Watch the webinar to hear the full set of product updates, or get a summary of Insightly’s new features below.

Watch the webinar

What’s new with Insightly AppConnect?

AppConnect is an integration automation platform that allows you to connect Insightly and its data to all the other software applications you use to get work done every day. Out of the box, it includes over 500 pre-built connectors to applications across HR, Finance, IT, Sales, Marketing, Productivity, and Data storage.

Updates to Insightly AppConnect:

• Added new Marketing, Data Storage, Database Programming Language Connectors
• No usage or record limits or restrictions on data transfers with AppConnect
• New bulk action to run an AppConnect integrations across multiple records
• It’s now much easier to set lookup field values in a recipe in AppConnect

What’s new with Insightly Service?

In September of 2021, Insightly Service was added to the platform. It’s a powerful, yet easy-to-use service and support application that’s built natively within Insightly, connecting seamlessly with all the applications you use today to run your business. Since then, we added a new mobile application for both Apple and Android users, while also updating three key areas of the Service product:

• Knowledge Base 
• Ticketing Management
• Customer Portal 

Knowledge Management Improvements

Insightly’s Knowledge Base is a convenient reference designed to save time and resources for customers. It’s also a great source of all documentation that teams need when learning about the product.

Updates to the Service Knowledge Base within Insightly Service:

• Reorganize articles in bulk
• New Insightly API endpoints for knowledge article management
• Generate a table of contents in an article automatically from a new editor button
• Archive knowledge articles in bulk from within list views
• Last published date field to article lists and details
• New reports available for knowledge base articles

Ticketing Management improvements

Ticketing is at the core of a team’s ability to track, respond to, and manage customer service requests and we have a significant number of feature updates to report here as well.

Updates to ticketing management within Insightly Service:

• New mobile and tablet applications
• New API endpoint for Insightly Service
• @ mention other agents within a ticket comment
• Ability to see when other agents are viewing or responding to a ticket
• Automated customer satisfaction surveys
• Additional capabilities around ticketing merging
• Improvements to processing incoming emails 
• Auto-hiding of quoted reply text in the ticket view 
• Improved visibility of customer service tickets

Customer Portal improvements

Another Insightly Service update is to our community management experience. You can use the customer portal to organize, manage, and order community content like topics and posts, moderate user comments, flag posts and comments as spam, or edit and clean up user-posted content.

Updates to the Customer Portal within Insightly Service:

• New capabilities for moderating, editing, and approving community posts and comments
• Insightly now monitors and auto-flags offensive and spam user-generated content using AI to save time
• Ticket forms in portals can now be completely  customized including custom fields
• New ability to customize 404 pages

What’s new with Insightly Marketing?

Check out these updates to the behavioral analysis and segmentation functionality of Insightly Marketing.

Segmentation improvements

Segmenting your customer base and targeting a subset of people with exactly the right communications or journey is now easier than ever in Insightly Marketing with powerful new capabilities. Users can now segment and filter prospect’s static and dynamic lists by activities including:

• Emails sent
• Journeys completed
• Forms filled
• Web pages viewed
• Links clicked
• Video’s viewed
• Emails opened

Email system improvements

Email systems often include security software that opens and scans every incoming email for malicious content and scams. Those automated bot email opens and clicks can cause issues for marketers in journeys and email analytics. 

Insightly Marketing now includes newly added AI-based capabilities to detect and filter out these automated bot clicks and phantom opens so marketing journeys that branch off email opens or clicks work reliably, lead scoring is accurate, and email engagement analytics are correct.

What’s new with Insightly CRM?

The Insightly team has also been working on ways to not just improve each product’s functionality, but also the integration between products. In the past 6 months, we’ve invested heavily in the integration between Insightly Marketing and Insightly CRM to make it more seamless.

