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By: Johnathan Dane Posted: January 18, 2016 | Digital Marketing Have you ever been so good at something that that everyone looked at you jealously while binging on Ben & Jerry’s? In this blog, I’ll share some effective AdWords Display tricks with you that not many people know about. These are the tricks that you can implement today. But before we get into how you can create your own AdWords Display Network plan, you need to understand the key difference between AdWords Search and AdWords Display. AdWords Search Network: You’re limited to bidding on keywords with a finite amount of ad spots. This means that your competition can make your ad clicks pretty expensive, pretty fast. AdWords Display Network: You have almost limitless ad space across various websites, along with the ability to advertise both image and text ads in different sizes. Now, we’re ready to jump in. These are the five AdWords Display hacks you won’t find outlined in user manuals: 1. The Competitor Email Subscriber Hack aka Gmail Sponsored Promotions Your competitor’s hard work can actually pay off for your company. In fact, you can advertise directly to their prospects when they open your competitor’s emails. With Gmail Sponsored Promotions (GSP), you can target competitor domains as keywords. By doing this, Gmail will look for emails from competitors you target, and if the email recipient is in their Gmail account, your ad will show up. Some people think that because GSP is an AdWords Display channel, the intent behind the GSP visitors would be the same as regular Display visitors—low time on site and high bounce rates—since people aren’t actively looking for what you’re offering, like on the Search Network. On the contrary, not only do the GSP visitors hang around longer than many Search visitors, but you’ll find that some stick around for 2-4x the average time on your site. Check out the average time on site from a GSP campaign within Google Analytics: GSP conversions can actually be the cheapest of all AdWords campaigns. Just take a look at the example below at the cost per converted click for GSP vs. other campaigns. So what makes GSP ads so powerful? You’re paying an AdWords Display style cost-per-click that has almost as high of an intent as an expensive Search click. Since your ad recipients are interested in what your competitors have to say, they’ll most likely be interested in you too. You’re stealing away market share from your competitors, one conversion at a time, since your competitors are hoping that their email leads to a conversion for themselves. You’re going to find that it works tremendously well for high-ticket industries that have longer sales cycles, but also great for small-ticket items too. This is because some high ticket industries pay over $50-$100 per click on the Search Network, but only $0.20 with GSP ads. 2. Supersize It, Please: Use Display Layers To Improve Your Display Targeting This next AdWords Display hack is as much a money maker as it is a mouth drooler. Consider for a second that all of your AdWords Display targeting options are one big, fat, juicy burger (if you’re vegan, please substitute for a veggie patty).Each layer of this ‘display burger’ is a different targeting option, and the more layers you add, the more specific your targeting burger gets. . Placements: Actual URLs you want to target. You can use a tool like WhatRunsWhere.com to see where your current competitors are having their Display ads show and target those directly as well.Contextual: This is just a fancy word for keyword targeting. Give Google the keywords, and it will find “relevant” placements for your ads (heavy air quotes on the relevant part).Interests: This is people-based targeting and is considered a stronger way to understand your audience’ browsing behaviors across different sites.There are two types of interest layers you can target: Affinity Audiences: People who have long-term interests, like gardening. In-Market Audiences: People whose browsing behavior shows that they’re ready to buy. Topics: This is a group of websites that relate to a similar topic.Demographics: This is where you get target age, gender, and parental status.Geo/Languages: This includes geographic targeting (country, state, city, radius, etc.) and the language of your targeted audience.You may find that the more layers you add to your burger, the lower the volume, but the better your performance is. Your layers will have different results, and sometimes, simply targeting a direct placement will yield the best results. 3. The Automatic Money Making Robot In the world of AdWords programmatic advertising, the Display Campaign Optimizer is one of my favorite tools when it comes to making money (and impressing people on the dance floor). Display Campaign Optimizer (DCO) takes the targeting criteria from your regular layer targeting (remember the burger earlier?) and uses that info to find new nooks and crannies based off your goal cost per acquisition (CPA) bid that you set.Let’s say you that you want conversions at $5. DCO would then go out and find placements and mobile apps that help you hit that goal. Some placements and mobile apps might be more expensive than others, and if that continues, the DCO would automatically exclude those placements and mobile apps and go after others.A few other things to consider when it comes to Do’s and Don’ts of DCO: Do gradually rotate in new creatives. Do change your CPA bid in small increments. Do use target CPA to control traffic volumes. Do create new ad groups for thematically different ad creatives. Don’t make full ad swaps. Don’t change the target CPA constantly. Don’t remove high performing placements. Don’t test a ton of radically different landing pages. The reason why you want to be careful with big changes is because the DCO uses your ad and landing page info, along with historical performance, to improve its baseline of performance. If you shake things up too often, then it won’t be able continually improve or backtrack to what worked before.Once you find automatic placements and apps that work for you, you can extract them into new campaigns and bid on those to get more volume. But there’s a catch. DCO operates off of browsing behavior signals where it can see the path a visitor has taken prior to the placement where they see your ad. This means that if you extract a specific placement and bid on it, then the performance might not be the same as it was in the DCO campaign. While there’s not much you can do about that, you can still use layer targeting on top of that specific placement to try to replicate the results. 4. The Smallest, But Most Powerful: Mobile App Ads Mobile apps are a huge deal these days. Just take a look at Snapchat and Uber. And then there’s things like the iPhone Blower, which isn’t worth much, but is full  of advertising potential. This is because most of the free apps have high usage rates. With high usage rates come high ad-click rates, and with high ad-click rates, come high conversion volume. And there are literally millions of apps out there that are part of the Google AdWords universe where you can buy ad placements directly in a specific app.You can use your own targeted demographics to find a pool of apps to target or if you use DCO to your advantage (which I hope you do), then targeting mobile apps by themselves will be insanely easy because the robot finds the apps that perform the best for you. Not to mention that it feels like Christmas every time you see the new mobile apps the DCO robot has found in theAutomatic Placements report!Here’s where your Automatic Placements report is located inside AdWord s: Once you find mobile apps that are performing well, you then want to find their unique package names so you can target them individually.Both iTunes and Google naming conventions.iTunes apps have numeric package names that can be found in their iTunes URLs  Play apps have different package : Google Play apps have alphabetic package names that can be found in their Google Play URLs: So now that you know where inside the AdWords Display world to go fish, let’s make sure you have the best bait possible to not just get the clicks, but the conversions too. 5. Your Army of Mini Conversion Baits If you know the big difference between the AdWords Display and Search Networks, then you know that your visitors are in different stages of the buying cycle.Display visitors might not even know they need your solution until you generate their awareness first, whereas Search visitors could be looking for exactly what you have to offer and buy something today. So how do you get your Display visitors to get their foot in your door?It’s relatively simple. All you have to do is test your bait. If a Display visitor sees your ad, but they’re not ready for a free consultation (or whatever other call-to-action you use on the Search Network), then you need to give them something that’s a different—a low threat offer.These mini baits/offers could be a lot of different things, and you’ve likely seen them before. Here are a few examples, all of which you can mix and match: Coupon Checklist/Cheasheet Quiz Video/Video Course Tools Calendar Podcast/Interview Consultation Tickets Live Demo Email Course Swipe File Infographic/Gifographic Free Quote White Paper eBook Industry Stats Case Study This almost goes without saying, but make sure your new Display visitors taken some kind of opt-in approach before they can get what you promised. If you don’t, then you can’t really nurture them to become paying customers in the future. Here’s What You Should Do Next Even though we only covered a small part of what’s possible with the AdWords Display Network, you now have five easy-to-use and actionable ways to expand and grow your conversion volume. Aside from continuously testing, be relentless in tracking everything directly to revenue. You may find odd nooks and crannies that you never thought would make sense to target, but once you have the complete revenue picture, you’ll be excited to continue fishing and expand your AdWords Display targeting portfolio. Happy fishing! What other AdWords Display hacks do you know of? Share them in the comments section below.
