This is a primer on Marketing Automation I gave to SFSU's MBA digital marketing class. It gives a high level overview of everything a well implemented marketing automation system can accomplish for a business.
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WHAT’S MARKETING AUTOMATION?
▸ Think of Marketing Automation as
a robotic shopkeep.
▸ Analyze and segment humans.
▸ Interact with humans.
▸ Track human activity.
▸ GAIN TRUST OF HUMANS
▸ ACQUIRE AND RETAIN
HUMANS
4. COMPANIES THAT EXCEL AT
NURTURING GENERATE 50% MORE
SALES-READY LEADS AT A 33%
LOWER COST.
Forrester Research 2013
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I, FOR ONE, WELCOME OUR NEW ROBOT OVERLORDS
1. MA happily does otherwise tedious tasks like:
1. Follow-up and reminder emails
2. Audience segmentation
3. Reporting
2. Well programmed MA can also:
1. Score leads
2. Personalize buyer journeys
3. Predict sales
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BASIC PROGRAMMING
▸ WHO
▸ Everyone we met at the
tradeshow.
▸ People that downloaded a white
paper on X date.
▸ Our 1,000,000th visitor.
▸ WHAT
▸ Send an email.
▸ Update status.
▸ Append information.
▸ Send an alert.
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SEGMENTATION
▸ Modern data-mining
tools, coupled with
good marketing
automation and CRM
data hygiene, can give
you an ability to launch
highly targeted
campaigns.
▸ Right audience for
sales, most receptive to
communication, able to
tailor relevant content.
9. 59% OF COMPANIES WITH MARKETING
AUTOMATION ARE ABLE TO USE
INTELLIGENT TARGETING TO TRIGGER
CONTENT, COMPARED TO 17% WITHOUT.
Lenskold and Pedowitz Groups 2013
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NURTURE CAMPAIGNS
▸ The most prevalent types of MA
campaigns are Nurture Campaigns (aka
‘Drip Campaigns’).
▸ The goal of a nurture campaign is to
stay top-of-mind with a prospect.
▸ These can be linear, or a multi-path
“Choose Your Own Adventure”
campaign.
▸ Most commonly seen as an
annoying string of emails that you
didn’t ask to get.
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THINK OUTSIDE OF THE INBOX
▸ Nurture campaigns are NOT just email anymore.
▸ The buying environment has changed:
▸ Media is limitless
▸ Accessing information is completely different
▸ The buyers themselves have changed:
▸ They are always on
▸ They want instant gratification
▸ They are hyper-reactive to cheap/annoying sales pitches
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THINK OUTSIDE OF THE INBOX
▸ Drip email campaigns may work, but they are often not
awesome.
▸ Use social media, video, infographics, paid advertising,
and good old fashioned human interaction to create an
awesome experience for buyers.
▸ Good marketers don’t try to send great emails, they try
to create great journeys.
14. PEOPLE HATE TO BE SOLD TO,
BUT PEOPLE LOVE TO BUY.
Some Dude
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THREE TYPES OF DRIP CAMPAIGNS
▸ CANNED
▸ A set track that is seldom altered and
has a definite goal in mind.
▸ e.g. Demo Request follow-up drip
campaign.
▸ FRESH
▸ A generalized, en masse that changes
based on circumstances.
▸ Especially useful in content
marketing or products with quick
cycles.
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THREE TYPES OF DRIP CAMPAIGNS
▸ Individualized
▸ Welcome to the grey side of marketing automation
▸ Using an email address and a few tools, you can easily find out things like,
company, city, phone number, title, even what technologies they’re using.
▸ All that information, plus the fact that you’re tracking every move they make,
means you’ve got a lot of powerful segmenting and scoring power - use it wisely.
▸ “Right time communications” are hugely valuable.
▸ Triggering communications based on user behaviors is amazingly powerful, but
it can get a little creepy.
▸ Triggering an email to send when a user visits a pricing page might be a little
uncomfortable.
