Marketing automation-best-practices

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Marketing Automation Best Practices

Opportunity and Operational Reality

Marketing Automation Best Practices Opportunity and Operational Reality

Econsultancy London

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Copyright © Econsultancy.com Ltd 2011

Published May 2011

Marketing Automation Best Practices Opportunity and Operational Reality

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage

and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Copyright © Econsultancy.com Ltd 2011

Contents

1. Introduction ..................................................................... 1

1.1. About this report .......................................................................... 1

1.2. About Econsultancy .................................................................... 2

2. Background ...................................................................... 3

2.1. What to expect when you’re expecting marketing automation .................................................................................. 4

2.2. Selecting marketing automation solution, or not ...................... 4

3. Why Marketing Automation? .......................................... 6

3.1. Realistically, how long will this take? ......................................... 6

3.2. Who should be in charge? ........................................................... 8

3.3. Does marketing automation really work? .................................. 9

4. Marketing Automation Concepts Explained, Then Expounded ..................................................................... 10

4.1. Listening tactics .......................................................................... 12

4.2. Preference centres, surveys, and progressive profiling ............. 13

4.3. Database integration .................................................................. 15

5. Individualised Content Tactics ...................................... 18

5.1. Dynamic segmentation .............................................................. 19

5.2. Lead scoring ............................................................................... 21

5.3. Medium as message .................................................................. 22

5.4. Timing tactics ............................................................................ 23

5.4.1. Auto-responders or triggered email ...................................... 23

5.4.2. Lead nurturing ....................................................................... 23

5.4.3. Frequency and cadence.......................................................... 24

5.5. Bringing it all together .............................................................. 25

6. Continuous Testing and Optimisation .......................... 27

6.1. B2B vs. B2C considerations, length of purchase cycle ............. 29

6.2. Workflow considerations .......................................................... 30

7. Getting on Your Way with Marketing Automation ....... 31

Marketing Automation Best Practices Opportunity and Operational Reality Page 1



1. Introduction

1.1. About this report This report was created to provide an unbiased look at the burgeoning marketing automation

industry. While optimistic about the potential of marketing automation (MA) software and

services, the report will not endorse any one vendor, service, or product. It intentionally skews

towards the experiences and needs of a B2B marketer, but will also address B2C marketing

automation.

We began the research process by interviewing many marketing automation third-party service

and software vendors. We talked to the individuals within those organisations that are currently

involved with hands-on implementation of marketing automation. We strived to get their

unvarnished opinions on what specific tactics and strategies have been most successful for their

clients, and what headaches a marketer can expect when attempting to implement them. We also

turned to high-level individuals within these companies for their opinions on strategy and big-

picture issues.

In addition to speaking with vendors, we turned to an online focus group of marketers that are

currently using marketing automation software/services for their opinions. This group was

randomly recruited from the current client base of multiple marketing automation vendors. They

anonymously contributed their stories of success as well as their frustrations with marketing

automation implementation within their own organisations. The online focus group consisted

entirely of B2B marketers.

The end result is a view of the industry that takes both vendor and marketer opinion into

consideration, and spans the services of many vendors and the experiences of many marketers.

All interviews were conducted between August and November 2010.

Participating marketing automation vendors included Eloqua, Manticore Technology, Marketo,

and Neolane, to whom we offer our sincere thanks for their candour, transparency and help.




1.2. About Econsultancy Econsultancy is a digital publishing and training group that is used by more than 200,000

internet professionals every month.

The company publishes practical and timesaving research to help marketers make better

decisions about the digital environment, build business cases, find the best suppliers, look smart

in meetings and accelerate their careers.

Econsultancy has offices in New York and London, and hosts more than 100 events every year in

the US and UK. Many of the world’s most famous brands use Econsultancy to educate and

train their staff.

Some of Econsultancy’s members include: Google, Yahoo, Dell, BBC, BT, Shell, Vodafone, Virgin

Atlantic, Barclays, Deloitte, T-Mobile and Estée Lauder.

Join Econsultancy today to learn what’s happening in digital marketing – and what works.

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2. Background Marketing automation, using technology to manage, scale and measure marketing, is not a new

concept. In fact, at its most basic level, marketing automation has been around for many years.

For example, using software to perform a mail merge, dynamically inserting the names of people

in a database into a form letter, has been a common practice among direct mail practitioners

since IBM made the technology available in the 1980s.

While conceptually similar to the original mail merge program, what makes contemporary

marketing automation software and services different is that they perform automated functions in

real-time, using nearly infinite sources of data, across multiple digital and even analogue media

vehicles. Now, when you visit a website like Amazon.com (while logged in), you will find that they

have dynamically inserted your name, information on your browsing history, information on your

past purchases, and based on all that information, products their predictive algorithms have

determined you are likely to be interested in. After you leave the site, you may get an email with

offers relevant to the items you viewed. If you purchase something, you may get an email with

information on a complementary product. This interactive communication is made possible by

marketing automation.

Much of the technology behind marketing automation was pioneered by B2C e-commerce

retailers trying to guide shoppers to relevant products. It made economic sense for giants like

Amazon to invest heavily in this kind of technology and build what they needed in-house. For

many years such sophistication was out of reach of most marketers simply because the cost

outweighed the cost-savings.

Lately, however, a nimble new breed of technology company known as third-party marketing

automation suppliers has started to democratise such highly sophisticated automation software,

in many cases deploying technology remotely as software-as-a-service (SaaS). By supplying a

relatively easy-to-implement back-end infrastructure to companies looking to try marketing

automation without a big initial investment and with minimal IT resources required, these

vendors are helping to rapidly increase adoption of marketing automation to mid-size companies

and even small business.

B2B marketers in-particular have been quick to take advantage of the services offered by third-

party marketing automation vendors. At present, many of the marketing automation vendors

have client bases that are heavily skewed towards B2B. Many of these vendors have built

applications that seamlessly integrate the marketing automation software with sales-side CRM

software/SaaS such as Salesforce.com. This is particularly useful for B2B organisations that

already use CRM and/or are heavily dependent on an internal or channel sales organisation. By

integrating marketing automation technology with CRM, these organisations are not only able to

more effectively manage the lead lifecycle through marketing and sales alignment, they also

accelerate the buying process by providing the sales organisation visibility to the leads activity

and online behaviour.

The VP of Marketing for marketing automation company Manticore Technology, Christopher

Doran, offers this definition of marketing automation:

“Marketing automation is a platform that supports a marketing business process which

enables marketers to manage and measure the marketing funnel, driving more

qualified leads to sales, driving revenue growth and improving marketing

accountability. Marketing automation is to marketing as CRM is to sales.”

A definition like this may sound vague to the uninitiated, but we can assure you that the reason

marketing automation is so hard to define is because it is breaking new ground. To paraphrase

Mr. Doran, marketing automation is a platform that supports the marketing process, enabling

targeted communications that nurture leads until they are sales ready, better management of

marketing programs and the ability to measure marketing impact on revenue. It is the invisible




back-end technology that enables better, faster, more relevant, more accountable marketing on

the front-end.

2.1. What to expect when you’re expecting marketing

automation When first evaluating marketing automation software and services, there are a variety of technical

and strategic decisions that must be made. Internal politics are nearly as important at this stage

as are marketing considerations. You must identify an Executive Sponsor to secure support and

enforcement. Then identify what your initial goals and objectives are. Which other teams should

participate in the selection process? How will success be measured / which metrics are most

important? Which skills are needed for the individual in charge of automation implementation to

have? What skills are needed on the team moving forward?

To answer these and many other questions, we asked both vendors and their marketer clients to

tell us what to expect when first getting started.

2.2. Selecting marketing automation solution, or not While the various vendors we interviewed were unsurprisingly bullish on the benefits of their own

solution, what they all agreed on is that individuals shopping for marketing automation should go

with an option that enables easy growth and additional sophistication over time, not the cheapest

option to complete the few specific tasks that are immediately pressing. The point is valid,

because most of the work on the client-side is ensuring processes are in place for having and

keeping clean data, and defining how leads will be handed off and managed between marketing

and sales. Next is getting the system configured, all of which must be done up-front, with support

from the vendor or one of their partners. Finally, you need to ensure your team is trained on the

benefits of marketing automation before the solution can be fully leveraged. According to our

client-side focus group, it can be a painful process for already short-staffed marketing

departments, and you really only want to have to go through it once.