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By: Johnny Cheng Posted: December 30, 2015 | Marketing Metrics Just like the saying goes to keep your friends close and your enemies closer, it’s important to keep tabs on what your peers are doing as a good benchmark of your own results. While your email campaigns may be hitting all of your marks, you may want to set your goals higher for 2016 based on how other companies in your space are doing. After posting my earlier blog around email performance, in which I revealed which types of email perform the best, I received a ton of requests to break it down by industry so marketers can compare the performance of their email campaigns to those of their peers. The numbers are in and the wait is over! Refresher on Email Types In case you’ve forgotten the three types of email campaigns, here’s a recap from the original blog post: Batch Emails: Also known as “batch and blast”. These types of emails don’t have any “intelligence” built in. Instead they just gather a list of contacts and send them the same email. A great example of this is your company newsletter—it goes to everyone, no matter what. Nurture Emails: This is a series of targeted emails based on personas (e.g. by industry, role, or use case). Nurture emails are primarily used to lead prospects through the sales funnel and warm up leads for a sales handoff. A nurture email offers something different to a person based on where they are in their buying journey. If they are just learning about you, your nurture email might offer a fun, light infographic versus a buyer who has engaged with you many times and consumed your content might get a webinar invitation to a live demo. Trigger Emails: These are personalized emails that are delivered based on prospect actions. Some range of email “intelligence” is built in based on behavior (think of it as a two-way conversation of listening and speaking). An example of a trigger email would be this: a prospect visits your events webpage and then, based on that activity, receives an email invitation to an event in their area. Email Performance by Industry Here’s the email performance for the three types of campaigns across all industries. As you can see below, batch campaigns performed significantly better in Healthcare and Life Sciences and Travel, Recreation, and Leisure. Nurture campaigns, on the other hand, performed the best in Energy, Healthcare and Life Sciences, and Transportation and Storage. Trigger campaigns prospered across several different industries, with the highestaverage click rate across all types of campaigns. This data represents average click rate for the 3 email types across all industries. Per the legend on the right, the green shades indicate the relative click rate performance (0.2% – 23.5%). Only industries with statistically significant averages are shown above. What We Learned This chart speaks for itself, but there are definitely some cool data points that stand out. Here’s my take on why certain email types do better or worse for certain industries. But I’d love to hear from readers of that specific industry (I’m looking at you…) to give their opinion. 1. In General–High Performance Trigger Emails I know I sound like a broken record, but despite its proven success at Marketo and beyond, there are still plenty of email marketers that don’t realize the potential of trigger emails. So I’m going to say this one last time (no promises)…personalized messages based on behavior are much better than batch and blast. In fact, they’re 3x better on average. They are an important customer touchpoint so spend that extra time and effort to create those triggers campaigns! 2. Energy–The Power of Nurtures The Energy vertical has the highest nurture email performance of any industry, at a whopping 12.4%! That’s as high as some trigger email metrics. It makes sense if you think about how an energy utility company communicates with their customers. Do you get regular emails around your energy usage, ways to save energy, and updates to policies? Those highly relevant targeted emails are nurture programs at work. Below you’ll see a similar example from a water department. 3. Travel–Brochures for Everybody! This one is really interesting. The Travel, Recreation, and Leisure industry has the highest batch rates, but the lowest nurture rates. Their batch programs perform almost 40x better than nurtures! This is most likely due to the nature of the travel industry. Interest in travel traditionally happens by time of year and less dependent on the individual. Nurturing a customer every month probably isn’t as effective as blasting your entire database with beach excursions right before summer or a trip to the mountains right before ski season. 4. Healthcare–You’re in Great Shape The most well rounded email performance award goes to Healthcare and Life Sciences. They excel in every type of email campaign. I think this is due to two main factors. First is how technologically advanced healthcare has become in the past few years. The overnight shift to the digital era definitely shows in their marketing efforts. Second is the wide range of use cases that each email type solves for this specific industry. Patient doctor office visits? Triggered emails! Ongoing preventative care tips and tricks? Nurture emails! Hospital announcements and newsletters? Batch emails! You can see that different types of emails serve different purposes, but I hope that digging into this data gave you some ideas on how you can use email more effectively for your organization. Notice something in the data that stood out to you? Have suggestions on what data to dive into next? Got follow up questions for me? Leave your comments below
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By: Jamie Lewis If you’re not tracking your website analytics, it’s time to step it up. Contrary to more traditional marketing channels, your website and web analytics are direct, specific, and measurable. So what exactly is website analytics? A good definition I often use is “The qualitative and quantitative analysis of your website and your competitors’ websites for the continuous optimization of business outcomes for all channels, both online and offline”. Essentially, you don’t need to use good ol’ faith any longer. Now you can use data to measure the things that drive revenue for your business. The benefits of robust website analytics include an increase in accountability within your organization, finding the best solutions faster, and delivering better business outcomes through enlightened decision making. Answer the Right Questions Let’s get started now. To begin, you need to start by tracking the most basic elements of activity on your site. 75% of the data you need is gathered just by placing a JavaScript code into the footer of your website. Simply place the code provided by a free service like Google Analytics or Yahoo Web Analytics or let a tag manager tool do this for you. Keep in mind this is just the start. Website analytics tools typically only help you answer the “What”: What are the top 10 pages visited? What are the top 10 products sold? What are the most popular downloads? While that’s a great start, to drive real improvement in revenue performance, you must be able to answer “Why”: Why did they go to those 10 pages? Should those have been the top 10 pages? Which ones should have been and why weren’t they? These questions are crucial to your business and a must-have for every digital marketer out there. To discover the “Why” of your website’s performance, implement these 5 processes: 1. Web Activity Analysis As we mentioned above, this will tell you what is happening on your website and can be provided to you quite easily through tools such as Google Analytics and Yahoo Web Analytics. The simple act of adding a tag to your website will give you access to a near limitless amount of visitor data. With it, you can better understand things such as what pages are working, what your visitors like and don’t like, where they come from, what time of day they visit, what pages or ads sent them to your site, and on and on and on. This will allow you to form hypotheses and draw conclusions that can shape your testing and web strategy—it’s wonderful! 2. Conversion Analysis Now that we understand what happened we also need to know how much and for whom. This is where we tie the web activity to online and offline conversions. We can continue to get all of our online conversion data from Google Analytics Yahoo Web Analytics, but offline data can be a little more of a challenge. A complete marketing automation solution can solve this problem by integrating with different CRMs and rolling the offline conversion data back into your marketing database. However you accomplish this, tie your digital marketing efforts to both the online and offline revenue data. 3. Customer Preference Analysis You should hear the voice of your customers loud and clear when performing your analysis. In fact, every web marketer should be able to answer three key questions about their visitors. “Why are you here?”, “Did you get what you came for?”, “If not, why?” The answers will provide insights about your customers and your website. You may find out that they are coming to you for things you never dreamed of. Only after you understand their reasons will you be able to better serve them and drive more revenue for your business. Answering these questions is typically accomplished by providing a survey for a small percentage visitors in two formats: Site-level surveys: for measuring session experience. These are done upon entrance or exit and are usually a pop-up. Site-level surveys are very good at understanding macro issues—big things that might be wrong such as experience, navigation elements, and overall effectiveness of site. Page-level surveys: for measuring micro issues. These are usually part of specific pages and are typically opened with a “plus” sign. In page-level surveys, you gain information about micro conversions, transactional efficiency, and overall experience with individual pages on your website. 