As email marketers know, lead-nurturing is a difficult skill to learn. You’ve learned how to do it to some degree, but how good are you really at it and what opportunities are you missing? Figuring that out isn’t as hypothetical as it sounds; all you need to do is employ lead-nurturing metrics in your marketing analytics tool. The best part is: you’re already measuring these metrics—you just need to read and apply them a little differently to measure your lead-nurturing abilities.
Here are the important lead-nurturing metrics to keep track of to ensure your sales success record:
List Segmentation Metrics
How well you are segmenting your lists will determine how well you can nurture your sales leads. You can use your analytics tool in two ways to determine your lead-nurturing segmentation success. First, use your analytics tool to determine if any of your list segments are under-performing others. As a safe rule of thumb your unsubscribe rates should be less than 1% across all segments. If one section is higher then another it means you haven’t been nurturing your leads in that specific lead-nurturing sector. The second way to measure your segmentation success is by checking your click-through rates. Your click-through rates should also be reasonably uniform across your various segments.
Action Item: If your click-throughs and unsubscribes are not uniform (or are uniformly poor performing) then you need to reconsider your segmentation strategy.
Time-to-Customer Conversion Metrics
Nothing says good lead-nurturing skills like a quick time-to-customer conversion rates. Use your time-to-customer conversion speed in your metrics tool to see if your conversion rate has increased over time—as it should have—or if you have stagnated and could use a lead-nurturing pick me up. For more lead-nurturing internet marketing tips, click here.
Qualified Lead Generation Metrics
To be successful in lead-nurturing, you need to have a sufficient group of leads to nurture through the sales process—without them you are just chasing your own tail. If you haven’t defined what a ‘qualified’ lead is, do that now. Next, figure out how many of your sales leads are truly qualified. This will help determine your true time-to-customer conversion rate and boost your overall lead-nurturing success.
Also, apply your qualified lead definition and generation techniques to your segmentation metric to ensure that you are nurturing qualified leads across all segmented lead-nurturing campaigns (if you haven’t segmented your lead-nurturing campaigns yet, consider that now). If your qualified leads are unbalanced then you will need to redefine how you earn your leads. This may involve strategizing with others in your marketing or sales departments.
Cost-per-Customer Metrics
In order for your lead-nurturing to be effective you need to have a reasonable cost-per-customer conversion rate. To measure this use closed-loop analytics to see how many leads actually turn into customers. Note: in this step the speed with which they convert matters less than the conversion itself. If the time invested in lead-nurturing costs more (on a wage per hour basis) then your conversions earns, you will need to re-examine your lead-nurturing strategy—especially the quality of leads being worked on. When measuring your cost-per-customer lead-gen ratio you should look at the cost ratio over time because a decreasing cost-per-customer means significantly more success than the current ratio alone.
You should be incorporating lead-nurturing metrics into your weekly or monthly analytics use. Heck, you’re running analytics anyways—might as well keep an eye out for your lead-nurturing success.
Robin Wilding is a professionally trained Canadian journalist striving to bring journalistic-era intergity to online media. She has a second degree in Political Science--with a focus on International Relations and the developing world. Currently Robin is a contributor to several technology publications, including Brajeshwar.com, SocialTechnologyReview.com, HostingIndustryWatch.com, AnimationCareerReview.com and CompareBusinessProducts.com. She also works for several web developers; and does ghost writing for several high level executives within the technology sector. Robin's work is showcased in her portfolio: http://shownd.com/robinwilding
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