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Marketing Assessment Results
Let's see how you did!
Congratulations on completing your marketing health assessment! As you have seen, there is a lot that goes into a successful marketing program and regardless of where you currently stand, you now have a point A and are about to get an absolutely awesome guide that will help you get to point B, whatever that is for you.
Below, you will find a quick summary of how you ranked in each specific section and a couple of quick points to focus on. But that is just the beginning.
At the bottom of your assessment results, you will find a robust, insightful, and highly actionable guide on how to level up your marketing in all four of the areas we measured.
The good news is that you can review the guide in sections and it is broken down into beginner, intermediate, and advanced strategies. This will allow you to return to this time and again to improve your marketing, and ultimately, your organizational outcomes.
So without further ado, let's dive into your scores:
In this section, we took a look at the following:
- Channel diversity
- Email strategy
- Exit and entrance criteria per funnel level
- Content types
You have a vision for what full-funnel marketing would do for your organization and how to achieve it, but you have a fair amount of work to do to get there.
You are exploring some channels that are available to you, but have room to expand. You are emailing, but perhaps without the segmentation and strategy that you need if you really want to give your constituents the experience that they want.
While you lack clear definitions for what it means to be top, middle, or bottom of the funnel within your marketing strategy, at least you know that you need these funnel stages defined!
It can feel like a lot to try and tackle building a full funnel when you do not have a lot in place, so here are the things we recommend implementing, in this order:
- Define what your constituents are aware of, in terms of your organization, and the types of engagement and interactions that they are having with your brand
- Figure out how you are going to measure it - page visits, email opens, etc
- Outline the content that will help you to build out your funnel and assist you in measuring where your constituents are at in your funnel
- Decide on one or two new channels to reach your constituents
Be sure to check out the full guide at below for the inspiration you need to level up your constituent engagement strategy.
You are doing alright! You have a solid marketing strategy and are experimenting with building a true marketing journey for your constituents 🙌🏽
You know what it means to build a funnel and the value of doing so. Sure, you need a bit more content, some added channel diversity, a bit more clarity on funnel level definitions and some level of automation to reach full-funnel bliss, but you've put in a lot of work already. An automated full-funnel strategy is within reach.
So, what’s next? Here are the next steps that we recommend to level up your full-funnel strategy:
- You have funnel levels defined - so level those definitions up by adding inclusion and exclusion lists, entrance and exit criteria, and diversifying the middle of your funnel
- While your at it, mix up the bottom of the funnel with a variety of offers and some A/B testing
- Add at least one more channel and focus on a specific segment or funnel level within that channel
- Create a substantial piece of content to test in your middle funnel strategy, perhaps even adding it as a required step to reach the bottom of your funnel
Check out the full guide below for a more robust look at how you can action these recommendations with specific playbooks and tactics!
You have full-funnel marketing down - congratulations! This is not an easy place to get to and takes a lot of strategy, hard work, and tactical deployment and management.
At this point, you're best served by finding places where you can segment and personalize further, where you can expand and refine your criteria, and add even more channels and content to the constituent journey.
Here are the places where you can focus to be even more impactful with your constituents:
- Doubling down on segmentation will allow you to make incremental improvements that add up to big impact. Dial in your retargeting at each funnel level by adding behavioral elements, like CTAs viewed but not clicked, etc.
- Take personalization to a whole new level by using information about past behaviors or where someone is at in their journey to serve a personalized message, such as “Jen, you have donated $425 this year, can you donate $75 more to join the top 5% of donors who donate $500 or more per year!” by using tokens and calculated properties in your marketing automation platform.
- With more segmentation, you can better define exactly what each channel does for each audience at each funnel level, and you can create the content to meet your constituents where they are at in your current channels.
Ready to action all of this and dive deeper into the specific tactics and tools you can use to make marketing like this a reality? Be sure to read our full guide below!
