Product Documents

I wanted to share a step-by-step on our solution to track multiple landing pages with a Person Attribute Field while using one generic form, without relying on URL UTM parameter. I hope this will be helpful to anyone looking for a solution. This solution was pieced together through some research from different sources and some trial and error. Feel free to share your thoughts or comments on it! Let's begin. [Problem] We have multiple landing pages linked to different campaigns and different assets to download. We wanted to use one generic form for all of those landing pages, and capture a Person Attribute Field to track the campaign, we didn't want long UTM parameters following our URLs or multiple forms so we built it into the page instead. [Solution] Populate a Hidden Field on your form through HTML code embedded into your Landing Page to capture campaign information. An alternate solution which doesn't use Person Attribute fields –  you can also use the "Add Constraint" option on the Fills Out Form trigger to select any form and the web pages you want to capture for the campaign, as shown below. If that's all you need, this simple solution would suffice. Step 1: Setting your Generic Form Field In your generic form, add a new Field and select the Person Attribute you're going to use to track the landing page. For our form, I used the "utm_campaign" Person Attribute because we're already tracking through that field. You can choose to use any Person Attribute that is appropriate for your Marketo instance to track campaigns. The Label doesn't matter, set Field Type to "Hidden", and set Form Pre-fill to "Disabled". Edit the Autofill, set Default Value as "utm tracking missing" (or anything similar of your choice, we'll get into why later) and Get Value from as "Use Default Value". If you don't set a default value Marketo defaults to "null" which will block changes to that field for this form. Once you're happy with your other fields, save your form. Step 2: Populating the Hidden Tracking Field through your Guided Landing Page HTML In your Design Studio, find the Landing Page Template you're using for your Landing Pages, and edit it. Note this step is only for Marketo Guided Landing Pages*. In your head section, place the following Marketo String with your meta tags (more information on Marketo Strings here). This will allow you to easily adjust the landing page campaign later as you create more pages. Find where your Marketo form div is located, and insert the script code following the mktoForm div as shown below. This script will change your hidden "utm_campaign" field to the value indicated on your landing page. "utmcampaign"** is your Person Attribute Field name, and ${hiddencampaign} points to the Marketo String you set up. Save your Landing Page Template and you are done with this step. *Note: You can also do this step with embedded forms on non-Marketo pages using the code for setting Hidden Fields on this page. Note that you'll skip setting the Marketo String Syntax and input your desired Person Attribute value directly into the script as Marketo Syntaxes cannot be used on non-Marketo pages. **Note: You'll notice that the HTML form.vals "utmcampaign" is different from the displayed Person Attribute "utm_campaign" in your form editor and Marketo record. Sometimes the actual SOAP API value used by the backend is different from the Friendly Display value in Marketo, I will include steps on how to check the SOAP API value in the appendix at the end of this tutorial. Step 3: Create your Landing Page Once your HTML is set in your Landing Page Template, create or edit your Landing Page using that template. Set your generic form from earlier, and in your right-hand elements bar you should see a section for Variables, where you'll see the "Hidden Campaign Field" you created using the mktoString meta tag. Type in the campaign name you want to track with there. I chose "Example Campaign" for the purpose of this tutorial. Once you're happy with the rest of your landing page go ahead and save it. Your landing page form will now populate the "utm_campaign" Person Attribute for the Person with "Example Campaign" once the form is submitted. Step 4: Set your Trigger Capture Campaign Now that all the client facing elements are ready, you can create your Trigger Smart Campaign to capture and update the Person record. In your Marketo Program, create a new Smart Campaign. I've named mine "Campaign Capture" for my own organization, but you can name it whatever you want. Description is up to you, or just leave it blank. Once it's created, go to the Campaign's Smart List and add the Trigger Filter "Fills Out Form", and indicate one or more forms that feed into this campaign. Now add a Filter for "utm_campaign" and set the value to the "Hidden Campaign Field" you indicated on your landing page, in this case "Example Campaign". Insert any other Filters you want to exclude or include People that come through the program, and make sure to adjust your Smart List Rule Logic accordingly. Once you're happy with it, move onto the Flow step and set your form fill success actions. For this tutorial, we've opted to "Change Program Status" to Responded and "Send Email" confirming form success. Now "Activate" your Trigger Smart Campaign and you're ready to go! Step 5: Error Reporting No process is without errors, so now we'll set up a simple error reporting Trigger Smart Campaign to notify you when your campaign capture process fails at the form step. You'll recall that in the form, we set the Default Value for our "utm_campaign" as "utm tracking missing". This is so that in the event the HTML code in your Landing Page fails to populate the field with a value, the form sets this as the "utm_campaign" Person Attribute. To catch this error and notify myself, I set up a new Default Program with our "Operational" channel settings and named it "Tracking Error Notification". Inside it I created Smart Campaign and and an Alert Email (information on creating Alert Emails using the specific Alert Token). In the Smart Campaign Smart List, insert a Trigger Filter for "Data Value Changes", Add Constraint "New Value" set it as the default error value, in this case "utm tracking missing" Now all that's left is to create a Flow Step to "Send Alert" (information on how here). Now you'll receive an email alert anytime the utm_campaign field fails to populate through the Landing Page form. *EDIT: A commenter recommended that the error message be cleared so that multiple exceptions can be flagged, which would be a great step. To do so, add a "Change Data Value" flow step for the Person Attribute, in this case "utm_campaign" and set the new value to "NULL", which will clear the "utm_campaign" field after the alert is sent. You're done! Now for all future Landing Pages with this generic Form, just remember to populate the "Hidden Campaign Field". I hope you've found this tutorial helpful. Cheers, Lawrence Mien Marketing Operations TigerText The Very Short Appendix So you've set your hidden Person Attribute field and indicated it in your HTML code, but the Person Attribute is still not populating correctly through the form. The issue may be that the Friendly Display Person Attribute field name is different from the SOAP API Person Attribute field for HTML. If you don't have Marketo Admin access, or don't feel like exporting the full field list, here's how you can check it: Publish or preview your Landing Page and go to it in your browser. Right-click at the bottom of the form (on Chrome) and hit Inspect. This will pull up the righthand side development panel to show you the HTML. Find the where the Marketo Form HTML is located and expand the mktoFormRow where the hidden field is. In the highlighted section below, you'll see that the SOAP API name of the Person Attribute is "utmcampaign" and not "utm_campaign". Simply drop this correct SOAP API Person Attribute name into your code back in Step 2.