4. Experimentation and Testing This is a key step to understanding your website in terms of what is working and what is not. Only through experimentation and testing can you determine how to improve and optimize your website. Typical types of testing are A/B testing and multivariate testing. A/B testing swaps one page out for another to see which one works better and multivariate testing swaps out one or more components of a page to do the same. This will give your customers a say in how your website will work going forward because the results will be based precisely on their behavior. 5. Competitive Intelligence Understanding how your competitors are faring in the marketplace will provide bountiful insights for your business because it will provide context to measure your own performance. For example, do you know who their customers are, their demographics, and their lead sources? Do you know how many visitors they are getting, the duration of stay and bounce rate? The ability to understanding your competitors’ performance on the web versus your own is vital to your success in the internet economy. Right now you are probably saying to yourself, “But my competitors won’t give me their data!” You’re right, they won’t, but www.compete.com will. Go check it out—most of this data is available for free. By tracking these 5 simple metrics, you can execute a true website analysis and provide tangible value to your company, and I’m talking dollars here people. Have you already uncovered meaningful insights with the metrics above? I’d love to hear what you found in the comments below!
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By: Sesame Mish The most important part of any marketing team is its people. Without the right people—and the right combination of people—things like resources, processes, and strategy won’t be optimized. You need dynamic individuals at the helm, all working in areas of their strengths, banding together in unison to achieve company goals. All marketing teams should think of it this way—and digital advertising teams are no exception. So, what’s the best way to form your digital advertising team, in particular? Let’s explore… By now, marketers are acutely aware that we’ve entered the digital age—we communicate by email with our customers, we promote our brands through social media, and we always point people to our website to learn more. On that same note, we have seen the advertising landscape undergo a massive shift—from the retro Mad Men-esque days of print ads and advertising agencies all the way to the present day emergence of digital ads and internal digital advertising teams. With this transformation comes a new set of roles and duties that need to be taken into consideration when forming your digital advertising team. But at the same time, we don’t want to forget the attributes and skills that made our Mad Men predecessors so great. Therefore, Modern Mad Men need to embody both the old and the new—someone who understands the foundational elements of being a good advertiser with someone who lives and breathes the digital space. With this in mind, check out our new infographic, Mad Men of the Millennium, to learn which elements you should consider when forming your modern digital advertising team. View the infographic in a new window here. Please use the HTML code below to embed this graphic <a href="http://blog.marketo.com/2015/11/infographic-how-to-form-your-digital-advertising-team/"><img alt="[Infographic] Mad Men of the Millennium" src="http://blog.marketo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Mad-Men-of-the-Millennium_Marketo.png" width="100%" /></a><br><p><small>Brought to you by <a href="http://www.marketo.com/marketing-automation">Marketing Automation Software by Marketo</a></small>
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By: Johnny Cheng In my role at Marketo over the past few months, I’ve had the pleasure of paging through mounds of enticing Marketo data. I have seen some absolutely outstanding stats from some of Marketo’s top customers—stats covering everything from email sends to opportunities sourced. Now, I want to share these stats with you so you can see the potential of what happens when smart marketers, the right technology and great campaigns come together. These stats show us how far marketers can take their marketing programs and campaigns. So, get your hands warm and get ready to learn about and applaud these truly impressive (and inspiring!) accomplishments. Largest Email Campaign Wow, over 249 million email sends from one campaign! That’s equivalent to the total U.S. population back in the 1990s. Aside from the volume, imagine the anxiety that email marketer had clicking the “confirm send” button. And judging from the deliverability and performance stats of the campaign, that email marketer deserves a raise (just sayin’). Why It’s Impressive: The sheer email sends coming from this one campaign is remarkable. Compared to the average send size which is 8,900 per email campaign across all Marketo customers, this is absolutely massive. What’s even more extraordinary is that this particular marketing team runs multiple email campaigns in the millions, ALL of which have over 90% delivery rate! They’re surely doing something right! Highest Performing Email Campaign (over 5,000 send size) Whatever this email campaign was, kudos to the marketing team; not only did they get an extremely high open rate, they got a near perfect click rate. With results like that, I’m going to imagine the email subject was “Free Trip to Disneyland (not a scam)” and the call-to-action was “Claim Your Free Tickets NOW (not a scam)”…and then the whole thing truly wasn’t a scam. But really, they seem to have cracked the code on what yields near-perfect results. Bravo, team, bravo. Why It’s Impressive: Think of your typical email campaign—what percentage of open and click rate would you be happy to get? At my past few companies, we were ecstatic to get over 30% open rate for prospects and double that for customers. It’s hard to fathom an open rate of 90%, and even more impressive—a 89% click-to-open rate, especially for this email send size. To do this, their team must have attained the email trifecta: a squeaky clean list, extremely relevant content, and an irresistible call-to-action. Nice job! Widest Net Cast by a Campaign Over 525,000 opportunities were sourced from one single inbound asset. I have no idea what the content of that asset was, but it must have been pretty compelling to capture that many leads. Just imagine that company’s sales team swimming in that ocean of leads (seriously, imagine it). What a fantastic problem to have! Why It’s Impressive: This is every demand gen marketer’s dream: the golden goose—an asset soooo good it practically prints leads. This campaign towers over the average 180 opportunities generated per campaign (first-touch attribution) across all customers. When I looked up which company this was, I wasn’t surprised to find it was one of the most well-known respected brands in the world (which partly explains the golden goose content). But what we can learn from their massive success, is the potential and power of great content. Largest Pipeline Attributed to a Campaign OK, get ready for this one. $2.3 billion of pipeline was generated from a WEBINAR. I’m not making this up. And I know you’re thinking exactly what I’m thinking on this one—that’s more than what the Titanic movie made! OK, maybe that’s not what you were thinking, but in all honesty, this webinar is the Titanic of webinars, and probably a lot cheaper to produce. Actually, even if they hired Leonardo DiCaprio to host the webinar, the ROI would still be impressive! Why It’s Impressive: Webinars usually perform really well in terms of pipeline attribution, but this one is beyond an anomaly. I actually have to take this off my data set because when I graph this, it breaks my chart—literally, it’s off the charts. I was only half joking earlier in that this might actually be a mainstream film that a media company classified as a “webinar”…that would explain a lot. If it’s not, they probably have developed a mean set of webinar best practices. What’s your company’s most impressive stat? Please share in the comments section below!
