In the report, “Automation: Redefining Marketing’s Game Plan,” Forrester details the results of a survey of 155 US-based senior marketing professionals on their use of, results from, and attitudes towards marketing automation. To those of us who work in and around marketing automation every day, none of the results are startling. However, in sum, they do reinforce some key facts, namely:

• Most companies who employ marketing automation are realizing only a fraction of its potential because they tend to focus the technology on improving efficiency and addressing tactical needs

• The keys to marketing automation ROI lie not in features but in strategy, collaboration, metrics, and the development of more sophisticated, multi-touch, triggered campaigns

Forrester maintains that most marketers invest in marketing automation with the goal of increasing marketing efficiency – i.e. doing more with less. However, the study also finds that this focus on efficiency can blind marketers to marketing automation’s true strategic value, what Forrester describes as: “improving lifetime value, building dialog with customers, and increasing collaboration.”

This observation is consistent with our firm’s experience working with many marketing automation customers who, a few months into their deployment, find that their use of the technology is falling far short of the vision that compelled them to take the plunge. The issues that drive that frustration, as Forrester confirms, is very seldom the technology itself, but rather a lack of planning, process, and more sophisticated campaigns and metrics. Indeed, according to the report:

• Newer users of marketing automation tend to measure campaign performance by basic response metrics like email clicks, rather than more “downstream” measures like ROI and incremental revenue (as the technology allows them to do)

• Newer users focus marketing automation on driving customer acquisition, whereas more mature users leverage the technology’s ability to impact on lead nurturing and customer marketing (e.g. cross-sell and up-sell)

• Newer users leverage marketing automation primarily for recurring, “batch and blast” campaigns (for example, monthly Webinar campaigns) whereas more mature users “make heavy use of multi-step and dialogue-based campaigns, using a combination of inbound and triggered outbound communications to deepen relationships with their prospects and customers.”

As with any technology investment, there will always be pressure with marketing automation deployments to demonstrate a short time to value. Unfortunately, that pressure can steer marketers into a premature focus on mere process efficiencies and basic, tactical campaigns. Instead, the true secrets to marketing automation success are:

• Planning – creating a formal vision and plan for what you want marketing automation to achieve

• Processes – designing and deploying lead management processes that take full advantage of the platform’s capabilities

• Campaigns – moving beyond tactical, “batch and blast” campaigns to more tailored, triggered, multi-touch campaigns that build relationships with prospects and customers

• Metrics – putting in place reporting and analytics that show true business value, not just response rates

• Collaboration – integrating other departments, notably sales and customer service, into the planning and design of lead management and customer communications strategies

You can download a free copy of the Silverpop/Forrester report here.

The degree to which you still need to “sell” the offer at hand once your reader is at the landing page is influenced in large part by the amount of information he or she received on the front end of the campaign. Online display ads, text links, and PPC (search) ads impart very little information. The reader may be intrigued, but not yet know much about your company, your product or service, or what he or she will learn/save/gain by accepting your offer. Landing pages intended to serve as the back end for online ad campaigns typically require more copy because there’s still work to be done.

Conversely, if someone clicks on a link in an email, or enters a URL in response to a direct mail campaign, there’s a high likelihood that individual will know virtually all he or she needs to about the offer. In these situations, the landing page should simply reinforce the key selling message and get out of the way. Short and sweet is the way to go.

The second key factor in determining landing page copy length is the type of offer, and the level of commitment required of the individual responding. Simply put: the more you’re asking of the reader, the more information you need to provide. Generally speaking, ecommerce landing pages or any campaign requiring credit card information will require that you answer all the key questions that any potential customer would likely have, and address any objections that would possibly get in the way.

Remember, in situations where you have a lot to say: not every ounce of copy has to fit on the same page, especially if doing so forces key messages “below the fold.” Information such as FAQs, product specs, or terms and conditions can be made available through links and tabs as part of a larger microsite.

At the other end of the offer spectrum, a simple information request such as a white paper download requires much less selling copy because you’re asking less of the reader. Assuming your registration form is short and painless, a few simple bullet points (“what you’ll learn”), a short author bio, perhaps an excerpted paragraph, is all that should be necessary.

