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How to Run a Content Download Campaign with Marketing Automation and Microsoft Dynamics

June 13, 2020 CRM News and Info

Ready to ramp up your lead generation efforts? As more of your marketing strategy moves online, it’s more important than ever to create downloadable, education-oriented content that can deliver more early funnel leads into your pipeline.

How and When to Gate Your Content

One of the questions we hear frequently is when should content be gated, and when should it be freely accessed? Creating long-form content, like whitepapers, user guides, and informational pieces, can help you establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry. Since these pieces often contain lots of information and are pretty time consuming to create, it’s fair for you to ask your target audience to “pay” for this content by providing their email address and contact information. Blog posts, on the other hand, are typically shorter and more informal by nature. They are great for SEO goals and for providing high-level content, and thus aren’t quite worth the value of requiring contact information in exchange for access.

We recommend a successful content strategy that incorporates both blog posts—for early interest and for SEO—and content downloads designed to drive more leads into your nurture funnel.

Converting Downloaders into Leads

As you make a plan for content downloads, the first—and most important—question you’ll want to address is where will these downloaders live? This conversation is best captured by discussing how your sales and marketing departments want to track Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) versus Sales Qualified Leads (SQL). MQLs are often early funnel leads who are in a nurture state—you have their contact information and they have demonstrated some level of interest (e.g., by downloading a whitepaper), but they aren’t quite ready to have a conversation with a member of your sales team. SQLs, on the other hand, are sales-ready leads. They have filled out a “contact us” form or reached out directly to say that they would like to have a conversation about what you sell.

In some organizations, the sales and marketing departments may choose to integrate everyone, including MQLs, into Microsoft Dynamics. Other organizations prefer to keep MQLs in their marketing automation platform until the MQL either reaches a predefined contact score or demonstrates intent. How you choose to track this is important—if you don’t have this conversation ahead of time, you could wind up with MQLs getting contacted by a member of the sales team well before they’re ready to talk.

Setting Up Your Campaigns with Marketing Automation

Building the content and the landing page to gate it is just the beginning! Don’t forget to set up an automated email and a nurture campaign to work that downloader into a sales-ready state. On the Microsoft Dynamics side, use your integration to your marketing automation platform to create a notification to members of your sales team in the event that a Lead or Contact they own downloads your content. Also, be sure to create a Campaign to help you track the overall success and budget of your downloadable campaigns.

Watch How We Build a Nurture Campaign

Want to see what we recommend for whitepaper download campaigns and nurture strategies? Watch our three-minute video here: https://emarketingplatform.com/blog/whitepaper-download-nurture-campaigns/

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COVID-19’s Immediate and Future Impact on Marketing

May 28, 2020 CRM News and Info

COVID-19 is forcing us to adapt the way we live our lives, raise our families, and conduct our businesses. And as the global economic downturn impacts companies big and small, we need to update our thinking, our approach, and our execution to marketing our offerings and value — likely for the long haul.

Keep reading to learn how.

Adapt COVID 19’s Immediate and Future Impact on Marketing

Find Ways To Do More With Less

With the threat of a pandemic and the short- and long-term impact it could have on our economy, marketing will likely need to seek ways to achieve more with less — even as our target audiences are tightening their spending.

Here are a few business suggestions for marketers to consider based on the current reality.

Be Brutal With Priorities

More than ever, marketers need to re-evaluate their priorities and take a hard look at what is important right now. It is not business as usual. Focus on those initiatives and messages that will generate the most business value against the backdrop of the pandemic while also looking to increase your engagement with your company’s existing customer base to tighten bonds. This might mean that you need to pause or reduce questionable or experimental campaigns that might have potential in order to be brutal with your priorities.

Choose the Most Cost-Effective Tools

You need to look for technology solutions that help you consolidate and move faster with less while freeing up valuable marketing resources that can be applied elsewhere. As you begin planning for 2021, consider what your marketing tech stack looks like and find ways to focus on the core. Expanding your focus beyond the traditional top-of-funnel demand generation is critical, so look for centralized tools that can be used across your marketing functions.

Identify Team Efficiencies

Now that you’ve brutally prioritized your initiatives, developing clear and concise processes is vital — across teams and technologies. Streamlining your processes will give your marketing team the best chance to execute at higher-than-normal levels, which is essential to counter the negative macroeconomic conditions. Define your short- and long-term goals clearly with stakeholders, and equip your team with the right collaboration tools, documented processes, data collection, and automation capabilities to get the job done better with less.

Roll Out the (Virtual) Red Carpet for Existing Customers

In any recession or crisis environment, a focus on customer retention becomes absolutely paramount in protecting your business and revenue. By doubling down on your customer marketing efforts to deliver great experiences and quality engagement with your install base, you can begin to build “brand moats” to maintain revenue streams and, most importantly, inspire your happy customers to attract new consumers.

Customer expectations have changed greatly in the last 5 years. When your customers feel more connected to your brand, they’re 57% more likely to increase their spending and 76% more likely to buy from you instead of one of your competitors. Therefore, you need to truly invest in creating authentic connections by understanding what makes your customers tick — their interests, their favorite content types and topics, their current pain points, and their ambitions. Take that data and build a strong engagement plan that blows them away.

Lastly, an authentic and personalized approach is even more critical in today’s environment to cut through the noise, as 75% of consumers report avoiding any advertising altogether. Conversely, brands with at least five online reviews from happy customers enjoy a 270% increase in sales. As more and more buyers turn to social and professional networks (as well as third-party review sites) to make purchasing decisions, we need to focus on delivering engaging growth-centric adoption and retention campaigns that deepen connections between customer and brand.

Follow these proven techniques to make it happen.

Create great engagement strategies to welcome, onboard, and check-in with your newer customers. Hear what they have to say early and feed it into your organization.

Really focus on personalization across your digital communications, especially with repeat or long term customers. Go that extra mile to make sure they know you hear them. Now more than ever, customers do not want to be treated like a number.

