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The ROI of marketing is a topic that every organisation needs to address. However, with the vast growth of the digital era, getting results from marketing campaigns becomes increasingly difficult. It’s even more challenging when you need to answer questions like “What was the return on my investment in social media?” and “How much profit did I make off this email campaign?”.
This blog post will help you find out how Salesforce Marketing Cloud can help you measure your ROI. We’ll also discuss how you can get more out of your existing investments in marketing with the help of marketing campaigns and Marketing Cloud data.
What is ROI
ROI stands for Return on Investment. The main idea behind this is, that in order to be successful, you need to get a certain return from your investments. The Marketing ROI consequently enables you to measure how effective your marketing efforts are. You do this by calculating the profit and revenue growth as a result of your marketing channels. These channels might include e-mail, social media, and digital advertising.
It is crucial to know the ROI for marketing initiatives so that you can allocate resources and spend money wisely on your marketing campaigns. It also establishes expectations with stakeholders who want to see tangible results from investing in a campaign.
So that you can get the most out of your Marketing Cloud investment, you need to build a strong marketing foundation. This means building a plan or strategy in place with defined and measurable KPIs. An agreed-upon definition of success is critical. This means you need to define key performance indicators (KPI) for each marketing channel, comprising social media, e-mail campaigns etc., before commencing with your campaign. If it’s difficult to track these KPIs in the first place, there can be no way of telling if you are on the track to success.
Once these KPI’s have been determined, ensure that all stakeholders agree with these metrics. This ensures that you have full buy-in and can increase support for any resources that you might need to reach your goals.
How to track your ROI with Marketing Cloud
There are a few different ways that marketers can gauge the effectiveness of their marketing efforts using the Marketing Cloud software. Here are a few that ways that we recommend.
1. Create a measurement dashboard
By creating a measurement dashboard, comprising marketing metrics that lead to sales, you’ll have a full picture of how marketing contributes to the overall company success. With Salesforce Marketing Cloud, marketers have access to a wide range of detailed reports that track all sorts of information. This helps you comprehend how every marketing activity contributes to sales.
It’s much easier to view this information on Marketing Cloud than trying to find this information in separate places for each channel, which is all too common with other tools. And because your organisation will be able to use these reports year after year, it’ll be simpler and more efficient by the day.
2. Integrate Marketing Cloud reports with Google Analytics 360
One of the many benefits that Marketing Cloud can provide your team is a unified reporting capability. The integration between Analytics 360 and Marketing Cloud allows you to connect customer site engagement from Analytics 360 into your Marketing Cloud reports, which helps you see end-to-end customer relationships.
In the Marketing Cloud dashboard, you’ll see one single interface that gives you all the reports related to journeys created across e-mail, mobile, advertising, and the web. This gives you a unique insight into the experience customers have with Marketing Cloud campaigns, from initial engagement to the final touchpoint.
In the past, this required manual tagging; however, now the integration enables marketers to automatically add UTM parameters to each e-mail within Marketing Cloud UI. Analytics 360 can properly categorise all outgoing links by source, medium, campaign, term, and term content.
3. Measure each activity separately
The most successful companies use segmented metrics to track marketing success. Tracking specific campaigns and individual activity is crucial for determining the effectiveness of Marketing Cloud. We recommend monitoring sales and lead volume against website traffic, the sources of traffic, effectiveness of campaigns and total traffic over different time periods. When you’ve done this, you’ll be able to determine a single source of truth in Marketing Cloud for how visitors turn into customers.
4. Calculate the ROI for your campaigns
If your organisation uses Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud, then Salesforce’s Campaign ROI Analysis Report is an essential tool to understand how well a marketing campaign has performed over time. This automated tool calculates the return of investment rates and gives you an idea of your campaign’s strengths, weaknesses, and successful investments.
The Campaign ROI Analysis Report can be found on the Reports tab in the Campaign Reports folder. It calculates your campaign’s performance by return on investment (ROI) and average cost. When using this tool, each campaign in the report is expressed as a percentage and is calculated as the net gain (Value Won Opportunities in Campaign – Actual Cost) divided by the Actual Cost.
Value Won Opportunities in Campaign is the calculated sum of all closed or won opportunities where the campaign is the Primary Campaign Source on the opportunity.
5. Look at the full customer journey
It’s important to look at the full customer journey when establishing ROI. Marketing Cloud can help to support that by providing real-time activity reports for analytics, sales and marketing. You can see how your campaigns are performing in different market segments to determine where you need more investment or what channels work best.
Consequently, it’s paramount to know which marketing channels deliver the best results at each stage of the customer conversion. Marketers should be spending their time and resources on those channels that provide them with the most conversions for a given investment, rather than spreading themselves too thin across all available options.
6. Share the data
Used correctly, Marketing Cloud offers transparency between sales and marketing teams to define success and celebrate the resulting revenue increase. This in turn can help you scale up your organisation to a new level of success, enabling all team members across the company to collaborate effectively.
7. Crunch the costs
Marketing teams need to establish the costs of their marketing efforts, such as how much is invested in creative production, personnel or an agency. With this information, it’s possible to look at what metrics can be included in your ROI calculations and decide on which ones are worth the investments.
8. Get the right training
In order to be successful in Marketing Cloud, everyone on your team needs to get up to speed with how they can measure their success metrics and each other’s so that you know who is contributing or not. Invest in upskilling your team so that they can implement and upkeep your strategy.
Get a fast return on your marketing CRM
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a scalable marketing solution that reliably facilitates business success. Consult with experts like ourselves in order to get a fast return on your marketing CRM investments and ensure that you’re using the Marketing Cloud correctly. With our strategies, support, integration and training in place, you can predictably measure marketing ROI and maximise customer value at every turn.
Marketing ROI is not a difficult metric to measure. You simply have to understand the steps and ensure that your marketing strategy maximises customer value by providing real-world insights on ROI, such as with Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud can help you to prove ROI by utilising the right tools to maximise customer value, optimise systems or increase team training. If your organisation would like to understand how it can benefit from Marketing Cloud, then get in touch with Pracedo. We help customers to understand how Marketing Cloud can help them to effectively demonstrate ROI, while streamlining and simplifying systems and processes that they use to measure its success.
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Pracedo is an award-winning Summit (Platinum) Salesforce Consulting Partner that delivers innovative Salesforce implementations to forward-thinking customers.
With over a decade of experience focused on Salesforce, we work with our customers to unlock the platform’s power through tailored implementations that facilitate achieving business goals and ambitions. Our talented team of over 80 Salesforce professionals globally means that Pracedo offers a boutique consultancy experience, delivered locally to you, with the breadth and depth of knowledge earned from delivering over 1000 projects across our locations.
Pracedo specialises in Digital Transformation and Change Management. Implementations and customisations include: Salesforce Sales Cloud, Salesforce Service Cloud, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, Salesforce Revenue Cloud, Salesforce Experience Cloud and Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud.
