Marketing Automation For Dummies (2014)

Part V. Putting It All Together

Chapter 15. Implementing Advanced Marketing Automation Techniques

In This Chapter

Auditing your performance

Split testing to increase conversions

Saving time with agile techniques

Integrating marketing automation with offline efforts

Iwrote this chapter because I have noticed that after about six months to one year, most marketers are ready for more advanced learning. This chapter gives you some more advanced techniques to consider. Most of these techniques relate to testing and organization, and that’s because I’ve seen these techniques — more so than any other — increase companies’ ROI using a marketing automation tool.

This chapter covers topics such as how to structure your team for better efficiencies when using marketing automation, how to better understand the specific testing of your marketing programs, and how to ensure constant improvements in your marketing over time.

This is a more advanced chapter. If you’re new to marketing automation, go ahead and read this chapter but hold off on working with these techniques until you master the basics. When first starting with marketing automation, you have a lot to do, so understand that you have room to grow, but don’t try to grow too fast. You’ll likely just end up going crazy.

Auditing Your Performance for Improved Results

Auditing is a key to improving any process. Auditing marketing automation programs can be eye opening. A simple audit can show you whether your scoring model is correct, your nurturing program has become less effective, or your lead qualification has gone bad. I cover auditing your lead-scoring model in Chapter 12, so in this section I tell you about how to create a sustainable review process and benchmark your performance over time.

Creating a sustainable review process

To put together a sustainable review process, you need to have a few tools already set up and ready to go as well as enough data to make a review worth your while. This is why, earlier in this chapter, I recommend holding off on this chapter’s techniques for a while. Before you begin to create a sustainable review process, make sure that you have the following ready to go:

· Spreadsheet: As much as we’d all like to do away with keeping spreadsheets, you need one for this review process. I suggest using an online spreadsheet, such as through Google Docs, on which you can collaborate with others. Or use an application like Dropbox so that others on your team have easy access to the spreadsheet.

· Data: You need data to do reviews. Without the data, you can’t get much value out of your review. Have a minimum of 30 days’ worth of data for analysis.

With your data and spreadsheet in hand, you can set up your spreadsheet as follows. Make your first column the name of your asset or program. The second column should contain your benchmark data. (For your first time, this data should be the results of your first attempt at marketing automation.) Figure 15-1 gives a good example of how this spreadsheet should look. Also, although I don’t show it in the figure, consider having a column for keeping notes, such as what you changed for this campaign, or what came out differently than you expected. Keeping these notes helps you to quickly look back in time to see what you did to get the results you had, or come up with ideas as to why the results weren’t what you expected.

The date column headings in Figure 15-1 are to help you understand that this should be a living document, with revisions expected in the future. Having the dates here helps you note on your calendar the next time you need to review your program.

Figure 15-1: A spreadsheet ready for data.

Be sure to gather all your existing data before you implement a marketing automation tool. If you have an email program, you need to capture your results before you implement marketing automation. Having results on hand will help you benchmark and prove the value of marketing automation over other options, as well as create the baseline for growth. For programs that you haven’t run before using marketing automation, use the results of your first attempt as your baseline.

Try to make this process easy on yourself. The spreadsheet is a tool to help you see large trends over time. If you make it a hassle, you won’t keep up with it. Try to use only a single number for your benchmark, and use the same number each time. Having multiple benchmarks for a single campaign can add too much complexity to your reporting and increase the time it takes for you to keep up with this data. For a best practice, try to get to where you can fill out the full sheet in only 10 minutes.

Benchmarking your performance over time

Now that you have the data in a single place, you can start to look at it over a long time period, fill it in periodically, and get a feel for how to check out performance over time. I cannot stress enough that this task should not be a time sink. Keeping it quick and easy will ensure that you do it. If you make it hard on yourself, you’ll never do it, and you’ll fail to improve at the rate you could.