Invest in virtual events now. Customers want community, and there will likely not be any live events until 2021. By being the organization that creates these social connections with your customers, you continue to build the value of your brand.

Listen harder than ever. Use sites like Yelp and G2 to gather feedback, analyze the information, identify patterns, and then apply what you’ve learned to improve consumer confidence and satisfaction.

Get Serious About Digital — and Do It Now

Even before the pandemic, 87% of all consumers began their product searches online. And now that many storefronts are closed or limited and in-person events, conferences, and user groups are on hold, being exceptional at digital marketing is more important than ever and will allow you to stand out. To do this well, you need to ensure that you are collecting data on your customer’s digital behavior across your digital properties, online services, and products. Leverage this critical data in your customer engagement strategies to deliver more consistent value. Doing this well will endear you to your customer base and help you distance yourself from the competition.

Do so by using simple and sophisticated tools that are focused on driving engagement and delivering great experiences throughout the customer lifecycle. As budgets and workforces decrease, you need tech that is agile and easy for small teams to use easily and with good results. Instead of automatically defaulting to enterprise solutions with excessive feature sets, really think about how you can achieve your goals efficiently and at a price point that allows you to scale within your budget.

Marketing Has Changed, but the Goal Remains the Same

The coronavirus is changing how we market to individual consumers and massive corporations, but the primary goal will always stay the same: generate the kind of brand excitement, product stickiness, and customer affinity that results in sustainable and scalable business growth.

If you want some help doing that with a really great platform built by some really smart people, please let us know. We’ll be here — now and in the future.

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Act-On Blog

How to use predictive analytics for better marketing

May 11, 2020 BI News and Info

In the world of marketing, knowledge is power. Having knowledge about customer behavior, preferences, demographics, and purchase history—among other things—is essential for any successful marketing team.

But obtaining this information is only half the battle. The other half is turning the data into actionable insights that can inform marketing strategy and improve the effectiveness of campaigns. That’s where predictive analytics comes in.

In its simplest form, predictive analytics is the practice of forecasting the future based on current and historical datasets, machine learning techniques, and statistical algorithms. This mathematical clairvoyance enables marketers to transform data into actionable insights, which they can leverage to iteratively improve their messaging strategies.

Being able to anticipate spikes in demand, analyze buying habits, or predict the lifetime value of potential customers unlocks many doors for marketing teams and allows them to make acquisition and nurturing strategies more impactful than ever before.

10 ways predictive analytics can be used to drive marketing performance

So how exactly can marketers leverage predictive analytics as part of their ongoing strategy? Virtually any marketing scenario can be a target for predictive analytics, provided the requisite data is available—and let’s be honest, what modern marketing team isn’t swimming in tons of data about their prospects?

Here are just a few examples of how predictive marketing analytics can be used to impact performance.

1. Segmenting customers

Customer segmentation allows marketers to create highly personalized and targeted messages for more effective acquisition and retention. When predictive analytics is used for customer segmentation, marketers can make deeper analyses than simply grouping customers by age, geography, gender, or other shallow traits.

Predictive analytics allows for more nuanced groupings, considering many customer traits that are (or are not) present in specific groups, as well as identifying new features that might not be obviously important. This deeper analysis can reveal patterns that would be impossible to recognize otherwise.

For example, a bank’s marketing team could segment customers into different categories with varying receptiveness, income, age, and financial experience in order to determine what segments would be most interested in taking out a loan or opening a new savings account.

2. Understanding customer lifetime value

With the expansion and accessibility of digital advertising, the number of customers any given brand can reach has increased exponentially, even for smaller businesses. But this increased reach comes with some challenges. With such a high volume of potential customers, it’s simply not practical to treat every customer the same way.

Using predictive analytics to analyze customer data like average purchase value, purchase frequency, and likelihood of churn, marketing teams can calculate a customer lifetime value. This value projection helps better tailor messaging, offers and service levels depending on what customers are likely to have a higher lifetime value, maximizing future revenues and profit.

3. Analyzing trends & seasonality

An effective marketing team must be agile and proactive in designing strategies. In today’s marketing world, it’s not enough to simply look at previous years’ numbers and assume old patterns will continue as expected.

Predictive analytics helps teams make demand forecasts and predict market changes, allowing them to plan and execute on strategies before their competitors. This way they are setting the trend rather than chasing it.

And because it’s virtually infinitely scalable, marketers generate both high level insights and granular analysis from large swaths of data—more than would be possible using traditional market analysis.

4. Joining customer data

Marketing data is almost never able to encompass everything an organization knows about a given customer. This is due to the dispersion of data across the organization—from sales, tech support, product, finance, etc.

However, piecing together this information is required to build a comprehensive understanding of customers and more advanced marketing tactics. Predictive analytics helps ease the stress of such a large undertaking by:

Sifting through an entire organization’s data
Automatically finding correlations between data belonging to the same customer
Joining it together under one unified profile

This unified customer profile can then be used by marketers to produce more impactful campaigns. Marketing teams can look at a customer’s past purchases from sales data, recent product page views and clicks, and the sentiment of reviews left on purchased products to gain a greater understanding of that customer’s needs and preferences.

5. Scoring leads

With lead scoring, marketing and sales teams can better understand how likely potential customers are to progress through the customer journey. Sales calls, customer support, special offers, email campaigns, and other valuable resources can then be prioritized for those with higher probability.

Predictive analytics helps segment customer data for scoring, allowing recommendations to be automatically generated for marketing and sales teams to use. The power of predictive analytics can even be combined with widely used visualization solution (like Grafana) to create custom reporting dashboards.

6. Cross-selling

One of the best marketing strategies is to leverage an existing customer base into new sales. It’s a win-win for you and your customers, not to mention it’s far less expensive than acquiring a new customer.

