Marketing automation software helps you gain efficiencies in your marketing by automating tasks and freeing up your team to execute strategically. It helps you drive more leads, turn leads into sales, and optimize your spend.
Reports from your marketing automation platform help team and company leaders see how the team and the platform are performing. By providing insights into core marketing automation functions and their results, these reports can fine-tune decision-making, increase profitability and optimize spending for the best outcomes.
What is a marketing automation report?
Marketing automation reports are documents that provide business insights based on marketing data generated over a given period. These reports let you know how the marketing teams is performing — including areas of excellence and areas that require improvement.
When used optimally, marketing automation systems let you automate processes, such as email delivery, dynamic list creation and list segmentation. The software helps you build pipeline and revenue, optimize the customer journey and create lifelong customers.
Reports from your marketing automation platform teach you what’s happening with your prospects and how they are moving through your funnel.
Marketing automation reports in Insightly
Below are details about some report examples from Insightly’s CRM platform.
Email Reports
Email marketing is one of the standout digital marketing tactics and its a core function of a marketing automation platform. When done correctly, you gently remind customers of your presence and provide them with a little value for free. But email campaigns can only be successful if you accurately segment customers and track their effectiveness.
An Email Performance Report lets decision-makers analyze statistics to measure how well emails perform. In a few clicks, you can view the following information about your sent emails:
- Email Name
- Date Sent
- Emails Sent
- Emails Delivered
- Percentage Delivered
- Hard Bounces
- Soft Bounces
- Total Opens
- Unique Clicks
- Total Clicks
- Total Opt Outs
- Open Percentage
- Total Click-Through Rate
- Unique Click-Through Rate
- Click to Open Ratio
- Opt Out Rate
Some platforms, including Insightly, also have the power to detect clicks from bots and filters them from your email report to provide an accurate picture.
Use Cases
The use cases for email reporting are practically endless, but let’s look at a couple in detail:
- You can view the number of opens and unique clicks for every sent email from a single employee. This provides you with information, such as the time of year emails are most effective at your company and whose emails get the most clicks.
- There are ways to drill down even deeper, such as filtering the report to display all emails with an open rate higher than 90% over the past 120 days. This lets team members review subject lines to see what resonates with your target audience, so they can refine future campaigns.
File Reports
Your marketing department uses your website to teach web users about your product or service, and you can track their effectiveness with Insightly. The File Activity Overview gives you an outline of the files you’ve uploaded for your platform to track, including information, such as:
- File Name
- Total Number of Views
- Total Number of Unique Views
Use Cases
Here are some use cases for file reporting:
- You can review every file each team member has created and see how many times each file has been viewed. With a marketing team that’s briefed to upload files in their own names on the system, you can see who creates the most compelling content, and train the rest of the team based on what customers respond to.
- By comparing the number of total views and unique views a file has over a given period, you learn how frequently people return to read your web pages. If something keeps drawing consumers to your site, it’s worth exploring and replicating.
Form Reports
The forms on your website are gateways to customers’ contact details and other useful data. It’s crucial that your marketing team has the ability to track metrics associated with the submission forms, so you can place them in the right positions and use buttons and calls to action that convert.
Use Cases
Analyzing the performance of your site’s submission forms lets you refine the website to increase conversions. Let’s look at a couple of specific use cases:
- Google reCAPTCHA filters the humans from the bots to minimize spam and provide you with accurate statistics regarding how visitors interact with your content. You can review a list of all forms with and without reCAPTCHA to get an instant view of how many real vs. fake submissions you’ve received in a set period.
- You can view all forms with a submission rate over 50 to get an idea of what makes prospects hand over their details. Web forms are a crucial part of a consumer’s online experience — and your sales process — so optimizing them is critical.
List Reports
Within a marketing automation platform, you can create three types of lists, known as static, dynamic and email test lists. These records of your prospects, which can be added automatically or manually, can help you effectively manage your database. Your marketing team can create separate lists for each customer segment, campaign and touchpoint on the customer journey.
List reports let you view the following:
- List Name
- Folder
- Prospect Count
- List Type
- Public
- Date Created
Use Cases
Below are use cases for list reporting:
- It’s possible to sort lists by owner, so you can see the size, status and state of each salesperson’s lists. This shows the effectiveness of the methods each rep is using to source and nurture leads.
- View lists with more than 50 prospects to see which customer segments are showing the most interest in your company and which points in the customer journey generate the most leads.
Prospect Reports
Being able to turn prospects into customers is every company’s goal. Guiding website visitors to interact with your business requires that you have a deep understanding of your target audience. These prospect reports teach you about how leads go from prospect to customer, so you can refine the journey based on real-world, ultra-relevant data.
Prospect Report
The prospect report provides a wealth of data about the people in your marketing automation plaform. It shows the following by default:
- Prospect ID
- Prospect Name
- Organization Name
- State/Province
- Country
- Date of Last Activity
- Linked Lead (if applicable)
- Linked Contact (if applicable)
Use Cases
“Know thy audience” is the first rule of marketing, and one of the best things about using a CRM is the data you glean about your target market. The prospect report can tell you who’s visiting your site, where they’re located, who they work for and when they last interacted with you. Let’s look at three use cases in more detail:
- Organize prospects based on which organization they work for and how recently they interacted with your business. Your team can use this information to set their priorities and focus the best employees on the highest-value accounts.
- You can group prospects based on their location to see where your company makes an impact and where you find less success. Increasing marketing spend on people in locations where you’re popular and decreasing it where you’re less popular is a cost-effective way of managing your budget.
