Product Documents

The original press release can be found here. 250ok and Marketo Breathe New Life Into Email 250ok strengthens partner integration with Marketo with addition of Email Informant and Reputation Powerpack to take email campaigns to the next level SAN MATEO, Calif. – July 20, 2016 – Marketo, Inc. (NASDAQ: MKTO), the leading provider of engagement marketing software and solutions, today announced that 250ok, a leading provider of deliverability services, has strengthened its partner integration to make email deliverability smarter. As part of this enhanced collaboration, 250ok will offer its full product suite, including Email Informant and Reputation Powerpack, to make email more engaging, intelligent, and effective for Marketo customers. "We are extremely excited to continue to expand our relationship with Marketo,” said Tim Moore, vice president of Customer Solutions, 250ok. "With Marketo’s partnership to offer our full product suite, including Email Informant and Reputation Powerpack, customers will possess unparalleled visibility into the data driving the success of their email programs." According to a study by Deloitte, Americans collectively check their smartphones upwards of 8 billion times per day and continuously check email. Despite the volume of emails people read and send daily, the vast majority of messages get lost in filters. Up to 85 percent of incoming email is considered abusive, and mailbox providers often apply aggressive measures to deter spam and protect customers. As a result, senders need more sophisticated tools to understand when emails deliver and when they do not. Addressing this challenge, the enhanced partner integration between 250ok and Marketo will allow proactive management and insights that will help optimize future email campaigns. “250ok has been at the forefront of innovation for one of the oldest forms of digital communications. Its ability to continually reinvent the medium is testament to its years of experience and dedication to combining scalable technology with intelligent solutions,” said Kiersti Esparza, director, cloud platform technologies, Marketo. “This partnership with 250ok exemplifies how Marketo works closely with partners to continue to innovate and offer the best, integrated products and services to our customers.” Americans spend up to 6.5 hours a day on email; here’s how 250ok and Marketo are improving the experience: Email Informant – Responsible for delivering more seamless emails, this offering provides: Engagement Analysis: Offers insights into who read your email campaign and for how long, drilling down to the individual recipient, device, and platform. Trend Discovery: Highlights which links or calls-to-action perform the best. Allows companies to optimize emails around peak hours for recipients and utilize 250ok’s data to gain insights on the best and most engaged subscribers. Device & Browser Tracking: Provides data on which devices and clients matter most by tracking devices, clients, and browser usage across an entire mailing list so companies can optimize future campaigns. Reputation Powerpack – An industry first in the world of communications, this offering provides: Unprecedented Granularity: Upon analyzing billions of messages, this offers the analytics required to identify issues while providing the level of detail marketers need to take corrective action. Enhanced with SNDS & Signal Spam: Companies can automate SNDS & Signal Spam reporting to track spam traps and complaint rates at Hotmail, Outlook.com, Laposte, Sfr, and Orange. Comprehensive Analytics: Quickly detect fraudulent mailing activity and identify which IPs, email addresses, and domains are sending the most unauthorized mail. To learn more about Marketo products and solutions that can help you build personalized, long-term relationships with your customers, visit https://www.marketo.com/solutions/. To learn more about the company, visit https://www.marketo.com/company/. About Marketo Marketo provides the leading engagement marketing software and solutions designed to help marketers develop long-term relationships with their customers - from acquisition to advocacy. Marketo is built for marketers, by marketers and is setting the innovation agenda for marketing technology. Marketo puts Marketing First. Headquartered in San Mateo, CA, with offices around the world, Marketo serves as a strategic partner to large enterprise and fast-growing small companies across a wide variety of industries. To learn more about Marketo's Engagement Marketing Platform, LaunchPoint® partner ecosystem, and the vast community that is the Marketo Marketing Nation®, visit www.marketo.com. About 250ok 250ok is the preferred choice for email deliverability services and analytics by forward-thinking brands. Trusted by some of the world’s largest senders, we cut through big data noise and provide actionable, real-time email intelligence. Fortune 100 companies to small businesses use 250ok to monitor deliverability, sender reputation, DMARC, and customer engagement. Follow @250ok on Twitter or visit www.250ok.com. ### Media contact: Stefanie Gordish, sgordish@marketo.com

By: Nick Westergaard Posted: July 19, 2016 | Content Marketing Content is king! Content rules! No one is going to tell you in this day and age that you need to create less content. In fact, according to the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs, 80% of marketers across all sectors (B2B, consumer, nonprofit) are using content in some form. Of those same marketers, 74% have plans to produce even morecontent in the year ahead. And yet, 57% of marketers report that creating content consistently is a top challenge. As very few organizations claim content creation as a core competency, many are wondering how they should go about developing all of these new ebooks, newsletters, blog posts, videos, and images required to engage today’s buyer. Content creation can get real complex, real fast. In my new book Get Scrappy: Smarter Digital Marketing for Businesses Big and Small, I outline several frameworks, strategies, tactics, and hacks for helping today’s frustrated marketers do more with less. Let’s take a look at four content creation hacks that should be in every marketer’s toolbox, including yours: Hack #1: Relentlessly Repurpose Content In Content Rules, Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman encourage brands to be a “content chop-shop” by always looking for ways to get multiple uses out of a particular piece of content. You should strive to relentlessly repurpose all of the content you create. You can start small by combining smaller pieces like photos, cheatsheets, and blog posts into something larger like an ebook or whitepaper. You can also take a larger piece of content apart and create blog posts, videos, infographics, and social media updates. The possibilities are endless, so get creative! Pew Research Center does this by sharing individual data points on Instagram, which point to a longer article about the research, which then invites you to download the entire report. As expensive as formal research is, it makes sense to repurpose it as much as possible. This also provides an opportunity for you to reach your audience across multiple channels and get your team involved. For example, you can make re-imagining your content an internal challenge by encouraging others to offer ideas on additional forms of content you can create. Hack #2: Utilize Historical Content If your business has been around for a while, chances are there are old photos laying around in some closet or storage facility, or stored digitally. One of the scrappiest things you can do is to digitize this old-school content so that you can give it new life online. Whether it’s #ThrowbackThursday on Instagram or populating Facebook’s timeline feature, these content classics can be a tremendous asset. For examples, check out what Herman Miller is doing on Pinterest with their history board “107 Years and Counting.” Even your old marketing collateral and advertisements offer some nice history. Southwest Airlines has a Pinterest board dedicated entirely to their old photos and ads. Hack #3: Curate Content Beyond finding ways to repurpose as much of your brand’s internal content as possible, there are other sources you can leverage outside of your organization through content curation. With budgets spread thin, curation is a viable part of the mix for many. Some examples include a blog post or email newsletter that rounds up the best articles on a particular subject important to your buyers or industry. There are several tools that can help you streamline the task of finding good content. Some are free or low-cost—like Feedly, Scoop.it, Newsle—and some are geared more toward the mid-market or enterprise level with more functionality and features, such as Curata and TrapIt. One word of caution: Avoid thinking of curation as simply a low-cost alternative to content creation. Bothshould be viewed as complementary approaches to the same overall strategy—providing your community with useful content. Hack #4: Encourage User-Generated Content The final external source for content is from your own community. User-generated content is valuable in more ways than one. First, it’s content you don’t have to create that you can turnaround and share again, which brings me to my second point. User-generated content is powerful as it demonstrates in a very public and authentic way that your audience is engaged. A common misconception is that user-generated content just “appears.” Like all things involving others, it starts with a request from you. Remember, no one (your buyers and community included) will know what to do unless you ask them. More often than not your community will participate if you ask them. For instance, after seeing their fans share photos showing their love and happiness around their product, Ben & Jerry’s put out a call for fans to share their best euphoric photos by using the hashtag #CaptureEuphoria, with favorites featured in print and digital ads for the brand. As you work to do more with less when it comes to your content marketing, these four scrappy content marketing hacks—relentlessly repurposing content, utilizing historical content, content curation, and user-generated-content—deliver big results. Looking to get scrappy with your other marketing initiatives? Register for my upcoming webinar Get Scrappy: Smarter Digital Marketing for Businesses Big and Small to learn how to create a scrappy marketing strategy to win in today’s complex digital world.

