Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 provides platform features for active analysis and visualization of data. In this chapter, you will learn to understand key marketing metrics, how to visualize and analyze marketing data with Microsoft Dynamic CRM 2013 views, and how to use charts, reports, and dashboards. In addition, you will also learn about the goal management feature in Dynamics CRM 2013. Goal management allows the setting of goals in a hierarchical fashion for users and teams with predefined metrics. The performance can then be measured by continually tracking the metrics at regular intervals or after specific events such as marketing campaigns.
We will cover the following topics in this chapter:
- Key marketing metrics
- Marketing charts
- Marketing reports
- Marketing dashboards
- Goals and Goal Metrics
Quantitatively measuring the impact of marketing activities and the ability to measure the contribution to the revenue growth are critical to bring accountability to marketing investments. They cannot be justified only by soft metrics such as the brand awareness, ranking, website hits, social likes, brand impressions, and number of attendees in an event. While it is good to track these metrics, the key is to relate them to hard metrics, such as revenue growth and returns on marketing investment.
It's important for the marketers to start thinking in terms of revenue, and they should take into consideration the following points when designing campaigns:
- Track marketing expense and estimate ROI: Estimate the campaign cost and expected returns from the campaign at the beginning
- Marketing performance and impact: Create campaigns whose response and impact can be measured and related to the revenue growth
- Revenue growth: Constantly analyze and improve the effectiveness of campaigns based on the revenue metrics
Key marketing metrics that measure the impact of the marketing effort on the revenue and profit are critical to any organization.
- Revenue impact: The following are the ways in which marketing impacts the company revenue:
- The marketing investments are made to generate prospects, nurture them to make them sales ready, and qualify them for the sales team
- Net revenue from the prospects is generated by marketing
- Marketing performance: The following are the ways to individually look at the marketing campaign and measure its performance:
- The lead volume measures the success of lead generation programs
- Closures describe the customers derived from leads showing the effectiveness of the lead nurturing programs
- Time to close describes the average time to close the leads generated by the program
- Cost per closure tells the average cost incurred in closing a lead
- Revenue per new customer signals the quality of leads generated
- Performance with time and forecast: These metrics look at the historical performance and the current progress based on the marketing programs and forecast the future performance and growth.
Effective measurement of marketing performance is possible when the impact is measurable, starting from lead generation to prospect count, from lead to conversions to customers and the velocity at which the leads move across these stages.