeline Overview is a great way to get visibility into where marketing and lead management efforts have bottlenecks. If you see a high number or leads stacking up on a given step, it is time to investigate that step and/or the person responsible for completing it.

New: Marketing Measure

While the Pipeline Overview helps you keep things moving, the new Marketing Measure helps you see what lead sources result in value and which ones do not.

Here is an example. (This is not real data.)

You can open the details behind this report by clicking the “see report details” link. Open the detailed report to see performance by source.

During its introduction, this report is found on your Dashboard. (Because not everyone will use it, it will soon become an item optionally moved to a new reports section).

How to Set It Up

Not all leads get captured into the new report. Only those assigned to both a source and a stage are included in the new measurement.

Source Here are some example sources.

If you want to use the new report you will first create some entries into the Source list. Click on Source in the Setup menu now. Source is important because it is where you specify your costs. If a lead source or offer results in high conversion rate, but also carries a high cost, that source may not be as effective as you first think.

Make sure to try to include all costs, including your time to make a call, write a blog entry, etc.

Fixed Cost

Some sources have fixed costs that are the same regardless of the number of leads generated from the source. Yellow Pages advertisement, booth at a show, etc. Enter the fixed cost component of this source or offer here.

Per Lead Cost

Some sources have a cost per lead, whether it is the cost to acquire the lead or the cost of each postcard sent out, for example. Enter this incremental cost here.

Enter source information into your account, save it and we are ready to look at stages.

Stage

You assign each stage a value. The represents the likelihood of conversion at that stage. This may be a guessing game at first, but as time goes on LeadsOnRails will gain a new feature that will actually be able to self-monitor the stage % value based on previous results.

Lead Value

Each lead record can be assigned an estimated value. What amount do you think the product or service the lead would purchase is worth? At each stage, this value is multiplied by the Stage value to give a present value. (e.g. If a lead has an estimated value of $1,000 and currently has a 50 likelihood, then its present value, for this purpose, is $500).

To enter a lead value, scroll down to the new ‘Opportunity’ section when entering or editing a lead. Look for this:

What Happened to the Old ‘Source’ Field?

For accurate reporting among your leads, the source field needed to become a dropdown list of choices. The lead field formerly known as ‘source’ has simply been renamed to ‘referred by’ and no data has been lost.

Try it Out

Create some source and stage entries in setup, and then assign some leads a source, stage and value. Don’t forget to make sure each lead has a value assigned or they will not show on the Marketing Measure report.

Do you find this useful? Do you have certain data you would like to see in the reports that are being developed now? Let us know.

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"New Feature: Measure Your Marketing Results" by smeade