Marketing will buy more tech than IT by 2017...
Look at the traditional marketing budget... you know, TV, radio, print and then expand it to include ecommerce, personalization, predictive modeling, social media... anything and all things that are categorized as digital interactions.... now think how those digital interactions will be measured, monitored and managed. That's a lot of technology...
In fact, in many companies it's not uncommon to see marketing spend at 10-30% of revenue. Yea, I know I've tended to work in companies in the 3% of revenue range... lol... but there are a lot of companies out there spending a lot more.
And that's a whole bunch more than IT and the CIO get to spend. Look at the InformationWeek top 500 and compare their expense to revenue with the CMO's expense to revenue. It's not too hard to grasp that marketing is swinging a very big technology bat...and it's getting bigger... and IT needs to become their best friend.
The future of marketing is built on technology for one simple fact... customer interactions are going digital - no matter what channel the customer is in...
www.irgilyeat.com
Inbound marketing & pay-per-click: recent experiments
This is a consumer offering, with geographic focus and a single path ecommerce site as the destination. Meaning, there's only one way through the site ( no branching) and it results in a credit card transaction when completed. We're using an array of tailored landing pages, customized for groups of ad words and text only ads that are aligned with the landing pages to bring people to the site.
So far, we've taken the click-through rate from the initial tests up by 400% over the last ten weeks. We've bench marked the site against the internal Google standard and know that we're way above the norm at this point and we're continuing to take the ppc budget up at the beginning of each month. Conversions on the site are are shall we say "healthy" and by this I mean better than we typically see on catalog sites we have worked with that produce $10M-$2B per year. Now, we know scale works in our favor at this point, because the volume is still small...however, we also know that we're early in the market and there is plenty of upside in the search volumes of data we're not yet serving ads to...
We are in the process of designing abandoned shopping cart programs, on-site abandonment interventions and customer feedback mechanisms. All of which will continue to move the ppc volumes and click-through rates up and improve the e-commerce conversation rates.
This is what we call fun! It's an ideal scenario where the market has scale (tens of millions of potential customers) a competitive product offering that is validated everyday with customers and lots of rough edges in the operation, yet to be smoothed out.
Customer life cycle management, dynamic content, predictive modeling, integration of multi-channel routes-to-market and much more... leaves even more to grow on...
Inbound marketing clearly has it's place but it really must fit the scenario - and it should tie into your marketing automation platform.
If you're struggling to figure it out, click here and let us help. There are lots of options in the market: HubSpot, ExactTarget, InfusionSoft, Marketo, Pardot, ConstantContact and others.
You just have to know what you're trying to do and make sure you have the right technology to make it work.
www.irgilyeat.com
Sometimes email service providers outgrow themselves...
Example, Constant Contact is really built for small business... and yet, they have a plan for companies with 75-100,000 contacts. Now, most small businesses don't have that many customers - if they do, they're not small. However, newsletter publishers can be small in head count, revenues and lots of stuff, just not the subscriber list. Cool, Constant Contact can handle 100,000 subscribers... except when you're loading the list. In that case, their maximum is 20,000 records... so you have to cut the file up into five pieces... and redo the mapping process five different times... and please don't try to load 20,000 and 1. That one little extra row means you have to back to your source file, strip it out and make sure you're below the 20,000 maximum.
Oh, and up to 15 custom fields is great, but don't plan on having any more... at least not until a future release addresses the fact that publishers, catalogers, online store merchants and other might just have more than 15 attributes they want to track... but please don't expect to name them what you want to them... no, they're called Custom1, Custom2 and so on... so you better keep a field map handy because if you need to know Custom field #6 is or if you want to add records to your file, don't plan on finding the description online... you'll need to keep that data map handy so you can import and update your records with the right fields.
Like I said, sometimes email service providers outgrow themselves. Constant Contact is a very nice platform. It handles the needs of small business very gracefully and with plenty of power to spare... but, growing into the mid-market space - for size and complexity takes a little work... and they are hard at work in extending their capabilities up market.
