ROMI Calculators – The top 10 on the web

Calculating ROMI: Return-on-Marketing-InvestmentThe economic downturn over the last year has forced many b2b companies to take a closer look at their marketing spend, to see where they are getting their best Return-On-Marketing-Investment (ROMI). Better ROMI is one of the many reasons that more and more b2b marketers are turning to Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation.

My last post focused specifically on website ROI, and how relatively easy it can be to calculate your marketing ROI for your website and internet marketing campaigns. In that post, we also offered our own Gossamar ROMI Calculator as a great tool to estimate the ROI of deploying  Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation on your website.

In this post, we’ll go beyond website ROI, and look into ROMI for all your marketing campaigns, both online and offline. And to help you determine your ROMI, we’ll offer you our list of the Top 10 free ROMI calculators found on the web.

Before we dive in, a reminder that the next post will cover how you can build your own specialized ROMI calculator, should none in our Top 10 list meet your requirements.

The Top 10 free ROMI Calculators and tools on the Web.

  1. Yahoo’s PPC ROI Calculator. Application: Simple PPC (Pay-per-click campaigns) calculator, but limited to B2C businesses. May not apply to B2B because the Lifetime Value of a Customer (LTVC) usually far exceeds the profit of the initial sale. Format: Web application.
  2. 280 Group’s Adwords ROI Calculator. Application: Same limitations as Yahoo’s PPC ROI calculator, but this calculator is a little more detailed, showing a matrix of results for different CPC (Cost-per-click) rates. Format: Downloadable Excel Spreadsheet.
  3. Marketing Today’s Direct-Mail / E-mail Marketing Campaign Marketing ROI Calculator. Application: Direct Marketing campaigns. Again primarily for B2C businesses. Format: Web application.
  4. Mac McIntosh’s  Sales Lead Calculator. Application: A kind of “reverse” ROMI calculator to determine the marketing budget required to achieve a set revenue goal through sales lead generation. The data from this spreadsheet can be used to estimate ROMI. Format: Downloadable Excel Spreadsheet.
  5. Cymbic’s ROMI Calculator. Application: Calculate the ROI of both client retention and client acquisition through analysis of growth plans, customer turnover, and conversion rates. Offers some analysis of results and benchmarking to industry norms. Format: Web application.
  6. Gossamar’s ROMI Calculator for Inbound Marketing Automation. Application: To estimate the ROMI for B2B websites equipped with sales and marketing automation.  Includes interactive features to play “what-if” scenarios, and “best-practice” conversion guidelines. Format: Web application.
  7. Lenskold Group’s Basic ROI Spreadsheet Tool. Application: In-depth ROI calculation for both B2B and B2C. Jim Lenskold wrote the book on Marketing ROI. Next to getting an MBA, this is the best ROMI tool to look at all the variables for a very accurate ROI calculation, complete with net present values of future expenses and revenues. Format: Downloadable Excel Spreadsheet.
  8. Lenskold Group’s Lead Generation ROI Scenario Analyzer. Application: Another Lenskold highly interactive ROI planning tool that demonstrates the relationship between marketing and sales effectiveness (and costs) to manage profitable lead generation. Format:  Web application.
  9. Dragon Search’s Social Networking Media ROI calculator. Application: Focused primarily on larger B2C companies, this calculator tries to calculate Social Media ROI by assigning values to benefits like clicks, word of mouth, PR, and market research. Format: Web application.
  10. Frogloop’s Social Media ROI Calculator. Application: Intended for non-profit organizations with fundraising objectives, this is another Social Media ROI calculator that boldly tries to quantify the benefits of social media marketing. Again, not for B2B applications, but highlights the thought process of justifying any social media marketing investment. Format: Web application.

That’s it. A good list of free calculators for just about any marketing campaign – from the very simple (Yahoo’s), to the more sophisticated (Lenskold’s).

If you’ve found a great ROMI calculator that should be added to the above list, just let us know by commenting on this post or by email to info@gossamar.com .

Until next time – Axel

Related Posts:

  1. The Shift from Art to Science in B2B Marketing
  2. Website ROMI – How to calculate your online ROI
  3. Building your own ROMI calculator
  • The Gossamar ROMI Calculator

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    This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 12:28 pm and is filed under Blog Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

    December 14th, 09
    Axel
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    13 Comments
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    13 Responses to “ROMI Calculators – The top 10 on the web”

    1. Eric
      December 15th, 5:12 pm

      Axel;
      Thanks to this list, people can now calculate the ROMI for just about any campaign by downloading a calculator and keying in the numbers. And for those campaigns which are not met by the available free models of calculator on your list, your next post should let them roll their own. Great stuff – thanks!

