Marketing Automation and Lead Management Blog

The FunnelHolic Interview on Demand Generation

In the past few months Craig Rosenberg at The FunnelHolic has posted some informative interviews with executives of the leading Marketing Automation firms. This week yours truly got grilled with some great questions. Check it out:

Interview with Market2Lead on Marketing Automation

Craig's questions included:

• What are the three trends you see emerging in 2009?
• What are the biggest challenges for 2009?
• What are the top oversights marketers are making regarding lead generation?
• What will you prescribe to marketers to carry out effective lead generation?

-Kevin

Marketing Automation - A rose by any other name...

I just finished reading Larry Goldman's Blog post on the topic of Lead Management.  It reminded me that the industry is still very divided as to what to call the product category  that includes all the marketing automation vendors. My answer is of course: "Marketing Automation!" but there are vendors and industry analysts that have other names.

Industry analysts do not agree on a single name for Marketing Automation
The analysts have offered up several names including "Lead Management system"  - one I find particularly difficult to swallow because there is only a small amount of overlap. Not quite as bad but still understating the capabilities is "Campaign Management software". On the other hand Sirius Decisions calls it simply "Marketing Automation". Hurrah!

EMM vendors do not agree on a single name for Marketing Automation
Then we add to the mix of Enterprise Marketing Management vendors (EMM) who ostensibly offer Enterprise Resource Management (MRM) products and prone to creating new TLAs. They really don't want to change their primary messaging so it is more convenient for them to add some of the capabilities into their MRM, call it campaign management or MRM or EMM and be done with it! Admiting that there might be a new category of products on a peer level with MRM wouldn't look good!

A visual Taxonomy for Enterprise Marketing Management
I took a shot at a visual taxonomy of the EMM space, borrowing ideas from the analysts and vendors. Here is what I came up with, and I welcome your comments. I do show overlap because the lines are not rigid between sub-categories. For instance the Marketing Automation vendors are adding some asset management but not nearly to the level you find in MRM. Incidently, I left CMM (Content Management or Marketing Asset Management - MAM - or Digital Asset Management - DAM - I am not making this up) off the chart. It would over lap the production management and asset management portion of MRM.

From my perspective Marketing Automation combines portions of 5 things:

• Contact Data Integration (CRM integrations, and other marketing data integrations)
• Marketing Business Intelligence (operational reports, data mining, web analytics)
• Campaign Automation (Planning and executing out-going touches)
• Response Management (Dealing with all the incoming responses)
• Lead Management (Scoring, routing and distribution of leads)

A pitch to elevate the importance of Response Management
Breaking the functionality of a Marketing Automation system down into the 5 areas listed above simplifies things tremendously. Response Management for instance is one of those areas that has not received enough attention. When you consider  that the success of a campaign is predicated first and foremost on the quality of the data, which is fully dependent on how well your response management works wouldn't this be the most important part of the product?  But instead vendors seem to focus prospect attention on complex nurturing campaign workflows, or scoring alogrithims! GIGO people!  Response Management includes all the predictable functionality such as Microsites, forms, landing pages, resource centers etc. but it also deals with data de-duplication, standardization, and validation.

Why not call the category Lead Management?

So what is wrong with calling the category lead management?  A lot of the marketing activities are not related to leads, they are related to existing customers, or channel partners. Marketing Automation systems help you acquire and retain customers. Besides, at least half of the lead management functionality is in the SFA (Sales Force Automation) system where it belongs. Perhaps we should rename SFA systems to Lead Management systems...not.  A worthy Lead Management Process document might comprise of:

• Definitions of all the lead types
• A flow chart of the flow of leads from birth to death
• Lead Scoring model
• Role definitions for sales, marketing, and channel parters as it pertains to leads
• Important lead meta data field definitions (lead source, lead type, lead status etc)
• Routing rules drawn from the flow chart (macro level)
• Lead Assignment rules down to the individual  (micro level)

Does a lead management document have any business discussing microsite construction, or data standardization, or progressive profiling of registrants? No. So Marketing Automation is some portion of the lead management and a lot of other stuff.

EMM, MRM, CMM, DAM, MA, SFA, CRM, CM, LM, BI, Montague and Capulet
The name "Marketing Automation" is simple, descriptive and unique. It also parallels "Sales Force Automation" rather nicely. Hmmm this rose smells sweeter already!
-Kevin

How to manage your Lead Nurture campaigns?