Follow these tips for keeping your review on track:

· Review timeline: Set up a standard review timeline and follow it religiously. Be diligent in your review to ensure that you are automating the correct processes. Remember that you’re now speeding up and running more programs than before. If you fail to carefully monitor them, you’re likely to automate some very bad processes. I recommend the following time frames for specific parts of your new marketing automation campaigns and supporting assets:

· Nurturing programs: For nurturing campaigns, the review timeline depends on the time frame of the full program. Evaluating every 90 days is a good practice. This gives you plenty of time to see results, compare, and tweak.

· Automation rules: Look at automation rules 30 days after you set them up the first time, and then review them every 90 days after that.

· Scoring rules: I discuss reviewing scoring rules in Chapter 6, but in general, you should make sure to review your scoring rules once a quarter to begin with, and taper off to twice a year when you have it dialed in. The only time you should do it more frequently than once a quarter is when you notice a high percentage of leads being qualified as MQL but not being accepted as SQL. If you see more than half of your MQL leads not being accepted, you need to reevaluate your scoring as soon as possible.

· Lead-assignment programs: Review these every quarter. Quarterly provides a good time frame to see how the leads are converting into sales. If you have a very long sales cycle, you need to review your programs less frequently because you won’t have enough data until you’ve had time for leads to close out, giving you data to work with. So if you have a sales cycle of six months or more, consider evaluating your models only twice a year.

· Content: I suggest reviewing your content as a whole every 90 days. Lumping your content together into a single number helps you to see larger trends. Consider having a group for all webinars, emails, white papers, and so on.

· What to look for in your data: Your data can tell you a lot, and you want to look at both short-term and long-term trends, as follows:

· Short-term trends: Your short-term data reveals trends that you see very easily after you put in a new metric. Seeing that you had a gain or loss over the previous time frame is a good example of short-term data. When looking at short-term data, do your best to understand why the change happened. This is where the real investment of time comes in. Make sure that you understand what drove the change; this is the key to changing your programs to either capitalize on the gain or minimize the loss.

· Long-term trends: Long-term trends reveal themselves over quarters, even years. This type of data is key to your organization as a whole. Studying this data can greatly help with seeing large trends coming down the line. For example, if you notice that your webinar attendance is fading over time, yet your leads from videos are increasing, you get a clue about the importance of a webinar’s life span. Many companies have seen this exact trend and are now putting more emphasis on replaying their videos and integrating more inline video CTAs as a result. This is helping them to put more CTAs in the middle of the video while it is playing to help them drive more leads over the life cycle of the video.

A great benefit of tracking your data is the increase in PR opportunities you might get. By tracking your numbers, you can become great case study material. Vendors love to know how their clients improve as a result of their technologies. They will be more than happy to write a PR article with your data if you have good data, providing you with plenty of free PR as well.

Benefitting from Split Testing

Split testing, also known as A/B testing as well as multivariate testing, means to conduct a test by holding a factor constant and testing different outcomes from various scenarios. An example is to have a single paid search ad driving people to two separate landing pages. Testing which landing page has a higher conversion from the same advertisement allows you to maximize the effectiveness of your campaign.

Most of the mainstream marketing automation tools allow for split testing, so you should easily be able to perform this type of test inside your application. Consider split testing your emails, landing pages, and content first. After you have mastered the testing process, you can dive into deeper split testing and test smaller items such as email subject lines, dynamic CTAs on landing pages, and so forth.

The basics of split testing

Split testing goes better if you follow some basics steps. Review the steps in this section and then you can easily use this model to split test many different aspects of your marketing campaigns.

1. Define your variable.

I suggest testing only one element at a time. This makes for the clearest test and removes the subjectivity of most people’s opinions as to which email is better. Trying to test more than one element at a time is not good practice and doesn’t give you a clear result. Good variables to test are the following:

· Call to action language

· Form length

· Type of content (video vs. white paper)

· Email subject line

· Offers

2. Create the content you want to test.

For example, to test landing page copy, you need multiple variations of your landing page, with each one having a different version of the variable you want to test. Figure 15-2 shows two versions of the same landing page with different call-to-action language in order to test which language converts best.

Figure 15-2: Three landing pages with different language.

3. Create your test.

How you create your split test depends on the item you’re testing, and the differences between setting up an email split test and a landing page split test are large enough that I cover them in their own sections (coming up).

