Your business probably spends a good deal of time and money on driving people to your website using different marketing channels. Now, having massive amounts of visitors every day is good—but if you can’t convert them into customers, then what’s the point?

Would you prefer 100 visits a day with a 10% conversion rate or a 1,000 at 0.1%? I would pick the first. So how do you increase your online conversion rates?

Read the full article

Lead scoring as its name implies allows you to associate a score to each individual leads based on different criterias. Criterias can be both demographic (state, country, title…) Or behavioral ( # of site visits, type of downloaded content…). The score can be based on any range (0-100 or 0-1000…) The important thing is that the range stays the same and that your point attribution is aligned with your range.
Here are 7 steps to creating your lead scoring system

1. Define what a sales qualified lead is for your business. Create this definition with sales. Your ideal sales lead can be one or more type if you have multiple markets or buyer types. Your definition should identify key demographics or behaviors that qualify your lead. Here is an example. CEO for a business with 1M+ in revenue  that has attended at least one webinar.
2. Determine your scoring range. Will your score from 0 to 100? or 0 to 500?
3. Once you have your perfect lead definition identify how many points you will attribute to each action/attribute. For example when title is CEO you will give 20 points on 100. When someones attend a webinar you will give 10 poins etc…   When building your scoring start simple. You can always refine later. Your scoring model will evolve over time so start simple and refine as you go. Give points only to lead attributes or actions that help you qualify your lead.
4. Identify the threshold (score level) at which you want your leads transfered to sales. For example, “All leads over 65/100 should be moved to sales”. Most marketing automation vendors can sync your leads to a CRM based on score.
5. Implement your scoring inside your marketing automation software.
6. Review and evaluate leads being passed to sales with sales. Make the needed adjustments on your scoring and then repeat review each week or month.
7. Enjoy the benefits of lead scoring.

As you can see lead scoring itself is not complicated. Getting your recipe straight will however take more time and effort. Lead scoring will not be perfect when you start but stick with it, review it and refine it and you will see the benefits of lead scoring.

Here are the Top 4 Benefits Gained from Adopting Marketing Automation. There are plenty more but in our minds these are the ones that will really help your business thrive.

1. Improved follow-up to all new leads. Implementing an automated lead response process via marketing automation will ensure that each lead receives a consistent, prompt and personalized response from your company. It will also prevent leads from falling through the cracks due to human error. These automated processes can be used in different situations. From auto-responders on forms to automating sales follow-up of raw trade show leads.
2. Increased sales productivity. Marketing automation automatically identifies the leads that are ready to buy and then hands-off these leads directly to your sales people. Leads are qualified utilizing demographic and behavioural criteria’s defined by each organisation based on their own qualifying methodology. This eliminates sales wasted time and allows them to focus on good leads.
3. Make smart marketing decisions. Marketing automation helps businesses get more bang for their buck. Marketing automation systems make it easier to track the true ROI of marketing programs especially for complex multi-touch campaigns. See which campaigns is driving revenue and which ones aren’t. Companies can make smarter marketing investments based on more than just conversion rates and Cost Per Lead.
4. Lead nurturing shortens sales cycles. Marketing automation and a well-designed lead nurturing program help accelerate the speed at which leads move along your sales cycle. Lead nurturing programs provides information your leads need at each step of the sales cycle enabling them to make buying decisions more quickly and more efficiently.

Topics covered:

• The basics
• The Technology
• Taking Your Integration To The Next Level
• 10 questions you should ask when evaluating a marketing automation platform

One thing I would add to the article is ensuring your CRM/Marketing Automation integration allows you to gather sales feedback on the leads you are assigning them. It is one thing to synchronize leads from your marketing automation software to your CRM but if you don’t have the possibility to get sales feedback on leads then it is not worth much. The CRM integration should allow sales rep to recycle leads or put leads back in nurturing tracks directly from the CRM. This allows leads that were judged “ready” or “hot” based on scoring to be passed back to marketing based on sales judgement. Nurturing and scoring is not a marketing only process. It should be a joint sales and marketing effort.

B2B Marketing Zone is a collection of blog posts and articles all around B2B Marketing. Alsamarketing will be providing content revolving around Marketing Automation and Lead Nurturing best practices.

