Marketing Automation Performance: Assess, Understand, Enhance

Marketing automation opens up a wide range of opportunities to delight audiences, enabling more objective and timely monitoring, collection, and analysis of data.

Advanced marketing automation platforms, such as Oracle Eloqua, now allow you to target your users and customers with pinpoint accuracy, so you can reach your contacts at the right time, with the right content, on the right channel.

Once you have deployed your campaigns, though, assessing their performance is critical.

Tracking your efforts’ impact using key performance indicators allows you to create accurate estimates that will add value to your business. In doing so, it’s essential to choose adequate KPIs to monitor.

In this article, we zoom in on several indicators of marketing automation performance, focusing on the value they provide. Dive in to explore the value behind Eloqua advanced intelligence features and have a look at our set of five quintessential email marketing KPIs you should track.

Email Marketing Fatigue Analysis

Nurturing your contacts in the best way possible, delighting them with relevant and valuable resources, often depends on specific business requirements and varies from one industry to another. One aspect, though, remains ever-influential.

When wishing to send the right message, through an adequate number of attempts to reach out, all at just the right time too, it can be challenging to determine which contacts are ready to engage more, and which are already saturated from having received too many emails.

With email marketing Fatigue Analysis, you can determine how fatigued (tired, oversaturated) contacts are due to the communication you target them with. It enables you to change your email frequency to reduce disengagement and lower unsubscribes.

With the function enabled in Eloqua, a corresponding Fatigue Level value is generated by the marketing automation software using AI. It is then added to the Fatigue Level contact field for each Eloqua contact.

We extensively cover the mechanism and importance of undergoing Fatigue Analysis in another article. Check it out to better understand why we’ve listed this marketing automation KPI at the top of our list.

Correlating Email Sends & the Email Open Rate

To take our discussion further and thoroughly assess audiences’ engagement with communication, we need to cover the relationship between email sends and the email open rate.

In fact, marketers must fully understand these two metrics’ relationship for multiple segments - for each fatigue level, by regions, industry, or business unit. This is one of the surest ways to confirm assumptions and retrieve additional insights.

In light of this fact, we recommend building a correlation chart for sends and open rates by fatigue level. As the example below shows, the chart includes a line graph (indicating the Fatigue Level's relative total open rate over the previous six months) and a bar graph (representing the Fatigue Level's total email sends for the last six months).

In practice, these charts are very valuable. As we try to reduce the number of emails sent to oversaturated contacts, we can track the progress and desired increase to the open rate from here.

You can read more about the application of Email Sends and Email Open Rate correlation charts here.

Email Send Time & Engagement

Taking email engagement into account as an overarching performance indicator, it’s wise to keep track of when you are sending your best-performing emails, so you can use this in your future sends.

But different members of various audiences will naturally behave differently, meaning that some timings might work best for certain contacts and completely different timings work best for others. The solution is definitely not as tedious as setting up custom campaign rules based on all these different timings.

Send Time Optimization, an Advanced Intelligence Cloud Service can enable the delivery of emails at the ideal time for each contact individually, based on when they were historically most responsive.

Email Delivery Rate

This metric highlights the volume of email communication that ultimately reached contacts' inboxes.

It’s critical to keep a steady eye on this performance indicator while also diving further into its analysis. Your emails sent out are only helpful to your goals when they really reach contacts’ inboxes. With email deliverability top of mind in our efforts, many strategies around increasing the delivery rate exist.

IP warming, for example, is part of IP reputation management. The technique implies gradually increasing the number of emails sent with a dedicated IP address under a well-planned timetable and with high engagement connections taking part.

Read more about IP warming in the context of email deliverability and continue exploring other vital marketing automation KPIs.

Email Open Rate

Every business evaluates their email open rate to assess the effectiveness of their email marketing campaigns. This indicator displays the percentage of emailed contacts who opened a certain email.

Above, we recommended tracking the open rate in correlation with other metrics, such as total sends, send time, or email fatigue. Zooming in on the email open rate as a metric by itself, though, is essential to highlight performance over time, by industry, region, sector, campaign, and email touch.

Email Click-Through Rate

The CTR (click rate or click-through rate) determines how many people clicked on a hyperlink, call to action or image inside an email.

Just like the case is for the open rate, you can also compare the email click rate across multiple regions, campaigns, segments, or time periods to highlight granular performance and adapt your strategies.

Unsubscribe Rate

Marketers periodically track the unsubscribe rate to pinpoint how many subscribers opt-out of a mailing list after an email campaign. We need two indicators to measure the unsubscribe rate: the number of delivered emails (total sends minus bounces) and the number of unsubscribes.

This measure is often predictive of a brand's relationship with its clients. A rising unsubscribe rate may indicate that certain aspects of your approach are failing to meet customer needs. Being aware is the very first step in taking action.

Lead Qualification Rate

When it comes to the synergy between marketing and sales, shedding light on prospects who are more likely to convert into clients is a must. The overall number of leads generated by marketing automation campaigns is a great starting point for upcoming lead generation and qualifying initiatives.

Consider implementing a score-based model to evaluate prospect and lead engagement data, and make sure you monitor your marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads, and opportunities.

Final thoughts...

All in all, assessing marketing automation performance can become overwhelming, considering the large number of potential KPIs to track. To quickly get a good grasp of how your marketing automation campaigns are performing, you could streamline the process using the list we hereby provided.

Try these out and let us know how it worked out for you!