5 Signs You’re Ready FOR MARKETING AUTOMATION · using Marketing automation. With more than ... and lead management, supporting programs such as lead nurturing. Increasingly, marketing

5 Signs You’re Ready

FOR MARKETING

AUTOMATION

IntroductionHow do I know if I’m ready for marketing automation?

1

As your business grows, so do your marketing needs and ability to scale, especially

the way you go about sending emails to your customers. At this point, you may be

asking yourself what the difference between email marketing and marketing

automation is, and if your company is ready to make the switch.

You probably wouldn’t be reading this eBook if those questions weren’t on your mind.

In this eBook, Ledgeview Partners, a globally-ranked leader in business and

technology services, and Act-On Software, a leading marketing automation

technology provider, help you answer these questions by providing relevant insight

and information that will help you make the best decisions for your organization

when email marketing and marketing automation is concerned.

If you find yourself wondering if making the move to a marketing automation system

is right for your team, you’ve downloaded the right eBook.

Table of Contents:

2

Conclusion | PG. 19

What is Email Marketing? | PG. 3

What is Marketing Automation? | PG. 4

Marketer Levels of Expertise, Defined

| PG. 5

What Comprises Marketing Automation?

| PG. 8

5 Key Indicators You’ve Outgrown Your

Email Service Provider | PG. 12

The Future of Marketing Automation

| PG. 16

What is Email Marketing?

3

Email Marketing refers to the process of sending a commercial message,

typically to a group of people, using email.

Email is still the number one communication channel for businesses today.

Reports from Litmus show that 91% of consumers still check their emails

on a daily basis despite the rise of social media and other digital

channels. It sustains its position as the most effective way to connect with

your business prospects.

“On average, 51% of

companies are currently

using Marketing

automation. With more than

half of B2B companies

(58%) plan to adopt the

technology.”

– Emailmonday“The Ultimate Marketing Automation stats” (2018)

Email service providers let you own your lists, unlike social media channels. No one can take leads

away from you via email. Unless you use social media ad campaigns, which sometimes allow you to

collect lead and prospect information by setting certain objectives. For example, LinkedIn Lead Gen

Forms allow users to do this.

Email marketing helps business convert their leads more effectively. The ROI is still huge by

comparison to product promotion on other channels. Emailmonday reports that email has an average

ROI of $38 for $1 spent, which is a massive turnout for marketers.

So, you may wonder, why you’d leave your email service provider knowing this and move to

marketing automation to manage your marketing processes and strategies instead. It’s a valid

question, and there’s a method to the transition that is sure to blow your concerns out of the water.

An email service provider will only provide you the functionality to send mass email blasts and track

open rates, but when you really think about it, this is not scalable for what most marketers want to do.

Marketing automation, on the other hand, allows you to take advantage of email marketing

functionality and beyond. The extensions are what set it a part as the front-runner for how marketers

generate higher quality leads to drive growth and boost their business’ bottom line.

What is Marketing Automation?

4

Marketing Automation refers to

a software platform that

automates manual tasks and

multi-step processes such as

email and social media

campaigns, allowing marketing

departments to get more done

with less effort.

This creates many efficiencies,

saving time, allowing for

increased measurement, and

data consolidation. It tracks,

gathers, and consolidates data

that would be difficult to obtain

or respond to with the typical

email service provider. Traditionally, marketing automation has been used for demand generation

and lead management, supporting programs such as lead nurturing.

Increasingly, marketing automation systems have been extended to facilitate account-based

marketing, customer marketing, and support activities. Utilizing a marketing automation platform

helps automate a lot of repetitive tasks around email, social, and website actions to streamline

workflow within your marketing department.

Marketers needs have evolved over the years to be multi-layered and complex. Finding solutions to

meet these needs ultimately determine a marketing team’s effectiveness or ineffectiveness. Marketing

technology experts say there are three common stages that indicate digital marketing maturity that

we explore in-depth, in the next chapter of this eBook.

