Marketing Automation For Dummies (2014)

Part V. Putting It All Together

In this part …

· Learn about generating leads from your existing database.

Follow the steps in crafting your first white paper campaign.

See how to drive leads to your first event with automation and conduct upselling campaigns.

· Audit your performance and use split testing to increase conversions.

Chapter 14. Mastering Your First Campaigns

In This Chapter

Mining your existing database for leads

Driving downloads of white papers

Driving attendance to an online event through automation

Conducting upselling campaigns

Now the real fun begins. Building your first campaigns is just like everything else in marketing automation in that the more complex your campaigns are, the more time they require in setup and maintenance.

This chapter applies many of the concepts covered in previous chapters to a white paper campaign, a database campaign, an online event campaign, and an upsell campaign. You can find some additional guidance in this chapter for running these specific kinds of campaigns.

Mining Your Existing Database for Hot Leads

You have two ways to get hot leads: You can find new leads, or you can turn a cold lead into a hot one. Most marketers are focused on finding new hot leads, but your database is your best source of hot leads, even if it is highly underused.

Marketing automation opens a new way to mine your database and convert existing database records into new leads. The following sections show you how to find leads in your existing database, keeping in mind that you need to use specific segmentation, special content, and tailored nurturing campaigns to help you do the heavy lifting. I discuss these concepts throughout other chapters in this book.

Finding your hottest leads first

The moment you get into marketing automation, your scenario is as follows: You have a database, but you do not know who is sales ready and who is not. Making this determination is the first thing you should tackle. Identify the most sales-ready leads and get them to the sales team. This is the fastest way to prove the value of your new tool. Figuring out sales-ready leads should be your first campaign. Identifying those sales-ready leads will help you to quickly show value with your new marketing automation tool as well as help you reach your goal of generating more leads with your new tool.

When you first get your marketing automation tool, work on your hottest leads first and then make sure that you can get them to the sales team:

· Finding your hottest leads first. Finding the hot leads is easier said than done. To send a targeted email to your hottest leads, you first have to know who the hottest leads are. To find them, I suggest using the stage-based marketing approach that I discuss in Chapter 10. You craft different content for each stage of your buyer’s journey. Next, send the email to your entire cold database.

When sending your emails, be hypertargeted. You send one email to an entire database. This is very similar to email blasting, which I advise against elsewhere in this book, but you must understand the difference. The goal here is to send hypertargeted communication based on a buying stage to help you identify a prospect’s buying stage. After you identify that stage, you change your communication to nurture the prospect’s specific interest.

So, for example, if you send an email to your database targeted to the first stage of the buyer’s journey, and ten people open that email, you should realize that those prospects are in stage 1 and take appropriate actions. You move those leads on to a nurturing campaign designed for prospects in the first stage of the buyer’s journey because you now have a context in which to communicate with them.

Make sure that you present clear differences between your communications in your stages. This technique is a way to fish for information when you do not have any to start with. People engage with emails that are relevant to them. A recent study I conducted highlighted the need to send fresh, relevant content. Of my 500 survey responses, 76 percent said that they want different content at each stage of their buyer’s journey. By sending a series of emails targeted to each behavioral persona, you get some people to engage and tell you which behavioral persona they are at that time. Figure 14-1 shows the data from this report.

To find your hottest leads first, you can easily target your first email to your database to the last stage of the buyer’s journey. For this book, I have identified three stages in the buyer’s journey, so this first email should be targeted to the third buyer’s stage. I cover what type of content to use for this stage and what this email should look like in Chapter 10.

Figure 14-1: Most B2B buyers want different content at each stage of the buyer’s journey.

· Passing leads to the sales team. This campaign differs from the same campaign without automation in that you can do two things. First, you have a clearer picture of sales readiness because of a combination of lead scoring and email tracking. Many leads may open the email because they find the subject line appealing. For example, a lead who reads the stage-1 subject line “Thought you might like this” and actually enjoys the stage-1 content you sent may be a stage-3 lead, even though your email was not a stage-3 email. However, because you have lead tracking tied to your website, if the lead chooses to continue engagement with you and searches around on your website, your lead scoring can identify that lead as sales ready.

The second major difference that comes with marketing automation is the ability to get hot leads into the hands of sales instantly. After a prospect engages with your most sales-ready content, you can have an automation rule quality and pass the hot lead to sales in real time. This removes the need for you to do lead triage, or sift through an email report trying to pass on the leads who opened your email manually.