Through predictive analytics, marketing teams can generate more accurate and personalized suggestions for their customers. Perhaps the best-known examples of this type of cross-selling are the automated suggests from providers like Netflix and Amazon.

Providing these kinds of suggests to your customers can dramatically increase cross-sales while also strengthening customer relationships and trust in the organization’s products.

7. Predicting customer behavior

Knowing the most likely actions a customer is going to take helps marketers formulate a tailored message before the customer has made a decision.

By combining a customer’s recent online behavior with historic purchase data, marketers can accurately predict what products a customer is most likely to purchase in the future. Marketers can then expose the customer to said products with cross-selling recommendations and make other promotional strategies more effective, allowing marketing teams to take a proactive role in guiding customer journeys.

8. Personalizing content

Personalization is no longer just an option for marketers, it’s a necessity for running successful campaigns. Consumers are used to receiving blast marketing aimed at a broad audience – offering personalized and engaging content is required to catch their attention and encourage them to take action.

Marketing teams can use predictive analytics to consider the collected data on past behaviors and then anticipate the next best action with regards to a customer. Teams can then craft more personalized and targeted interactions with which to engage and treat their audience.

9. Determining pricing

Optimizing the price for a given product is a complicated process. Marketers must strike a balance between demand, profit, and risk when they set a price, considering multiple variables, trends, and demands from both their own organization and competitors. Knowing the best possible price can often be the deciding factor in the success of a campaign, giving a brand the competitive edge that it needs.

Predictive modeling can streamline the entire pricing process through price optimization, using all possible factors and historical data to arrive at the optimal price. Marketers can use this information to plan promotions around price changes or optimize the timings and discounts of sale events.

10. Optimizing campaigns

All the above uses come together for marketers to create more efficient, optimized campaigns through predictive analytics.

It’s worth noting that having the right predictive analytics solution is key, as marketers must be able to streamline processes and unify their strategy. This will ultimately help marketing teams better reach their audiences with more personalized and engaging messaging, while maximizing the efficiency of marketing budgets through more targeted campaigns.

Having a unified predictive analytics solution implemented also helps eliminate redundancies and resolve any internal strategies that are in conflict, making sure the overarching strategy is as streamlined and effective as possible.

Common challenges that marketers face with predictive analytics

Although predictive analytics is a powerful tool for marketing teams, like any strategy, challenges do arise. Here are the most common challenges we see marketers face.

Understanding the audience

An algorithm can predict customer behavior, but it can’t understand a customer base’s sense of humor or the cultural sensitivities of an advertisement. When implementing analytics-based insights, marketing teams still need a deep understanding of their audience in order to best implement predictive analytics insights.

Keeping track of ROI

Even with predictive analytics, it’s important for marketing teams to keep track of how their campaigns are performing and make continuous adjustments. Often, even if a campaign proves effective in the short term, its costs can outweigh the benefits as time goes on. Tracking campaign ROI is vital to getting the best value out of predictive marketing analytics.

Tracking conversions

Again, no algorithm has perfect accuracy and there are usually many algorithms to choose from, so the first predictive analytics model implemented might not be the best. Accurately tracking lead conversion rates associated will help avoid wasting time and resources on faulty leads down the road, as well as helping you iterate through different models and strategies to determine what works best.

How RapidMiner can help with predictive marketing analytics

From the many uses highlighted above, it’s clear that predictive marketing analytics is a must for the modern marketing team. A major key to success here is adopting a platform that is easily accessible for team members of all skillsets, even those with little or no data science experience.

Luckily, RapidMiner Go is just that. All you need is a data set and something you want to predict. The automated and guided experience helps you select the best model for your business and use that model to uncover insights and inform business decisions.

You can try RapidMiner Go right from your browser, no download required. Explore your data, discover insights, and create models within minutes.

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RapidMiner

Email Marketing Data Permission and Acquisition

April 28, 2020 CRM News and Info

Not long ago, marketers delivered email campaigns to millions of recipients — regardless of whether or not those recipients expected to receive communications from that sender.

As we shift into an era of ever-tightening privacy regulations and stricter recipient ISP expectations, however, marketers who engage in these outdated batch-and-blast strategies are experiencing far lower open/click rates — thus getting far less value from their email marketing efforts.

Email Consent Email Marketing Data Permission and Acquisition

But fear not! Compared to the alternative of saturating inboxes with spam and potentially causing end users to abandon email altogether, moving to more calculated and targeted email marketing strategies is actually a good thing! All it requires is a simple shift in perspective.

Most notably, marketers need to empathize with their subscribers and follow best practices for email deliverability. Doing so builds trust in your brand and your email communication efforts. And when you strengthen trust, you start generating serious long-term revenue from dedicated repeat consumers.

So how can marketers thrive in an era of increasingly restrictive email marketing rules? It all begins with your data strategy!

Obtaining data permission to send to your contacts will increase email engagement, leading to more business opportunities. Conversely, marketers who don’t obtain these permissions will suffer from low engagement metrics and miss out on sales opportunities.

What is considered permission to send? How do we get permission? How do we keep it?

Read on!

What Is Email Marketing Data Permission and Why Does it Matter?

Email marketing data permission means that a contact expressly opts-in to your mailing list, granting you permission to send your email to them.

You should only market to those contacts who have expressly consented and opted-in to your list. By sending only to those subscribers who have expressly consented, you will drive more business opportunities through higher email engagement rates, achieve a more sustainable sending reputation, and obtain a better understanding of your customers and target audience.

However, a subscriber clicking a checkbox doesn’t automatically translate into positive engagement if you’re not setting the proper expectations — especially if your communication permissions request is buried in the fine print. During the opt-in process, make it clear what your end users are signing up for. You’re looking for clear consent here to avoid unsubscribes and the spam folder.

The Risks of Sending Marketing Emails Without Permission

Marketers might be tempted to purchase or rent leads from third-party providers. At Act-On, purchased data is against our terms of service. Permission-based sending is essentially the opposite of buying leads from a third party, sharing data between affiliated business partners, forcing opt-ins, or anything that does not involve the recipient expressly consenting to your marketing communications.