One factor that impacts very little on landing page copy length is product complexity. This is a topic that comes up often in our agency’s work with technology clients. Many tech marketers assume that if their product is complex, logic demands that copy length should follow suit. But landing pages aren’t about the product, unless the call to action is “buy now.” A white paper about a highly technical, complex solution, for example, requires no more copy than a paper about something much more basic.

A further strategy for minimizing unsubscribes is to employ subscription management, a technique in which you, as the publisher, give the wannabe unsubscriber the option to choose which types of messages he/she wants to receive (or not receive, as the case may be.) This can be a useful option if some individuals want to continue to receive your newsletter, for example, but not Webinar invitations. Or if customers want to receive critical product updates, but not information on training classes.

Subscription management turns the act of unsubscribing from a simple Yes/No question to one of: “Which types of communication would you like to receive from us?” It prevents situations in which you may lose forever the ability to market to an individual because he/she happened to dislike one particular email. And it does so under the cloak of customer service, i.e. giving the subscriber the opportunity to choose the type of email communication most relevant to his/her interests.

To the right is a subscription management page that we created recently for a software client, Noetix. When someone clicks on the “unsubscribe” link in a Noetix email, rather than landing on a simple Yes/No unsubscribe page, he or she will be pointed to this page offering an array of options to choose from, including “unsubscribe all.”

Because the page is hosted in Marketo, a leading marketing automation platform, the person’s email address, first name, last name, and company are all pre-populated, making it easy for the individual to update or correct outdated profile information.

In sum, subscription management is an effective way to reduce unsubscribes, increase response rates (by allowing subscribers to choose the emails that most interest them), and improve data hygiene. Maybe the people who unsubscribe from your emails aren’t really saying “I don’t want to hear from you again.” Maybe what they really mean is “I’m not interested in this topic.”

Time to give them that option.

On that score, there’s a lot to like about the email campaign below from CallidusCloud, a leading provider of cloud-based business software solutions. Most notably, it’s to the writer’s credit that not once in the email is there any mention of the CallidusCloud solution, or even what the company does. Every ounce of copy is dedicated to selling the value of the content on offer, in this case: an analyst report from the Aberdeen Group.

So kudos to the marketers at CallidusCloud for not succumbing to the temptation of explaining how their technology can help companies attain the very same industry standards that the report describes. Instead, the email is selling information of value, and moreover, that information is positioned in a way that would appeal to prospects suffering the very business problems that (presumably) can be addressed by CallidusCloud software.

Here’s what else I like:

1. A headline in HTML text (versus an image). This ensures the headline will be visible in most email clients even with images turned off.

2. The header takes up little vertical space, and so avoids pushing valuable selling copy below the fold.

3. The offer is mentioned early and often, and there are a total of three calls to action: a button in the right sidebar, and two text links in the body copy.

And here’s what I’d change:

4. Wow, that white paper image is ENORMOUS. I’m a huge proponent for featuring offer images in email campaigns (it makes the offer seem more real and tangible), but in this case, the image itself is so large that it’s forcing much of the main selling copy to appear below the fold. A much smaller image in a narrow right sidebar would serve the same purpose and the email would look a lot shorter as a result. Furthermore, the entire offer image is invisible when images are turned off in Outlook.

5. The questions that open the email read awkwardly to me. I can understand how they’re intended to promote the learning value of the content on offer, but in the context of a letter-style email, they seem out of place. (First you say hello, next you’re asking me a bunch of questions?)

I would do one of two things: either a) turn the questions into benefit statements, as in: “In a compelling report from the experts at the Aberdeen Group, learn the secrets behind how some sales teams consistently exceed their quota” and so on, or b) move the questions into the headline, where they’d serve to grab the reader at first glance.

6. Drop the exclamation points. Admittedly, it’s a particular pet peeve of mine, but as an early mentor once told me: in business writing, exclamation points are a crutch for a weak argument. Put another way: if your message is strong enough, you don’t need them.

What do you think? Agree/Disagree? Anything else you’d change?

For more tips on email creative, download a free copy of our white paper: “Top 10 B2B Email Marketing Mistakes.”