“80% of marketing

automation users saw an

increase in the number of

leads using marketing

automation software, and

77% had an increase of

conversions.”

– Emailmonday“The Ultimate Marketing Automation stats” (2018)


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LEVEL 1 : EMAIL BLASTERS

For many marketers today, email is still their

central digital channel. Those who live this

challenge of relying primarily on email instead

of taking full advantage of other digital

options fall into this category. Organizations at

this level of maturity, focus their digital efforts

primarily on email with a strategy that is

usually facilitated by an email service provider

that is relatively simple as well as limited

functionality.

Email blasters do a lot of manual work, scoring

leads and managing their data. There’s a lot of

heavy lifting on the people involved. The CRM

in operations are typically lacking at this level.

Without those in place, it makes it challenging

to measure results effectively. This prevents

accurate goal-setting and KPI measurement.

To determine if you are an email marketer, you

should ask yourself a few questions, like:

• Are you doing too much manual work of

scoring and data management?

• Do you lack the integration that supports a

data flow between your digital marketing

and CRM tools?

The first step towards becoming a multi-channel

campaigner (Level 2) is to add more automation to

your processes, which will allow you to spend more

time focusing on strategy, and less time tactical

execution.

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LEVEL 2 :

MULTI -CHANNEL CAMPAIGNERS


When you spend less time on the tactical execution throughout

your marketing processes, you create a cycle that allows you to

spread your wings to embrace other digital channels, moving

beyond just email marketing to start to explore other benefits

outside of it.

The defining characteristic at this level is their growth beyond an

email-centric marketing strategy to a multi-channel digital

marketing approach. Many companies today are actively

moving in this direction to better compete and better respond to

customers’ multi-channel expectations.

A few characteristics that demonstrate you’re at this level are:

• You have a segmented campaign strategy that is

segmented by behavior and profile data.

• You utilize automated scoring data management and data

enrichment activities.

• You have key contact information synced into your CRM

(Customer Relationship Management) environment.

• You have a defined funnel supported by specific

campaigns with correlated attribution reports.

Marketers at this level do more advanced segmentation and

have implemented marketing technologies that facilitate key

process automations. Most of these organizations filled out their

marketing stack over time by finding areas where they could

steadily move forward with specific marketing use cases for

greater productivity and effectiveness.

7

LEVEL 3 :

ADAPTIVE MARKETING PROS


At this level, a marketer has already adopted

technology that enables them to add

personalization into their multi-channel marketing

activities, and they’re eliminating what experts

refer to as “random acts of marketing”. They are

marketing with purpose and data to drive them

into the future.

At this stage, the real challenge is to remain at

the forefront of the digital marketing evolution,

updating your strategies as new technologies

become available. At this level, marketers will

find themselves at the beginning of a very long

game, so to speak. Still, it will be transformative

as technology evolves and adaptive marketers

evolve along with it.

There are many aspects of marketing where adaptive marketing can apply transformative

technologies today, so you can make incremental changes that are small, but impactful. For

example, predictive scoring, look alike modeling, adaptive sending, and content recommendations

such as subject line organization can all foster small yet significant improvements that will definitely

add up for you over time.

Many people automatically assume they need to start at level three, but this just isn’t true. You

need to move at your own pace to truly thrive. Wherever you are at in your journey, it’s important

to be guided by the marketing spirit of embracing change. Marketing organizations exist at every

level of digital marketing maturity. We are all a part of the learning process, regardless of the

point we’re at today in our marketing maturity.

While it can be helpful to benchmark yourself against your competition, it is more important to

understand where your organization falls on the digital marketing maturity journey to set the right

goals for advancement and improvement, specific to your company.

What Compr i ses Market ing Automat ion?

8

There are many different components that make up marketing automation. With an

email service provider, managing all of the different aspects of marketing automation

can be extremely difficult to juggle. There would be multiple platforms involved and

manual data consolidation to ensure that every platform is truly speaking properly to

each other.

