Arming Your Marketing Department with the Necessary Skills

Only those marketers who are intimately familiar with how to use their marketing automation systems will be able to aptly approach leadership and make a demonstrable case for continued or increased investment for the program and complementary technology to leverage it more fully.

How do you close the gap?

There are four useful strategies for increasing your marketing departments ability to leverage marketing automation:

1. Supplemental Training

From marketing planning and process change instruction t0 content development, metrics definition, and organizational alignment assistance, marketing departments with enough bandwidth might take advantage of an educated consultant able to shape training around a path for your marketing department’s future success.

2. Easy to Use Platform

If you do not have the ability to leverage consultant resources to boost your team’s marketing automation skills, choosing a marketing automation program that’s simple and easy to use can likely be the most favorable decision you can make to ensure that your team’s abilities do not fall short of the technology. Look for systems that require minimum preparation. Consider out-of-the-box solutions like  Marketo, Pardot, Act-On Software, Genius or Net-Results.

3. System-Directed Automation

While expensive to execute, it is possible to leave the marketing automation completely to your marketing automation system. This strategy is usually only used in part, such as implementing a lead scoring system that creates scoring formulas automatically versus your department defining what will be scored and how much each activity will be scored.

4. Vendor Full Service

If you are challenged for enough manpower in your marketing department, but resources are available, you might consider allowing a vendor to execute all marketing automation tasks, rather than use resources to hire, promote or train an individual or individuals to create, deploy and report out on marketing automation. Considering the complexity of some programs, this is a particularly reasonable approach, and you definitely eliminate much of the risk of ending up behind the curve in terms of how you are leveraging marketing automation. This approach is very common among small businesses, but continues to gain more and more traction among larger customers.

Have you implemented any of the strategies above? If not, what approach will you take to resolve a skills gap in your marketing department?

Do not take your responsibility lightly when it comes to managing the privacy of your contacts. You continually collect their personal information through landing pages, web forms, third-party list providers and conference registrations. Make sure you notify individuals about how you will collect, use and protect their data, and abide by that statement at all times. Being honest and upfront about the use of individual data will reduce the likelihood of complaints, unsubscribes, bounces and spam traps.

What happens if you do not manage your contacts’ expectations with regards to their personal information? Your deliverability score can suffer as a consequence. Make sure you track both active and inactive contacts in your database. If you are sending emails to people who are inactive, you are not only throwing off your metrics, you are posing a nuisance to people and damaging your online reputation, potentially labeling your IP address as spam.

Furthermore, if your email is seen as spam, your IP address will be labeled as a spammer’s IP, preventing you from getting into the inbox. According to Return Path, the world’s leading email deliverability services company, more than 20 percent of opt-in email in North America does not make it to the inbox.

The tips below will help you maximizes the potential number of emails that reach their intended destination:

Manage Your Sender Score

Your Sender Score is based on your behavior as an email sender. This score takes into account email recipient complaints, hard bounce rates, blacklistings, inactivity, volume consistency and unsubscribe capabilities.

According to senderscore.org, sender reputation, “measures a sender’s behavior and the impact those behaviors have on email recipients and the sender’s brand and email deliverability.”

To measure your Sender Score for free, go to http://www.senderscore.org. While there, check to see if your IP address(es) are on the network blacklist. If so, immediately request removal.

Manage Your Lists

Validate the source of every list you use. Purchased and rented lists typically result in a high number of complaints. You are better off generating your own lead lists organically. If, however, you do decide to purchase a list, make sure you are fully knowledgeable about the source of the data, the timeliness of the data, and how the opt-ins were verified.

How is your list hygiene? You should routinely perform a data check to correct any misspellings and typos as the first step towards clean lists. You should also remove any distribution email addresses, such as sales@company.com, system email addresses, such as postmaster@company.com, and any email address with the word “spam” in it.

How do you know if your list needs cleaning?

You should make every effort to clean your list if you meet any of the following criteria below:

• You irregularly send to your audience.
• You’ve been inactive during the past 6 months
• Your SPAM/abuse report rate is higher than 0.05%
• Your unsubscribes on a send exceed 1%
• Your total bounces on a send exceed 2%
• Your open rate is below 10%

One of the most critical steps you can make toward list management is knowing the difference between hard and soft bounces. A soft bounce is a temporary deliverability problem such as an inbox that is full or a server that is down.  It is okay for you to resend the messages to these addresses because there is a good chance the message will go through on the second or third attempt. A hard bounce, on the other hand, is a permanent deliverability problem such as an invalid email address. It is important to remove these addresses immediately, as ISPs track the number of bounces you generate with each send and use it when determining your reputation.  If you generate too many bounces, ISPs will block your messages from being delivered.

Deliver Optimal Content

Make sure your privacy policy is clearly stated in your client and prospect communications at all times. Further, it is always a great idea to approach new subscribers with a welcome message that includes direction on how to make sure they receive the type of emails they desire from you, at a frequency they are most comfortable with. Another best practice is to periodically confirm with your subscribers if they are still satisfied with the type and frequency of your communications. Lastly, make sure that your email campaigns are relevant to the audience that received them. Closely measure the online activity of your clients and prospects to predict with better accuracy the content that will be most impactful.