We're a fan... and we like what they're doing...
www.irgilyeat.com
Pick the right email marketing platform for your company
We talked and I laid out several of the players in the market: ExactTarget, Pardot, Vertical Response, Marketo, Eloqua, Constant Contact and MailChimp. I stopped there because his eyes were starting to cross...
It was a fairly short path to the decision point:
- Broadcast email requirements
- No lead scoring or lead nurturing
- No marketing automation or heavy profiling
- Big enough volume to knock out the pay-per-send players
- Easy-to-use interface with reasonable analytics
- Through-put (e.g. 3,000 pieces per hour sending just won't cut it)
The short discussion led us to recommend Constant Contact, which they agreed with and are now in the process of bringing up the account with email creative, list import, etc
Email marketing with all it's attendant improvements in dynamic content, profiling, drip marketing, lead scoring, lead nurturing, variable content landing pages, integrated analytics, CRM integration, etc., etc. doesn't have to be overwhelming or difficult if you just know the right questions to ask and how to make sure the technology is a fit for your organization.
The cost to effectively manage the 70,000+ subscribes is much larger than was anticipated. However, the company is now on a strong platform with room to grow into events and social media conversations that will productively serve the needs of the company.
If you're trying to find a fit for your company in the ever expanding sea of marketing technology, send me an email, or pick up the phone. I'm happy to have a conversation.
Lead scoring and marketing automation fall short...
Lead scoring can bring many immediate benefits to an organization. It allows companies to structure data from many sources – creating order and direction; it helps companies identify the most responsive individuals in campaigns; it creates qualified leads for sales team, etc.
Lead scoring can also be a “false positive”. Finding the “most responsive individual” is often a misleading positive indicator. This can be seen in companies where consumers respond very favorably to business-to-business offers. The company may see strong response rates in a campaign only to be disappointed by high maintenance costs, low profit and lousy life-time-value.
Lead scoring is most beneficial when it is aligned with a strategic customer model. This approach is based on taking a long-term view of the value of a customer, the size of the available market and “mapping” it back to campaign models, lead scoring efforts, routes-to-market, etc.. Only then will companies avoid the “strategy gap” and obtain the real benefits of their lead scoring efforts.
If your experience reflects what I've noted above and you want help aligning your lead scoring and marketing automation efforts with a strategic customer model, send a private note to ig@irgilyeat.com and I'll respond the same day.
Inside sales + marketing automation = big data
These discussions have spun my brain to think about several ways in which large amounts of data can be created in inside sales operations. Consider the following:
- Real-time or historical audio analysis. The opportunity to analyze and build predictive models based on every phone call could create an enormous amount of data. Segment and model by customer, sales associate, gender, age, title, industry, etc. A sales center with just 100 sales agents and 25 phone conversations per day (not dials but conversations) could result in 625,000 recorded conversations for the year. Build your models, and then use screen pops to prompt your sales associate with timely hints on how to close based on tone, key words, verbal gestures, etc. Or automatically trigger email or alerts based on the assessed attitude and mood of the customer. Create your content based on attributed behavioral assessments like verbal skills, logic vs. emotional decision making tendencies and demonstrated urgency.
- Call source. Every call has an origination point. Is it initiated by the customer or by the sales agent? Direction when combined with other key data points can be very predictive. At the simplest level, is your closing rate highest when a customer calls you and asks to buy your latest and greatest product? Or is it better when you hire a team of sales agents to do outbound calling to find someone who is willing to talk to you when you interrupt their day? Closing rates on inbound calls can be in the 20-40% plus range while outbound prospecting is commonly less than 5%. Collect those originating call markers in a complex B2B multi-call sales cycle and you'll be much closer to knowing when those leads will close. Your ability to predict the closing rate of your pipeline will increase exponentially.