Go take a look at B2B Marketing Zone

We published an artivle on demandenreport.com discussing ways SMB can use marketing automation to improve their results. Here is an excerpt

Time and cash management are two key challenges that SMBs face each and every day.  Finding ways to maximize these resources is crucial to the prosperity of every small and medium business. As a business owner or manager you probably have been asking yourself these questions:

• Which marketing/sales initiative should I be spending my time on?
• Salespeople are having a hard time following up on all our leads. Should I hire more sales people?
• Where should I spend my marketing/sales money to get best results and benefits?
• Am I spending too much or too little on my marketing and sales initiatives?
• Could I be generating more profits?

Read the full article

See below the chart for further information of what email marketers should concentrate on measuring in 2011.

In 2011 email marketers should strive to gain a better understanding of what happens after the click. It is nice to know that someone clicked on a link in your email but the real value is understanding if your email campaigns are driving the results you want and if  they are allowing you to meet your goals.  In order to do this you have to measure what happens after the click.

For example, you send an email to a segmented list of individuals to offer them a free trial of your product. You see that 80% opened the email and that 50% clicked your call-to-action and proceeded to visit your free trial landing page. That’s all nice data but if you stop there you will have no idea how many people actually requested a free trial as a result of your emailing. Isn’t that the most important question to answer? Is my free trial email actually allowing me to generate more free trial requests?

These metrics where more difficult to track in the past but not anymore. There are many online tools that can help you track this type of information (Alsamarketing Marketing Automation software is one of those tools).

In 2011, give yourself the goal to track your email campaigns past the click. It will ask for a little effort but the rewards are great.

In 2011 B2B Marketers will:

1. Continue increasing their spending on online marketing activities (content creation, blog, SEO, email marketing and paid search) and will decrease spending on their offline initiatives (direct mail, trade shows and print advertising). Given the changes in how buyer’s research products and services they want to purchase I see this trends continuing in the coming years.

2. Use social media marketing in a more effective way. As social media becomes more mature as marketing tool and more success stories emerge we will start seeing an increase in lead generation initiatives on these various platforms. Social media will also become an excellent tool for customer service and customer retention programs.

3. Mobile marketing will explode. With the emergence of all the new platforms (Apple iPhone and iPad, Googles Android) mobile marketing will move beyond mobile messaging. Mobile email, mobile websites and mobile applications will become a valuable channel for marketers in 2011

4. Concentrate on understanding their prospects behaviours online and offline to gain a deeper insight in their prospect buying cycles. Using these insights marketers will be able to produce higher converting content and marketing programs that will allow them to generate quality leads for their business.

5. Investments in marketing technology will ramp up as marketing needs more and more data and automation to be efficient. This will allow marketers to gain valuable data that will help them.

Do you see other trends that will emerge in 2011?

How To Avoid Email Fatigue – Create Pertinent Emails

Email is a great tool for marketers; it’s cheap, it can be monitored, and recipients can take actions right away.  But online marketers are challenging a huge problem: email fatigue.  Reports show that around 90% of all emails sent are spam. Add to that all the business email you receive in a day and you start to understand why there is email fatigue.

To overcome this issue you have to ensure you are sending your leads quality information (what THEY want to read about) at that time/speed they want it. While this may seem simple in theory it can very difficult to implement in a business context. One of the solutions to counter email fatigue is making sure your emails are pertinent.

Solution: Increasing the pertinence

Increasing the pertinence of your emails is a problem that can only be solved by having the adequate information on your leads and understanding their level of interest. Most companies’ only monitor email open and click-through rate.  While these are valuable metrics they don’t give you the whole picture. A lead’s level of interest should also be monitored by looking at the interactions he is having with your other marketing channels; such as which link they clicked, the number of visits to your web site, to your blog, which of your tweets the interacted with, which campaigns touched them, have they filled in any forms lately, etc. Using this information you can easily gage the interest level of  your leads and decide which email communications your lead should get and if you should slow down or accelerate your communications with him.

The general idea is to delay/space-out the communications to those who aren’t interested right now and send more specific emails to those that are.

Implementing this type of process might sound like a lot of work but remember that Marketing Automation solutions can automatically retrieve data on all online activities across all your online campaign channels (social media, social news, corporate website, blog, emails, etc) and can automatically adjust email campaign settings based on the information gathered.

