5 Metrics to Gauge Outbound Marketing Campaign Success

Revenue directly impacted by a marketing campaign. While few IT marketing campaigns will close additional revenue without a salesperson’s assistance, they do directly impact it. The primary purpose of outbound campaigns is to build awareness, generate interest and move contacts through their Buying Cycle. By using lead scoring, you can identify which people are ripe for contacting, and our research shows nurturing campaigns consistently reduce the length of the sales cycle and increase the average sale.

Revenue and quantity of net new customers. With this metric, you want to evaluate where the bulk of net new customers are originating. Nurturing and lead generation campaigns? Networking? Trade shows? Cold calling? Once you know that, you’ll want to focus on who owns that activity and what it costs to implement. If your demand generation campaigns are working, they should build awareness and interest with new companies and create leads for your sales team to follow-up on.

Revenue growth in existing customers. Sales account management activities can only reach so many accounts. Sales reps don’t have enough time to personally connect with every contact within customer accounts. Forgetting that can cause you to leave revenue on the table. Marketing campaigns supplement sales activities by making customers aware of maintenance renewal dates, technology end-of-life and new features, services or offerings they didn’t know you had.

Pipeline growth. While I’m a firm believer in sales reps taking responsibility for prospecting activities, the truth is that sustained nurturing and lead generation campaigns should drive consistent, qualified leads. As salespeople follow up on those leads, new opportunities will enter the pipeline—and those opportunities should be better qualified because of the exposure they’ve had to your brand.

Media interaction. This metric is the direct result of social media engagement and effective content, but it’s often ignored. As your content gains credibility in your target market, people (customers and media influencers) will take notice. As a result, you’ll field more requests to participate in interviews or contribute comments to industry articles. Those interactions may seem qualitative, but it is possible to quantify your market awareness and recognition—and both can significantly expand your contact list and drive revenue.