We use Eventbrite for smaller, local events (such as regional happy hours or lunch & learns) that our non-Marketo team members set up and run. The integration between Eventbrite and Salesforce was not allowing us to capture the data the way we wanted to, so we looked for a way to feed the data from Eventbrite into Marketo, prior to sending it into Salesforce. The solution for us was adjusting our data flow process to utilize “zaps” via Zapier. This step-by-step guide will show you how we were able to integrate our systems to capture the data we need. Side Note: Zapier offers a 14-day free trial which will allow you to test this functionality to see if it will work for your organization. WHAT YOU NEED TO GET SET UP: Admin access to Marketo, Eventbrite and Zapier Unique email address to create Zapier/Marketo connection (ex: zapierapi@yourcompany.com) Custom Field: Eventbrite ID (this may or may not already be available – just check ) PROCESS TO GET SET UP: Step 1: Add Eventbrite and Marketo to your “Connected Accounts” within Zapier Connect Eventbrite account to Zapier account Connect Marketo account to Zapier account Follow the instructions found here to obtain your Client ID, Secret and Domain Please note: You will need to create an alias email address to connect the Zapier API to your Marketo instance (ex: zapierapi@yourcompany.com) Step 2: Create Zap to capture event “registration” in EventBrite and feed the data into Marketo EVENTBRITE: Create the event in Eventbrite. Make adjustments to the “order form” as needed to ensure that the appropriate fields are being captured upon registration. If certain fields are necessary to add to your database, make sure that they are “required” fields on the order form (ex. First Name, Last Name, Company Name, Email Address, etc.). Make your event “live” and submit a test registration (you’ll be able to remove the test later). MARKETO: Create a list in your Marketo Lead Database to capture registrants. For scalability, it’s recommended that you create a “Zap Lists” folder under your “Group Lists” folder. Use a naming convention that will clearly identify which list should be associated with which event. We use the date of the event as the unique identifier (ex: 160629 NE Happy Hour - Registered) MARKETO: Create an Event program in Marketo. If you would like to use the Marketo Events app to check people in at the event, be sure that you use the appropriate channel for your program. In the “Setup” tab, be sure to add your period costs, appropriate tags, and analytics behavior. Also, be sure to “schedule” your event if you plan to use the Marketo Events App for attendee check-in. MARKETO: Create a smart campaign to add the appropriate registrants to the event program. SMART LIST: Trigger: Added to List > List Name is [insert the list name you created in Lead Database to capture registrants] Filter: Eventbrite Id > Eventbrite Id is [leave blank until you obtain the id from Zapier] FLOW: Change Program Status > Program [the program you created] New Status: [channel > registered] Please note: You can create whatever additional flow steps or smart campaigns you need to facilitate your program. The above are just the basics needed to associate the lead with the program for the Zapier dataflow process described here. ZAPIER: Once you’ve completed the items listed below, select the “Make a Zap!” button. Be sure to clearly name your Zap, so you know what event and action the Zap represents: The Eventbrite and Marketo accounts are connected The event has been created in Eventbrite The event registration list has been created in the Lead Database (Marketo) The event program has been created in Marketing Activities (Marketo) Create Step 1 of the Zap. Follow the document titled “Use Zapier for Registration” for visual guide of the following steps: Select Eventbrite for your trigger app Select “New Attendee” for your Eventbrite Trigger Select the appropriate Eventbrite account Select Event Status is “live” Select Event is [the event you created in Eventbrite] Review the details of the attendee registration to obtain the “Eventbrite ID”. MARKETO: Copy that “Event ID” and insert it into your event program smart campaign in Marketo. This will ensure that the appropriate registrants are being associated with the appropriate events. Please note: event_id = Eventbrite id Create Step 2 of the Zap. Follow the document titled “Use Zapier for Registration” for visual guide of the following steps: Select Marketo for your action app Select “Create or Update Lead” as your Marketo action Select the appropriate Marketo account Associate the fields captured via the Eventbrite order form with the appropriate fields in the Marketo database. Not all fields need to be associated. This step is unique to your organization. Email is the only “required” field and you must populate the “Eventbrite Id” field with the appropriate information. Create Step 3 of the Zap. Follow the document titled “Use Zapier for Registration” for visual guide of the following steps: Select Marketo for your action app Select “Add Lead to List” as your Marketo action Select the appropriate Marketo account To Set up Marketo Lead to List, select List = [the list you created in the Lead Database for registrants]; select Lead = Use a custom value, Custom Value for Lead ID = Step 2 ID You will be able to verify that the registration process fired appropriately by reviewing your list in the Lead Database and the event program in your Marketing Activities section within your Marketo instance. Step 3: Create Zap to capture event “check-in” in EventBrite and feed the data into Marketo The hang up we’ve run into with the Marketo Events app is that you have to use a tablet to “check in” event attendees. With Eventbrite, our reps have the ability to use their phones to check people in, which tends to be easier for our organization. This is why we set up a Zap to push “check in” data from Eventbrite into Marketo. Please note: if you’re using the Marketo Events app to track attendees, you do not need to set up a Zap to push attendee data from EventBrite into Marketo. This is only needed if you will be “checking in” attendees via the EventBrite app/platform. MARKETO: Create a List in your Marketo Lead Database section to capture event attendees. Use a naming convention that will clearly identify which list should be associated with which event. We use the date of the event as the unique identifier (ex: 160629 NE Happy Hour - Attended) MARKETO: Add a smart campaign to your event program that will listen for registrants to “check-in” to the event. SMART LIST: Trigger: Added to List > List Name is [insert the list name you created in Lead Database to capture attendees] Filter Eventbrite Id > Eventbrite Id is [same id from the “add to program” smart list created in previous steps] FLOW: Change Program Status > Program [the program you created] New Status: [channel > attended] You can create whatever additional flow steps or smart campaigns you need to facilitate your program. The above are just the basics needed to associate the lead status change with the program. EVENTBRITE: Go into your event in Eventbrite and mark your test registrant as “check-in” to update the status ZAPIER: Create Step 1 of the Zap. Follow the document titled “Use Zapier for Attendees” for visual guide of the following steps: Select the “Make a Zap!” button Select Eventbrite for your trigger app Select “New Attendee Check-In” for your Eventbrite trigger (this option may appear under “show less common options”) Select the appropriate Eventbrite account Select the