Product Documents

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 !

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.

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: Marissa Lyman Posted: July 15, 2016 | Modern Marketing Okay, I’ll be honest—I should have written this blog post three days ago, but every time I sat down to write about Pokémon GO, I would just play Pokémon GO. I’ve been in over 20 hours of professional development training this week, dropping digital “incense” so I could attract and catch Rattata from my conference room seat. Last night, I decided that cruising by PokéStops would be more fulfilling than a first-date conversation. Not to mention, I used the phrase “OMG, a Jigglypuff!” in a non-ironic manner while I was out in public on Tuesday. And I’m not alone. Pokémon GO–the new mobile app that lets you catch “pocket monsters” around you through GPS and augmented reality–has more daily engagement than Facebook Messenger and Instagram combined, according to data from SimilarWeb. It was installed on 10.8% of all Android devices in the U.S. as of July 11 (with those numbers rising to 15.1% and 16% in Australia and New Zealand, respectively). And, Pokémon GO has more users than Tinder, which means you are officially more likely to find your soulmate while hunting down Charizard than you are by swiping right. With fictitious, (often) adorable creatures from a popular ‘90s card and video game, Pokémon GO has rapidly changed the game on engagement, and curious marketers everywhere are asking three things: What can I learn from the game that’s applicable to my day-to-day marketing activities? How can I take advantage of Pokémon GO in my marketing? Should I spend all these Zubat candies leveling up to a Golbat or just try to catch an evolved Pokémon in the wild? Valid questions. I won’t pretend I have all the answers, but read on for a few of my insights and tips on how Pokémon GO fits into your marketing strategy: 1. Develop a Laser Focus The stats above and my activities over the past week are proof enough that Pokémon GO is addicting, with users laser-focused on their objectives. I mean, why else would I prioritize catching these creatures over writing this blog?For your marketing campaigns, use the same type of focus to assess your goals, establish a set of metrics to measure them by, and identify which activities will help you achieve them. Why purchase an ad in a business publication when its readership doesn’t consist of your target audience? Why pour all of your money into pricey acquisition campaigns when you know that retention is your team’s top priority at the moment? Why acquire new Pokémon when you should really be focusing on leveling up the ones you have so you can fight and take over a gym? 2. Incentivize and Provide Value to Your Buyers As a Pokémon GO player, I’m attracted to PokéStops, places where you can load up on sweet virtual Pokémon swag that will help you in the game. The draw of these places is so strong that on my lunch break Monday, I swung by the local church just to load up on Poké Balls and potions.To get your potential and current customers to interact with your brand, you need to provide them with incentives to do so. This can be as basic as providing engaging content that adds value to their business or lives or more complex, like customer advocacy programs. The key is to keep your audience in mind first understand how you can help them–things like revenue will follow.At a practical level, if your business is lucky enough to be labelled as a PokéStop in the game, I recommend capitalizing on that. We’ve seen businesses go in a few different direct with this. This can go both ways–some diehard players will fork out cash in order to reap Pokémon GO rewards, while others may just move onto the next PokéStop. So, it might be a good idea to welcome Pokémon GO players into your business with open arms, rather than drive them away. It’s likely that you’ll still benefit from the foot traffic, especially if you come up with some creative ads.Even if your business isn’t a PokéStop, there are four ways you can still get your foot in the game: Ads will be available in the app very soon in the form of sponsored locations, according to TechCrunch. You can drop an in-app “Lure Module,” which will attract Pokémon to your business and make them accessible to others for 30 minutes. It’s like a flash sale…with cartoon animals. While the example below shows a storefront and the potential for retail locations, for B2B marketers, you can consider adding a Lure Model to your location at a tradeshow to generate leads. Find out what kind of Pokémon can be found around your business and let people know, just like this business below did. The ultimate goal of Pokémon is to catch as many as you can (gotta catch ’em all!), so it’s likely to lure in players who haven’t caught that character yet or are trying to catch more of it trade in for candy and evolve their existing ones Reward players with some free perks. Remember, it’s not about what you gain from acquiring a new customer–it’s about their lifetime value, which includes repeat business and recommendations to their networks. 