Market Insights
How Marketing Automation Can Help You Improve Efficiency, Lower Costs, and Maximize Revenue
— Friday, November 11, 2011
Marketing automation tools are helping companies — large and small — improve response rates, identify well-qualified leads, and make informed decisions about when and how to act on opportunities. They are also reducing the time and cost of creating campaigns and improving overall returns on marketing investments. Read on to find out how your organization can start leveraging marketing automation and how other companies that sell to schools are using these tools to reach the right educator with the right message at the right time…
Is your organization ready for marketing automation?
The marketing landscape is rapidly changing, and marketing automation is helping companies find new and easy ways to qualify leads and drive them through the sales and marketing funnel. In a recent live MDR Webinar, Christopher Ziemnicki, Senior Product Development Director, MDR, and Ryan Mantzel and Matt Martelli,Co-Founders of Flywheel360, a demand generation and marketing optimization firm , discussed how marketing automation works and offered some time-saving strategies to help you get more results from your education marketing campaigns. Following are highlights of that session.
“While implementing an automation program may seem challenging at first, it forces you to be a more efficient marketer because the up-front planning that the program requires is really a time-saving approach. With marketing automation, you work through the whole process and all its scenarios together,” points out Christopher Ziemnicki. “Once the automation program is up and running, you then can use your time to tweak and fine-tune the program and also focus on more strategic matters, including converting those leads into sales.”
Ziemnicki notes the up-front thought and strategy involved but points out that MDR has a new email trigger program which makes it affordable and easy to leverage the power of automation. Education marketers can quickly set up a series of follow-ups to their segmented prospect list to get started with lead nurturing. Check out a recent campaign done by Learning A-Z. “Overall, the results are looking very positive for Learning A-Z. The campaign, which is a repeat campaign from last year, is performing 49% better than last year,” says Christopher Ziemnicki. “The trigger campaign has 46% more unique opens and 45% more unique clicks than the single message stand-alone campaign they ran the previous year. They plan to more fully use the trigger tool in the future for even higher returns.”
The Evolving Sales and Marketing Funnel
Many education marketing campaigns have begun with a direct mail piece, followed by some combination of inbound and outbound sales calls in order to move the teacher through the pipeline until a sale was closed. Determining a prospect’s propensity to purchase was more subjective than scientific.
With many marketing channels available now, including email, social channels, web ads, and online searches, companies can use automated programs, such as drip marketing, Trigger-Based Email programs, and lead scoring to capture behavioral and demographic information, better qualify leads, and determine if they need more marketing nurturing and if/when they are ready to be passed onto Sales.
What does automated lead nurturing offer your business?
“Small and large companies alike face the same business challenges: insufficient lead generation, poor alignment of marketing with sales, along with difficulty tracking and measuring marketing ROI,” says Matt Martelli, a demand generation and marketing optimization expert who has been working with education companies for years. “Nurturing programs keep teachers engaged with your company and products — instead of with your competitor — so that when they are ready to buy, they buy from you.” Martelli offers many ways automated lead nurturing benefits marketers:
- Increases productivity through efficiency
- Uses the behavior of leads to drive marketing activity
- Increases revenue opportunity
- Focuses on qualified leads
- Acts on the right lead at the right time
- Creates a positive synergy between sales and marketing
Case Study #1: Generated qualified leads and an expanded house file through lead nurturing
Ryan Mantzel shared a teacher appreciation program that has been successful for several education industry clients of FlyWheel360. An automated, multi-step email program was used recently to build one client’s house list and create a thriving social community for them in order to ultimately drive increased revenue. The program began with an email invitation to 10,000 teachers from the client’s house list, asking them to refer other educators to sign up for their daily thank-you message that would also include free downloadable classroom materials. An email was created for each day of the weeklong campaign along with a coordinated landing page for each day, as well as a Facebook page where teachers were encouraged to share with each other.
Before the program began, a flow chart of each step of the campaign was developed. Everything was prepared before the campaign began, with unique lead nurturing built into every day’s message.
All of the thoughtful planning paid off. “The referral campaign generated 25,000 new prospects for the client’s database and 4,000 Facebook fans, including 1,000 active contributors,” reported Mantzel. “More important, the automated program produced 300 new qualified leads, with opportunities in over a dozen new districts.”
Case Study #2: A trigger program that improved retention rates for a classroom subscription product
Mantzel also shared details about an auto-response trigger program that was used to retain more teachers for a client’s subscription product. The campaign’s goal was to specifically reach educators who had bought their product but then went on to use it very little or not at all. Their active users had a strong 90% renewal rate, so there was a compelling case for getting purchasers to use the subscription software.
A multi-step nurturing flow chart was created, triggered at 90 days after purchase. Dynamic message content was developed for different groups of buyers based on email behavior, relational data, web behavior, and off-line behavior.
The nurturing program helped the client reach its business goals. Using the automation software and more relevant copy, images, and calls to action, the campaign moved 30% more inactive users into active-user status and also bumped the company’s overall renewal rate up over 95%.
Mantzel provided additional examples of other nurturing programs that can be effective with teachers:
- Welcome messages
- Up-selling/cross-selling
- Abandoned shopping cart
- Re-engagement – activate inactives
- Time-sensitive offers
- Event-driven campaigns
- Referral and loyalty programs
- Accelerated lead programs – Taking hot leads out of your standard nurturing program and moving them through the pipeline more quickly
To get the full scoop on what Chris’s, Matt’s, and Ryan’s insight into how marketing automation can help your organization, listen to a recording of the live session.
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