When I originally had the idea to write this post, I decided to focus on our new marketing automation platform release and how the menu system had changed. I soon realized that the real story was not product-specific, but the underlying reason for the change; To align a menu system with how business-leaders today think about online marketing and sales.
So how is it that today’s B2B Marketing professionals think? Enter the 4Cs:
There are a variety of different emails that I send out through LoopFuse OneView on a monthly basis. With a freemium offering of our product, the volume of inbound leads we receive has increased substantially making it more important to nurture these prospects through email marketing. I have emails that have been created and built into leadflows so that my existing database of users feel the LoopFuse love and we continue to educate them on the best practices within the product. In addition, there are prospects that we reach out to through email marketing to help educate them on marketing automation and the benefits of utilizing such a tool.
No matter what type of email I am crafting, I always run down a checklist of 5 things before I click the “Send” button. Because once that button has been pressed – there is no going back.
Email Deliverability is a hot-topic today as marketers seek to fine-tune their outbound messaging and engage customers with mass email campaigns and lead nurturing programs. Before making a purchase decision for a marketing automation platform, buyers should know the basics of email deliverability, as it will have a direct impact on the success or failure of their marketing programs and ROI.
The list below is composed of technology and usability items that we believe are a base-line for achieving increased deliverablity rates from your email marketing campaigns.
Enhancements in this Release:
In this release, we have completely redesigned our Email Campaign user-interface, adding new features in the process. The entire user-interface was redesigned from the ground up, in an effort to improve usability, deliverability, minimize test cycles, and provide eye-popping real-time analytics on your awesome email creations. Enhanced usability and testing capabilities makes it easier than ever for you to test your email content rendering as you are working on it. Real-time email campaign analytics means you no longer have to wait to measure results of your awesome creation.
Changes in this Release:
This is a significant change in the way we handle email personalization. As of this release, LoopFuse OneView will use the latest contact information to personalize email content. In the past, LoopFuse used the contact information that was associated with a particular list member.
Special thanks to our customers for submitting these and other feature requests via the LoopFuse Community!
And now the fifth way marketing automation provides job security for marketers from 5 Ways Marketing Automation Provides Job Security for Marketers. Below is the excerpt from the white paper:
“5. Make Marketing Intelligence Actionable
For most marketers, the challenge with channel proliferation is not a lack of data, but a lack of data integration. Disparate systems (email marketing, web analytics, landing page creation tools, digital asset management, and CRM) often fail to bring critical information together in one centralized location. Marketing automation tools should integrate with CRM solutions (e.g. Salesforce.com) to deliver a centralized source of multi-channel analytics for one version of the truth in simple, drill down dashboard reporting designed for marketers.
Website Analytics allow organizations to quickly assess website trends with accurate statistics covering a wide-range of metrics. This type of real-time insight is critical to marketers so they can identify areas of improvement and better tune the website to increase message response. Likewise, marketers can measure response and engagement by incorporating call to action website links in email campaigns.
It’s also important for marketers to track the success of their email campaigns, in real-time, to make adjustments or additions to a campaign based on user response. Marketing automation can provide comprehensive reporting across CRM and marketing tools, so marketers can see a complete picture of recipient activity, email bounces, bad email data, link activity, geographic breakdowns, as well as associated opportunity. Comprehensive reporting allows marketers to adequately judge the effect of marketing campaigns on real dollars.
Job Security Scorecard:
Download a free copy of 5 Ways Marketing Automation Provides Job Security for Marketers
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Last week, we released 5 Ways Marketing Automation Provides Job Security for Marketers, and we have received very positive feedback from B2B marketers. So, I’ve decided to share more sections of the white paper to help marketers be more effective within their organizations. Here is an excerpt of the first way marketing automation provides job security for marketers:
“1. Track customer engagements and qualify the best leads for sales:
The process of engaging with customers and prospects across one or more channels is complex, and marketers simply can not realistically build relevant, timely, personalized relationships with every prospect unless they can automate this engagement. Marketers need to realize, it’s not about the quantity of leads, rather it’s about quality of leads. Marketing automation can help marketers review their pipeline and find out the attributes of the best opportunities and then automate prospect nurturing so only the most qualified and educated prospects are passed to sales as “sales-ready” leads backed by qualified and verified data.