Email performance analytics sits at the heart of every digital marketer, you want to be aware of how the performance has been and need the ability to report on the same using various dimensions relative to your marketing. More often than not, all marketing automation systems have a performance issue when it comes to providing analytics quickly with the parameters that you would like. Marketo has also been lacking in this area for quite some time since RCA is sold as a separate product and that also had performance issue till last year or so, when the UI was changed but still performance is not up to the mark and Marketo analytics is not that powerful a feature to suffice the digital needs of today. As a resolution to the same, Marketo has introduced Email insights to provide lightning quick reporting on Email performance with a plethora of dimensions/parameters to filter your report. It works real fast and allows you to report on performance which not only includes batch campaigns but can also include trigger campaigns and operation emails (You can choose to exclude them as well). There are options of choosing performance relative to one/multiple workspaces, you can add parameters such as segmentations, channels and program tags and include them as dimensions and report on them. There’s an option to filter the report on Audience (country and state parameters), Content (email, program, smart campaigns, theme) and Platform (Device OS and Device type). You can generate charts to assess the performance during selected period based on Time (Day, Week and Month) and filter on various parameters. On the right hand side you can also select metrics such as opens, clicks and unsubscribes to check on the performance by parameters of audience, content and platform. You also have the ability to save these reports as quick charts for periodic performance review, you can save up to 20 quick charts. Although it’s a fresh new option for analytics there’s a lot of scope for improvement, for example. The ability to export data/reports/charts is not available so if you want to share the data with anyone outside Marketo you can’t, which is a huge disappointment. There’s no option to report on custom parameters such as conversions, program successes etc.  There are only 10 custom dimensions that can be added which makes the set up limited. The ability to report on custom lead filters using smart lists as available in Email performance reports is not there. There’s no email link performance analysis. Overall a fresh new interface and a much needed option for Email performance reporting but still has a lot of scope for improvement. Here’s the Summary: Pros: Lightning quick reporting capabilities. Dimensions and work-space options for reporting. New filter options such as Audience, Content and Device. Ability to create quick charts. Cons: Inability to export reports Only 10 custom dimensions No custom lead filters and custom parameters No Email link performance analysis Here’s an example of how to use Email insights for your reporting purposes, it includes the steps you need to follow to leverage the various capabilities available for reporting. Log into Marketo and click on the tab on the top left hand side to go to Email Insights: This is how Email Insights home screen looks like: It provides you a lot of options of choosing to report on, you can select the Workspaces on which you want to see the performance: In this example, I want to check the performance in Europe, so I’ll choose Europe as the work-space. You can select the dates for which you want to check the email performance: There’s an option of comparing periods as well. You can click on sends on the top left corner to check the various email sends during the period and choose from it the one that you are interested in: If the desired email communication doesn’t show up here, then it could be because it is an operational email, the general settings of Email insights excludes the operational and trigger campaigns, you can change the same in the personal settings: There are a lot of parameters on which Email insights allows you to filter, one of them is Audience. You can filter the audience from country/state and check the email performance for them, for example: If you want to report on email performance during the last month in California etc. You can also filter on specific content, which can be either email sends: Select the email send you want to check the performance. You can also filter on Smart campaigns and the same would reflect in the report: Similarly program filters are also available: A new and fresh addition would be the ability to report device and OS performance, although this option is available as a constraint in Marketo Analytics, this is much better and faster, as it provides you comparative performance views on devices, which is nor the case with Analytics: You can select the Operating systems as a filter as well: There are filters available on your left and right side and you can select either to modify the report/chart: Here’s an example of filtering using parameters on the left side: On your right hand side you have options of choosing filters as well, by default all filter options will show: You can click on Audience, content and device to filter on and analyze the performance further: You have an option of viewing the performance by time as well in the selected time frame, you can select from day, week and month and the report will be modified accordingly: You can also add custom dimensions to these reports which can be used as a filter. To do so, click on the settings option: You can go to System settings to add dimensions, you can add segmentation, channels as dimensions and report the performance on them. Program tags can also be added as a dimension, a maximum of 10 dimensions are allowed with Email insights: Once you are done creating your report/chart based on all the filters and parameters, you can save it as a quick chart for periodic performance review: Name the chart and save it: You can it on the quick charts option on the right hand side, a maximum of 20 charts can be saved: Hope this was informative and helps you in leveraging Email insights for your organization. Your feedback matters a lot to me so if you have any suggestions/comments/queries relative to this, please comment below.

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.

