Marketing
November 17, 2021

Which SaaS solutions can best measure your marketing performance?

By
Amandine Fernandez
Head of Acquisition
Many SaaS solutions can help you measure the performance of your digital campaigns. From Google Data Studio to out-of-the-box solutions, there's no shortage of choices. Yet the challenge remains the same: gathering data from all channels with one tool.

Three simple letters and a whole program: KPI, or Key Performance Indicator. A digital marketing campaign is based on a strategy around clear and measurable objectives. The first steps, then, are establishing goals and measuring progress toward them.

The good news is that evaluating the effectiveness of a marketing campaign is much easier in the online world than offline. Traffic, numbers of new visitors, leads, shares on social networks, and sales are all good indicators to be aware of, but they're typically scattered across many tools. Compiling them manually would thus become tedious and time-consuming. Therein lies the usefulness of solutions capable of uniting all the KPIs to give them broader meaning.

Which KPIs should I monitor?

It all starts with the key question: what do you want to measure?

01. Measure your website's attractiveness

Before you can achieve your marketing goal, whatever it may be, you need to attract visitors to your site and then get them to act or become interested in your products. The main indicators are as follows:

  • the number of unique visitors
  • the number of loyal visitors (close to becoming customers)
  • engagement (time spent on the website, number of page views)
  • navigation path (path, pages, and contents most consumed)

02. Measure the results of your marketing campaigns

  • number of leads generated
  • lead generation rate (percentage of visitors who leave you information via a contact form or newsletter subscription)
  • acquisition cost and average per channel

03. Measure sales effectiveness

Your main goal is to grow commercially, so the KPIs are as follows:

  • total revenue and number of sales
  • amount per customer
  • conversion and response rates
  • income per channel

04. Measure your brand image and customer loyalty

Is your company well known? Does it have a good reputation? Measure: brand awareness and share of voice through mentions (in the media, on social networks, in search intentions). Are your customers so satisfied that they recommend you? Regularly evaluate your net promoter score (NPS).That's about it for the main KPIs, but the Content Marketing Institute goes even further and lists many more:

KPI indicators

Which SaaS solutions should you use to measure your marketing performance?

Gathering so many KPIs implies aggregating data from many sources and solutions: web and social media analytics, SEO tools, marketing automation, CRM... To make this data "activable" (i.e., sufficiently intelligible to inform management), it must be collected, aggregated, correlated, and visually displayed. This is complicated to do by hand each month in spreadsheets or in a presentation. That's why SaaS-based data visualization tools have multiplied.

Firstly, there are tools that are similar to dashboard construction workshops. They require technical knowledge to connect the data as well as to elaborate the restitutions.

Google Data Studio

Google Data Studio

Widely adopted because it's free for the most part, Google Data Studio allows users to aggregate, visualize, and share data—directly when they come from the Google environment (Google Analytics, Adwords...), but less directly for third-party sources such as social networks, marketing automation solutions). That said, many paid "connectors" are available. These options vary in the wide variety of visual outputs they offer, including tables, maps, and diagrams) and in the simplicity of access rights management.

Power BI

This is like the alter ego of Google Data Studio in the Microsoft environment. Here too, the solution offers a wide range of visual representations. But, here too, technical skills will be required to connect data sources and prepare them to obtain the most readable results. Not surprisingly, Power BI easily interacts with Microsoft's offerings. Note that a partnership with Adobe facilitates access to analytics of Adobe marketing solutions.

There are other solutions on the market like Databox that are more ready to use and require less technical expertise. They offer direct integration with third-party solutions or restitution models and layouts that accelerate dashboard design.

Beware of "black box" SaaS software

While all companies (within their resources) can find a SaaS marketing solution for a global view of performance, these solutions must agree to share their data. A selection criterion that is sometimes underestimated. Every solution—from a complete marketing automation platform to a simple email tool—includes a dashboard. Beware, as not all martech solutions define "sharing" in the same way. Some are even like "black boxes" from which it is very difficult to extract data.

The ideal scenario is a specific dashboard within each solution, while keeping the possibility of integrating this data when needed. This is the scenario Letsignit offers to measure performance of email signature campaigns. Within the solution itself, it is possible to analyze the performance of the current campaigns, to identify the best performing signatures or the groups of users for whom the signatures are the most clicked.

Moreover, Letsignit also proposes to rely on UTMs (parameters inserted in the URL) to read the performance of email signatures through web analytics and thus integrate these data in a dashboard produced with a specialized tool. Useful for example to compare the performance of your email signatures to other channels used for the same campaign (emails, posts on social networks, content hosted by third party sites, sponsored links).

The data from your martech solutions can therefore "speak" as long as you are able to aggregate it and render it within a global performance measurement system.

Not yet capitalizing on the potential of your email signatures?

