MS CRM 2011 – Marketing Analytics, ROI & Best Practices
Marketing campaigns are investments that need to be measured and reviewed like one does with any other investments. There’s an old business adage that goes like this “You are wasting half of your marketing dollars, unfortunately, you don’t know which half”. What was true fifty years ago, holds true even now but partially…as technology is helping us closing this gap slowly & steadily…
For marketing ROI, the tricky part is determining what constitutes your “return” and what you’re true “investment” is.
Broadly, ROI can either be:
1. Number of leads or opportunities generated
2. Monetary returns, or revenue generation because of lead conversion
3. Brand awareness (generally from social media marketing campaigns)
With Microsoft Dynamics CRM, all the leads or opportunities that generate out of the campaigns are tagged with the specific campaign activity. Moreover, responses to email blast or any campaign activity can be logged in CRM and converted to leads with “just a single click”.
In order to understand the Marketing ROI and program effectiveness, Microsoft CRM provides Marketing Analytics in the form of Dynamic Dashboards and Reports:
Few interesting reports that Microsoft CRM provides for measuring ROI are:
1. Number of leads generated campaign wise
2. Campaign wise Lead conversion ratio
3. Actual budget VS Sales revenue campaign wise
4. Campaign Performance
Some of the best practices for measuring the Marketing ROI that we recommend to all our clients are:
1. Identify the target list for every campaign – It makes zero business sense for a bank to target and cross-sell their Portfolio Management Services to low-income group customers. Data in CRM can be segmented based on desired criteria such as interest or demographics via user-friendly tools.
2. Maintain planned budget and actual expenditure for each campaign.
3. Tag every lead and opportunity with a campaign.