Author: Joe Paone  ​ It’s no secret that the financial services industry has been going through a transformation in recent years. Independent financial advisors, as well as large institutions, are moving away from commissioned accounts to a fee-based approach. Firms like Merrill Lynch that were once full of commissioned-based brokerage accounts now have a company roadmap to transition customers to fee-only accounts. Advisors who were once paid on transactions are now be paid a percentage of all the money that they manage. This not only has implications for their business models but their marketing models as well. By tying compensation to assets under management (AUM), advisors are now highly incentivized to retain existing customers (unless they want a pay cut). And if they want to increase AUM, they must acquire new customers or cross-sell additional services like estate planning or tax planning. Impact to Marketers This shift in focus applies to marketers across all verticals, as buyers have higher expectations and are harder to win over without having personalized conversations. Gone are the days where a print ad strategy was all you needed to acquire new customers and keep your brand top-of-mind. Today’s marketers have to be more savvy than simply sending mass emails to their databases or hiring an agency to run a digital ad across the internet. Buyers and investors expect the same level of personalization they would get from Amazon, YouTube, or other retail companies. In an industry that is traditionally slow to adopt new technology, it’s imperative that marketers push their firms to change. There’s a reason robo-advisors like Wealthfront or Betterment are growing at breakneck speeds (granted, a very small percentage of assets are currently managed by robo-advisors). They are embracing technology like marketing automation to more efficiently and effectively acquire and retain customers through a personalized approach at scale. Here are three key ways marketing automation can help you acquire and retain customers, in financial services and beyond: 1. Segmentation To get the right message to the right investor, you must segment your audience. This is the same strategy YouTube uses when suggesting videos you may be interested in, or Amazon uses to suggest products you might want to consider. While there are ways to implement segmentation outside of marketing automation (excel, CRM, etc.), if you want to deliver different messages to different segmentations in real-time, there are no substitutes. Create a personalized journey by segmenting your prospects into different buckets so that you can provide each bucket specific content that aligns to your desired outcome. Basic segmentation can be separated into two different buckets: demographic (based on who they are) and behavioral (based on what they have done). Demographic: If you are an asset manager, for example, you can start demographic segmentation by splitting your audience into two categories: institutional investors and retail investors. For institutional investors, you likely know your target market very well. Marketing automation allows you to segment based on industry, company size, role, location, AUM, investment style, and anything else you deem important. On the other side, you have retail investors, which at a basic level can be segmented by age, net worth or investable assets, location, gender, and investment preferences or goals. Behavioral: Behavior segmentation is based on what your audience does, which could be: where a prospect is in the buying cycle, what their score is (which will be covered below), different financial products or strategies they have expressed an interest in, web activity or email engagement, and, of course, non-activity. All of these behaviors reveal their online body language that indicates their level of interest and future intent in becoming a client. Now that we’ve gone through the basic two components of segmentation, you can define and build specific segmentations for your clients and prospects that leverage both demographic and behavioral information. You will use these segmentations to help tailor your messaging for each group. Target accounts, investment strategy, client behavior, portfolio size, investor persona, and region all lend themselves well to different segmentations. Once you’ve nailed that down, the next step is to start developing even more advanced and targeted segments taking into account behavioral data, scoring, etc. An easy place to start is through your buyer personas. For example, a prospect may be retired and primarily interested in fixed income. If you want to acquire that prospect, it doesn’t make sense to communicate with them about a long-short strategy or some other tactical play. On the other hand, you may have identified some prospects that are more hands-on or sophisticated. Those potential investors may prefer more detailed communications in the form of a whitepaper and more frequent updates. The bottom line with segmentation is that if you know what your customers and prospects care about, you can tailor your communications to them. Whether you’re marketing financial products or business software, by delivering personalized communications to specific segments, with you’ll be able to take the personalized touch and feel of a 1 on 1 conversation and extend it into all of your digital marketing communications. 2. Scoring Lead scoring—a method of ranking leads for their sales-readiness, agreed upon by both sales and marketing—is a concept that you’re probably familiar with. Lead scoring helps you prioritize which prospects sales need to follow up with immediately and which prospects need to be nurtured. While it sounds easy enough to implement, depending on the size of your business, it can be extremely challenging without the right tools. If you work for a large firm, you may have to engage multiple teams (analytics, digital, etc.) and partners (agencies, third parties, etc.) in order to pull all the information that you need for lead scoring. This is extremely inefficient, time-consuming, and more often than not leaves you with stale data. If you work for a small firm, you may have to conduct your lead scoring by exporting data from various sources and running multiple Excel searches s to match known users to their behaviors. You may also be using a CRM system to help with your lead scoring. In either case, you’re left with incomplete data and can only score “known visitors,” leaving all unidentified or anonymous prospects behind. With marketing automation, you can set up rules that score prospects and customers based on demographics (investible assets, investment time horizon, etc.) and behavior (online and offline) as well as anything else that your sales team finds important. If your marketing automation platform integrates with your CRM, when a salesperson updates a record (i.e. changes a person’s investible assets), that information will be immediately reflected in the score. Scoring should happen in real-time, so you don’t have to spend countless hours pulling data and matching accounts. For an illustrative look at the benefits of lead scoring and how to implement it, refer to the chart below. On the right-hand side of this chart, there are two types of scores: latent behaviors (which are really just forms of engagement) and then active behaviors which demonstrate some buying intent. In latent behaviors, a prospect could download an early stage whitepaper and get +3 points. Then, that prospect, who you assumed to be a good prospect, began to visit the careers page heavily. This action indicates that perhaps this wasn’t a prospect at all, but rather someone who is interested in a job, so then you can decrease the score by -10. In active behaviors, if a prospect visits the fees page, you can assign them +30 points. Or if someone requests to be contacted, give them +50 points and send them straight to sales. Using this scoring methodology, you can then set a score threshold that indicates when a prospect is “sales-ready.” For example, if a prospect gets to a score of 100 (and you know that based on sales feedback, a score of 100 or greater indicates a warm prospect that is ready for a sales conversation), you can automatically notify sales. 3. Sales Efficiency Implementing a segmentation and scoring strategy will ultimately help your sales team become more efficient. They will better understand the right people to call (based on their lead score) and better understand what to talk about (based on their segmentation). As an example, let’s say that before you implemented marketing automation, you were sending 30 prospects per day to sales. Of those, only five were warm and ready to have a conversation. But since sales didn’t know which prospects were warm, they had to call all 30 to find the five warm prospects. That is inefficient. With marketing automation, taking the same example of 30 prospects per day, you can eliminate sending 17 of those prospects to sales because they didn’t reach the scoring threshold. Furthermore, you can eliminate three other prospects who visited your careers page. Ultimately, you end up only sending 10 prospects to sales, which means that your salespeople only need to make 10 calls to find five warm prospects, rather than making 30 to reach the same outcome. Through marketing automation, segmentation, and leading scoring, you’ll increase sales efficiency and your salespeople can spend more time prospecting through their own outbound efforts. All the companies and industries can benefit from a solid marketing automation platform. The financial services industry, in particular, is perfectly positioned to realize tremendous value. Investing can be very emotional for people as money doesn’t come easy, so if you send them mass emails or blanket messages that don’t speak to their particular needs or situation, you’re likely to alienate them. But with the right segmentation and scoring in place, you can create timely and hyper-relevant marketing campaigns that will help you acquire and retain clients, grow your existing customer base, and ultimately increase sales efficiency. What other industries can benefit immensely from marketing automation? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