With marketing automation, however, you have everything you need in one place. In

this chapter, we will explore the elements, above, at a high level, in detail, so you can

begin to understand the importance and comprehensiveness a marketing automation

system can offer your company.

WEB

FORMS

SOCIAL

PROSPECT

SOCIAL

PUBLISH

ACTIVITY

SCORING

LEAD

SCORING

SEGMENTATIONEMAIL

NURTURING

LANDING

PAGES

WEBINARS REPORTING


9

When you think about reporting, you should think about why you do

marketing automation to begin with, because if you can’t report on all of

the individual elements, what is the point? Reporting is extremely

important. Reporting on what matters is crucial to your success.

As a marketer, you need a clear, quick understanding of campaign

performance in order to optimize the customer experience and grow your

revenue. With marketing automation, you can measure your results in

real-time. This will allow for immediate insight into performance so you

can take action, and make changes, if needed.

REPORTING

SEGMENTATION

Segmentation is a great piece of the marketing automation puzzle.

Marketing automation lets you create specific segments that are well-

defined by combining different qualifications. Segmentation is a key

ingredient that helps make your email messages personal and relevant

to your unique audiences, which will boost prospect engagement, and

increase conversion.

Act-On, for example, allows you to create tightly-targeted list segments.

You can profile attributes, observed behaviors, and incorporate a

specified timeframe.

If you discover you have a person with a specific title with buying power interested enough to

attend two webinars with your organization, and engaged enough to click on three of your email

marketing messages, it may be time to send this individual a special incentive to “buy now”.

Segmentation will help you identify this catalyst.

LEAD

SCORING

Lead scoring uses a point system to assign values based on pre-determined

criteria such as the person’s industry and job title; essentially, a lot of

demographic factors. Lead factors also take into consideration, activity scoring,

which we explore on the next …


10

Activity scoring includes things like website visits, content downloads, event

attendance, and form completions. All of these points accrue over a set amount

of time. The sum of these points is the lead score, as described on the previous

page.ACTIVITY

SCORING

SOCIAL

PROSPECT

Social publishing is also lumped into the category of social prospecting.

Social media tools in Act-On help you track, interact, and build your audience

all within the platform. This is a huge time-saver for marketers. It eliminates

the need to click between multiple screens or tabs to navigate social

platforms. You can manage all in one place instead.

You can find out what customers and prospects are saying about you, track a

specific keyword to monitor, or even follow your competition. Act-On

Software makes it simple to keep a pulse on what is happening with all things

social.

There’s a simple way to share content through your social channels

automatically. The software integrates platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and

LinkedIn into a single publishing interface. You can easily schedule or share

any assets all from within the platform, which is a great way to interact with

your target audience(s).

Web forms are a key component and feature top marketers today use regularly.

Creating forms within Act-On is quick and easy. You never have to start from

scratch, since there are a library of templates available. Creating the forms is a

simple drag and drop. Their built-for-responsive design makes them safe for

mobile, and progressive profiling is another key feature of using them to

WEB

FORMS

consider as they will help minimize your form fields, allowing

you to gather key data over time without negatively

impacting your conversion rates.


11

Landing pages are a tool that top marketers use frequently on multiple channels.

Building a single landing page in Act-On helps drive conversions across the entire

customer buying cycle. They are a key component of marketing automation and

instrumental to digital marketing, as they drive all types of conversions from

simple signups like a newsletter or blog to a major purchase, contact, or even a

demo request.

LANDING

PAGES

Email nurturing is a key component of marketing automation, as we have

already described earlier in this eBook. Email nurturing allows you to

quickly and easily set up strategic campaigns that deploy automatically

based on your pre-programmed rules. Email nurture programs allow you

to use conditional “if-then” logic to trigger the next step in a campaign.

This results in prospects getting content based on their activity that is

personalized to their journey, helping them digest information at their own

pace until they’re ready to talk to someone in your sales department.

EMAIL

NURTURING

A lead may be qualified, but not yet ready to buy. Behaviors with email nurturing campaigns may

help marketers determine when the lead is ready to move from being marketing-qualified to sales-

qualified.

