How To Measure Crucial Marketing KPIs For SaaS Lead-Generation Efforts

If you are a SaaS marketer, you understand the importance of healthy lead generation for your business’s growth. After all, you put months or sometimes years into building glitch-free high-end software, and introducing it to paying clients/users is undoubtedly an ultimate success. 

You might have a basic idea of how to measure crucial marketing KPIs for SaaS lead-generation efforts. For instance, you may be familiar with metrics like Customer-Click-Though rate, Email Performace Analysis, etc. But are those metrics enough to measure your efforts? 

Also, note that most of your competitors are taking the same approach. So, what new and better methods can you add to your analysis of your SaaS lead-gen campaign? 

Keep reading ahead to know some key metrics and lead generation KPIs to measure for your SaaS cold email marketing efforts in 2023 and ahead. 

Why Lead Generation Analysis Matters For SaaS?

• Waste of effort and money on unnecessary marketing areas. 
• No direction for future marketing campaigns. 

37% of marketers already consider lead-generation as one of the greatest challenges. So, make the wise decision to determine what lead-generation efforts work best for your SaaS business first. It will help you effectively justify your budget, helping you have a significant return on investment. 

Check out top three benefits of measuring the success of your SaaS marketing efforts focused on lead generation: 

1. More marketing-qualified (MQL) leads
   When you learn what pleases your clients or which marketing efforts influence them, your marketing team will know which platforms and strategies to prioritize. 
2. In-depth understanding of the audience 
   Regular review and analysis of your lead generation efforts will help you understand how different users navigate your website. It gives you an idea of how your website looks and how your business market itself to different users. 
3. Identification of high-traffic generating regions 
   You can easily identify which regions within the country or worldwide has users that most frequently visit your site. Your marketing and sales team can further launch lead-generation practices focused on these high-value areas. 

5 Best Lead Generation KPIs & Metrics To Track In 2023

1. Free Trial Sign-Ups

As a SaaS company, offering your website visitors a free trial period during the 1st sales cycle phase would be beneficial. 

Why? 

Know that it is the most simple and effective way to let people have a glimpse of your software's capabilities. Thus, you allow your potential customers to test the service before they make a purchase. 

Once you set up a free trial plan, move ahead to implement a conversion funnel. It will track how many leads convert into paying customers. Keeping track of sign-ups will show the performance of your first-touch marketing efforts. 

2. Engagement Scores

This score tells you how engaging your content is. Measuring engagement scores will automatically cover other key metrics like website traffic and bounce rate of your SaaS business website. A good indication of whether your lead generation campaign is working is to check the rise in clicks, likes, and shares to your site and social posts. 

1. Website Engagement 
2. Product Engagement 

Website Engagement 

• Bounce Rates - It’s high when your website gets decent interactions but fails to convert customers. Remember, customer conversion does not only imply when a client buys your product; it also includes sign-ups and newsletter and email list subscriptions. Conversely, low bounce rates indicate visitors like or explore your products/content. 
• Time Spent on Landing Pages - If there has been low to no movement on your website after launching a lead generation campaign, you need to review your campaign strategies. 

Product Engagement 

Another way to measure the engagement score for your SaaS-based business is by analyzing customers' interaction with your products. Though it focuses more on leads already converted, it helps identify needed improvements in your products to attract new customers by providing what they expect. 

• How do your customers use and engage with your product?
• What features do they never use?
• How frequently do they log in?

Use the obtained information from the engagement score to nurture your customers during the onboarding process. For example, you can provide them with product roadmaps depending on where they engage the most. 

3. Months To Recover Your CAC

It is the most underrated metric to analyze lead gen efforts and drive conversions. 
53% of businesses spend almost half their budget on lead generation campaigns. Thus, the metric shows how efficiently your company spends its money to attract new leads and how effectively it can sustain its long-term acquisition strategies. 

Here's how you can calculate the Months to Recover your CAC: 

Months to cover your CAC = Customer acquisition cost (CAC) / Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA) x company's gross margin (%)

If CAC payback period is long, it indicates your company's poor customer acquisition efficiency. However, if the CAC payback time is less or reduces with time, then it indicates sustainable company growth. 

• Effective spending on customer acquisition cost.
• Better customer monetization by applying improved pricing plans offered to potential customers. 

4. Sales Pipeline Analysis 

You should use this metric to evaluate your sales pipeline and determine at which point(s) leads are falling off. To know whether you need to perform pipeline analysis, you will have to do the following steps: 

1. Discover Your Business Churn Rate

You see the following formula to find out the churn rate: 

Churn rate = Total number of churned customers over a specific period / Total number of customers you had on the 1st day of the specific period.

If your churn rate is high, then there is a problem in your lead generation and acquisition campaign strategies that you need to fix. 

2. Collect Important Customer Data

You can use sources like historical sales performance, interviewing sales representatives, customer surveys etc. Make sure the data you use is up-to-date and accurate. Next, organize the obtained data in a document format that is simple to access and work with. 

3. Perform Important Sales Pipeline Metric Analysis
Measure the following:

• Number of leads/opportunities in your pipeline
• Value of leads/opportunities in your pipeline
• Number of new leads/opportunities added to your pipeline
• Number of closed or won deals
• Number of closed or lost deals

The sales pipeline analysis will give you in-depth insights into which customer journey stage is important in need of your efforts. 

5. Lead Velocity Rate

LVR lets you measure the timely growth in the count of qualified leads each month. You can use this metric even if your business depends on recurring revenue or if you are a subscription-based SaaS company. LVR percentage showcases your pipeline's efficiency and your company's long-term growth potential. 

Here's how you can measure it: 

Lead Velocity Rate = (Number of qualified leads in the current month – Number of qualified leads last month)/ Number of qualified leads last month x 100

LVR allows you to plan lead-generating campaigns more accurately rather than using guesswork. 

Conclusion

So what's the takeaway? 

When measuring your lead generation success, it's best to avoid vanity metrics. The point of tracking is to give you concrete, measurable data you can use to improve. Additionally, every new lead that comes in through your SaaS site is an opportunity to learn and implement those results into your approaches to win over more prospects. 

Hopefully, this article delivers the needed insights on measuring crucial marketing lead generation KPIs for SaaS.