By: Alexandra Nation Posted: May 9, 2016 | Sales Ah, my first software demo–I remember it like it was yesterday (it was four years ago). Somewhere out there is a shell-shocked prospect wondering why on earth they even took my call. If you’re in a client-facing role and looking to improve your demo and presentation skills, this blog post is for you. For your amusement or horror, below is a list of some of the missteps I made during that call: My voice shook from nerves and too much coffee. I didn’t ask questions. Instead, I rambled on with details of no consequence and irrelevant tangents. My mouse flew all over the screen for no apparent reason as I excitedly clicked into every last feature of the product. I jumped to answer every question instead of trying to understand the use case, which invariably led to more questions. I completely neglected to read my audience and adjust accordingly. I made a very sleek and easy to use technology appear complicated and confusing. I called out bugs in the demo instance on the 1-2 occasions that the product didn’t function properly. Tell them. This is when you build your business case for why your solution meets their needs. Don’t just rattle off different features. Speak to how you can help—how can your product or service can help them overcome their challenges? Tell them what you told them. Repeat your takeaways to drive the point home before you end your presentation. When you deliver your demo, pause early and often. In my early days at Marketo, I watched my fellow SCs employ the magic of a pause in their demos. At the end of each section, they would pause for several seconds–to the point where it was borderline uncomfortable–instead of asking for some kind of feedback. Again, it demonstrates through your actions that you care about keeping the call conversational, and it gives your conversational partner an easy way to participate. 5. When You Do Talk, Pretend You’re a News Anchor Think of how news anchors speak: in easily digestible, repeatable sound bites. Celebrity news hosts are especially good at this, but you can watch for it on every single news program. When someone on CNN is explaining a foreign policy decision, they don’t go off on some obscure tangent. Rather, they don’t waste a single word, use plain English, and follow a very logical flow. I just gave you an excuse to watch TMZ to improve in your job—you’re welcome. Pretending you’re a news anchor will also accomplish another important goal: keeping your demo laser-focused. Every click and every screen you show should have a purpose. 6. Take Your Hands Off the Keyboard If you are not specifically clicking on something, take your hands off the keyboard and put them in your lap while you answer a question. This will help you avoid waving your mouse all over the screen and distracting your prospect. They will look wherever you point, so mind your gestures. Plus, who knows what you might accidentally click on? 7. Discover the QBQ–the Question Behind the Question I was recently on an internal certification for one of our newer Solutions Consultants. Our manager asked her how many filters we have in a specific feature, and she handled it perfectly. Rather than scramble to answer, she paused, smiled, and asked him to explain his use case. Sure enough, he had no interest in a number, but wanted to see a specific scenario built out. The conversation took a completely different and far more productive path because it veered away from features/functions and towards benefits and addressing pain points. 8. Balance Likability with Excellent Product Knowledge I firmly believe that people buy from people they like. They also buy from people who know what they’re talking about. It’s important to establish a positive relationship with your customer, but only after you’ve earned it by establishing your credibility. This means that if you don’t know something, admit it candidly. Then, earn their trust even more by following up promptly with the correct answer to their question. 9. Record Yourself The best athletes watch their games and pick apart everything they could have done better. The best salespeople do the same. Use the camera on your computer or phone if you do any onsite presentations, or use a screen/voice capture product like Snagit if you conduct business virtually. This will help you identify your filler words and see how well you navigate your product. 10. Don’t Call the Baby Ugly This one drives me crazy. If your demo instance is lacking some data, loads an odd screen or error message, or just takes a minute to pull up, don’t acknowledge it. Fill the space with conversation and don’t apologize for your tools. Most of the time, the customer doesn’t notice that there’s an issue. Worst-case scenario is that you can follow up after the call with a screenshot of what you wanted to show, which opens a door for another conversation with them. Whether you’re just getting started in sales or looking to master your craft, I’d love to hear from you. Which of these tips resonated? Is there anything you’d add to the list?