Kristin Hambelton, Senior Marketing Director for Neolane offers advice and asks questions

prospective MA buyers need to consider:

“The first step is selecting the right tool. It should match your organisational needs.

Those needs vary, from the business and marketing perspective, then the financial, then

technical perspectives. There are a lot of solutions out there. Do you want software as a

service vs. perpetual license? How do you want to pay for it? Do you want to buy

monthly by subscription or pay for it all up front?

“Make sure you don‟t buy good enough – something that‟s going to meet your needs

right now because you want to get it in and get it done. That‟s going to backfire on you

because the one thing that‟s predictable in marketing is change. New channels and new

techniques are coming all the time and you need to be able to adapt. Buying a tool that

you can grow into is the advice that I would give. Look for open standards. If you have

an open system integration is much easier; that means APIs that you can write to.”

Jerry Kosmachuk, the Sales Engineer for Neolane, deals with the challenges of hands-on

implementation of marketing automation on a daily basis. He offers some sound advice for those

considering marketing automation:

“One of the key project benchmarks is flexibility and adaptability. You may have

marketing challenges today, so you go out and select technology that addresses your

marketing needs, but your practices may not be the right practices. You can automate

bad practices and never achieve success. Once you realise that, how adaptable is the




technology? If you implemented for a specific set of requirements and practices and

they‟re the wrong ones, how easily, how quickly can the solution that you‟ve

implemented adapt? Having a platform that is adaptable and can change with business

should be a top of mind metric when you select an application.”

Kosmachuk raises questions that each organisation must answer for itself, questions that would

be wise to answer honestly, taking into consideration the organisation’s short and long term

strategy.




3. Why Marketing Automation? Most vendors tout marketing automation as a way to make marketers more efficient, better align

sales and marketing departments, and increase the effectiveness of marketing through greater

relevancy. We were curious, however, to know what it was that attracted their clients to marketing

automation prior to purchase, so we asked why they had invested. It turns out that marketers

come for the same benefits that the vendors offer.

Hoping for greater efficiency, one focus group marketer offers the reason that there was a

“pressing need to streamline otherwise manual processes through an integrated CRM solution.”

Another tells us, “Our leads were being inefficiently handled. If they didn‟t buy after one or two

contacts from the rep, they disappeared off the radar.”

Another respondent says, “[We are a] small company with limited resources so [we] needed to

leverage automation [and] wanted a way to better educate our leads and provide touch points

without it being sales driven. [We] needed to give sales more insight into what was happening

within marketing campaigns and their assigned prospect accounts.”

Helping out a sales team was a common reason given by focus group members for investing in

marketing automation. An example of a reason given was that “integration with Salesforce.com

database was the biggest reason for change.”

Making the process more relevant and timely for customers was on the mind of many

respondents, one of whom says, “We had no easy way to market to early stage buyers who

downloaded educational material.”

Another marketer gives us the following list:

1. “To do more email marketing without increasing resources (people or dollars).

2. Capture leads via web site more efficiently.

3. Nurture and progressively qualify leads.

4. Improve quality of campaigns.”

3.1. Realistically, how long will this take? According to our focus group of automation users, on average it took three to four months to get

marketing automation systems in place and working well enough that they were seeing

improvements over the old system.

System Fastest

time*

Average

time*

Longest

time*

Integration of databases 1 1.4 4

Getting the first campaign in market 1 1.6 3

Complete migration from old system to new system 1 1.7 5

Learning the system 1 2.5 8

Seeing improvement over pre-automation success metrics 1 3.3 6

*Time in months

The focus group marketers who weren’t seeing the benefits they had hoped for all voiced similar

frustrations. Those that were having trouble with their programs typically didn’t allocate adequate

resources to define and document processes for proper configuration and use of the system. In




some cases, the wrong person was chosen for the job, while in others they didn’t have executive

sponsorship and were unable to get support and adoption within the organisation.

One marketer tells us, “Resource constraints severely limit our ability to take full advantage of

advanced campaign features.” Another complains, “Our supervisor thought it [MA] could

replace an Inside Sales rep - however, that obviously isn‟t true and programs of this sort require

hands-on management, collaboration between marketing and sales, and strategic thinking and

segmentation.”

The same person goes on to tell us that marketing automation “has improved efficiency in the

sense that we can develop a campaign, set it up, and let it go without intervention other than

looking at metrics, reports, etc. It has failed to do so in the time and resources [required] which

we do not have.”

The problem many marketers considering MA are facing is that while it is imperative that the

right person(s) be tasked with MA implementation, budgets for staff are shrinking. The irony of

the situation is that it takes money and time of an in-house worker to save money and time of in-

house workers. Neolane’s Hambelton offers some insight into how marketers got into this

predicament: “It‟s incredibly hard for marketing people to get budget for infrastructure. The

down economy actually helped last year. It sounds strange. Staffs got wiped out, organisations

didn‟t have people, so they said „what the heck let‟s automate and be more efficient‟.”

The takeaway here for anyone considering investing in marketing automation software is that

while it will save time and resources in the long run while improving effectiveness, probably even

a few months from now, you will need to put someone in charge of getting it set up, and educating

your team on how to use the technology as well as new options available with automation. That

process will be fairly labour-intensive, at least for the first couple months.

The marketing automation vendors we spoke with have a slightly different opinion on how

difficult the process of getting set up is. However, they all feel that marketers could start small,

then slowly ramp up the sophistication of their programs, adding tactics one at a time.

On the practical side, Jennifer Horton, the Best Practices Consultant for Eloqua, pointed out:

“Bigger budget does not equal bigger success. More time can equal more success if that time is

dedicated to testing and optimisation of any automated program.” In other words, just throwing

money at a problem won’t necessarily make it go away.

On the bullish end of the spectrum, Jon Miller, VP of Marketing for Marketo, thinks companies

just getting started with marketing automation should move quickly. He says:

“Think big, start small, move quickly. If you try to say I have to build everything at once

before I‟m live, you‟re going to have a three month implementation, and frankly, three

months from now your world is going to look different than it does today, and you‟re

probably going to have built some of the wrong things. If you just start with something,

like ten scoring rules, and turn it on, and then do the next thing and the next thing and

keep being agile and iterative and learning as you go... Three months from now, not

only will you have been live for two and half of those months and delivering value, but

you‟ll also have ended up at a better place.”

Manticore’s Christopher Doran represents the middle ground, arguing against rushing the

implementation process while staying focused on easy wins from the start:

“Marketing automation isn‟t an „all or nothing‟ proposition. It‟s a way of doing business.

As you‟re getting started, look for small wins that drive value across your organisation.

This can happen in a matter of weeks of implementation. Test, refine and retry. With

some wins under your belt, you‟ll look to become more sophisticated. With the proper

processes in place, within six months, you‟ll have significant business improvements to

report on.”




Similarly, Caryn Gray, a B2B Solutions Strategist for Aprimo, suggests:

“Know what your metrics are today and what you want to improve because you have to

have that baseline and then prioritise them. There might be low-hanging fruit you can

get to, but exercise patience and know that bigger gains don‟t come immediately.”

3.2. Who should be in charge? We asked our focus group of marketing automation buyers who had been most important during

the purchase and implementation of their marketing automation service. The most common

answer was the marketing manager, followed by the marketing staff and CMO. Not a single client-

side focus group member indicated that their sales staff was as important to the process as the

marketing staff. The reason why this is so interesting is that it is quite the opposite of what we

heard from the vendor-side individuals we interviewed. They see a real need for sales involvement

to ensure the implementation supports the lead management process across the two departments.

Kelly Abner, a Principal Consultant for Marketo Client Services, sums up the overwhelming

consensus among vendors on this subject:

“The biggest stumbling block [to successful MA implementation] is not aligning sales

with marketing. Getting sales and marketing to agree on what‟s a sales qualified lead

and what should be recycled back to marketing – that‟s a big chunk of the battle.”

Eloqua’s Jennifer Horton feels the same, telling us that the clients who have seen the greatest

success “worked strategically with key business stakeholders (outside of the marketing team) to

define sales and marketing business process, resource alignment, and campaign strategy as it

relates to driving revenue.”

Along similar lines, within our client-side focus group, only one person thought the CTO/CIO or

IT Manager was an important part of the process of evaluating and implementing their marketing

automation service. Again, the vendors we talked to consider this a huge mistake.

