Our previous lead nurturing articles discuss the essence of why you should engage in this practice. We will now look at why it is also important to know how to measure your company’s nurturing technique.
After all, it is difficult to achieve an aim if you don’t know how to measure that goal.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are an important analytical tool in this instance and here are 10 of them you’ll see when analysing your company’s lead nurturing tactics.
1. Lead Nurturing Return on Investment
Of course, the goal for most business owners is to turn their leads into deals; this key metric measures if their lead nurturing campaigns are doing this.
An easy way to calculate this is to subtract your average monthly revenue from your monthly revenue after you run a lead nurturing campaign. This will get you a number for your estimated lead nurturing return on investment.
Campaign Monitor give the following example: “if you have $5,000 in revenue each month from leads and $8,750 in surplus from monthly revenue from new nurtured leads, you’re left with $3,750. Lead nurturing essentially gives an additional $3,750 per month, which results in an increase of $45,000 revenue annually. That’s a 75% increase from effectively lead nurturing potential clients.”
Of course, this will only compare the difference between nurturing a lead and not doing so. Once you’ve engaged with nurturing practices, it will not tell you what nurturing tactics work, and which ones don’t.
For that, you will need to look at several other KPIs and understand what each one of them reveal.
2. Lead Response Time
It has been consistently proven that the sooner you contact a lead, the better chance of it becoming a sale. There is already a huge amount of data supporting this and the lead response time measures is what measure how quickly it is done.
‘Speed to lead’ is three words you should be reciting. In the latest Franconnect report, this was emphasised with the fact that 85% of the leads that resulted in deals were those that were contacted within the first four hours.
3. Database Size
This indicates the number of leads, or contacts, you have. In other words, this is a measure of the amount of people who have given you permission to contact them with business offers. Your aim is to turn these leads into closed deals.4. Opt-Out/ Unsubscribe Rate.
There is always going to be a certain amount of people who decide that they no longer want to be contacted, even if your lead nurturing strategy is top notch!
The above metric measures this. The key here is to ensure this number is as low as possible. To develop leads into deals, you need to see what works and what doesn’t. Companies that don’t engage with constructive criticism of their lead strategy are doomed to make the mistakes.
Some of these brands don’t even get contacted – for instance, according to the Franconnect report, 62% of leads did not receive follow-up calls from Enterprise level brands.
5. Marketing Qualified Leads v Sales Qualified Leads
This is the number of leads that are interested in your business (marketing qualified), opposed to those who are ready to speak with your sales team in the short-term about doing a deal (sales qualified).
A well designed automated initial contact often sorts the tyre kickers from the genuinely interested parties.
6. Delivery Rate
You should keep an eye on this one, particularly in the early stages of lead nurturing, when much of the contact is automated.
It indicates the rate of emails that reach your leads within your database.
7. Click-Through-Rates
If you are going to keep in contact with your leads, then you will want to check if to see if the emails you send are being read. Click-through-rates are a key analytic tool for you.
It is exactly what it sounds like – a measure of the individuals who click through a mail to a link within it.
8. Conversion Rates
This KPI reveals the recipients who click through to your desired site and then become a sale or complete a desired action.
A recent report revealed that 47.5% of leads fall out of the sales funnel due to “no response.” If that is the case with your business, your conversion rate will suffer greatly.
9. Monthly Leads Generated from Nurture Campaigns
No matter what nurturing software you use, you should be able to find this out through analytics and metrics listed above. You can also insert campaign codes into click-through URLS and keep track of this on your own analytics.
10. Cost Per Customer
If your lead nurturing system is costing you a fortune, yet not bringing in sales, then you need to change something.
This metric measures both the marketing and nurturing cost of bringing a customer through from unqualified lead to sale.
Follow Through with Your Lead Nurturing
It seems obvious, but your KPIs in all these areas will improve by doing the basics: contact your leads as quickly as possible with targeted, useful information.
Follow this initial contact up and nurture all genuinely interested leads from the initial introduction to your business, all the way through to the sale.
If you do so, your numbers will increase in no time!