Metrics for Marketing Learning Programs

A generation ago, training departments published pages and pages of course catalogs and schedules, mailed them out to employees via interoffice and snail mail and then waited for the phone to ring with managers and employees inquiring about and signing up for one or more courses. A lot of advance planning went into this process because, once the catalogs and schedules were printed, it was costly to make revisions. Success was measured in terms of minimizing change and adherence to the set schedule.

However, today your learning catalog is online, and making a change usually is as quick and cost-effective as pulling out your keyboard and tapping the keys a few times. Built-in catalog capabilities such as audit trails easily can track the number of catalog and schedule changes over periods of time.

Marketing professionals love to use targeted mail lists that have been prequalified and sorted by various characteristics including industry, job title, geographic location and more. There is no need to pay top dollar for your targeted list, as marketing professionals do. If you choose the right one, your learning management system (LMS) can be a perfect marketing tool for learning.

The LMS has been elegantly defined as the system that gets the right learning to the right people at the right time and in the right format. The LMS and its ability to prescribe interventions based on job development profiles or learning plans is your best source for defining your target audience. Where marketing professionals would measure the success of their solicitation based on list conversion, you can measure the success of your learning initiatives based on the targeted alignment of your learning to the right audience and its consumption of that learning.

The LMS also is great at capturing learning marketing data and the transactions that equate to conversions. Unfortunately, this is usually where the LMS stops. Although it is wonderfully data rich, at the same time it often is very weak at reporting on the data it collects and stores. In most cases, you are left to fumble with inadequate tools and the complicated LMS data model to pull out the information you need to track the success of your learning marketing initiatives.