The Sales Engineer for Neolane, Jerry Kosmachuk, offers the following advice about IT

involvement:

“When IT is involved early, the process is typically smoother, but when they get involved

late, they start throwing up objections or red flags, and they tend to delay or slow the

project down. I‟ve seen them actually kill the project. If IT agrees with the approach to

use software as a service, then implementation is going to go a lot easier. We can

address all the performance issues and how the website‟s going to interact with the

marketing system that‟s hosted, and all those questions are going to get addressed in the

selection and sales process.”

When asked how to convince a sceptical CIO or CTO of the value of marketing automation to him

or her personally, Eloqua’s Jennifer Horton offers the following rationale:

“There‟s a report that came out recently about the cost of bad data, and typically data

discussions tend to apply to the CTO, and if you can show the cost to the business from a

data integration perspective, that‟s one way that their ears perk up and they get

interested. Marketing automation systems can actually help with the data quality

problem, and that‟s typically what gets the CTO to say „Oh! You could make it easier on

my organisation in many cases.‟ There are a lot of data points out there that talk about

what a bad record costs, and what that means to the bottom line of the business. Those

are typically the things that get their attention.

Clearly, while in the research and evaluation phase, marketers need to pull in people from outside

their own team. Sales staff, marketing staff, and IT all need to be able to have input into and agree




on the processes, metrics and data definitions that the marketing automation solution will use.

However, once those decisions have been made, someone will have to do the hard work of

implementation.

Kristin Hambelton of Neolane offers this advice on determining who will be the best person for

the job when it comes time to implement the decisions of the group:

“Once you select the tool you have to get it implemented. That means looking at people

and process. You have to make sure you have the right people, or train them, to use the

tool. The „right person‟ to assign is anyone comfortable with the data – somebody who

has worked with the database. You want somebody who‟s really operational or tactical,

or somebody who can be analytical.”

It may be that the marketing and sales departments are actually the wrong place to look for the

best possible “super-user” who implements the system, makes sure data quality is maintained,

considers technical questions, and acts as an instructor to the marketing and sales staff who will

use the system on a day-to-day basis. This person might come from a marketing analytics

background, direct marketing background, sales CRM background, or IT background. It may be a

cross-departmental team who manages processes and configuration of the solution. As we’ll see,

choosing the right people for the job becomes critical once money has changed hands and

implementation is imminent.

3.3. Does marketing automation really work? Simply put: yes, marketing automation works. The caveats, of course, are that how well it works

depends largely on how well the user wields it, and that it takes time for automation to build up to

its full potential. It is important to note that if a company invests in marketing automation but

best practices (such as those outlined in this report) are not adhered to, it is entirely possible that

the investment may produce few, if any, results.

We polled our focus group of marketing automation users to see if and how marketing

automation has improved their marketing. All were successful, but to varying degrees. Following

are attributes listed in order of how beneficial the introduction of marketing automation was to

each:

1. Improved time to market (campaign inception to execution)

2. Quality of reporting/analytics

3. Better cooperation between Marketing and Sales departments

4. Higher quality of leads

5. Fewer people/less time needed to execute a campaign

We also asked our focus group to rate the effectiveness of the various tactics. Keeping in mind

that this is only a poll with a small sample, following are the average ratings given on a 10-point

scale, with 10 being the most effective, for the effectiveness of each tactic tried.

Lead nurturing 9

Sales database integration 8

Dynamic segmentation 8

Lead scoring 8

Auto-responders 7

As you can see, marketing automation certainly has the potential to effectively improve

marketing’s impact on revenue.




4. Marketing Automation Concepts

Explained, Then Expounded In this section we’ll get into the specifics of marketing automation implementation and tactical

effectiveness. It is important to understand on a conceptual level how marketing automation joins

the technological back-end to the marketing front-end and sales CRM systems, as well as how that

enables various marketing tactics and improved sales intelligence. Many tactics are multi-step,

meaning some back-end process must first be in place before a front-end process can take place.

The following sections will present topics in roughly the order they must be completed.

Nearly every marketing automation tactic is designed to help improve marketing in one or more

of the following four areas:

Enable listening – Learn about individual consumers in order to better understand their

needs, based not only on what they are telling you, but the behaviours they exhibit.

Individualise content – Figure out what the most relevant information is for each

customer and using that to drive your communication strategy.

Time delivery to match need – Find out when different types of information are relevant,

and when they are not, and make sure each individual gets the right information at the right

time.

Measure and optimise – Once repetitive automation tactics are in place, effectiveness

metrics quickly build up, enabling insight into which programs are driving qualified leads into

the funnel and converting into revenue.

Neolane’s Jerry Kosmachuk offers these words of warning:

“A lot of people when they think of marketing automation just want a better way to send

emails – more emails faster. That‟s the wrong approach. You need to create a dialogue

with your customer. People buy from people. You want people to feel like you‟re

engaging and listening to them. When you approach marketing automation, it‟s not just

to automate getting the message out, it‟s automating getting the right message out at

the right time.”

In other words, as you build your marketing automation program, take a step back and ask

yourself whether you’re just building a system that maps to your sales process, or if you’re

building a system that maps to your customer’s buying process.

Looking at the feedback from our marketing automation client focus group, Kosmachuk’s

assertion that most people focus too much on email was confirmed. When asked what they had

already done, nearly everyone in the focus group had integrated their email and website with

marketing automation, but only a handful had done anything else with it. However, when asked

what they intended to focus on in the next six months, we got very different answers, indicating

that the group hopes to keep increasing the sophistication of their programs:

Voice of the client – What do you intend to focus on in the next six months?

“Lead scoring – haven’t come to internal agreement on processes but hoping to begin lead scoring to target our

marketing even more effectively.”

“Self-identifying process for mailing lists – still determining which list segments will be created and are most

relevant to our database.”




Voice of the client – What do you intend to focus on in the next six months?

“We would like to have segmented campaigns that would help our Inside Sales.”

“Mobile marketing via text messaging.”

“Nurturing non-sales ready leads vs. people who downloaded white papers.”

The precise nature of MA with the various features it provides, makes it difficult to focus on a

starting point. Caryn Gray of Aprimo offers advice on where to focus first:

“The first thing I always work on with clients is setting quantifiable goals. They can also

be qualitative. You‟re talking about a medium that can be personalised and basically

creating a segment of one, in which your messages would be different than mine. Once

you‟ve got identifiable objectives, you need a communication plan, which is a step a lot

of people skip. A communication map that says we‟re going to mix a bunch of pre-

determined, feel-good, branding-type messages that keep the high brand affinity and

aspirational [sic] messages out in front of your customers, but then you mix that with

behaviour driven messages and automated messages, and those are opportunistic.”

Eloqua’s Jennifer Horton lays out her process for getting a new MA program off the ground:

“It‟s an iterative process. For our clients we have an assessment tool where we will go

through and benchmark where are you today, and at the same time ask them, if you can

improve in this particular area or add efficiency in this area, how important is it to you

at that time. Based on how they answer those questions, as well as some weighted

answers behind the scenes, we spit out: for the first phase we‟re going to focus and get

these things sound and running.

“Typically those things are sales and marketing alignment. What are the definitions of

our integrated sales and marketing funnel and what systems are going to be used to

support that funnel? The marketing automation might be handling some of the front-

end stages of the funnel, the CRM system‟s handling later systems in the funnel, so how

do those all integrate and talk to each other? Phase 2 might be adding in past purchase

data that maybe lives in an accounting system, or some other ERP system. Again, even

with a transformational approach, it‟s still phased out, but we tackle the key

foundational areas on the front end: what sales and marketing alignment look like; let‟s

make sure the segmentation criteria are clearly defined and those data sets are

standardised so that the team can pull very easily segmented lists and create filters.”

This is all good advice that makes a lot of sense, but some may find the language confusing. If you

are among the confused, fear not. In the following sections, we’ll explain all of these ideas in plain

English.




4.1. Listening tactics Marketing automation needs accurate data for it to work well, which means before you start using

it on the front-end, you’ll need to get your back-end in order. If you don’t already have a robust

database in place with good information about your prospects and customers, you’ll need to set

up a way to consistently collect information about them. For digital marketers, listening means

first collecting data about prospects and customers, then finding a way to organise, store and

maintain that information in a way that can be accessed by your marketing automation solution.

