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Should You Invest In Marketing Automation?

August 5, 2011 By Candyce Edelen Leave a Comment

Recently on Focus, someone asked for recommendations for marketing automation products for very small companies. She got a lot of answers that essentially said, “it depends.”

About 18 months ago, PropelGrowth decided to invest in marketing automation. We’re a very small company, and I constantly second-guess myself on this decision. We use a product from one of the larger providers, and the product works as advertised, but it takes substantial resources to effectively use marketing automation of any kind, and for our company, it means redirecting resources from other projects that may have similar or even greater impact to revenue. So our marketing automation effort generally gets far less attention than it needs to be used effectively.

Here are a few lessons learned:

  1. Don’t base your decision solely on the price of the product or even the functionality. Evaluate whether you actually have the resources available to commit to what it takes to use the products effectively. That decision should have substantial impact on what products you choose to evaluate.
  2. These programs are effective only if they are used with targeted, compelling content. As you’re making the decision, carefully consider your content needs. Marketing automation, when done right, is a content beast that keeps growing and demanding more content. There are ways to re-purpose and reuse content, but the bottom line is, you’ll need to constantly produce fresh, engaging content to feed the beast. (see our article, “Thought Leadership to Support the Entire Buying Cycle” for more info)
  3. Marketing automation only works as a component in a larger strategy. You must also have budget for related marketing activities such as online and live events, advertising, content marketing, blogging, thought leadership and other efforts. Your marketing automation is the tool you use in promoting content/activities and measuring response.
  4. You will need a substantial database of contacts who have opted in to receive emails. Around the world, more and more governments are restricting use of email marketing. Europe is particularly restrictive, allowing you to send only one email to a new contact before they opt in. The US currently requires opt-out options, meaning you can email someone until they unsubscribe, but you must provide an easy way for them to do so. If you’re going to do email marketing, you must develop strategies to build a list of leads who have opted in to receive your content, and that means your content has to be compelling enough for them to WANT to read it (see item 2).
  5. You are best off if you start with substantial traffic to your website. If you are getting decent traffic, consider products that can facilitate inbound marketing efforts and track leads over time.
  6. Products that track the pages a lead has viewed and tie that information to email response (opens/click-throughs) are very helpful. We use this information in scoring leads, and we also provide it to sales as a helpful tip for conversation starters. For example, if a lead has read a number of my blog posts on content marketing and thought leadership, then sales might call to find out if they’re interested in exploring ideas around implementing a thought leadership program. This information is also particularly helpful in determining what other content we should be adding to the site (when we can appropriate resources…). However, even this activity is being threatened in the EU, where a directive was passed requiring marketers to let visitors opt into tracking. Most countries in the EU have not adopted this yet, but it’s something to watch for.
  7. Effective implementation of marketing automation requires substantial process re-engineering. While the marketing automation companies promise to have you up and running within 2 weeks, reality is quite different in most organizations. You’ll need to carefully evaluate a number of processes including lead management, database cleansing, CRM data, fields for use in landing pages, list segmentation, marketing process, workflow approval, etc. Medium and large companies generally need 6-18 months to implement the process. I strongly recommend using one of your marketing automation providers’ implementation partners to help work through some of these issues. Be very careful in how you modify your CRM. We got a little too enthusiastic in our SalesForce.com implementation, and I’m kicking myself now for introducing unnecessary complexity.

I’m still a big believer in the potential for marketing automation and see substantial advantages for small businesses that invest the resources to effectively implement and use this type of technology. Organizations that make the investment in technology, process, and human resources see BIG payoffs in terms of increased lead quantity and quality, improved conversions of leads to sales prospects, and improved close rates. Research has also shown that business from nurtured leads generates higher average order value than non-nurtured leads.

Do you have any marketing automation stories to tell? Share them with us here.