WEBINARS

Webinars can sometimes be tricky to setup. They take time to plan and

execute, but a lot of the heavy lifting can actually be alleviated with

marketing automation. For example, Act-On has integrations with

GoToWebinar and WebX, which make it a lot easier to organize,

promote, and manage webinar events.

According to The Content

Marketing Institute, over 60% of

marketers are using webinars as

part of their marketing programs.

5 Key Indicators You’ve Outgrown Your

Email Service Provider

12

What’s marketing automation all about, at the end of the day? Why does it even exist?

Act-On reminds us that every time a prospect interacts with your brand, it means

something. It means something about who they are, what they want, and where

they are in their buyer’s journey, so the idea behind consolidating all of these tools

into one centralized command center is to enable marketers to track, measure, and

analyze those interactions to enable them to sell smarter.

It’s all about connecting the dots between these activities and giving you the insight and intelligence to

be able to respond in real-time to prospects as they interact with your brand and are getting to know

you.

There are five key indicators that you’re ready for marketing automation, as you know based on the

title of this eBook, and now that you’ve learned the basics, it’s time to unpack what they are …

L E AD NU R T U R I NG

Email marketing serves as the core component to many outbound marketing programs.

However, the Batch + Blast method is now a thing of the past. Batch + Blast refers to

a “one size fits all” approach. As we know, this style lacks customization; and, to gain

brand loyalty, you need to adapt to what your customers want to see. Your prospects

aren’t just numbers in a database. They’re people with unique interests.

In today’s hyper-personalized marketplace, they will expect to be treated that way. Instead of

blanketing your lead list with one-off emails, automated drip marketing campaigns give you the ability

to plan out interaction pathways that progress prospects through messaging streams based on their

behaviors and preferences. Lead nurturing is a proven method for turning prospects into buyers. It’s done

by contacting prospects over a set amount of time and providing relevant content that eases them

through the buyer’s journey.

You may be asking: Why is that so important? Lead nurturing means keeping your brand front and

center with potential buyers, and lets you build trust over time. With Act-On, you can set triggered emails

to be sent to prospects or customers based on specific actions like filling out a form, registering for a

webinar, or abandoning a shopping cart. This allows you to target prospects based specifically on their

actions, and what information they have consumed on your site. These workflows can be very

sophisticated, and having to segment your prospects or customers with an email service provider can be

very time-consuming. It also doesn’t take into fact, the behavioral data behind it, unlike marketing

automation.

Key Indicators You’ve Outgrown Your


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ANAL YT I C S

Unfortunately, fragmented technologies create a number of challenges for marketers.

It’s extremely time-consuming to pull reports from multiple platforms, and to aggregate

and consolidate data. The result is usually an inability to analyze and optimize the

customer experience across multiple channels. If these various data points are not put

together correctly, it can result in lost opportunities for your business, and make it

difficult to properly measure ROI on your marketing programs.

With marketing automation, unified data is key, and we all know in marketing, how important it is to

track that return on investment. You need to look at how all of your marketing activities are working

together, rather than measuring separate emails and programs. Gathering data and analytics in one

place can help you attribute revenue, and adapt your marketing to suit your customers’ needs, and

create prospect profiles.



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L E AD S C O R I NG

Imagine deciding between lead lists and sales hand-offs, or prioritized leads and sales

alignment. Most marketers would prefer the latter! Lead scoring allows you to pinpoint

your hottest prospects. Not all leads are created equal. Some are ready to buy right

now, and others aren’t. Some will likely be ready soon, and others might just be

entering the funnel.

Lead scoring will help you identify where they fall in the funnel. It will help you decipher the warm leads

from the cold leads. A good lead scoring system watches for online and offline buying signals, which

increases marketing’s ability to pass qualified leads to sales. And, most all marketers know salespeople

want qualified leads – who doesn’t?!