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By: Mike Stocker I’ve been at Marketo now three years, where I have managed the customer success team and, as a part of that role, personally managed several of our largest enterprise customers. In managing those customers I gained insights into what many CMOs were hoping to achieve in their Marketing efforts. Now, in my current role, as Director of Business Development, I’m helping to drive partnerships that provide additional solutions that help Marketo marketers be more successful in their marketing. In both roles, and through many conversations, it’s clear that many CMOs are struggling to get a clear picture of how their paid media acquisition channels perform when viewed through the entire customer lifecycle. My belief is that by connecting the worlds of paid media and acquisition and marketing technology and engagement, CMOs can get a complete view of the customer lifecycle. At that point, they can decide where to allocate their budgets to get the maximum return. But CMOs continue to face organizational obstacles that prevent that from happening. All too often, the groups inside companies responsible for customer acquisition and the groups who manage retention and engagement live in different silos, if not different worlds. And that’s not making the CMO’s life any easier. Lifetime customer value In the last decade, marketers have embraced engagement marketing as a way to cultivate high-value relationships with loyal and long-term customers. But many companies are still only focused on the cost of acquiring customers on a one-off basis. It’s almost a throwback to the era of transactional marketing when the goal was to generate revenue short-term, not forge long-term relationships between the business and its customers. Understanding customer lifetime value can be a difficult proposition. Remember that a lot of marketers are, well, marketers and not technologically inclined. Getting at this data often presents a technological hurdle, and marketers may not be adept at stitching together the new technology and big data systems needed to get a true picture of lifetime customer value. This has been a challenge for marketers long before the arrival of the Internet. But it’s a vital metric for CMOs who otherwise are forced to fly blind about what they spend and the true returns on their acquisition efforts. I was listening to a presentation by an e-commerce CMO whose division did about $100 million in revenue. When we spoke afterwards, I asked whether she knew who her best customers were. “What was the lifetime value of each of the company’s customers?” I asked. No idea. “It’s too hard to pull that data together,” she said. I scratched my head after hearing that. When you think about digital marketing and e-commerce, all that information is trackable. It’s just a matter of bringing systems together. Six months later, the parent company shuttered the division. It simply didn’t know who their best customers were and was marketing without understanding the ROI contributed by each of the company’s channels. Reach out and touch someone CMOs can’t get an accurate picture if these two camps—the folks responsible for acquisition on one side and the folks charged with retention and engagement on the other—don’t talk with each other. It’s only by breaking up the organizational silos and bridging those two worlds that you’ll have a clear idea of the customer journey as well as the broader customer life cycle. This is more than a call for “kumbaya.” By letting super-valuable customers slip away, the organization loses a tremendous opportunity to make money later on. I can demonstrate this with the example of an automotive marketing campaign where the company is only concerned with immediate returns. Assume that some customers who came in to buy a vehicle also planned to buy several more cars from the same manufacturer over their lifetimes. Even if we were only talking about a few customers, all are worth their weight in gold. But a transactional approach that valued only the single point of sale would shut down the campaign if it failed to meet expectations for immediate returns, especially if you didn’t know what the true lifetime value was over time. There is no room in that calculus for some of the best customers the company could hope to find. Take a page from Williams-Sonoma Pat Connolly, the great CMO at Williams-Sonoma, likes to joke that he’s held the title CMO longer than anyone ever. But tenure brings wisdom and after some 30 years in the post, he’s stored up valuable insights about what works and what doesn’t. And Pat’s a proponent of utilizing technologies that help his team understand the product preferences and lifetime customer value of the people who shop from Williams-Sonoma. The reason he’s so good at this is that he and Williams-Sonoma have a rich heritage of catalog based direct marketing background. Catalog and direct marketers were the first to recognize the benefits of measuring their costs of acquisition and understanding the metrics around lifetime customer value. Since Williams-Sonoma ships huge numbers of catalogs that cost a lot to print, the company needs to calculate what they expect to make from each of their customers over a period of time—or they risk wasting a lot of money. At the same time, if you make purchases from Williams-Sonoma, they keep your preferences and later will offer things that are complementary as they upsell and cross-sell effectively to their customers. Starbucks gets it right This is no secret to anyone who works with me, but I’m addicted to Starbucks. And the reason has to do as much with the company’s understanding of lifetime customer value as with the quality of its particular brew. The company rewards me with a free drink or food item each time that I accumulate 12 stars on their app. This loyalty program nicely demonstrates the concept of customer lifetime value in practice. Until I starting using their mobile app, I would rarely patronize Starbucks; now I go there every morning. In return, I receive the company’s gold card with numerous special offers, because Starbucks values me as an important customer who is going to spend a lot of money in their stores. Or at least they’ve succeeded in making me feel valued. Fast takeaways Those are just a couple of examples of the companies who get the importance of Customer Lifetime Value. Many companies are starting to think more about their customer lifetime value and customer lifecycle and the common theme of those that are doing it well is that they are leaders in their fields. It’s hardly coincidental that the companies that misunderstand lifetime customer value often turn out to be the laggards in their sectors. There are clear lessons here for marketers: If you only focus on acquisition and don't include the entire customer lifecycle, you’re simply shooting yourself in the foot. Lifetime customer value needs to be the main metric you are measuring on and not just immediate acquisition. Tear down those silos—All your teams should be collaborating productively so when the CMO says, `Show me the money,’ they know the true returns their paid media campaigns are driving and budget can be allocated for maximum results.  