The data marketers collect can come from just about anywhere: past purchase records, user-input

info on social networks, web analytics, surveys, preference centres, or any other information

source that enables a database to append a record for a unique individual. All this data, however,

is just noise if you don’t have back-end software that is designed to consistently capture and make

sense of it all.

Neolane’s Kristin Hambelton explains the kind of data marketers should be listening for comes

from what people tell you, as well as what they do – the behaviour data that is captured by the

marketing automation solution:

“We look at two types of data, some people call them demographic and behavioural,

others call them declared and inferred, but you always want both. The demographic

data is what helps you do that initial targeting and segmentation. The behavioural data

does the same thing, but it helps you start more deeply profiling individuals into deeper,

smaller segments, so you can really do personalisation. It allows you to use your

marketing automation to communicate in a very individualised manner.”

Gray of Aprimo points out that it’s important to make sure that you’re listening for the right

things; collecting data that will be actionable against your goals. If necessary, you can also trade

or buy data whenever it’s difficult to collect yourself. Ms. Gray offers the following very detailed

plan for doing data collection right:

1. “Set quantifiable and qualitative business objectives (customer-centric).

2. Create a communication plan with a mix of tactics to meet objectives (e.g.

newsletters for brand affinity, greater perceived brand value, offers to drive

incremental business, increase visits/shopping frequency, etc.).

3. Determine which of the communication tactics are pre-set and which are automated

/ triggered. Set priorities / contact rules so if more than one is in queue, the

individual receives the one that optimises business performance. (Bumped

communications can be “removed” or delayed depending on a company‟s approach.)

4. Identify data needed to support the communication plan.

5. Inventory existing data and determine plan to close gaps (between have and need).

6. Repeat 4 and 5 for your marketing content.

“Ideally, marketers should have a mix of data, including behaviour data for the obvious

reasons – what products/services they buy, how often, when – patterns, trends to

purchasing (at the individual level as well as aggregate e.g. shopping cart analysis,

product pairing). They should also have descriptive information about the individual,

their lifestyle and residence.

“If and when possible, competitive purchases should be part of the data arsenal – used to

gain share of wallet. For B2C there are cooperative databases for multi-channel

retailers – e.g. Abacus, Z24.

“Data available to marketers:




Compiled lists with demos, geos, psychographics, etc. (source from public records).

Response lists (e.g. purchaser lists that are rented for new customer acquisition).

Modelled lists – Mozaic, Prizm (birds of a feather flock together).

Restricted data lists – credit data.

Syndicated Panel data – for modelling to extrapolate data across the database for

coverage) e.g. Simmons, Yankolvich.

“[You can] reverse-append a buyer‟s personal demographics and psychographics.

[With] email reverse appends, pick up home address, and the world of data opens up.

Just because the individual is making a commercial purchase does not mean they

parked their brand preferences and shopping behaviours at the door. You can gain a lot

of insight into what‟s important or how they think with the wealth of B2C information.”

There is a lot of easy-to-get information, but getting the right information to drive your sale is

key. Don’t waste time collecting data that is never going to be used. Pulling in the most relevant

and useful data can make or break the success of an automated marketing campaign. For these

reasons, we’ll expand further on some common listening tactics in the following sub-sections.

4.2. Preference centres, surveys, and progressive profiling Just about anyone that has ever signed up for an email newsletter has encountered an email

preference centre. Usually, you have just a few options, which are to subscribe, unsubscribe, or to

indicate interests from a list of topics. However, there is no reason to so narrowly limit the

options you give your prospects and customers.

Kristin Hambelton of Neolane explains why preference centres are more than just another online

form: “You need to ask your clients about their contact preferences, and not only ask them but

honour them. Part of what we‟re doing in marketing, especially with a long sales cycle, is trying

to build trust between my company, my brand, and my customers.”

Jerry Kosmachuk of Neolane tells us essentially the same thing: “A lot of marketers miss the

mark by not setting up customer preference centres. A preference centre is very important in

achieving success. Especially when everything is fully automated, it gives the customer the

opportunity to state what it is that they‟re interested in, and you can listen to that, recognise it,

and give it back to them.”

Jenifer Horton of Eloqua also offers her opinion on how best to manage a preference centre in a

way that balances the needs of the marketer against the amount of time and effort asked of the

customer:

“In general, we only ask for preferences and subscriptions that you‟re actually going to

manage to. Asking everyone for all of the interests they possibly have or about all your

products and solutions is fine, but if you‟re not actually going to deliver based on that,

then don‟t ask it. Don‟t force the customer to give you that preference information if

you‟re not going to do anything with it.

“We usually start by thinking about the types of content and give the users options

there, and then in some cases you can just use behavioural information to determine

what you think their preferences are, and implicitly imply – this person keeps hitting

this product area of my website, so I‟m going to learn that it‟s probably their top level of

interest, so in my next newsletter, or next promo, I‟m going to dynamically serve up that

product line, based on the fact that I know they‟ve visited that page so many times.

“I think companies can go overboard with it. I always recommend that if it‟s the first

time with a subscription centre, start with the basics, get comfortable with being able to




adhere to those basics, and then if you realise you can offer more, test it, see what

happens when you add more preferences, and if you don‟t get a better form completion

rate, then I would try to imply it by behaviour.”

Preference centres, online surveys, email surveys, and web forms are all excellent opportunities to

collect data. All of these different methods of collecting information can merge what they collect

into a master database where they form the core of a profile progressively, over time. A

progressive profile doesn’t ask for every single data point all at once, and doesn’t assume that an

individual’s information won’t change over time.

Of course, it’s important to keep in mind that asking for preferences does not mean demanding

preferences. Asking for too much information may fatigue your customers unnecessarily. If you’re

sending a bulk email with three empty form fields, you need 100% of your database to have those

form fields filled or you wind up with an awkwardly generic filler in your fields like “Dear Sir or

Madam” instead of “Dear Bob”. But, with marketing automation, you can send emails with

various levels of customisation automatically, swapping out whole sections instead of being forced

to insert text into empty fields. Every customer will get an email with as much or as little

customisation as the data allows; a customer who has given you a lot of information can get a very

highly customised email, while an anonymous prospect will receive less customised content. That

said,

Coming at the topic from a B2B angle, Kelly Abner of Marketo gives some good advice on the best

ways to go about collecting data:

“You want your forms to be as short as possible keep your conversion rates high, but

you still want enough information to be able to assign them to the right rep. If you

aren‟t yet at the point where you want to assign them to a rep, you can use progressive

profiling forms. You just ask them a little bit when they first sign in, and you keep

asking more as you nurture and as you offer white papers and more content to them.

The goal is that by the time they become sales-ready, you have enough information

demographically to assign them. Just get what you need to know. We can infer what

state they‟re from by doing reverse IP look-up, and a lot of other information too. I

always tell people not to ask for a mailing address unless they are physically going to

mail them something or they‟re asking for something to be mailed to them. And, it‟s easy

enough to append your data with Hoovers, Jigsaw, or OneSource to those, so you can

often get that information without having to ask them.”

Thinking more about appending data from external sources, Caryn Gray of Aprimo offers her rule

of thumb, and then expanded on where to turn to for data:

“I have the policy that when using the precious time that you have with customers

engaging in a marketing campaign, don‟t collect data that you can collect from outside.

If you can get income, or presence of children in the household from somewhere else,

don‟t waste your time getting it from them directly. If you are going to collect it, make

sure you structure it in the same way it looks in compiled files so that if you ever want to

do a comparison and index them against a comparable population, you already have

the data formatted the way you need to.

“If you don‟t have any data when you start out you can get compiled lists from public

records with demographics, cluster codes, or things like Mosaic from Experian. You‟ve

got response lists and sellers have their own lists, which they barter back and forth, so

as long as you‟re not a direct competitor you can barter back and forth response lists.

You can get data there on what they buy or how they buy in a particular category. Then

there‟s things like Jigsaw other B2B types of data, and even credit data. You would need

to create a profile of current buyers/owners, find out what they look like, and then from

the many resources out there build a composite view to predict who are the most likely

look-alikes within that external group.”




