Marketing Automation Goal Management, Part 1

Introduction

Recently I finished writing a couple of chapters for an upcoming book, co-authored by several Microsoft CRM MVPs. One of my chapters was on Dynamics CRM 2011 Goal Management, which for me is turning out to be one of those the more I use it the more uses I find for it features. This article is the first of a series on what I find to be a particularly useful application of the goal management features: how to use them to manage marketing automation and email marketing goals.

For many organizations, the combination of email marketing and web content (e.g., this blog) is a potentially powerful marketing engine, especially when integrated with a customer relationship management system. And the goal management features of Dynamics CRM give us a great way of measuring precisely how powerful that engine is.

In these articles I’ll assume you’re familiar with the basics of Dynamics CRM goal management. (If you are not, skip to the end for a list of resources you can use to learn the basics.) In this article I’ll explain what I think of as baseline marketing automation goal management: using the ClickDimensions add-on solution for Dynamics CRM, how to build and track progress against goals for email marketing click-throughs.

In ClickDimensions terminology, what many people refer to as an email blast is called an Email Send. The interactions a recipient can have with a received email include the following:

• Bounces
• Unsubscribes
• Deliveries
• Opens
• Clicks

You can think of deliveries, opens and clicks as a kind of a pipeline: of the successfully delivered emails, a subset will be opened; and of the recipients opening an email, a subset will click one or more of the links contained in the email. The following figure illustrates these concepts using the last four monthly email newsletters I’ve sent in the form of these Email Sends:

The numbers you see here for Deliveries, Opens and Clicks are aggregated up from the specific email event records associated with each email send. From the perspective of goal management, the main questions are:

• What should the goal be for clicks? Pull a number out of the air? Go with some kind of “industry average”? Figure out a goal based on your specific situation?
• How do you actually create and manage the CRM goals?

In the rest of this article I’ll answer those questions and show you how to build a set of baseline goals for email marketing.

And just in case you’re thinking, well, clicks are fine I suppose, but what I really want to know is whether all this email marketing has any impact on sales!, I agree: for most organizations clicks are really just a starting point, and in the next article in the series I’ll extend the discussion to other measures of email marketing success. But clicks are important in themselves, and click goal tracking is a building block for everything else, so let’s start there.

One-Time Setup Activities

As I was building out my email marketing goals, I found it helpful to divvy up the required tasks into one-time setup and ongoing monthly activities. Let’s start with the setup stuff.

Create the Goal Metric

You can’t have a goal without a goal metric, so this is a good place to start. Here’s a view of the different goal metrics I use:

The first one in the list is the metric we can use for Email Clicks; here’s what it looks like:

Key points:

• A click is a discrete event – it either happens or it doesn’t – so the goal we create only needs to calculate an Actual value, not an In-Progress. This means that the goal metric only needs a single rollup field. In this case it’s actualinteger, because the metric is of the Count metric type.
• The source record type is the Email Event, the State (a.k.a status) doesn’t really matter (again, because this isn’t one of those situations where we’re looking for a change from one status to another: all we care about is existence), and createdon should be used for the date field.

Create a Custom View for Goals

Elsewhere I’ve written about a unique characteristic of goals: that you find yourself creating more custom views for goals than for almost any other record type. This is because goals are aggregate records, and different goal records aggregate data of different types: a sales goal might aggregate information from the estimated revenue field on opportunities while an email marketing goal aggregates click counts. What this means is that a default system view such as Active Goals is generally pretty hard to interpret, since it includes a mish-mash of goals of different data types, orders of magnitude and so forth.

Here’s a custom view I use for my monthly goal tracking for my monthly emails, with the Goal Progress (Count) selected in the chart pane:

In my experience, there are two main factors to consider to create meaningful goal views:

• The included goal records should be based on the same Goal Metric. Then you know that the data types are all comparable.
• The Target values should be of the same order of magnitude. If one goal’s target is $100,000,000 and another’s is $10,000, the Goal Progress (Money) chart will not be very meaningful.

Create a Custom Dashboard

Dashboards are more important for goals than for other record types, for similar reasons as the ones I mentioned regarding views. Ad-hoc analysis of goals is confusing even for experienced users, so it’s generally best to create a more managed experience for your users. And that’s what dashboards are for. Here’s one I like for email marketing clicks. The top row displays charts for clicks by day for my most recent two Email Sends, and the bottom row displays the Goal Progress chart for the view I just described:

Key Points:

• Notice the sharp drop-off after day 1. It wasn’t as pronounced in February as it was in January, although I can’t put my finger on exactly why…
• Dashboards like this one I usually create as personal dashboards, and then share them out to whoever else needs to see them (or to a team whose members need to see them). This is because system dashboards can be seen by everybody who has privileges on system forms , which with the default security roles is everybody, but very few users have privileges to see the goal records displayed by the dashboard. Remember you will also need to share out any charts and views used by the dashboard if you take this approach.

