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Ever chose a top range marketing solution that your business was looking for, with promises of achieving the best Return on Investment (ROI) possible? Only a year or so into it, and you’re still struggling in seeing any value from your investment.
In today’s fast-paced world, businesses have less time and tolerance for any friction when trying to get the most marketing potential from limited budget and resources. And when it comes to evaluating your tech, it’s difficult to get a realistic picture based on a simple ROI estimate. Given the multitude of the scenarios, goals, and drivers your brand has, calculating the true ROI from your marketing requires a bespoke approach.
In this blog, we’ve nailed down four practical steps to help you calculate your ROI more accurately to make the most out of your marketing platforms.
STEP 1: ALIGN THE METRICS
When it comes to ROI calculation, it’s easy to get carried away in solely focusing on the increased performance a MarTech solution can provide. The most common metrics tend to be:
Traffic and subscriptions on the website
Website engagement and message engagement
Conversions/conversion rate
Seem familiar? They’re often the apple of a marketer’s eye – but beware of fixating on these too heavily. It may cost your business on missing out on valuable opportunities that could have driven your performance metrics, simply because you had overlooked on:
Identification rate: the percentage of visitors that you can recognize (known visitors)
Deliverability rate and all data cleaning processes: these help to keep a good reputation of your sender domain (because if your messages don’t reach the inbox, nobody will see it)
Enhanced measurements (dashboards, reports, analysis): to understand easily when and how your performances are evolving
Both quantitative and qualitative benefits
So where should you start? The first focus needs to be on aligning your KPIs with what you expect to achieve from your chosen software. This helps to prevent investing in technology that simply cannot meet your goals.
STEP 2: THINK ABOUT THE TIME-TO-VALUE
The next step: understanding how much time it would take you to see a ROI from the platform. The top external influences here often come down to how user-friendly the platform is and the training & support the tech vendor provides.
But that’s not all. The major delay comes internally from the slowness of your internal company procedures or lack of availability from your internal teams. For instance, your internal IT teams may not have the availability to help with implementation, the project may have been set as low priority in the company, or you’re having to rely on an external system integrator that releases updates every six months.
This is the biggest random variable and is precisely why you need to ensure that in the implementation process before starting the project, you’ll be supported internally or externally (if you’re outsourcing work to agencies).
TIMELINE
Asking the platform vendor how much time it usually takes to implement a project like yours is essential. It helps you to steer clear of any complications and is also a good way to understand how easy it is to get up and running on the platform. For instance, asking them to provide an onboarding timeline with milestones to commit to can help smoothen the process and keep stakeholders aligned.
USE CASES
Capturing expected use cases upfront is what really makes the difference. It’s also essential to document any use cases you would like to implement and consider putting them on a roadmap, including cost estimation to avoid any hidden cost that you may encounter later down the line.
TRAINING
It’s important to consider the time your team will need to get properly familiarized with the new platform. Will you have to schedule deep-diving training sessions in the first few months? Or will the solution be easily adopted internally and won’t require heavy training? These are often crucial factors in how to get a greater ROI faster.
STEP 3: GET ONBOARD WITH AN EVOLUTION ROADMAP
Now that you’ve selected your fantastic new platform, the only priority now is ensuring your investment will be effective enough by being able to exploit 100% of the technology.
Most businesses equipped with digital marketing platforms use around 30% to 50% of their capabilities. As many businesses are often unaware, tech vendors tend to struggle in communicating this as every business use case is different. It’s why it’s essential to have a clear dialogue about your needs. Here are several actions you can take:
Align the technology vendor with your business goals – they will be more than happy to provide suggestions to reach your targets!
Engage the vendors Customer Success team to deploy new strategic use cases collaboratively every month
Request for a periodic refresh from the tech vendor on their new features and training sessions
Challenge your team to use the platform on a wider level and try to push it to its limits A good example of this would be scheduling monthly team hackathons where each member of the team must come up with a new use case that was not possible before.
Don’t rely on your experience only, let data and insights help you!
STEP 4: DO BUSINESS, BUT MAKE IT INSIGHT-LED
Now, let’s look at the action part of this all. You need to consider the methodology your teams are using and how the technology can help you execute effectively to drive your performance. Insight-led marketing is crucial here, as understanding your consumers and adapting your strategy to suit their changing behavior and expectations can help uplift your ROI.
Yet, companies make the mistake of relying and settling on siloed, inaccurate, and poor-quality data. To adopt an insight-led approach for your marketing, you need to select a platform that requires minimal effort in being informed on your business performance and even suggest some smart recommendations to fine-tune your customer journeys (with the help of AI). We recommend looking at solutions that offer:
Custom data visualization capabilities to extract insights easily
Customizable analysis and reports updated in real-time
Insight-friendly dashboards to identify what action to take next
Smart alerts and notification whenever an anomaly can be detected
Forecast of relevant metrics to ensure they are aligned with your goals
As a result, using all your customer insights will help deliver a real hyper-personalized experience that drives customer engagement, conversions, and finally, brings a higher ROI.
THE ROI OF MAPP CLOUD
Just because you selected the best technology, doesn’t mean you should expect spectacular results instantly. It’s a joint venture between you and your vendor when it comes to achieving the desired results and a greater ROI, combining quantitative and qualitative benefits.
Mapp Cloud is an insight-led customer experience platform, built with you and your MarTech ecosystem in mind. We help you leverage your customer data to help you unlock the full potential of your marketing technology. Our platform enables you to expand your capabilities to deliver truly personalized customer experiences, driving your customer acquisition, customer retention, and revenue with the use of actionable insights.
After commissioning Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact study of Mapp Cloud, here are some of the benefits they found:
QUANTITATIVE BENEFITS:
+20% Rise in Conversions on Marketing Messaging
+25% Improves Messaging Engagement
+25% Marketer Productivity Increase
+10% Greater Basket Sizes
+1.5% Deliverability Increase
QUALITATIVE BENEFITS:
Usage Of Intelligence Data Across Marketing Efforts
Diversification Of Campaigns
Growing Maturity of Marketing Team
Technology Spending Efficiencies
ALL THESE COMBINED CAN BRING 540% ROI IN 3 YEARS!
Want to know the full story behind these great numbers? Download your copy of The Forrester TEI Report now!
This article was first published by Mapp. Permission to use has been granted by the publisher.
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