4.3. Database integration A good marketing automation program pulls in lots of data from many different data sources with

the end goal of creating a centralised database of organised, easily usable information about every

individual to whom you are marketing. An integrated centralised database is what turns the noise

of many (often conflicting) data sources into useable, organised information.

Most organisations start with a collection of data that looks like the illustration below, in which

many databases, each containing a great deal of information, are separated into silos. Rather than

try to replace them all, the centralised database simply pulls in the data it needs from each

existing source.

Figure 1: Database integration

Older databases were often designed with technological constraints in mind. For example, some

ancient mainframe allowed for only eight fields with 32 characters each. Newer databases do not

have these limitations, however, and should be set up to more closely model reality. The thing

about reality, of course, is that it is rarely perfect, and never stays still for long. Databases need to

be flexible enough to handle that.

Jerry Kosmachuk of Neolane offers his experience on the topic of database design, illuminating

the troubles one can run into with an overly restrictive database:

“The database is the most changeable dimension of a system like this. The database that

you have today ends up changing. We often run into existing customers who are

working with other vendors who say to us we have to fit everything in a flat data-

model, but our data-model is four layers deep. We need to be able to do ABC and D and

are you able to facilitate that?

“The system that cannot look across multiple hierarchical structures would not be

adaptable. You back yourself into a corner if you pick something that is one

homogeneous database, one fixed structure. Sure the database can grow horizontally

but it can‟t grow vertically. Build a marketing database that can be executed against,

updated, and if need be, feed back into the operation systems. The operational systems

will feed into the marketing database, then in that marketing database will be all the

data needed to support the marketing initiatives and strategies.”

Most companies that have been in existence for many years will already have collected large

amounts of transactional data over the years, data which marketers can put to good use. Start-ups




or companies with no data in the bank will need to look elsewhere for data, and often pull in

external lists, do data matches against external databases, or scrape info from social networks in

order to jump-start their in-house database.

To illustrate the point, consider the example of how Bob, who bought a printer six months ago

and is now looking for replacement printer ink, appears in two types of databases – data in silos

vs. a centralised database.

Figure 2: Many different databases in silos

When data is split up across databases, any decisions made can only take advantage of one

database at a time. In the example above, looking at only one database, it’s impossible to piece

together that our fictional printer buyer named Bob is now in the market for ink for his printer.

The only possible way to know all this is by combining what you learn from each different source,

as in the next example. By using software that automates the process of maintaining a centralised

database, a computer can pull in whatever it needs, then use that information to make much more

intelligent automated decisions than it could if only referencing one “siloed” database.




Figure 3: Data combined in centralised database

Social networks offer a fairly new way of gathering data. Much of their potential is yet untapped.

Jennifer Horton of Eloqua explains her take on incorporating social network data into the mix of

the centralised database:

“There‟s lots of social data that people are missing the opportunity to incorporate into

their behaviour [data]. We have a couple of partners who have built monitoring tools

that are then pulling key statements by individuals back into their profiles, into the

CRM, or into the marketing automation system for segmentation and targeting

purposes. We have one client, they‟re an agency that allows you to match up with a

photographer for weddings, and they do a lot of social media monitoring, and they‟ve

started to profile how the bride that comes to them from Facebook is totally different

than, say, a bride that comes from Town & Country. The Facebook bride is younger,

their expectations on budget is a little different, and they typically come to the site closer

to the wedding date than, say, a different type of bride.

“They‟ve learned that by pulling in that data and monitoring for a certain amount of

time, and now they‟ve got personas based on that. If you come to me from a different

source, I‟m actually going to tailor my nurturing stream for you. I might use different

imagery. You can learn a lot by source tracking and listening to find out where people

are talking about your products and services in those communities, and then pass that

on to the sales team. The sales team can see, by individual person, what perception they

have coming in to that conversation. There‟s a huge case for external data – to be

bringing that in and tracking that the whole way through.”




5. Individualised Content Tactics Once the foundations of a useful database have been laid on the back-end, automation software

can deliver much more relevant information on the front-end: individualised content in real-time.

The goal of delivering customised content is to make sure the customer receives the most relevant

message possible, at a time and in a way that is appropriate. When creating a marketing

automation program, you can imagine programming a robot capable of having infinite

conversations with your customers, using an infinite amount of data to inform the conversation,

while speaking in your voice. By doing so, you as a marketer can make yourself exponentially

more effective.

Figure 4: Example of how personalised marketing offers work

This example uses search data and historical purchase data to create a dynamic web page, but it’s

important to point out that this is just one example of how dynamic content might be delivered.

You could just as easily use a web cookie to pull up demographic info and a preference centre

choice for SMS texts, then send a dynamic text message. The ways in which you can mix and

match the equation (data + content + delivery method) are only limited by your imagination.

Neolane’s Kristin Hambelton offers insight into why we use automated methods, and how one

might best mash up customised content with a dynamic delivery method by pulling in the right

data in real time:

“If I had a database of 100,000 customers I couldn‟t possible communicate manually

with each individual on an ongoing basis. It‟s just not possible. If you‟re able to infer

that someone is interested in buying a certain widget from you in the next few months,

you could serve up on-the-fly some customised content and offers for the next time when

they visit the website. In terms of the type of behavioural data [that trigger content], it‟s

things like web pages viewed, how long they‟re on the website, how long they might be

on individual pages, what action caused them to commit in the first place (what was the

first thing that got them to raise their hand and agree to communicate with you, such as

joining a newsletter list). That‟s all creating a digital footprint that‟s part of their

profile, that you can merge with the demographic information.”




5.1. Dynamic segmentation Segmentation has long been touted as an extremely effective tactic among marketers, but when

automation software allows for segmentation on the fly using whatever data works best,

segmentation starts to more closely resemble individualisation. There is a direct relationship

between the amount of data available to apply to your segmentation scheme and how specific

each segment can be.

One of our focus group marketing automation users gushed, “Even the moderate use of list

segmentation and list building has greatly improved our email open and click-thru rates over

prior methods.” And: “The use of block lists has greatly improved our partner perception and

satisfaction by consistently removing partners from competitive mailings.”

Segments can be as broad or as specific as you are willing to make them. A simple segmentation

scheme might simply separate individuals that are existing customers vs. those that are

prospective customers. A much more specific segmentation scheme could use a variety of factors

simultaneously, such as gender, age, in-market status, educational background, job title, physical

location, sentiment towards the brand, behaviour on your website, or any other way of dividing

your audience you can think of.

Because you can have an infinite number of segments – theoretically, every individual person in

your audience could be a unique segment – it’s important to decide which segments to focus on.

Deciding how to segment your messages can be a matter of simple common sense (i.e. someone

who already owns product A should get an offer for a different product they don’t already own,

product B), but statistical methods are needed if you are to implement more sophisticated

segmentation. Put simply, instead of guessing at what your segments should be, you should mine

your data to see exactly what your segments are and ensure your messaging maps to those

segments.

Statistical segmentation is vastly improved by closed-loop reporting. When conversion metrics

are connected to your segmentation and marketing data, it allows your segments to be based on

real purchase data rather than mid-funnel behavioural data such as clicks. In the example below

of a data-driven analysis designed to discover which segments convert best for each product, we

find proof that budget has a corollary relationship with the product purchased. We infer the

likelihood of action by behaviour or demographic, in order to predict what prospective customers

who share the behaviour or demographic will do.




Figure 5: Segmentation Discovery

By performing analyses of your data to find relationships between purchase and demographics or

upper-funnel behaviours, you can start using the information you collect about your audience to

infer what content will interest them most during the marketing process prior to purchase.

Demographic data, like the budget number used here, can often be difficult to collect, which is

why using inferred behavioural data, such as what content was viewed on a website, may be easier

to implement.

Asked which data was the most useful for predicting behaviour, Jennifer Horton of Eloqua

confirms that behavioural data is often easier to collect and often more likely to be predictive of

purchase than demographic data:

“Activity data – such as which web site pages were visited, which campaigns the

prospective buyer engaged with, which content was downloaded – give a more accurate

level of insight as to where the buyer is in their evaluation process and what they will

respond to as a next step in the process. Prospective buyers can be „turned off‟ by forms

especially if they are early on in their learning stages – therefore, they may either

answer form questions inaccurately or truly not know the answers to some BANT

(budget, authority, need, timeframe) type questions on a form.”

