One of the prime purposes — if not the only reason — for any type of competition is to win or come out better than the majority. And to prove this success, the stats, points and/or results are grouped together, analyzed and then quantified. This not only sets a record for others to compare themselves to and beat, but also highlights how they can improve their efforts. The same illustration applies to the dynamic world of marketing.

Launching a marketing campaign without a plan to evaluate is like learning a new skill without ever being tested on it. While you may appreciate a life without quizzes or tests, you can still see why assessing skill proficiency is an imperative step.

In the same way, evaluating marketing campaigns for learning and development (L&D) consumers serves as a compass that allows training suppliers to gauge the effectiveness of their marketing strategies, identify areas of improvement and refine their approach to generate more leads at every stage of the sales funnel.

What is the Goal of Your Marketing Campaign?

Before launching a marketing campaign, you must consider what you are hoping to achieve. Most of the time, L&D marketers will focus their campaigns around these two goals:

1. Lead generation: aims at attracting leads who may be interested in your product and service.

2. Brand awareness: efforts are targeted toward building brand recognition and sharing what sets your business apart from the competition.

Ultimately, the objective of any marketing campaign is to present your brand to your target audience, generate leads and convert them into buyers so they can grow the business’s revenue.

How to Prove Your Marketing Campaigns Worked

In reality, training suppliers should evaluate metrics at various stages of the campaign to gain insights and make adjustments:

1. Prior to launching the campaign, training suppliers need to assess baseline metrics so they can set realistic goals and establish key performance indicators (KPIs). This is a critical step because it gives them the key to measuring success.
2. During the campaign, they should continuously monitor metrics to assess real-time performance.
3. And once the campaign concludes, training suppliers must be ready to prove whether or not the campaign reached its desired goals. To do so, they will need to evaluate the KPIs that were set prior to the campaign launch.

To assess campaign efficacy, you should revisit the campaign goal to know which metrics demonstrate success. This process helps ensure training suppliers are continuously reaching their audience and improving their campaigns.

The campaign goal should include defined KPIs to track outcomes. These KPIs should align with the business’s objectives. Here are some KPIs to consider when evaluating the impact of your campaign:

Website traffic.

Website traffic measures the volume of users who access and interact with the website. This uncovers the visibility, popularity and reach of your website. When measuring website traffic, vendors should identify the number of sessions and conversions: Sessions are the sum of visitors the website received within a given time period, and conversions are the sum of visitors who completed a form on the website indicating interest in the product/service.

Training vendors should also focus on how they are acquiring website traffic, so it can be attributed to their campaigns. To do this, you will want to use Google Analytics to report on:

1. Channel: Did the website traffic come from an email, social media, a referral site, or somewhere else?

2. Campaign: Using UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters on your hyperlinks, you can use Google Analytics to report on which campaigns are driving the most traffic to your website.

Email metrics.

Email metrics show the effectiveness and performance of the email campaign. Metrics to measure include:

• Open rate — the percentage of recipients who opened a particular email out of the total number of emails delivered. The higher the open rate, the better the subject line of your email resonates with your audience.
• Click through rate (CTR) — the percentage of recipients who clicked on one or more links within the email body. This metric helps business professionals assess user engagement. A higher CTR indicates that the content and call to action (CTA) resonated well with recipients.
• Conversion rate — the percentage of recipients who completed the specific desired action out of the total number of clicks to your landing page.

Consider this example:

Let’s say you send an email promoting a thought leadership webinar. You send the email to 15,000 people, 3,500 people open the email, 650 people click on the email, and 300 people complete the form on your website to sign up for the upcoming webinar.

In this example:
Open rate = 23% (total opens/total sent)
Click through rate = 4.3% (total clicks/total sent)
Conversion rate = 46% (total form completions/total clicks)

Over time, you will be able to compare these email metrics, and trace year over year change.

Conversion metrics.

A digital marketing campaign will likely include gated content behind a form on your website. Conversion metrics measure the number of form submissions out of the total number of form views. This measurement assesses how many visitors were interested in your content online and thus converted into leads for your marketing or sales teams.

You can use data from the customer relationship management (CRM) to track success of marketing campaign conversions. For example, how many of the marketing qualified leads that your team sends to sales become a business opportunity? Determine that percentage and work to constantly improve it.

Cost per lead.

This metric shows the average cost incurred for acquiring a new lead. This is measured by dividing the total cost of the campaign with the number of leads generated. Suppliers want this number to be low because that indicates that the business is generating new leads at a more cost-effective rate.

When working to acquire a lead, the cost will vary depending on the customer’s stage in the sales funnel. Someone lower in the funnel, closer to purchasing your product or service, will have a higher cost per lead. Someone higher up in the funnel will have a lower cost per lead.

Consider the different costs between running a banner ad and having high attendance at a product demonstration. A banner ad is both relatively inexpensive and will yield several leads who may not be fully qualified. An attendee at a product demonstration is likely dealing with an issue that your product will solve and is actively seeking that solution. By being lower in the funnel, they are close to making a purchase decision and thus will require more financial backing to ensure they are fully aware of your product, interested in attending a demo, and likely to set up a call after the demo.

Best Practices to Continuously Testing Your KPIs

Training suppliers should evaluate their marketing campaigns on an ongoing basis to ensure that they are hitting the right targets and reaching the desired goals.

How to do A/B Testing.

Use A/B testing to ensure which efforts lead to the best outcome. A/B testing, also known as split testing, compares two or more variations of a marketing asset to identify which performed better. These assets include: subject line, CTA button, landing page layout, etc.

Here are four steps to follow when A/B testing:

1. Identify a specific asset to test, such as the email subject line or CTA button.
2. Develop multiple variations of the chosen asset with one key difference between them. For example, if testing an email subject line, create two versions with different wording.
3. Implement the variations simultaneously to comparable segments of the audience, sending one email to group A and the other to group B. For the test to be effective, group A and B should be similar in terms of characteristics.
4. During and after the campaign, collect data on the performance of each variation. This can look like evaluating metrics like, click-through-rate, open rates, conversion rates or other defined KPIs.

The importance of evaluating your marketing campaign cannot be understated. Continuously evaluating marketing metrics gives you the data to refine and update your marketing strategy to reach the L&D consumer, as well as get to know personal pain points in the training world. Because, at the end of the day, that’s really what this is all about — understanding your buyer.

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