Marketing automation tools integrate email marketing, web analytics, landing page creation, and other marketing channels for a comprehensive account-by-account view of the customer engagement. By tracking the number of “sales-ready” leads that are passed to sales over time, marketers can literally demonstrate how effective marketing collateral has been at converting prospects into qualified opportunities. Marketers gain credibility with sales and executive stakeholders when they can demonstrate exactly how the marketing budget translated into top-line opportunities for the organization.
Job Security Scorecard:
Download a free copy of 5 Ways Marketing Automation Provides Job Security for Marketers
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Email marketing is an industry that survives based on the ability to measure the effectiveness of email campaigns. This is accomplished through some technical wizardry that leverages two primary features of HTML-based email : images and hyperlinks. In order to track if/when an individual email recipient actually opened the email campaign, the recipient’s email client must display images. Unfortunately, having images enabled in your email client can result in embarrassing situations such as opening what looks like a legitimate email in a business meeting only to find that it is a spam containing pornographic images. As a result, more and more email client programs (Outlook 2007, Gmail, AOL, Windows Live Mail) come with images disabled by default. As more email client programs adopt this default setting, email marketers will see fewer and fewer “opens” in their campaign analytics and may even misinterpret the trend as a reflection of their campaign quality when it is simply a byproduct of technical evolution.
It’s all Relative
Does this mean that email marketers should ignore the open-rate statistic when evaluating their campaign performance? No, but it does mean that the open-rate is only meaningful as a relative measurement of whether your email was compelling enough for people to open. For example, it’s valid when doing A/B testing to compare whether email subject A or email subject B was more compelling (but, of course, only if the segmentation of groups A & B is completely random). But it is not valid as a measurement of this year’s total email open-rates versus last year’s.
Nurturing Gone Awry
Another dangerous practice is using “email open” events as conditions inside of your lead nurturing programs (in LoopFuse we refer to these as leadflows). I have had two new LoopFuse customers propose leadflows which take different paths depending on whether the recipient actually opens a particular email. However, if the recipient has images disabled there is simply no way for the leadflow to determine the correct path. This can create a confusing or even frustrating experience for their prospects as a result. If you want to react to a prospect’s email interactions, a click-through is much more reliable.
In an era of analytics overload, it’s understand exactly what the data is telling you, not just what it says.
Empowering Sales with up-to-date contact information on contacts and interested prospects is essential in this day and age of high-volume, low-touch sales processes. LoopFuse OneView offers Sales organizations deep integration with a great number of common 3rd-party business directory and news sites, easily accessible from any visiting Company’s analytics page.
The current integrated 3rd party directories and news sites are pictured below, and include direct-linking to information providers such as Hoover’s Business Directory, Jigsaw, Google News, and ZoomInfo.
Because the level of integration is “native” and presented as a hot-link, LoopFuse is able to provide the added value and information to sales organizations at no cost to us and therefore no additional cost to LoopFuse customers… and sales people are much happier for it all. 
OneView v3.20 (release FAQ) was released last week after weeks of testing and hardening by our QA staff. It stands out among all of our releases, as the focus was not concentrated on the LoopFuse side, but shared equally and externally by providing tight integration with our new Community Support Portal.
The new Community Support Portal is now populated with over 100 articles, FAQs, videos, and screencasts. It hosts a complete reference documentation section for all aspects of LoopFuse OneView. Its goal was to cover every category, module, page, and possible user action in the product and out (Aspects of our Web Service API are also covered for techno-savvy users).
The highlight of our integration is that we now have a seamless integration for users in our OneView product and our Community Support Portal. That is, users (even non-paying trial users) can easily login to the portal from within the product and ask questions or share ideas and feedback openly.
One particularly innovate approach to online help we have taken is making the OneView Help System contextually aware – no matter what section of the product you happen to be in, calling the online help menu will point you to the correct Help Article, Category, and pre-fill the correct Search Terms.
In keeping with our original beliefs, we have decided to make our Community Support Portal completely open and transparent. Anyone, even guests, may browse the documentation and online discussions. We feel it is important to show prospects all aspects of the product and level of community participation. From companies as large as Oracle to your local gardening forum, open communities benefit registered users and anonymous ones alike. They provide an open door for all to window-shop your offering before taking the next step.
At its core, leveraging communities for effective marketing and sales is not an original idea (it’s actually Marketing 101), which of course makes me wonder why our over-funded Canadian friends and those other guys (you know, the ones that rhyme with stiletto and spend their lives telling you how much they know about marketing) chose to lock-up their documentation and community conversations with an iron door that only paying users can unlock. C’mon guys, what are you hiding?
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