      Reply
    2. Axel
      December 15th, 5:42 pm

      Eric: I was really surprised to see a couple of solid attempts at calculating the ROMI for social media marketing. Kudos to Dragon Search and Frogloop for jumping in. As you can see from their calculators, this Social Media ROMI is not at all a straight-forward calculations. A lot of assumptions. But it does spark an idea for using both Inbound Marketing Automation and Reputation Management Analytics to take some of the “guesswork” out of the exercise. Perhaps I will make this an upcoming post.

      Reply
    3. uberVU - social comments
      December 28th, 11:31 am

      Social comments and analytics for this post…

      This post was mentioned on Twitter by gossamar: List of the 10 best (and free) ROMI calculators – get yours now! http://bit.ly/7fwBkF

      Reply
    4. Lars Tong Strömberg
      January 6th, 10:00 am

      ROI analysis will be the new black once companies understand they need to start measuring social media time/investments. Imo, traditional “DM school” analysis will be highly sought after.

      Reply
      • Axel
        January 6th, 11:19 am

        Good comment, Lars. Marketing has traditionally involved more of the soft skills, than hard analytic abilities. Sales and Marketing Automation will be a ROMI enabler for marketers, since it removes much of the headache of data collection, analysis, and interpretation.

        Reply
    5. Uri
      February 8th, 2:12 pm

      Thank you for this list and post. ROMI and general ROI are all the hype today because a lot of the marketing resources that before the recession went to traditional marketing channels, are now going into SEO and social media. These calculators are doing a great job in simplifying the calculation process and Dragon and frogloop’s calculators are making some good assumptions, but the main problem still remains; how do you measure the R in the ROI? While assumptions are okay, they are not concrete numbers and will never hold in front of a questioning BOD and shareholders, what really makes a difference is results – leads and sales – and the Challenge is how to show that your social media efforts drove those leads.
      What we need are simple tracking tools that will make it easy for the marketers to know what efforts drove those leads (BTW, great post on website ROI – really addresses this problem).
      The problem is that marketing automation and CRM systems became so complex that it created another “black box” that marketers don’t understand. You push from one end, and on the other end some results come out. It should be easier!
      Not to just plug my company, I urge you to look at some simple marketing automation companies, that present the data, but also give you a simple way to look at it and understand it. It will help you become the marketing hero you deserve to be.
      Check out Optify (www.optify.net) and specifically http://www.optify.net/real-time-web-analytics/

      Thanks again for this series of posts.

      Reply
      • Axel
        February 8th, 8:14 pm

        Uri:

        Thanks for your in-depth comment. I agree, finding the R in ROI requires an end-to-end tracking system, from initial contact of the prospect by marketing to closing the deal by sales. No single software tool exists today that can meet the particular needs of both marketing and sales (although Salesforce.com seems to be getting closer and closer). Luckily many marketing automation suppliers are now offering native integration with the most popular CRM systems, such as Salesforce.com, bridging these two worlds with a seamless flow of data.

        Like you, I like simple. If simple marketing automation gets the job done for the marketer, if it has enough flexibility to fit his business model (and not the other way around), and if it gives marketing and sales all the data they need to better attract, engage, convert, and nurture sales leads, then bring it on!

        Reply
    6. Eric
      February 9th, 12:27 am

      Hi Uri – thanks for dropping by and leaving such an insightful comment.
      As Axel said, “we like simple”, too. Our service was designed to make it easy for a marketing manager to begin using Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation.
      We are a one-stop solution – so its one simple phone call. Our experts then guide our clients through every aspect of designing, building and operating a state of the art website. Our custom websites are designed to suit each client’s specific needs, and we interpret their results and offer suggestions on a monthly basis. Basically, the marketing manager has to know enough to make the call – we do the rest. Not to say the marketers don’t have to know how to do their own marketing – they still create the campaigns – we just automate the running of them and the subsequent management of the resulting sales leads.

      Reply
    7. Investing in Marketing: Calculate ROI before you Leap « The RIC Blog
      July 20th, 8:02 am

      [...] calculate ROMI for just about any other type of marketing project, click on this link. Here you’ll find the Top 10 free ROMI calculators found on the web – for all your marketing [...]

      Reply
    8. Thomas Pisello
      February 23rd, 2:21 pm

      Would like you to consider adding to the list, an ROI calculator we developed from extensive best practices research, to calculate social media ROI, a web based calculator to estimate engagement levels and the ROI from those levels:

      http://www.alinean.com/socialmediaroi

      Reply
    9. Eric
      February 23rd, 2:36 pm

      Thomas; thanks for visiting and contributing a new ROI calculator! As you can see, we have added it to the comments section above, and will add it to our official list next time we update it.

      Reply
    10. http://www.wwefw.radabg.com/url/ipv6info.org
      April 10th, 12:03 am

      Thanks for finally talking about > Top 10 ROMI Calculators > Inbound
      Marketing Automation blog Gossamar < Liked it!

      Reply

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