How to Write a Great Inbound Marketing Report?
What is an Inbound Marketing Report?
Inbound marketing report is vital for understanding how our marketing strategy performs over time. Since there are many moving parts in almost any inbound marketing activity, it can be difficult to track the impact of each separately. But that’s where inbound marketing reporting comes in. Inbound marketing reporting can help us see how all of our marketing activities relate to each other and work together as a system.
What Metrics Are Important in an Inbound Marketing Report?
General Metrics
- Conversions: the goals of your inbound marketing plan should be specified in a series of actions you want users to perform, for example, downloading a piece of content or completing a purchase. Your inbound marketing report should include information on the fulfillment of these goals through conversions.
- Click-through rate: percentage of users who click on a call-to-action button, for example, after reading a piece of content or seeing an ad on social media or search engines.
- Best and worst performing content in terms of traffic and clicks: this metric will help you target your content strategy to achieve the best possible results.
Lead Generation
- Leads generated: the number of users who have left you their information to send them marketing communications.
- Marketing qualified leads: number of leads that, after applying a lead scoring algorithm, are considered suitable for sending them promotional communications.
- Sales qualified leads: number of leads that, after applying a lead scoring algorithm, are considered suitable to send their data to the sales team and close the final conversion.
Social Media Metrics
This section is one of the trickiest, as it is very tempting to fill it with vanity metrics such as the number of likes or clicks. Instead, we need to focus on how effective social networks are being in attracting quality traffic to your marketing website. Specifically, it is advisable to track these metrics:
- Traffic generated through digital social networks.
- Leads generated through social networks.
- Conversions generated through social networks.
Email Marketing Metrics
- Open rate: percentage of users who open your emails after receiving them.
- Click-through rate: percentage of users who click on a link in your emails after opening them.
- A/B testing: email marketing is one of the most advisable channels for this type of testing, since variables that are relatively easy to modify, such as the subject line of an email, can have a great impact on the results.
- Bounce rate: it is important to make sure that the bounce rate is not too high. As this could indicate problems with your database or your email provider.
- ROI: the return on investment rate of your email marketing, calculated from the conversions generated.
Bonus Tip:
When you’re creating your next Inbound Marketing report; consider creating graymail lists. It’s quite an important digital metric that most marketers miss and you’ll need a tool like HubSpot to get started.
Graymail is all of the emails that your contacts opted-in to receive – but they don’t really want them. This helps to keep your contact database clean so that it’s always full of meaningful contacts.