Recently Firebrick released a white paper: “”Fortune 500 CIO” is Not a Target Market” that offers a unique perspective and insight on what Bob and his team perceive to be a common mistake made by technology companies seeking to target top IT executives as part of their demand generation and go to market strategies. In a recent conversation, I asked him to share some of his thoughts on the topic.

(HS) Why is it a mistake to treat CIOs as one homogeneous group?

(BW) For many B2B tech companies, the CIO has moved to the forefront as the important buyer or gatekeeper for IT spend. In our experience successfully positioning a number of high-profile tech companies to this buyer, we believe the market is looking at this situation through the wrong lens. Treating CIOs as if they are a single, homogenous market is a ridiculously expensive and inefficient way to build relationships and market/sell tech solutions to this audience. For example, the way you message and sell a “Change Agent” CIO versus a “Cost-Cutting” CIO is very different.

(HS) How has the role of the CIO changed? What are the market trends driving that change?

(BW) The role of the CIO has become a high-wire act. The convergence of recent inflection points such as Social, Mobile, Cloud, Big Data, and IT Consumerization has created enormous opportunities for CIOs to add value and drive their businesses forward. At the same time, the transition from infrastructure to services-based IT organizations has massive ramifications for how IT is organized. The breakdown of traditional IT organizational silos is creating a lot of friction and disruption within IT.

Simultaneously, the consumerization of IT and the ubiquity of mobile technologies is creating new pressures on IT organizations to meet different user expectations. The convergence of these trends along with the volume of data that must be secured, stored and made available to the business is creating a data management nightmare for many IT executives. As a result, there’s a broad range of different ways that CIOs are responding – resulting in a distinction between CIOs and the advent of different buyer segments – each with different motivations, objectives and problems.

(HS) What makes one CIO different from the next, and how should technology companies tailor their message accordingly?

(BW) CIOs are responding to these market trends with a broad range of different responses. We have identified four distinct CIO buyer segments, each with their own motivations, challenges and personas. This has big ramifications for technology companies and how they specifically target, message and enable the sale org to engage the CIO buyer. We’ve categorized CIOs into 4 distinct buyer types: the Strategist, the Change Agent, the Maintainer, and the Early Adopter. The tech companies that are driving revenue growth and are the most successful at engaging this audience understand these distinctions, narrow their target accordingly, and position their solutions in a way that resonates with the CIO buyer that’s a best fit for their company and solution.

(HS) Thanks Bob!

To download a copy of Firebrick’s white paper: “”Fortune 500 CIO” is Not a Target Market,” click here.

1. Promote subscriptions prominently.

Capturing new subscribers is one of the most efficient ways to convert random visitors into loyal readers that you can nurture over time and eventually turn into actionable sales leads. Just be sure to offer the reader as many subscription options as possible, and at a minimum: Email, RSS, and Twitter. If you post blog content to your Facebook or LinkedIn or Google Plus page, add those also.

These days, however, it’s not enough to simply display a row of icons (RSS, Tweet, Email) and expect the reader to act. Start with a prominent headline (“Subscribe” works just fine) and consider descriptive selling copy that “sells” the various options:

“Get instant notice of our new posts by following this blog through RSS or Twitter, or become an email subscriber and receive a convenient monthly summary of new content in your inbox. You can also be notified of new posts by following us on LinkedIn or Facebook.”

2. Offer downloadable content.

If the content on your blog is topical and relevant and insightful, and if you’re following basic SEO principles in your post title and body copy, there’s a high likelihood you’ll be generating significant traffic from interested prospects actively researching the types of issues and problems your company solves. Now the challenge is to convert those casual visitors into inquiries and opportunities.

One of the most effective ways to generate blog leads is to feature downloadable content – white papers, case studies, analyst reports – in your sidebar, and gate that content behind registration forms. A simple text link will do the trick:

White Paper: 5 Keys to
Increased Developer Productivity
Download Now

or even better, show a cover image or icon. Our experience indicates that a visual element serves to highlight the offer on the page, as well as making the asset more “real” and tangible.