New Cross-Object List Filtering Capabilities

Easily combine Marketing data and CRM data together in the Insightly platform with new capabilities in list filtering:

• Filter CRM contact and organization lists using filter criteria from Insightly Marketing Prospects 
• Filter Leads in Insightly CRM by using filter criteria from Insightly Marketing Prospects
• Filter opportunities by the linked organization fields

New Quotation Productivity Improvements

Easily manage, search, and generate quotes with these updates to the quoting experience within Insightly CRM:

• You can now use the same list filtering and search functionality in the standard list views to quote products, including the ability to filter by multiple fields and search within a list
• Added support for custom fields on quote products and quote line items, and in our API
• Now configure fields displayed in modals for managing quote products & quote templates
• New capability to quickly clone a quote
• Now one click to email linked contacts in opportunities, projects and organizations

What’s new with the Insightly platform?

Rather than just affecting one application, there are several improvements that will affect the entire Insightly platform:

• Configure Insightly to display a fixed number of  columns of data in any details view
• New improvements to email notifications after  bulk updating records
• Search dashboard lists to find the right dashboard & a new setting to lock all dashboard cards in position
• Automatically log back into the last app used
• New detailed login history of every user login for security purposes
• Audit logging now includes a history of changes to made to related links

If you’d like more information about these new features and how you can leverage them within your current Insightly plan, reach out to your Customer Success Manager. 

Looking to upgrade your plan to include Insightly Marketing, AppConnect, or Service? Request a demo.

Request a demo

The post Q2–2022: Product updates to Insightly AppConnect, Service, Marketing, and CRM appeared first on Insightly.

One of these will forever remain…email.

In fact, just as marketers thought this was a dying art, email marketing is doing better than ever. It’s projected by the year 2024, the number of email users will reach 4.48 billion.

And one way to reach them is to start an email drip campaign.

What is a drip campaign?

A drip campaign is a form of digital marketing where relevant information is “dripped” to sales leads over a period of time. These messages typically take the form of email marketing and are based on either a user action or predefined time interval.

For any given action, a marketer can choose the number of emails, type, and rate at which to send them. These emails can also be personalized with data, such as a prospect’s name or specific references to actions they took.

A drip campaign is automation mixed with prewritten messages. Important engagement points are mapped in the marketing automation system and information is generally sent on a preset schedule in response to a specific action or strategic plan.

Drip actions

Some examples of important actions a consumer might take to trigger a drip campaign include:

• Purchasing a product or placing an order
• Shopping cart abandonment
• Not placing an order for a period of time
• Engaging with customer service
• Attending a store event
• Registering for a webinar
• Downloading a report or white paper

Anything you can think of where automation easily gets the message across should be suitable for another drip message.

How are drip campaigns used?

Drip campaigns help you better connect with the right person at the right moment. They are designed for hyper-targeted messaging without the manual labor. They accompany every prospect through the sales pipeline and assist them when any snags or challenges occur.

Important dates

Date-based automations help a brand communicate with an audience on days that matter to them. This goes beyond just a birthday. You can also initiate a drip campaign for things like:

• Subscription renewal
• Reordering prompts
• Anniversary of first purchase
• Major holidays

Anything that can further brand value for the consumer can be added to a timely drip campaign.

User behavior

Drip campaigns can also be triggered by a user’s behavior. This includes actions they do or do not take. Here are some examples:

Welcome email

When a new person joins the audience, use a welcome drip to share your brand highlights or product information and tips for first-time users. Keep new people posted on upcoming events, sales, and other relevant activities.

First order

After someone makes an initial purchase, thank them for their business. Reinforce they made a good decision and suggest complementary products for future purchases.

Recommendations

This is a great automated email to boost sales. Recommendation messages can be sent with an order confirmation or shipping details.

Customer service

Emails that follow up after a customer service or sales inquiry are a productive way to keep your audience engaged. This creates an opportunity to further educate and onboard prospects.

Lead nurture

Drip campaigns are particularly well suited for nurturing active interest in prospects. If someone registers for a webinar or downloads a white paper, this is a cue to send a lead nurture drip email that keeps the conversation flowing.

Abandoned shopping cart

Anytime a prospect fills a shopping cart and then moves away from the page, you want to send them a reminder message. You can encourage people to reassess the purchase or send them offers on similar items.

