Lead analytics is the art of analyzing your sales and marketing leads to learn more about which of your conversion strategies are likely to have the biggest impact on your bottom line. With successful lead analytics, you can avoid wasting time on the wrong leads, and ensure you’re focusing the majority of your attention on the most lucrative opportunities.
Lead analytics also allow you to learn more about your target audience, and create a comprehensive, personalized, and valuable experience to your audience.
What is lead analytics?
In the sales and marketing world, the term “lead analytics” refers to the reporting and evaluation strategies you use to understand your leads, and which of your marketing strategies have the best impact on your business.
A crucial part of marketing analytics, lead evaluation can include a range of different metrics and steps depending on the goals you’re trying to achieve. Typically, most companies will use tools specifically designed for tracking leads to help them gather useful information.
Lead analytics tools can help you to determine where to find leads most likely to convert into long-term customers, which marketing strategies you should be using, and how you can personalize your marketing and sales strategies to generate the best results.
How to start the Lead Analytics Process
To thoroughly analyze your leads, you’ll need access to handful of tools which help you to collect information about your potential customers. You’ll need to set up website analytics, if you run marketing campaigns online, to help you track the customer journey and which pieces of content your leads interact with before connecting with your brand.
It’s also important to collect information from your sales conversations, with recording features, and access CRM tools (Customer Relationship Management), which allow you to make notes about your leads and develop a deeper understanding of each customer over time.
CRM tools often come equipped with a range of tools to help you improve the lead analytics process, such as lead quality scoring, which measures the potential value of each lead based on factors like their demographics, behavior, and background. Lead quality scoring can help you to understand which prospects are most likely to convert as soon as they join your sales cycle.
Lead analytics metrics to track
Deciding which metrics to track when engaging in lead analytics will require you to think carefully about what you want to accomplish with your analysis. If the goal of your lead analysis is to improve your marketing strategies, you’ll focus on factors like customer demographics and engagement rates on your marketing content.
If you want to better understand your audience so you can make more sales, you can focus on things like lead to conversion rate and the number of marketing qualified and sales qualified leads you get from each campaign. Some of the metrics tracked in lead analysis include:
- Visit-to-lead conversion rate: This metric examines how many people are actually converting when visiting your website and interacting with your content. Examining this number will help you to see whether you’re targeting the right audience, and whether your campaigns are having the right impact on your customers.
- Overall contact growth: A successful marketing campaign should give your sales teams plenty of contacts to reach out to with personalized sales pitches. If your overall contact growth is low, this could be a sign you’re not using the right lead capturing strategies.
- Engagement rates: Engagement rates within your marketing campaigns help you to determine exactly which kinds of marketing strategies push your customers to action. You can look at things like open and click-through rates for your emails, and interactions on your social media profiles.
- Customer close rate: This metric looks at how often the leads you target convert into genuine customers. You should be able to track your closing rate using your CRM technology to track which leads turn into conversions.
At the same time, it’s worth paying close attention to the information you can collect about your leads. Compare the customers who convert with your sales team to the leads you’re targeting with your marketing campaigns. What are the differences in their behaviors, demographics, and buying journeys? How can you adjust your sales and marketing strategy to target and convert more of the correct leads?
The Value of Lead Analytics
Lead analytics in sales and marketing is a great way to improve the quality of your leads, and get a better ROI from your sales and marketing efforts. With lead analytics, you can ensure you’re focusing your attention on the people most likely to pay attention to your marketing campaigns, and appreciate your sales offers.
Most importantly, you’ll be able to upgrade your buyer personas, so you can better guide your sales and marketing teams in every stage of their role.
