Marketing Automation and Lead Management Blog

A/B Testing and Multivariate Testing of Marketing Campaigns

I get asked frequently if Market2Lead supports A/B testing of email campaigns and the answer is “yes, of course,” but sometimes I wonder if the people have thought through the process.

You can dissect the average email campaign down into 6 broad areas that can influence the outcome as shown in the graphic above. In my August 28, 2009 post on effective campaigns I discussed the value of a high quality list as the primary determinant of the effectiveness of a campaign, so we won’t repeat that here. Instead I want to discuss how one would best go about A/B testing campaigns for the 5 remaining items.

Select the A/B Testing Outcome To Test

In B2B with long sales cycles, and multiple touch points, it would be silly to A/B test email campaigns for closed won opportunities, but in B2C this might be the perfect answer. In B2B email campaigns you are probably more likely to constrain yourself to opens, clicks, and offer downloads. In B2C with short sales cycles, you might consider “added to basket”, or purchases as the outcome you are testing.

A/B Testing Requires Random List Segmentation

To be an effective A/B test, the other factors beyond the one you are testing must be held constant or, in the case of segmented lists of people, be made random. So the first question should be, how does one produce random lists:

1. Allow the marketing automation system to randomly pick people from your segmented list for either the A or B treatment. To the best of my knowledge no marketing automation vendor offers this today.
2. Manually produce two lists (A and B) using some random mechanism; you could use the odd numbered contact ID numbers for the A list for instance. Trying to create random lists by selecting letters found in names or emails is not as random as you might think!  But if the contact ID numbers are assigned randomly when new leads are created or imported, it is a great way to go.

A/B Testing with One Program and Two Lists?

Some folks believe that it is simpler to use one program with two random lists, and have the functionality built in to apply the appropriate A/B subject line, or A/B email body, or A/B offer, or A/B Landing Page, or A/B Form to the A or B target list. In the reporting, the system would then have to be smart enough to produce two different reports on clicks, opens, downloads etc based on the A/B variable that was chosen. I find this too complicated.

I much prefer to create the program for A, copy it, point it to list B, change my one variable (subject line, or email body, or offer, or landing page, or form) and launch both programs. I can do this in two minutes and they each have their own results, it is easy to interpret, and easy to copy these programs for future tests.

You Don’t Need Dedicated Functionality for A/B Testing

The bottom line is that you can do some very creative A/B testing or multivariate testing as long as you have a means to create random lists. Everything else is easily done by copying the program and changing your one variable, and the reporting will make much more sense to you and everybody else.

So, an exercise for the reader: How would you do A/B/C testing since 3 does not divide evenly into 10, so our trick of using odd versus even contact IDs won't help...

-Kevin

Pull versus push for more effective lead nurturing campaigns

I just read Ardath Albee’s interesting post on "Lead Nurturing is not about campaigns."

It reminded me that I wanted to comment about “Pull Lead Nurturing”. Let’s face it, many lead nurturing campaigns pour out offer after offer in the same sequence to all recipients. I would describe these as “push lead nurturing” campaigns. They fail to encourage the recipient to engage in any other way except to download or unsubscribe. Pull Lead Nurturing on the other hand encourages prospects to interact, offer feedback, to offer up more information about themselves in return for more relevant offers, and more control of the course of the lead nurturing program.

Relevant content is not considered junk

When I look inside what is left of my US Mail box (the City of Portland recently sawed off the front half with a roadside vegetation trimmer) and find a direct marketing piece about linens, I immediately categorize it as junk and into the big blue recycling bin it goes. Clearly the linen store knew very little about me and did a “spray and pray” mailing. The very next piece of “junk mail” is an astronomy accessory catalog. These folks bought their list from a magazine that knew something about me. The catalog avoids the big blue bin fate of the linen Direct Mail piece. The point is that the more you know about your target, the better you can segment and the more relevant you can make the content. So, ironically, the more you share about your interests and needs, the less “junk mail” you will receive! Your challenge is to convince prospects of that.

So let’s map this concept over to email based lead nurturing. We want to encourage our prospects to engage with us, to interact, to tell us what they are interested in, and what they are not interested in. If they do this we will offer them more relevant content and assist them in pulling more relevant materials from us.