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By: Divya Dutt As the search engine marketing and social paid programs manager at Marketo, I have always loved the fact that my work involves both number crunching and creativity on a daily basis. On that note, the best part of my job is probably that I have the opportunity to find new ways to increase click-through and conversions rates on our site. This requires reviewing and assessing data and then drumming up new ways to craft digital ads based on what I have learned from that data. What is the process called? A/B testing! A/B testing is the strategic process of comparing two versions of creatives, ad copy, headlines, etc. to see which one performs better. Then, with that result, you know which aspects of your website to change in order to yield more clicks and conversions. Examples of A/B Testing in Digital Ads Even though I have worked in online marketing for nearly 10 years, I am still surprised by some of the results I see from A/B testing. Here is a good example of a recent ad copy test that thoroughly caught me off guard. Before reading further, see whether you can pinpoint the difference between these two ads: In most channels, the best practice is to keep your ad headline short ‘n sweet, however, one of my colleagues wanted to test a longer version of the ad headline and so we went for it (hey, you never know). To my absolute shock, the longer headline actually won the test—and by a good margin, too [.28% click-through rate (CTR) vs a .19% CTR]! Below is another example of A/B testing in digital ads. Here there was a profound difference in click-through rates, with the ad that contained the image of people garnering .64% CTR and the ad containing the image without people garnering a measly .11% CTR. What a difference a picture makes! So, what is the primary lesson we can all learn from this? A/B testing shows us that we cannot make decisions based on our instincts alone. We must back them up with evidence. And that evidence comes straight from testing. Therefore, I am a strong believer of testing pretty much anything I possibly can in my campaigns—if it’s testable, I’m all over it! In order to conduct a comprehensive assessment of your programs and campaigns, and be sure that you’re constructing them the best you could be, I hope you will get on board with this comprehensive approach, too. 7 Elements to Test in Your Digital Ads With that being said, I’m excited to share with you my list of the top seven items to test in your digital ad campaigns: 1. Ad headlines: The right headline really helps with click-through rates. You should come up with at least two—if not more—versions of your headlines to see which one better captures your audience’s attention. The target audience on most channels is different, too, so what works as a headline on LinkedIn might not work on Facebook, and so on. The take-away here? Test a few versions of a headline on each channel. 2. Ad copy: It is often difficult to fit your core message in your headlines, so your ad copy is the next best place where you can try and include some messaging. Don’t miss the opportunity to test the messaging here, too. 3. Creatives: Images, colors, and text all combine to make a great display creative. You can play with the colors and images to make your display ads stand out more. 4. Ad units: It is important to test the different ad units and sizes to see which one performs best for you. It is a best practice to start a campaign with as many units as possible and then based on the results, keep the best performing ones intact. 5. Time of day: Spend some time assessing what time of day during which your audience has the highest interaction with your social posts or searches for your keywords. This is important especially when you have limited budget to work with. 6. Days of the week: Depending on your business, certain days of the week might work better for you versus others. Again, knowing the days that you get most interest on your social posts or your Google search ads can be helpful so you can increase your budgets during those days and turn it off during the others. This will help maximize your budget and increase sales and conversions. 7. Call-to-actions: Testing your call-to-actions can be very powerful. Sometimes changing a simple “Download Now” button to “Submit” can increase your conversion rates by a few points, or changing the color of your download button can bring you more conversions, too. This is a simple thing to test, so don’t leave those additional conversions on the table. These are just a handful of the elements that I always like to test; this is not a complete list. There is a lot more you can test. You can start with some of these and build on them as new ideas pop up. Finally, I would just like to mention that testing is an ongoing process—there’s no end date, so don’t expect there to be! With that said, make sure you continue to add new tests into your campaigns. It is important to document the changes you make, analyze the results, implement those results, and then repeat the process again and again…and again. I hope you find these tips useful! If you would like to know more about testing as well as other topics regarding digital advertising, such as targeting, segmenting, measuring, and budgeting, please join us for our upcoming webinar “Tips to Evolve Your Digital Advertising” on October 13th. Register today!
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Personal thanks to Stephane Hamel​ for providing this document. If you have an feedback, .. if you find it useful, if it helps you, if you see any errors or things that could be improved - let me know! Please let Stephane Hamel​ know.
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Back by popular demand: Johnny Cheng Following my blog earlier this month on win rate and velocity, we’ve finally reached the most important metric of the series… drum roll please…The Golden Ratio! With the Golden Ratio, aligning channels across conversion rate, win rate, and velocity will give you the full picture of channel performance. What Is the Golden Ratio? The Golden Ratio is pipeline generated over cost. I believe pipeline/cost is more important than ROI for marketing metrics. While ROI depends on multiple factors, some of which are out of marketing’s hands, such as sales performance and capacity, the Golden Ratio is measured primarily on marketing aptitude—the ability to deliver pipeline across certain channels. Now, before we dive into the data, let’s set some context around first-touch and multi-touch attribution, since those are the two lenses for viewing the Golden Ratio across channels. First-Touch vs. Multi-Touch Attribution When looking at pipeline attribution, it’s crucial to understand the difference between first-touch and multi-touch. First-Touch Attribution: Attributing the pipeline contribution to the first touch point of the opportunity. Example: If a lead came in as a result of attending a webinar, regardless of all subsequent touch points, all credit gets attributed to that webinar. Multi-Touch Attribution: Attributing the pipeline contribution to all touch points of the opportunity. Example: If a lead came in as a result of a webinar, but later responded to an email campaign, attended a tradeshow, and then downloaded a whitepaper, all of those channels would get credit distributed equally across them. Many companies only look at first-touch attribution, which is good for looking at acquisition snapshots (specific point in time), however it does not give a complete picture of channel performance across time. A lead could have come in through a certain channel, but gained most of the influence in subsequent touches, such as through a nurturing program. In a first-touch model, only the acquisition channel gets the credit. In a multi-touch model, all touches that influence an opportunity get credit. Pipeline to Cost Ratio (First-Touch) Here’s first-touch pipeline to cost ratio. This measures pipeline generated over the cost, normalized across marketing channels. All attribution is based on first-touch (lead source). Pipeline to Cost Ratio (Multi-Touch) Here’s multi-touch pipeline to cost ratio. This measures pipeline generated over the cost, normalized across marketing channels. All attribution is credited across all touch points. What We’ve Learned I love this data; we’ve got digital marketing down to a science! The Golden Ratio proves two fundamental theories, first of which every marketer probably practices, and the other that’s not so intuitive. Let’s take a look: This Is Why We Nurture: I was waiting patiently for the publishing of this blog for the big reveal. Email nurturing is amazing! OK, you’re not surprised, but at least now you have the data to prove it. Email has THE HIGHEST pipeline to cost ratio of all marketing channels, especially in a multi-touch model where email nurturing has huge influence over opportunities relative to cost. Think of those deals that have two-year sales cycles—why would you not nurture them? First-Touch vs. Multi-Touch: I recently met with a past colleague that was using a competitor marketing automation system that couldn’t do multi-touch attribution. She told me her company had stopped doing webinars due to poor performance. But she was completely unaware how webinars affected opportunities after the first touch. And judging by the data, webinars could have been a great vehicle for nurturing prospects. The moral of the story is that first-touch attribution only gauges acquisition, whereas multi-touch attribution gauges everything else. Putting It All Together Imagine if you had a magic crystal ball that told you exactly where your best leads came from. Well now you can build your own magic crystal ball (actually more like a magic telescope). By aligning conversion rate, win rate, velocity, pipeline, and cost across all of your channels—or even better—across all of your programs, you can clearly see what works and what doesn’t. Some of my current and past demand gen. colleagues have perfected this art; some have even been able to work backwards to drive future revenue projections. That’s how marketing gets a seat at the revenue table.