3. Tell your readers to share

As with driving subscriptions (#1, above), it takes more than a row of sharing icons (Like, Tweet, +1) on your blog to get people to spread the word. My personal view is that the icons have become so commonplace that many readers don’t even notice them. You can encourage people to share your blog with their friends and followers, a proven technique for improving traffic, subscribers, and sales leads, by including both a sub-head as well as action-oriented text above the icons.

Share this blog!
Click on any of the
buttons below to
share this blog with
friends and followers.

As an illustration of this approach, consider the email invitation below that I received recently from the marketing team at PowerReviews, a company that bills itself as “the world’s largest social commerce network.” The overall structure of the invitation has its good points: there’s minimal use of graphics, the call to action (“register now”) appears multiple times throughout the copy in both text and button form, and the sidebar includes a photo of the speaker, which is an effective way to make the event seem more “real” and thus drive response.

There’s only one thing missing: namely, why exactly should I attend? Rather than provide concrete examples of what I’ll learn, discover, see or hear during the Webinar, the copy extols the PowerReview solution, for which the Webinar is simply a backdrop.

Even in the very first paragraph, where you would expect to learn a) why the company is writing to me, and b) what they want me to do (i.e. the offer and the call to action), instead I’m told:

“PowerReviews is offering the only solution to integrate all three key components of social success …”

Now that may be fascinating to some, but 1) it lacks any kind of action-oriented language (e.g. “learn how …”, “discover why …”) and more painfully, 2) there’s absolutely no mention of the Webinar and why I should attend.

In the next paragraph, more than halfway through the copy, I’m finally invited to the event (“Please join …”) but the reasons for my doing so are relegated to learning “how exciting new products leverage the three social components of social …” In other words, I’m being invited to a sales pitch.

Now, let’s face it: it’s understood by all but the most naïve reader that any Webinar invitation is designed to introduce someone to a company’s product or solution. But that doesn’t mean you have to be quite so transparent about it. Instead, sell the event so that it will appeal even to someone who has no immediate plans to engage with your company. What will he/she learn during the event that would make that investment worthwhile? What information, insight, or analysis will he/she gain by attending?

In the case of PowerReviews, the company claims that their product is unique because it integrates the “three key components of social success: content, engagement, and measurement.” If I were a potential customer (and I may be, but it’s tough to know from this invitation) I’d want to know:

* why are those three components so important to social selling?
* what is it about having all three that would make a social initiative successful?
* what are some real-life examples of initiatives that have been successful in using this approach?

all of which would make me seriously consider the invitation. But just to hear a senior product manager tell me why his product is so exciting?

Not so much.

I suspect this reticence is for two primary reasons: 1) lead follow-up isn’t a particular “sexy” application for marketing automation, nor the primary business case used to justify the purchase in the first place, and 2) many organizations have inside sales teams in place dutifully contacting leads by phone and email and so those companies feel that lead follow-up is already attended to.

Big mistake.

In a ground-breaking report back in 2007, the people at InsideSales.com reported some startling statistics about just how quickly companies should follow up on Web leads, and the repercussions of not doing so. (The company just published a “5 year retrospective” on the report including some newer data – you can download a copy here.) Here are some highlights from the original report:

Plainly put, simply calling or contacting every lead isn’t enough. Multiple dials or emails isn’t enough. Bottom line: if your inside sales team isn’t consistently reaching every new lead within five minutes of that person’s expressed interest, you’re losing sales.

What’s the solution? Well, you can hire more telesales reps and throw warm bodies at the problem. Or you can make the smart investment, and integrate marketing automation seamlessly into your inside sales operation by incorporating automated, personalized, relevant email follow-up within 5 minutes of any new lead entering the funnel.

Besides ensuring that every lead receives prompt, systematic follow-up regardless of sales bandwidth, marketing automation also increases the productivity of an inside sales team by helping filter out junk leads (eliminating wasted calls) and prioritizing the rest based on demographic and behavioral criteria. It’s a win-win for both sales AND marketing. Marketing automation systems can even generate sales alerts so hot leads get moved immediately to the front of the queue.

Incidentally, if you’re under the impression that since 2007 companies have realized the error of their ways and are following up with leads more promptly, InsideSales.com has some bad news. In their recent update, the firm released the results of a survey conducted at the 2011 Dreamforce conference showing that the average overall response time to new leads is 42 hours. That’s almost 2 days.