As part of the campaign, you can also set the task of having the salesperson follow up with his new hot leads. This can happen through automation.

There are no silver bullets. If you think you can have 100 percent engagement by using this stage-based approach and a perfect piece of content, you are wrong. This campaign will help you to find leads faster, but it will never find them all. It will have much better engagement rates than any other type of email blast campaign, but you’ll need to continue to run a campaign like this one when you have a database of cold leads. Remember that you won’t find all the hot leads; you’re just stacking the odds in your favor to find more than you would have before.

Getting more lemon from the squeeze: Reaching back out to old leads

Old leads are not always dead leads. Finding which old leads you can reinvigorate allows you to get more value out of the money you have already spent, thereby getting “more lemon from the squeeze,” to quote Joel Book of ExactTarget. If you create your segmentations (I talk more about segmentation in Chapter 6) and nurturing programs correctly, reaching out to leads can happen consistently without your having to lift a finger, and it can help you to generate more leads from your existing database. This should be the second campaign you set up.

This campaign combines an automation rule, lead scoring, and a nurturing campaign. At the beginning, it does not need to be complex. A single nurturing campaign to stay in front of leads you identify in your database works just fine. You can get more granular over time by breaking your campaign into many targeted campaigns for each buyer stage and persona, but a single campaign suffices as a starting point.

Begin your campaign by creating an automation rule to identify the cold leads. Here are a few easy ways to identify the cold leads in your database:

· No score change. Leads whose score has not changed over a period of time are ripe to be reengaged. Identifying the correct amount of time to wait before reaching out again is something you should investigate on your own. I suggest waiting 45 days at the minimum, and possibly up to 60 days, past their last engagement before you consider them “cold.”

· No status update. If the sales team has not updated their Lead Status, you have a great way to identify cold leads. Looking at the Lead Status field is also a much better way to measure than just scoring because it allows you to be even more granular with your follow-ups. So if you know that the lead was passed over as MQL but has not been changed to a lead status of SQL in the CRM system, these leads are in a very specific stage, and you can craft a very specific message to help move them along. (I talk more about the importance of MQL and SQL in Chapter 13.) You can set up this message using a very simple automation rule. See Figure 14-2 for an example of the automation rule to create.

Figure 14-2: Automation rule identifying a cold lead and adding the lead to a nurturing campaign.

When creating the emails for your cold-lead campaign, make sure to keep the following ideas in mind:

· Dynamic content: Using dynamic content allows you to create a single campaign and have each email highly targeted to your leads. Dynamic content is any part of an email, ad, or web page that is automatically driven by your database. A good example of dynamic content is an email signature. If you are sending an email on behalf of your sales team, and each email comes from a different sales rep, you’re using a dynamic signature block in your email. Dynamic content can change words in your emails (think of mail merge fields from other email tools), content blocks inside your emails, and even HTML blocks on your website. The point of using dynamic content is that your marketing strategy changes based on the characteristics of each prospect.

· Subject lines: Subject lines should not be sales specific. Consider excluding your brand name or your keywords in your first few emails. Instead, try subject lines such as “Here’s a great article I found,” or “Thought you would enjoy this.”

· Time between messages: The general rule is no fewer than six days between nurturing emails, and no more than 45 days.

· Length of campaign: Your initial nurturing campaign for a cold lead should not exceed five emails at the beginning. You can add more emails later, so begin with five and grow from there.

· Using branching in the campaign: Lead nurturing is effective because you can set up if-then scenarios. If-then scenarios look like this:

If <condition> is true, then do <action>

For example, if an email you send remains unopened, you can use your if-then rule to send a standard follow-up email. So If <email is un-opened after three days>, then <send email number 3>. If, however, an email you send is opened, your if-then rule can send an alternative follow-up email.

· Content: Refer to Chapter 8 for more on content. For general nurturing emails, make sure that people can digest your content quickly. In the same research project I mentioned earlier in the chapter, only 1.7 percent of respondents said that they preferred their content to be more than five pages long. So keep it short.

After you’ve set up your nurturing program to send emails to leads, you need an automation to identify sales-ready leads and pass them to sales. Ensuring that you have a plan to get the hot leads you find into the hands of sales is the most important step in mining your database of cold leads. Make sure that you follow all the lead-scoring methods I discuss in detail in Chapter 12.

