The Importance of Goals In Marketing Automation – AC Guide

• When planning a marketing automation, always ask yourself, “What am I trying to achieve?”
• Goals are an action you can add to your automations
• They are a way of measuring the effectiveness of your marketing. Used properly, goals provide an accurate snapshot of how a specific part of your marketing (or your marketing as a whole) is performing
• Critical to start automations by recalling your ultimate marketing goals
• Primary function of goals is to help measure the effectiveness of your marketing
• Helps avoid unnecessary steps within automation
• AC automatically calculates goal’s conversion rate and displays it next to the automation the goal belongs to
  • Conversion rate is the amount of total contacts that enter the automation divided by the number of contacts that meet the goal.
• Anatomy of a goal
  • Consists of four elements: Name, Criteria, Location and Action
  • Name
    • Label you create for the goal
    • Should describe the goal’s desired outcome
  • Criteria
    • Determines the nature of the goal
    • Can choose from hundreds of conditions
    • Can be single or multi conditional
  • Location
    • Determines if contacts are eligible to achieve a goal, based on their current position in the automation.
      • Below Contact’s Position
        • Once the contact’s position is below the goal, he or she can no longer achieve the goal even if the criteria is met
      • Anywhere
        • Allows criteria-meeting contacts to flow both downward and upward in the automation
  • Action
    • Next action for contacts who arrive at the goal stage but do not yet meet the criteria.
      • Continue anyway
      • Wait until conditions are met
      • End automation
    • Only affects contacts who reach the goal, but do not meet the criteria
• Golden rule of goals
  • One-time achievement: If a contact meets the criteria of a goal, that achievement is permanent. That is, goal-fulfilled contacts always skip to the goal position the moment they enter the automation.
  • Connected path not required: Goals do not need to be on a connected path in order for the contact to jump to the goal and pass through them. The automations pictured below achieve the same outcome when the “Enrolled in Course” criteria are met.
  • No outsiders: In order to achieve goals, contacts must be in the same automation the goals are in. If contacts meet the criteria but are not in the correlating automation, no action occurs.