Measure Which Lead Magnets Attracted Paying Clients, Not Just MQLs

The tools we use feed into this separation.

Marketing analytics show how many leads they’re generating, such as website interactions and form submissions. 

Meanwhile, the CRM data helps the sales team monitor how their leads progress through the sales cycle. 

These tools are usually unconnected, so the marketing analytics doesn’t gather info about whether website visitors turn into clients and the CRM doesn’t record which marketing activity attracted each lead.

Leadfeeder is part of the solution. 

The CRM integrations help the marketing team inform the sales team about who is visiting your site. But, it is still tricky to measure how lead gen tactics such as releasing whitepapers are affecting sales.

In this article, I show how to measure the success of lead magnets even if you have long sales cycles, another requirement for seeing the full picture.

Note: Want to generate more MQLs that convert into actual clients? Sign up and try Leadfeeder free for 14 days to know which lead magnet works for your audience.

Matching up lead magnet activities to actual deals

If you have built a lead gen funnel then you probably have two key metrics 

1. How many people downloaded each lead magnet

2. How many leads turn into closed deals

There are many analytics tools we recommend, but it can be a challenge to match up these two stages to discover

1+2) Which lead magnet attracted leads that became closed deals

Bridging this gap would let you claim the kudos you deserve for your hard work, as well as providing a meaningful way to compare which lead source you should be putting in the most effort to promote.

Tools such as Google Analytics can measure how many people download your lead magnet, white paper or guide, but not whether those leads turned into deals weeks or months later.

Meanwhile, your CRM will measure how many MQLs are turning into clients, but won’t record data about which marketing activity created the lead.

You can generate this data by comparing your subscriber list to the Sales Team’s client list. 

Two steps to see which lead magnet was the most successful

The key is to use the email addresses to match up the data, which I’ll discuss in two steps

Put simply, first you will need to enrich the data in your email automation platform, then match it up to CRM or payment data

Step 1 - Tag contacts with how they entered your funnel

Most major email platforms will let you tag subscribers with extra information. This might be the URL of the signup page or the name of the file they downloaded.

So set up an automation to tag subscribers with which lead magnet they downloaded.

The aim is to be able to identify how people are entering your funnel instead of just having them appear in your subscriber list out of nowhere.

I can’t cover every platform, but as two examples:

HubSpot - You can use HubSpot’s automations to enrich contacts when they download a lead magnet. 

Create a static list for each lead magnet, then add an automation step to add contacts to the relevant list after they complete the form.

MailChimp - If you use MailChimp, you can add tags into your automations. 

Create a tag for each lead magnet, then tag contacts with the relevant tag depending on which lead magnet they downloaded.

Step 2 - Find the revenue or deal status of each contact

The second step is to see which contacts progress through any follow-up emails or sales calls to eventually sign up for your service.

There are two main options to do this, each requiring a bit of Excel manipulation

Option A - Export and merge the lists from your CRM and email platforms

The aim is to match up the email addresses of people on your subscriber list with customers in your CRM. That way you can see the source tag (from step 1) for each client. To do this you will need to:

1. Export the list of subscribers, then tidy it up so it is just email addresses and source tags.

2. Export the list of leads the CRM and again tidy it up into only email address and deal status

3. Use a VLookup to attach the sale to their subscriber entry

4. To see how many closed deals came from each lead magnet [how to organize it as deals per tag]

Option B - Integrate your email platform with your payment processor

Alternatively, if your company collects payments through an online gateway it is often possible to send this revenue information to your email platform.

These integrations are commonly used to monitor revenue per email blast, but they can also let you see revenue per tag. To measure this, you should:

1. Export the list of subscribers, then tidy it up so it is just email addresses, source tags and revenue.

2. To see how many deals came from each lead magnet create a pivot table between the tag that’s applied for each lead magnet, and the number of leads and revenue that were generated by those contacts.

Bonus option C - Use a funnel analytics tool like SegMetrics

There are funnel analytics tools designed to bridge these data silos and look at performance through the whole marketing-sales cycles. SegMetrics will directly collect information from multiple sources, such as ad campaign data and email subscriber tags to let companies analyze their full customer journeys.

Going beyond MQL stats

Data-focused marketing is a powerful tool...but only when we have the right data.

Measuring which marketing activities bring in MQLs is a great start, but with a bit of creativity we can go further to measuring actual closed deals and revenue.

The aim should be to see how each marketing activity contributed to a company’s bottom line. 

We should want to see which sources generated eventual clients, not just leads who ticked a few criteria.

Note: Want to generate more MQLs that convert into actual clients? Sign up and try Leadfeeder free for 14 days to know which lead magnet works for your audience.