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Back by popular demand -- Johnny Cheng , who is the Platform Product Marketing Manager at Marketo. Johnny has a passion for tech, marketing and math – which luckily all intersect at Marketo By: Johnny Chenghttps://nation.marketo.com/people/2feccddc1ff09ea1ee9967df7f1b64bb0db7a7fd In my recent blog on channel conversion rate, I mentioned conversion was only the initial piece of the puzzle. To get the full picture of how effective your acquisition channels are, you also need to look at win rate, velocity, and pipeline created vs. cost. So in this fourth blog in the Marketo Institute series, we’re going to look at the next two channel pipeline metrics: win rate and velocity. The Happy Marketing-to-Sales Handoff You can’t measure the effectiveness of a channel just based on conversion rate. A lot of marketers fall in to the pit trap of stopping their metrics right before the marketing-to-sales handoff. Without closed loop visibility from sales back to marketing, you often hear conversations like these: Marketing: “Here are some high converting leads!” (3 months later) Sales: “Those leads were garbage.” Marketing: (With eyes rolling and arms crossed) “Learn to close…” Like bickering siblings, let’s stop the finger pointing and work together to solve the problem. Just because a channel converts well, doesn’t mean it’s effective. We need to look at the sales end of the funnel to really understand channel quality (regardless of whether sales can close). First let’s take a look at win rate (#Winning!) This image shows win rate across all channels (all Marketo customers). Looking at this image, you can see the various channels, here’s a quick breakdown of what they mean: Client and Customer Service is your existing customer base, so think of things like product upsell and additional support. Event, Inbound, and Other Paid are your marketing acquisition channels. Channel, Partner, and Referral are your friends and family. Prospecting and Sales are from your direct sales teams. The win rate is based off closed won/total closed, not total pipeline. Example: Out of a handful of leads, two became opportunities, and of those two opportunities, one closed won and one closed lost. So, the win rate is 50%.We see from the data that marketing and sales-sourced leads are about the same and are both lower than leads coming from your existing customers and partners (to be expected). This sets a good benchmark to compare your marketing channels to other channels. For example, if leads coming from an event have high conversion and win rate—and it’s as high as your inbound channels, then you’ll probably want to attend the same event next year, right? Well, to be sure, we need to look at velocity to get the bigger picture. The Need for Speed This image shows velocity across all channels (all Marketo customers). The channel categories are the same as the last chart.Velocity is based off of the average number of days to close. Think of this as your sales cycle time.While win rate was relatively close across channels, velocity definitely varies from one channel to another. We see that existing customers and advocates naturally have the highest velocity (as this relates to trust). But what’s interesting is that several marketing channels are just as good at delivering high velocity leads.So now that we’ve added another dimension, let’s continue from the last example. Is that high performing event still worth attending? Well, it depends on your objectives. If you’re looking to close those deals as fast as possible, then events might not be a good channel. However, if you’re in it for the long-run, and you have the resources and patience to nurture those leads for well over a year, then events may be a good choice. What We’ve Learned Now that you have a more complete picture with conversion rate, win rate, and velocity, you can start gauging the health of your acquisition channels. Here are a few common patterns you might see in your own data that align with this Marketo Customer Data: The Bad Apple: If you just look at conversion rate alone, some channels such as Sales Prospecting look average, and there’s no harm in continuing it. However, if you factor in win rate and velocity, you might see that Sales Prospecting has low win rate and high sales cycle. If that’s the case, you may want to reconsider sales-sourced leads and shift to a higher marketing-sourced model. The Hidden Gem: The opposite is true for certain channels that have low conversion rate but an incredibly high win rate and low velocity. You could be overlooking these channels due to lackluster conversion, or maybe your lead scoring system is too stringent (causing a low conversion rate). Consider opening up the funnel on these hidden gems to see if win rate or velocity drops; if it doesn’t, keep going until sales can’t handle any more leads. Content Is King: If conversion rate hasn’t convinced you yet, you should be a believer now. Inbound has the highest conversion rate, highest win rate, and fastest velocity of all marketing channels! The power of educational infographics, articles, and videos are more important than ever in this digital marketing era. The fact that you’re reading this blog should be proof enough. But we aren’t done yet. Now that we understand conversion rate, win rate, and velocity, we’re still missing one piece of the puzzle—the final and arguably most important piece. Stay tuned for the next blog as we dive into…THE GOLDEN RATIO! Notice something in the data that stood out to you? Got follow up questions for me? Let me know what’s on your mind in the comments section below. http://events.marketo.com/marketing-nation-online/2015/?vsource=blogcta
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As part of my role in Marketing Operations is to manage data quality. Data comes form many sources and not always in the optimal state I require it to be for lead routing. Not all Marketers are data savvy and will need some coaching when they hand over a CSV file from an event they have just ran. As we collect data from a variety of regions, not all of it is going to be perfect. Some folks expect Marketo platform to cleanse the data on upload. Some maybe missing mandatory data points in order for them to be routed to the appropriate sales rep for follow up. Bad practices of data collection can leave your data base with gapping holes and will require extra scrutiny at some point. One of the first things I do each Monday morning is check on how many leads we are collecting from our marketing activities with missing data by running a Marketo report. We took advantage of Marketo lead report in Revenue Cycle Analytics with the ability to add custom smart lists to the report. This report can then be subscribed to on a weekly or monthly cadence. Below are the steps to take to build a database health report: First off, we need to build smart lists for every field we need visibility into. Create a new folder in your Smart List section of Marketo Data base, name it ‘Data Base Health Report Smart Lists’ and create a new Smart List and start off with First Name. Make sure to name your Smart Lists the way you want them to be named in your custom columns as they will appear exactly the same. Drag and drop in First Name field into your smart list, select ‘Is empty’. This smart List will group all leads in your DB with a missing First Name. Do the same for Last Name, Company Name, Country, Lead Source, Industry, Phone etc. All the ones you need to monitor. Now go to Analytics section and create a new lead report. Go to set up and add in your custom column smart lists, the first two columns will be your 'Grouping' and 'Total leads', so be sure to add them in the order you want them to appear in the rendered report. Note: can only add up to 10 smart lists as custom columns to the lead report. Now group your report by lead create date and select to view monthly. Go to subscription section and add yourself and pick whatever cadence you want your report to be sent out. In the smart list section of your lead report, add any filters you need to segment your report by, E.g. try to look only for leads created by a certain date or from a large static list etc. Below I'm making sure I don't pull leads with empty email address and a lead type of Corporate. This area helps you to focus your lens to a smaller set of data or leave blank and pull in your whole data base to the report. Now hit report to render, once rendered, you may need to adjust the columns. Your report will now show you your total leads by your chosen create date and grouped by created month. Along side will have columns to show total leads and how many of that total are missing First Name, Last Name, Company Name, Country, Lead Source, Industry, Phone etc. Advanced actions: Using this method of reporting can show many more ways to chop your data up. Try using smart list columns for certain Marketo forms your monitoring for engagement. Filter on lead sources with lead source detail.