It’s enough to make a demand generation marketer weep.

Amongst companies who adopt marketing automation technology, the problem of lead score inflation is a common one, mainly due to the rudimentary way in which most companies first decide to assign those scores. The basic lead scoring recipe is typically a variation on the following:

* assign positive scores for desired behavior or demographics (e.g. attends Webinar, VP-level title or above)
* assign negative scores for undesired behavior or demographics, or inactivity (e.g. visits career page, located outside of North America, no response to any campaign in 3 months)

The loophole in this design arises when “active” prospects, those who regularly visit a Website or respond to nurturing campaigns, for example, build up lead scores well out of proportion to their actual level of interest or stage in the selling cycle. Using the sample logic outlined above, if a prospect took ANY “positive” action at least once every 2 months and 29 days, his or her lead score would continue to climb indefinitely.

Once a contact’s lead score exceeds the threshold value for sales-readiness or “hot lead,” any further increase ceases to have much relevance. Worse yet, lead scores that are clearly irrelevant can lead a sales team to lose confidence in the overall system, to where they begin to ignore lead scores altogether.

One elegant solution to this problem is to assign “expiration dates” to all positive lead scores. Expiration dates make sense because positive behavior is only truly relevant in the short term. A lead that was very active 6 months ago, for example, isn’t very interesting to a sales rep today. However, in most typical lead scoring schemas, that same lead could rack up 60 points in a burst of activity, and as long as he clicked on an email once every 3 months, that score would never go down.

Expiration dates are programmed as follows: add points, wait a certain period, then remove those same points. The time period can vary according to the importance of the activity, for example:

* Visit a Web page: add 1 point, wait 3 days, subtract 1 point
* Visit a high-value Web page: add 10 points, wait 2 weeks, subtract 10 points
* Click link in email: add 5 points, wait 1 week, subtract 5 points
* Request demo: add 30 points, wait 2 months, subtract 30 points

and so on. Note that expiration dates only apply to behavioral scores, not demographic values. The fact that a company has 100+ employees, or is located in the US, never “expires.” In addition, your particular sales process or revenue model may provide for other exceptions, where certain behaviors represent specific milestones along the success path (e.g. download trial version).

The method of assigning and subtracting scores described above is based largely on our work with clients using the Marketo platform, but the same overall approach could be adapted to work with virtually any other marketing automation system. All credit for developing this approach (and helping with the description) goes to Dan Reed, Spear’s Technical Production Manager and resident marketing automation guru. Thanks Dan!

For more tips on how to get the most from your marketing automation investment, download a free copy of our white paper: “Top 10 Tips For Lead Nurturing Success: How to Get the Most From Your Lead Nurturing Program, and How to Plan for Success if You’re Just Getting Started.”

My response:

The short answer to your question is: “no,” but let me expand a little. First of all, I’m assuming that the content hosted on your Website is gated, that is, available only behind a registration form. If that’s the case, it matters less whether people download the content from the designated landing page or the main site because you’ll track the response regardless (although the download from the main site may not credit your campaign.)

However, even if the content is ungated (perhaps you’re only gating “premium” content), I’d still argue that there’s little reason to remove the content from the site, even temporarily. First, the percentage of people who will bypass the landing page in search of a more anonymous route should be nominal at best. (If it’s anything more than nominal, that likely points to problems with your landing page.)

Secondly, some subset of respondents will always seek a detour around your selected path for them, no matter how difficult you make it to do otherwise. There’s little reason to make your Website less content-rich in deference to the few visitors that don’t do what they’re told no matter what.

Of course, to minimize the chances that anyone will want to do anything but complete the designated form, your landing page should be devoid of any extraneous links or other escape routes that would entice a visitor to go elsewhere. Also, sell the offer in a way that stresses the convenience of responding via the form using phrases like “instant download,” or “emailed instantly to your inbox.” Lastly, consider “packaging” content by pairing assets – a white paper and a case study, for example. By doing so you’ll broaden the appeal of the information and make the appeal of downloading each individual asset from your Website less attractive.