61% of consumers say they’d tell their friend and family about a positive experience and 27% reported they’d sign up for a loyalty program, according to a Teradata survey. 3. Be Contextually Relevant You don’t honestly think you can catch Articuno during a Southern California summer, do you? The folks over at Niantic, the makers of Pokémon GO, have done a decent job of making Pokémon appear in environments that reflect their origin (sea creatures by bodies of water, plant creatures near parks, etc.). Marketers should follow suit–there’s no use advertising ice cream in the middle of a Scandinavian winter. Similarly, if your target audience is millennials, then yes—you should absolutely consider working Pokémon into some fun marketing copy. The average age of the user is in the late 20s, meaning it’s a mecca for hard-to-catch millennial buyers. Case in point: Just yesterday, I fell for opening the below email because I was intrigued by what strategies could possibly be used to capture Pokémon on a dance floor (spoiler alert: there were no tips). Now Go Catch ‘Em All! A week from now, maybe everyone will have stopped playing Pokémon GO. Perhaps we all will have moved on with our lives and jumped onto the next bandwagon. It’s hard to know, which means if you want to jump on this trend–act FAST, as fast as you would going after a CP 142 Raticate. For now, enjoy this rare chance to integrate adorable cartoon creatures into your marketing and focus on what insights you can glean from what may be the most viral game of all-time. And if all else fails, run around throwing red and white Poké Balls at people. It’ll definitely get you some attention. Are you a fellow Pokémon Go player? What else have you learned from the game that you can apply to your own marketing strategy? Share your ideas 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!

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.

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: 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?

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: 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.

By: Chandar Pattabhiram, Marketo Group-SVP of Marketing “Strategy is all about choice,” says Marketo CMO Sanjay Dholakia. Sanjay, a former McKinsey strategist and a master marketer, was referring back to one of the axiomatic insights developed by Harvard Business School guru Michael Porter, who is absolutely right. The essence of strategy is about choosing what we are going to do, thus making the right choice among a set of alternatives. But the most essential and difficult part of strategy is about answering the reverse question, “What we are not going to do?” Many high-achieving executives and their teams are programmed to attack new markets with innovation and strategies to drive success. However, the same leaders find it hard to choose to stop doing something and actually stick with the decision. Procter and Gamble’s former CEO A.G. Lafley and strategy consultant Roger L. Martin wrote an insightful book called Playing to Win, where they describe how they implemented strategy at P&G using Michael Porter’s foundational principles regarding choice and trade-offs. They define strategy as the need to win. And to win, they say, one needs to make clear choices across five areas: What is our winning aspiration? Where will we play? How will we win? What capabilities must be in place? What management systems are required? I want to offer a slightly different way to think about this. After aligning around a common business vision, I believe that the most important question to ask is, “Where will we not play?” In other words, where are we going to stop investing scarce human capital and innovation capital in order to maximize our focus and chances for success? http://www.amazon.com/Positioning-The-Battle-Your-Mind/dp/0071373586What’s a good framework for saying “no”? Let’s consider the following criteria to answer this question: 1. Saying No by Product Market Fit Before hitting the gas on sales and marketing in any segment, we need make sure to have true product-market fit. Do customers truly yearn for the differentiation our products offer? If they do not, walk away and say no to any further sales requests. When I worked at Cast Iron Systems, our initial struggles to clearly answer this question hurt our ability to scale. Our fundamental product differentiation was speed and simplicity. We offered a plug-and-play appliance that connected business applications within days, not months. We enjoyed some early success with Fortune 500 clients in a number of one-off scenarios. So what did we do? We naturally doubled down and created a plan to go after the Fortune 500 market. However, it turned out we were trying to sell the equivalent of an iPod to buyers looking for large, professional-grade stereo systems to run their concerts. The Fortune 500 did not fundamentally yearn for our product differentiation of speed and simplicity – not when compared to other capabilities that they wanted, such as feature-breadth, large volume performance, enterprise-grade security, etc., that traditional middleware vendors provided. It was only when we said no and walked away from this market to focus on the SaaS market – one that yearned for speed and simplicity – that we achieved success. 