correct event associated with the “check-in” for the Eventbrite Attendee Create Step 2 of the Zap. Follow the document titled “Use Zapier for Attendees” for visual guide of the following steps: Select Marketo for your action app Select “Create or Update Lead” as your Marketo action Select the appropriate Marketo account Associate the appropriate fields in Eventbrite with the fields in Marketo. For this step you only need to associate the “email address (profile email)” and the “Eventbrite id (event id)”. This lead (if new to your database) was already created in your registration zap. Create Step 3 of the Zap. Follow the document titled “Use Zapier for Attendees” for visual guide of the following steps: Select Marketo for your action app Select “Add Lead to List” as your Marketo action Select the appropriate Marketo account To Set up Marketo Lead to List, select List = [the list you created in the Lead Database for attendees]; select Lead = Use a custom value, Custom Value for Lead ID = Step 2 ID You will be able to verify that the check in process fired appropriately by reviewing your list in the Lead Database and the event program in your Marketing Activities section within your Marketo instance. Congratulations! You’re all set up. Remember to remove your test registrants/attendees from the Marketo program. You’ll also want to be sure to turn your zaps “on” before collecting registrants/attendees. Another thing to consider is that Zapier charges based on the amount of zaps being used. You may want to consider deleting the zaps once the event is completed, so you will not be charged.

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!

By: Heidi Bullock Posted: July 18, 2016 | Targeting and Personalization Okay, so maybe account-based marketing (ABM) isn’t quite as viral as Pokémon Go, but I would say that ABM is a close second in the B2B marketing world! But what does this mean for you as a marketer? What do you need to know about ABM? Why does it matter? How do you know if it’s right for your business? So many questions, and now’s the time for answers. Here’s a simple way of looking at how to make sense of ABM. In demand generation, it ultimately boils down to two key strategies: Traditional B2B marketing is often done through broad-reaching campaigns. Most marketers try to get their word out—as far and as wide as possible—by leveraging different marketing channels: owned, earned, and paid. The objective is to cast a wide net and put out as much content as possible, in order to act as a marketing magnet and draw a large number of leads into your funnel. On the other hand, account-based marketing (ABM) is in many ways the exact opposite. It’s about getting all your resources— your program dollars AND your people (including your sales and marketing teams)—working together in a coordinated way to pursue and convert very specific accounts. But is ABM right for you? Both strategies have their benefits, so it depends on your objectives, the market you sell to, and your product/price point. Generally, ABM is the way to go when you have a large target market with hundreds and thousands of prospects, and need to narrow down your focus to high-value accounts. With ABM, you can focus your time and efforts on running campaigns that are personalized to target accounts. Deciding on whether to do account-based marketing is just the start. Once you’ve decided whether it aligns with your objectives, there are a few considerations to take into account. Here are five simple steps to walk you through the essentials of account-based marketing: 1. Identify Your Target Accounts While this is fairly obvious, you can’t do full blown account-based marketing if you don’t even know what accounts you’re targeting. To get this right, you need to work in close conjunction with sales. ABM will not work if sales isn’t onboard, since it requires both marketing and sales to focus their resources on the defined set of target accounts. Once you work with sales to build an initial list, you can use lead scoring to help stack rank the accounts to make sure everyone is focused on the ones with the highest propensity to close. Tip: There are many options for predictive scoring, so take the time to research them. With the right solution, it can add another helpful lens to prioritizing your account list. 2. Develop Personas Next, you’ll want to map those accounts to marketing personas better understand which divisions are the right ones to target. You need to understand what challenges the account faces as a business, how decisions are made in the organization, and who makes those decisions. This sort of information is critical to an effective ABM initiative. There are different approaches to building out white space, so this should be an ongoing effort. Tip: Agree on a timeframe to lock in the target account selection. Target account programs, in many cases, take time to work–so you don’t want to switch out the accounts too frequently. 3. Find the Right Content Targeted customers are more likely to engage with content that is tailored specifically to them. According to MarketingSherpa, 82% of prospects value content made for their specific industries, and 67% say the same of content created for their specific job functions. And because ABM is inherently more personalized, you’ll have a great opportunity to provide prospects from target accounts with content and messaging that resonates with them and is relevant to their business and stage in the buyer journey. Tip: Try to leverage the content you already have and make small adjustments as needed so that the content or offer really speaks to your audience. For example, if you’re targeting accounts in a specific industry, you can repurpose a more general ebook and add in more examples and case studies from other companies in the same space. 4. Integrate ABM into Your Multi-Channel Strategy At the end of the day, your target accounts are similar to your other buyers in that they’re on a multitude of different channels every day. To effectively reach and engage them, you will need to execute cross-channel campaigns, targeting the right people in your target accounts on different channels and leveraging the personalized content you pulled together in the previous step. And remember, you’ll need to do this in tight coordination with sales so that they can understand how each target account prospect has engaged with your company. Tip: Set up an entitlement framework so it’s clear what certain accounts (top tier) receive from a program perspective and others (e.g. tier 1 or tier 2) do not. For example, at Marketo, some of our top tier accounts receive direct mail from us while our tier 2 accounts do not. 5. Measure and Optimize I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again– as with any good marketing initiative, you’ll want to measure and analyze your results over time so that you can continually optimize your campaigns. It’s not about ONE metric either, but which set of metrics matter to your business objectives. Tip: It is ideal to look at success throughout different time points so you can make adjustments as needed. Some metrics, like pipeline and revenue, take more time to mature, so measuring your campaigns throughout time allows you to get a holistic view of its impact. Measure as you first launch a campaign, while it’s running, when it ends, and three to six months down the line. Interested in learning more? Check out our webinar tomorrow on The Essentials of Account-Based Marketing as we go through how to get started with ABM and focus on what really matters.

