How to measure your Marketing Performance in easy steps with Unica Insights

In the current era of marketing, the marketer needs the insights into the activities and programs that they are running. Marketers are looking out for the data (marketing reports) that can help them to plan the new initiatives based on their past marketing programs, campaigns, and activities. Studying and evaluating all of these elements lead to successful campaigns.

A marketer looks for the insights of the campaign from a marketing automation tool to measure progress and identify actionable steps to improve marketing performance and meet the goals. The easiest way to gather those useful insights is via marketing reporting. With efficient reporting, a marketer measures the success of the marketing programs and proactively optimizes the planning and execution accordingly.

You must be thinking, is there an easier way to get to these insights from marketing automation software without a need for another reporting solution? The answer is Yes, Unica does it for you. But many of us sometimes miss the useful metrics, parameters, and KPIs, we should be reporting upon and how to utilize that information effectively. This guide will lead your path.

Why should marketers evaluate their marketing performance?

What should be the focus of your next strategy? What information should you look into to determine their success? 

The goal of marketing reports is to help you measure your results and optimize your marketing strategies. Tracking specific metrics and goals on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis can prevent you from wasting your valuable time and money. It is also crucial to understand what metrics should constitute a part of your marketing reports. The type of metrics, such as channel source, revenue, conversion rate, engagement, and many other metrics, are primarily based on your marketing goals.

However, creating/maintaining a marketing dashboard eases the task for you. It allows you to see only the metrics that you believe are aligned with your strategies. While building, one should determine the business goals and the target audience, to decide the KPIs you want to include as part of the dashboard. However, there are 3 crucial aspects that all marketing (campaign) reports cover.

• Your campaign frequency and goals

If there are offers associated with your campaigns, the types and the frequency of your campaigns depend on your goals and the buying cycle of your product. However, there are certain marketing objectives that a marketer tries to fulfill via campaigns, like; retaining existing customers, breaking into new markets, increasing revenue and profit margins, and enhancing the overall customer experience. There are types of campaigns that are affected by seasonality, and then there are those that walk by frequency

For example, Birthday offers can help you increase revenue or simply give a small token of appreciation to your customer base, and they aren’t dependent on seasons. Just let it run indefinitely and give potential customers a big surprise for their birthdays! However, you’ll want a dashboard to visualize and assess the metrics like increased customer engagement and the number of ongoing offers to verify if the running campaign is effective in turning the positive outcomes for your marketing goals.

• Your market segmentation

Segmenting and targeting a group of customers is yet another strategy that marketers have found effective for the accumulative uplift of the customer base. It helps in identifying the right market for your product. Socio-demographic being one of the common forms. A specific campaign can be explicitly targeted towards a specific demographic (age, sex, marital status, family size..).

For instance, a personal care company will launch two different perfumes- for men and women. While driving more specific and targeted campaigns, other factors can be considered, as the cost of the perfume or age. To measure the efficiency of target segmented campaigns or narrowly defining the offerings to suit the customers, marketers require data for KPIs like acceptance rate, rejection rate to analyze the purchasing behavior of your audience for better product positioning.

• Cost benefits of your marketing efforts

Measurement is the key to optimizing any process; the same is the case for marketing campaigns. For measuring your campaigns on parameters of profitability, risks, potential gains, marketers look forward to calculating the ROI or ROMI, conversion rate, incremental sales to show the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns in generating sales of the project.

What is ROMI?

ROMI measures the revenue a marketing campaign generates, in contrast to the cost of running it. It can be considered as a sub-category of ROI, but it includes a lot more variables.

A basic formula defines ROMI = Gross Profit- Marketing Investment, where gross profit is the total revenue earnings and marketing investment incorporates both tangible and intangible resources in the equation, such as brand awareness or user conversions. It provides a full overview of whether or not the campaign has reached its target audience.

To make critical decisions, the marketing department needs deep insight and analysis of the campaigns, marketing initiatives. Without reporting and analysis, a marketer can’t explore the insights of marketing programs, initiatives, and campaigns.

What can you achieve with Unica Insights?

To overcome the hurdles of marketing analysis, the Unica Suite provides the analytics to identify the performance of your marketing programs, initiatives and Campaign via Unica Insights. Unica Insights contains the out of box reporting that empowers you with the capability of easy to use interface, out-of-box reporting templates, exporting reports to other applications like Microsoft Excel, power-point, Word, Adobe PDF, etc. 