Types of drip campaigns

When it comes to the method and style of drip campaigns, there are several archetypes to choose from. Some of these include:

Top-of-mind

This type of message keeps leads engaged throughout the sales process.

Educational

This includes any relevant data for prospects to help them make a more informed purchasing decision.

Re-engagement

These are designed to win back the interest of cold leads.

Training

Messages for new clients (or internally) to move readers through a training program.

Competitive

Target a competitor’s customers with a better offer or the benefits of switching to your product.

Promotional

Entice prospects with time-sensitive promotions and special pricing offers.

Setting up a drip campaign

Drip campaigns are an automated workhorse that helps a business maintain the marketing, nurturing, and selling that’s essential to success. Setting up drip marketing is not as difficult as one might think. Follow these simple steps:

1. Choose what will trigger the campaign. Is it a specific date or action?
2. Identify your audience. Information must be targeted. Where in the pipeline are they?
3. Tailor your messages. Drip emails don’t need to be long, but they should always be on-brand.
4. Measure your success and adjust based on performance. Choose metrics based on the email you type, audience, and other factors. You may track open rates, click-throughs, and conversions.
5. Save all copy. These messages can be repurposed down the road.

Why are drip campaigns important?

A study of 2,000 people on the Transformational Consumer, found that more than half of us are engaged in a never-ending search for content, services, and products to support changing behavior. A drip campaign is just the type of marketing to encourage this quest.

Drip campaigns are important because they support a variety of business pursuits. Benefits from this style of digital marketing include:

• Nurture leads
• Boost sales
• Provide relevant and timely information
• Targeted and custom messaging
• Increase engagement
• Bolster brand trust
• Automate manual actions

Drip campaigns are also one of the easiest forms of digital marketing to track and analyze. All sorts of metrics and user behavior data can be collected to give a brand deeper insight into exactly what people want to see and read.

Best practices for your drip campaign

When creating a drip campaign, there are a few things to remember.

Specific design

Make it easy for prospects to express their preferences regarding things like the frequency of messages, the type of content, and how they would like to receive it. Never push messages on anyone. That negates the point.

Targeted campaigns

Always tailor your message to a specific audience in mind. The more targeted your marketing, the more relevant the email will seem to the very person reading it.

Test everything

Always monitor and analyze every drip campaign you send. This is how you will test the effectiveness and which aspects of the campaign are working, or what needs to be changed. Review key performance indicators (KPIs), campaign goals, and important metrics like open and bounce rates.

Use your tools

Marketing automation tools typically integrate with other platforms that will make your life easier. Consider items that facilitate drip marketing, like social media management, CRMs, and analytics.

What have we learned?

Drip campaigns are a vital part of digital marketing. The most popular medium is email. This type of personalized messaging provides timely and relevant information to people, just when they need it. Not only does it leverage sales, it stimulates brand trust, and brings your customers closer to you.

Looking for a marketing automation tool? Check out Insightly Marketing.

The post A 5-minute guide to drip marketing appeared first on Insightly.

Unfortunately, in today’s omnichannel business landscape, creating one map that represents the entire customer journey can seem daunting—if not impossible. After all, some customers are very candid about their motivations and desired outcomes, while others are less willing to open up. Some customers prefer to interact through face-to-face conversations, while others rely on non-verbal forms of communication, such as email, social media, or text message.

With so many personas, goals, motivations, and communication styles to consider, how can you ever develop a single document that represents the customer journey? One way to do it is to start small and develop your customer journey map over time.

Here are three mapping exercises to help you use CRM data in developing different types of customer journeys for your business.

1. Define your ICPs & personas

Customer journey mapping is a waste of time until you have developed a very specific understanding of your ideal customer. Start by clearly defining your ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and personas before spending any time on journey mapping. If you do not have an ICP or personas, consider the following questions:

• If you could only sell to one industry, what would it be?
• Within that industry, what is your primary niche?
• Within your ideal industry and niche, what are the firmographic characteristics of your ideal customer ? (i.e., revenue size, line of business, number of employees, etc.)
• Of the companies that you’ve served in the past, which were less than ideal? Why?
• Who are the types of people (job titles, responsibilities) that your company interacts with?
• Which job titles tend to make decisions about your products or services?
• Which gatekeepers and other stakeholders are involved in the buying process?
• Who will be the actual users or consumers of what you provide?