You will always have leads on your lists that will unsubscribe or won’t be fully engaged but this is a good thing. You are weeding out the leads that are not interested. Concentrate on those that are engaged, increase the pertinence of your email and email fatigue should be less of a problem for your organization.

The B2B sales environment has changed drastically with the introduction of the Internet to the personal and business space. Companies are finding that it is increasingly challenging to reach potential prospects, and they are changing their sales and marketing tactics in order to cope. There are several specific trends that are driving the adoption of marketing automation, making it an integral asset to any organization.

Software Advice, a free online resource for software buyers, outlines seven macro trends that they believe are pushing the growth of marketing automation. You can view them below or read about them in more detail on the Software Advice blog.

1. Buyers want valuable content.The traditional marketing speak needs to be replaced with original content that provides value and education to the buyer.
2. Buyers are hesitant to engage over the phone.Sales professionals are constantly facing the issue of decreased sales engagement. Software Advice deals with this issue on a daily basis when trying to communicating with software buyers.
3. Buyers require marketing accountability.Traditionally, marketing ROI was difficult to measure on positioning, collateral and brand building. Organizations require a better view of marketing efforts so they can quantifiably measure them against total ROI.
4. A down economy results in longer sales cycles.When money is tight, people are less inclined to buy, period. Sales professionals are faced with more and more prospects that are more risk-averse than ever.
5. Consumerization of B2B sales processes.B2B buyers want their sales process to mirror that of their B2C exchanges. They demand clear and concise pitches, simplified pricing, quick implementation and ease of use. Also, they prefer as little interaction with sales as possible.
6. Marketing channels have transformed.With the advent of the Internet, the way we communicate has drastically changed. Companies have to find a way to contact prospects through the various channels they access.
7. SaaS is the preferred deployment method.Due to the high number of relatively new entrants to the marketing automation space, many of these vendors are built on a modern, software-as-a-service (SaaS) architecture. This deployment method enables users to get up and running faster than with traditional on-premise models. Also, with subscription pricing, the marketing team can easily add a digestible line item to their budget, as opposed to seeking approval for a big capital expenditure.

Marketing automation has hit the ground running. It will be interesting to watch as it develops over the next couple of years, helping companies adjust to and embrace the new B2B sales environment.

Lauren Carlson writes about various topics related to CRM software, with particular interest in sales force automation, marketing automation, and customer service. She has a background in the music industry, and when she isn’t writing about software, you can find her running at Town Lake and singing at local venues. She is a graduate of the University of Texas with a bachelor’s degree in journalism.

Who else wants more quality prospects?

One of the challenges in internet marketing is ensuring you are gathering accurate prospect information from your various marketing initiatives. How many times have you tried to reach out to someone through email or phone just to find out that the information was fake? Tired of it?  Here are two ways to minimize the number of “fake” prospects you are getting.

1-Send valuable content through email

Many businesses redirect the user directly to a content piece after a successful form submission. For example, user fills and submits a form to gain access to a white paper. Seems correct to you? It works but it does not help to gather accurate data. Instead, send the white paper using email after the successful form submission. Warn the user on the form that the content piece will be sent to them by email. This won’t guarantee that the visitor will give you a valid email address but it does increase the chances.

When sending documents in email it is also a good idea to send a link to where the document lives on your website instead of an attachment. First it makes the email smaller to download and second you will be able to know who accessed the document and when. Marketing automation solutions really excel at tying this type of information back to prospects and/or leads so that it can be reused in future marketing campaigns

2- Validate data

It is a good idea to validate data on the form before a user can submit the information. This will help gather consistent information on your prospects and prevent prospects from posting forms filled with garbage. At a minimum you should be validating email formats and phone number formats to ensure you can at least contact the prospect. The other fields can be validated as you wish but the more validation you have the better the data will be. However, you can overdo it so be careful. Implement strict validation only on the fields you really need or it will make filling and submitting your form a lot more complicated for your prospect.

3- Use a Privacy Statement

Including a Privacy Statement below forms requesting personal information from the visitor is a good practice. This will help reassure your visitor that their personal information will not be abused or sold. Reassured visitors are more likely to input their real contact information if they know you won’t spam them or sell their info to others.