Sending to contacts who aren’t expecting your mail can be expensive, time-consuming, unfruitful, and most importantly, risky. Senders risk poor engagement rates, high spam complaint rates, and a damaged sending reputation — meaning your emails could soft bounce or your domain blacklisted. Most importantly, sending to contacts who have not opted-in to receiving your mail risks violating GDPR and CCPA laws.

Regardless of whether you’re a B2B or B2C marketer, sending without an inbox owner’s express consent ultimately results in brand damage, poor engagement metrics, and poor ROI on your marketing efforts. It’s just not worth the risk.

Go Organic to Obtain Permission

Now that you know what email marketing data permission is, how should you go about obtaining it? Here are the two most accepted methods of obtaining permission to send.

1. Double Opt-In

The double opt-in method is the best way to grow your marketing list with a highly engaged audience. This method collects contact information from valid contacts who have clear expectations on what they will receive and drives better email deliverability. While your overall list of contacts may be smaller, your engagement rates will soar because you’ll only be sending to contacts who want to receive your communications.

Here’s what the double opt-in process looks like:

Form Submission: The contact completes an Act-On form supplying various demographic and/or firmographic information. (Bonus points if you include a captcha before they submit the form!)

Verify & Confirm: Send the new contact an email confirming their address. Once they click the confirmation link, the contact has completed the double opt-in process, expressly consented to receiving your mail and cementing their position as an active subscriber!

2. Single Opt-In

This process requires a bit less work than the double opt-in process. The contact submits their personal information and email address via an Act-On form. Once that’s completed, they are an official subscriber. This method generates a larger (albeit less engaged) email marketing list.

The single opt-in method is not without fault, however. Users commonly submit erroneous personal information. And sending to incorrect email addresses can result in increased spam complaints and bounces, damaging your sending reputation. If your marketing efforts revolve around long sales cycles or ongoing subscriber engagement (as is often the case for B2B marketers), the double opt-in method is a better fit.

When using the single opt-in method, keep a close eye on your bounce rates and spam trap hits. If you’re having trouble with either of these, switch to the double opt-in method.

Maintaining Email Marketing Permission

Obtaining email marketing permission is just the first step in the email marketing process. You also need to maintain it.

Just as easily as permission can be granted, it can be taken away. It’s imperative that you respect the privilege that your subscribers have given you in order to maintain their permission to receive your email communications.

Here are some things you can do to maintain your subscribers’ permission:

Let Subscribers Manage Permissions: Include opt-out links in every email you send, and maintain a permissions page that includes options on how and when your customers hear from you. This will help you gain trust and protect brand reputation.

Send Engaging Content: Don’t send your subscribers emails asking them to purchase your products or services! Send them engaging content that makes you stand out as thought leaders in your field.

Prove That Subscribing Is Beneficial: Make unique offers, provide content that would otherwise be gated off, and remind them that subscribing to your mail is valuable to them.

Respect the Privilege to Send: Don’t over-communicate with subscribers. Always ensure you send at times that make sense to them. Email fatigue is a very real phenomenon. Nothing revokes permission more quickly than sending with too much frequency, too much volume, or poor timing.

Passive Revocation of Consent & Sunsetting: Sometimes subscribers give consent to receive marketing communications but later stop engaging with your mail. If a subscriber stops engaging with your marketing efforts for longer than 6 months, consider them unengaged. Before sunsetting them from your active mailing list, consider a re-engagement campaign so that no one accidentally slips through the cracks.

Any subscribers who do not engage with your re-engagement campaign can be sunsetted from your marketing list. Doing so ultimately protects your brand, sending reputation, and deliverability performance.

Learn How Act-On’s Expert Deliverability Consultants Can Help You Achieve Success!

In the world of email marketing, permission has become more important than ever. As marketers are driven by highly targeted sending, adhering to email deliverability best practices to achieve strong engagement rates can be frustrating.

Act-On’s team of expert Email Deliverability Consultants are here to help you at every step of the way. Our team provides ongoing monitoring of your sending performance, personalized engagement reports, and strategic recommendations to help you realize success and drive the most value from your marketing campaigns.

To learn more about our approach to email reputation and deliverability, please click here to schedule a no-risk demo. Or, if you’re not quite ready to speak with an expert, download this free eBook to get better acquainted with the benefits and drawbacks of email marketing.

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Act-On Blog

Three Ways to Turn SMS Marketing into Sales

April 20, 2020 NetSuite

Posted by Austin Caldwell, Senior Product Marketing Manager

Over the past decade, ecommerce website traffic has rapidly shifted from desktop to mobile devices. In 2018, mobile overtook desktop as the predominant global online traffic source. Mobile usage skyrocketed during the 2019 holidays and for the first time ever, became the primary ecommerce revenue source from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday. In today’s mobile-first ecommerce environment, marketers should strive to invest in strategies that optimize user experience on smartphones.

One of the most effective mobile marketing strategies is implementing a Short Message Service (SMS) program. With 98% of text messages read within two minutes, 36% average click rates and 45% average conversion rates, SMS marketing has unparalleled engagement rates compared to other channels. These metrics aren’t surprising considering the text message inbox is one of the least saturated; especially compared to email inboxes and social media news feeds.

Get Started with SMS

SMS allows marketers to reach their customers in a more personal way, in the right place, at the right time, and on the device they can’t do without. In order to help get started with SMS marketing, here are some leading practices businesses can utilize to start acquiring mobile contacts, design engaging messages and automate personalized campaigns.

Mobile Contact Acquisition

Similar to email marketing acquisition strategies, marketers must promote their SMS marketing channel if they hope to grow subscribers. Luckily, SMS and email marketing are easy to promote together and leverage similar tactics to optimize sign-ups across web and digital marketing channels. Offering an incentive to sign-up like a coupon or special offer is the top tactic to help boost subscription conversion rates. Businesses need a contact’s mobile number and their opt-in consent to receive SMS text messages.