2. Saying No by Buyer Type Tony Nemelka, who heads up IBM Software in Japan, always reminds me that there are no markets, there are only buyers. “And one needs to really understand truly who the buyer is and align a set of product capabilities that simplify their lives and solve real problems,” he says. Amen, Tony! The converse of this adage applies to companies that target multiple buyer profiles with the same product offering. For example, a software platform company may decide to offer variations of its product for so-called line of business buyers, such as sales, HR, and services as well as IT buyers. This can get dicey. A few established companies have been reasonably successful with this approach. But it can be disastrous for a growing company with a small product portfolio. Imagine the challenges faced by a generic sales team that has to learn how to speak contextually and demonstrate its solution uniquely to each segment? It typically does not end well. The more proven approach for growing companies would be to align a set of capabilities – home-grown and acquired – and target a single customer. Nortel Networks’ acquisition of call center company Clarify in the late 1990s was a classic failed example of what can go wrong. Nortel bought Clarify for $2 billion; barely a year and a half later, Nortel sold Clarify for 10 cents on the dollar to Amdocs. The problem: Clarify’s buyer was a line-of-business executive and very different from the profile that Nortel’s technology sellers were accustomed to selling to. “Nortel had a sales force that had no ability to sell application software," said Laurie Orlov, then research director at Forrester Research. Contrast that example with IBM, which walked away from the application software market in the early-to-mid-90s; IBM’s software head Steve Mills thought it made more sense for Big Blue to focus on one buyer type – the Fortune 500 CIO – and align a set of product capabilities and services to make the CIO successful. It worked marvelously well, and for over 15 years, IBM’s acquisitions and home-grown innovation adhered to the goal of serving the CIO (interestingly, IBM has aggressively come back to the application software market in the past five years). 3. Saying No by Leadership Position I’ll be Captain Obvious here and state that the goal of any company is to win the battle for the minds of the buyer and establish itself as one of the top brands in its market. This is obvious, but never easy. Legendary marketers Al Ries and Jack Trout write about the Law of Duality in their book, “The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing.” In the long run, they note, consumers associate with two main brands for every product category. Google and Apple for phones. Coca-Cola & Pepsi for soda. Nike & Reebok for shoes. Crest & Colgate for toothpaste. This is not true for all categories, nor does it mean that marketers in the No. 3 brand should stop working. However, the key takeaway is that senior management should always honestly evaluate a company’s current market share in any market and the potential to become No.1 or No. 2. And sometimes, the best decision is to say no to a particular market or segment if they can’t reach this potential over the long run. GE’s former boss, Jack Welch, embodied this approach in the 1980s and 90s with his famous “No. 1 or No. 2” strategy. One of Welch’s primary leadership directives was that GE had to “fix, sell, or close” any business where it was not first or second in the market and did not have the potential growth opportunities to get there. Welch applied this principle to sell off $15 billion worth of GE-owned businesses, ranging from housewares to mining operations. At the same time, GE spent $26 billion to acquire companies which were either market leaders or had the potential to reach the top. 4. Saying No by Company DNA A company’s culture establishes its sense of purpose, core values, and fun. It also establishes its ability to successfully serve a market segment. Broadly speaking, a company’s DNA is primarily either enterprise-centric or consumer-centric. Problems crop up when companies refuse to recognize their dominant gene and attempt to equally participate in both markets. HP struggled with this question for years and couldn’t decide whether it was a consumer-centric or enterprise-centric brand. That led to confusion and cost the company dearly. HP ultimately reorganized into two separate entities – a strategy that significantly improves its chances for future success. By contrast, Cisco more quickly recognized its corporate DNA and sold or shut down its consumer businesses to concentrate on doing what it does best. Choose Carefully So there you have it, four strategic options to consider and evaluate to answer the question, “What should we not do?” Your answers and their follow-through may be more crucial to your business’s success than any other decision you face. Remember that strategy is all about choice. As Jack Welch famously noted, “You pick a general direction and implement it like hell.” And as his storied career made clear, it’s up to leaders to carefully select the corporate initiatives that they want to push through. You can toss the other stuff into the trash basket.

