The ABCs of CLR

Imagine for a moment that you are browsing your favorite online store. It doesn’t matter if the store is Target or Neiman Marcus; no judgement here. Now, envision yourself finding a few items that you love. You quickly add them to your “shopping cart,” checkout, and eagerly await your virtual receipt with tracking information. Your phone “dings” with a new email message. Yay! You check your order confirmation email only to find the following note: “We can’t guarantee that your purchase will result in your receipt of the expected product.”

As unbelievable as that seems, it’s an extreme analogy for how many executives feel about marketing spend. As marketers, we invest money, time, and resources on marketing automation programs with the goal of increasing revenue, customer lifetime value and retention. In many cases, dollars are invested in various demand generation, lead nurturing, and retention efforts without proof of real return. As much as we would love to see the fruits of our labor and report on key metrics, it’s not always clear where to start, or even what is required. We continually hear the term “closed-loop reporting,” and although it sounds like the exact solution to our problem, it remains an elusive target to many.

What is Closed-Loop Reporting and Why is it Important?

Closed-loop reporting (CLR) provides marketers with a full view of what is and isn’t working. With CLR, marketing activities are tracked through the buyer’s journey and tied to opportunities and revenue. This provides visibility into marketing’s true return on investment. More and more CFOs (and CMOs) are asking marketers to provide detailed reports on marketing’s revenue gains. It’s no longer about campaign engagement metrics. It’s about adding dollars to the top line and increasing the bottom line.

But true closed-loop reporting goes deeper than just dollars and cents. By its very name, closed-loop implies visibility from the beginning of the funnel to the end of the funnel and all points leading back. If done properly, it provides insight into not just leads and opportunities, but also each stage of the sales process. It helps us answer critical questions about our marketing initiatives. How many marketing qualified leads did this campaign create? Of those leads, how many turned into sales qualified leads? Sales opportunities? Won business? Armed with this knowledge, we have the power to optimize our activities to garner the deepest engagement that goes far beyond opens, clicks, and form submits.

Another important perk of closed-loop reporting is the inevitable alignment that must happen between sales and marketing. Is it easy to get there? No. Is it crucial? Yes. Otherwise, the information you see on your dashboards and reports may not tell the true story. As they say, “garbage in, garbage out.” To properly administer closed-loop reporting, sales/marketing alignment needs to be top priority. Sales and marketing must work together to define the proper funnel stages, lead flow process, and qualified lead criteria. A proper feedback process also has to be defined to ensure marketing receives the information it needs to properly “close the loop.”

What’s Involved in Implementing Closed-Loop Reporting?

Up-Front Homework
Sales/Marketing Alignment
As mentioned previously, it’s crucial to bring these teams together in order to solidify process flow and key definitions. Once in place, the marketing team needs to work through key decisions related to campaign tracking and conversion.

Campaign Costs
Develop a consistent way to track costs for your campaigns. This may sound simple, but it can be quite challenging. Costs go far beyond the tangible items such as asset creation, event fees, infrastructure costs, etc. Costs also include resources and internal time dedicated to the creation and execution of campaigns. Consider creating a standard spreadsheet for your marketing team to properly and consistently track the costs of your marketing initiatives.

Response Definition
As you visualize your campaign goals, be sure to think strategically about what actions signify a true response to your campaign. In the CLR world, a response indicates interest and should trigger campaign association for that particular lead. Keep in mind that a response can come from a variety of sources, including email actions, form submits, and external activities such as event attendance.

Contact Association
An important consideration for CLR is how opportunities are associated with contacts. Should an opportunity be tied to the primary contact that the business was closed with, or all contacts that are apart of the opportunity? Opportunities can also be tied to accounts, and all contacts on the account, but this is typically a longer-term approach.

Revenue Attribution
Perhaps most important, and likely most challenging, is deciding how revenue should be distributed across campaigns. It forces us to ask which campaign(s) ultimately triggered the opportunity. Which campaign(s) gets the credit? Should it be the first campaign to which the lead responded? Should it be the last? Perhaps it should be an even split across them all? All are options.

Execution
If you are utilizing the Oracle Eloqua, closed-loop reporting can be configured to make the technical side of this process easier to manage. During implementation, once the above factors are defined, integrations are created to ensure data points are shared between Eloqua and salesforce.com (SFDC).

Without getting into the nitty-gritty details, the basic idea is that Eloqua manages the campaign components: logic, assets, responses and associated costs. As the campaign runs, Eloqua will send responses to CRM in the form of campaign members and member statuses. SFDC Opportunity data is configured to be communicated to Eloqua, which ultimately allows Eloqua to monitor opportunities (and sales) against campaign responses. Insight has a number of reports that allow you to gather full-circle visualizations of your campaigns and marketing efforts, however, the use of external business intelligence tools can seriously augment your reporting capabilities and give you greater flexibility in the types of reports and dashboards available to you.

If you are not utilizing Salesforce, but you still want to move forward with closed-loop reporting, you can. The decision requirements and pre-work will be the same (remember, garbage in/garbage out). Eloqua’s native closed-loop reporting configuration only works with Salesforce, but there are ways to share data with your CRM system, depending on your platform. You will also want to consider utilizing an external business intelligence tool that can aggregate data from your CRM and OCM (among others) to pull together the data and provide your “one view of the truth.”

Taking it to the Next Level
Once you are up and running with a standard CLR process, it’s time to think about taking your reporting to the next level (if you haven’t already). It’s important to continually brainstorm on ways to track all of your marketing initiatives, not just email marketing. Look for ways to tie all demand generation tactics to campaigns in Eloqua and your CRM platform. Webster visits, event attendance, paid search, 3rd party marketing, and even direct mail can be structured in a way to allow for revenue attribution.

Conclusion
More and more marketers are demanding visibility into the success of their initiatives not just because our feet are being held to the fire, but also because it helps us become better marketers. To ensure your marketing efforts are moving the needle, closed-loop reporting becomes essential. It may not be simple to implement, but the benefits are worth the effort.

If you have Eloqua and you need support with reporting, please contact us!  We love helping companies transform their marketing automation.