A very encouraging trend that we are observing within our installed base is an increasing number of Nurture campaigns being executed. Kudos to marketers (and our customers) for responding with the right tactics to the economic downturn and the constrained environments that they are working within. I plan to dedicate my next few posts to 'Lead Nurture' and share some tips about various aspects of Lead Nurture. 

In this post, I am going to share some techniques to measure the efficacy of nurture campaigns that are already in play. One of our recent customers launched a handful of nurture campaigns in the span of a few months. I was on the phone with this customer a few days back to review progress and was posed a question, "Sundeep, we launched quite a few nurture campaigns that have some interdependencies and now need some guidance on managing and measuring them". Here is a list of questions by category that you might want to ask yourself when analyzing your nurture campaigns. 

Contact level analysis: These questions are pertinent when you are trying to understand what is happening to a specific Contact that is being nurtured. 

  1. Where in a nurture campaign is a specific Contact?

  2. Why did a Contact get stuck at a specific step in a nurture campaign?

  3. Why did a Contact move to another nurture campaign?

  4. Why didn't a Contact get included in a nurture campaign?

  5. What is the average number of Responses from this Contact in this nurture flow?

Step level analysis: A step, as the name suggests, is a distinct tactic that you employ within your nurture campaign. The questions below are intended to help you think about different ways to analyze activities within each step. 

  1. How many people have been targeted so far in this step of the nurture flow?

  2. What are the statistics for the previous X runs of this step?

  3. What are the cumulative statistics for this step till date?

  4. If the next step in the nurture is conditional, what is the distribution of Contacts across the different options?

  5. What is the relative position of this step from the standpoint of overall response rate?

Campaign level analysis: Once we have analyzed each step we need to analyze the entire nurture campaign. Here are some questions that you might want to ask to better understand the campaign.

  1. How many people have been targeted for this nurture campaign so far?

  2. What is the current snapshot of this campaign and how many contacts are at what stage in the campaign?

  3. Show me statistics for the previous X runs of this nurture campaign?

  4. What are the most traversed paths in the nurture campaign up to a given date?

  5. What are the least traversed paths in the campaign up to a given date?

  6. What is the average time spent by a Contact in this nurture flow before he/she became a qualified Lead?

  7. What is the average number of steps that a Contact is included in within this nurture flow?

  8. What is the relative position of this nurture campaign across all nurture campaigns?

Analysis across lead nurture campaigns: The set of questions below will help you analyze the effectiveness of your overall lead nurturing strategy.

  1. How many people have been targeted up to a given date across all my nurture campaigns?

  2. How do my nurture campaigns stack rank relative to each other based on total number of qualified Leads generated?

  3. What is the full list of transitions across my nurture campaigns?

  4. What are the top 5 active transitions between nurture campaigns?

  5. What are the bottom 5 transitions between nurture campaigns?

  6. Show me the nurture campaigns with maximum/minimum touches by Contact.

Over the next few weeks I will share with you insights about such questions that you might be asking yourself when analyzing your nurture campaigns. How are you managing nurture campaigns within your organization?

-Sundeep

Do Marketing Program Managers Really Need New Skills?

Scott Brinker in his recent blog post “5 new skills for the future of marketing” suggests that marketers need to acquire some additional skills. Megan Heuer from Sirius Decisions suggests something similar in her recent blog post.  Do marketing program managers really need to become more analytical? I believe what my colleagues are saying is that the marketing organization needs to acquire additional skills, not simply that the individuals in marketing program management need to morph into something different. 

Marketing Automation will usher in the Marketing Operations function

We still want the Marketing Communications folks to have strong right brain creative talent. That mastery of transforming 1000 words into a single image! Knowing just how to distill complex messages down to a crisp sound bite!  No, I don’t want to change these people a bit. And it is not that marketing hasn’t had the analytical, data oriented skills, it has simply been in the other side of the house, over in product marketing and product management!  I believe what we are saying is that additional analytical skills need to be applied to the demand generation side of the house.

The best way to do this is not to replace creative people with analytical people (shudder), but rather to recognize that a new group is coalescing in marketing – the marketing operations group.  The advent of marketing automation systems such as Market2Lead’s most excellent SaaS put tremendous power in the hands of the marketing program manager. But if they are largely creative individuals, someone else may need to formulate the lead scoring, or analyze the lead nurturing tracks, or create the marketing dashboards and reports. Someone else may want to analyze the marketing data quality and devise data hygiene guidelines and standards.