By: Dave Chaffey Posted: July 7, 2016 | Email Marketing I recently participated in a Marketo webinar on Key Email Trends European Marketers Need to Know (that really all marketers need to know). We left some time for questions, and we received plenty of interesting questions on email marketing—from basic to advanced. It was interesting to see how similar these questions were and the common themes that arose, despite the different topics we covered. Because we couldn’t address all the questions in the session, I’ll answer some of the most frequently asked questions in this blog. I’ve grouped them into the categories of evaluation, growing and profiling your list, segmentation and targeting, and email frequency: Email Marketing Evaluation Q: What responses should I be receiving for my emails? A: Although most marketers measure their email success with open and click-through rates, a practical tip is to combine these measures to look at the click-to-open rate (CTOR%). This shows you how effective your creatives and offers are for different types of campaigns. To evaluate your email marketing campaigns in a more realistic way and identify ways to improve them, I recommend breaking out your overall responses by: Type of email: Categorize your responses by the types of emails you send. For example, personalized, event triggered emails tend to perform better than untargeted newsletters or 3 rd party email advertising (sometimes known as a solus emails), which can make the average meaningless if you group them together. Lifecycle stage: Emails sent to recipients who are in an earlier stage of the customer lifecycle, like welcome emails, usually work better than emails to long-term subscribers, so you need to break these out accordingly. Segment: Your response will naturally vary by how it resonates with different audiences, so break out your response by the different audience types. Subscriber type: Determine how your responses vary by the subscriber type, such as between Gmail, Live Mail, and iCloud addresses and company addresses. This can help you identify delivery or rendering issues between each type. Evaluating your emails with these factors in mind will give you a much better idea of the engagement your email campaigns are getting and how you can optimize them (if your email provider supports it). Q: Given the increasing number of email clients that download images automatically, how important are open rates as a metric now? A: Email open rates have always been potentially misleading since some email clients may block or download images by default or some users will change their preferences to automatically download them. Today, Gmail and Apple Mail on iOS tend to download images by default, so this doesn’t necessarily suggest interest in your emails, but more so that a reader has clicked on the subject line. However, I believe that open rates are still relevant for comparing email effectiveness between recent email sends. Comparing open and click rates helps you measure the different types of email sends (outlined in the previous answer) to reveal which perform the best. Ultimately, what really matters is whether the emails you send are helping you reach your goals. For some marketers, one of the best measures of effectiveness is sales value generated per 1000 emails sent. How to Grow and Profile Your List Q: What are the best ways to encourage opt-in? A: I recommend brainstorming alternative techniques for capturing e-mail addresses. Map out all the opportunities available for capturing a buyer’s information between your different channels and audience segments (shown in the matrix below) and use this to generate new ideas. Take a look at what you and competitors are currently doing and then do a ‘gap analysis’ to select options you aren’t currently used Here are a few  examples you could start with:  Q: Should I be using pop-ups? A: Pop-ups are increasingly being used in many industry sectors, particularly retail, publishing, and travel. This is because, when well-defined and tested, they will almost always give you significantly more new contacts in your database. We discussed this in depth in the webinar, when I described how well they have worked for Smart Insights, increasing the conversion of visitors to leads by 35% on a site where we already use a range of prompts to encourage subscription. Q: What about the quality of the people from pop-ups? A: If you use pop-ups to boost your subscriber numbers, it’s inevitable that there may be some decline in quality—but from my experience, they are still very worthwhile. To maintain the quality, it’s important to be able to profile visitors efficiently. Also, follow best practices to be sensitive to the user experience and don’t display a pop-up too quickly. You can address this by adding a time delay or detecting exit intent (e.g. when movement of the mouse to the navigation bar suggests users are about to leave the page). Q: How much do I need to profile subscribers? A: There’s a balance between asking for too much profile information and thus reducing the number of new contacts added to your database and not asking for enough. Identify two or three ‘killer question’ profile fields to ask subscribers that are most important for enabling your business to send more relevant emails. For example, at Smart Insights, we ask about the subscriber’s role, sector, and the number of people in the marketing team and then tailor our welcome emails based on the responses. Q: How can I target better without asking too many questions? A: A good rule of thumb for this is to ‘watch, don’t ask’ or ‘sense and respond.’ Instead of asking interruptive questions, monitor your recipients’ clicks to better profile them and understand their needs. Then, trigger follow-up communications accordingly. Some examples include: Monitoring click-throughs to different types of content or offers within your emails. Recording which content or offers are browsed on your website and then adding them to the individual’s profile. Recording products or categories searched for and then following up with relevant information. Over time, you should continue to add details about your buyers to gain a better picture of them by asking additional questions or tracking their behavior. For a B2B organization, I recommend defining a common customer profile (CCP), which includes all the data you could potentially collect in addition to the data you already have on a subscriber. I worked with one B2B organization that had three levels of profile and separate goals for each: level 1–basic contact information, level 2–position, market sector, and application and level 3–detailed information about standards and preferences. Segmentation and Targeting In the webinar, we looked at results from different research studies which revealed that detailed segmentation and targeting for email is still surprisingly rare. We also did a poll which showed that around 40% of the hundreds of marketers that attended the webinar didn’t target their audience. So, we received some interesting questions about how to get started. Q: Where can I begin to improve email targeting? A: Ideally, you want to start your targeting with a quick-win technique that is simple, but achieves the best results. Some options you could consider include: Creating two (or more) alternative versions of your standard newsletter. For example, you could create different versions for larger or smaller businesses, staff in different sectors, or male or female subscribers. Changing your welcome email content to be relevant for different audience segments. Sending post-purchase emails to promote similar products or related products in different categories (cross-sell and upsell). You can send these variations by creating distinct rules in your marketing automation or email system. This is a relatively quick win, and while it is efficient, it may not scale to multiple content types. This is where I recommend ‘dynamic content’ insertion (which I’ll cover next). Q: How can I get started with dynamic content insertion? A: With dynamic content insertion, you can add different content to a single section or block within your emails. For example, many emails have a ‘hero’ section at the top email, which often have the biggest impact because they are seen first. Dynamic content insertion will enable you to tailor images and text in this block to appeal to different audiences.Once you roll this out, you can develop a dynamic content marketing model that gives better results. In the webinar, we looked at this personalized B2B email example in which a series of dynamic content blocks were displayed: Hero block content varied based on lifecycle stage (new subscriber vs. engaged subscriber vs. lapsed subscriber) Secondary block content tailored by product category interest Tertiary block content varied by discounts and offers relevant for the audience Frequency for Email Marketing Take a look at this data gathered from UK email marketers that shows a huge variation in the number of emails they send every month. Accordingly, if you send just one email a month to your subscribers, you might be under-mailing and missing out on opportunities. But, if you’re emailing your subscribers more than eight times a month, you’re probably sending too many emails and are in danger of being seen as a spammer. The next question will explore how to get the balance right. Q: What is the best frequency to send emails? A: This is one of those ‘it depends’ questions since email frequency depends on the industry, audience, and what you’re looking to achieve. In retail, it’s common to email more frequently to prompt sales—at least weekly; whereas, in many business sectors, this may be considered too much.Here are three techniques you can use to determine the ideal frequency for your business: Test varying frequencies for different groups. This method will only be practical for larger businesses since it’s far more involved than A/B testing a subject line. You can classify a control or ‘hold-out’ group which has the original frequency and then create different segments for varying frequencies. For one financial services company we worked with, we originally set the frequency to be monthly and then increased it to weekly and fortnightly. In this case, we found that the increased frequency resulted in more product sales without causing a big issue with engagement or unsubscribes. Vary frequency by individuals depending on activity. One of the biggest challenges of email marketing is inactive subscribers. For many businesses, a large proportion of their subscribers haven’t engaged with their emails in the last six months or even a year. While some would argue that you should still regularly email these subscribers to stay top-of-mind and increase the potential of sale, I would argue against this since you could be identified as a spammer, negatively impacting your email deliverability. Instead, if an email subscriber becomes inactive, you can try to win them back to start regularly engaging with you again, and then add them to a different email group that you mail less frequently, but hopefully, with more impact! Vary frequencies throughout time using automation. This is a more sophisticated approach where individual frequency is controlled by the rules in your prospect or nurturing campaign. The emails you send to your subscribers depends on where they are in the lifecycle (new or older subscriber) and their behavior as they interact with different products and offers across your channels. Using this approach, you can increase email frequency (and offer a personalized message) when a subscriber shows more intent or engagement with your product. As you can see, we received a lot of great email marketing questions during the webinar. I hope these insights help you assess your current methods, try new approaches, and improve your email marketing. If you have any other questions, please feel free to ask them in the comments below!