There are many important aspects of reporting covered by Unica Insights that will help marketers to verify and check their campaign performance to ensure they are on the right track.

• People buy different products at different times of the year. The conversion rate of an offer campaign running for the entire month of December will be higher than the one running in November. The purchasing behavior of the people is different because of Christmas; at the same time, there would be a higher competition. The marketers need to plan their marketing calendar for creating suitable assets like emailers, landing pages, ad design, etc. that can help them provide a fruitful brand experience along with the promotional campaign. They might need to analyze the outputs on a weekly or daily basis.
  The Campaign Offer Summary Report lets you evaluate and keep track of the efforts and effectiveness of the number of running campaigns. You can acquire a report for assessing the offers eligibility, number of times an offer has been extended to have a clear picture on the response rate, number of unique responders, acceptance rate, and rejection rate. It becomes easier for marketers to assess the data and align their next steps for reaching out to a wider audience

• To evaluate the potential of a market that your businesses have reached or are yet to reach, market segmentation helps by tailoring and developing products for different parts of your customer base. Analyzing the data of a particular segment can help marketers discover interests their customers had that they did not realize. For example, a business that is running a global online clothing store will have different campaigns for running for different segments like location, gender, age, special occasions. They can never have a single campaign running for all its customers.
  If the correct metric is not considered, the assessment of the campaign performance gets even trickier. In Unica Insights, the Campaign Performance Summary by Cell report provides performance data for campaigns with cells grouped by the corresponding campaign. It enables you as a marketer to track the target and control the campaign. With information like presentation rate and acceptance rate, it gets easier to analyze the insights gathered from a control group campaign to use the information efficiently for the target group campaigns.

• Return on marketing investment or ROMI is one of the key metrics to measure the effectiveness of a marketing campaign. But a simple formula for calculating the ROI or ROMI doesn’t always work. You have to decide what constitutes ROI. Is it the net revenue? Gross revenue? Average sale price? Customer lifetime value? The Campaign Financial Summary by Offer report provides financial data such as contact costs, gross revenue, net profit for offers within campaigns. ROI can have many different calculations.
  You can calculate overall ROI, which includes all marketing spend and all revenue generated from your ongoing campaigns or calculate the ROI from an individual campaign and compare the performance by utilizing the data like Incremental ROI. Each of these numbers has value to your business, so consider the metric that will prove strongest when it comes to evaluating your marketing strategies.
• But how can marketers optimize their campaigns after gaining and utilizing all this information?  The ‘What If’ Offer financial reports in Unica Insights calculates the hypothetical financial performance of an offer based on your input. You can specify parameters for evaluating different response rate scenarios. For example, if you specify a response rate of 2% and a response rate increment of 0.25%, the report returns performance data for six scenarios with response rates ranging from 2% to 3.25%.  You can optionally change parameters in the “what-if” report, such as cost per contact, offer fulfillment fixed cost, and revenue per response.

How to achieve it with Unica Insights?

Unica Insights is built on BIRT technology and is complementary with Unica that will also eliminate the Cognos reporting dependency. It lets you customize and modify the Out-Of the Box reports suiting your marketing needs. It is easy to export and amalgamate the data, focusing on the analysis and then identifying the programs/campaigns are yielding the maximum-minimum marketing ROI

Unica Insights promotes partition level installation to help you restrict unauthorized access. It can easily be installed in a distributed environment. There aren’t any additional system requirements, they get accommodated with the overall Unica suite. Once Unica Insights are ready and installed, you will be able to access the object-specific and system-wide reports.

The object-specific reports can be fetched from the analysis tab inside the required object’s item. For example- Within the plan, go inside any plan/program/ project/campaign and click over the analysis tab of that item. You will find the analysis of that item.

The system-wide reports can be fetched from the Analytics tab of the Unica software. Inside the Analytics tab, there are a couple of options to select, like – Operational, Campaign, and Unica platform Analytics. 

Unica Insights provides you more than 90 out of the box reports that a marketer can pull from Unica, depending on their needs and requirements. The above mentioned are some of the frequently used reports which every marketer wants to have. The processes of collecting and reporting data insights may seem like tedium in some cases, but it offers great potential. The insights you gather are the foundation of your marketing strategy and your guide for tracking your progress.

You can learn more about Reporting in Unica V12.0. Just follow the link, and after a quick registration form, you’ll be able to view the webinar recording. Register Here