By: Sam Harkness Posted: April 19, 2016 | B2B Marketing Want to close 20 consecutive quarters on plan? Any interest in a 63% win rate? Need another 1,000 registrants for your next webinar? If you haven’t seen Moneyball, you should. Based on Michael Lewis’s book on the Oakland A’s incredible 2002 season, Moneyball is the kind of movie you can watch 15 times, but then still get excited for when it pops up on Netflix. The movie blends together fan favorite themes of competition, analytics, and the underdog-taking-on-the-system. Marketing and sales teams face challenges eerily similar to the Oakland A’s in 2002: never enough budget, lofty goals, and pressure to win. The Winning Moneyball Formula In Moneyball, Jonah Hill plays the biographical character Peter Brand, the A’s newest assistant GM and soft-spoken economics geek from Yale. In one of the great scenes of the movie, the Moneyball formula emerges as Brand begins to transform the way the A’s leadership approaches winning baseball games. After the A’s lost several of their best players to competitors with 3x the payroll, they had no other choice but to pivot and try something new. “People who run ball clubs, they think in terms of buying players. Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players. Your goal should be to buy wins. And in order to buy wins, you need to buy runs.” So how did the Oakland A’s put this concept into action? Their first step was to focus on recruiting and starting players with a high on-base percentage (OBP). Rather than trying to replace their best players’ batting averages, they instead focused on replacing their best players’ OBP. One example included signing a former catcher, Scott Hatteberg. This guy couldn’t really throw the ball anymore (post injury), but he could still catch it, and he had a great OBP. Hatteberg was their new first baseman. By prioritizing OBP over BA, the Oakland A’s elevated one of the most unsexy metrics in baseball: the “walk.” Baseball dictionary for the uninitiated: getting walked is when a batter takes four pitches outside the strike zone, and then advances to first base without an “out.” To walk more = to get on base more = to score more runs = to win more. As the Moneyball formula kicked in the Oakland A’s went on a tear, winning 20 consecutive games and finishing the season with 103 wins and 59 losses. The A’s earned the second best winning percentage in the American League (63%), and got there on a shoestring budget, spending just $260,000 per win vs. the Yankees’ $1,000,000 per win. Moneyball Marketing How do you apply the Moneyball formula drive more efficiency and revenue into your business? As an example, two basic metrics typically captured by marketing and sales include opportunities created and opportunities closed. When you divide these two metrics into one, you get an even better picture of your business known as “win rate.” Think of win rate in business as the equivalent to batting average in baseball. If you open 10 opportunities and close 5 every month, that’s a great win rate; you’re batting .500. But if you open 10 opportunities and close 1 every month, that’s a bad win rate; you’re batting .100. But what is the OBP equivalent in the business world? Or better yet, what is the business equivalent to getting more walks in baseball? Walking more in baseball translates to partnering more in business. Leveraging a partner for a warm intro and endorsement to a decision maker–that’s a walk. Asking a partner for help in an industry where they’re stronger than you–instant credibility, and less expensive. Investing in your partners and making their success and your success synonymous….now we’re getting it. Marketing example: Our marketing team recently leveraged eight partners to help drive over 1,000 registrants to a Marketo-hosted webinar. If half of those registrants show up (500) and we close only 1%, that’s still five new customer wins with partners. Sales example: Three of the largest deals we closed recently included highly influential strategic alliances. Our experienced sales team outsourced the implementation and consulting services revenue to a partner, while earning software revenue at 3x the average enterprise deal size. Each deal included a motivated partner working hard to make it happen. That’s Moneyball. Follow these five Moneyball tips to win big with partners: 1. Give, then Get The first principal of economics: People. Face. Trade-offs. As a company, every dollar you spend on project A is a dollar not spent on project B. This zero sum game demands that companies carefully balance partner interests against their own. If you can build incentives for your partners to help you (while sometimes sacrificing your own immediate self interest), in return, you may have the opportunity to build a “force multiplier.” A force multiplier is a factor that dramatically increases your scale and effectiveness as a company. Think of how many marketing and sales people you employ, and then add in the number of employees within your partner ecosystem. This incremental lift and multiplier can be a beautiful thing when you’re competing against companies 3x your size. 2. Focus & Specialization Hiring people is expensive, and there’s a point of diminishing returns for every company. It’s simply impossible to hire for every needed specialty in every industry in every country. Instead of spending six figures on a full-time, subject matter expert, why not recruit a partner with established expertise and incentivize them to help you? Marketo recently built a task force with an agency that has unique expertise in a specific industry. We didn’t have to go out and hire a team of experts. Instead, we focused in on this partner and made a conscious effort to include them early and often in the sales process. As a result, we’ve closed more deals in that industry in the last 12 months than in our entire history as a company. 