Encouraging prospects to interact more and pull content from you

There are several things you can do to encourage prospects to interact and pull content from you:

• At the end of every offer, place a link to the next most relevant piece with a line such as “People who enjoyed this document also enjoyed that document” – shades of Amazon.com in there! Of course you should tag the links so you can see exactly how many people clicked, and on which links.
• As part of your next offer email, ask them to rate the previous offer – read it and liked it, read it and disliked it, didn’t read it, cannot remember, etc. You can do this with a single link for each rating in your email, so it is a one click feedback mechanism (Netflix does this for movie ratings).
• Add questions to your dynamic profiling, early in the sequence, to enquire about the prospect’s preferred cadence – how often do you want us to send you offers? Design your campaigns to use the prospect defined cadence.
• Ask questions about their areas of interest; are they more technical or business; are they in management or individual contributors?
• Ask them questions about the media they prefer: webcasts, webinars, whitepapers, seminars, etc.
• Allow them to opt out of a nurturing track and opt-in to a different one instead.
• Design campaigns that adapt to every new behavior, new download, new information
• Don’t offer someone something that they already got before - you don’t want them to think you are not listening.

As Ardath points out, lead nurturing can extend beyond the typical sales cycle length, so why not let the prospect have more control over how you interact with them. Think about how to encourage them to pull content from you. It will tell you much more about them, and your content quality.

And now here is my one click survey! What did you think of this blog post?

It was garbage
It was insipid
It was ok
It was interesting
I really liked it

See how easy that was,

Kevin

Lead Nurturing the C and D leads in your CRM with Telemarketing

Three events coincided this week that provided the inspiration needed for this post.

1. I met with Susan Linman, President of Dunthorpe Marketing, and we discussed the role of Telemarketing in lead nurturing, especially for C and D leads.
2. I read Craig Rosenberg’s thought provoking post suggesting that marketing “sells the connect” not the product. 
3. I read the release notes for Market2Lead’s upcoming call center module for our marketing automation system.

Telemarketing is not the same as appointment setting

Do you use telemarketing as part of your lead nurturing? What is the most effective way to use it and when?  I must confess I am not a big fan of appointment setting services. Yes, I am sure they have their place, and there are businesses for whom getting an appointment for $750-$1000 is a ‘good’ deal. I simply have not been in a position yet where I thought this was a good deal for generating new leads.  In a past life I examined the opportunity connect rate for these leads and it was no better than website leads or PPC leads, so why would I pay 10x more for them?  But using telemarketing to connect with prospects and nurture them, now that is different than attempting to sell to them.

Telemarketing is not telesales

We are talking about telemarketing, not telesales. I don’t want savvy sales people in this role, who know the product inside out, and are slicker than clean socks on a linoleum floor. I want people who know how to listen more than talk. Their role is to not waste the prospect’s time; they need to figure out where prospects are in the purchase cycle, what they need, and offer them relevant help.

Use telemarketing to nurture C and D leads

Telemarketing can be a very powerful part of your lead nurturing strategy. Let’s say you have a marketing automation system, and it scores your leads. All the A and B leads are shipped off to the various Sales Channels, but the Cs and Ds are retained in the Marketing hopper. Does your system assign them to a lead nurturing track that pumps out unsolicited whitepapers, webcasts, and webinar invitations every two weeks for months on end until such time as the prospects surrender, unsubscribe, or sideline you with their junk filter?  Inoculation of your prospects is not a good idea unless you are practicing medicine.  An alternative is to engage them in Pull Nurturing, and you can also use telemarketing in the middle of this lead nurturing track to coax more Cs and Ds out of their shells, and into an actual relationship with your firm.The Market2Lead system enables you to include programs with telemarketing scripts in the middle of a lead nurturing campaign.

The telemarketer's role in effective lead nurturing

The effective telemarketer will, on the first call, introduce themselves as part of the Marketing team, they are NOT in a sales role.  Their role is to:

• Initiate the relationship with the prospect
• Help the prospect in their research, find relevant information
• Make them aware of upcoming events that might be of interest
• Collect feedback on the events or offers the prospect already accepted
• Update the prospects record, and influence future automated nurturing behavior
• And when the prospect wants to talk to a sales representative, make an appointment

Run a test; take a random selection of your C and D leads that your are actively nurturing and have some telemarketers call on them for a month or two in addition to the regular nurturing activities. See what percentage you can convert into Bs and As, and compare this to your control group. You may be surprised at the results. The purchase cycle behavior of prospects is evolving so that the Sales person may not be welcome until later in the cycle. This does not mean that the prospect doesn’t want some human engagement. Connect with your prospects!