- Sales agent performance. Instead of focusing on the call origination create your analysis on the sales agent instead. Build your models on total calls inbound, outbound and time between calls, mapped to each customer and married to the transaction history or other customer interactions. With this kind of data, you will identify training needs for sales reps, customers and sales operations. 65 calls a day, 260 work days a year and 16,900 phone calls later on a per rep basis and it's easy to see how quickly the data piles up.
These are just three sources of where big data can show up in inside sales...and every recorded interaction is an opportunity to automatically trigger a message to the customer; personalized and tailored to their individual and unique needs.
Does "big data" have the opportunity to transform the inside sales industry? Yes. There is no question, that it can. It's simply a matter of time, money and resources as to how far companies will go to leverage the data that is now available.
The rise of cheap messaging services - $23B lost and counting
This is noteworthy for multiple reasons:
- $23 billion in revenues has been extracted from traditional telecom carriers through the end of 2012 - so says Ovum.
- In a day when visual communications is bursting at the seams. where two cameras are being built into phones for instant two-say video... the lowly and simple text message is booming around the globe. Video may be hot in America, but text is fast and cheap.
- Multi-channel marketing providers like ExactTarget, Responsys and others need to come to grips with the texting reality. This might be a boon to their margins since they charge as much as 10 cents per text sent or it may be a massive disruptor to a new revenue stream that has yet to become meaningful. Ergo, in conversation with a client, the cost of 7 cents per text message was cost prohibitive. However, given some IT talent and a little elbow grease, paying WhatsApp $1 per year for unlimited messages becomes extremely attractive.
Digital messaging is great, and we're quite happy with the progress that ExactTarget and the crowd are making, but WhatsApp and others like it with their massive downloads and message volumes will become highly disruptive unless they (ExactTarget, etc) pulls their capabilities into the fold.
ExacTarget and others would do well to integrate WhatsApp into their interactive marketing hub (IMH) before it's too late. What'sApp alone has increased message volume from 10B messages monthly to 18B messages monthly over a five month window. Those are big numbers and it's not just the telecoms that should be paying attention to these new players. Marketing automation players, digital marketing platforms and social networks fall into this bailiwick too...so $23B may look like chump change in terms of lost revenue in the market as cheap services continue to expand capabilities.
A brief moment in... marketing time
I've taken that core story and translated it into the following graphic to draw further attention to the industries that make a living off of the data we produce as a society.
The point I want to make is that all of these industries are prolific producers and users of data. The company names associated with each industry are widely known. Each one has great brand strength. They all are proactive in their embrace of messaging technologies and these technologies include direct mail, television, email and social media just to name a few.
Their usage of large volumes of data correlate to the scalability of their companies and the breadth of their brands. Millions and billions of interactions with customers make them smarter and smarter about how to go to market.
If your company looks like these companies, then the scalability of your messaging systems is critical to your ability to interact with your customers. Large scale providers like ExactTarget, Responsys, Unica, Eloqua and others are mission critical platforms to how you do business. These are big game players and they're the ones who are building the backbone of messaging systems that will continue to support the worlds most scalable corporations.
Having said that three industries are strikingly absent in the story: communications, healthcare and government. I suppose we're on the cusp of the communications industry breaking into the behemoth users of big data. Why? One reason is eye ball tracking software is making its way onto mobile devices. This means the communications companies will have a two-way vehicle for interacting with consumers. They'll be able to see what we're actually looking at when we view something. I suppose wire-tapping protections and privacy laws have prevented them from really leveraging communications platforms in the past but at some point these companies are going to figure out how to scale their data even in regulated industries.
The second industry is healthcare. In a word where sensors can be put just about anywhere it's only a matter of time, before doctors and patients collaborate on maintaining and improving health in the most private and pervasive ways possible. The technology is available, I believe the healthcare industry too will figure out a way to get consumers to "opt-in" to big data solutions that are built on everyday living habits - from the inside out.