Caryn Gray of Aprimo confirms that, at least in the B2C space, past purchase tends to correlate

with future purchase to a higher degree than any demographic segment. She offers an example of

a campaign that successfully used behavioural triggers for dynamic segmentation:

“In the B2C space it‟s extremely easy if you‟ve got purchase transaction data to use

previous purchases as predictors of future purchases, so if you‟re doing predictive

modelling, that‟s always what pops to the top. Descriptive characteristics like „single

family home dwelling with an income of X‟ – that rarely is predictive of behaviour.

When we did models, predictive data are not only brand affinity (like if you bought in

the past), but if you bought a specific model or make that was a higher predictor, but

then beyond that, how frequently do you buy, how recently did you buy, when are you




in market? The purchase of a brand is always very telling, but predicting when they will

then need it again, that‟s the harder part.”

5.2. Lead scoring So now that you are engaging leads in your database, how do you objectively determine the value

of that lead and if it’s ready to be passed to sales? Lead scoring is simply the process of taking

segmentation to the next level by combining the demographic and behavioural segments

associated to an individual in order to come up with a more accurate prediction of how likely a

prospect is to convert to a sale. A negative indicator can counteract a positive behavioural

indicator or two positive indicators could add together to indicate a hot sale. Lead scoring can be

used to determine what automated content will be served, but can also help your sales team

prioritise which leads to call first and what to say when speaking with those prospects.

Jon Miller of Marketo, a big proponent of lead scoring, explains how he thinks others should use

the process:

“The most important place to start, the biggest leverage point, is getting lead scoring

and lead intelligence to your sales team. Sales is spending so much time looking at what

I call a „flat‟ list of leads, where they might see that someone has the right title or

attended a webinar, but they have so little data to understand where they should

actually be spending their time, and frankly, they can get so much value from just a

little bit of low-hanging fruit. Who went to the pricing page? Who actually opened the

email that they sent? Even those little, little steps are an amazing quick win for sales.

When they log in to their CRM system and they see that stuff there and can sort their

leads based on quality, it‟s just a great way to get started with a fast win.”

Figure 6: Determining lead scores




When marketing is able to show the sales staff a report like the one above in real time, for

individual prospects, the sales staff can use their time much more wisely. Jennifer Horton of

Eloqua encourages marketers to make such data available to the sales team:

“Where marketers fall down is figuring out what information to pass over to the sales

organisation. They just pass email, phone, and the fact that they‟ve been scored highly,

but they might want to give sales visibility into the fact that they‟ve been on the website

and what things they did on the website and what campaigns they actually responded

to, and give them visual cues of trending in that activity. It‟s not that marketers aren‟t

collecting that data, it‟s that they‟re not making the best use of it with other teams in the

organisation that could benefit from it.”

So, how do you know when you have enough data to reliably predict that a behaviour, such as

downloading a brochure, will result in a sale X% of the time? Jon Miller tells us “As a good rule of

thumb, you need 20 of the behaviours you‟re looking for to be statistically valid. For some

behaviours I can collect that in a month, whereas [others] took about eight months. Meanwhile,

if you‟re not 100% statistically valid, that‟s fine. You can still make good directional inputs.”

5.3. Medium as message The buying process has changed. Buyers are more educated long before you even know they are

interested in your solution. In fact, it’s been estimated that 70% of the buying cycle is complete by

the time a prospect engages with a sales person. Therefore, it is essential to ensure your

messaging and communication strategy provides the right information in the right format at the

right time.

Email tends to be the focus of most marketing automation campaigns, since it is expected that it

will be used as a vehicle for corporate communications, and because it facilitates one-to-one

digital dialogue relatively easily. In many cases the communication experience can be made more

relevant by using another vehicle such as Facebook, Twitter, SMS text message, phone call,

mobile app, or website. A good automation program will make ongoing decisions about which

medium to use when sending a message, as well as what unique content that message will feature.

Jerry Kosmachuk of Neolane says, “You have to give customers their channel of choice. Listen to

them, if they want to be communicated with in a particular channel, communicate with that

specific channel.”

Neolane’s Kristin Hambelton offers some insight on the kinds of programs Jerry mentioned:

“On the demographic side, what‟s becoming important is collecting social media

information. In order to communicate, you collect the Facebook page, the LinkedIn

page, the Twitter handle, just as you would an email address. We have customers that

are doing both acquisition and retention through Twitter and Facebook. One of the slick

things we can do with our tool is put out a coupon to Facebook fans that has a barcode

we generate, that they can take into a store to get a sample or discounted purchase.”

While many marketers are still in the very early stages of effectively using one-to-one digital

communication methods beyond email, it seems likely that this will be a huge area of growth as

social media and mobile platforms become increasingly sophisticated.




5.4. Timing tactics An important part of message relevance is the timing of when the message is sent. Just as a

warning not to step into traffic is much less useful after a bus has already hit the intended

recipient, the right marketing message sent to the right person is nearly worthless if sent at the

wrong time. People offer up all sorts of signs – some obvious, some subtle – that they are ready to

receive a message. The key to relevance as a marketer is to be listening for these signs and then to

react appropriately, often immediately.

5.4.1. Auto-responders or triggered email

Auto-responders can take the form of any automatically triggered communication. However, the

most common type of auto-responder is the automatically triggered email. The three most

common types of triggered emails are automated welcome messages, acknowledgment of

downloading a web asset (i.e. white paper, archived webinar) and post-purchase transaction

confirmation messages. Each of these triggered messages tend to use an action completed on a

website to trigger an automatically sent, customised email in real-time.

Eloqua’s Jennifer Horton offers her opinion on why these types of auto-responders are the most

popular triggered tactics:

“The attention span of an individual is greatest at two points in the customer lifecycle: the

moment they learn about who you are and the moment they decide to do business with you.

Long or short sales cycle – this holds true. A Welcome Campaign way is a great opportunity

to:

Consistently introduce prospective buyers to the brand.

Progressively learn more about what the prospective buyer is interested in and guide

them to relevant content to answer her questions.

Profile the activity and level of engagement of the prospective buyer. This activity can be

used for future segmentation and targeting of future communications and provide

valuable insights to sales reps that may be following up with the contact.”

There is no reason, however, why marketers must limit auto-responders to just the welcome

message and transaction confirmation. Any behaviour can trigger an automatic response, or in

some cases, multiple responses.

5.4.2. Lead nurturing

Lead nurturing is simply the practice of staying engaged with a prospect over a long period of

time, initiated when the marketer deduces that the prospect is not yet ready to buy, but may

convert in the future. A drip campaign, like drip irrigation, slowly feeds prospects bits of

information over time. The drip campaign may take months or years to play out. It is triggered, or

turned on, by prospect behaviour indicating they are not yet ready to buy, and turned off when

the prospect’s behaviour changes, indicating that they are now either in-market, or wish to sever

ties completely.

Lead nurturing was an extremely popular tactic among our focus group of marketers currently

using marketing automation. One respondent told us “lead nurturing contributed to 35 won

opportunities, which resulted in approximately $770K.”

Jennifer Horton of Eloqua advises marketers, “When developing a first nurturing campaign,

evaluate content that you already have and consider repackaging this content in the context of

an automated sequence of touches.” This is good advice, but marketers first need to take a critical

look at their existing assets.




Unearthed by our focus group was frustration among those keen on trying lead nurturing, only to

discover that they weren’t ready yet. One respondent bemoaned the fact that as a result of

adopting marketing automation, “we‟ve uncovered many deficiencies within our marketing

processes... mostly around the lack of collateral assets to run a nurtured campaign.”

Assuming you do have the assets in place to run a successful lead nurturing program and are

successfully staying engaged with prospects, the next step is making sure you can switch gears

once the prospect does become ready to buy. After all, the point is not to nurture a prospect

forever, but to eventually convert them into a sale.

Caryn Gray of Aprimo offers some advice on how to know when it’s time to turn off a nurturing

campaign:

“With progressive profiles, I think you can ask the same question twice [over time]. As

they move through the buying process, you hope some of it is changing, bringing the

close date nearer, or budget could be lost, meaning they‟re back to just researching. I

think you need to be able to do that. Often with a nurturing campaign with an inbound

form, you can pop it up there and the fields are already pre-populated and you just ask

if they want to update their profile. You‟re showing you know it, but asking if they want

to change it.”

5.4.3. Frequency and cadence

Frequency refers to the number of messages sent to an individual within a specific timeframe.