Warm regards,

Candyce

 

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Epsilon Breach – Banks Need Best Practices for Email Marketing

April 14, 2011 By Candyce Edelen 1 Comment

The recent Epsilon breach that exposed millions of email addresses has the potential to create a very big problem for all email marketers and will demand development of new best practices in the world of email marketing. It is of particular importance for banks and brokerages with a retail facing business, as these organizations are the most likely targets for phishing attacks.

This breach is unusual because hackers captured not only email addresses, but also first and last names and associated companies where those users have active accounts. This enables a much more effective fraud tactic called “spear phishing.” The fraudsters know that jdoe@gmail.com is John Doe who has an account with Citibank. So they can send a targeted email to John, using his first and last name and sending something that looks very much like it came from Citibank.

The affected Epsilon clients rushed to inform their subscribers of the breach and tell them to be suspicious of any email purported to come from them. The emails made an effort to help consumers distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate emails. But as consumers get better at discernment, they’re also likely to become a lot more suspicious of any marketing or transactional emails (a transactional email is correspondence confirming an action or updating a recipient on their account status. Often these emails include offers related to other services, sent in an effort to expand the banks’ business with existing customers).

Most phishing emails today contain obvious spelling or grammatical errors and calls to action that are quite different than what the legitimate company would send (e.g., “please log in to verify your account information…”). Users can be trained to detect errors and to recognize when a phisher asks for information that a legitimate company would not request in email.

However, I would posit that the phishers are getting more and more sophisticated with their attacks. While much of the phishing is currently originating in countries where English is not the first language, I’m noticing increasing levels of sophistication in design and language in phishing emails. The phishers are getting smarter, and this will make it more difficult for consumers to differentiate. If the hackers that broke into Epsilon’s database knew what they were stealing and are planning “spear phising attacks, then it’s likely that fraudsters using this data are going to get more sophisticated in their approaches.

The better the attackers get at their cons, and the more consumers get educated about phishing fraud, the more suspicious consumers will be of any marketing or transactional email from their banks, brokerages, credit card providers, etc.

This creates a problem with the way email marketing is done today. For example, most email service providers and marketing automation platforms use tracking code and personalized URLs (PURLs) in their links. These allow marketers to observe click through rates and measure effectiveness of their efforts. They also greatly simplify the process of finding information that might be buried deep in the linked website, significantly improving the user’s experience.

The more educated the recipient becomes; the more likely he or she will be to detect complicated PURLs and distrust these links in emails. When suspicious of an email or link, he won’t click it, opting instead to type a URL he already knows directly into a browser. This creates two problems as I see it.

First – our marketing automation software won’t be able to detect a click. This makes linked calls to action and response measurement much more complicated.

Second, and more importantly, the user is less likely to type in the full URL of our landing page. For example, they’re far more likely to type in www.communitybank.com than https://www.communitybank.com/Community/retailoffers/account/login.aspx?acid=0000000.  So how do we then lead them to our offer? Do we modify the home page for every campaign? How will this affect complex trigger campaigns? How will this affect transactional emails where the links need to take users to specific pages buried deep in a navigation hierarchy?

This breach will make it critical that email marketers, demand generation specialists and email service providers define new email marketing best practices.

I’d love to hear your comments and ideas for new best practices.

Warm regards,

Candyce

 

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Epsilon Hack Demands New Best Practices

April 7, 2011 By Candyce Edelen 1 Comment

In the aftermath of the Epsilon breach that exposed millions of email addresses , I’ve seen a lot of content talking about best practices that email providers and others need to take to prevent hackers from gaining access to data. But what I’m not seeing is best practices for marketers to take moving forward to help consumers differentiate legitimate transactional email from phishing fraud.

This breach will make it critical that email marketers, demand generation specialists and email service providers define new emailing best practices.

Do we need to change the way we provide links in emails? Do we need to eliminate HTML? How will this affect website design to help people get to the offers in our emails if they choose not to click a link in an email? How will this change the use of tracking code?

Here is an opportunity for someone to step forward as a real thought leader and change this industry for the better.