We looked at the following elements when considering your progress in tracking your constituent journey:
- Scoring model
- Lifecycle stages and lead status
- Access to behavior and engagement data
- Criteria for engaged or disengaged
You are starting to track your constituent journey and understand the importance of great data and data visibility, but have some room to improve to better understand your constituents and be able to forecast what is likely to happen with them.
Forecasting (or revenue operations) can be seen as an icky word for nonprofits, but, at the end of the day, most organizations do need to drive revenue in order to fulfill their missions and continue to operate.
Here are some steps you can take to better understand your constituents and how to connect your mission with what they care about:
- Develop a basic scoring model that considers engagement, such as email opens, page visits, CTA clicks, etc.
- Understand the difference between a lifecycle stage and a lead status and why they matter to your organization
- Define a simple lifecycle stage model, something like: Contact>Subscriber>Donor/Member>Past Donor/Member
- Begin tracking and updating lifecycle stages
- Implement a marketing automation platform that will allow you to track and easily access engagement data and use it to segment your constituents based on engagement
Of course, there is a lot more to learn and consider in order to take action on these recommendations and we have those for you over in our full guide below.
You have some solid strategies in place when it comes to tracking your constituent engagement. You know what pages are being visited, you have some behavioral data at your fingertips, and you have a pretty good understanding of how to use this data.
At this point, you are ready to stitch all of this into a more complete and comprehensive strategy that will allow you to make better decisions and optimize your marketing efforts.
Here are some areas to focus on:
- Make a scoring model that not only gives points for engagement, but takes them away for disengagement. Additionally, reconsider how much value you are giving certain actions based on how often they tie to an even more bottom-of-funnel action being taken, like donating, becoming a member, or signing a petition.
- Refine your lifecycle stages and measure how long the average constituent spends in each one
- Clearly define the difference between your lifecycle stages and lead statuses and use them to better align your 1:1 and 1:many communication efforts
- Use your engagement data to update lifecycle stages, lead statuses, and list membership
Yes, the above is easier said than done, but with the guide below you'll see how the right tech, tactics, and tools will help you get there!
Wow! Your constituent tracking is impressive and you are considering all of the right things! You can see what is happening as people move through their journey with you and understand some of the finer nuances.
So what is next?
- Move to three separate scoring models - one that focuses on overall engagement, one that focuses on health as it relates to donations, memberships, or other important actions, and one that specifically guides you on how your constituents are engaging with content related to your mission that is heftier than your standard blog.
- Use this scoring, as well as the engagements that you are tracking, to better update lifecycle stages and lead statuses
- BONUS: put your constituents into 1:1 cadences based on scoring, lifecycle stages, etc.
- Segment your lists further based on engagements that intersect with behavioral data, such as SYBUNTS who have a score above X or LYBUNTS who have clicked a CTA in the past 30 days, etc.
This is just a sampling of how you can take your already strong tracking strategy to the next level - check out the guide below for even more tech, tools, and tactics you can consider!
Segmentation
This section was all about how you are using what we have covered above to leverage automation in order to reach personalization and segmentation nirvana - that is the goal of marketing, after all. You want to ensure that all of your constituents feel seen and cared about, and there is no better way to do this than to listen to them digitally and respond automatically.
Here are are areas that we measured your current strategy based on:
- Engagement lists
- Behavioral, demographic lists
- Personalization and segmentation based on lists
- Smart content based on lists
While you have dabbled in automation, there is room for improvement. So let’s look at where you can first focus your automation energy:
- Start charting out how you are going to use automation to deliver assets and communications that are routine for your organization (think thank you messages, membership renewal messages, etc.).
- List out the user behaviors that you can currently track and measure. How can you use automation to personalize your marketing based on these behaviors? Can you send two different email nurtures based on pages and content that your constituents like to visit?
- Can you automatically update the lifecycle stages and lead statuses that were covered in the last section?
- When someone visits an important page, like your donation page, one basic automation to consider would be adding them to a list and then sending an email to someone in your organization to have 1:1 communication with that person.
While this is just scratching the surface of automation potential, it will help you to get started with a manageable program and then grow from there! Dig into our guide further to get more specifics and strategies to implement your for better automated segmentation and personalization.