Cadence is the spacing of those messages in time. For example, two individual prospects may both

receive 12 emails in a six-month period, but one that’s been designated a hot prospect may get

seven emails the first month, then the remaining five emails spaced evenly over the next five

months. Meanwhile, the other individual has been put into a lead nurturing campaign and may

instead get two emails a month spaced evenly across the whole six months. Setting the right

frequency and cadence is a key part of ensuring that the timing of your messages are relevant to

the receiver.

A big part of frequency and cadence is delivering just the right amount of emails. Too few touches

and you might lose the sale. Too many touches, and you might lose the customer for good. Jerry

Kosmachuk of Neolane offered instruction on what to avoid:

“Don‟t over-communicate. Marketers look at open rates and click-through rates, but

very few look at the frequency. If I‟m sending you email every day but it‟s taking you

three days to open the email, then I should be sending it every three days, at least to

you. People don‟t segment enough, they take their audience and have the same

communication frequency for the whole audience, but you can take it a level further

than that, and segment by how often they open my email, or how quickly they open my

email, or their preference for the number of times they want to be communicated to.

Creating fatigue in your base is a huge tactical mistake.”

The illustration below shows what happens when three different fictional prospects trigger

different types of automated direct marketing campaigns. Dave, the hot prospect, gets an

immediate promotional email, followed by a series of tightly spaced promotional emails and a

direct mail offer. Bob, a low-priority prospect, gets fewer offers and less informational info.

Susan, a window-shopper, is sent a low-frequency drip-campaign made up of a mix of

informational emails and occasional offer emails.




Figure 7: Unique cadence, frequency, and content

Just as you should let the data determine what your segments are rather than creating arbitrary

segments, Eloqua’s Jennifer Horton points out that you should test to determine what the optimal

frequency is for each type of campaign: “Clients have had a lot of success testing frequency and

timing between communication touches. One client went from a 30-day trial nurture to a 5-day

nurture and saw an increase in trial conversion of 48%.”

Jerry Kosmachuk offers a similar take, saying, “You need to understand the sales process of your

product. Is it a six month or 18 month sales process? You have your gut, your intuition, and you

can validate your intuition with analytics. Understand the nurturing that gets people to

conversion before you kick off your marketing.”

5.5. Bringing it all together Getting one tactic up and running will have an immediate impact on your marketing program, but

it’s the combination of multiple tactics working together that is most likely to have a serious

impact on the bottom line.

The example below sums up how the combination of individualised contact message, contact

medium, and contact timing radically increases the relevance of marketing messages. Our three

fictional website visitors, Bob, Susan, and Dave, all come to the website looking for very different

information and are hoping to accomplish very different tasks – Susan is window shopping and

not yet ready to buy, Bob simply wants to buy one cartridge of printer ink, while Dave wants to

buy a large order of printers. Before the automated listening and marketing infrastructure was

put in place, there was no way to know any of this, or to act on it.

Now, the database is recording the differences in each individual’s behaviour while on the

website, which allows for a unique reaction. Instead of sending each person who fills out a contact

form the same bulk newsletter email on the first of the month, the program uses information

about their website behaviour to guess at what marketing message will be most relevant to each

person. All are treated differently because all three have unique needs.




Figure 8: Bulk messaging vs. individualised messages

Caryn Gray of Aprimo tells us about a company in the B2B space that has used a combination of

all these tactics discussed to measurably increase their success rates:

“CA Technologies has thousands of automated global interactive marketing campaigns

running that automate outbound communications, score leads, collect information (via

inbound forms) and distribute leads over to Sales. What they did right is created

narrowly focused communication campaigns, which combine to make larger, longer

on-going commercial dialogues. CA Technologies uses a mix of behaviour-triggers to

automate communication sequences – even non-behaviour can trigger

communications.”




6. Continuous Testing and Optimisation As Eloqua’s Jennifer Horton says, “Marketers that are focused on testing and optimisation are

able to consistently yield the best performing campaigns.”

If you followed best practices when first setting up your marketing automation program, you

should already have a list of metrics and closed-loop success metrics that marketing and sales

have agreed to track. If not, you’ll need to take care of this before getting serious about testing and

optimisation. Manticore’s VP of Marketing, Christopher Doran thinks that the organisations that

have done this are the ones that are most likely to be successful:

“The common thread of marketing organisations that have been successful with

marketing automation is a defined marketing funnel. Instead of treating marketing like

a black box, they‟ve approached marketing as a business process. Once the process has

been defined, they work to measure and incrementally improve the process, thereby

improving their business results with improvement. These organisations can easily

define a sales qualified lead and the entire team works towards improving this metric.”

Once your marketing automation programs are in place, all your success metrics are being

tracked, and closed-loop reporting is up and running, that’s when the real fun begins. Now,

instead of spending all your time cranking out new campaigns that entirely replace your old

campaign, you can leave the parts of your campaign that are working in place, and focus solely on

improving the areas of greatest strategic value. In much the same way that you can use data to

isolate unique segments that act differently, you can use the data coming from the marketing

automation system to see where performance is falling under acceptable benchmarks, then focus

your efforts where needed.

Jon Miller of Marketo has a lot of great advice on where to start testing and what tests will yield

the most actionable results:

“Look at your conversion rates and your velocities from stage to stage to stage in your

revenue cycle. You need to de-aggregate the problem. If sales aren‟t going up, you‟re

either putting less fuel at the front end of the engine, or somewhere along that revenue

cycle conversion rates are dropping or the cycles are lengthening, or some combination.

If you started your automated marketing in January and are tracking conversion rates,

and in March, sales haven‟t gone up yet, you at least have three months of data, and in

that three month period can look at what didn‟t go up.

“Did one conversion rate go down while all the others went up? Now you know why

your sales didn‟t go up – because you had a bottleneck in that one stage. Even though

everything might be getting better, you‟re dropping the ball at that one place, and now

you know where to dive in. That‟s where the analytics can really become strategic and

help you see the trends over time. Maybe you see that leads from trade shows take

longer to convert than leads from pay-per-click, and in that time period your mix

skewed more towards trade shows, so that‟s why your sales didn‟t go up.”

Once your marketing is set up and all metrics in the marketing chain are reporting numbers

within acceptable benchmark ranges, you can transition from the emergency management phase

to the creative optimisation phase. For example, you can tweak something that’s already working

well in order to find incremental improvements. You could do this by creating experimental cells

within the automation program, which are only served to a small percentage of a segment,

offering the ability to compare results without having to serve untested creative to a large portion

of your audience.

Caryn Gray of Aprimo offers her advice on where to test for incremental improvement once

everything is up and running within acceptable benchmark ranges:




“The immediacy of digital really allows you to do A/B testing on a small sample before

you even execute a full campaign. You can get results really quickly and improve your

first time out performance because you‟ve done a small sample test first.

1. Lead acceptance rates? Have they increased? If yes, but the leads close rates are

unchanged, check...

a. Audience Composition

i) Review lead source distribution report for closed deals, and compare that to

the lead source distribution for individuals in the „nurturing campaigns.‟

ii) Is the percentage of leads sourced similar or dissimilar to closed deals – i.e.

are you getting the right individuals in your nurturing campaigns?

b. Lead Quality

i) Revisit the definition of a qualified lead. Include Sales in this exercise. Re-

assess the lead scoring, looking at the content weighting/scores and how

they align with the buying stages. (Reference recent closed deals.)

ii) Adjust scores according to closed sales scoring data. Many companies take a

linear approach to scaling these variables, leaving equal distances between

each option. The alternative approach is curvilinear scoring, which

elongates the distance between options to more heavily prioritise those

options that appear more important indicators of buying cycle advancement

or validation.

2. Look for opportunities to A/B test changes.

a. Communication sequencing.

b. Contact frequency and cadence, etc.”

An important thing to remember about testing is that the results of your tests may change over

time, so you need to keep testing. Different parts of your campaign will wear out faster than

others. Paying attention to your metric benchmark rates using dashboards will show which areas

are wearing out the quickest and, consequently, where to direct your creative resources. Jennifer

Horton from Eloqua suggests “an analysis of asset engagement in each step. Perhaps a content

asset is no longer up-to-date, relevant, or timely to the buyer personas.”