Lead scoring automates the process of monitoring a prospect’s online body language and flags key

digital buying signals so that sales reps know who and when to call them. This is all done automatically

within a marketing automation platform, meaning there is no longer a need for manual lead lists. This

enables your sales team to focus their time on closing revenue and driving increased profitability rather

than spending time qualifying leads they could need or suffering from marketing blocks.

Having something like this in place makes scaling your company a pretty seamless process. No matter

how your business is growing, the integrated single platform design of a marketing automation solution

enables you to easily manage your contacts, leads, campaigns, and data. Automated workflows and

nurturing programs are size agnostic, which means they can handle thousands or millions of contacts at

once.



15

S AL E S E NAB L E M E NT

Marketing automation lets sales and marketing bridge the gap between hopeful

possibilities and closed sales. With marketing automation, marketers and their sales

counterparts can define on what makes a lead marketing-qualified, sales-accepted,

and sales-qualified. By establishing these qualifications and processes early on, it helps

to instill trust and alignment between sales and marketing.

When thresholds are set so that sales-ready leads get automatically delivered to sales, it helps sales

become confident about the quality of leads that marketing is generating since they understand the lead

scoring process. Then, the leads that aren’t ready to be sent to sales can be returned to marketing for

further nurturing and development within the sales funnel, until they’re ready to buy.

M U L T I - C H A N NE L I NT E G R A T I O N

Most companies, no matter their size, need a system that tracks and monitors behavior

across multiple channels, a system that encompasses all of the benefits of email, but

with linkages to track and aggregate cross-channel customer engagement. That’s where

marketing automation comes in.

Email marketing tools are primarily designed to be good at one thing – email, but, of course, most customers don’t interact with customers using email alone. Multi-channel engagement is a

core differentiator for marketing automation. Marketing automation combines all of the benefits of an

email marketing solution along with integrated capabilities that would otherwise need to be consolidated

using various standalone technologies.

By combining, most functionalities in a unified platform, marketing automation serves the needs of both

the marketing and sales departments through integration as well as personalization, which ultimately has

a greater impact on the business as a whole. Integration with additional channels also simplifies the

process of integration based on demographic and behavioral information.

Segmenting your audiences based on various attributes like industry, revenue size, or title, can help you

compose custom messaging and serve up content that resonates most with that audience. You can also

customize forms to help build out the segments you are looking for. Within Act-On, for example, you can

use progressive profiling to gather this information over time without disrupting conversion rates.

16

If you’re currently doing any one of the steps we’ve just covered, you should

consider bringing them all into one system.

It’s important to understand where your organization falls on the digital marketing

maturity scale to set goals for advancement and improvement, and to really make

sure you move at your own speed.

As you move from one level of maturity to another with your marketing automation journey, it’s always

good to think about the future and to update your strategies as new technologies become available.

The future of marketing automation is becoming adaptive – making incremental changes that are

small, but impactful.

You may be wondering, at this point, why marketing automation is truly the way forward for

companies. Let’s recap and elaborate upon the six major benefits!


P E R S O N A L I Z AT I O N

Personalization is the key to standing out. With email alone, you can’t truly do that. Every

customer wants to be a part of a moment where they feel a company truly understands them and

their needs. Adapting your message to an individual is a great start to getting a customer’s

attention. You want to nurture your leads with relevant content at the right time. You can create

programs to suit everyone’s needs. So, for example, if they’re frequently downloading case

studies, you may want to send them more and keep them updated on that. Likewise with other

content types.

17


R E A L - T I M E A L E R T S

Real-time alerts allow for instant notifications for contacts, leads, and user activities; and you, can

get alerts for contact actions (in Act-On) such as email opens, link clicks, and web browsing

activity, and CRM user activity such as new deals or incoming sales calls. Marketing automation

allows you to automatically notify salespeople within their CRM of highly qualified prospects and

their behaviors.

Thanks to having real-time alerts, your marketing campaigns will become dynamic, and will help

initiate authentic dialogues and every prospective customer interested in its products.