By: Heidi Bullock Posted: July 5, 2016 | Demand Generation Often in life, more can be wonderful. For example, I like more tacos. If possible, I would like seven, not two. I would also like more Amazon Prime boxes and more NBA playoffs. Historically in B2B demand generation, more has been better too. More leads? You bet! But wait, let’s go back to college for one second. Remember the law of diminishing returns? There becomes a point when more is not more and the level of profits or benefits gained becomes less than the amount of money or energy invested. This is a very important concept to understand in marketing, especially for demand generation. More is not more, and here are three reasons why you should be wary of focusing solely on volume in demand generation: 1. 20,000 Names Is Not Winning If you bring in 20,000 names from a tradeshow or inbound marketing tactics, but the leads do not convert–so what? It’s important to remember that a name is not a lead. A name is just someone who enters your database (e.g. a student doing research or a candidate looking into your company), but a lead is someone with the right profile–specifically the right demographics and behavior, and ideally even the right account type. It is very important to have a method for making the distinction between what a name and a true lead is. So how can you distinguish the two? Define a revenue model with business rules that determine a prospect’s movement from one stage to the next and at which point a prospect should be handed from marketing to sales. At Marketo, a lead has to meet three criteria to become a lead: right demographics, right behavior, and right account profile. You can score your leads to understand their unique demographics and behaviors so that you can deliver high quality leads to your sales team. 2. Focus on the Right People and Accounts, Not Just Volume Even if you bring in leads who buy your product or service, if they ultimately churn, that is not an optimal outcome. All leads are NOT the same. Some buyers will make better customers and are more ideal for your business. These might include customers who buy additional products or upgrade their current ones, refer your company to their peers, and advocate on your behalf. So how do you determine the right leads to focus on to maximize their customer lifetime value? It’s critical to analyze your customer base to understand what attributes make up the ideal prospect. Is there a buyer persona that is more successful for your business? It may be a specific company size, vertical, buyer type, or all of these combined. You can use predictive scoring to help you identify the profile of an account or individual that is more likely to be a profitable and account-based marketing tactics to market to them in a focused, stream-lined manner. 3. Think About the Lifecycle, Not Just Acquisition Acquisition is really important, but it’s only part of the picture. Yet, many marketers are still primarily focusing their investment and activities into driving acquisition. In fact, according to a 2014 Forrester Content Marketing Benchmark online survey, only 12% ofcontent marketers are focusing on retention, cross-sell, and upsell. That means marketers are missing out on revenue that they could generate from growth opportunities that are much more affordable. By spending the majority of their efforts on costly acquisition techniques, marketers are leaving money on the table (data from Bain & Company shows that a 5% increase in retention yields between 25%-95% increase in profits). The action here? Don’t get tunnel vision with the number of leads you acquire and spend time thinking about the right customers for your business and the programs you have in place to continue to engage, retain, and delight them. How have you tweaked your marketing strategy to focus on obtaining quality over quantity? Share your experience in the comments below!

Written by Sanjay, our CMO It’s been just over a month since I spent four days in Las Vegas for our annual Marketing Nation Summit, and I’m still excited about the time I had with more than 5,000 attendees and some of the best minds in the business. The chatter in the halls was infectious and often lasted well past my bedtime as attendees swapped ideas and traded war stories about what they were doing to stay ahead of the curve in a rapidly changing digital world. I was fortunate to have an opportunity to offer my own ideas about the challenges to tomorrow’s marketers in the Day 2 keynote address, where several marketing icons joined me on stage. The program captured the theme of “Tomorrow’s Marketer.” The future of “what” As Phil Fernandez, CEO of Marketo (my employer), said during the Summit’s opening keynote, marketers now play on a bigger stage, so the expectations for both content and success are high. As Ken Wincko, the CMO of PR Newswire, noted during his Day 2 talk, credibility follows only when your customers trust you. That means marketing to moments that matter and delivering exceptional customer experiences take on increased importance. Consider the following: Trust equals credibility. Credibility is shaped by the accumulated expertise of every person in an organization who interacts with current or prospective customers. By the end of this decade, most boards will be asking their organizations to create metrics that measure how well they fare when it comes to customer trust. Great marketing is about serving, not selling. The question will be how well you know your customers’ wants and desires. Invest to foster customer advocacy. Great customer experiences will need to be contextual, empathetic and inclusive. In tomorrow’s marketing world, it’s vital to adopt a holistic approach that can engage your customers no matter the channel they choose. The future of “how” When Gary Briggs started his career in 1985, marketing had little idea of what worked and what didn’t. In 2016 we’re awash with data on our every campaign.Briggs, now the CMO at Facebook, rightly noted that consumers nowadays spend more time than ever on multiple devices, and while their interactions may be more fragmented than before, they are also more measurable than ever. A couple of points to keep in mind: We’re at the dawn of the era “of people-based marketing.” Use this measurable information to bolster your ability to tell a great story and get people to interact with your business. Marketers now have an opportunity to understand consumers at a level they never could previously. Take advantage of the ability to communicate with them like never before. The future of “who” If the chatter today is around decoding millennials, Wunderman CMO Jamie Gutfreund offered an astute reminder that the next generation is coming — Generation Z. This group, she noted, has become a proxy for all consumers. By 2020, it will make up 40 percent of the global population, and it is a picky bunch. (I should know — I have two of them at home right now!)Generation Z doesn’t like the way the world is going and has little confidence or trust in brands, governments or politicians. Consider this when marketing to these unconventional consumers: Trust is the new currency. It is a challenge to capture this generation’s attention, loyalty and confidence. They don’t only judge individual products but also take a broader look at the companies behind the brands. These digital natives, who are growing up with technology, are the ones who will decide whether or not to engage with you. And they will immediately head elsewhere if they believe you’re lying to them. This is the “optimization generation.” Gutfreund told us that Generation Z prefers to rely upon themselves and wants things to work well. If you want to cultivate a relationship with them, you’ll first need to understand their passions, values, issues and needs to communicate that you really get them and aren’t just interested in trying to sell a new widget or service. They have higher expectations, so disappoint them at your own risk. The future of “you” That leaves me with the fun stuff: the future of YOU in tomorrow’s world of marketing. What is the organization and talent profile required to succeed? You need special types of marketers to navigate this new world, and you can’t narrow your criteria to the same old experiences and personas. We’ve seen some of the most successful marketers come from backgrounds as diverse as zoo keeping and biology and teaching. These are not people who are classically trained four-P marketers, but these are people who had the right intrinsics for this new world. Marketers need to be intellectually curious and possess the grit and determination to power through whatever challenges you throw at them. Look instead for