You have a solid strategy for leveraging automation for optimal personalization and segmentation, but you also know that you can do so much more.
Now it is time to level up and start playing with updating properties/fields to drive further automation and personalization. Here are some things to consider:
- Create a calculated property or use a workflow automation to count the number of times that your constituent does something (eg. visits your donation page, reads your blogs, signs up for an event, etc.) and then use that property to create a list, personalize a page, etc.
- Create properties/fields that are “yes” or “no” for showing interest in a particular part of your organization. Use those properties to segment your email nurtures.
- Use the lists that you create with automation to personalize landing pages or change what page someone sees if they are on one list or another.
There are countless ways to upgrade your automation strategy and grow your impact - dig into the lengthy automation section in the guide below for specific examples.
You have all but mastered automations. You have loads of lists, nurture segments, and hyper-personalized campaigns running…but like any good marketer, you know that there are still gains to be made that will result in real impact for your organization.
So, how do you make the leap and improve your automation strategy even further?
- It is time to get really creative with your automation and start using multi-channel inputs. Dynamically update a landing page if someone has already visited it or if they come to that page from a specific channel, like paid social.
- Start to stack your automations - updating one property leads to updating another, which leads to a specific campaign being delivered, which the results in another property updating a list…and so on. This takes very detailed documentation but based on your automation scoring on this assessment, you are ready for it!
- A/B test your automation workflows - which automations are getting you the best results?
The number of advanced automations you can dive into are nearly unlimited, but you can find inspiration for your future automations in the guide below. Check it out!
Even if you have the greatest full-funnel strategy in the world that is tracked, personalized, segmented, and automated…if your reporting and dashboards are not great, you will not be able to reap the full benefits. You won’t be able to:
- Understand who is responding to your campaigns
- If your segmentation is working or not
- Determine who and what you should focus on based on who is responding, who is not responding, and what is working
- Measure if you are on track to reach revenue goals that are tied to your marketing
- Understand whether or not marketing is making an impact on development, membership growth, volunteer engagement, etc.
You know that reporting is important but need a strong foundation to build your reports and dashboards on. So here's some low-hanging fruit to get started:
- Define the top questions that you want answered
- Outline how you would visualize that data - charts, graphs, tables, etc.
- Ensure you are capturing the data to report on these things
- Create one dashboard that focuses on one thing, such as website performance or campaign performance
Reporting is the reason we do all of this - why build a full funnel, track it, segment, and automate if not to learn what is working or not and to iterate? Dig into the guide below to get more specific and detailed guidance on getting your reporting strategy dialed in.
You have some great dashboards in place but know that gaining deeper insights more easily would allow you to iterate faster and improve at the pace that you want to - so here is what you can do next:
- Create reports and dashboards that will allow you to measure specific assets and campaigns based on traffic source and campaign.
- From there, look at how specific segments or audiences are performing
- Next, pull these together to start to understand your constituent journey at a high level so that you can determine what to prioritize when it comes to A/B tests or new campaigns and assets to drive the most impact
Once you have this in place, you will be ready to move onto advanced reporting and start tying your actions to actual revenue or meaningful outcomes for your organization.
You get why reporting is so important, how to define the questions that lead to great reports and dashboards, how to intersect data for meaningful insights, and at least have an idea of how to tie these actions to revenue and keep an eye on the overall engagement of your constituents - well done!
Here is what you can consider measuring next:
- Forecasting reports based on user behavior and marketing activities
- Impact that marketing is having on memberships, donations, etc. for not only new donors and members but also existing ones
- Projected churn or growth based on overall constituent engagement as well as marketing engagement
Clearly, these are high-level ideas. Be sure to check out the full guide below for more solid examples to consider when continuing to build out your advanced reports and dashboards.
Get The Full Guide!
Your results above are only scratching the surface. If you want a deep dive into all four areas covered, as well as ideas, playbooks, and tactics to drive your marketing even further, download the full guide!