I’d like to wrap up this series on ROI (return on investment) marketing metrics by summarizing the key lessons we’ve discussed over the past few weeks. Each of these lessons will help you improve the performance, profitability and credibility of your marketing analytics.

1)    Lay Plans for Your Future Success – Allocating sufficient resources to your marketing reporting is important to benefiting from the insights offered by the reports. Reports are not an end; they are a means of supporting decisions that improve profits, and to discover which strategies work best at increasing ROI. Planning involves setting goals and scenarios for all marketing initiatives prior to actually funding the initiatives. All programs must be measurable, and should benefit from insights developed during previous planning cycles.

2)    Maintain Financial Credibility – Senior management cares about increasing profits and revenues, so use metrics that speak to these concerns. Be scrupulous in accounting for the costs generated by your marketing campaigns. You should create models of your revenue cycle that include lead flow, conversion rates, and sales rates.

3)    Work Strategically – Know your measurement priorities before starting campaigns and make sure you include specific measurements for each campaign. Different measurements from different methodologies should be integrated so that you can leverage the unique strength of each strategy. You will see that multiple measurements have a beneficial cumulative effect. Review all expenses that relate to customer value and find ways to improve the profitability of each account.

4)    Create a Successful Environment – Allow all interested parties to access critical sales, marketing and financial data. Select tools, such as dashboards, to display information that is relevant, important and urgent. Technology helps you extract increased productivity from staff. Invest in business analysis expertise to advance the precision of ROI analytics. If possible, hire and/or train experienced technicians who don’t mind experimenting with methodologies. Be sure to maintain good communications with top management.

5)    Continuously Improve – It is essential to establish a long-term roadmap for increasing marketing ROI and boosting measurement capabilities. Your marketing and measurement processes should align with business objectives. Feel free to budget small pilot programs that experiment with new capabilities. The insights you develop should help you create a winning momentum, and will spur you on to continuously evolve your strategies for improving marketing ROI. Think of it as a never-ending process: you can always find ways to make things better.

Eric Bank