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By: Johnny Cheng  I hear this question from email marketers all the time: Does the size of my email send affect the performance? To answer this question, we’re going to play MythBusters! Email Myth #1 “The larger your email sends, the higher your unsubscribe rate”. Hypothesis: This one seems reasonable. I feel like if you’re doing huge email size sends, your messaging is probably going to seem “spammy”, and so a larger percentage of recipients will unsubscribe due to irrelevance. Data and Analysis: Here, you’ll see email send size against unsubscribe rate. Each dot represents an email send from a customer. I’ve cut off the data at 1M emails because everything above that becomes a special case. There is no significant correlation here. In fact, you can see there’s actually a slightly negative correlation. Larger email sends actually have lower unsubscribe rates. This could be a result of companies with larger databases having more well-known brand names so they are more careful with their email campaigns. But, I think the opposite is true in that there are many “experimental” small email sends that are sent to “unknown” contacts. Results: Myth busted! Email send size does not affect unsubscribe rate. Wow, this one wasn’t that intuitive. I assumed large email sends mimicked spam email which would warrant higher unsubscribes. But the data shows that email volume size doesn’t affect unsubscribe rate. However, it’s important to note that several other factors such as frequency, content, and relevance do. Take a moment and think about your every-day email behavior: if could be seen as annoying or irrelevant, you’re probably going to take the extra effort to unsubscribe. Email Myth #2 “The larger your email sends, the lower your click-to-open rate”. Hypothesis: Just like the first myth, this one looks plausible. Huge email sends dilute the messaging so I would imagine email performance would suffer. It’s hard to imagine one email would be relevant to millions of people, at least not relevant enough for them to click through. Data and Analysis: Here, you’ll see email send size against click-to-open rate. Each dot represents an email send from a customer. I’ve cut off the data at 1M emails because everything above that becomes a special case. There’s a very strong correlation here. If I were to sketch out the natural curves, it would look like a sideways funnel with a huge drop-off at around 20,000 to 50,000. Email sizes above that rarely reach higher than 20% click-t0-open. This makes a lot of sense if you think of content relevance. More segmented email sends, with more targeted messaging, get more clicks. And for all you inquisitive minds out there, if you’re wondering about just click rate, yes, the exact same phenomenon as click-to-open rate occurs. Results: Myth confirmed! Email send size is directly tied to performance. I love science! We proved an industry-old myth with data! But if you really think about this one, it makes a lot of sense. Open rate is tied to your subject line and sender info. Click rate is tied to your content and offering, which equals relevance. The larger your email sizes, the harder it is to stay relevant and have a compelling call-to-action that appeals to that audience. Especially after the email send size exceeds 20,000—where the average click-to-open band narrows to 3-18%. It’s very rare to escape that band. What We’ve Learned The main takeaway here is to find a good balance between the granularity of your segments and the relevance of your content or offering. If you have the resources, segment your email campaigns based on the audience persona (industry, demographic, geography, etc.) and behavior (e.g. looked at your product webpages). As a general “guideline,” the email size sweet spot is around 5,000. However, as long as your message is relevant and resonates with the recipients, you’ll get good email performance. It’s just very difficult to stay relevant beyond a certain audience size. Notice something in the data that stood out to you? Leave your comments below.