By: Heidi Bullock Posted: June 13, 2016 | Marketing Metrics Does it feel like every day you see a new article on marketing metrics? Lately, there has been a lot of buzz around the RIGHT metrics to focus on. Today it’s pipeline, yesterday it was MQLs, and last week it was customer acquisition cost (CAC). In marketing, the one thing that is a constant is change, and it can feel overwhelming to finally agree on a set of metrics with your team, then go to a conference or see a tweet from an analyst and realize that you’re missing five more. Today, I saw that pipeline is the #1 thing your business should be looking at if you’re in B2B. I can’t say I disagree with this, but I do really think it’s less about one metric like pipeline and more about what metric matters forwhen you’re measuring. Here are a five things I’ve learned over the years about marketing metrics, and while they may not be the trendiest, they still hold true to this day: 1. It Starts With Understanding Your Business Objectives Be clear on your business objectives first, then determine what metrics to measure. One way to do this is by mapping your business stages to the customer journey. In the example below, the customer journey is broken into stages, including: awareness, engage, convert, retain, and advocacy, but they may differ for your organization depending on your business model. These stages represent the different business outcomes your company is driving towards (e.g. retention or share of voice), and it’s critical to establish this first to determine the right set of metrics and timing that map to those objectives. 2. It’s Not About ONE Metric The metrics you measure depend on the set questions you’re asking and the timing. When my team first runs a program–whether it’s for target accounts (ABM) or a PPC program–we understand that we won’t have a pipeline number on day one or even day 14. While we ultimately care about the pipeline/cost ratio and revenue won to show how our programs contribute to business growth, these numbers take time to mature so we track them at a later time. However, this doesn’t mean that you should just twiddle your thumbs as you wait for your programs to run their course. It’s important to track early stage metrics in the meantime because they help you understand whether you’re seeing early signs of success or need to make modifications. The example below demonstrates the different types of metrics you might track for an ABM campaign. While your business objective is to generate more revenue within your target accounts–you need to look at other early- and mid-stage metrics along the way to understand whether you’re making the right progress. Here’s another example for an event. While you ultimately want your event to bring in closed-won deals, that takes time. In the interim, it’s important to look at early stage engagement. While it’s not a perfect predictor, you can still see if you need to make any adjustments, such as sending out more invites or adding a registration discount, to ensure you’re getting closer to the end goal. 3. Agree on Definitions EARLY If you haven’t heard it enough, here it is again: sales and marketing alignment is critical to closing more deals. This starts with agreeing on definitions early on so that both teams are on the same page as leads come in and progress down the funnel. Is your revenue team aligned on the definition of a lead, MQL, SQL, or opportunity? This definition may differ throughout different companies, so it’s critical to make sure your definitions are documented and communicated. 4. Get the Right Systems in Place to Track Your Progress One of the reasons it’s so important to understand what metrics you’ll track before you run a campaign is because there’s nothing worse than not being able to answer a critical question because the right tracking and technology wasn’t in place. Think of the questions you’ll want to ask first, then work backwards to ensure you can track the different steps that answer them. Do you have the right technology to be able to track the number of blog subscribers on your site? Do you know which email program was the most successful for deal acceleration? Which case study was the most successful for your sales team? The example below shows how a webinar program is tracked in Marketo (although you can use another marketing automation system to do this). You can dig into the data to understand how your leads interacted with your program. Did they register for the webinar? Did they actually attend? Did they engage with the follow-up email you sent? How did this webinar contribute to revenue growth? These are the types of questions you’ll want to ask before you even run your campaigns to make sure everything is set up on the back-end to answer them. 5. Focus on a Few Key Metrics That Help You IMPROVE Your Marketing This means that you should measure things not just because they are measurable, but rather because they will guide you towards the decisions you need to make to improve company profitability. Think about the contrast of a 747 airplane dashboard and your car dashboard–there are so many different indicators on an airplane dashboard that it’s hard to quickly ascertain the most important ones. On the other hand, the different indicators on a car are pretty clear so that you can quickly decisions like when to bring your car in for maintenance or when to get gas. Likewise, you should have a key set of metrics for your business objectives that you monitor regularly to understand what are positive outcomes and where you need to focus more.  Marketing metrics can be a mouthful, and while it’s important to stay up-to-date on the latest and greatest, all the buzz can get overwhelming when you don’t know what to look for. With the right measurement strategy in place, you can be well on your way to mastering metrics and measuring the right ones. What other factors do you consider as you’re planning your measurement strategies? Share your tips in the comments below!

By: Aleece Germano Posted: June 21, 2016 | Marketing Metrics As a digital marketer, you might be asking yourself this question: “Where’s my (social) ROI?” Your boss is asking you for it. You see ads following you on the web trying to help you calculate it. Your peers tell you it’s impossible: “You want to attribute revenue dollars to social? Good luck with that.” So what’s a data-driven marketer to do? When it comes to attributing ROI to a top-of-funnel social media strategy, the challenge is often in having access to enough data points to correctly understand its impact on revenue. While a sale may not result directly from a social engagement, social may have served as the initial entry point (discovery) or a point of reference (consideration) multiple times along the buyer’s journey. In this case, attribution requires analysis across multiple touchpoints, using multi-touch (MT) attribution, rather than only looking at first-touch (FT) attribution or last-touch (LT) attribution. Let’s start by looking at an example: Marketing is creating approved content for the sales team to distribute across social networks in order to start and nurture conversations as part of their social selling strategy. On some teams, sales uses Twitter to search for buzzwords and chat with potential leads. How can you track a conversation on Twitter all the way through to a closed-won deal? Before we get started, let’s take a look as some assumptions I’ve made about your marketing and sales technology: Your sales team is using a customer relationship management (CRM) system and your marketing team is using a complete marketing automation platform. Your sales or marketing team is using a social relationship platform (SRP) such as Hootsuite, Synthesio, or Sprinklr for social publishing and/or listening on social networks. Now, let’s explore how to measure the ROI of B2B social campaigns with multi-touch attribution: 1. Connect Your CRM and SRP to Your Marketing Automation Platform First, you need to integrate your solutions so that data can flow in and out properly. Some marketing automation solutions may offer a native integration with your CRM that syncs the data on a regular schedule. Or you might build your own connector via open APIs and/or middleware partners. Check to see what integrations may be available for the SRP you are using. If you’re using Marketo, you’ll need to configure an easy, out-of-the box integration with your CRM and SRP. (Details in our LaunchPoint ecosystem.) Now, when your sales team publishes content via the SRP and it ignites a conversation on social, they can send that data into your marketing automation system. Here’s a peek at what that looks like using the Hootsuite integration for Marketo (of course, your exact solutions may differ): 2. Identify a Match or Create a New Lead Next, a complete marketing automation solution can check to see if there’s a match in the database. If not, as you can see below, it will identify whether that person is a new lead. Awesome! You just created a lead from social. 3. Measure Your ROI Now, as you run campaigns with your marketing automation platform, your lead may convert, and her email address and other form data will be appended to her record in your database. From here on, your marketing automation system will track every interaction along the funnel to a closed-won opportunity. In the meantime, you will want to track the program costs simultaneously as part of campaign creation.Time to run some reports. A solid marketing automation platform will allow you to measure multi-touch attribution, so that you can understand which programs are most influential in moving people forward in the sales cycle over time. In Marketo, you can run the Program Analyzer to see which channel drove the highest ROI. From a first-touch perspective, you can see that social as an acquisition channel brought in 1,367 new names (leads) and produced an ROI of 108%. That’s not bad, but what if you look at this from a multi-touch perspective? From a multi-touch perspective, you can see a different story emerge which helps you understand how social impacts middle-of-the funnel activity, as reps continue to nurture and engage leads on social. Here we see the true ROI as 142%–a higher ROI for a much lower cost than other marketing programs. Now that you’ve proven your social ROI, you can confidently ask for more investment. Let’s take an even closer look at social so that we can understand the ROI of paid vs. organic. By drilling into the Social Media channel (below), we can view our ROI at a more granular level—in this case, organic posts and conversations on Twitter drove an ROI of 106%. Before you celebrate your victory and go on to optimize your social campaigns, here’s a quick recap of how you can consistently measure your social programs: Use multi-touch (MT) attribution to understand the revenue impact of your top-of-funnel strategy. Connect your CRM to a complete marketing automation platform, and connect your marketing automation platform to your SRP. Track your program/campaign costs in your marketing automation platform. Use multi-channel analytics in your marketing automation platform to compare the ROI of one marketing channel or program over another. Budgeting is easy when you have marketing ROI data at your fingertips! Marketers can show the revenue impact of their efforts on social, and across other channels. Stay tuned for my next post, where I’ll cover a new attribution use case to solve. What are your marketing attribution challenges? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