4. Run the test.

It’s time to go live with multiple scenarios to test which one is the best. I suggest testing this with emails with a small segment of your total segmentation, with landing pages only for a short while, and with content for a limited time as well. I get more specific on the time frame for each in the following section.

5. Review it.

If you have a clear winner, first determine why and then end your split test. Next, replace the test group with the single landing page, email, or content that had the highest engagement.

Just because one asset has a higher conversion rate doesn’t always mean it’s the best one. If you can, look at the leads that converted during your initial split a few months down the road. If one of the lower-performing options has converted more leads into opportunities, you may have found what you really were looking for — that is, not just higher conversion rates on an asset, but more deals at the end of the day. Just remember to take a look back and double-check that the higher-converting asset is converting the leads you really want.

Testing emails for conversions

You can split test emails a few different ways, mostly depending on the tool you use. Here are the two main ways to do a split test:

· Inline split test: An inline split test is a split test built into your email-creation process. This means that as you are building your email, you can build a few different options simultaneously, letting you streamline your testing and making it easier to do so. Note that this is a very advanced option, so a tool with this feature usually comes with a higher price tag.

· List sampling: Sampling has always been a good way to split test. The sampling technique is how Gallup predicts the presidential elections. The sampling method is as follows: Take a few random samples of people from your list, about 10 percent of your total list. From the sample, divide the list into the number of variations you’d like to test. Send a separate email to everyone on each small list. Then send whichever email has the highest engagement to the remaining 90 percent.

Comparing forms, content, and landing pages with split testing

When considering how to improve your conversion rate on a landing page, split testing can easily show you the way. A landing page usually consists of the landing page itself, a form, and content that the form is protecting. You can test all three of these elements using the same type of split test, but not all at the same time. Here is how to split test the different parts of a landing page to increase conversions easily:

· Have your assets. To create your split test for a landing page, form, or content, start by creating the different assets.

· Use only one URL. To test your conversions, you need to have multiple possible outcomes. You want to drive people to multiple landing pages, but you also need to have a way to control traffic so that you spread the traffic to the multiple landing pages evenly, increasing the effectiveness of the test. To spread traffic evenly, you hold the lead source as a constant, which, in the case of a landing page, is its URL. By using a single URL and having your marketing automation tool sending the traffic to multiple pages equally, you can see whether you have a clear winner on conversions from your form, landing page, or content.

· Run your test. To create your test, you will most likely use a split testing feature within your marketing automation tool. Most major vendors include this feature. The steps involved to use it vary but the basics are all the same. You’ll create or have created the items you want to test already, and have them saved in the marketing automation tool. Your marketing automation solution will create a single URL to promote your content via social, email, online, or any other medium. The results of your test will be found in your marketing automation tool. Some tools can even automatically change your campaigns to optimize for the best outcome. Figure 15-3 shows a split test being set up in the Pardot marketing automation tool.

I’ve covered how to split test landing pages, content, and forms in the same section because each item lives on the landing page. You just need to change the form on each one to test different form fields, call to action text, or colors. The content presents your offer, so this method easily allows you to test content delivery formats. For example, what do people do more: watch videos or download white papers? Finally, you can test the landing page layout itself with this method as well to discover whether a particular landing page layout works better than your standard website layout.

Figure 15-3: Setting up a split test.

Agile Marketing for the Modern Marketer

Agile marketing is a topic I’ve been studying for a while now. It has picked up steam in the marketing world as a topic of interest to many marketers, and for good reason. During your day, you are probably trying to manage long-term marketing projects as well as react to your sales team’s needs and changing market conditions. So, for example, you may have to stop working on a long-term project to put up a blog post defending your position or promoting a new feature release.

Agile marketing is a mindset and framework to help marketers contend with their hectic workloads and better manage a department full of constant change and production. The essence of agile marketing comes down to this: Execute often, test frequently, and be nimble. Maybe these ideas seem too simple to have their own section, but it’s worthwhile to explore in some depth how an agile mindset can help you meet your marketing goals faster, easier, and with less effort.

Execute often

You have more to do than you have time in the day. Consider the total number of touch points you will have with prospects over time. Hundreds? Maybe even thousands.

