I recently evaluated a number of Marketing Automation (MA) products including Marketo, Silverpop, Eloqua, Genius, Hubspot, Pardot, Act-On, Manticore and a couple of others. I was interested in how our current MA system compared. I did not expect to switch vendors as a result of this review. However, that is exactly what happened. Our one-week review, which included 90-120 minute live (webinar) demonstrations from each vendor revealed a significant feature and usability disparities from the vendors.
While this process was still fresh on my mind I decided to document some of my current thoughts regarding Marketing Automation. There are many degrees to which one can implement Marketing Automation, from simple batch or dynamic email drip campaigns, to lead activity and lead scoring, and much more. In this article, I’m going to provide a comprehensive list of the features we use in our Marketing Automation system. Please leave comments of additional features you use.
- Web-to-lead forms – When someone fills out a form on our website, their contact information is written to our CRM system along with additional “hidden” information such as lead source, resource requested, SEO information, etc.
- List syncing – Any lists created in our CRM system are passed to the MA system and vice versa.
- Record updates are synchronized within a few seconds from system to system.
- Record de-duping – This may not sound like a big deal, but to do it right is not trivial. Surprisingly, salesforce.com does not handle this. They require a third-party product. If the MA solution writes records to the CRM system, then making sure they don’t duplicate existing leads is a very nice feature to include.
- Opt-out management – Again, this sounds like a feature every MA program would have solved, but unfortunately not. If your MA product is going to be talking to a separate CRM, make sure it handles opt-out management well. Emails must include an opt-out link. Unfortunately though, many opt-out links opt the user out of everything. You don’t want good leads to opt-out of ALL of your communications and to default to that is just throwing away leads. The best solution is to offer an email preference page, where your customers/prospects can select which of your communications they would like to receive.
- Bounce management – Not the same as opt-out. If you continue to send emails to addresses which are hard-bouncing, you will eventually be penalized and and your email deliverability will suffer. A good MA system will track hard bounces and automatically stop sending emails to those addresses. The very best systems will flag both opt-out and bounces in your CRM system, so that you and your sales reps will know that the email address is no longer usable.
- Workflows/Automations – There are times when you will want to update records in your CRM based on certain activity. You may be able to automate these updates from within your CRM system. It is sometimes easier to use your MA system. For instance if you decide to increase a prospects lead score if they attended a webinar. Your MA system should enable you “add” points to the lead score of any records which meet your criteria.
Email - Every MA product that I know of provides some level of Email delivery. We use the following four types of Email marketing via our MA system.
- One-off email announcements or promotions – This could be a product or webinar announcement, special offer, or other email blast to our entire database or to a subset (list, group).
- Multi-email “campaigns” – This group would include weekly or monthly emails that are delivered in order to a segment of our database. For example a four or five week information series to the banking and finance leads in our database.
- Dynamic, activity based emails – We use this as a way to follow up with people who request information on a particular product or service. Typically, after requesting a recourse such as a whitepaper or case study, we will send them additional related information each week for three or four weeks.
- Direct sales to lead emails – This includes single, very specific emails from an individual in our company (sales, inside sales) to a lead. These are usually simple text emails (not much formatting or graphics). These emails can be sent from within the MA system or via an enterprise email system like Outlook or Lotus Notes. The MA system tracks these emails and any action on these emails.
Lead Scoring - The next phase of MA for us was Lead scoring. Once we had our website talking to our CRM via our MA system and we were communicating with our prospects on a regular basis, we then implemented lead scoring. Most MA systems these days provide built-in administrative functionality where you simply set relative weighted values to specific actions. These values are tallied and written into the lead record where it can be used to measure and prioritize your leads. For instance if a lead opens an email they get 1 point, if they visit multiple pages on your website in a single session, they get 10 points. If they download a whitepaper, they receive 25 points. You get the picture. This is a very valuable tool in providing visibility into the interest level of your prospects.
Usability – This is a broad topic, but frankly was the primary reason we decided to evaluate competitive products to our old MA system. Even though our previous system could do a lot of what we needed, many features required multiple steps and work-arounds. Some of our biggest frustrations were the following:
- Editing an existing workflow email – If we wanted to edit an email that was part of a dynamic email campaign or workflow, we had to first pause the workflow, then copy/clone the email, make the desired changes, edit the workflow and update the old email name with the new, then restart the workflow. With our new system, we open the email, make the change and save. THAT is the way it SHOULD work.
- Folders, filtering or tagging (ie organization) – If you use an MA system, it won’t be long before you have dozens if not hundreds of emails, forms, landing pages, etc. If the MA system doesn’t provide a good management interface, you will quickly get frustrated searching for and managing all of your resources. An MA system should provide folders (like outlook) or tags for all of their list views.
Reporting - A customizable reporting system becomes more important the longer you use the MA system. If usability was the top reason we started evaluating alternate MA vendors, Reporting was the second reason. At an absolute minimum, you need to know how your email campaigns are performing, but more and more of the MA vendors are now providing traffic reports that supplement google analytics.
- WebEx – This was a big deal for us. Previously, when a new prospect would click the webinar button on our site, they would be redirected to the webex site to complete the registration. Their name was then stored on the webex site until after the completion of the webinar. At which time, we would upload the list of registrants into our CRM and tag them as registrants or attendees. If your MA system is integrated with your webinar system, you have more control over the registration process, the look and feel, and more importantly, the registrants are immediately entered through your MA systems into your CRM system, so that you can begin marketing to them before the webinar even begins.
- Outlook – Or other mail client. In addition to bulk marketing email campaigns, we want to track communications from individuals. With the outlook connector, our MA tracks all of these emails as well. We know who opens, clicks through all of our emails.
- Google Adwords and Analytics – By connecting our Google accounts with the MA system, we are able to see relevant analytics, SEO and PPC information within each lead or contact record.
There you have it. The features above represent the functionality we we use in our Marketing Automation software. Please leave comments and let me know how you use yours. I’m sure there are things we could be doing better. MA is constantly evolving and for better or worse it is here to stay.
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