And lastly, government. This is an industry juggernaut that powers no less than 25% of the entire economy. You don't think they don't want to know more about you and what you're doing? I'm certain the bureaucrats are licking there chops over the notion of "big data." This is perhaps the one place where privacy laws may win out in preventing an industry from embracing big data.
Big data is here to stay - but the real revolution is in the messaging systems that will leverage all that data. In my view of the world, we're thinking way to narrow if we simply view these platforms as marketing automation or email marketing solutions. We're missing the boat if we don't see the massive communications platforms that will be powered by mountains and mountains of data.
www.irgilyeat.com
Is big data inside? Inside your marketing automation system that is?
If your business has scale, then big data is inside. It's likely not a surprise or a new thought, but let's think about this for a moment:
- Your customer base includes 250,000 active 12 month buyers
- The typical customer buy 6.7 times annually
- Each purchase involves two dozen conversations and 4-5 quotes and 30-50 emails from an experienced and skilled sales person
- And your lead nurturing platform is used only for acquisition of new customers and then it stops...
Wouldn't it make sense to use that messaging platform to increase the value of existing customers? I mean, if you run a billion dollar operation and you're acquiring 10% net new customer growth - and I'm talking quantity of customers not value of customers or share of customers - you're doing a bang up job. So what about the 90% of your business that is already in-house? They're already engaged... what about them?
You have this great marketing automaton platform and it's only being applied to 10% of your business - and by the way - it's the least valuable part of your business?
Years ago, I learned that the "sexy" part of the magazine business was in new customer acquisition. This is where all the budget went, all the time and all the effort. Yet, all the revenue came from existing relationships. Seemed kind of dumb at the time to follow the same model...
As the years have passed, I've made note of the same pattern in marketing budgets across dozens of companies. The "sexy" part of the business, the fun part, the part that gets all the attention and money is in finding those knew customers...and it's still strikes me as kinda dumb.
If you're working on a billion dollar revenue stream and you've deployed a marketing automation platform like Eloqua, Pardot, Act-On, Unica, SilverPop, Marketo or other similar systems dig into your customer files and put it there...it doesn't take a lot of imagination to discover a treasure trove of opportunity - and big data.
And I do mean big data. Going back to my simple 250,000 customer scenario above, we get to 500M data points pretty quickly and that's not including any of the variables that a sales person brings to the party. Things like tenure, education, language, certifications, behavioral assessment models, compensation plans, etc, etc.
If big data is the next nirvana for business analysis and marketing automation is the holy grail for managing the sales funnel, then bringing the two together is a natural conclusion - although it's not a conclusion at all. Revenue always leads back to existing customers and customers are the golden key to your future.
Dear friends, if you're enamored with big data, then look inside and leverage the dickens out of your marketing automation platform.
Who are the biggest and baddest retailers using for email?
Okay... so if that's true, who are these big boys using?
ExactTarget and Responsys are two of the largest purveyors of email services and digital marketing and combined they have less than 15% of the largest and arguably the most sophisticated digital marketing users on the planet?
About 18 months we were in the hunt to provide the digital marketing platform for a global organization. This was an outfit with operations in 150+ countries, a sales force of 55,000+ and over 80 brand managers.
Want to know who our biggest competition was? The internal IT department. Everyone with large IT staff can send email. Who needs an outside provider like ExactTarget or Responsys when they're doing just fine without them...at least that's what they thought until we started to peel back the layers of integration, sophistication and personalization.
Digital marketing is maturing and very few IT teams, even in the biggest of companies can keep up with the advancements that are occurring. It's just not going to happen. There is too much money chasing this market and big strides are being made.
If your company still has a "home baked" solution for email marketing or digital marketing, give me a call (602-692-3818). We can help build the ROI and demonstrate why you should use a best-of-breed digital marketing platform.
www.irgilyeat.com
