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7 Lead Nurturing KPIs to Maximize Your Marketing ROI

April 11, 2019

Mieke Houbrechts

Track and optimize the success of your lead nurturing strategies. This guide will set you up for success with the top lead nurturing KPIs to track!

In our previous blogpost, you learned about the key metrics to measure lead generation. In this second post, we will zoom in on the next step in the funnel: lead nurturing.

So, what is lead nurturing? Which tools exist for this process? How do you know if a lead is ready for the next step towards becoming a paying customer? In other words, how do you measure how engaged your leads are with your brand, your product or your content?

Let’s break this down step by step. At the end of this post, you’ll have a better view on what lead nurturing is, which tools to use and how to get more insights into a lead’s engagement with clear, interactive dashboards.

What is lead nurturing

On average, 50% of your new leads are not yet ready to buy. They need to be nurtured first, but what does that mean?

Lead nurturing is the process of engaging leads with relevant information at each stage of the buyer’s journey. Typically, you’ll approach leads with different messages in time, and fine-tuned to the buyer’s interests and preferences.

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With the rise of marketing automation tools, lead nurturing has become a widespread best practice in marketing, both in B2B and B2C.

  • B2B companies nurture leads with content marketing such as articles, whitepapers or webinars to convince them of their product’s added value
  • B2C companies use marketing automation to generate more sales and retain their customers with abandoned cart emails, coupons or loyalty benefits

Now, how do you know which leads are not at all ready to buy or, on the contrary, on the verge of buying? The answer lies in your marketing automation data.

Measuring marketing engagement with lead scoring

Measuring the engagement of leads has become quite easy with marketing automation software. Many marketing automation tools work with a mechanism called lead scoring.

Leads gather points based on the actions they take. For example: a lead opens your email and gets 2 points. Clicking on a link in that email would add another 5 points. If the lead downloads a whitepaper, he’ll add another 15 points. Starting a trial boosts their score with 50 points.

Example of a lead scoring model
Image source: ActiveCampaign

We won’t go into too much detail, since there are many good sources on lead scoring. Basically, you can attribute points based on how valuable each action is for your company. The total lead score is a sort of ‘hotness score’ of how likely your lead will buy.

Now, although marketing automation tools help you with lead scoring, they often lack reporting tools to find trends & insights in engagement across your lead pool. That’s why we’ll further break down the metrics and categories to explore your lead nurturing data in this article.

If you’re active in the marketing automation landscape or MarTech in general, the example dashboard may be of inspiration to embed a similar dashboard in your marketing SaaS platform.

Key metrics for lead nurturing

Lead score is a crucial metric to track engagement of your leads. However, other metrics will help you break down that lead score in more detail. For example, what are the exact actions users took to get to this score? Did they mostly open emails, or did they take more down-the-funnel actions like a signup?

Furthermore, you can analyze which factors have an influence on the lead score: are there differences per country or per marketing acquisition channel?

The list below will give you an idea of the basic KPIs to measure.

  • Lead score
  • Number of (content) downloads or form fills
  • Number of signups
  • Number of emails sent
  • Number of emails opened
  • Number of emails clicks
  • Email open rate
  • Email clickthrough rate
  • Number of website visits

You can also further drill down on these metrics by looking at them from a specific dimension. Below are a few examples that should have you covered for a first deeper analysis of your lead nurturing process.

  • By lead
  • By geography
  • By marketing acquisition channel
  • By marketing acquisition campaign
  • Evolution over time

How to build a lead nurturing dashboard?

Once you’ve selected the proper lead nurturing KPIs, you can gather them all in one place: your lead nurturing dashboard. This will be your one source of truth to analyze your lead nurturing activities.

If you’ve built a marketing automation software yourself, you can easily add similar dashboards to your SaaS platform as an integrated reporting module. In that way, users don’t have to export the data and do manual analysis. They can simply stay inside your platform to get the insights they need: one more reason they don’t have to leave your app!

Whether you build a dashboard yourself as a marketer, or integrate it as a marketing automation vendor, you’re probably curious to see an example. Play around with the embedded dashboard below to get a better idea of what it can look like!

How to use a lead nurturing dashboard

Your dashboard is ready, but that doesn't mean your job is done. This is where the real stuff begins: finding valuable insights in your marketing data!

The goal of your dashboard is to help you make better marketing decisions. Now, how do you start gaining insights from a lead nurturing dashboard like the one above? We'll dive into an example use case below.

Segment your top leads with the lead scoring filter

Have a look at the lead score filter on top of the dashboard. Engagement of the leads in your bucket goes up to 180 points. Those are your top leads, and you'll want to have more of those!

If you filter the dashboard to show only leads with lead score higher than 150 points, you'll be able to drill down on your top leads only. Drill down further in the dashboard to find out if they have common characteristics.

Example of a lead nurturing dashboard that filters lead nurturing KPIs for the top engaged leads

This can help you make the decision to create new campaigns that resemble successful past campaigns, or to put more efforts into certain marketing channels that drive quality leads.

You can do exactly the same for the least engaging leads, and spot similarities there. In that way, you can optimize your marketing mix and campaign content to fuel your leads with the content they love most

Lead nurturing dashboards for marketing automation platforms

If you're using a marketing automation tool, you download the data from that tool and build your own lead nurturing dashboard. However, wouldn't it be much easier if this dashboard was available inside the platform itself?

As a marketing automation platform, you can easily connect your platform to Luzmo's analytics software via API, and build dashboards for your customers. You can even integrate these dashboards into your own application, so your customers have more insights into their lead nurturing at all times, directly inside your own platform.

Are you running a marketing SaaS platform and interested to learn more about dashboards for your platform? You can have your first embedded dashboard up and running in just a few days! Get in touch and we’re happy to show you.

Build your first embedded dashboard in less than 15 min

Experience the power of Luzmo. Talk to our product experts for a guided demo  or get your hands dirty with a free 10-day trial.

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