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A QUICK THING ON LEAD SCORING
▸ Way to go, you generated 1,000 leads for sales!
▸ (Sales is super pissed about that.)
▸ Lead Scoring maps demographic, firmographic, and observed behaviors to a scoring
framework.
▸ Lead has right title? +10 Points
▸ Lead attended our webinar? +5 Points
▸ Lead left our webinar 10 minutes after it started? -3 Points
▸ Lead works for a Fortune 500 company? +7 Points
▸ Lead works in the Brazilian branch of Fortune 500? -5 Points
▸ A lead scoring framework is an organism that needs to be constantly refined in concert with
the sales team.
▸ Typically, marketing will only turn over leads that have hit a minimum lead scoring threshold.
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ADVANCED APPLICATIONS
▸ Real Time Personalization
▸ Conversion Rate Optimization
▸ Sales Intelligence
▸ Multi-Attribution Intelligence
▸ Retargeting
▸ Predictive Analytics
▸ Lead Lifecycle
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CARE AND MAINTENANCE
▸ Two crucial elements of a consistently functioning MA
tool:
1. Organization
‣ Think of this as how you communicate with your
robot.
‣ Non-competing campaigns.
‣ Well curated segments.
‣ Clearly grouped and labeled assets.
2. Great Content
‣ What (and how) you say to
your humans.
‣ Depending on cycle length, you might need a
little or a lot of fresh content.
‣ Every interaction needs to earn its right to be
there.
21. 45% OF COMPANIES WITH MARKETING
AUTOMATION REPURPOSE CONTENT FOR
EFFICIENCY, COMPARED WITH 28% OF
COMPANIES WITHOUT MARKETING
AUTOMATION.
The Lenskold and Pedowitz Groups 2013
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22. 91% OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL USERS
AGREE THAT MARKETING AUTOMATION IS
“VERY IMPORTANT” TO THE OVERALL
SUCCESS OF THEIR MARKETING ACROSS
CHANNELS.
Marketo and Ascend2 2015
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FACTS
▸ The company makes web-based software used to post jobs, organize applicants, and
collaboratively screen candidates.
▸ The company offers a 7-day trial of their lowest-tier offering.
▸ Because the price point is so low, self-conversion (i.e. signing up for a monthly subscription online, as opposed to going
through the sales organization) is the only viable way to achieve upside at this tier.
▸ The company’s data science team ran a conversion regression study and determined that three
distinct behaviors exhibited during the 7-day trial window increase propensity to buy by
almost 50%.
1. Posting more than one job
2. Adding more than one user
3. Buying at least one premium job posting (i.e. “Featured Jobs” on LinkedIn)
‣ All of these behaviors are observable in the marketing automation tool.
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THE CHALLENGE
▸ Using marketing automation to observe and react to
behaviors, design a drip campaign that increases
propensity to buy.
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WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED
▸ Developed a cadence of emails
and display ads based on last-
known activity.
▸ Users receive welcome email
encouraging them to take two
most imperative actions: post a
job and add more users.
▸ Supplemented with general,
non-sales content to help users
achieve results.
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WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED
▸ Triggered follow-up emails as soon
as a desirable behavior was
observed.
▸ These emails encouraged
visitors to take the next most
impactful step.
▸ In-app notifications were also
used as reminders. Links in
those notifications were tracked
through MA to measure CTR.
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WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED
▸ Inactivity emails were also
triggered if a trial was abandoned.
▸ If a user came back, they were
put back on to the initial trial
track.
▸ If they didn’t, they were put into
a sale-save track.
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WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED
▸ CTA emails were schedule the day
of and the day after the trial comes
to an end.
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WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED
▸ Prior to an integrated email
campaign, the self-subscription
rate was 12% per monthly cohort.
▸ After implementing the campaign,
the subscription rate popped to
24%.
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THANKS GUYS
▸ Hit me up!
▸ justin.keller@mac.com
▸ @justinkeller
▸ in/justindkeller