L E A D N U R T U R I N G

Lead nurturing ensures all of the money and effort you put into your marketing automation

technology, specifically with lead generation, isn’t being wasted. It lets you further hone in on

the most qualified leads, but also ensures that those qualified leads make it to the end of the

buyer’s journey and are converted into customers. Marketing automation is one of the core

components of any successful lead nurturing program.

A powerful marketing automation system provides an abundance of lead generation tools to

help you qualify and convert leads faster. It’s also an essential element to have in place to

increase revenue and overall business growth.

18


E F F I C I E N C Y

Efficiency with marketing automation is clear. You’re doing more in less time, which is great for

your entire organization as it allows you to spend less time on manual tasks and focus on what

you need to during your day-to-day. By streamlining tasks that were previously manual, you are

freeing up your time to focus on impactful activities instead of tactical activities.

This also helps to increase sales and marketing alignment. Without it, sales and marketing

typically are culprit to operating in silos versus being aligned when it comes to goals and

tactics. Marketing automation helps to close any existing gaps.

TA R G E T E D M E S S A G I N G

Marketing automation helps businesses enhance their messages for specific customer profiles.

Planning for automation directs attention into how customers view specific products they’re

using. An automated solution can continuously receive information related to customer activities

such as email opens, link clicks, and form submissions.

This activity-related data is stored for future use. Marketers can then use it to develop

recommendations for solutions based on customer activity, history, and interests indicated.

Measuring message performance based on customer profiles can lead to tailored feedback

faster and more efficiently.

All of this together helps marketers to see the bigger picture!

The ability to send an email is just one small part of what marketers do, so a system that encompasses

ongoing cross-channel customer engagement is key. That’s where you can see that bigger picture and

ROI for all of your marketing efforts.

19

CONCLUSION

In this eBook, we’ve covered a lot about marketing automation, focusing on key

indicators that can help you determine whether or not you’re ready to make the

transition from your email service provider to a single interface that lets you manage

everything in more place more dynamically than before.

Marketing automation systems have been proven to help align your sales and

marketing teams to create efficiencies. They are valued as a strategic tool that helps

you target buyers more effectively across the customer journey, providing them

personalized experiences based on their behaviors and profile attributes to

increase relevance during a carefully set period of time.

When you spend the time, money, and effort on a marketing automation system, you

are bound to see a grand ROI. By implementing a marketing automation system, the

possibilities of driving growth, creating more effective processes and strategies, and

boosting your bottom line is vast and truly exciting!

You can learn more about the benefits of a marketing automation solution like Act-On through

Ledgeview Partners or through the solution itself. Both Act-On and Ledgeview Partners offer a wide

variety of resources to always help ensure your success.

Click here to access the Act-On Resource Library + here to access Ledgeview’s

Are you looking for a

marketing automation

solution like this?

GET IN TOUCH!

The Marketing Experts at Ledgeview Partners, LLC. can help provide you a thorough

business analysis to identify if a solution like Act-On Software is right for your

organization.

With Ledgeview Partners’ Marketing Consulting Services, we can help you to define

your buyer persona’s, and customer segmentation. Create alignment strategies

between sales and marketing through technology integration and develop lead

generation, nurturing, and customer retention programs. With a customized set of

metrics and goals to measure success and ongoing training resources, your team will

have all the tools they need!

Learn more about our Marketing Consulting Services at

LedgeviewPartners.com/Marketing-Consulting.

Ledgeview Partners is a certified Act-On Partner. Start thriving with marketing

automation when you get in touch …

LEDGEVIEW PARTNERS:

P: (920) 570 – 5571

E: [email protected]

W: LedgeviewPartners.com

T: @LedgeviewCRM

ACT-ON SOFTWARE:

P: +1 (877) 530 – 1555

E: [email protected]

W: Act-On.com

T: @ActOnSoftware

Documents

5 Signs You’re Ready FOR MARKETING AUTOMATION · using Marketing automation. With more than ... and lead management, supporting programs such as lead nurturing. Increasingly, marketing