Customers Speak Out: Is Marketing Automation a Blessing or a Curse?
“Marketing automation” has a bad reputation
among marketers. The term conjures up all
the negative associations we have with big,
expensive, time-consuming CRM enterprise
software application deployments. And yet, as
Aberdeen Group’s Leslie Ament has stated,
marketing automation could offer practical,
high-value benefits, if only it were delivered in
a more consumable fashion.
This report presents an alternative to conventional
marketing automation in the form
of a highly effective system developed by
Market2Lead. We will also summarize the
experiences of three Market2Lead customers to
demonstrate how organizations can generate costeffective
results from the right kind of marketing
automation – quickly and painlessly.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation refers to systems that are designed to generate leads by capturing customer data. It works well enough with hot prospects that are ready to buy. Unfortunately, the majority of leads are lukewarm at best; they need to be carefully developed and nurtured over time before deals can be closed.
Marketers understand the shortcomings of marketing automation systems, including their failure to allow prospects to move at their own pace. The typical Web-based system, for example, offers a take-it-or-leave-it approach, demanding that prospects answer long lists of questions about their companies and themselves in exchange for a promised white paper or webinar. CRM vendors load up their packages with features that lack any real benefits, and as a result, executives are skeptical of their value. For example, most vendors pitch all of the following:
- Web forms/data quality enforcement;
- Response management;
- Contact management;
- Privacy compliance/management;
- Legacy data migration;
- Lead scoring;
- Complex business rules;
- Integration with salesforce automation systems;
- Precision segmentation;
- Behavioral profiling;
- Reporting, analytics and modeling; and
- Implementing technology without surrounding business process.
Here’s the problem: None of these features enhances the prospective customer’s experience. They simply give marketers more ways to slice and dice the data. Prospects don’t even want their relationships with marketers managed; they just want respect.
Market2Lead has developed a new kind of marketing automation system that takes a different approach. By focusing on the quality of both the customer’s experience and the data instead of trying to force prospects to divulge as much information as possible, Market2Lead has developed powerful CRM products that facilitate developing relationships with prospects at a pace they’re comfortable with. The result is much more accurate data, fewer abandoned leads and enhanced ROI. The following three customer vignettes illustrate how the right CRM solution can deliver positive results in a wide variety of marketing situations.
Infoblox – Higher-Quality Data Improves ROI
The Problem – Infoblox, maker of network identity appliances, needed to increase the number of qualified actionable leads generated and to improve the accuracy of its data. The company’s salesforce was abandoning leads because many duplicate leads were being generated, and the salespeople had no way to identify duplicate leads. Infoblox was also limited in the number of direct email campaigns it could execute due to limited personnel and laborintensive manual data-manipulation procedures.
The Solution – Infoblox chose Market2Lead’s Gold Edition service, coupled with Salesforce.com, to improve data accuracy, generate more highly qualified leads and increase the capacity of its marketing team. Market2Lead’s Gold Edition service eliminates duplicate leads before publishing them to Salesforce.com, and saves time and effort by reducing labor-intensive manual data manipulation.
The Gold Edition also includes Market2Lead’s “Progressive Profiling” feature; customers are asked limited numbers of relevant questions at the right time in the process, to build accurate profiles gradually, at a pace prospects are comfortable with. All customer interactions flow through a single marketing data mart.
The Results – The Market2Lead solution was implemented in less than six weeks. According to Greg Lanier, director of marketing at Infoblox, “After using Market2Lead’s solution, we’ve reduced our lead abandonment rate by 50 percent. We have more high-quality leads. Plus, our staff is now able to run three-to-five programs per person per week versus one to two in the past.”
In addition to generating much higher-quality leads, the improvement in execution efficiency has enabled the Infoblox marketing team to increase its focus on more highly precision-targeted campaigns, executing a greater number of highly targeted regional, vertical and topical programs. “We never want to make blanket email blasts, and because we have better information about customers we can narrow our focus,” says Lanier.