There’s a lot to think about when developing your ICPs and personas. You may not have all of the answers, and that’s normal. Use your CRM data and build reports that help you answer the tough questions. Your sales team is also a reliable source of first-hand knowledge to help you check your assumptions. Collect all of the feedback and begin simplifying it for the next step.

Example: A manufacturing business that makes and sells assembly line equipment could theoretically have numerous ICPs and personas. However, for customer mapping purposes, it may be beneficial to focus on one industry at a time—especially if buying patterns and customer service requirements vary significantly by industry. Instead of trying to force all industries into a single map, the manufacturing company would be better served to develop one map for automotive, one for healthcare, and so on. The first step would be to itemize each industry’s ICP and persona(s) as follows:

2. Analyze CRM data for closed-won deals within each ICP

Once you’ve defined your primary ICP(s), it’s time to use data from your CRM to identify trends that are common to each journey. Drill down using tags or custom fields and quickly identify won deals that fall within your target ICP. Be sure to set a date range that provides enough meaningful data.

Do you notice any similarities? Things to look for may include:

• Similar interactions in the journey from awareness to close
• Content that was frequently downloaded or viewed on your website
• Marketing emails that helped move deals forward
• Lead sources that were responsible for a sizable percentage of closed deals
• Typical customer buying processes and the personas who were involved
• Objections that were noted during the sales cycle
• Average amount of time that was required to close each deal
• Post-close and implementation details

Note: Looking at closed-lost deals can also be instructive, but you may not need to do it if you have enough closed-won data.

Use actual deal data to build a more complete view of the customer profile. Going back to our previous manufacturing example, the company’s automotive ICP may look something like this:

3. Start building your customer journey map

Having enriched your ICPs and personas with reliable data from your CRM, you’re now ready to begin constructing a basic customer journey map. What’s the best format for your business? There’s no one-size-fits-all template that works for every industry and use case, so here are a few tips for designing a simple, yet effective customer journey map:

Grid layout

Most customer journey maps are built using a graph-based design and have horizontal and vertical axes. Above the grid, it’s important to have your ICP and persona clearly defined. If you’ve developed fictitious personas with names and photos, this might be a great place to use them. Remember, each map should be specific to one persona / ICP combination. If you have several customer journeys to map, start with the most important persona. If certain maps are very similar, you can always combine them or eliminate some later.

Horizontal axis

The horizontal axis of your graph will most likely align with specific stages that customers go through from pre-awareness to satisfied customer. Using your internal sales pipeline terminology could work, although it is better to describe the stages from the perspective of your customer. So, instead of “initial discussions,” you might use the phrase “research vendors.”

Vertical axis

Some customer journey maps try to squeeze as many criteria into the vertical axis as possible. This can lead to an overwhelming experience that defeats the original purpose of mapping. Decide on three to four important criteria as a starting point for your y-axis. Customer actions, customer feelings and thoughts, and common objections are good examples. You can always add more later.

Example customer journey map

Based on our previous example, here’s what a simple customer journey map might look like. You could build this in a document or spreadsheet and hand it off to a designer to pretty up later. The main goal is to get your basic facts on paper as quickly as possible:

Persona: VP Process Engineering – Plastics (Automotive ICP)

Notice that the map’s last row provides space to collect notes and ideas for streamlining each stage of the customer journey. In this example, developing “automated onboarding workflows” is listed as one opportunity to help the customer achieve his or her goal during implementation. Using a tool like Insightly Marketing can be an intuitive and effective way to automate various aspects of the customer journey—from initial awareness to repeat buyer.

Build better customer journeys

As the business world evolves at an even faster pace, smart companies are realizing the importance of building accurate and actionable customer journey maps.