Ongoing (Monthly) Activities

Every goal must be based on a goal metric, and the single metric illustrated in the previous section will work for any goal for clicks. However, for goals like the ones we’ll create here, rollup queries will be required to specify which clicks will contribute to each month’s goal. So in addition to creating a new goal record each month, an underlying rollup query must be created. Generally it’s best to create the rollup query first, so after doing that I’ll show you how to create the goal record.

Step 1: Create Rollup Query

The rollup query will be based on the Email Event entity, and look like this:

A few key points for creating these rollup queries:

• Remember from the introduction that the marketing email is referred to as the Email Send. It has a 1:N relationship to the Email Event, which is where the interesting action is. This rollup query returns email event record of the Click type, but only the ones related to my February email newsletter. I know it’s hard to tell since the text is cut off, but the highlighted area in the previous figure is the same Email Send as the one highlighted in the first screenshot in the article.
• You may have lots of Email Send records, so make sure you know which one you need to select before building this query. Usually the Created On field is how I identify the one I need.
• Again, you’ll need to create a rollup query for each goal, so make sure you come up with some good naming conventions. The following figure illustrates the convention I’ve adopted for my click goal rollup queries:

Step 2: Creating Goals

Once the rollup query is created, you can create the goal. Before creating the goal record, however, how do you decide what the target value should be? Remember, in goal management the Target value is manually entered: everything else (actual, in-progress values and so forth) is calculated. Personally, I don’t think “industry averages” are very useful for things like click-through targets. Plus, depending on things like how you construct the marketing lists you email to, you can influence how many click-throughs you’re likely to get.

For example, my Dynamics CRM email marketing list currently has about 2700 members and over the last four months I’ve averaged about a 12% click-through rate. Suppose I constructed a separate marketing list by filtering out all of the members who did not click through last month. If I emailed to this list of my clickers, I’d be surprised if the click-through rate wasn’t significantly higher than it is for the overall list!

What I’ve done is pretty simple: I calculated the average click-through % over the last four months (clicks divided by deliveries), and calculate what the target should be in a month by applying that percentage value to the number of deliveries. The following figure shows my highly scientific approach to this, where I use the 12% average to calculate the target values. On a going forward basis, I’ll probably use a trailing 4-month average to adjust the factor monthly.

OK, now that I know what my target’s going to be, here’s how to create the goal. The first figure shows the top part of the goal form, including the General, Time Period and Targets sections:

Key points:

• Notice the selection of the goal metric discussed above in the setup section.
• What should the time period be? My experience is that 95% or more of the clicks from an email send happen in the first few days, so a 3-month goal period might be a little long. On the other hand, I do get a few clicks even 2-3 months after doing an email send. In order to decide what the From and To dates should be, it’s important to know what they determine:
  • The Today’s Target field is calculated by dividing the target value by the number of days in the goal period.
  • The goal stops automatically recalculating at some point after the end of the goal period.
• The Target value is based on my super-sophisticated Excel model, rounded up from 297.24 to 300.

The following figure shows the most important part of this kind of goal, in the goal criteria section:

The rollup query is the one I showed above; this is a good illustration of how a rollup query can work to filter the records that will roll up when a goal is calculated.

Summing Up

If you read this far and still have my February email in your inbox, feel free to click one of the links and lengthen the tail of the February NYCU clicks by day chart.

In the next article in the series I’ll extend the discussion past clicks and discuss conversions and other potential revenue-generating activities. As you’ll see, that will require a discussion of forms like this one. In the meantime, if you know somebody who would benefit from receiving my monthly email newsletter, please forward this link to them.

Articles on Goal Management

Extreme Session on goal management:

http://www.dynamicscrmtrickbag.com/2011/10/06/extreme-crm-session-scalable-goal-management/

YouTube video on goal criteria:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAIh_vv3sF8

Creating sales goals for product units:

Part 1: http://www.dynamicscrmtrickbag.com/2012/02/13/crm-2011-product-unit-sales-goals/

Part 2: http://www.dynamicscrmtrickbag.com/2012/02/14/product-unit-sales-goals-part-2/

Part 3: http://www.dynamicscrmtrickbag.com/2012/02/28/product-unit-sales-goals-part-3/