SharpSpring Onboarding Part 4: Tracking Your Performance

If you’ve read the previous posts in this series, you should have a pretty good idea of what to expect from SharpSpring Onboarding. Your Onboarding Specialist will guide you through the platform, ensuring you know exactly how to (a) see who’s visiting your site, (b) send the right content to the right audiences, and (c) implement the best automation strategies for your business. In this final post, we’ll talk about how to put it all together and measure your marketing automation success.

Where Are My Leads Coming From?

Every business works with customers, and those customers have to come from somewhere. Whether it’s a $3 million Super Bowl ad, a trade show where you networked with new leads, or a Facebook post about a special new offer on a product, there are a variety of ways to get people to visit your site. Your Onboarding Specialist will show you how to attach a UTM code to the end of your URLS, so you can:

Understand which campaigns are driving the most traffic.
Improve any initiatives that need adjustment.
Keep track of which lead sources are generating ROI.
Prove the long-term value of your marketing efforts.

In the previous blog segment, Matthew showed you all of the different types of automations you can build. Here are some common lead sources that you can track when executing your campaigns in SharpSpring:

Social Media: Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram
Offline events: Tradeshows, seminars, webinars, billboards, commercials, radio ads, flyers, etc.
Emails: Newsletters, blog updates, promotions
Paid Search: Display ads, search engine links
Organic campaigns already made for you: Google search, Bing, word of mouth, direct traffic, etc.

Why are these important? At the end of the year or quarter, you’ll be able to see which medium is providing the most traffic and which ones are generating profits for your company. Your Onboarding Specialist will help you understand the campaign analytics and how to manage and improve your campaigns.

How Well Are My Emails Performing?

Back in part two of this series, Cassandra showed us how to create a powerful content strategy – but just how well are your targeted messages converting? Email analytics break down the statistics of email performance by showing you who is opening your emails, who is clicking on links, who is unsubscribing and why, and so on. Email analytics are your best friend when it comes to understanding the types of content you need to include (or exclude) in your automated processes.

Maybe you have multiple versions of an email and aren’t too sure which one should be sent out to leads and customers. Conduct an email A/B test with the help of your Onboarding Specialist to see which one your clients are more likely to interact with.

How Effective Is My Sales Process?

Whether we’re talking about B2B or B2C, every business has a specific set of steps to close a sale. Keeping track of your sales processes is easy in SharpSpring. You can:

Create and customize as many pipelines as you need.
Track the performance of each of your sales reps.
Understand which lead sources generate the most conversions.
Quickly access the communications your sales reps are having with leads.

Sometimes, you might just want to see the raw data. With SharpSpring’s CRM reporting, you can:

Easily export reports on sales performance over a specific time period.
Forecast sales in the future.
Monitor whether your sales team is following up with leads.
See which stages in your sales process are producing the most conversion.

Take Things to the Next Level With Utilization Score

Once you’ve logged into SharpSpring, you’ll quickly see how robust the platform is. There are ten major areas of SharpSpring you should be sure you’re using at all times to improve your marketing efforts and overall company growth. By the end of onboarding, one key goal is to help you achieve the highest-possible utilization score, by expanding in the following areas:

Landing Pages
Lead Scoring
Emails
Automation
Personas
Analytics
Sales
Media Center
Forms
VisitorID

Utilization scores are broken down into tiers to indicate how much you have progressed within a certain period of time. Throughout each step of the onboarding process, you are working your way to becoming a marketing automation “Dragon.”

Connecting the Dots With Onboarding

In part one, Chris showed you how to set yourself up for success by tracking your page visits, boosting conversions with lead scoring, VisitorID and personas, and connecting with third-party platforms. Next, Cassandra showed us how to create killer content, integrate forms, and measure its success with the Media Center. Then, Matthew showed us the power of automation in part three. And now, you know how to go back and see how it all performed, so you can make constant adjustments to maximize your efforts.

It all takes a bit of practice, but with the help of your Onboarding Specialist, you’ll soon be able to put all the pieces together and achieve anything you want with marketing automation.

Want to see all of these tools in action? Sign up for a demo of SharpSpring today.

This is part of a four-part blog series that covers the ins and outs of SharpSpring’s onboarding process. Find out how our Onboarding Specialists will set you up for success with marketing automation – so you can streamline your daily operations, convert more leads to sales, and calculate the ROI of your campaigns.

Read the whole SharpSpring Onboarding series:

Part 1: Setting Yourself Up for Success

Part 2: Creating a Killer Content Strategy

Part 3: Building Automations that Convert

Part 4: Tracking Your Performance