It’s becoming more ubiquitous to see print advertising and physical signage inside retail stores promoting SMS sign-ups. Simple directions enable users to opt-in with a text to join, followed by an automated SMS message asking to provide their mobile number to opt into the program. Subscribers then receive their initial welcome SMS campaigns. This efficient process makes it possible for shoppers to easily sign up while they’re in the store. Marketers should place text-to-join signage at the front entrance and throughout the store, so shoppers can sign up before heading through the check-out line; eliminating the need for staff to annoyingly collect shoppers’ phone numbers at the register.

Designing SMS Campaigns

SMS communication is more intimate than email and must be used thoughtfully. SMS subscribers expect SMS messages to be timely, personalized and deliver value. Since SMS unsubscribe rates are nearly three times higher than email marketing opt-out rates, designing exceptional SMS interactions are vital to keeping well-earned sign-ups.

In order to be timely, plan SMS campaign send times when shoppers are on their phones. Sends between 6-9 p.m. result in the highest engagement as people have time to shop. Don’t schedule campaigns during the early morning or rush hour commutes. SMS campaigns sent on Fridays have a 44% higher open rate compared to any other day of the week.

Keep SMS content short and sweet. With a 160-character limit that includes website URLs and mandatory unsubscribe language, it’s best to lead with an offer and reinforce a call to action without wasting words. Save fine print for the website landing page and shorten URLs to save character count. Personalized dynamic content such as first name, local store, loyalty program status, order details and one-time use coupons can be used to stand out from generic promotions. Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) content like video, images, animated gifs or scannable barcode offers can be utilized to help grab attention and drive engagement.

Automated Mobile Interactions

SMS requires exceptional marketing automation in order to scale. Using behavioral triggers rather than gut intuition takes the guesswork out of sending the right message at the right time. SMS adheres to established customer lifecycle automation strategies like welcome, website abandonment, transactional order status and post-purchase.

Shoppers expect an immediate response upon sign up. It’s unacceptable to not receive an initial welcome campaign until the next day when a back-end process decides to run. Text-to-join strategies will quickly fail if shoppers don’t receive their sign-up offers while in the store. Make a great first impression with a multi-touch welcome series that provides shoppers with a reason to keep receiving your SMS campaigns.

Marketers can recapture lost sales by monitoring website browsing activity and triggering abandonment messages when shoppers bounce. By being mindful of timing and frequency, shoppers will be open to receiving SMS reminders if they don’t become annoying. It’s useful to send an initial SMS cart abandonment campaign within the first few hours of their session and follow up the next day with an email campaign containing the full details of their shopping cart. Limiting SMS frequency prevents unsubscribes and allows the more non-pervasive email channel to handle reminders.

Even if shoppers aren’t interested in receiving promotional SMS campaigns, many are willing to opt in to receive order status alerts like order, shipping and delivery confirmations. With workflow triggers for when an order is added or marked to ship, you are able to send order and shipping confirmation messages with dynamic variables such as order number, order total, shipment tracking and projected delivery date. These transactional messages are intended to give shoppers peace of mind, reassuring them their order was successful and on the way.

Start Engaging Customers with SMS

With NetSuite’s Bronto Marketing Platform, marketers can take advantage of today’s mobile-first ecommerce environment. Bronto’s integrated SMS capabilities make it simple to start seamlessly engaging with shoppers through multiple channels including mobile, email, web and social to drive sales with consistent messaging throughout. Bronto has helped many businesses find omnichannel success using a single fully integrated, unified marketing platform.

Learn more about SMS marketing capabilities with the Bronto Marketing Platform and how marketers can use SMS to reach their VIP customers.

Posted on Mon, April 20, 2020
by NetSuite filed under

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3 Marketing Tactics That Will Help Your Financial Advisory Firm Attract Customers

April 16, 2020 CRM News and Info

The technology explosion of the last decade has forever changed the way that investors grow their wealth. Subsequently, financial advisors are doing their best to adopt new approaches to attracting and securing new clients — while also improving the digital experience for their existing customers to ensure retention and continued growth.

Whereas financial advisors used to be able to hang their hat on their local reputation and word-of-mouth referrals, modern investors are eager for more immersive digital customer journeys, which means that financial advisors need to be able to meet them on their path to financial growth through holistic marketing initiatives.

And as the financial industry becomes more and more saturated with younger and younger investors, financial advisors must be able to capture their attention and make a compelling case for their firm’s skill and value.

That said, developing and executing a robust digital marketing strategy aimed at financial investors is rife with challenges, especially if it hasn’t been a priority in the past.

Among other things, it requires:

Updating your website and optimizing for search engines
Building great content in the form of blogs, infographics, eBooks, and videos
Delivering engaging demand generation campaigns
Optimizing your sales funnel at every stage
Improving brand awareness and customer loyalty
Tracking, measuring, and improving the full suite of initiatives

That’s a lot, right?

Luckily, you’re not alone.

In fact, most of your competitors are well behind the when it comes to adopting a comprehensive digital marketing strategy that drives growth. So, focusing on the most effective and efficient tactics can help you quickly and significantly distance yourself from the competition, grow your brand, and exceed your business goals.

Today, we’re going to equip you with three easy-to-implement marketing tactics that will help you do just that.

1. Adopt a Multi-Channel Approach

As we mentioned above, neighborly referrals aren’t enough to grow your financial advisory in the modern digital age. Today’s investors are accustomed to performing their own research and evaluating numerous options before choosing a skilled and experienced firm or professional to grow their wealth.

However, what modern investments own in terms of digital savvy and independence, they severely lack in financial literacy. As such, you should be focusing on the following channels to grab their attention and educate them about their options.

