Preparing to Create Your Marketing Funnels

Creating marketing funnel reports in Act-On is straightforward. The harder part - and the part worth doing first - is deciding what you're actually trying to measure, so the funnel you build reflects your real sales and marketing process instead of a generic template.

Questions to answer before you build

Prior to building your marketing funnels, it's very important to review the following questions and how you respond to them:

• Do you have multiple marketing processes? What are they?
  • For example, you might need one funnel to model inbound marketing, another to model how you market to acquired lists, and another for leads that are returned to marketing. Or, you may have several business units that engage differently in their marketing and/or sales and therefore can't be modeled by one funnel.
• What lead-to-revenue cycles are driven by your marketing and sales efforts?
  • This will be modeled by the stages of your funnels – stage name, description, data population, query criteria. Each funnel stage represents the conversion of a prospect towards the goal of the funnel.
• What changes in the data indicate a conversion into a specific funnel stage?
  • This will be modeled by the query criteria you set for each funnel stage. For example, you might have a stage for early engagement as defined by certain behaviors. Or an engaged visitor may become a marketing lead when their record is pushed to the CRM with lead status 'open.' Or a marketing lead may convert to a sales lead when a sales team member opens an opportunity.
• What are the key data points you measure, analyze, and optimize for success?
  • For example, is it important to 'slice' up your funnel report by lead source, by country, by product line, by campaign type, etc.? This will be modeled by the reporting fields you select in your funnel stages. The funnel stage reporting fields are made available when downloading and filtering the funnel report.