Measuring your early campaigns

Evaluating your cold-lead nurturing campaign can be very easy or very complicated, depending on what you are looking for. I suggest keeping your measurements simple at this stage and evaluating yourself on just a few key goals. Forget ROI; instead, focus on value created. I talk more about this topic in Chapter 10, but to keep this section specific to early nurturing campaigns, here are some ways to value your campaigns:

· Do you have more engagement than before? If you got more opens and clicks, along with fewer bounces, you should consider this a step in the right direction. Keep striving.

· Have you found new leads? Many times, nurturing campaigns help you uncover leads you may have missed or who fell through the cracks. Finding any new leads or opportunities from this campaign should be viewed as a giant win. Many people might use these opportunities to prove ROI, but I suggest that you don’t; otherwise, you train yourself to always value a campaign on ROI, which is not always the best measuring method.

· Are you doing less work to manage your cold leads? You should be working less now on managing your cold leads. Your campaigns should help you to set up a process for identifying leads, segmenting them, and keeping them engaged. If you can remove these basic tasks from your daily activities, you can focus on higher-priority items.

Crafting a White Paper Campaign

Content marketing drives the majority of marketing efforts for most B2B companies. In the following sections, I use the term white paper as a general term for any marketing asset that is downloaded.

You can use white papers for paid search campaigns, SEO campaigns, email campaigns, and nurturing campaigns. SEO, SEM, and any other paid placement campaigns are called inbound campaigns. When you reach out to people via email or social media, you’re conducting an outboundcampaign. Also, one white paper campaign might be part of multiple marketing campaigns. Before you start to build your first download campaign, make sure that you step through the following:

· Create your asset. You need to have the URL of the asset ready before you begin. I discuss creating assets and related URLs in Chapter 8.

· Set aside time to build a few emails. Make sure to set aside time to build your email templates. If you are running an inbound campaign, you likely need only one template. If you are creating a nurturing campaign, you need three email templates. For a basic outbound email campaign, you need one email template. I discuss building email templates in Chapter 4.

· Talk to your webmaster. You may need administrative access to your website if you plan to place a form on any web pages. To minimize your need for IT help, you can easily build a landing page in your marketing automation tool. I discuss building landing pages in Chapter 9.

· Set a goal. Whether your campaign is supposed to support the buying cycle, launch a new product, attract new leads, or support other efforts, your goal shapes how, where, and when you execute the campaign. I discuss goal setting in Chapter 10.

· Send “sets” of emails. I suggest building nurturing programs in groups of three emails at a time, or sets. At this stage, you don’t yet know what works best for nurturing programs, so building any more than three emails is wasted effort because you are likely to have to redo them anyway. So building three emails, sending three emails, and then seeing what worked on those three emails before you build your next set is the best way to begin.

Inbound white paper campaign

For inbound marketing, you need to advertise your white paper and then drive people to its location so that they can download it. You therefore need a URL and a landing page/form. I talk about the importance of forms in Chapter 4, but in this section I tell you what a form should look like for this specific type of campaign to give you an even clearer picture of what this campaign should look like.

· Keep the form short. Keeping your form short increases your engagement rates.

· Keep the content long. Long-form content performs much higher than short-form content with inbound marketing campaigns.

· Use progressive profiling. Progressive profiling is also a wise choice in this instance. I talk about how to set up progressive profiling in Chapter 9.

· Create an auto responder. Your auto responder needs to send the white paper requested by a prospect. Using the auto responder ensures that you get the correct email address. An auto responder email is an email set up to automatically go out to the person filling out a form. Your forms should always email the content to the person filling out the form. If you offer the content directly, you are missing out on validating an email address. Delivering the content via email guarantees that you’re sending to a correct email address because if your content is good, people will give you the correct email address to get it. Auto responder emails also allow you to identify and track the prospect. That way, you can connect email activity with web activity and begin your lead tracking and scoring. Here are some ideas to remember when creating a white paper campaign:

· Clearly state what the prospect will receive. Make sure that the text on your form clearly explains what happens when the form is filled out.

· Automate the next steps. If you are scoring sales-ready leads, make sure that you have your scoring model already set up and the automation rule ready to pass them on to sales. If you are adding people to a nurturing campaign, this is a good time to add people to a nurturing campaign that you have already created.

I say this elsewhere in the book, but it’s worth reiterating: Your competition will get your content regardless of what you do, so don’t try to create ways to stop them. You’ll just create barriers for the people you want to reach.