The Basics of Ensuring Correct Reporting in Marketing Automation Tools

A campaign report is an indispensable aspect for any digital marketer.

Not only digital marketers, but the sales team also monitors various reports because they speak volumes about campaign performance. A great deal of reports are available in Marketing Automation (MA) tools, but the larger questions are - which are reports we should focus on? Which reports will give data customized to your needs? What are the factors that differentiate one report from another?

Earlier, marketers use to prefer conducting campaigns/email deployments with the help basic tools or tools which are only designed for email deployment, but now the thinking has changed and most of the marketers prefer to use MA tools as they not only ease the process of email deployment, but it also gives a host of add-ons such as lead nurturing, scoring, lead assignment, and others.

In present times, we have tools that give us an advance level of reporting, as they help to plan our campaigns efficiently and effectively. However, many marketers do not use this feature to its fullest.

Before we pull down any report, we need to first understand the source data of that report. This is because if the source is not clear, we will only look at numbers but will not be able to improvise the overall strategy behind the campaign. Also, we wouldn’t be sure that the source picked is what we considered during our strategy.

Let us discuss a couple of scenarios:

1. Campaign ROI Report

Usually marketers and sales teams are majorly interested in ROI reports. Each organization use multiple channels to reach to the customer and then calculate ROI. Some do it manually by downloading data of multiple reports and then customizing it for ROI. Whereas, others marketers do it with the help of tools, where a dashboard is created and report is generated automatically.

However, the idea behind this report is to see ROI and if we want the tool to do this, we would need proper planning of campaign budget (actual/planned), campaign channels, start and end date and other fields, to ensure that all values of the required fields are passed, to enable the tool to calculate ROI correctly.

2. Dynamic Content vs Region Wise Report

Usually to save time, we go with dynamic content where emails need to be sent out to multiple regions and in different languages. Hence, dynamic content helps in dropping email setup/creation/deployment time but is it the right approach for each aspect of report?

If a marketer want reports to just to observe performance of campaigns, irrespective of individual region based performance, this approach is superb but if a marketer wants region based performance, this approach is not a good fit.

There are many scenarios where a marketer’s expectations from any report are not met. This makes us to think that a report is of no use, but in reality we didn’t pass required parameters tool for some scenarios. Once we pass the required parameters to the MA tools, those tools will eliminate manual efforts and can be used recurrently, for use with the latest information, as and when required.