For marketers seeing metrics start to fall below historically good benchmark levels, Kelly Abner

from Marketo offers the following advice:

“First thing I would look at is the content that‟s attached to it, because content is the first

thing that‟s going to become stale. Either the content, or the marketing around the

content needs to be updated some. Doing basic updates of content can do wonders for

your programs. Otherwise, maybe something is broken. Maybe something happened to

a form on the website. Don‟t always count on the technology, most of the time [the cause

of sudden drops in effectiveness] tends to be human error.”

Ms. Abner makes a good point, which is that a sudden decrease in metrics may have nothing to do

with the marketing. Marketers seeking to avoid blame for technological mistakes should be sure

to set up their analytics in a way that identifies breaks in any part of the system early so that the

correct area to be fixed can be isolated and addressed quickly.

Along similar lines, Kristin Hambelton of Neolane points out that measurement dashboards and

marketing analytics programs can’t omit measuring what happens once a lead goes to sales.

“Look at the demand waterfall for your organisation. Look at the marketing metrics,

but also look at the sales metrics – number of calls, number of appointments, number of

opportunities – because you may actually find out that you were passing too many

unqualified leads to the sales folks, they were too overwhelmed to follow up on them, so




that‟s why you‟re not seeing conversions. This would immediately tell you that your lead

scoring rules need to be adjusted. I would also say you should look at the number of

calls and touches after that marketing lead was passed, because you might find out, and

every once in a while you do, that there hasn‟t been that much activity. You may find out

that the sales people were frustrated by you sending a few unqualified leads over, so

they have decided everything you send them is junk and they‟re not going to call at all.”

6.1. B2B vs. B2C considerations, length of purchase cycle The technology that drives marketing automation programs for B2B and B2C companies is very

similar, as is the technology used to set up analytics and closed-loop reporting. What will differ

greatly, however, are the strategies used and the metrics by which you judge the effectiveness of

your campaigns. The reason for this is that high-consideration B2B buyers tend to have much

longer purchase cycles than B2C buyers. Decisions on consumer purchases, on the other hand,

are often made the same day that an individual starts researching, unlike business buyers who

often take many months to convert to sale.

Jerry Kosmachuk of Neolane offers the following advice on how to set up reporting and metrics

for B2B buyers with long purchase cycles:

“If you have a long sales cycle, 12-18 months, and you have a lead funnel, you need the

right communication at each step in the process. I would look at my lead funnel and

make sure that I had the metrics to report on marketing filling the funnel with leads so

that it supports the marketing process. For a long sales cycle, ROI is nebulous, but at

least I can show that I am filling the funnel.”

Jon Miller of Marketo offers his own take on how marketers with longer purchase cycles should

be thinking about their analytics and ROI reporting:

“At the highest level, the number one challenge of B2B marketing analytics is the impact

that time has. The fact that you spend the money today that‟s going to have an

uncertain impact on revenue at an uncertain point in the future. And, that influence of

time is what makes this, traditionally, incredibly hard to prove marketing‟s impact on

revenue. What I think people need to do is, first, you have to look at not just closed/won

business, but how marketing influences movement down every stage of the pipeline. We

call that the revenue cycle, as opposed to the sales cycle. It‟s really about moving people

from the early stages into education, into being a lead, into the opportunity to be a

customer and beyond. By starting to look at movement down the revenue cycle, you can

start to measure and prove impact without necessarily having to wait until it‟s all

done.”

Jennifer Horton of Eloqua also sees the benefit of using mid-funnel metrics to judge the ROI of a

sale using metrics supplied by marketing automation over time. She says:

“Our clients typically leverage insights from two revenue attribution methods:

Total Influenced Revenue – what were all of the communication touches that

influenced closed revenue. This view can illuminate what marketing‟s total impact

was on revenue – not just marketing-sourced opportunities.

Attributed Revenue – where the business defines an attribution methodology to

judge a more cause and effect impact on revenue. This definition can be simple or

complex depending on the intricacies of the sales cycle and campaign strategy but

can highlight more quickly „top‟ and „poor‟ performing campaigns as a comparison to

baseline.

The reality is that any ROI model that you come up with is inherently flawed in that it

can never take into fact the incalculable elements of the selling/purchase process (brand




value, customer discussion in the marketplace, etc.). The important thing is to pick a

framework that you can consistently judge performance of one campaign against

another. The other thing to remember is that ROI alone may or may not be the decision

to cut or keep a program – it is an indicator to drill down and learn more about why a

campaign is performing well or not.”

Reporting is not the only difference between B2B and B2C, however. The size of B2C campaigns

can potentially bog down the real-time elements of a marketing automation program. B2B

marketers hoping to begin using marketing automation can focus right away on tactical features,

such as CRM integration and lead scoring, but B2C marketers need to take the additional step of

ensuring the solution they choose can stand up to the size of their campaign.

Jerry Kosmachuk of Neolane warns B2C marketers with massive campaigns of the following

potential pitfalls:

“If your data is not as fresh as it should be, that‟s not going to work. Something simple

like opt-outs – if you don‟t have information on who has opted-out in your segmentation

in a timely fashion you‟re going to tick off your base. The database needs to be as fresh

as the campaigns running against it require. If it‟s daily campaigns and it‟s based on a

model, that model either has to be scored in-stream or on the fly by the campaign or

marketing automation tool, or the model scorer has to be updated before the campaign

runs.

“To overcome a challenge like that I would seek a marketing automation tool that‟s well

integrated with the modelling process. So, it can kick off the model and run the model

for a smaller set. You don‟t need to score all 20 million consumers, you only need to

score the 500,000 that meet the criteria of the segments. If I‟m sending out a coupon

book and the value of the coupon book is $40 and it costs me $4 a piece to produce, I‟m

not going to send it to everybody. I‟m going to score and select an audience based on the

objective – [e.g.] response, number of sales, revenue. I‟m going to maximise my

audience using the model, but I don‟t have to wait for all 20 million consumers to be

scored.”

6.2. Workflow considerations While not the focus of marketing automation, one of the benefits of centralizing all your

marketing resources into a single database and tool is that it allows all the parties involved in

marketing to use the same interface. This can potentially save a lot of time and duplication of

effort when multiple organisations, such as external creative agencies, web design, or media

agencies, are all working on the same project simultaneously. It also allows the client-side

marketer to see everything that’s happening in a campaign, including where creative assets may

be missing, from a single, centralised vantage point.

Caryn Gray of Aprimo shared a story about how one of her clients improved the workflow of their

marketing by centralizing marketing asset upload and approval within the automation program.

“Autodesk has extended its marketing staff by sharing its Aprimo installation with its

digital agency. Autodesk initiates jobs via Aprimo, which starts a work flow process

with task notifications and due dates. The agency team accesses Autodesk‟s customer

and prospect data and builds its interactive marketing campaign content and invokes a

Creative Review for Autodesk to review and provide feedback. What they did right is

streamlined and standardised the agency/client processes to improve time-to-market

and productivity.”

By creating a centralised, automated way to control the flow of data, digital assets become much

more organised.




7. Getting on Your Way with Marketing

Automation Marketing automation doesn’t replace the marketer. Rather, it allows the marketer to increase

their effectiveness by giving them much more information to analyse and utilise, as well as a real-

time platform for delivering customised content. Nothing stays the same for long, however, so

what worked yesterday may not work tomorrow. It’s the marketer’s job to use these tools ensure

their marketing is always primed to deliver the most relevant content to every individual at the

time that they desire.

Marketers in the process of evaluating whether marketing automation is right for them need to

consider whether they have:

1. Enough budget and the right person in-house with enough time and empowerment to

make sure all the benefits and features available can be implemented.

2. Cross-company buy-in from all involved parties and a fully thought-out strategic plan

including funnel metrics from top to bottom that both marketing and sales can agree

on.

3. A marketing automation package that meets both immediate marketing needs, and

the future needs of the company as consumers shift to non-email platforms, whether it

be software-as-a-service, on premise licensed software, or homegrown software.

4. A robust, centralised database with all the relevant info needed to drive unique

segmentation.

5. The creative assets needed to feed highly individualised communications over long

periods of time.

Once the answer to all of these questions is “yes,” it is absolutely to the benefit of you, the

marketer, and your customers, to fully adopt and embrace marketing automation. At that point,

you can begin the rewarding work of moving away from bulk marketing to automated,

individualised marketing.

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