Social Media Marketing Platforms: Whether your target audience’s social media platform of choice is LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter, they’re likely spending a lot of time browsing and interacting on social. Use this to your advantage by distributing content and messaging that helps you build trust and brand awareness with your audience through this channel. You can also curate content from thought leaders in your space to avoid feeling overly promotional or sales-driven.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising Using Dedicated Landing Pages With Adaptive Forms: Creating search, display, and remarketing pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns is a great way to attract your audience. And by sending this traffic to dedicated landing pages with adaptive forms, you can educate your audience about their investment options while collecting valuable contact information in exchange for informative and engaging content assets. Growing your marketing lists in this way will grow your sales funnel and nurture hot prospects into loyal clients.

Interactive Digital Events and Webinars: Online events, especially webinars, are an awesome way to identify new prospects and speak to them directly about their primary goals and challenges. A lot of investors would rather watch a webinar than read an eBook, so getting in front of them online can be more personal and more effective. Plus, it gives you the chance to speak to them directly during a live Q&A session after you delivered your presentation.

Event-Based Emails: Event-based emails are automatically triggered whenever a known contact completes a significant action – such as visiting a webpage, filling out a form, or purchasing a product or service. These automated messages allow you to immediately follow up with great prospects as you guide them through the customer journey and beyond. They provide an added layer of personalization and keep your brand top of mind at crucial moments.

We know this sounds like a lot, but marketing automation can streamline and simplify this process while producing far greater outcomes. That way, you can ensure you’re targeting the right audience with relevant messaging wherever they are without having to exhaust your time and resources.

2. Nurture Your Customers With Targeted Email Campaigns

Batch-and-blast email marketing is simple. It’s also ineffective because it’s a dated one-size-fits-none approach.

When you send messages that don’t align with your potential investors’ needs and interests, they’ll either unsubscribe or send your emails to the SPAM folder. Not only does this hurt your marketing efforts, but it also rapidly decreases your email reputation and delivery, which can be a death sentence for digital marketing initiatives.

To get more out of email, you need to segment your audience based on their financial status, investment interests, demographics, and how they’re interacting with your brand. Once they’re properly grouped, enter them into targeted email nurture campaigns and continue to update your segments, content, and messaging for consistent improvement. This allows you to send more targeted messages to your prospective and current clients. As a result, your engagement metrics and return on investment will skyrocket.

Marketing automation allows you to automate all of your lead nurturing efforts — from basic A/B testing to advanced segmentation with conditional logic and dynamic content. One thing to remember, though, is that these programs are never “finished.” Be sure to check in on your performance at regular intervals and innovate and iterate accordingly.

3. Develop and Distribute Relevant Content

Your investors want to feel confident in their decision to pick you to manage their assets. It’s up to you to build that trust and credibility by guiding investors through compelling buyer journeys that provide them with relevant information and resources. The right content can help you answer pressing questions, position yourself and your firm as real thought leaders in your space, and build your reputation as an effective wealth manager.

If content development and marketing hasn’t been your focus in the past, don’t stress. You can’t build a full content library overnight, so focus on quality over quantity. Even one good asset for each funnel stage will put you in great shape for all of your inbound, outbound, and demand generation strategies. Be sure to gate the content and nurture the incoming leads while you work on building out additional assets.

Before even starting, though, you should map your various customer journeys to determine the information you need to provide to keep investors engaged. This will help you focus your time and resources on projects that will make the biggest impact and allow you to provide unique and useful content.

Once you’ve developed some solid content, you can use marketing automation software to distribute all of these great assets using a multi-channel strategy from one centralized location. Act-On even has an entire media library that allows you to store and share your content with just a few clicks!

Streamline the Sales Cycle With Powerful Marketing Automation

At Act-On, we know our stuff, and we know your business. We work with dozens of financial advisory firms to help them revitalize their marketing and grow their assets under management by aligning their unique strategies with our powerful marketing automation platform.

If you’d like to learn more about how your financial advisory firm can overcome common industry challenges, please download our eBook, “The 4 Main Challenges Facing Wealth Managers and How to Overcome Them With Marketing Automation.” This valuable resource walks you through a series of coordinated strategies you can implement to develop a holistic digital marketing strategy that helps you attract and retain loyal and lucrative investors.

And if you’re ready to see how Act-On makes it easy to align your strategy with the best marketing automation software on the market to deliver amazing customer journeys, please schedule a demo with one of our marketing automation experts. They’re eager and excited to show you how you can leverage our powerful platform to implement the tactics outlined in this blog — and many more!

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Marketing Strategies to Help B2C Companies Attract New Customers

April 12, 2020 CRM News and Info

When I first realized the importance of B2C content marketing, it changed everything I thought I knew about running a successful business.

I was working for an ecommerce company that boasted over 600 items in our online store and more than 100 items for wholesale customers.

I received a new lead, and when I visited his website I was floored.

Where we offered 600 items, he barely had 20. But that wasn’t the most surprising thing.

What blew me away was the amount of content on his site.

We only wrote long descriptions for the top 10 products on our site; my new friend had grouped his items into product families. Then he had written thousands of words about the products in each group. How to use these products, their benefits, customer testimonials, how to spot copycat products… You name it; he had it.

He believed in these products so deeply that he had transformed his website into a library filled with recommendations and education.

That was his B2C lead generation strategy: Become the ultimate authority on these products by sharing everything you might ever want to know.

The results?

When I first spoke to him, he had 5 full-time employees and over $ 30K in revenue every month. That was almost 10 years ago. Since then, he has more than doubled his revenue with the same 5 employees.

This is the power of B2C content marketing. Done the right way, it can act as a lead magnet for years to come.

In this article, we’ll share the key benefits of B2C content marketing: what it is, why it matters, and how to design a strategy that works for you.

Why Is Great Content So Important for Your B2C Business?

Great B2C content marketing transforms your customers’ needs into wants. And it does it all within the framework of an exciting story in which your customer is the hero.