This blog was written ​ By: Mike Nierengarten Posted: June 23, 2016 | Targeting and Personalization As marketers, we work hard to acquire and retain new customers, but not enough of us spend much time thinking about what type of new customers we want to acquire by looking at our existing customer base. The best customers are those that last a lifetime, and by segmenting your current customers and identifying which are the most profitable, stay the longest, expand service, and refer new customers, you can allocate more of your marketing dollars to acquiring similar prospects. Segmentation also highlights which of your customers are leaving, helping you understand what causes them to churn and therefore make a conscious effort to fix it. If you’re a B2B organization, your company likely markets to large enterprise customers with large budgets differently than more price-conscious small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) whose needs may be different. You might separate your enterprise sales teams from SMB sales teams, and you may have different cost per new customer targets for enterprise and SMB. If you’re a Consumer organization, your marketing understands that marketing to pre-teens is different than marketing to a new mom—your whole approach may be different, including your revenue goals. Go beyond just segmenting your customers into large buckets and distinguish sub-segments for each of your customer segments. Here are four steps to segment your existing customers to target the right prospects: 1. Identify Your Best Customers to Find Your Best Prospects If you want to acquire the right prospects, it starts with knowing who your core customers are. Your best customers are going stay with you for a long time, refer you, and extend your marketing and sales efforts. So, prospects who have the same personas, or attributes as your core customers are your best prospects. Every company is going to have different ways of defining their best customers and prospects. As an example, Dialpad understands the key attributes that make up their customer personas: industry, number of employees, company revenue, job roles, product interests, etc. But they also realize that their best customers share their positive experiences on social media, so they target prospects who have the same persona as their core customers and are more likely to publicly advocate. Specifically, they look for prospects who have shared positive experiences on social media profiles and technology review sites in the past. Then, they pair this knowledge with data from exploratory questions, onboarding information, and third party tools. They know their best customers use Google Apps, for example, and this factors into their prospect vetting process. 2. Calculate the Customer Value In creating a list of your best customers, take into account the value that each customer brings your business. Calculate their profit margin, customer lifetime value, and retention rate and consider added value such as client referrals, joint marketing, case studies, and reference. While profit margin and lifetime value are significant, do not underestimate the value of advocacy. A past study by Zuberance revealed that brand advocates are worth five typical customers, significantly multiplying the overall customer value. Understanding common attributes in your customers advocating your brand will help you easily identify future brand advocates. 3. Increase Spend on Campaigns Targeting Core Prospects Once you have put together a profile of your best customers, you can use those same attributes to identify your top prospects. Since long-term, highly profitable customers who advocate are worth more than a standard customer, you should spend more to acquire them. Picture a campaign budget of $100,000. Let’s assume a core customer costs twice as much to acquire, but profit margin is 15% compared to 10% for a standard customer and their lifetime revenue is five times a typical customer. If historically, half of your budget was spent on acquiring standard customers and half was spent on acquiring core customers, you could increase profitability by 35% just by shifting your media spend to 80/20, targeting more core prospects. Despite spending more on targeting core customers, these buyers will provide more value to your business due to their advocacy, retention, service expansion, and overall spend. 4. Run More Campaigns Targeting Core Prospects By knowing who your best prospects are from evaluating your best customers, you can optimize your current campaigns and determine which are most effective at acquiring these target buyers. You can go a step further and establish different cost per opportunity targets for core prospects and then optimize campaigns to drive future long-term customers and advocates. For example, if your general customer target is IT decision-makers and you determine that IT companies who use Hadoop with 100-1,000 employees are more profitable and advocate more often, you can increase your cost per opportunity target for the sub-segment of Hadoop users at mid-size companies. Ideally, you’ll know just how much more you can pay. And if in your analysis of your best customer you determine that your best customers are worth 8x a standard customer, you should be able to increase your target cost per opportunity by 8x. Long-term revenue goes beyond just acquiring customers. If you have a good grasp on the correlation between your best customers and what you are willing to pay for those customers, you may end up paying a little more per customer in the short-term, but your long-term profitability will skyrocket. On the flip side, it’s just as important to proactively identify which customer segments are more likely to churn and work hard to continuously provide value to them to retain them. Have you started segmenting your customer base to find the best prospects to target? Share your experience in the comments below!

Hi Community, I recently worked on a template to prove my social media ROI to my boss ! And I want to share it with you here because I need some feedback on this job For french readers here is the complete article which explains the purpose, and the template : [Template] Le ROI social media enfin démontré à ton boss | LinkedIn (I will translate it soon) If you need more information, you can ask me at : marineboussat@gmail.com Or add me on Linkedin : https://www.linkedin.com/in/marineboussat/ Thanks !

A good doc to keep near your desk or on your desktop.