3. All Hands on Deck There are three key pillars to any productive partnership program: Recruitment: Identifying and recruiting highly specialized partners Enablement: Training and nurturing partners to unlock holistic value (1+1=3) Commitment: Establishing and providing incentives for both partners and internal stakeholders to rally behind a “better together” strategy The number one partner momentum killer is “channel conflict.” Channel conflict occurs when marketing and sales compete with their channel partners’ area of expertise. Competition is a good thing–it raises the bar on quality and drives price down–but it needs to be refereed with crisp rules of engagement. Compensation drives behavior, and the most effective lever in driving a partner-friendly ecosystem is to incentivize your stakeholders to play nice in the sandbox. This step is absolutely, positively, mission critical. 4. No “Barney” Meetings Remember Barney? “I love you, you love me, we’re a happy family…” Barney meetings with partners are not okay. These are particularly common among prospective partner discussions. As a rule of thumb, you can expect that at least 80% of these Barney meetings with partners will be a waste of time. To mitigate this, build a process that automates the discovery stage with partner prospects. At Marketo, we’ve built a partnership program with a number of prerequisites that help set the bar for a successful partnership. A thorough, automated certification program with thoughtful prerequisites can help filter out false positives. 5. Measure Success How do you ensure partner contribution is widely recognized within your company? A clear gauge on partner progress with high visibility throughout the company is a fundamental need for any marketing and sales organization looking to build a force multiplier. Start with a baseline and ensure your measurement system is widely adopted, simple, and always improving. At Marketo, we’ve tried a variety of partner success metrics (average deal size, customer retention, time to close, etc.), and we’re constantly tweaking and evaluating their true impact on our business. A world-class partner program should promote equal parts specialization, balanced investment, and bi-directional revenue contribution. Here’s a simple barometer to help you get started in measuring your top partners: Overall, what I love about Moneyball is similar to what I love about business: our challenges are analogous. We have to be resourceful, creative, and approach the game differently in order to win. So if you’re a marketing or sales professional, try leaning into your partner ecosystem and invest in a force multiplier to beat the competition. Play Moneyball! If this was helpful and you’re interested in learning more about Marketo’s evolving partner-first culture, or how to build your own Moneyball playbook, join me for my session, Marketo Moneyball, Building a Partner-First Culture, at the 2016 Marketing Nation Summi

By: Mike Burton Posted: April 5, 2016 | Lead Management The cult classic movie, Glengarry Glen Ross paints a harsh reality of the world of sales. At the bottom line, the movie is all about a salesman’s ability to close and the endless battle for a quality set of leads. And while perhaps exaggerated in its delivery, these two core messages ring true for marketing and sales teams alike. The ever foreboding challenge is finding and closing the ‘Glengarry’ leads, the ones that will guarantee conversions and revenue. So how do you ensure that, as a marketer, you do your part in finding those Glengarry leads for sales to close? Achieving AIDA to ABC In the B2B world, the notion of AIDA is key: Attention Interest Decision Action Predictive lead scoring, personalization engines, and segment builders have evolved to help marketers find qualified leads and salespeople pursue them, but they can sometimes fall short on accurately delivering on the “Attention” and “Interest” areas of target audiences, making the success of “Decision” and “Action” at best an educated guess. And marketers are only as good as the tools they are equipped with. Enter external intent data. Much like a FICO score provides a holistic view of a customer’s credit history by using collectively shared information from different banks, external intent data provides a business with an understanding of what an individual, a department, or a company in a specific location is most interested in. Through a large cooperative of B2B media companies, external intent data companies monitor a range of audience interactions with your company such as collateral downloads, tradeshow booth visits, articles read, webinar and video views, social engagement, etc.). This external intent data is consolidated and categorized into a range of different topics and then benchmarks are created against each, allowing you to identify when certain topics are experiencing a surge of interest. The result is moving beyond the traditional batch and blast approach to understanding when