Sound like a tall order? It’s actually easier than you think. And it all starts to click when you understand one fundamental aspect of human psychology:

People make decisions with their emotions. They only justify those decisions with logic after the fact.

How should this affect your B2C content marketing strategy?

Simple.

Whenever you create new content, don’t just describe what something is. Talk about what it does.

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How 3 Insurance Companies are Leveraging Marketing Automation to Stand Out from the Crowd

April 7, 2020 CRM News and Info

by Helen Veyna

Last updated April 4, 2020

Good marketing takes a lot of work as it is, but folks in the insurance market really have their work cut out for them when it comes to providing prospective and existing policyholders with personalized marketing efforts that match their needs.

Many insurance organizations, big and small, are dealing with disconnected marketing systems and have to spend a great portion of their time completing manual tasks before their efforts ever see the light of day. This makes it difficult to even start thinking about enhancing their strategy and growing their efforts at scale.

The quest for better marketing has led many insurance professionals to adopt marketing automation, and they’ve been able to significantly revamp their marketing strategy as a result. Unlike more basic email marketing tools, marketing automation allows insurance industry marketers to build a robust marketing stack that enables them to launch personalized efforts that result in more enjoyable and effective customer journeys.

Insurance companies that implement this technology are able to easily develop and launch multi-channel campaigns that:

Attract and convert new policyholders
Promote engagement, retention, and growth within their existing customer base
Eliminate manual processes and streamline workflows
Match leads and customers with the appropriate content and resources
Equip agents with the insights they need to close more deals

These benefits might sound too good to be true, but they describe some of the milestones your insurance industry peers have been able to achieve with marketing automation. We can go on and on about the wonders of marketing automation, but it’s much easier to show you the benefits of this technology through real-world examples.

Today we’re going to show you how three Act-On customers have leveraged this powerful technology to stand out from the crowd in and see results!

5 Marketing Challenges Facing Insurance Brokerages CTA How 3 Insurance Companies are Leveraging Marketing Automation to Stand Out from the Crowd

RSA Insurance Enhances Their Email to Stand Out in the Inbox

RSA Insurance is one of the oldest and most well-known insurance providers in the world and are dedicated to serving individuals, small businesses, and large corporations. Despite being well-known in the industry, this insurance powerhouse’s UK unit was struggling to break through the noise of the inbox to reach their target audience, which consisted of brokers and risk managers.

In addition, RSA had no way of determining which contacts had opened their emails and lacked very little visibility into their results. This made it very difficult for the organization to track their campaign ROI and enhance their efforts to improve audience engagement.

All of this changed when RSA began leveraging marketing automation. The insurance giant has upped their game and is using Act-On to design and A/B test their emails, create automated campaigns and landing pages, and measure their impact.

This has allowed RSA to:

Achieve open rates 18-20 percent above the industry average
Easily design engaging emails that make a great impression
Enhance their email efforts thanks to better visibility into results
Easily comply with GDPR

Physicians Insurance Launches Targeted Campaigns to Improve Customer Engagement and Retention

Physicians Insurance tested the waters with Constant Contact and Mailchimp, but neither of these solutions had the features and tools they needed to provide their audience with targeted communications. These solutions forced the team at Physicians Insurance to manually perform tasks such as segmentation, which was a process that required a lot of time and effort and was prone to error –– leaving the company far short of achieving their marketing goals.

n7ZTeoVMYWV2huECjw44qT How 3 Insurance Companies are Leveraging Marketing Automation to Stand Out from the Crowd

Implementing marketing automation has enabled Physicians Insurance to dream big and innovate their marketing strategy. Physicians Insurance is leveraging Act-On to segment their audience by their job title, specialty, geographic region, and even the size of their organization. With these lists in place, the company is able to improve the engagement of their monthly newsletters because they’re now designed to match their audience with resources and content that fit their needs and interests.

The insurance company was also able to connect Act-On with their instance of Sugar CRM to consolidate their progress and eliminate the manual transfer of data.

These combined efforts have empowered the organization to:

Achieve email open rates as high as 31% for existing clients
Keep their customer retention rate above 95%.
Connect their MarTech stack to streamline processes
Consolidate data to make more informed decisions

Meyer and Associates Easily Markets Insurance Products to Over 100 Alumni Groups

It’s widely known that personalized marketing that resonates with your audience will yield better results. Although that was the goal for Meyer and Associates, providing their audience with the level of personalization they needed to make informed decisions turned out to be an overwhelming lift.

The broker and “third-party administrator” faced the unique challenge of marketing its insurance products to over 100 alumni associations, often having to coordinate with the colleges and universities on messaging and timing. If that wasn’t difficult enough, Meyer and Associates was finding that their emails were being blocked by ISPs and not reaching their audience’s inbox.

The company had previously used ESPs such as Constant Contact and Mailchimp, but they knew they needed a more robust and holistic solution to overcome their marketing challenges and provide their audience with a targeted and enjoyable customer journey.

Act-On not only equipped Meyer and Associates with powerful marketing tools, but our organization’s deliverability team also worked with them to fix their email reputation and improve their email marketing performance and results.

Convert More Leads Into Customers CTA How 3 Insurance Companies are Leveraging Marketing Automation to Stand Out from the Crowd

With marketing automation, Meyer and Associates has been able to develop a lead scoring model that enables them to understand their customers place in the buying journey to deliver a more enjoyable and relevant customer experience. Best of all, they can now easily segment their lists, send automated emails, and measure the performance of their marketing efforts for consistent optimization and improvement.

All these benefits combined have empowered Meyer and Associates to:

Gain access to insights that help them shape and enhance their marketing strategy
Achieve open rates that exceed industry averages
Easily send different versions of tailored emails to their various marketing segments

Act-On Is Designed to Empower Insurance Marketers to Get the Best Results

Insurance marketing isn’t easy, which is why our team is dedicated to providing your business with powerful technology to help you easily launch personalized multi-channel campaigns that empower you to achieve your marketing goals.