intrinsic traits to find the people with the right stuff. In a world where data drives everything that we do, marketers need to adapt and be analytical. Find these people and bring them into the profession — they will soar. At the same time, look for people who love customers and have a gift for storytelling. After all, this is marketing. You’ve heard me refer to them as the “Da Vincis” — the unique individuals who are talented across a variety of interconnected disciplines. They are in short supply, so don’t let the opportunity slip when you find one, and also strive to cultivate these traits within yourself. There’s no single marketing playbook anymore, and you and your people will need to be creative, analytical and strategic. Straitjackets and narrow specialties don’t work anymore. And finally, take no sh*t How should future Da Vincis behave in this marketing world of tomorrow? Very simply: Take no sh*t. Our Day 2 keynote ended with an inspiring performance by singer-songwriter Rachel Platten. Her inspirational hit “Fight Song” became popular after she had already been demonstrating grit, determination and passion…for 14 years. She faced a lot of naysayers and a lot of challenges, but kept at it until her talent and commitment paid off tenfold. It’s a life lesson to keep in mind. The fact is that tomorrow’s marketers will never get all the recognition, credit and popularity they deserve — at least not at first. So count on resistance from entrenched thinking — you’ll be in pretty good company. But remain determined and persistent, and you’ll overcome any and all obstacles. You will soar. This post originally appeared on Marketing Land on June 30, 2016.

By: Nate Dame Posted: June 30, 2016 | Search Engine Marketing One concern I hear over and over from marketing managers and executives is about accurately and objectively measuring SEO progress and ROI. The team members in the trenches are monitoring rankings, bounce rates, engagement, etc., but eventually, you have to know what’s actually driving revenue—and the C-suite wants numbers to prove it. But modern SEO hasn’t been the easiest thing to confine to a static set of metrics. Traditionally, SEO efforts that could rely on more technical strategies were easier to measure. Today, effective SEO is much less technical, so we need to adapt our methods. While search engines are always improving (which means that your content must always be improving), they’re always focused on the same end goal, which means good, modern SEO really is a long-term strategy. How do you measure your efforts for improvements and what do you show the C-suite in the meantime? The need for some kind of concrete answer has sent marketers after a lot of vanity metrics that look good (or not) on paper, but don’t really tell the brand’s true SEO story on their own. Bounce rate, time-on-site, clicks, and even—to an extent—an isolated view of search rankings don’t relate directly to revenue and don’t give an accurate view of an SEO campaign’s value. Maximizing your SEO opportunities, and providing reports that executives actually care about, means focusing on the right metrics: 1. Keyword Ranking Are Helpful, Sometimes “Where do we rank for our top keywords?” It’s every CMO and business owner’s first (and sometimes last) SEO thought, and usually the primary metric by which SEO efforts are measured. When we consider the big picture of SEO, it’s a good consideration, but—especially in the day-to-day business of SEO work keyword ranking shouldn’t get too much of your time and attention. There are several reasons for this: Search results are personalized. Google considers factors like browsing history, physical location, demographics, and personal preferences when dishing up search results. When you Google your key terms, you are probably not seeing the same results that your target audience is seeing when they search those same words. All keywords are not created equal. Reporting that your brand now ranks on page 1 for six of your top 10 keywords can be a good excuse to buy the marketing team lunch on Friday, but that’s about it. The importance of each individual keyword depends on search volume and its relevance to your business. Resources should be focused on the keywords that actually impact the bottom line. Ranking changes are not measured by a universal standard. If I told you that your brand dropped eight places for one of your keywords and two places for another, which would be more important to address? The answer: you don’t know yet. Dropping eight places on page 4 of search results isn’t going to impact your organic traffic, but dropping two places on page 1 probably will. The truth is, effective SEO—the work that drives real, lasting ranking changes and leads to increased revenue—is long-term work. Marketers that make a daily habit of checking their rankings tend to fall into reactive, instead of proactive, SEO habits. Most ranking changes don’t require immediate SEO attention. Search engines are always testing new algorithms, and competitors are always publishing new content. SEO that is constantly responding to ranking changes misuses resources that should be spent on the real job of building influence. And SEO reports that over-emphasize keyword rankings tend to lead executives astray on the health of their SEO efforts.How to monitor keyword ranking appropriately: If you must Google, at least use a depersonalized search to strip (most of) the personalization out of your search results. If you are using another SEO tool to monitor ranking, choose one and stick with it. Every tool uses a slightly different process to determine your “real” ranking, so stay consistent with one tool to get results you can use.As you monitor rankings and track changes, remember to look at the big picture. Resist the temptation to scramble after every tiny ranking change by creating one report that looks at high-value keywords and a separate one for low-value keywords, so you can more easily focus on the keywords that actually drive conversions. Similarly, be sure to note the page and/or position numbers of rankings that change so you can emphasize smaller changes on page one over big changes on page four. 2. Organic Traffic is a Better SEO Metric than Ranking Search traffic is the real goal behind improving search engine rankings, so a greater emphasis should be put on your efforts here. Any improvement in keyword ranking could be the result of a standard search engine fluctuation, but increases in organic traffic are concrete evidence that SEO work is paying off.How to monitor traffic from organic search: First, make sure you are set up with Google Analytics. It’s a free tool, with a Premium feature that is priced for enterprise-level organizations. The Premium version mostly offers greater support and service, and more specific numbers—whereas the free version “samples” data to provide more rounded numbers. The data you get, however, is enough for your purposes here.In Google Analytics, use the left-hand column to navigate to Acquisition > Overview > All Traffic > Channels. The table at the bottom of the page breaks down where your site traffic came from, and there’s one row for “Organic Search.” Of course, the organic traffic number includes branded and non-branded traffic. (Branded traffic is from keywords that use you brand name—e.g. ”Marketo marketing software”—whereas non-branded traffic is from keywords that do not—e.g. ”marketing automation software.”)Ever since Google took away keyword data, it’s incredibly difficult to break organic traffic data into branded and non-branded categories (although there are some great tools that can help). The best way, within Google Analytics, is to click into Organic Search from the first column in the above table, and then select Landing Page from the Secondary Dimension drop-down option above the table. The keywords are, surprise, “(not provided),” but we can gather some clues from the landing pages they point to. For home pages and login pages (rows 1-3 above), we can assume most of that traffic came from branded searches because there is no keyword focus for those pages other than the brand name. Traffic to blog posts and resource content (rows 4-8 above) probably mostly came from non-branded search traffic because they focus on a solution or on information that Google would have delivered in result to a more generic query. Rough estimates to be sure, but we’re at Google’s mercy concerning what data they choose to share. 