Putting the correct amount of effort into an idea is the only way to survive. Also, the truth is that you have no clue how someone will react to a new campaign. No matter how much planning you do, you never know how a campaign is going to work out until you hit Send.

But you have to test. This is the first part of being agile. Get into the mindset of executing small test batches and then sending the big batch. In his books Good to Great and Built to Last, Jim Collins explains the concept of shooting bullets and then cannon balls. Do your lining up and aiming with smaller, less expensive items; then, when you know you’re on target, bet big with the big guns and fire away. Here are a few practical ways to put this idea into play:

· Split testing: I cover split testing earlier in the chapter. Split testing is an agile approach. The next time you want to send an email blast to your full database, take 10 percent of them and split test your emails. You’ll find out which one is best and then you can fire that one to the remaining 90 percent for your best results possible.

· Surveying: Surveying is an agile approach as well. Before you create your next white paper, consider calling your current prospects, offering them three white paper titles, and asking them which they would rather read. You can even go so far as to draft the first two pages. Use your prospects’ feedback to decide which option to move forward with.

· Beta ideas: Another great way to test ideas is with beta programs. Beta is a term frequently used in technology to identify an early-stage idea. Google is known for using the term beta on any new item it releases before launching the full version. Consider trying the same idea with webinars. Case in point: I was working for a software company selling marketing software and wanted to test the waters for a new webinar series on, oddly enough, the concept of agile marketing. So we tested the idea and did a light promotion with a small goal. If we hit our goal, we would spend more money next time on positioning the webinar.

We did hit our goal, and our last webinar (the third one) had more than double the attendance of our average webinar. Had we not tried the idea, we would never have found those new leads.

Review constantly

Constantly releasing small tests is the first key to being agile, but testing without review doesn’t equal good results. You must look at the results of your test to know whether to continue. Set a goal for your test and keep the following in mind when reviewing your results:

· Baseline: Use a baseline as the metric you want to beat. If a small test can beat your baseline, you’ve found a gem to invest more money into.

· Feedback: The baseline approach can work well, but sometimes you might be too early to market with your idea. This was the case with my company’s agile marketing webinars. Our initial sign-up number didn’t come close to reaching our baseline; however, attendees rated the webinar “super helpful,” so we decided to do another one after gathering feedback about what worked and what we could do better. This feedback is what led to such a great result in the end.

You have to be okay with failure. Many companies hear the word “fail” and run the other way. To improve yourself and to be a market leader, you have to try new things. This is why I suggest testing ideas on a small scale. Fail on a small scale and you’ll learn. Fail on a big scale and you’ll be fired.

Getting your boss to buy into acceptable failure isn’t easy. Try to get your boss to buy into the concept of small tests. If your company is not progressive with ideas, it isn’t likely to adopt this methodology, however.

Eliminate the need for perfect

The best advice I can give you on being agile are the words from my dear friends Scott Armstrong and Nolin LeChasseur of Brainrider: “Always strive for better, not best.” There could be no better words to live by in marketing today.

I can easily prove this idea to you. Draw two dots on a piece of paper, one on the bottom left and one on the top right. Now put your pen on one of the dots and close your eyes. Try to draw a straight line to the other dot. This is the “non-agile way.” You will find that when you stop drawing your line, you are likely to be a good bit off of your intended target. You can stare at the other dot for hours and you’ll get the same results.

The point is that no matter how long you plan, if you don’t set up a review loop and change course, you’ll never hit your mark. Now try this the agile way.

Go back to the first dot you started on. Put your pen on the dot and close your eyes. Draw a short line and open your eyes. Notice where your line went and then close your eyes and try to continue to draw your line toward the other dot. You can open your eyes and recalibrate as many times as you want. You’ll almost certainly hit the dot, with precision and much faster than if you had looked at the other dot for an hour. Figure 15-4 shows what your paper might look like using the two approaches.

Figure 15-4: One line drawn with an agile approach and one without. Notice which one hit its goal.

The lesson here is to execute often, review your results, recalibrate, and execute again. This process helps you manage more work, get better results, and be happier in general.