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By: Johnny Cheng Posted: August 3, 2015 | Marketing Metrics I’m baaaack! It’s me, Johnny, with your next blog from the Marketo Institute! This time around, we’re going to take a look at conversion rate. Conversion rate is one of the most important marketing metrics. It’s a metric that lead generation marketers—from practitioners all the way up to CMOs—are measured on. And that’s because today marketing owns just as much of the pipeline as sales does, and conversion rate is a great indicator of pipeline health—starting from the marketing end of the funnel. Let’s start at the top of the funnel and look at conversion rate by acquisition channel. This will help answer the age-old question of channel performance. For every dollar, what percentage would you allocate to which acquisition channel? Easy! The one with the highest conversion rate, win rate, and velocity. What Is Conversion Rate? The conversion rate, in terms of demand generation, is the percent of “contacts” that successfully go from one stage of the funnel to the next. Conversion rate could identify with any activity such as clicking a call-to-action and going from a “name” to a “lead”, or reaching a certain lead score and going from a “marketing qualified lead” to a “sales qualified lead”. But the ultimate conversion rate every demand gen marketer is measured on is lead to opportunity. Converting an interested customer into a buyer is what marketing is all about. Now, let’s dive into the data! Channels That Convert The chart below represents average conversion rate (from lead to opportunity) by acquisition channel across all Marketo customers. The darker shade of green indicates where leads converted at a higher rate. The first column shows the acquisition channel where leads are sourced. The second column shows the average conversion rate percentage of each channel. The third column shows normalized conversion rate to highlight relative standings (e.g. Paid Marketing converts 2x Events). So what does this data tell us as marketers? Looking at the results, here’s what stood out to me: Referral: The power of “word of mouth”. Bah, I guess that old cliché saying was right. Referral is by far the highest acquisition channel for conversion rate (almost 4x the average.) In fact, some of the largest, fastest adoptions (Gmail, Dropbox, Zappos) can be credited directly to “word of mouth”. Takeaway? Build a great product, build a great experience, tell the world, ask your customers to tell the world (maybe even reward them)—and you’ll profit. Inbound: Content is king. As Bill Gates predicted in an article written in 1996: “Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the internet”. Almost 20 years later, this couldn’t be more true, especially in the digital marketing era where choice of content is in the hands of the consumer. Imagine a popup ad (outbound) versus a funny infographic you chose to look at (inbound). Data clearly shows that people who choose to interact with your brand naturally convert higher (28% more than paid marketing). What are your doing to build content to support your customer’s journey? Not sure? Well, for one, it’s time to take a cue from me and start writing those awesome blogs! Prospecting: Mining for leads. This one is a bit surprising. Leads sourced from prospecting convert at a third of overall average. But this goes to show you how old-fashioned prospecting such as door-to-door or cold calling just doesn’t work well compared to other sources. It isn’t uncommon these days for me to hear about companies with 60-80% of their leads sourced from marketing. It’s much more efficient to have sales do what they do best: selling, not cold calling. Email and Nurture: Emails have the lowest conversion rate. Wait…what?! Don’t fire your email marketing team. This is showing conversion by acquisition channel, which means if your lead source came from emails and nurture, you’re doing something wrong, or you’re just desperate, or…you’re a spammer (which also explains the bad conversion rate). And as we’ll see in an upcoming Marketo Institute blog, emails and nurture both have amazing ROI for multi-touch attribution after you’ve acquired the lead. Now, It’s Your Turn Let’s use this analysis as a comparative exercise. Take a look at your conversion rate, broken down by acquisition channel (or first touch attribution, if you prefer.) How does it stack up against the Marketo average? Are there channels that are much higher or lower by comparison? Here’s what you could possibly see: “All my conversion rates are way higher than average”. Congratulations! You’re doing a great job! Take the day off. Well, unless it’s high because you have no lead scoring in place, in which case—get back to work. “My conversion rates are all over the place”. This could be due to several factors, first and foremost is the industry. When I sliced and diced the data by industry I saw some interesting things. I saw that the real estate industry’s highest conversion channel is events, which makes sense if you think about open houses being the main source of leads. Or that the non-profit industry’s highest channel is prospecting, which also makes sense if you think of all of the donation calling. Another reason your conversion rates could vary is resources and timeframe (urgency.) Certain channels are just more resource intensive (dollars or people) and can greatly differ in time-to-value. An example would be if you have a sizeable budget but need to meet an immediate spike in leads this quarter, you’re probably not going to rely on inbound content marketing. Another example would be if you have an incredibly strong partner ecosystem or reseller program, you’re going to focus more resources on those channels. “All my conversion rates are much lower than average”. Conversion rate alone isn’t a good indicator of marketing success. This is where you’ll need to look at other data sets. Align your conversion rate with win rate and velocity by channel. Hopefully you’ll start seeing some positive patterns in the data. If, for example, your conversion rate is low, but your win rate is phenomenal, it could just mean you have a very conservative marketing handoff or stringent lead scoring system, which is OK. Another scenario could be that your leads have extremely low velocity so they are sluggishly moving through the funnel, taking years to convert and realize value. But if all of the data indicates poor performance then you should take a look at your funnel. Be extra careful of this common pitfall: casting too wide of a net top-of-funnel, hoping to play a numbers game, but lacking focused programs, activities and content to drive the leads through the funnel. This is doubly dangerous because you end up wasting extra resources pulling in bad leads (ones that would never convert), while leaking out potentially good leads due to the lack of attention and touch points. Notice something in the data that stood out to you? Let me know in the comments below.
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A good doc to keep near your desk or on your desktop.
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Note: This playbook was provided by our LaunchPoint partner, Neustar. This white paper provides six simple steps for developing accurate and usable data. It's a good quick read.
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Note: This playbook was provided by our LaunchPoint partner, Neustar Results from this study reveal that the practices and attitudes of marketers and publishers are aligning with consumers’ privacy concerns. For all the negative connotations around data collection, the reality is much less scary. Below are some key findings from the study, followed by a more in-depth discussion. The marketing industry still struggles to link data to create individual customer profiles. Half of the respondents said they aren’t able to do it. Complexity seems to be the overarching challenge when it comes to data collection. 25 percent said that legal issues are a challenge; 29 percent said process is a main challenge; 19 percent responded having no systems in place was a hurdle.' Traditional modes of data collection are still dominant. 71 percent told us they collect information based on phone numbers, home addresses and IP addresses; 76 percent reported collecting demographic profile data. Interestingly, only 47 percent are collecting psychographic data. Marketers and publishers believe, overwhelmingly, that consumers should know what data is being collected. Approximately 96 percent said that consumers should have complete control and be fully informed about a company’s data collection policy and have the ability to opt-out. Additionally, 89 percent said that a company is either responsible or completely responsible for respecting and protecting consumers’ privacy. Some industry executives (21 percent) believe government constrains companies too much when it comes to collecting data. There’s also an education issue; 23 percent said they’re not familiar with the current legal framework.
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Relive a 2015 Marketo Summit session with Melissa Davies, Marketing Technologist from SLI Systems, and Marketo Community Champions, Mark Townsend from Eagle Creek Systems.
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Note: This survey was created by our LaunchPoint partner, Annuitas. From April 8 to June 15, 2014 ANNUITAS conducted a study to analyze current Enterprise-level B2B Demand Generation Strategies and discover key patterns, including where B2B marketers produce the best results and where they continue to struggle. This survey was unique in that it focused exclusively on the B2B Enterprise (organizations with revenues that exceeded $250M in annual revenue). More than 100 B2B enterprise marketers responded to the study.
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Note: This guide was provided by our partner, Cake. Topic: Mobile, Mobile, Mobile. It is important for every marketer. Understanding mobile analytics is still a challenge for most companies. This white paper aims to outline the new and emerging challenges facing those hoping to monetize the incredible potential of mobile tracking techniques.
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Note: This guide was provided by our LaunchPoint partner, Cake. Intro:  When it comes to where and how to invest their digital advertising resources, today’s marketers have more choices than ever. From display banners and mobile apps to email promotions to social media campaigns, the options available for engaging with consumers are diverse, varied and continually evolving. But while digital opportunities may be numerous, marketing budgets have limits. Now more than ever, decision makers need ways to quickly assess what’s working and what’s not so they can intelligently allocate available spend. This requires more than instinct and intuition. Data that provides accurate, rich, real-time insight into digital campaign performance is needed. Thanks to the explosion of data generated online, a goldmine of performance-related information is now available to digital advertisers. But with so much to track, organize and analyze, making sense of it all can be challenging. Transforming “Big Data” into “Smart Data” that guides fact-based decision making is the key to digital marketing success. Download the doc and read more)
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