What is marketing reporting?
Marketing reporting is the collection, analysis, and sharing of your marketing data across your marketing team and your organization. It helps you measure and track the performance of your efforts so you can make smarter, data-informed decisions.
Marketing data also shines a light on who your customers are and what they want. Without data and marketing reporting, you’re flying in the dark.
Why is marketing reporting important?
How B2C brands do business changes at lightning speed. From innovations around AI to unpredictable shifts in the market, it can feel overwhelming trying to stay ahead of the competition. But brands that understand and respond to genuine customer needs will always have an advantage.
The best way to understand your customers is to look at the data. Marketing reporting is the key to gathering and understanding that data, so you can see exactly what’s working and what isn’t. It helps marketers perform several key responsibilities:
Track the marketing metrics and KPIs that matter
Marketing reporting helps you understand key metrics like web traffic and conversions, social media engagement rates, and email click-through rates, and it can help you monitor strategic revenue metrics like customer lifetime value (CLV).
With this information easily available, you can track and compare performance across different channels and set up benchmarking against other brands in your industry.
Uncover what resonates with your customers
Marketing reporting allows you to measure the impact of your campaigns and automations to understand what your customers are responding to (and what you need to tweak). It also helps you dive deeper into marketing attribution to track what inspires customers to continue to purchase.
For example, marketing reporting might show you that your holiday campaign did better than expected or that your abandoned cart email isn’t having the effect you’d hoped. All of this is valuable information that can drive strategic decision-making going forward.
Optimize marketing efforts
With the right data and reporting, you can easily understand what works and what doesn’t, A/B test new tactics, and make changes accordingly. Experimentation and optimization are key to making better, faster marketing decisions.
Drive revenue growth
Optimizing your marketing efforts to resonate with your customers means more revenue and less wasted spend, whether that’s through improvements in return on ad spend (ROAS) or segmenting your campaigns to personalize your marketing for your audience. Reporting uncovers valuable opportunities to increase marketing efficiency and ROI.
Metrics and KPIs to track for effective marketing reporting
The list of marketing metrics you could track is probably as long as your neverending to-do list.
Don’t get overwhelmed trying to track every single action. The metrics you track and report on will depend on the purpose of your report and what decision you’re trying to make. It doesn’t make sense to include information about website bounce rates when you’re interested in understanding your email engagement rate, for example.
Here are a few key metrics you should be tracking for different goals:
- List growth metrics help you track how your lists grow over time. They include metrics like form conversion and subscribe rates.
- Campaign metrics help you understand and evaluate the performance of your email and SMS campaigns. They include metrics like opens, clicks, placed orders, and revenue per recipient.
- Flow metrics track the performance of automatically triggered messages, like welcome sequences or abandoned cart emails. Similar to campaign metrics, they also include opens, clicks, placed orders, and revenue per recipient.
- Attribution metrics like “last touch by channel” help you understand where customers come from and which channels are performing best.
5 types of marketing reports and how to use them
It doesn’t make sense to cram all your data into a single report. Different reports give you different insights, depending on the questions you want to answer.
Here are a few of the most common types of reports and how to use them.
1. List and segment reports
What they are: List and segment reports break down customers based on specific criteria to show which groups are most engaged with your marketing and whether your lists are growing.
How to use them: List and segment reports can help you track your list growth over time. You can break down subscribes and unsubscribes for each list in your account and filter that by attribution method. This allows you to see where new profiles are coming from and direct your marketing budget toward the highest-converting acquisition channels.
2. Automated flow reports
What they are: Flow reports show you how the automated flows you’ve created, like welcome series and post-purchase follow-ups, are performing.
How to use them: Flow reports help you measure flow performance, spot drop-off points, and optimize engagement. For example, a flow report can help you diagnose a broken link in an email or increase conversions by reaching customers at just the right point in their journey.
3. Campaign reports
What they are: Campaign reports look at individual campaign performance. Different campaign reports can help you track things like engagement, conversions, and campaign impact, as well as deliverability metrics like open rates, bounces, and unsubscribes.
How to use them: You can use campaign reports to compare the performance of different campaigns against each other, to see which ones perform best and optimize future campaigns accordingly.
4. Benchmark reports
What they are: Benchmark reports allow you to compare your business against other similar businesses in your industry and measure your performance against industry trends.
How to use them: Benchmark reports can give you a general idea of your performance against competitors or help you dig into channel-specific performance compared to industry standards.
5. DIY: custom reports
What they are: Custom reports answer specific questions about your marketing performance, including message, channel, and business performance. For example, you can use custom reports to dive deeper into a single metric or look at multiple metrics at once to examine cross-functional performance.
How to use them: You can use a custom report to analyze the performance of a specific flow, campaign, or profile property across key Klaviyo, integration, API, and custom metrics. This allows you to see identify if different marketing strategies work better across important key performance indicators (KPIs).
How to create a marketing report
Building marketing reports and dashboards is an important skill for any marketing professional. Many CRMs have marketing report templates that you can choose from, but not all report templates that come with CRMs are built with B2C businesses in mind.
To help marketers get started, Klaviyo has a library of pre-built marketing report dashboards. All reports include data like:
- Campaign and automated flow performance
- Email and SMS engagement
- Landing page and form analytics
- Attribution tracking to measure channel performance
You can choose a pre-built report or start building your own. Here’s how to build a marketing report:
1. Consider what you need to understand
Start by thinking about the question you want to answer. In Klaviyo, you can explore:
- Business performance: What’s my revenue growth over time? Which products are my customers purchasing? What’s my order fulfillment over time?
- Message performance: Where are drop-offs occurring in my message funnel? How much revenue are my messages generating? What messages are having deliverability issues? Which messages are more likely to result in a purchase?
- Channel performance: How is email performing? How does email compare to SMS? Is my marketing performing above industry benchmarks?
- Subscriber and segment performance: Am I growing my subscribers across channels? How do my different audiences engage and make purchases?
2. Find the metrics you need
Once you have a clear idea of what questions you want to answer, familiarize yourself with where the metrics live in your specific platform and work to understand how they’re calculated. Knowing your metrics will help you develop benchmarks so you can properly report on performance and spot trends.
3. Set parameters
Choose a timeframe you want to analyze (using Klaviyo Marketing Analytics) , along with other data points like customer segment or technographic data. For example, if you’re trying to understand how SMS is performing, you might want to break that down by message type or location.
4. Review and distribute
Once you have the insights you need, you can share the report with your team, use it to show leadership how marketing is performing, or try experimenting with different tweaks to see how to improve engagement and conversions.
Start building marketing reports right now
Many CRMs can help you get started with marketing reporting, but Klaviyo is the only CRM built for B2C.
Using a platform built for your needs means access to more reliable and in-depth marketing reporting so you can get a better understanding of what your customers want. And knowing what your customers want—and delivering it—is the key to stronger customer relationships.
Get started with Klaviyo to start building better marketing reports today.