In what ways have you tried to boost your organization’s email deliverability? Have you seen a positive effect on your sender score?

• Multi-Channel Marketing
• Enterprise Demand Generation
• Customer Acquisition
• Marketing Operations
• Marketing Automation, Lead Nurturing and Pipeline Management
• Revenue Analytics

Email marketing

Email continues to be an excellent tool for demand gen, despite the proliferation and buzz around the many new media channels. In the enterprise context, its an indispensable tool for drip marketing and for continuous engagement with prospects and clients. Email continues to be an important touchpoint in the marketing and sales process and figures prominently in almost all of the sales opportunities created.

Social Media

While every company needs to do social media, the ROI on this channel is very hard to pin down, especially in a multi-touch enterprise sale. However, it is harder than ever to stand out in the clutter and you risk losing out on engagement and monetization possibilities. Worse still, your competitors may be reaching out to your target audience better than you are. We use the best-of-breed solutions available to run campaigns and track conversion metrics all through the pipeline.

Search Engine Marketing

Search Marketing today is a very complex science and necessiates complicated business rules and algorithms to optimize you ad spend with the search engines. Growth Fusion has strong expertise in this area and can design and run large campaigns very effectively to maximize your ROI.

Content Syndication

Any demand gen strategy would be incomplete without a syndication component. We have relationships with publishers that we leverage to get your content out to your target audience.

Marketo announced its inaugural class of Marketo Champions to recognize those that are experts in Marketo products, are avid contributors in the social world and are showing outstanding leadership in the Marketo Community.

According to Marketo, “Champion” quality characteristics include:

• Expertise – A strong understanding of Marketo and the needs of their fellow users
• Responsiveness – Responding regularly to questions in the Community and on social sites
• Leadership – Representing and bringing the voice of the customer back to Marketo
• Evangelism – Being a loyal Marketo advocate
• Activity – Participating in the Community and other social channels several times per month

See also: Marketing Automation and Automation Does Not Equal Autopilot

Marketo:
Revenue-focused marketing automation & sales effectiveness solutions unleash collaboration throughout the revenue cycle.

See Related: >growthfusion

See Related: 8 Questions You Should Ask Yourself About your Demand Gen Strategy

Here are some tips to get started with a simple lead nurturing program and BANT and Lead Nurturing.

What is the current state of your demand generation strategy? Here are 8 questions you should ask yourself.

• Do I have a complete model of my revenue cycle, starting from the time a prospect enters the sales cycle all the way to deal close?
• Does marketing have a seat at the revenue table? Is Marketing able to contribute effectively to revenue forecasts?
• How many leads do I Have in each lead stage? What are the best practices on lead stages?
• What do our customers think of our company and products. What is my Net Promoter Score?
• What are the Content Consumption trends on my website? Can it inform my business strategy?
• Are our email marketing practices hurting us? What are the numbers telling us?

Answering questions like these is critical for your business to succeed. Without a robust analytics strategy and resource, it is almost impossible to compete effectively. We can do deep-dives into your data revealing nuggets that make a real difference to your top line and bottom line.

In his interview with Marketo TV, Rajesh talks about revenue and other demand generation strategies he leveraged at his client Simply Hired.

Here are some of Marketo’s new features and key enhancements:

• Advanced Dynamic Content - Email communications and landing pages are made more engaging and creative to your target audience and multiple assets are no longer necessary. This feature has long existed in Eloqua and is almost a basic necessity at large companies. This feature will help Marketo compete more effectively with Eloqua at large accounts and possibly displace Eloqua.
• Single Sign-on
 - Given the proliferation of cloud apps, a single sign-on is necessary and allows for seamless login to Marketo from a corporate portal. Single sign-on was recently added to the functionality enjoyed by Eloqua users, putting Marketo and Eloqua at par with this particular feature.
• EU Privacy Directive Support
 - This one comes on the heels of EU regulations that came into effect a couple of months ago and allows you to disable tracking for leads that are anonymous. This compliance with EU regulations is obviously critical if Marketo is to be relevant for companies that are operating and/or marketing in Europe. While Eloqua enabled European opt-in compliance last Spring and have offered white papers and other resources following, Eloqua has not recently revamped their support for EU regulations or implemented further support. 
• PURLs
 - Users can create personalized, contact-specific URLs for direct mail and email campaigns. This feature which is common in the social media space (e.g. Hootsuite) will allow for smarter marketing. PURL creation is also available in Eloqua, putting it at par with Marketo with this particular feature.
• Updated Email and Landing Page Editors
 - We are very much looking forward to this updated, more intuitive interface. No recent updates have been made to Eloqua’s email and landing page editors.
• Program Management
 - With Token delete and easier deletion of programs, program management is vastly simplified. To the best of our knowledge, Eloqua has not recently released any enhancements to their program management feature.
• Munchkin Updates
 - Webpage load times are reduced, providing more consistent performance for click link events. To our knowledge, Eloqua has not released any updates of this nature.
• Program Opportunity Analysis
 - Allows you to monitor program lead velocity to better determine marketing contribution to opportunity revenue.

Which of these updates will you benefit from most upon their release? What other updates and enhancements are you hoping for in 2012?