The Metrics You Need to Measure Lead Nurturing Success

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Successful inbound marketers don’t make decisions based on feelings -- their decisions are based on data. But where does that data come from? Why, their marketing analytics, of course!

But just collecting data isn't enough. Effective marketers track important data points, analyze what they mean, and then use that knowledge to make actionable improvements. After all, what's the point of having a bunch of juicy data if it can't make you a better marketer?

So we're going to dive into some core lead nurturing metrics and explain how you can use them to measure and improve the performance of your campaigns -- which generates more leads and customers!

Important Lead Nurturing Metrics

Before we get started, let's review the 4 important metrics you should have handy in your analytics tools to measure your lead nurturing performance.

Click-Through Rates - the proportion of the audience who clicked on one or more links contained in a lead nurturing email messageConversion Rates - the percentage of recipients who clicked on a link within an email and completed a desired actionTime to Customer Conversion - the length of time it takes for a lead to become a customerCost per Customer - the marketing cost of acquiring a new customerClick-Through and Conversion Rates

The effectiveness of your lead nurturing is dependent on how well you’ve segmented your leads. Dive in to your analytics tool to identify any problems with your list segmentation. Start by looking at your unsubscribe rate, which should stay below 1% at all times. If it’s higher for any particular list segment, this is an indication that the content you're sending isn’t relevant to that list segment, and recipients are unsubscribing as a result. You can glean similar insights by examining the click-through rates of each list segment. Marketers who suffer a low click-through rate for a particular list segment haven’t aligned their offer well with the recipients on that list.

Faulty list segmentation can be remedied by revisiting how you’ve mapped content to your list segments based on their stage in the sales cycle. Deliver email content to leads based on the pages they’ve visited on your site, the content they’ve downloaded, the blog posts they’ve commented on, and how far down the sales funnel they are. (Learn more about how to map lead nurturing content in this comprehensive blog post on the subject.) You can optimize the offers you deliver by analyzing which CTAs have the highest click-through rate, and which landing pages have the highest visitor-to-customer conversion rate in your closed-loop analytics. For HubSpot customers, for example, you can find this information in your Landing Page Analytics.

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