-Kevin

How and when to bypass lead nurturing

Are there times when Marketing should bypass nurturing and send a lead straight to Sales with "hot" status? Absolutely.

We have a Lead Nurturing webinar at 10am PDT next Wednesday and Thursday with NetProspex (ok that was shameless self-promotion), and it got me thinking about when NOT to nurture.(webcast of lead nurturing webinar is saved here).

FastTrack Existing Customer Leads instead of sending to a lead nurturing track!
Let's say you have a $200K/year existing account and its CEO suddenly decides to pop onto your website for the first time and download a piece of premium content requiring registration. Do you:

1. Ask her 20 questions including purchase timeframe?
2. Put her in a 9 month long drip campaign that pours out dreary whitepapers monthly?
3. Recognize that she is a customer based on her email domain?

The answer should be #3 of course. What you want to do is have the domain of every customer in a look-up list so you can compare all new leads to it, and then give them a boost in their lead score based their existing customer status. If a new lead shows up from an existing customer, the score should shoot to super hot (A+) and the lead should be sent to the Sales Rep immediately. Don't add them automatically to a drip campaign. Let the sales person decide when they review the lead if they are going to allow that person into a drip campaign, and which one.

FastTrack Strategic Account Leads After Lead Generation
The story is much the same for leads from target accounts. Just upload 500 of your favorite email domains, from strategic accounts or target accounts, and boost their score appropriately when they show up at your door. You might even consider making a unique score just for target accounts, and changing the subject line in the task (activity) you set for the sales rep to reflect that this is a new lead from a strategic account!

FastTrack Existing Account Leads
You may go one step further and decide that even if an account is not yet a customer, you don't want new leads from that account languishing in marketing land. You want Sales to be aware that another person in that account has just been added to the automated marketing system. Their score might be really low under normal circumstances, but because the account they are with is "highly qualified" you give their score a boost and deliver the lead to the Sales Force without delay.

SlowTrack Competitors, Analysts, and Vendors for more effective campaigns
Now that you have started to recognize visitors when they enter your marketing automation system based on their domain, you may as well have a SlowTrack. Recognize competitors, analysts, and vendors, and give them the lowest score, do not send them to sales, do add them to any lead nurturing programs, do not collect $200. If you want to have more effective campaigns, think about whom you exclude as much as you think about whom you include!

All of this is easily set up in Market2Lead with the derived attributes capability in the response funnel! Adding a "FastTrack" to your existing lead management process is important if you want to improve the quality and timing of leads sent to your Sales Force. Nurturing isn't for everyone!

Happy nurturing,
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

Economic Downturn - A chance to leapfrog your competition

It is interesting to listen to the economic pundits talk about whether we are already in a recession or whether we are heading towards one. While the popular definition is 2 continuous quarters of negative economic growth there are other interesting views about this definition. Here is an interesting blog post by two economic professors at UC San Diego and University of Wisconsin, Madison where the authors espouse that "recessions represent distinct and objectively identifiable episodes in which the usual dynamic factors that drive economic growth-- technological progress, population growth, and capital accumulation-- are replaced by a distinctly different dynamic in which lost income in some sectors feeds back into declines in output for others".

While economists fight out the technicalities of a recession what are B2B Marketers doing to brace for a period of sluggish growth (at best)? Here are a few areas that we at Market2Lead think Marketers should focus on in the near future so that they can emerge more effective and efficient when the economy turns around.

1. Consolidation & Automation - Eliminate rote work: Most businesses are extremely sensitive to cash investments vis-a-vis resource investments. Many potential clients that we talk to have a hodge-podge of systems/resources to manage their Marketing efforts. A typical mix includes email tools, data scrubbing tools, landing page tools or web masters, webinar registration tools among others. Some of these tools tie into the client's CRM system while others don't. A significant amount of operations resource time is spent in moving data between the tools, scrubbing data files and manually building reports by collating data from these tools. During recessionary times companies are forced to not just cut back budgets but are also forced to either cut back or extract more efficiencies from existing
resources. At the same time, work load typically goes up. The best way to work within these constraints and still maintain throughput is to consolidate systems. Now is the time to invest in a comprehensive Marketing Automation solution that will help automate/eliminate manual tasks. Another big benefit is Marketing departments will be able to spend time on strategic initiatives that can have a direct impact on top line revenue.