Marketing Gets More Analytical

But this requirement for more analytical thinking on the demand side of the house is not new. B2C firms are very analytical when it comes to market segmentation and demand generation. And the advent of online lead generation inspired many budding marketing folks to start off in SEM analytics 10 years ago. Many firms outsourced the analytical work to agencies (or to IT), but unlike Interactive Agencies, Marketing Automation savvy demand generation agencies are few.  Rubicon Marketing is a good example of the latter.  As a result many firms will elect to in-source additional analytical marketing skills.

 It is time for Marketing Operations

Outsourcing analytical tasks to IT has its pros and cons. Many marketing departments have been frustrated at the loss of control that this outsourcing represents and as a result would rather outsource to agencies. But there is now a critical mass of analytical marketing skills required that many firms recognize can be unitized into an internal group.  It is more than a web team. They have responsibilities for marketing analytics, marketing automation, marketing tools, CMS, marketing data quality, and perhaps project management. 

So all you right brainers out there don’t have to go buying slide rules just yet. We just need to nudge management into recognizing that there are additional analytical skills required in marketing and maybe it would be ok if the next marketing new hire was a geek.

-Kevin

Top 10 Marketing Reports To Be Viewed Weekly

So if you only have time Monday morning to scan the top 10 reports from your marketing demand creation team, what would be on your list of things to view and why. Here is my take, in no particular order. Most of these reports should be weekly trend lines with 56 (sic) weeks of history if you have it so you can view year over year trends too.

1. Form completion rates by unique form. One chart showing the weekly historical trend for all your major forms on the website (info request, newsletter sign-up, free trial, download, partner sign-up, PPC form, etc). Web leads can be very economical, and are usually a good indicator of interest. I find it fascinating that so many people focus so much attention on getting more visitors to the website and so little attention on the "last mile" - getting the visitors to complete a registration form. Form completion rates can vary depending on the offer, but in many cases it will be a lot easier to double the form completion rate than it is to double the number of visitors to a website!
2. Form completion rates by offer name or offer type. This is a pretty good measure of the content, especially when the same form is used for many different offers.  It can be an early indicator of when content is getting stale, or which topics are hot.
   
3. Unknown visitor - company name from IP address. A report that lists all the companies that visited the website in the past week but the visitors were unknown to the Marketing Automation system. Sorted by highest number of visits first, and filtered to remove ISPs, this report can be very useful to ISRs (telemarketing).
4. Total marketing leads added into the SFA. You can run this one from your SFA or from your Marketing Automation (MA) system. A VERY important measure of the output of the demand creation group. Notice that I said leads added into the SFA. By this I meant leads that have been handed off to the sales team. This weekly trend line should be moving up and to the right!
5. Marketing lead conversion rate in the SFA. This report is simply the number marketing leads converted to contacts/accounts last week divided by the total new leads added by marketing that week. The leads converted may have been added 6 months ago, that doesn't matter. You are simply keeping track of the ongoing sales perceived quality of leads given to them by marketing. It should be used as an early warning indicator of declining lead quality if the number trends down over time. If the number trends up over time that could be perceived as a good thing (better quality leads) but it could also be viewed as marketing holding back too many leads for further nurturing. Sometimes quantity has a quality all of its own!
6. Leads by Lead Source. A simple trend chart that shows the number of leads by lead source. If you have a defined lead management process, and set up your lead source optimally, it will have no more than 10 or 12 possible values (all the details go into another field - lead source details or specific lead source). As such it should be easy to plot out the numbers for these 10 different lead sources week after week.
7. Marketing conversion rate by lead source. This one might produce results that will freak people out but it is very important. What is it we all want to do in hard economic times? Cut the 20% of marketing programs that are NOT working. It is usually easy to recognize the campaigns that are pulling their weight, harder to determine what is the bottom 20%. One way to really measure the efficacy of campaigns is to figure out the lead conversion rate by lead source. If you really want to go crazy on this, you can do the same for "specific lead source" or campaign name. Just remember that you will want to have a good handle on your average lead age before it converts, when you look at the results so that "young" campaigns don't get dinged simply because the leads haven't had time to mature to a conversion ready state. 
8. Basic web statistics - weekly trend on visits, duration, bounce rates etc
9. Out going marketing campaign statistics - weekly trendlines. All the usual quantity targeted, open rates, click throughs, card swipes from shows,  etc
10. Responses by contact/lead type. Marketing spends a lot of the budget on generating out going touches, it is nice to be able to measure the incoming responses and codify them based on the type of person: Net new lead, existing lead in system, existing contact but not a customer yet, and lastly customers. By graphing the responses by contact type you have a rough idea of how much you are spending on marketing to your installed base (loyalty marketing), on nurturing, or on net new lead generation!

What are your favorite weekly reports?
-Kevin