By: Heidi Bullock Posted: March 24, 2016 | Modern Marketing Earlier this week, the big marketing technology (MarTech) conference swept through San Francisco, giving marketers and technologists a sense of new and upcoming solutions, and what technologies are truly standing the test of time. Every year when this time rolls around, I personally really look forward to Scott Brinker’s updated Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic. And every year, as I look at the graphic and sift through the landscape, I go through a series of emotions (and this year was no exception, with the number of MarTech solutions now reaching 3,874): Excitement: Wow, this is a beautiful visualization of tech geek nirvana. I love it! Look at all of these new companies with interesting new offerings. And Scott has done a great job of categorizing the thousands of companies in a very elegant and organized way. Pride: MarTech is real. Marketing has come a long way and I’m so proud that this area of business is getting the investment and attention it deserves. Several years ago, this would have looked like a few green peas on a big white plate, but today, it’s a satisfying meal–complete with mints when you are done eating. Panic: Dear God, do I really need to know about all of these companies? Am I an incompetent marketer if I am not using all of the “latest and greatest”? How is my budget going to support another tool–and who on my team is going to run this thing? These concerns are real. It’s hard enough to come into the office every day and work on your day-to-day tasks, but more and more, marketers are challenged with being a technical landscape aficionado on top of it–and this is coming from someone who loves it! Calm, Cool and Collected: Okay, stay cool. I have got this and I need to chill out. It’s easy to get stuck in any one stage of the emotional journey, it’s critical to keep moving forward. While an entire book could be written on how to make sense of all of the MarTech solutions, let’s keep things simple for the purpose of this blog. Follow these three steps to navigate the ever-evolving MarTech landscape: 1. Build a Solid Foundation It’s critical to have a few core solutions that represent the foundation of your ‘house’. A good way to think about this is to understand what will be your source of truth or system of record for your key functions. For many companies, this is often your marketing automation systems, customer database/CRM and content management system (CMS) . This is an obvious point, but make sure you put energy and thought into this blueprint. The tools you put in place here are critical to getting set up correctly. For example, understand your data flow, rules, and data hygiene processes. Understand APIs and what is truly out-of-the box versus needing to bring in a team to complete your integration. It’s also helpful to connect with other companies similar to your own to see what they have done right and wrong–essentially, learn from their successes and mistakes. 2. Understand Where You Are and Where You’re Going You need to know what the current state of your business is and where you plan to go. The majority of businesses are trying to grow–so make sure you consider this as you evaluate new solutions. It’s critical to think about tools that will grow with you, so you don’t have to rip-and-replace every other year. Some solutions are excellent for a small businesses, but then reach real limitations quickly. Another important lens is understanding needs versus wants. What is mission-critical for your business? If customer marketing and referrals are important, you may need software to drive advocacy. Or, if this is in your future, build your stack knowing this could be an addition for next year. 3. Avoid a ‘Frankenstack’ Some of you might have seen what’s commonly referred to as a “Frankenstack”, a set of individual siloed tools that an organization tries to get to work together and ultimately results in a hot mess. It can happen to the best marketers, and it often happens because of rapid growth and a lack of planning or impulsive decisions (“Hey we can use it here!”). It is painful for IT, and it is painful for marketers. When this occurs, it is often more time consuming and expensive to fix. The key here is to have a plan, involve IT, and be honest about the resources you need to maintain and manage the solutions. This thoughtfulness will save a lot of grief in the future. The ever-evolving sea of MarTech solutions can be overwhelming, but with the right plan in place, you can understand how to evaluate new solutions and avoid being swept away by “shiny new objects”. Have you checked out the new Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic? What other tips do you have for evaluating these solutions for the best fit for your business?

ABM campaigns are about making one-on-one human connections despite the impersonal barriers of big business. If you want to cut through the noise, reach your champion and sway a whole organization you need to act outside of the inbox. Direct mail works and we’ll show you how it integrates with digital channels to make your ABM campaign connect. This guide shares best practices on why and how marketers should incorporate direct mail into their ABM strategies. It includes example campaigns and tips on when to send mail, how to personalize it and how to measure its effectiveness as part of a multi-channel ABM program.

By: Jamie Lewis Posted: February 2, 2016 | Marketing Metrics While it may seem like there is a new marketing channel available almost every day (I’m devising my smart fridge strategy as we speak), email marketing, when done right, is still one of the most profitable acquisition and lead retention channels available. To clarify, by “done right” I mean permission-based email marketing with content that is personalized, relevant, timely, and highly optimized. And if you don’t have a great email program like this already, then you’re leaving tremendous value on the table. Be data-cated So how can you craft a slammin’ email channel to drive value to your stakeholders? The answer is actually quite mundane: you need to have the right set of metrics to analyze your email marketing channel and optimize it to stardom. This set of metrics is called your key performance indicators (KPIs) and should be very closely tied to your organization’s primary business goals. In fact, they will be a direct measure of how well you are achieving those goals. Traditionally, email analytics has been hard because all of your demographic data, open rates, etc. resided in your email service provider (ESP) database, while all of your web traffic and conversion data was being tracked by your content management system (CMS) and/or Google Analytics. This was a problem because unifying your end-to-end data is really hard, not to mention time consuming. Nowadays, this problem is being solved by the adoption of marketing automation platforms that unify email and conversion data in an end-to-end fashion. Now let’s talk data. When choosing KPIs that help measure your business goals, it is important that you follow these three rules: keep them very simple, produce them in a timely manner, and make sure they are useful. In other words, make it so that people can view your KPIs, quickly understand what they mean, and then take action on them immediately. This is critical because in today’s world we all need to act fast! There are three categories of data you will analyze when it comes to optimizing your email marketing channel. When creating your KPIs, you need to always be thinking about these things: 1. Engagement Engagement is a category that encompasses email campaign metrics and reveals how your emails are resonating with your target list. It measures things such as: how many emails were sent, who you sent them to, and what the result was. Here are some great KPIs that help measure the business goal of driving deeper engagement within my list: Delivery rate: (# of emails – bounce backs)/ (# of emails) – measures the quality of your lead list. Open rate: (# opened/# emails delivered) – represents the success of your “from” field and subject line. Subscriber retention rate: (# subscribers – # bounces – # unsubscribes)/# subscribers) – measures how well you are targeting your database and if you are delighting them. Click to delivery rate: # of clicks/# of emails delivered – helps you understand the mailing list quality and email content relevance. 2. Behavior Behavior is a measure of what happens after the viewer clicks a link on the email. It answers: what do they do on my site, how well they engage, and do they buy? Here are some great KPIs to measure the business goals of deeper engagement on my website, elevated content consumption, and an increase in Sales Qualified Leads : Bounce rate: (# of clicks to the website with a single page view / # visits) – a great measure of the alignment between email and landing page. Depth of visit: (% of email campaign visits that last longer than xx pages) – especially important for non-ecommerce. Actions completed: (% of visits that took the call-to-action on the landing page) 3. Outcome Outcome is a measure of the goals, conversions, and revenue you drove through your email channel. Tracking all of these conversions and attributing it back to your email programs is critically important. Here is my list of outcome KPIs that measure the business goal of increasing total revenue: Macro conversion rate: (revenue producing conversions / visits) – How successful are you at targeting your audience with the right message at the right time. Avg. revenue per email sent: (total revenue / # of emails sent) – Use this to measure how clean your list is. Profitability: (rev generated – cost – cost of goods sold) / # emails sent) – the “Holy Grail” of KPIs One last thing to note is that there is no one size fits all when it comes to email KPIs, you must be willing to experiment with your campaigns and how you analyze them and change your approach accordingly. Nor is it always possible to track all of these metrics all the time. I find that choosing one from each group may be sufficient. For example, if I wanted to keep it simple I would choose “click to delivery rate” for engagement, “bounce rate” for behavior, and “profitability” for outcome as my top three and go from there. Metrics are critical for building success and identifying what works and what doesn’t. With the right ones in place, you can realize the full potential of your email channel. What KPIs are you currently tracking for your email programs? Share them in the comments below!