The concept of marketing automation has been around for a few years now, but there is still confusion about the potential and limits of this technology. Basically, Marketing Automation solutions offer three things (most tools offer a lot more features but in general the value comes from the three features to follow).

• First, it gathers information and creates detailed lead’s profiles based on identities and the online interactions performed across all your online marketing campaigns.
• Second, it provides tools to automate marketing campaigns using the previously accumulated information. This allows highly targeted and relevant marketing campaigns to be performed as well as lead nurturing and lead scoring.
• Finally, it generates reports  and data on various marketing metrics (campaigns performances, email performance, ROI, cost per lead…) that you can use to justify and optimize your various marketing efforts

To recap using a marketing automation solution , you will be able to:

• Monitor in real time all your online campaigns,
• Synchronize lead and opportunity information with your CRM.
• Automatically perform tasks like send emails, send alert to sales, lead scoring, lead nurturing… all based on leads’ behaviors and attributes.
• Obtain accurate ROI and various other marketing metrics information

Purpose

You should always keep in mind that the main purpose of using a Marketing Automation Solution is to understand your customer and to provide them with the information they need at the time they need it so they can make an informed buying decision.

To illustrate this lets suppose that you are at a car dealer and you’re looking at sport cars, the dealer certainly won’t come up and talk to you about pick-up trucks, which would be a big turn off for you.  He would talk to you about horsepower, traction control, and driving experience.  That is what Marketing Automation helps you to do.  Because automated tasks can be performed over lead’s personas, you can automatically open dialogs with every leads based on their preferences.  The future customers will feel more confident over your corporation when receiving personalized and relevant content. Confidence and trust is what gets leads to become customers ( not only that but it helps a lot!)

Keep in mind

One thing you should keep in mind before going into marketing automation. Marketing Automation solutions are tools and they won’t do anything unless you know how to use them efficiently.  You should make sure your solution provider offers you the expertise, training and proper services that will ensure you get a 100% value from you purchase.

At Alsamarketing we believe that too many marketing automation vendors sell their products but do not offer adequate services and best practices to their customers base. We totally disagree with this approach. At Alsamarketing we provide each of our customers with a top of the line marketing automation software COMBINED with services to ensure you get 100% value from our products all at a reasonable price.

Learn more at www.alsamarketing.com

Lead scoring for increased conversion rates

Nurture your prospects

Blog post deals with lead nurturing planning and execution steps that will guide you through creating a fully working lead nurturing campaign that you can use to drive up your lead conversions.

Go take a  look!

Why should you test?

I know this point is mentioned in every blog post dealing with increasing web conversions but somehow some marketers still do not test their marketing initiatives. Whether it be email copy, landing page forms, call-to-actions, etc…. The fact of the matter is if you want to get getter at something you need to learn. To learn you need data, you need to try new things and you need to make mistakes. This is what testing is about. Gather information on your successes, gather information on your failures and use all that information to improve.

How should you test?

Here are guidelines to respect to get the most out of your testing.

• When testing only 1 or 2 variables (copy, images…) at a time. If you change too many variables at the same time you will not be able to determine which one led to higher or lower results.
• Don’t be afraid to test new things. Only sending out html emails maybe your market will react better to text. Landing pages contain text and images maybe it is time for a video.
• Give your tests time. Usually you won’t see the impact right away. If after a certain period of time the effect you first saw is still there where you can say the test was conclusive and adapt your strategy accordingly.
• Measure your results. If you test and don’t measure you won’t get answers.

What should we test?

To gain maximum benefit in terms of conversions I would start off by testing and optimizing the below items. They usually provide the best bang for the effort

• Landing pages. This is where you convert most of your visitors into leads. Start by testing out different call-to-actions, different forms and then move to layout and graphics.
• Emails. One of the most widely used means of communication. They usually contain a great deal of copy and a call to action. Make sure you test all of theses for optimal results.
• PPC ads. It can be easily tested especially in Adwords. Results are automatically tallied for you and you can directly link your click-through rates with your ads.

If you follow these guidelines you will definitely be on your way to improving your B2B conversion rates

For those of you more interested on Adwords A/B split testing there is a good post on The Smart Bear blog.