you have the attention of your target audience and knowing exactly what they are interested in. And when this data is integrated with your marketing automation and CRM systems, you’re armed with key indicators of when marketing or sales should engage with each individual at an optimal time during the decision-making process, thus improving the ability toAlways Be Closing (ABC). No More Weak Leads In the movie, sales are won through slick coaxing and by playing on a prospect’s insecurities; in the age of information, relevance and authenticity are quickly becoming the new norm. So what does this mean? Often, demand for your product or service already exists, but it’s all about finding the right behaviors that indicate this and using it to inform your marketing campaigns. While an email respondent is valuable, an email respondent that is in a relevant research surge, as informed by external intent data, is much more likely to net an immediate sales opportunity. This added layer of data allows marketers and salespeople to understand the difference between the curious content junkies and those that are accessing content based on a current initiatives–ultimately weeding out the weak leads. Take for example a recent VM Turbo campaign promoting an ebook download on their hybrid cloud. When reaching out to surging contacts who responded to an email campaign, they saw a 51% lift in open rates when compared to a control group that was non-surging. Further validating the correlation between intent and engagement, their sales team reported that when they followed up with customers by phone, the individuals from the surge group were more engaged and their conversations much more in-depth. Overall, 80% of all of the opportunities created from the campaign originated from the surge group. Making the Most of Glengarry Leads Integrating behavioral intent data into your marketing automation instance requires a few foundational steps. First, it’s critical to have an understanding of your sales team’s strategy and align your topics. Once your topics are agreed upon and selected, an external intent data provider will be able to append these relevant topics to contacts inside of your marketing automation system. After you create your campaign and run it, you will need to close the loop back with your sales team, ensuring that they follow up on any interactions, especially with individuals in the surge group. The key to success is not only through delivering targeted content to an already interested group, but also in the follow-up conversations, which result in new opportunities. External intent data allows you to take a customer-centric approach, means that your prospects are getting content that they are interested in at a timely point in their decision-making process and it allows you to plan and distribute your content more strategically. Ultimately it opens up a way to uncover your Glengarry leads. Have you already integrated external intent data into your marketing campaigns? I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments below.

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?

By: Mike Tomita Posted: February 19, 2016 | Digital Marketing Return on investment (ROI) is an important part of digital marketing (and  really, almost every part of marketing)—it tells you whether you’re getting your money’s worth from your marketing campaigns. And if you’re not, it’s critical to get to the bottom of it, and understand why so you can learn how to improve your campaigns. But first, you need to understand how you can effectively measure the ROI of digital advertising. The most instinctive way to measure digital advertising ROI is to track metrics that tie directly to revenue and profit (think conversions, opportunities, etc.). While it sounds great on paper, in the real world, this oversimplified view can paint an inaccurate picture of your ROI, especially if your product is sold at a low price per unit. Big picture measurement often factors in soft metrics—things like brand impressions, impressions, website visitors, and downloads—which help tell a more complete story. Here’s how to measure ROI using soft metrics for three popular digital advertisements—mobile video ads, native advertising, and programmatic advertising: 1. Mobile Video Ads Mobile video advertising can be more effective than regular web video advertising or even television advertising. This is because mobile is a much more intimate medium—it’s less of a shared experience and has fewer distractions. When done well, mobile video ads provide helpful information that drives traffic to your website, increases brand awareness, and is valuable enough for social sharing. Home improvement retailer Lowe’s recently demonstrated the value of mobile video ads with their #lowesfixinsix campaign on the popular video app Vine. The quick tips are fun and informative—and over 35,000 of their followers choose to have their ads in their feeds. Measuring the ROI of Mobile Video Advertising When evaluating the success of your mobile video advertising, take these metrics into account: Brand awareness: Measure brand awareness by looking at your direct traffic numbers (hits that come from viewers typing the URL directly into their search bar), the number of people who searched for your video by its name or hashtag, the number of clicks that came from referrals, and the number of social media shares and mentions. You can also find current search