IronPort Systems – Treating Prospects With Respect Generates Stronger Results
The Problem – IronPort Systems, a leading email and Web security products provider, needed to deliver high-quality leads to its channel partners. IronPort relies on its channel partners to generate business, so it’s important to deliver high-quality leads quickly and securely. The company needed a solution that would encourage prospects that were not yet ready to buy to provide accurate information about themselves and their companies, and nurture their existing leads.
The Solution – IronPort selected Market2Lead’s Turbo Web2Lead Web form data capture system. Turbo Web2Lead allows IronPort to improve the experience of their prospective customers, encouraging prospects to provide accurate information through the company’s Web registration forms.
Turbo Web2Lead lets IronPort profile customers progressively, gathering as much data as possible during each Web contact. Turbo Web2Lead greatly enhances the effectiveness of Web forms by allowing them to skip previously answered questions, pre-populate known data and enforce mandatory questions. It also improves data quality by rejecting invalid email addresses, postal addresses and phone numbers.
Turbo Web2Lead also integrates seamlessly with IronPort’s CRM system and provides an easy-touse system for the company’s channel managers. Hence, both the IronPort sales team and the channel partners have greater confidence in the quality of the leads they receive.
The Results – Implementing complete lead management and progressive profiling took less than four weeks, and in addition to solving their immediate lead generation problems, IronPort continues to use more and more of Market2Lead’s powerful capabilities over time.
Jason Fass, IronPort Systems’ online marketing manager, reports that, “With the automation that Market2Lead provides, we can better close the loop within the sales cycle. Marketing is generating prospects, sales is using a subset of those leads and we are able to conduct a detailed ROI analysis.” Fass adds that, “Turbo Web2Lead was easy to set up and continues to be easy to use. Market2Lead packs a ton of features into a small package, and at a great value to any marketing organization. Implementing Market2Lead is an easy decision for any company that is serious about maximizing the ROI in its marketing campaigns.”
EDAC – Much Lower Effort to Produce Better Campaign Results
The Problem – The Electronic Design Automation (EDA) Consortium, an industry group representing 100 major companies, needed to leverage its existing data, systems, processes and staff more effectively. Data problems were hampering the organization’s ability to scale its sales and marketing programs.
The EDA Consortium’s systems required the marketing team to import and export data from their registration system to their CRM system, limiting their ability to grow the size and number of their events efficiently.
The Solution – The EDA Consortium needed a flexible solution that would synchronize contact data across their three main systems – central database, website and event registration system – and solve their data consistency problems. They also wanted to save time and effort by proactively collecting information online about members’ preferences.
The EDA Consortium selected Market2Lead’s Bronze Edition to improve customer data management and execute its ongoing campaigns. Market2Lead allows progressive profiling of prospects and customers, plus personalized outbound email marketing, dynamic list segmentation and marketing effectiveness reporting. All customer interactions can now flow through a single marketing data mart, seamlessly collecting and transferring data from event registrations into the CRM system.
The Results – The EDA Consortium implemented the Market2Lead solution for one of their largest and most complex events. They wanted to capture a variety of information from each participant and they also wanted to segment the registration list so they could send different messages to various groups.
The EDA Consortium’s Market2Lead solution was operational just 15 days after contract execution, promoting and accepting reservations with little manual effort. The EDA Consortium has since streamlined its operations with Market2Lead, virtually reducing data entry error to zero.
Karla Haley, EDA Consortium’s marketing manager, reports that, “Before implementing Market2Lead we had multiple vendors, complex HTML and a complicated approach for our marketing automation. Now we have achieved what we had hoped for in terms of reducing data entry, improving data quality and automating marketing. Our specific application involves seamlessly collecting and transferring data from event registrations into our CRM system and then taking the appropriate next step automatically based upon customer preference. In addition, our CRM system is synchronized with the Market2Lead solution.”