6 Easy Steps to Double B2B Conversions

You work hard and invest money to drive visitors your different landing pages with the hopes of converting them. Alas you aren’t getting the conversions you hoped for. Online visitors are busy and easily distracted. You NEED TO MAKE IT EASY for them to perform your call-to-action (convert).

Here are ways to simplify your conversion process:

• Simplify the forms used to capture visitor information. You don’t need to know the visitors address and postal code to allow them to request a free trial. You can get that information in subsequent communications. Ask only for the absolute necessary parameters you need to qualify your lead and keep it at that. The lower the number of fields the higher chances that someone will fill in your form.
• If you already have information about the visitor, use it to populate the form fields. The fewer fields to fill in the better.
• Handle form validation on the fly as the visitor fills in the information. Nothing is more frustrating than filling in a form, submitting it and seeing an error message or worse seeing an error message with the form fields all blank. Chances are the visitor won’t resubmit the form. Another one gone! Give feedback as the form is filled in.
• Simplify your message and you call-to-action. Make them clear and to the point. Make them simple to understand so the visitor can understand what you have to offer and what you want from him. Optimize your landing pages.

Can you think of other ways to simplify your conversion process? Leave a comment.

So for the next few weeks I am doing a series on 6 easy ways to double your B2B conversions. In this series of posts you will learn how the boost the effectiveness of your landing pages and increase the quality and the number of your B2B conversions with quick and easy to implement changes that WILL double your conversions.

This post serves as a hyperlinked table of contents, so either bookmark this page or subscribe by email or RSS to get notified when new articles get posted.

Stay tuned!

Leadsloth posted a very interesting video on their blog on 5 questions that will double your email response rates

Here are my key takeaways:

Leadsloth also has an interesting webinar on lead nurturing that goes beyond email content creating. Go take a look.

• Generate, Nurture, More Qualified Leads!
• Maximize ROI!
• Manage the Marketing Funnel!

This is ironic in that that the key element to any marketing automation campaign comes down to fundamental marketing strategy and execution.  A superior customer support program can accelerate and enhance the chances for success in the future.   Here are the support levels that should be offered:

1. Training: This should not be limited to online tutorials or user guides and should include some type of one on one with another human being.  Whether it is a one day, one week, or one month engagement, there needs to be guidance by a marketing automation subject matter expert.
2. Consulting: Some customers require more hand holding.  That’s why a higher level of lead management consulting services needs to be available for company’s that are new to marketing automation.  This can be offered in house or by 3rd party partners.
3. Customer Service:  Who do I call when I forgot all the things that I learned above?  Can you solve my problem or do you have to escalate to another rep?  24/7 phone and email support is preferred.
4. Online Community: Sometimes other users can provide as many solutions as the company.  Discussion forums and blogs can be filled with users from all over that help to solve problems together.

Many marketing automation companies charge extra for the services outlined above.  Whether it is free or paid, smart marketing automation vendors will focus on customer support as much as they do technology.

About the author: Jason Kort is one of the forces behind Marketing Automation Times, a blog dedicated to covering the world of marketing automation.   You can also catch him on Twitter.

Marketing automation can help you harness all these essential tasks. By using a marketing automation solution you will gain efficiencies and insight into your inbound marketing efforts and you WILL improve your overall marketing and sales results.

Here are ways where marketing automation can help your SMB

• Track and measure all your online marketing channels from the same place. By measure we mean revenue not clicks. Tracking your different channels and measure the revenue impact they are producing. Whether it be measuring social campaigns (twitter, linkedin…), banners or PPC campaigns you will be able to track all your marketing channels from the same place.
• Increase your lead conversions. You spend some much time generating quality leads for your business you need to make sure you can convert them to customers. Marketing automation can help you by allowing you to:
  • Optimize and test your landing pages therefore increasing the number of leads captured
  • Nurturing your leads through the buying cycle increasing your sales closes rates
  • Scoring your leads allowing you to concentrate on the leads most ready to buy.
• Manage your leads and create segmented views that you can use to better target your potential customers. Stay aways from mass emailing. Send out personalized and contextualized emails that are relevant to your potential buyer.
• Triggered emails. A lead downloaded a whitepaper you offer? They are probably interested in the webinar on the same topic. Invite them automatically using a triggered email

This is only the tip of the marketing automation iceberg for SMB. All of these things wont happen by magic and will necessitate effort on your part but once everything is in place you will reap the benefits day after day.