- It’s important to give potential customers the option to opt out of marketing communications. You can measure how many prospects are marked “Do Not Email” using the prospect report function.
Prospect Growth Report
With a marketing automation platform, your team can measure how prospects progress through the sales funnel. You can group the report by a range of filters. For example, a growth report can show you how many prospects are in each stage of the journey, how many times they’ve been contacted and how many new prospects you’ve gained over a certain period.
Use Cases
Prospect growth reports let you view prospects and add filters to gain insights. For example:
- You can view how many prospects have been added to your marketing automation platform over a set period. This can help with forecasting for the future or measuring the success of the sales process across different periods.
- Viewing all prospects from one organization helps ensure you’re allocating resources efficiently.
Lead Conversion Report
When your marketing automation platform and CRM work together, you add potential customers to a predefined list of prospects and convert them to leads once they’re qualified. Once your team qualifies a lead, it moves through to the new opportunity page. From here, your salespeople can work their magic and nurture the qualified lead through the sales process.
Use Cases
Here are some use cases for the lead conversion report:
- You can view how many prospects converted over any given period, helping you measure your team’s performance and keep track of your sales processes‘ health.
- It’s possible to view all new prospects from a specific organization that have converted, which means your sales managers can optimally allocate labor and responsibilities.
Redirect Link Reports
There are a lot of complicated elements relating to search engine optimization and your website, including redirect link strategies. These let you maintain link authority from discontinued URLs, so customers effortlessly reach the most relevant backup option when a requested page leads to a dead end. You can review and analyze the performance of each redirect link created in your Insightly Marketing account.
Redirect Link Performance Report
The redirect link performance report displays the following information:
- Link Name
- Destination URL
- Total Clicks
- Unique Clicks
- Date Created
Use Cases
Through a redirect link report, users can:
- View a list of every redirect link on a website and all related statistics to analyze whether their current strategy is keeping visitors on the site.
- View a list of how many redirect links have a unique click count higher than 25
Visitor Reports
Visitor reports are exceptionally useful for your sales process and prospecting, but they also provide unparalleled insights into your website visitors and content. Let’s look at some visitor reports decision-makers can take advantage of:
- Visitor Webpages Viewed Report: Track how many web pages each visitor views, how long they stay on each page and what makes them leave.
- Visitor Webpage Activity Report: View the activity of every site visitor.
- Paid Social Media Traffic Report: Measure the effectiveness of your paid social media campaigns.
- Organic Social Media Traffic Report: Compare organic social media traffic to paid traffic.
- Visitor Integration Activities Report: Learn which third-party integrations your site visitors interact with.
- Tracked Custom Event Report: Discover how website visitors interact with custom events, such as behavioral tracking examples that don’t already exist within Insightly Marketing.
Marketing automation report actions
Marketing automation reports are easy to generate and manage, but there are some important actions that help you get the most out of custom reports:
- Edit a report: To edit a custom report, locate the report you want to edit, open it in the Report Editor and either save changes to the current copy or create a new one.
- Copy a report: Open your chosen report in the Report Editor and select Save As. Choose a destination folder and new name for the file in the Report Properties popup, then click Save.
- Export a report: Extract raw data and create graphs using reporting software by finding the report you want to export and clicking the Actions dropdown menu. You can choose to export to an Excel or .CSV file.
- Schedule a report: You can schedule reports to run at specific intervals by selecting the one you want to automate and clicking Run Report. Hit the Schedule button, open the Schedule Report screen, assign the schedule and click Save Schedule.
- Set a smart alert for a report: Smart alerts only trigger automated reports if specified criteria are met. That could be only running an email report if it gets more than 300 opens or running a form report once 40 submissions are made. Use the Report Alert screen to define the schedule and set parameters.
- Create a grouping and add a chart to a report: Charts provide a quick overview of your data to speed up decision-making. Use the Report Editor to create a grouping and design charts.
- Add a summary field to a report: Summary rows provide snapshot views of your company’s numerical data. Add a summary field to a report that uses numeric fields in the Report Filter and Parameters section, then add a new field label and click Add.
- Report folder actions: You can create folders via the Reports page or Report Editor, organize them into folders, delete them and choose sharing permissions for each. Keep in mind that you can’t edit or delete default Insightly report folders.
Report Filters and Filter Logic
You can use quick filters and add basic filters to drill down into the details of your report data. For adding more than one filter using “and”/”or” boolean operators, you should also know how filter logic works:
- Quick Filters: Quick filters add an overall filter to your report and apply alongside any other filters you’ve added.
- Basic Filters: Add up to eight basic filters to a report and set parameters for each. When adding more than one filter, you’ll use “and”/”or” operators, depending on how you want to filter the information.
- Filter Logic: Use a process called nesting for reports with two or more filters that use “and” and “or” operators.
Why do you need marketing automation reporting?
Reporting is essential for all companies. It helps decision-makers use data to identify areas of improvement and locate areas of excellence, so they can focus on doing more of what works best.
But what makes marketing automation reporting specifically so important for your business? Marketing is often the largest operational expense for a company. Moreover, early-stage, high-growth companies will be spending a significant portion of their budget in marketing. Reporting lets you track and analyze your spend and your ROI, and helps you make sense of trends and patterns in your data. The broad scope of marketing automation reports helps you refine marketing processes, identify more opportunities, fine-tune team priorities and customize future campaigns.
