Reporting plays an essential role in lead generation. If you are not tracking your results, it will become extremely difficult to know whether or not your campaigns are succeeding. While final conversion numbers help to some degree, these do not always offer in-depth insight into each stage of your lead generation funnel. This means that you do not have the opportunity to identify potential leaks in your funnel. You also lack the opportunity to make improvements that have an impact on your overall results.
Tracking your campaigns at every stage of your funnel is the most effective way to get the data you need to not only gain leads but also to retain leads. Without accurate data and deep insight, it becomes difficult to grow your results. The simplest way to track your campaigns is a comprehensive digital marketing dashboard that is designed to give you funnel reports every month. Reports should ideally include the more obvious metrics such as click-throughs, open rates, and other data, along with customised data that is unique to your current lead nurturing campaign goals.
In this guide, we take a look at lead generation reporting to find out why it is so important to track your lead generation results.
The Importance of Tracking Your Lead Generation Results
Lead generation is all about results. Every single click, open, form completion, and lead funnel download is vital to your results. Although you can track many of these actions from your automation platform, it is not always as easy to get a deeper overview of your campaigns. The challenge with this is that it becomes a lot harder to see where you might be going wrong and where you might be able to make improvements.
A holistic overview of your results, month on month, allows you to track results at every stage of the funnel. Some of the ways that monthly reports help include the following:
1. Track open rates
You may find that your open rates are higher in the early stages of your funnel, only to decrease once leads get to the middle of the funnel. Rather than looking purely at the numbers, it is extremely useful to identify stages in the funnel that slow down open rates. You might find that leads respond well to information stage messages, for example. These campaigns might have powerful subject lines and messages that add genuine value. Your middle of the funnel campaigns may be trying to move leads through to the next stage too quickly. They may have subject lines that no longer inspire the same sense of urgency as they did in the earlier stage of the funnel.
When you can pinpoint the part of the funnel that is seeing a dip in open rates, it will become a lot simpler to make improvements within that specific stage rather than trying to make changes to your entire campaign.
2. Track click-through rates
Another vital metric in any campaign is click-through rates. Call to Action clicks are particularly important. It is valuable to track clicks in your funnel campaigns, to find out which CTAs are clicked at various stages of your funnel. You may find that your click-through rates are low at the start of your funnel. This, in turn, leads to a far lower conversion rate. You may find that you get a sudden drop in clicks during the late stage of the funnel when conversion seems highly likely. On a closer look at each stage, you may find that your campaigns are not hitting their mark. You may not have built sufficient trust or you may not have the right Calls to Action in place.
Being able to track your lead generation campaign funnels gives you the chance to make changes that will avoid blockages or leaks in your funnel, making it easier to take leads through the funnel more efficiently.
3. Facilitate testing
There is no doubt that testing is the lifeblood of any lead generation campaign. Without testing, it becomes impossible to make changes. Going in blind makes it difficult to know what to test for, however. This is where reporting comes in to help. Using one of our examples above, let’s say that you are battling to take leads from the early part of the funnel to the next stage. Your early campaigns did well and you saw a steady rise in open rates and clicks. As leads moved to the middle, you suddenly saw a dip.
Reporting will make testing easier by know when and where you are going wrong. Testing can then determine how you are going wrong by testing specific steps within your funnel. This could include subject lines, message content, CTA copy and placement, and various other focus areas. Other evaluations such as heat mapping can also be done to spot problem areas.
4. Identify opportunities
With all of this insight comes the chance to identify opportunities. You might find that making improvements to parts of your channel is not as effective as re-imagining and refining your entire funnel campaign. Reporting makes it far easier to find new approaches to refresh old campaigns that are no longer delivering results. As progress is tracked every month, you will be able to implement new strategies to see how they perform, making improvements where needed.
Another way that tracking helps you find and implement new ideas is that it helps you look at the bigger picture, by reporting on multiple channels. An integrated reporting tool that enables you to track social media, SEM, and specific ROI metrics will allow you to create well-rounded multi-channel campaigns that drive more conversion and reach more potential leads.
5. Increase retention
Finally, reporting also helps you improve your customer retention rates. Although customer acquisition is very important in lead generation, retention is something often overlooked. A new lead can bring in a sale. Existing customers will bring in repeated sales on an ongoing basis if nurtured correctly. This comes in the form of re-targeting campaigns designed to reach leads that either tapered out before converting or became stagnant after converting. It also comes in the form of upselling and cross-selling, targeting leads through personalised offers. Yet another way that retention strategies can be used is loyalty campaigns that are designed to incentivise conversion on a long-term scale.
Getting accurate data on your campaigns over the long haul will allow you to refine and improve your retention campaigns. It will additionally help you identify ways to reach existing leads by monitoring your current campaign funnel.
Lead Generation Reporting
Lead generation reporting does not have to be overly complicated or time-consuming. It does not have to waste valuable resources and manpower, either. Rather than wasting effort by trying to use multiple tracking tools or attempting to monitor your campaigns manually, it helps to look at reporting tools that automate the reporting process. This is your best chance of getting the critical insight you need to consistently improve your campaigns and see genuine results from your lead generation efforts.