Interested in knowing more you can always visit Alsamarketing.com for more details.

Here they are in no particular order

1. The Funnelholic – Great overall blog with very good marketing automation content
2. B2B Lead generation blog – If you don’t subscribe to this one do it right now. Excellent content on lead generation and other marketing topics
3. Marketing Profs Daily Fix – Here you can find content and on any topic regarding Marketing. They have fresh content all the time.
4. NuSparkMarketing Blog – We like to easy to apply advice in this blog. Every post usually has something you can apply or change to your own strategies.
5. Alsamarekting Blog - Our own blog It’s a newer blog but stay tuned and subscribe for great lead nurturing, lead scoring and marketing automation content.

If you want more there is a list of 330 Top B2B Marketing Blogs over on the Proteus blog

The first thing to do is map your nurturing program (content and offers) to your buyers buying cycle. This means writing and offering content that is relevant for each stage of a purchase. Are your buyers looking for more educational content at first? Are they looking to see an ROI as the first step before moving forward? This will depend on your market. The goal is to provide content and information that is relevant to the stage in which your buyers is hence making it more relevant to them. Don’t make the content too sales focused in the early nurturing phases.

To make sure you understand your buyers buying cycle involve sales when mapping it out. They should provide you with very good information. They know buyers. Once you understand the buyer buying cycle its time to move on to the next point.

You have your buyer buying cycle map and you are ready to go at it full speed. But wait… Do you have enough quality content? Is your content available and ready for different Medias? Is all your content printed material? Is all your content on your blog? Make sure you have the content and the different means to deliver that content at the appropriate time to the appropriate buyer. You can have the best customer buying cycle map but if you don’t have content you wont be able to nurture them. If media is the issue use the content you have now and repurpose it. Multiple blog articles can make a good eBook. Popular blog topics can make a great webinars. Be creative.

So you have the buying cycle map and the content. Now what?

How you will measure the success of your lead nurturing program? Will it be by tracking number of conversion from one stage to another in your marketing funnel? Will it be by how many prospects you converted to customers? Something else? Make sure you know this before you start so you can measure and adjust your lead nurturing program as it gets going. By having a measurement system in place it will also allow everyone to have the same understanding as to what you are trying to accomplish.

There is a lot more to lead nurturing then this article but if you follow these rules your experience will a positive one.

Do you have lead nurturing best practices or experiences you would like to share? Leave a comment.

Here are 5 Tips for Increasing Your Online Conversions:

1. Make it easy – Make sure its easy for visitors to respond to your call to action or your offering. If your are trying to get visitors to fill in a form for a trial or a demo make sure the form is simple and easy to fill in. You don’t need all 30 fields. Get the ones you need and then fill in the rest during further communications with visitor. Make it easy for visitors! They shouldn’t have to work to provide you with their information.
2. Test,test test – This is a sure way to increase online conversions. Test everything you do. Whether it be forms, your buying funnel, landing pages, anything. Testing will give you information that you can use to improve. Overtime this will guarantee higher conversion rates. One thing to keep in  mind when testing. Go slowly and test only one or two thing at a time so you now what worked and what didn’t.
3. Offer multiple communication channels – Not everyone likes to use the sames communications tool. Some prefer phone, some prefer email, some prefer filling in forms and getting a callback. Make sure you have the tools in place to handle your prospects preferred way of communicating
4. Know your visitors – Understand who your potential customers are. Understand how they speak, what matters to them, how they prefer to make decisions. Make your content and offerings relevant to them. Its much easier to convert a visitor to a prospect if you are providing value to them. To provide value your need to understand them.
5. Clear Call to Action – You want visitors to interact with your call to action then make sure they actually know what you want them to do and that they can actually find it! This means make sure you call to action message is CLEAR and DIRECT and that your call-to-action (button etc…) placement is prominent.