data on your brand name by using a tool like Google Trends. Purchase influence: Did your ad lead to an increase in sales? Look at the first-touch and multi-touch attribution that was generated by your video or video program for a look at the ROI but for a larger picture, look at the amount of traffic generated by your campaign and compare it to your sales numbers—including the numbers before and after the campaign launched. Accessibility: Track the placement of your ads and test them to make sure they are viewable on all devices and that they are not hidden on the page. This ensures people actually have access to your ads. Mind share: While you have no way of measuring how often people discuss your brand with friends over coffee, you can get a good idea how often people are talking about it by looking at the comments and shares on your mobile videos. A successful mobile video ad will have both. 2. Native Advertising Effective native advertising fits seamlessly into the organic content of the sites that carry them. Also known as an “advertorial,” this type of advertisement provides useful information to readers in a format that resembles non-paid articles on the website. Native advertising can be found in hard copies and online newspapers and magazines, but it’s also seen on social media sites such as Facebook.IBM pays to publish their own content on the Forbes platform as IBMVoice. Their paid content looks and feels like an article on the site, but it’s clear that it’s marketing content. In fact, native ads that look too much like unbranded content can actually hurt your campaign and reputation if you leave readers feeling duped. Measuring the ROI of Native AdvertisingMeasuring the ROI of native advertising can be challenge for many marketers. It’s measured primarily by click-throughs, which is an important factor to consider, but other measurements are also critical in understanding the full picture of its performance: Customer acquisition: How many click-throughs via native advertising led to acquiring information that you can nurture toward conversion? To measure this, divide the total number of click-throughs by the number of people who submitted contact information (for example, by signing up for your newsletter). This number should be higher in connection with a native advertising campaign. Reputation: Does the information presented in your native ad help develop the company as a trusted expert or thought leader? Does it increase the number of people turning to the brand’s website for advice? Look at the number of comments and queries you receive in connection to your ad, as well as increased traffic. Brand recognition: Do more people recognize your brand as a result of the native advertising? To determine this, look at your website analytics to find the number of hits that come in from your native advertising directly, and then use Google Trends to see if the number of people searching for your brand name is increasing. Mind share: Are people sharing your content on social media? Are they talking about it? You can usually find the number of social media shares right on the content page. 3. Programmatic Advertising Programmatic advertising is software-created, specifically-targeted advertising. You probably see this type of advertising many times a day online—they’re often displayed as banner or sidebar ads that change whenever you refresh your page.  A huge amount of marketing dollars go into programmatic advertising. In fact, eMarketer reports that it expects to see programmatic ad spend reach $20.41 billion this year. This type of advertising is automated—created directly, without an ad salesperson or contracts, and is based on your goals. The biggest advantage of programmatic advertising is that it can be altered to best meet your company’s needs, based on the demographics, location, and behavior of your target audience.Diesel, a popular fashion brand, included programmatic ads as part of their multi-channel campaign last fall. Their Shazam ads, for example, included copy specifically designed for the targeted setting. When Shazam couldn’t recognize a song, the Diesel ad empathized with the user. Measuring the ROI of Programmatic AdvertisingBecause of its versatility and flexibility, programmatic advertising metrics must be measured frequently to be effective. While things like click-throughs and mind share are important your measurements should focus on areas such as: Recognition and reputation: Search for your brand name on social media and keep track of the number of mentions, as well as whether the mentions are positive or negative. Your recognition should increase the longer your programmatic ads run. Website traffic numbers: As your brand becomes more recognized, you should see an increase in traffic, from people who come directly to your site by typing in your URL as well as following your ad. Hard metrics are without a doubt important for proving and improving ROI (and demonstrating the value of your activities and spend to the C-level), but it’s critical to track vanity metrics in addition to ROI in order to have a comprehensive view of how your ads are doing. As your brand pushes marketing boundaries into new strategies—like mobile video ads, native advertising, and programmatic ads—make sure you are measuring ROI beyond just revenue impact so your whole team can continue to drive engagement and improve sales.

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!