How Digital Marketing can improve the customer experience (4/4)

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How are the marketing teams doing?

Now that we have identified good practices, let’s take action. But we still need the power. Are marketing teams ready to implement these new rules?

Let’s do a little exercise: raise your hand – virtually – if your marketing team can answer “yes” to all these questions:

• Do you manage a single customer/prospect base?
• Do you have the ability to easily send email marketing?
• Is it easy to create landing pages for new campaigns (without IT intervention)?
• Can your team schedule all the emails and content for an event, launch it and let it run?
• Can you measure the contribution of each marketing program to your revenue?
• Can you easily identify and prioritize prospects based on your business criteria and their propensity to buy?

If you answered yes to all the questions, congratulations! You’re ready! Normally, according to Adobe statistics, only 8% of you raised your hand to all of these questions. To answer yes to all the questions, you need a single platform to manage all the channels.

Illustration through an example of Marketing Automation solution: Marketo

Marketo is one of the leaders in marketing automation. It is a platform that we are particularly familiar with at Merlin/Leonard, which is why I am relying on it for my examples. The attached presentation will show you screenshots of what can be achieved once the platform is deployed and the inbound marketing strategy is implemented.

Being found

The solution analyzes the flow of visitors to your website and blog, as well as the open rates and click rates of your newsletters. It is thus able to give an engagement score to your different contents, and thus tell you which one works best. This allows you to orient your editorial line for the future.

Also, it is very intuitive to perform A/B tests: two versions of an email title on which you hesitate? Two forms that seem nice? Several landing page ideas? In a few clicks, schedule your A/B test, define your sample, the duration of the test and the “win” conditions, and the solution takes care of everything.

Create personalized conversations

Without a solution, how can you keep track of the prospects who sign up for your newsletter every day? How do you send them the right content at the right time, according to their maturity? How do you keep track of unsubscribes? Or the preferences indicated by your prospect on their subscription page?

In a marketing automation solution like Marketo, you :

• Define your engagement program(s),
• establish the different moments of your customer’s life cycle,
• attach content for each moment,
• program the frequency and limits of communication, the rules of transition between stages

… and Marketo does the rest. You are assured that your prospects will receive regular content adapted to their maturity.

Behavioral segmentation

In a marketing automation solution, actions can be launched either at a given date in the future, punctually or recurrently, or better, based on triggers linked to the prospect’s behavior.

Examples: we can trigger an action as soon as the prospect downloads a content, visits a web page more than X times, opens an email, watches a video… This allows to contextualize the conversation.

Omnichannel experience

More and more channels are connected to the marketing automation solution: to date – for Marketo – we can natively couple

• the email channel,
• the ” landing pages “,
• Facebook pages,
• Google ads,
• Webinar technology providers like Cisco or Go to Meeting,
• Slideshare…
• and every day new connectors emerge.

So we can drive conversations centrally and consistently from the Marketing Automation solution. It is always possible to connect other channels using the available API set.

Decisions based on facts

Once the Marketing Automation solution is centrally positioned in the marketing department, it is then possible to follow the budget, the consumed, to dynamically allocate the budget on the different programs.

By linking the marketing automation solution to the CRM, we can also go to the revenue; it is thus possible to dynamically calculate the return on investment (marketing ROI), essential to determine which program gives the best result.

The marketing solution knows how to distribute the revenue generated to all the contacts that participated in the opportunity, and from there to all the marketing programs that reached these contacts.

Aligning sales and marketing

Alignment between sales and marketing starts by getting these two entities to jointly build the customer lifecycle, its different stages, and to agree on the criteria that move them from one stage to another.

To do this, building a scoring program together that values all interactions with the prospect is essential to establish trust between the teams.

Thus, it is then possible to agree on the threshold that makes a prospect pass from the marketing team to the sales team: sales will only have “hot” prospects, ready to receive a call from the sales force.

Even better if the information gleaned by marketing about the prospect’s customer journey before it goes to sales is transmitted to sales via the CRM! Thus, the latter can call the prospect with full knowledge of the facts.

Measuring marketing contribution

In order to gain a place on the board of directors, the marketing director must transform the image of his department from “cost center” to “profit center“.

This can be done by showing the contribution of marketing to the revenue on the one hand; this is possible thanks to the platform and the integration with the CRM. On the other hand, at the opportunity level, we can identify all the marketing programs that contributed to the creation of the opportunity, before any action by the sales person.

We can also identify influential people within the target company who were instrumental in the win; sometimes, some people will not be identified by the sales person in the opportunity because they don’t play a direct role in the sale… but they are very important. They will nevertheless have participated in some marketing programs, so they will be visible in the marketing automation solution, but not in the CRM.

Identify the most profitable programs

It is also very easy to compare different marketing programs with each other, for example according to their ROI, the number of new email addresses collected, or the revenue generated.

Measure the impact of your social campaigns

This field is growing rapidly, due to the number and importance of social networks. It is now vital to add a social dimension to all your campaigns and measure the number of touches, shares and engagement of your content on social networks.

Measure the rate and speed of lead conversion

An almost insurmountable task in a CRM – if a complex logic is not set up and implemented in the CRM – becomes a child’s play once the customer lifecycle is modeled in the Marketing Automation solution: you can have the conversion rates of the different steps, the average time at each step, and their evolution over time! In short, how can you still do without a Marketing Automation solution if you want to engage in Inbound Marketing?

Are you ready to start your journey?