There you go. 5 Tips to increase your online conversions. Do you have more you want to share? Leave a comment

Sirius Decision made this extremely clear in their latest 2010 marketing trends analysis by stating that “over the course of the last 4 years buyers are relying more and more on peers/social media  and vendors as their main content source for purchasing information”. Traditional information sources like Consultants and Trade Publications have dropped down considerably.

In my opinion this highlights a significant change in B2B marketing. Your business still needs to provide and disseminate your value proposition to potential buyers but you need to do it in a different.

• You need to facilitate the process of research and information gathering for your prospects.
• You need to leverage social media and its information dissemination power.
• You need to provide valuable and targeted information to your prospects in a timely manner.
• You need to nurture them into making an informed decision.

Is your business ready to make this switch? Have you already made the switch to a more inbound marketing style? Let us know your thoughts.

6.    Pace yourself
As mentioned earlier, marketing automation solutions offer a great deal of functionality. Make sure you take your time to learn all these different pieces and how they tie together. You are better off implementing what you know at first and then growing into the rest as you get more and more comfortable.  Implementing everything at once will overwhelm you. Take your time, implement programs, analyze the results and then move on to the next thing.

7.    Implement lead scoring
This is probably one of the reasons you bought the marketing automation software in the first place. Implement lead scoring techniques to make sure you are sending quality leads to sales. There are many resources on the Internet on this topic that you can read to ensure you are doing it right. Lead scoring can be complex so I won’t try to explain here in one paragraph but you definitely should be doing it.

8.    Implement lead nurturing
This is probably the second reason why you bought the marketing automation software. Implement lead nurturing techniques to ensure you are giving your leads the content they need to move them down your marketing funnel until they reached the stage of sales handoff.  Nurturing is very dependent on your business and the industry you are in but one thing remains the same: you need high-quality content to be successful at it.

9.    Test, test and test again
Ensure you are testing variations of your different content and delivery methods. Most good marketing automation solutions offer multi-variance testing in their software, make sure you use it. Test landing pages, test email content, test email subject lines, test everything. Do not change too many variables at once but always try to test something. This will allow you to improve over time and increase your conversion rates dramatically.

10.    Understand the data
Marketing automation tools will produce a lot of data that you can look at. Make sure you do. You will find a wealth of information on prospective buyer behaviours that you can then use to improve your lead nurturing, lead scoring and various marketing campaigns. Try to look at the data once a week and do a deeper dig probably once month.

Read Part1

Here is a list in two posts of 5 tips each geared towards marketing automation beginners. Where to start? What to concentrate on? How do you get the best value from your marketing automation software?

1.    Process first
Make sure you have internal processes that support what you are trying to accomplish with your marketing automation solution. If you don’t have processes you will not get the best value out of your marketing automation solution. Technology is nothing without solid business processes behind it.

2.    Define what is a “qualified lead”
The first thing to do is sit down with sales and make sure you have a common agreement on what is a qualified lead. In other words what criteria’s are needed for a lead to be passed on to sales? Criteria’s should be demographic (title, age…) and behavioural (visited website last 3 days, opened email x…).  This will ensure sales and marketing are in alignment as to what type of leads needs to be generated.

Once sales and marketing have a common understanding on the type of leads you are looking for the rest is easier to put in place. Lead generation, nurturing and scoring will all be based on the “qualified lead” definition.

3.    Work together
As mentioned above work with other departments. Do not work in a silo.

• Involve sales to define what a “qualified lead” is and get feedback. Sales and marketing should always be aligned.
• Involve Operations/IT to ensure you have internal processes to support the marketing automation software. This is less important for on-demand solutions (SAAS) but still important.
• Involve upper-management and ensure they know what is going and the value you are driving from the marketing automation. Most offerings have reports and dashboards that can be used to show the impact of the marketing automation solution on the business.

4.    Create quality content

Create content. Lots of it but don’t forget quality. Think about what buyers in your market want to hear about. Think about what they need to know to make better buying decisions… Content is important since it will be the base of all you’re nurturing and lead generation strategies. Make sure you spend quality time on it.
5.    Start simple
When dealing with automation make sure you understand how the marketing automation tool works before undertaking bigger automation projects. Start with high impact areas and easier processes first (sending out newsletter, basic scoring…). Once you understand your tool better than go for the more complicated processes.

Read Marketing automation – 10 tips for beginners Part 2

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