2. Lead Nurturing - Extract more from past investments: Sirius Decisions published a study that mentions 80% of Leads generated by B2B marketing are not followed up by sales. Also in times of slow economy growth most companies either delay buying decisions or are extremely picky in their buying decisions. This basically means that a slowdown in sales cycle time. The smart thing to do at this time is to shift focus from campaigns that drive new demand to campaigns that can nurture existing Leads. With cost effective tactics like emails, webinars, online syndication etc. lead nurturing campaigns are a lot more cost effective than demand generation campaigns. Marketing Automation solutions can help Marketers design and automate nurture campaigns that can extract more revenue from Leads that did not convert. A study published in Marketing Management V3 #2 suggests that 45% of Marketing Respondents buy in 12 months, not necessarily from companies that initially marketed to them. This is popularly called the "Marketing rule of 45" and has held the test of time for 3 decades. In this day and age, with a plethora of cost effective technologies and related processes, most companies barely manage to get a 5% yield from their campaigns. Now is the time to shift focus from Demand Generation to Lead Nurturing and extract more value from existing spend.

3. Funnel Optimization - Plug leaks: Marketing organizations need to scrutinize every stage of the integrated marketing and sales funnel and look for opportunities to increase throughput. Now is the time to look at conversion rates, qualification rates, sales follow-up rates and win/loss rates. Look at campaigns that demonstrate "Spray and Pray" symptoms. Figure out ways to optimize existing segmentation strategies and move towards an "Aim and Shoot" stage. In my observation, most organizations still lock and load a significant portion of their databases hoping for larger conversion numbers. Instead, focus on conversion ratios. You might get the same numbers by targeting a smaller audience segment. Next, talk to your sales organization and find out if there is a change in their capacity to handle Leads. Sales might be happier with fewer Leads if they are better qualified. You can positively impact sales morale and productivity. Recessions impact some industries more than the other. For example, in the current economic climate, it's a bad idea to go after the financial services market to meet revenue goals for the immediate future. Align your demand generation campaigns with industries that are relatively healthy when compared with the others. To facilitate this level of analysis your Marketing Automation system should give you visibility into the extended funnel and sales stages like lead promotion, opportunity management and forecasting.

4. Increase throughput - Implement best practices: This is a fantastic opportunity to take action on those creative ideas you had in mind to improve throughput from your campaigns. When the economy is roaring companies lay more emphasis on velocity to grow revenue aggressively. Inefficiencies are hidden or ignored when companies are in "order taking mode". When the economy slows down companies are forced to change behavior and become smarter. Budgets accommodate fewer campaigns and expect better results. Now is the time to wipe the dust off the best practice guides that you really wanted to implement but never got the time to. Try and micro-segment your campaigns and try different variations for emails, landing pages, microsites among others. MarketingSherpa is a great resource for case studies and best practices. Look for technologies that support A/B testing for emails, multi-variate testing for Landing pages, recommendation techniques for offers on microsites, progressive profiling techniques to improve form completion rates.

5. Measure, measure, measure - justify your spend: Marketer's are always under pressure to demonstrate return on their investments. The scrutiny is all the more pronounced during tough times. Every penny has to be justified and every campaign has to be measured. This job is relatively easy for demand generation campaigns since these campaigns are optimized for generating Leads. But demand generation campaigns always need support from awareness campaigns to build brand equity and buy mind share. As a Marketer, you know that you need to invest in PR and SEO to drive traffic to the website. How do you quantify the value from such investments to a CFO or a CEO who is trying to connect the dots between spend and revenue. The only way you can accomplish this is to be able to correlate data and trends from different initiatives and draw trends that can be quantified. This requires a robust Business Intelligence solution that will give you the flexibility to slice and dice data in different ways and look for interesting trends and patterns that can be used to justify spend. Imagine if you can view web traffic trends and marketing funnel trends side by side on the same dashboard and have the capability to analyze the impact of one on the other. It's a much easier argument to show your boss that by keeping the constraints constant on the demand generation side the quantifiable impact a dip in PR and SEO effort has on the funnel.

Recessions can be looked at with caution and skepticism or can be looked at as an opportunity to get lean, smart and more efficient. History tells us that smart companies emerge from down cycles much stronger and fitter and the weaker companies lose out.