So you’ve managed to make sure that the top of your funnel is full of high-quality prospects, ones that have a high probability of becoming qualified leads and ones who fit the criteria for becoming paying customers. However, what kind of key performance indicators (KPIs) need to be tracked so that you’re properly moving prospects through your buyer’s journey? More importantly, how do you leverage these KPI so that you’re providing the right incentive at the right time?
Marketing funnel KPIs help simplify your analysis.
Answering these aforementioned questions involves outlining each portion of your marketing funnel and defining the critical actions customers need to take in order to move to the next chain the process. It also means understanding how your marketing solutions can be leveraged so that you never allow a prospect, or group of prospects, to get stuck in limbo or unable to progress to the next stage. Here are several KPI you can use to make sure customers move through your buyer’s journey unabated.
Lead Quality and Funnel Progression
Tracking how and when leads move through your funnel is critical to ensuring that your process is easily navigated and effective in converting as many leads as possible. This means your funnel should not be difficult to manage for your sales and marketing team. Do not overcomplicate things. Keep it simple and straightforward.
KPIs in this section should track how and when prospects download free information, your costs per lead (CPL), the quality of leads, the source of the leads and the percentage of prospects that turn into leads relative to those that will never be qualified. If you decide that each stage of your funnel requires a customer action, then tracking how, when and why those actions are taken is critical.
Lead Progress and Stage Duration
Nobody wants a funnel where prospects are stuck in neutral. Either the prospect moves forward or they are forced outside the funnel. Your KPIs should track how long it takes each prospect and lead to move through each stage. If too many prospects and leads are stuck in one portion of your funnel, then it’s a sure sign that either your marketing solutions aren’t incentivizing prospects to move forward, or your funnel is too cumbersome.
Your data will help you know how and when to move prospect forward.
Lead Conversion and Abandonment
Your KPIs must also track lead conversion versus lead abandonment. How many prospects become qualified leads? What is the ratio of qualified prospects to unqualified? Finally, how many leads are converted into sales? Your lead-to-prospect ratio is a critical indicator as are your conversion rates, which is simply the total number of leads that become customers divided by the number of qualified leads.
Make sure you track your monthly conversion rates. Ask the questions that need to be asked. For instance, did your conversion rates decline this month compared to last month, and if so, why? Tracking these KPIs and comparing monthly and quarterly results will help you identify what needs to change and why.
KPIs are critical tools for measuring the effectiveness of your marketing solutions. When used properly, they can give you a tremendous amount of data about what’s happening inside your funnel and how well your strategies are working.
