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.
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:
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.
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.
Let's divide the engagement score metrics into two categories:Website Engagement
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.
Suppose customers buy your SaaS products but don't really use them as expected. This scenario will not let your business grow in the real sense, and you won’t be able to improve your product's quality as people need it. That is why having a product engagement scoreboard is a must. It helps in learning: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.
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.
Poor customer acquisition can be improved by focusing on two factors: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:
The sales pipeline analysis will give you in-depth insights into which customer journey stage is important in need of your efforts.
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.
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.