Not sure how to get started? Keep it simple. Rely on data that already exists in your CRM. Focus on business impact rather than worrying about design effects. And, once you’ve built your customer journey map, use it!

To learn more about Insightly Marketing and CRM platform, request a demo.

Request a demo

The post 3 ways to use CRM data in building customer journeys appeared first on Insightly.

Can it actually have a positive impact on your business?

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to the marketing automation question, but consider this interesting fact from Forrester Research:

“In 2017, 65% of global B2B marketing decision makers who said that their firms have implemented a MAP [marketing automation platform] also reported that their company’s revenue increased by 10% or more over the prior year; only 31% at firms that have not implemented a MAP could say the same.”*

Your competitors have already figured out how to use marketing automation to create a competitive advantage. What’s your next move? If you know that your company needs marketing automation, but you’re not really sure what to do next, then this article is for you.

Here are my key takeaways from a recent conversation with Benjamin Hoehn, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at Insightly. Ben and I discussed how his team uses Insightly Marketing to reduce busywork, increase lead conversion, and elevate customer engagement.

1. Reducing the cost-per-send of email newsletters

Sending a monthly email newsletter is very common among businesses across all industries. Unlike printed mailers, email newsletters provide a cost-effective way to inform and engage customers, leads, and stakeholders. Despite the many benefits, producing a monthly newsletter does have its share of production costs — from content to design to list segmentation — there are multiple moving pieces with many stakeholders and systems to coordinate. That’s especially true for a high-growth company like Insightly, whose email campaigns can include recipient lists that contain hundreds of thousands of contacts.

By its very nature, email is also much more data-driven compared to traditional forms of business communication. Email opens, clicks, forwards, opt-outs, bounces, and other interactions are trackable, down to the user level.

“Earlier this year we stopped doing our monthly newsletter because the ROI just wasn’t there,” says Ben. “Synchronizing data between our database and Marketo required substantial development work, which made the cost of producing the newsletter barely worth the effort.”

How Insightly Marketing helps: Seeking to streamline newsletter production and overcome data roadblocks, Ben’s team became the first customer of Insightly Marketing, a marketing automation app built on the same platform as Insightly CRM.

“Insightly Marketing eliminates time-consuming and complex data synchronization between your CRM and third-party marketing automation systems,” says Ben. “Syncing data from Insightly CRM to Insightly Marketing happens instantly with the click of a button.”

Solving the data challenge freed up Ben’s team to move faster and focus on producing higher-impact content, all without relying on costly consultants and busy data engineers.

The net result: Newsletters that keep stakeholders informed and engaged for a fraction of the cost-per-send.

2. Maximizing the impact of webinars

Hosting informative webinars has become a standard practice for many companies engaged in digital marketing. Professional services companies use webinars to educate clients about relevant issues. Manufacturing companies host webinars to onboard customers and train employees at scale. Technology companies, like Insightly, use webinars to announce innovative feature launches, such as Insightly’s recent announcement of Insightly Marketing.

“Webinars provide an excellent forum for keeping your customers in the loop,” says Ben. “At Insightly, we invite all of our contacts to a quarterly product webinar.”

Leveraging webinars to build pipeline is also quite common. In addition to product webinars, Insightly hosts regular industry-focused webinars for prospective clients in their target verticals, such as consulting and manufacturing.

While a well-planned webinar can be mutually beneficial to the host and the attendees, a poorly executed webinar is a waste of time. And, if you’ve ever planned a webinar, you know there’s considerable planning involved. From segmenting your invitee list, to sending out emails and following up after the event – failing to consider even one step in the process could dramatically limit the value of your webinar.

How Insightly Marketing helps: The journey builder that’s native to Insightly Marketing had an immediate impact on Ben’s webinar planning workflow. Instead of relying on third-party diagram builders or checklists, Insightly Marketing allowed Ben to design an interactive buyer journey for each webinar campaign, using rule-based triggers to simplify follow-up and reduce manual outreach.