3. The Bottom Line: SEO Conversions and ROI The goal of high search rankings is traffic, but the goal of traffic—to push the process all the way to the bottom line—is sales. Every website visitor does not convert to sales, so it’s important to monitor the conversion rate of your SEO efforts.Every conversion point, which will vary based on your industry and business model, should be considered: from ebook downloads to online purchases. Multi-touch attribution also needs to be considered, since every visit won’t convert—but every visit may lead to a conversion later. How to monitor conversions and ROI from SEO efforts:This process can start in Google Analytics, by setting up goals. Analytics has three options for setting up goals: Goal templates: These templates are organized by categories (revenue, acquisition, inquiry, and engagement). If your account is associated with a specific industry in Google, you will also see templates for specific industries. Every template can be edited. Custom goals If you prefer, you can create a custom goal from scratch. You just need to decide whether you want to create a goal based on which pages the user views, how long the user stays on a page, how a user interacts with your site, or how many pages a user views per session. Smart goals: If you’re using Google AdWords, you can take advantage of their machine learning programs to create smart goals. Turning on smart goals allows the program to monitor website visits, track which become conversions, use those insights to score visits, and automatically translate the best ones into goals. Your goals then become those actions that usually lead to conversions, and Analytics monitors them for you. Goal completions from organic traffic can tie SEO efforts back into the revenue stream. When you start using modern SEO strategies to drive traffic to a specific landing page (one with a good conversion rate), you can watch the views and time on that page increase. Modern SEO Strategies Need New Metrics I like metrics. Ask any of my staff: when we launch a new campaign, I put the Google Analytics Real-Time view on the flatscreen TV in our office. I like to gather data and try to extrapolate what it all means, but the truth is that most of what are commonly considered “SEO metrics” don’t mean anything to a brand’s bottom line. These three metrics—keyword ranking (with huge caveats), traffic from organic search, and conversions/ROI from organic search—can give you the insights you need to drive improvement and growth in your SEO strategy. They will also give you meaningful numbers to report to the C-suite, because they are rooted in a modern understanding of SEO.

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!

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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.

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By: Charm Bianchini Posted: June 14, 2016 | Digital Marketing Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the Argyle CMO Forum in San Francisco. With over 200 attendees, Argyle brought together marketing leaders from various industries to discuss new marketing strategies and best practices. One of the key topics of discussion? Digital transformation. In this digital age, successful organizations are keeping pace with technology changes and customer behavior. However, there are many challenges to overcome in order to achieve success. How do you implement innovative digital strategies and meet revenue goals at the same time? Let’s take a look at three ways you can drive digital transformation across your organization: 1. Understand Customer Behavior Who knew that it takes considerable effort to get people to go out? Most people fall into a rut of going home and staying in versus experiencing live events. Jennifer Betka, CMO of StubHub, candidly explained how hard it is to get people off the couch and has launched a new campaign to encourage people to “grab their ticket out.” It’s a great rebranding campaign on not missing opportunities of a lifetime; the foundation of which was built on understanding customer behavior. If StubHub did not profile their audience and uncover the truth about the effort it takes to get people to go out, their campaign would not have been successful. It was necessary for StubHub to first understand their audience’s behaviors and then speak to them as individuals. By putting in the time and effort to figure this out, they are now able to connect emotionally with people and identify target consumers across genres. If you don’t have agencies to help you with this, don’t fret. Understanding customer behavior can be done in numerous ways, an easy one being marketing automation. Marketing automation has transformed over the years into a scalable, behavior-based engagement marketing platform. It allows you to understand what people are really doing, beyond what they just say they’re doing. As the amount of customer interactions continues to grow, it’s imperative to listen and speak to your buyers in meaningful ways at every stage of the customer journey. 2. Personalize the Customer Experience Google’s Display Benchmark Tool reveals that 99.4% of online ads are ignored these days; in other words, marketing can seem like a big distraction to your buyers. The only way to fix this? Personalization! Dr. Volker Hildebrand, Global Vice President of Strategy, Customer Engagement, and Commerce at SAP Hybris, discussed how we can rethink personalization. He’s been passionate about this topic for years and stressed that personalization, when done right, should not look like marketing, but rather feel like a great experience. It should leverage rich customer information in real-time and deliver messages consistently across channels. Marketers must pivot away from segmentation, since often (2 out of 3) customers are pulled into an incorrect segment. A move towardsindividualization is needed to become more targeted and relevant. Unfortunately, this can be harder than it sounds. A 2015 study by Forrester Research, “The Contextual Marketing Imperative,” revealed large gaps in delivering personalization. The survey results showed that while 66% of marketers rate their personalization efforts “very good” or “excellent,” only 31% of customers believe that companies are consistently delivering a personalized, cross-channel experience. That’s a big divide and means that, as marketers, we have a lot of work to do in this area. One way you can deliver a consistent, cross-channel experience to your buyers is to integrate personalization capabilities into the primary channels they access, such as your website—the hub of your marketing activities. Leverage a web personalization solution to treat your buyers as the unique individuals they are and make your marketing more effective by delivering relevant, personalized experiences. It’s the only way to deeply engage people you know as well anonymous web visitors that you don’t know yet. 3. Engage With Customers to Build Lifelong Relationships True digital transformation is a journey with multiple layers and aspects. Autodesk’s VP of Customer Engagement, Jeff Wright, shared how Autodesk shifted to a subscription-based model, which started their company’s digital transformation. It was an entire company effort that marketing played a major role in. In addition to focusing more on customer retention vs. acquisition, Autodesk also needed to improve customer engagement, and at the heart of their strategy was a shift in marketing from where Autodesk wanted to market to channels their customers were actually on. Becoming customer-centric and knowing the channels they’re on earns you “the right to be heard” by your customers. In order to transform digitally, you must have the right people on board. Over the last 12-18 months, Autodesk has completely revamped their hiring strategy and now looks for people who meet their C-A-A profile (Content, Analytics, and Automation). A candidate must be able to create content that is truly useful for their audience, interpret data and ask the right questions to iterate and optimize campaigns, and understand how to use marketing automation to truly engage their audience. It’s a drastic shift, but it’s one that has already paid off for Autodesk and can pay off for your own organization. To learn how to future-proof your organization, check out our whitepaper Designing a Marketing Organization for the Digital Age, developed in conjunction with Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, to learn the best way to design your team for success. It sure is an exciting time to be a marketer! Not only is the marketing landscape evolving, but the way we interact and respond to buyers changes every day. Hopefully, these three steps will help you on your journey to digital transformation. Do you have any examples or insights on what has worked for your organization? Please share with me in the comments below; I would love to hear them!

