The final piece in utilizing your Pardot marketing automation tool is understanding the return on your marketing programs. In order to best justify market spend, your stakeholders will need to see the ROI from your email marketing initiatives. In this section, we will discuss what metrics to report on and the features in Pardot that give your valuable analytics and pipeline visibility.
One of the most useful aspects of utilizing an automation software like Pardot is that your marketing efforts are trackable — such as links clicked, emails opened, money spent, conversions, etc.
In this chapter, we will go over the most important email marketing metrics in Pardot, how to report on them, and what they are telling you about your campaigns.
We will mainly focus on:
- Email marketing metrics
- Landing page metrics
- ROI reporting
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Email marketing metrics
There are a variety of metrics that you can look at for email marketing, but Pardot breaks it down to the following:
- Bounce rate
- Deliverability rate
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Open rate
- Read rate
- Unsubscribe rate
Bounce rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of email addresses in your prospect list that didn’t receive your message because it was returned by a recipient mail server. High bounce rates negatively impact the sender, so it’s important to keep these low.
Soft bounce – Temporary issue. Either the mailbox is full, the recipient’s email server is down, or the email is too large to be delivered.
Hard bounce – More severe. It means the email is completely undeliverable. Either the email address does not exist, the domain does not exist, or the server has blocked delivery. (If this occurs, don’t attempt to email this address again.)
Deliverability rate
Deliverability rate is expressed as a percentage and is the success rate of an email being delivered to the prospect’s email address. Think of it as a more accurate form of bounce rate.
How to improve deliverability:
There are safeguards in place to prevent Pardot users from spamming large email lists. If some of your emails are not delivering, then you might want to remove those prospects from your database to improve this metric. Aim for a deliverability rate of 95% or higher.
When you first start out with Pardot, you will want to warm up your IP address to ensure email deliverability. This can be done by progressively sending out emails to your warm database, then to your colder database. By no means would you want to send an email blast out to thousands of prospects without warming up your IP first.
Click-through rate (CTR)
CTR is the percentage of prospects who click a link or image within an email. If the goal of your email campaign is to have the prospect click the link embedded in your email, then this may be one of the most important metrics to define success.
Tips to improve click-through rate:
- Consider rewriting your email to draw attention to the CTA.
- Create more urgency around the CTA.
- Rearranging the email template so the link stands out and is one of the first things the recipient sees.
Open rate
Open rate is expressed as a percentage and is a measure of how many people in your recipient list opened your email.
Ways to improve your open rate:
- Try testing new subject lines
- Use personalized messaging, such as the prospect’s first name or company name
- Send your emails from a personal email address, such as John.Doe@blankcompany.com instead of sales@blankcompany.com
Landing page metrics
Form conversions
Form conversions (landing page successes) show the percentage of prospects that filled out a form on your landing page. This metric should be compared with click-through rate.
For instance, let’s say you have a:
- High click-through rate with a low form conversion rate. This means your email campaign is successful at driving traffic to your landing page, but your landing page is not successful at getting people to convert. To improve this metric, you need to rework your landing page.
- Low click-through rate with high form conversion rate. This means your landing page is resonating with your audience, but your email campaign is not successful at getting traffic to the landing page.
To improve this metric, you need to rework your email campaign. Look at the tips listed in the CTR section to see how you can improve your emails.
Campaign reporting
Campaign reporting allows you to track your prospects from their first-touch with your brand all the way until they are a closed deal. To make sure this happens:
- Organize the names of your campaigns
- Attribute prospects to those campaigns
The easiest way to do this is by utilizing Pardot’s automation tools to automatically associate new leads to the marketing campaigns that brought them to you.
Tracking your campaigns will tell you how many converts are credited to marketing, and allows you to calculate ROI. This is a very important tactic used to see which campaigns are not only successful, but cost effective. It will give you insight on what needs to be done in the future to improve your marketing.
Lifecycle reports
The prospect lifecycle report is a combination of marketing and sales data that gives insight on how well your marketing and sales team work together to qualify leads and convert them into customers.
This high-level overview is a quick way to see if your marketing and sales teams are reaching their goals and see which step of the sales cycle could use some improvement.
Conclusion
Analytics and reporting are key to understanding the success of not only individual campaigns, but your entire marketing strategies as a whole. Keep a close eye on your performance data to see what marketing initiatives can be improved, optimized, or even removed from your workflow.
Beginner’s Guide to Pardot
Download our expert-created guide to begin your journey with Pardot.