For example, anyone who registers for the webinar within the first day is considered more likely to be interested than someone who does not. Insightly Marketing allows to build rule-based triggers that gently nudge engaged leads toward a desired outcome without any manual effort.

“The journey builder in Insightly Marketing makes it easy to plan for and measure the success of each webinar,” says Ben. “The app was built to help you consider every step of a buyer’s journey, from initial interaction through conversion.”

The net result: Interactive webinars deliver better results for less effort.

3. Identifying leads from webinar interaction data

Only a fraction (in my experience, about half) of a webinar’s registrants will actually attend the live event. Of those who attend, an even smaller percentage will stay to the end and take a desired action. In short, the majority of those who register will get busy, lose interest, or simply forget about your webinar.

That’s why interaction data, housed within your marketing automation system, can be particularly useful.

“Interaction data, such as opens and clicks, can provide much-needed context when determining who is most interested in your offering,” says Ben. “However, without the right toolbox, making sense of all the data can be a full-time job.”

How Insightly Marketing helps: Ben’s team uses Insightly Marketing to define what success looks like in advance of each webinar campaign.

“Creating lists in advance of a campaign’s launch allows us to build a finely-tuned list of potential leads without having to manually mine raw interaction data,” says Ben.

For example, when planning a recent webinar for the consulting industry, Ben’s team created several tiered lists of anticipated interactions, which would ultimately be populated with contacts based on recipient activity.

“Taking a three-tiered approach is an easy way to get started,” says Ben. “Create one list for anyone who opens your emails, another for anyone who clicks, and a third for highly engaged users, such as contacts who open and click on the first email within a certain time period.”

Converting anticipated behavior into predefined lists simplifies the handoff from marketing to sales and fosters greater alignment between the two teams.

Building customer journeys and lists with Insightly Marketing delivered real-time insights about hot and warm leads, which benefited both sales and marketing teams.

The net result: Real-time insights into lead engagement without manual data analysis that lead to higher conversion rate.

Marketing automation for your business

When aligned with sales, the right marketing automation system ⁠can be a strategic asset for almost any business.

To pick up more marketing automation best practices, check out these articles on the Insightly Blog.

The seven keys to marketing automation success

How to select a marketing automation system

Ready to take the next step? Request a demo with the Insightly team to see marketing automation in action.

Request a demo

*Forrester, Lori Wizdo with Caroline Robertson and Steven Casey, “Making the Right Choices For Your B2B Marketing Tech Stack”, September 2019

The post 3 ways to grow email engagement with marketing automation appeared first on Insightly.

As a digital marketing consultant, I’ve heard many clients make this exact statement. The benefits of a #1 ranking are obvious: more clicks, more pageviews, and — hopefully — more customers. In reality, showing up first doesn’t just happen overnight. It takes a well-orchestrated digital marketing strategy that requires a substantial investment of time and, yes, money.

So, what is digital marketing? As the term implies, digital marketing involves the promotion of goods or services through digital channels, such as websites, social media, mobile ads, and other online media. But how can it impact the growth of your company?

Let’s discuss some basic truths about digital marketing.

Digital marketing is multi-faceted

New clients often ask me, “How much should we spend on digital marketing in order to achieve our goals?”

Although budgeting is vital to any business endeavor, it’s not the best starting point for a digital marketing conversation. A better place to start involves exploring all of your digital marketing opportunities, such as:

• Search engine ads (aka pay per click/PPC)
• Remarketing ads
• Search engine optimization (aka SEO)
• Email marketing
• Paid social media ads
• Organic social media
• Video marketing
• Podcast marketing
• Paid promotion on industry websites
• Webinar marketing
• eBook and whitepaper marketing
• Influencer marketing
• Review site marketing

As you explore your options, you’re likely to find dozens of subcategories within each digital marketing category. Take, for example, search engine optimization (SEO). Unlike radio or TV advertising, you can’t just budget $10,000 for SEO and expect anything meaningful to happen. SEO involves a myriad of labor-intensive tasks that include content marketing, link building, on-page optimization, and other technical performance enhancements. Furthermore, SEO is increasingly linked to and reliant upon other digital marketing categories, such as webinar and eBook marketing. A website that generates significant organic traffic but fails to convert visitors to leads isn’t very effective. Therefore, smart webmasters design compelling digital assets that engage and convert.