Warm regards,

Candyce

 

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Email Marketing Firm Epsilon Hacked

April 5, 2011 By Candyce Edelen 1 Comment

On March 30, Epsilon, a huge online marketing and email marketing provider, was breached by hackers. The hackers obtained access to millions of email addresses belonging to customers of dozens of major companies including banks, online retailers, and other consumer-oriented providers. Not only did they access the email addresses, they also obtained information about which companies the emails are associated with.

This breach will enable the hackers to run more sophisticated phishing campaigns. Where most phishing is done randomly, now the hackers know enough about the target victim to send them an email purporting to be from a company they know well and from whom they have accounts.

This breach opens up concerns for any of us who use a marketing automation system or email marketing provider. How well do these companies protect our customer data?

I’ve seen several lists of the companies  affected, and none seem to be complete. Epsilon has made one brief statement, but has not disclosed a complete list. Epsilon has more than 2,500 clients. Below, I’ve compiled a partial list of companies affected, but it’s not complete.

For more info on this story, here are links to LA Times and NY Times.

Companies Affected:

JP Morgan Chase

Citibank

Barclays Bank

Barclaycard

US Bankcorp

US Bank

Capital One

Ameriprise Financial

LL Bean Visa Card

Brookstone

Target

Walgreens

Best Buy

L.L. Bean

Home Shopping Network

HSN, Inc.

New York & Company

Kroger

Amazon.com

Ethan Allen Interiors

Tivo

Walt Disney

Marriott

Marriott Rewards

Ritz-Carlton

Ritz-Carlton Rewards

Hilton Worldwide

DoubleTree

Hampton Inn

Waldorf Astoria

College Board

Disney Destinations

McKinsey & Company

 

Warm regards,

Candyce

 

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Addressing Abandonment Issues with Progressive Profiling: Part One

August 30, 2010 By Phil Donaldson Leave a Comment

If you’re like me, you’ve got some serious abandonment issues. In other words you want get the most from your online lead generation and lead nurturing tactics. You don’t want to scare prospects away with long, complicated forms. But you need to gather a significant amount of data in order to help understand the unique business problems of prospects and customers. I feel your pain. Let’s talk a little about progressive profiling.

In conjunction with lead scoring, progressive profiling automates lead qualification and provides an effective way to identify milestones in the prospect’s buying (or investment) process and increase marketing ROI. Face it, prospects are very busy people. They don’t have a whole lot of time when it comes to engaging with content and offers. They will quickly abandon a tedious form, considering it a drain on their valuable time. Additionally, people have become wary about how much personal information they give out and who they give it to. Certainly, they can smell a traditional marketing ploy a mile away. This is where progressive profiling can help increase prospect engagement.

Progressive profiling, as part of a marketing automation application, employs intelligent landing page forms that collect small chunks of valuable data over time. The visitor is presented with a brief form requesting minimal information. Initially, basic information fields are presented such as name, email, phone number, company and a couple strategic marketing questions (such as “are you looking to utilize a brokerage service in the next six months?”). Once the form is submitted, the visitor goes from being an “anonymous visitor” to a “known visitor.” A web cookie is placed on the lead’s hard drive that enables the marketing automation platform to recognize them when they return to your site. Then the form can be pre-populated with their name and email address. This way, visitors won’t have to re-enter information they have already provided.

Upon each subsequent visit to a landing page, you present the prospect with a couple of new questions, slowly building a profile while maintaining a friendly, low-pressure environment. Through a strategic succession of marketing campaigns, marketing can collect enough data to engage each lead more intelligently. From there, your company can nurture the prospect with relevant content that helps them along in their buying (or investment) process. Marketing can also provide sales with better insight and intelligence on a given prospect’s business needs and online behavior, as well as present the hottest leads in real time.
Personal information is a form of currency. People are more and more cautious about how much of that currency they give out. Progressive profiling helps to expedite that process, building an atmosphere of trust because you’re not asking for too much, too soon.

There’s more to say on progressive profiling, so let’s continue in our next post in this series.

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