Find out now why email signatures are THE channel to bank on in the future—for both your external campaigns and internal communications! Inexpensive, non-intrusive, and ultra-customizable, you'll quickly be won over. 👇

About the author
Amandine is the Head of Acquisition at Letsignit! Initially a content specialist, she now actively contributes to the profitability of acquisition channels: SEO, SEA, SMA, SMO... Amandine is also one of the pillars of Marketing at Letsignit! For more than 5 years, she has been participating in and initiating marketing projects and campaigns that systematically reflect her vision, writing style, and creativity (which can also be seen in all of her colorful outfits that brighten up the day of everyone she meets).
About Letsignit
With Letsignit email signature manager, connect with your audience in a way that's on-brand and personal, while driving quality lead generation.
Frequently
asked questions
1
Is it possible to track the number of clicks on email signatures?

Yes, with the 'Campaigns' offer, it is possible to track the number of clicks on the email signatures of all your employees in the 'Statistics' area of the platform.

You can then access a detailed or global view of the number of clicks on the email signatures of each employee. You can use the search option to target a specific signature or a given period. Finally, you have the possibility to export all statistics to an Excel document.

If you launch campaigns with banners inserted in your email signatures, you can also access their performance via this same space.

2
Can we add links to social networks, our website, and appointment-setting applications such as Calendly?

With Letsignit, you can easily add social network icons in your collaborators' email signatures and link to your company pages. Also, our "attributes" feature allows you to manage personalized URLs for each of your collaborators such as their individual LinkedIn profile.

And that's not all: you can add links to an appointment-setting application, allow your customers to leave reviews easily, and integrate our 'Chat on Teams' widget to let anyone start a discussion via Microsoft Teams chat.

3
Can employees update their signature information themselves (number, function, etc.)?

It’s up to you! As an administrator of the Letsignit platform, you choose whether or not to grant modification rights to your employees. These permissions are managed on an attribute-by-attribute basis, which means that you can decide to allow the employee to change their phone number, but not the address of your premises, for example.

This feature applies to all attributes in your directory, including custom attributes created on Letsignit. When your employees change one or more attributes, your directory is obviously not affected.

4
Why it is important to standardize our email signatures on a large scale to ensure our identity and brand image?

It often happens that employees make their email signature their own: custom format, bad fonts, colors inconsistent with the brand standards... all of this has an impact on your brand!

A consistent visual identity is considered authentic and outperforms a perceived weak one by 20%. And, your customers are 2.4 times more likely to buy your products.

With Letsignit, take back control over your brand identity by standardizing all your email signatures. Our tool has many features that allow you to customize your signatures by department, by audience or by subsidiary. Not to mention the possibility of carrying out campaigns within your email signatures thanks to our Campaign offer.

5
What is the user experience like for our employees?

What is the user experience like for our employees?

  • If you opt for the Letsignit Add-in for Outlook, they will have a dedicated space in their Outlook account where they will be able to view the signatures and campaigns assigned to them.
  • If you opt for the Letsignit Desktop APP, they will be able to preview all their signatures and campaigns in this space. If they want to change their default signature to another one when sending an email, this will be done in their signature library in Outlook.

In both cases:

  • They preview their signature before sending an email and choose from signatures assigned to them.
  • Based on the permissions granted, they will also be able to modify their personal information such as their name, position, or address in these spaces.

In short, they have autonomy in their email signature, but you keep control on the field, signatures, and banners they can edit or use.

6
Can my employees have multiple signatures available to them?

With our "multi-signature" feature, your employees can benefit from multiple email signatures. No technical manipulation is required. Thanks to our Add-in for Outlook or the desktop app, they can change their email signatures as they wish with just a few clicks.

Regarding the creation of email signatures, you can make several variations such as:

Everything has been thought of to go further in the personalization process based on the recipient of your emails.

7
Regarding “Green IT,” have you implemented measures to limit the digital footprint of email signatures?

If sending emails has an impact, non-optimized email signatures also have an impact. An unsuitable format or an image that is too heavy considerably increases the size of your signatures... and therefore, your emails.

As a responsible economic actor, we contribute to reducing our CO2 emissions and those of our customers in several ways:

  • Optimization of the weight of signatures and campaigns in emails.
  • Green features: lightening of signatures during response/transfer emails, possibility of not embedding images, implementation of lighter signatures for internal exchanges.
  • Integration of a 'Switch to Teams' widget to encourage your employees to continue their exchanges via chat, rather than email.

As we are increasingly involved in sustainability initiatives, our priority in 2023 is to develop even more green IT functionality.

8
Regarding “Green IT,” have you implemented measures to limit the digital footprint of email signatures?

If sending emails has an impact, non-optimized email signatures also have an impact. An unsuitable format or an image that is too heavy considerably increases the size of your signatures... and therefore, your emails.

As a responsible economic actor, we contribute to reducing our CO2 emissions and those of our customers in several ways:

  • Optimization of the weight of signatures and campaigns in emails.
  • Green features: lightening of signatures during response/transfer emails, possibility of not embedding images, implementation of lighter signatures for internal exchanges.
  • Integration of a 'Switch to Teams' widget to encourage your employees to continue their exchanges via chat, rather than email.

As we are increasingly involved in sustainability initiatives, our priority in 2023 is to develop even more green IT functionality.

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