Digital marketing is buyer-centric

A recent study by Forrester Research, Inc. found that 99% of respondents start their searches for products and solutions online (66% do so via search engines).* Regardless of the industry, B2B buyers are increasingly dependent upon digital information to make informed purchasing decisions.

How can your company capitalize on this trend? Enhancing your website, social media presence, and email communication is certainly a step in the right direction. After all, you can’t attract customers digitally when your digital footprint is virtually nonexistent. That being said, some companies stop short of considering their digital marketing in the context of the buyer journey. As a result, they spend a lot of time and effort building digital assets that do not actually resonate with potential customers.

A better approach starts and ends with a detailed understanding of the buyer’s needs. Think about your ideal customer with these questions in mind:

• What specific problems do our buyers have?
• What search terms would they use to find solutions to their problems?
• What tools do we need to identify related search queries?
• Are there specific websites that our buyers go to when solving problems?
• How can we help buyers solve their challenges without forcing them to talk to sales?
• What types of digital assets (blogs, whitepapers, infographics, etc.) could help buyers?
• Where does our product or service fit into the solution?
• How do competitors use digital marketing to solve buyer problems?
• How can we help buyers become aware of unrealized needs?

In short, buyers are seeking reliable partners who can help them solve their biggest problems. Although some buyers are ready to make a purchase, many — if not most — are not. Your digital marketing mix should contain a healthy blend of educational and promotional content that aligns with each stage of the buyer’s journey.

Digital marketing is data-driven

Aligning your digital marketing with the buyer journey necessitates a data-driven approach. The good news is that digital marketing (unlike most “traditional” marketing formats) is intrinsically data rich.

To illustrate my point, let’s compare two marketing initiatives.

Traditional marketing campaign: postcard mailer

Print-on-demand services have made postcard campaigns more affordable than ever before. For a minimal amount of effort and cost, your company can rapidly design and implement a postcard mailer that reaches thousands of potential clients.

The tricky part with direct mail has always been measurement. How many postcards were successfully delivered? Did the postcard make it to the intended recipient? Did the headline, creative, and offer grab the recipient’s attention? How many times did the recipient look at the postcard? How many recipients came to your website or called for more information?

You can configure vanity URLs and QR codes to answer some of these questions, but, ultimately, you’ll only have a partial data set.

Digital marketing campaign: email newsletter

Compare the postcard example to an email marketing campaign. In most cases, an email campaign requires much less cost and effort than direct mail. Better yet, most email marketing systems offer in-depth campaign analytics that provide insights into deliveries, opens, clicks, and user-level activity. With a few clicks, your marketing team gains all the data they need to measure campaign performance and ROI. Ideally, this data should synchronize to (or, preferably, reside in) your CRM, preserving a 360-degree view of each prospective buyer. Of course, if you use an integrated or unified sales and marketing CRM, then it’s easier and faster to design targeted marketing campaigns and reach customers at the right time with the right message, keeping your sales and marketing teams aligned.

Data is an accelerating force in today’s marketing world. Digital marketing programs expand your pool of corporate data, which, if properly utilized, can lead to smarter decisions that scale your business.

Digital marketing is a business asset

Blog articles float around the web until you decide to unpublish them. Emails get clicks for weeks or months after they are sent. Recorded webinars provide buyers with in-depth answers even when your office is closed for a holiday weekend.

With the right strategy, digital marketing can be a lifelong asset for your business.

What steps should your company take to turn digital marketing into an asset? Stay tuned for a step-by-step guide to launch your digital marketing strategy!

*Take L2RM To The Next Level With A Pivot – From The Funnel To Your Customer, Forrester Research, Inc., December 18, 2018

The post What is digital marketing? appeared first on Insightly.