Integrating Marketing Automation with Offline Efforts

Marketing automation came about to help manage online marketing efforts, and to give online efforts more power through better visibility, a single prospect record, and automated execution. These purposes are still important, but now you have many ways to integrate marketing automation with offline efforts such as trade shows and direct mail, as well.

Maximizing trade show effectiveness with automation

Trade shows are one thing many businesses have in common. You have to go to them but would rather not. People stop by your booth, get some data sheets, and likely throw them away soon after. Your salespeople usually argue over whose lead was whose, and you can never really get them to put into the CRM the trade show where they found the lead. As a result, all the time you spend setting up and planning is for naught because you can’t prove your ROI. Using marketing automation can solve all these issues with trade shows, and it’s pretty easy. Follow these steps:

1. Buy a tablet for each sales representative.

Any mobile touch-screen tablet will do.

2. Create a landing page/form.

You need to have Wi-Fi access at your booth for this to work. (There are other ways to do this without Wi-Fi; they require technical skill, however.)

3. Create automations for your landing page/form.

You want to set up a different form for each sales rep and create the following automations for each form to perform:

· Autoresponder email: This form automatically sends an email to prospects when they fill out the form. It also sends them the data sheet automatically so that they don’t have to carry it around. You can also now track whether prospects read the data sheet.

· Mark lead with lead source: This form marks the lead with the event that generated the lead, so you don’t have to rely on sales representatives to do this.

· Add to nurturing campaign: This form ensures that you add this lead to a follow-up nurturing program.

· Assign the lead to the sales rep: With this form, all leads that come through a specific salesperson are assigned to that person.

4. Load each tablet with the URL for the specific sales representative.

Give all the salespeople their own tablet with their own landing page. Figure 15-5 shows a tablet with an example form and landing page.

Figure 15-5: An iPad with a landing page and form used at a trade show.

Now your sales team is armed and dangerous. Send the team off to the event and watch the leads get automatically routed to the correct representative, personal follow-ups get sent instantly, and ROI tracking get done — and you never have to do a thing. And your sales reps don’t have to input business cards!

Integrating direct mail and automation

Some people think that direct mail marketing doesn’t work. I agree that mass-blasting mail doesn’t work, with regular mail or email. However, targeted mailings work just as well as targeted email. The main issue that most people have with direct mail is the difficulty in tracking its effectiveness, but with marketing automation, you can solve that issue. Here are the basic actions you need to take to integrate direct mail and your marketing automation tool:

· Create a specific landing page/URL. This is the first move you can make to easily track your direct mail efforts. If you give people a special URL to go to for the offer, you know they came from that direct mail piece.

· Use a PURL if your tool has this feature. PURL stands for Personalized URL. You can have your marketing automation tool generate a specific URL for each person. If, for example, you provide me, and only me, with the URL www2.companyname/Mathew-sweezey, and someone goes to this page, you can assume with a high degree of certainty that it was me. This is an older technology but is still useful in integrating the two technologies together. Do note that because this is an older approach, it’s no longer a common feature in marketing automation tools. It has been replaced with one URL for the campaign itself and uses the form mentioned in the preceding bullet to track the individual.

· Direct mail-in automations. With more people using email, direct mail has little competition in the B2B space. You might want to consider the following options:

· Fully integrated solution: Only a few “fully” integrated marketing automation and direct mail tools exist. This means that the marketing automation tool is tied to a direct mail fulfillment house. So direct mail can be sent as one-off marketing pieces in the way that emails may be sent at triggered times. This fully integrated solution is usually an option only at the very high end of the marketplace.

· Semi-integrated: Many tools have a marketplace through which vendors can add on other technologies. This means that direct mail vendors can add features to your application. This option comes standard with tools that fall below the very high end, as well as on most major applications.

· Basic integration: The most basic way to tie in marketing automation with direct mail marketing is by using a list. This approach requires no integration with your tool; you just have to keep up with a list. When you want to send direct mail, you add the prospect to the list and periodically take the list to your direct mail fulfillment center and have the mail sent. This is by far the easiest for smaller companies.