Rules-Based Marketing
For years, small- to medium-sized organizations have envied the powerful, integrated marketing campaigns conducted by their big-company counterparts. But with todays new technologies, big budgets, big databases and big marketing departments are no longer the only keys to marketing success.
Rather, new marketing automation technologies are making it easy for even the smallest organization to create powerful, cost-effective, rulesbased marketing campaigns. Rules-based marketing is an automated strategy involving predefined if-then rules, resulting in communications that are more timely, relevant and consistent across multiple communication channels (see Figure 1).
What is Rules-Based Marketing?
Rules-based marketing is a process that allows marketers to deliver timely, relevant and consistent communications to their prospects or customers via email, direct mail, telemarketing or other communication channels. Through rules-based marketing, you, as a marketer, create rules that guide your marketing campaigns. These rules govern which information is sent out when, which messages go to whom, which prospects or customers fall into which categories and so on.
Rules-based marketing campaigns can be as simple as a sequence of communications that are triggered by a specific event, such as when a customer fills out an online form. Or they can be highly sophisticated, involving multiple tracks of information, dynamic content and new rule sets that change or take effect after each communication. Perhaps most important, because rules-based marketing is triggered by actions taken by your prospects or customers, communications tend to be highly effective. Why? Two reasons. First, the information is highly relevant because its not only based on expressed interest, but also based on predicted areas of interest identified by actual behaviors. And second, communications are sent to your audience at the time thats right for them, rather than when its most convenient for you.
Rules-Based Marketing in Action
Lets say you send out an email announcing a Web-based seminar. Using rules-based marketing, you can set rules that automate the different actions youll take based on the different responses (or lack of responses) to your invitation. For instance, those who didnt open your email may, a few weeks later, receive a follow-up with a different subject line. Those who opened the email but didnt click through would receive the same message, albeit with different benefits statements. And those who clicked through and completed the landing page form would receive an attendance confirmation and perhaps other information as well.
While technology is making it easier to perfect the targeting of your marketing message, its also revolutionizing the management of your entire marketing campaign. In the past and, according to 2005 Vtrenz market research, in nearly two-thirds of companies today marketers have used disparate software tools to manage their marketing campaigns. These tools often called point solutions may include an email marketing solution, a survey-building tool, a custom-built landing page and much more. However, the lack of integration between these tools and the fact that these tools are list-based instead of databasedriven often leads to duplication of efforts, lack of data consistency and poor follow-up.
However, todays latest generation of marketing automation solutions allow you to run virtually every aspect of a campaign from a single, integrated marketing solution. This reduces data complexity, provides better visibility into customer marketing interactions, ensures message consistency across mediums and enables a comprehensive, rules-based marketing strategy.
Behavior-Based Segmentation Improves Marketing Results
As every good marketer knows, having the right information is critical to conducting successful, profitable marketing. The more you know about your prospect or customer and the behaviors of your prospect and customer, the easier it is to tailor your messages to their needs and, ultimately, make sales.
The good news for todays marketers is that new marketing automation technologies are making it easier than ever to segment customers and prospects based on their actions and, in turn, create new and more powerful rules-based marketing campaigns.
These marketing campaigns can be as simple as a sequence of communications that are triggered by a specific event such as when a customer fills out an online form or they can be highly sophisticated, involving multiple tracks of information, dynamic content and new rule sets that take effect after each communication.
Cracking the Segmentation Code
In the past, a major stumbling block to rules-based marketing was audience segmentation. Historically, segmentation was limited to relatively basic demographic, geographic or firmagraphic information. Sure, that information was enough to create good marketing campaigns back in the 1990s. However, faced with intense competition, a downward trend in response rates, tight marketing budgets and more accountability for measurable results, todays marketer needs even more.
Enter behavior-based segmentation. As its name implies, behaviorbased segmentation allows you to segment your audience and tailor communications to many different audience segments based on actual behaviors your prospects or customers have exhibited (see Figure 2). The biggest advantage to behavior-based segmentation is that it increases relevancy because the information you send is triggered as a result of real actions taken by your audience. You can then create as many different segmentation rules as needed and integrate those rules into your business process.
Behavior-based segmentation generally falls into three categories:
- Transactional These are customers or prospects who have conducted a transaction with you, such as making a purchase.
- Event-driven These audience members have taken a specific action, such as downloading a white paper, clicking on a link or opening an email youve sent them.
- Response-based These respondents have taken action by completing a form with a defined response or providing response information that has met some type of qualification criteria.
Behavior-Based Segmentation Meets Rules-Based Marketing
Lets say a prospect responds to a white paper offer youve made, and indicates that his firm is looking to purchase new software within the next nine to 12 months. By responding favorably to your offer, hes shown a willingness to consider purchasing your product. Better yet, hes provided an actual time frame for doing so.
This information, coupled with todays newest marketing automation technologies, allows your rules-based marketing to kick into high gear with the right message and timing. With it, you know precisely when to send additional marketing information about your product, when to pass his information along to your sales department and when to have a member of your sales staff call on the prospect.
As weve seen, an automated marketing solution that provides the right information can help your organization tailor its marketing efforts to those individuals or groups with high propensity to buy ensuring future sales and continued profitability.
Automated Campaign Execution Helps Transform Leads Into Sales
In 2003, the Meta Group estimated that a staggering 70 to 90 percent of marketing-generated leads are not acted upon because sales finds them unqualified (an often-provided excuse for not making sales projections). Whats more, those that actually are acted upon often arent followed up with in a timely manner.
As we all know, leads that arent followed up on dont turn into sales. And the greater the time lapse in contacting a prospect, the less effective that follow-up tends to be. As a marketer or company decision maker, these facts are undoubtedly horrifying to you and likely raise a critical question: What can our organization do to ensure that our sales leads are followed up on quickly and converted into sales? The answer, thanks to new marketing automation technologies, is to employ rules-based marketing along with automated campaign execution. In addition to automating follow-up communications, marketing automation technologies also manage the workflows for dynamically routing qualified leads to the right salesperson at the right time. This potent combination overcomes many of the factors that lead to marketing breakdowns and gaps in the sales cycle factors that include a lack of coordination between sales and marketing, poor timing and even basic human forgetfulness (see Figure 3).
Rules-Based Marketing Meets Marketing Automation
When you combine rules-based marketing with marketing automation, you can begin to bridge the gap between initial customer interest and readiness to make a decision. Using todays latest marketing automation technologies, your company can quickly design workflows that automatically execute the steps necessary to run an effective rules-based marketing campaign. These automated workflows allow you to do more sophisticated marketing with fewer resources. Plus, automation eliminates slow, costly and error-prone human intervention and helps ensure that you can conduct even the most complex multistep, multichannel campaigns quickly, consistently and on schedule.
To be sure, automating your marketing efforts is nothing new. Fill out a form on almost any website, and youll likely receive an automated email response. But with todays rules-based marketing automation solutions, an automated-response email is just the beginning of a series of communications you can send to your customers or prospects at specified time intervals or on specified dates.