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: Jessica Minasian Posted: June 8, 2016 | Email Marketing Over Memorial Day weekend, I took a road trip with my twin sister through Northern California. Before we embarked on our journey, we prepared for everything we needed (or so we thought): directions, extra snacks, water, and a good road trip playlist. However, nothing could have prepared us for the fact that anything can happen on the road, such as a flat tire or getting lost. Unforeseen incidents and mistakes happen in marketing as well, no matter how much you prepare. And similar to road trips, there’s no magical undo button that can take back whatever just happened, like the moment after you send an email and realize it wasn’t what you intended. But that’s how we learn, right? Usually, it only takes us making a mistake once to learn a valuable lesson. And no matter how bad things seem at first, it can be remediated. Drum roll, please. In the many years of working with marketers at Marketo, Business Consultants like myself have been called in to fix many of these road trip-like blunders. One of the most common email marketing mistakes that we see is when marketers accidentally send the wrong email to a subscriber. It could be sending a Russian email to all English-speaking customers (yes, we have seen this happen). Or sending out an incorrect subject line: “[Replace] with your creative subject line.” Or even offering something that does not exist: “20% Off of Unicorn Sale” (again, this has fallen into our laps, but we wished it was real). At Marketo, we don’t consider marketers battle-tested until they can overcome sending an incorrect email. Sometimes, this is done by sending an apology email. An apology email should be to the point and explain what happened, without risking further damage to your brand’s image. You certainly don’t want them to unsubscribe or lose faith in your brand, so decide if the mistake warrants an apology (this ebook offers some advice on how to determine whether or not to send one), more publicity, and if it actually risked customer’s confidence. And if it does, use the tips below to get back on the road. Here are four steps, written from the road, to crafting an apology email to redeem yourself: Step 1: Turn Around and Fix It Even the savviest of road warriors can take the wrong exit and get lost, but once they address the mistake, they can quickly get back on the road again. For email marketing warriors to do this, you need to first admit that you’ve made an error so that you can fix it. This starts with crafting the beginning of your apology email. There’s no need to overly explain your mistake; just get to the point. If your apology email is brief and sent to your email recipients soon after, you can catch most of them before they open the original email. Then, you can provide them with the correct information before they negatively respond. You could start off by saying, “Today, we sent you the wrong email by mistake.” By getting straight to the point, you are owning up to what happened without sounding overly wordy or concerned (even if you are, save your real feelings for internal conversations). Taking responsibility for the mistake clears the air. And by being clear and concise, you can send a message of confidence, security, and sincerity. Don’t waste any more of your time, or your recipients’, because there are more important things to get to—like continuing your journey. Step 2: Say You’re Sorry Whether you’re sending an email to your customers or on the road with your friends, proper etiquette still applies. One of the rules of the road is to apologize when your actions affect your fellow passengers. So, if you ate the last piece of beef jerky without asking anyone if they wanted some, then it’s time to say sorry. The same goes for an apology email. Ultimately, you need to say you’re sorry. In some cases, sending the wrong email will not raise any red flags for your recipients, but in others, this might be a sign your team is slipping. Depending on your line of work, the type of information you have about your customers (e.g. credit card, sensitive data) a misstep like the wrong email, can put them on edge if they receive an incorrect email. To put everyone’s mind at ease, you can include a section in your email that apologizes for the mistake and explains what went wrong and what you’re doing to ensure it will not happen again. Reassuring your customers of your ability to fix the mistake helps them continue to trust your brand. This section can also be an opportunity for your team to show a little humility. Some apology emails use humor to lighten the tone, but if your company is not known for humor, just stick to the facts. For example, you could write: “We apologize for the mistake. We have addressed the issue with our team and have taken steps to ensure this will not happen again.” You can even customize the subject line to: “Correction,” “Oops,” or “We Apologize.” Step 3: Ask for Forgiveness and Make Things Right Mistakes happen, but it doesn’t hurt to ask for forgiveness when something goes wrong and try to make amends. No one wants a road trip to end on a sad note and neither do your subscribers when it comes to marketing mistakes. Give your subscribers a reason to not only forgive you but also re-engage with your brand. Transform your mistake into an opportunity to re-engage inactive subscribers by offering a great deal. People are more willing to forgive you if you give them a good reason to and nothing works better than offering them a sweet deal. If you’re on a road trip and eat the last of the snacks, offer to pick up the tab for the next batch. As for marketers, the last section of your apology email could look something like this: “Click here to take an additional 10% off.” If you do not have a deal to offer, then you could end with, “Our customers are our highest priority. If you have any questions or concerns, please email us and we will respond to you promptly.” Step 4: Final Pit Stops Before Hitting the Road Again While it’s hard to avoid all the possible marketing mistakes, you can do your best to prepare for them and address them accordingly when they happen. It goes without saying that one of the best ways to prevent a blunder in the first place is by testing and scanning every email and double checking your lists and campaigns. Good email marketers understand that every email should follow a series of different checkpoints before it goes out. Here are some questions that you may want to ask yourself as you review your emails: Will these emails be sent to the right lists and segments? Do the custom fields throughout the email reflect the right information? Is the content up-to-date? Is it free of spelling or grammatical errors? Do the images render properly? Do all the buttons and links hyperlink to the correct URL? These checks and balances ensure that you’ve reviewed your email for mistakes to the best of your ability.  And if a mistake manages to slip through the crack, revisit where you made the mistake to prevent it from happening again. The last thing you want to do is send out another wrong email right after the first one. Do you have any email horror stories of your own? How did you overcome them? Share your experience in the comments below!