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!

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

By: Koustubha Deshpande Posted: April 28, 2016 | Mobile Marketing Getting users to download your app is easy. Okay, I might have stretched the truth there. It’s not easy at all, but it is the easiest step towards gaining a strong and loyal user base. Getting users to continuously use your app is an ongoing battle. But, these engagements are crucial to the lifecycle of your app. Today’s mobile user picks up or glances at their mobile phones up to 200 times each day and 75% of those interactions are just to glance at who called, what meeting is next, or what sale just started. With mobile marketing, you only have few seconds to make or break the relationship with your app users. In this blog, I’ll walk you through four different ways you can make your mobile app stand out and build a lasting relationship with your users: 1. Offer Choices App stores are extremely saturated. Users tend to install fewer apps and abandon them after only a couple of days. To build a loyal, engaged user base, you need significant acquisition budgets and a constant eye on retention rates. For their December 2015 index, Fiksu pegs the average cost per installs (CPIs) on a monthly basis for iOS CPI at $1.46 and Android’s at $3.34 (Android CPI is rising 144% YoY, with CPI skyrocketing in December). But offering your users choices can help you optimize your user funnel and increase app engagement, giving you a good return on your investment.  These choices include anything from allowing users to switch off push notifications to organizing aspects of the app in the order of their priorities. For example, the CircleBack app, which allows you to manage your contacts, personalizes user onboarding based on the user’s actions. Offering choices to your users allows you to personalize the app independently, so that it’s optimized to what’s best for them. Plus, you don’t have to do any guesswork or A/B testing; you can simply observe the choices your users make and move forward from there. 2. Push Notifications Push notifications are like email marketing, but for mobile apps. However, the main benefit push notifications has over email marketing is that mobile phones are checked much more frequently than email inboxes, so push notifications can make a more immediate impact on your audience. On the flip side, because they are looked at more frequently, traditional batch and blast marketing practices for push notifications can be more damaging than engaging. For instance, in email marketing, a company may send emails that they believe their recipients will be interested in, and then the recipients can choose whether to read it or ignore. But if you apply same rule to mobile push notifications, you are bound to fail because your notifications pop up on their home screen and are disruptive (which is OK as long as they are also helpful and relevant). If you use push notifications in your mobile marketing campaigns, you need to understand and respect that mobile devices are one of the most personal devices your users own, and if they feel that you are wasting their time with irrelevant or excessive push-notifications, you may lose their trust forever. Used correctly, push notifications can massively increase your sales and retention levels, as they have done for many brands already. As you’re planning your push notification strategy, consider what notifications your users would appreciate receiving (most likely, it’s not sales messages—unless you have a promotion going on). The examples below from Hopper and Dineout use push notifications to provide their users with value, notifying them when it’s the best time to book a flight and reminding them about their upcoming restaurant reservation. 3. Location Awareness Wherever we go, our mobile devices come with us. So it’s no surprise that using a mobile device’s location is helpful for both marketers and users alike. For example, after a user enters store or enters your conference hall, send them a coupon or a voucher for free food. Users expect relevancy and immediate action in these cases. So, you should plan your mobile marketing strategies so that as soon as your user arrives to a location, your app responds by delivering context-driven messages to their mobile devices. RetailMeNot’s app uses a user’s location to find offers in their vicinity. 4. Omni-Channel Communication Some mobile marketers may ignore email, SMS, social, or web channels with a narrow focus on purely mobile app marketing. But don’t forget that mobile apps or devices don’t make purchases; the people using them do. Buyers don’t care about your channel strategy; they only care about receiving a coordinated, contextual experience from you—they care want you to know them and understand what they want. Mobile apps aren’t the only way to communicate with your app users. There are multiple channels available, so use them in conjunction with your app. Use your buyers’ behaviors on one channel to inform your communication to them on the next channel they use. As you’re planning your mobile app marketing strategy, consider what type of content your users will actually want to see. And if you don’t know, just ask them, perhaps through mobile. 95% of consumers said they would respond to an SMS survey request, according to an Ipsos Mori study. Every communication sent to your buyers should be seen as a two-way conversation, one in which your audience and your business can benefit from. What other tips do you have for elevating your mobile app campaigns? Share them in the comments below.