Hi everyone! 👋 I'm really excited to be diving into the world of marketing automation from a data perspective. I come from a background in analytics and BI, so I'm always trying to translate flashy dashboard numbers into actual business impact.
I've been looking at a lot of platform comparisons here, which are super helpful for features and deliverability. But I'm trying to wrap my head around the *post-implementation* analysis. Once you've chosen a platform like HubSpot, Marketo, or Braze, how do you move beyond open rates and click-through rates to measure true ROI?
I'd love a detailed walkthrough on the key metrics that actually matter. For example:
* How do you effectively track and attribute pipeline revenue or closed deals back to a specific automated campaign?
* What's the best way to calculate the efficiency gain from saved manual effort? Is it just hours saved, or is there a more sophisticated model?
* How do you account for the cost of content creation, list management, and platform fees in your ROI calculations?
I'm especially interested in how you set up your data pipelines and modeling for this. Do you bring all the interaction data into a data warehouse and then model it with dbt? What dimensions and fact tables are crucial?
Any beginner-friendly recommendations for frameworks or even SQL query examples (conceptual is fine!) would be amazing. I want to help my future team prove the value of our marketing efforts with solid data, not just vanity metrics.