If you’d like to learn more about how marketing automation can help your insurance business overcome common industry challenges, we invite you to download our eBook, 5 Marketing Challenges Facing Insurance Brokerages.

If you’re ready to talk business and want to see our platform in action, please schedule a demo with one of our marketing automation experts. They can show you how Act-On’s marketing automation solution can solve your current marketing challenges and even share a few tactics you can implement to get even better results.

5 Challenges Facing Insurance Brokerages How 3 Insurance Companies are Leveraging Marketing Automation to Stand Out from the Crowd

The Ultimate Strategy Guide for Microsoft Dynamics and Marketing Automation

April 7, 2020 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Want to make the most of your Microsoft Dynamics and marketing automation platform integration? You’ll need a strategy that considers data, execution, and integration points first.

One of the things we love most about Microsoft Dynamics is how customizable the solution is for sales and marketing departments. It’s flexible enough to match up with just about any customer journey, and the ability to create custom data points makes it an ideal CRM for marketers looking to build hyper-personalized marketing campaigns.

All of that customization, however, can lead to data paralysis on the marketing side–with so much available data, setting automated nurture campaigns can feel like an overwhelming task. Layer in that marketing often gets left out of the CRM conversation, and building out a true strategy for leveraging Microsoft Dynamics with any marketing automation platform can be troublesome.

We’ve worked with marketers across countless industries leveraging dozens of different marketing automation platforms, including our own (the emfluence Marketing Platform). Based on those conversations, we’ve put together a guide designed to help marketers better leverage Microsoft Dynamics with their marketing automation platform.

In this guide, we’ve included tips for marketers who would like to better communicate with their CRM stakeholders and step-by-step guides on building seven of the best-performing automated marketing campaigns for marketers leveraging Microsoft Dynamics.

Get our guide for yourself or download it and share with your marketing team here:

Download the Guide

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Choose the Right Marketing Stack to Grow Your Financial Advisory Firm

April 2, 2020 CRM News and Info

Despite the fact that 65% of all investor interactions occur online, only 44% of investors say that their financial advisors do a good job of sharing best practices related to their investment goals. This gap in providing expert messaging and content to an eager audience is just one example of why financial advisors need to improve their marketing, deliver better customer experiences, and focus on delivering relevant educational messaging and content to prospective and existing investors.

The good news is that roughly 80% of firms are expected to increase their online marketing budgets moving forward, so clearly most financial advisories recognize the need to step up their game. Now, the challenge for many of these wealth managers becomes determining how and where to spend those marketing dollars to expand their assets under management and grow their respective firms.

MarTech Hero Choose the Right Marketing Stack to Grow Your Financial Advisory Firm

The reality is that it’s nearly impossible to plan, develop, distribute, track, and optimize a holistic series of marketing campaigns across all pertinent channels manually. Even those financial marketers who are able to miraculously launch their campaigns without a coordinated technological approach are almost certainly delivering mismatched and uninspired programs — and also failing to collect accurate and actionable data to understand their audience and deliver what they truly need to advance along their investment journey.

Simply put, disjointed tactics executed manually are guaranteed to deliver customer experiences that are confusing at best — which means less clients, less assets under management, and less revenue for your firm.

So if you’re part of the 80% mentioned above, you should be thinking about how you can build a marketing technology (MarTech) stack that empowers your financial advisory firm to scale your marketing efforts and capitalize on the most lucrative areas for growth.

What Is a Marketing Technology Stack?

A marketing technology stack is the collection of all the different marketing-related software that an organization uses to plan, develop, execute, track, and optimize their marketing efforts. Due to the wide array of marketing technology solutions available, MarTech stacks vary significantly among different industries and even from company to company within those industries.

In fact, the playing field is so diverse that Scott Brinker of Chief Martec has been creating a digital representation of all of the MarTech vendors every year since 2011 to try to make sense of it all.

Here’s what the “Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic” looked like in 2011…

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Tag Archives: Marketing

How and When to Gate Your Content

Converting Downloaders into Leads

Setting Up Your Campaigns with Marketing Automation

Watch How We Build a Nurture Campaign

Find Ways To Do More With Less

Be Brutal With Priorities

Choose the Most Cost-Effective Tools

Identify Team Efficiencies

Roll Out the (Virtual) Red Carpet for Existing Customers

Get Serious About Digital — and Do It Now

Marketing Has Changed, but the Goal Remains the Same

10 ways predictive analytics can be used to drive marketing performance

1. Segmenting customers

2. Understanding customer lifetime value

3. Analyzing trends & seasonality

4. Joining customer data

5. Scoring leads

6. Cross-selling

7. Predicting customer behavior

8. Personalizing content

9. Determining pricing

10. Optimizing campaigns

Common challenges that marketers face with predictive analytics

Understanding the audience

Keeping track of ROI

Tracking conversions

How RapidMiner can help with predictive marketing analytics

What Is Email Marketing Data Permission and Why Does it Matter?

The Risks of Sending Marketing Emails Without Permission

Go Organic to Obtain Permission

1. Double Opt-In

2. Single Opt-In

Maintaining Email Marketing Permission

Learn How Act-On’s Expert Deliverability Consultants Can Help You Achieve Success!

1. Adopt a Multi-Channel Approach

2. Nurture Your Customers With Targeted Email Campaigns

3. Develop and Distribute Relevant Content

Streamline the Sales Cycle With Powerful Marketing Automation

Why Is Great Content So Important for Your B2C Business?

RSA Insurance Enhances Their Email to Stand Out in the Inbox

Physicians Insurance Launches Targeted Campaigns to Improve Customer Engagement and Retention

Meyer and Associates Easily Markets Insurance Products to Over 100 Alumni Groups

Act-On Is Designed to Empower Insurance Marketers to Get the Best Results

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