Behavioral segmentation is a way to organize customers into segments based on the actions they take with your website, marketing content, sales team, your brand–really, any interaction they have with your company. Once you organize customers into groups based on the actions they take, you can more effectively target and market to them.

When done correctly, it can seem like marketing magic. It’s something you should be doing and it’s not terribly complicated.

Let’s break it down together.

What is segmentation?

Segmentation has been around forever, both informally and formally. It means dividing customers into smaller groups and speaking to those groups in specific ways. Examples include dividing by location, gender, or age. 

When we talk to segments rather than a whole group, we can speak more specifically and therefore have a more personalized conversation. 

For example, if you’re a window installation company emailing your US customer base in January, you can segment using location and change the header image to something snowy for your contacts in Minnesota (north) and something sunny for your contacts in Florida (south). 

The benefit is that the customer receiving your message feels that it’s personalized to them. 

While standard segmentation such as age, location, and gender can be powerful and make customers feel known, behavioral segmentation takes it a step further.

Breaking down behavioral segmentation

Behavioral segmentation in marketing uses data from actions your prospect or customer has taken and allows you to segment those contacts into lists based on those actions. 

For example, you can group prospects who visited your website 10 or more times in the month of January but did not purchase. These prospects show high intent and so may be on the cusp of a purchase. You might consider sending this segment a discount code valid through the first week of February to see if their behavior (site visits) can be turned into a purchase with the right incentive. 

In the first example, it was the person’s location (Florida or Minnesota) that determined the segment; in the second, it was the person’s behavior. The first is geographical segmentation, while the second is behavioral segmentation.

Behavioral segmentation goes beyond demographic segmentation to help you better understand your audience and give them the right message at the right time.

What are the benefits of behavioral segmentation?  

Personalized experiences: At its core, behavioral segmentation lets you create personalized experiences for your prospects and customers. When consumers feel as though a brand understands them, they react more favorably to that brand. This increases brand loyalty and, ultimately, revenue.

Data-driven decisions: Behavioral segmentation allows marketers to make more accurate decisions based on user data since your most (and least) engaged prospects are easy to isolate.

Budget allocation: Behavioral segmentation makes it more clear where to allocate resources. For example, prospects with multiple website hits are likely in-market vs. those with one or two.

How does Insightly Marketing enable behavioral segmentation?  

Tracked Custom Events

Tracked custom events allow users to create a custom event and when it’s triggered by a prospect’s actions, the behavior can be used to alter a prospect score or segment audiences and communications.

This can be useful when you’ve got a behavioral tracking use case that isn’t included out-of-the-box with Insightly Marketing For example, if there users are accessing an online portal, you might consider tracking behavioral data from their interaction with the portal. Or, you might want a combination of activities (clicking on an advertisement and visiting a specific website page) to be tracked or segmented for future communication, offers, and outreach.

Forms 

No matter the plan you choose in Insightly, you have the option to create multiple forms to support your marketing campaigns. To get granular, create unique forms for each campaign  so you can tie every form completion to the action that caused it. Then message those prospects based on the specific offer or asset with which they engaged.

Files

You likely have assets that speak to different phases in the buyer’s journey. Perhaps an article is at the top of your funnel, so you can create a follow-up campaign with industry-specific information for those who read the first article.. If you have a lower-funnel piece, like a pricing guide, your follow-up campaign may include a demo or trial call-to-action. 

Redirect Links

Again, there is no practical limit to the number of links you can have in Insightly. If an asset is ungated, meaning there is no form associated with accessing your eBook or article, append a UTM to the link so you can track the exact journey the prospect took to get to it. Then, segment based on that link to continue the conversation in context.

Use behavioral signals within Insightly Marketing

Your marketing team needs a powerful tool to drive leads and create opportunities. Behavioral segmentation is just one of the many features used to drive and nurture leads for your sales team. Insightly Marketing includes this feature, plus offers customizable prospect grading and scoring, an intuitive journey builder, beautifully formatted automated emails, and more.

Insightly marketing is also part of a powerful platform that puts your marketing automation tool in the same suite of products as your CRM and customer service app. This aligns sales, marketing and customer service teams on a single, powerful platform.

Get a demo of Insightly Marketing today.

The post How to use behavioral signals in marketing campaigns 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.

To scale in a way that is supportive of the customer journey, businesses are turning to automated systems that help them strike a better balance between growth and personalization. And marketing automation tools, such as Insightly Marketing, can be especially useful when implemented thoughtfully and strategically.

Let’s take a closer look at some best practices for automating your customer journeys.

Why marketing automation & customer journeys go together

As we discussed in a previous article, your customer journey map is a visual representation of the process that your buyer goes through from awareness to satisfied customer. A well-crafted customer journey map should help team members understand your buyer personas, their internal motivations, and their interactions with your organization.

Journey mapping is also helpful for improving the customer experience and overcoming internal inefficiencies. For example, you may find it easier to identify:

• Content gaps: Articles, eBooks, technical guides, and other resources that might help the customer achieve his or her goal faster.
• Unnecessary friction: Points in the journey that make life difficult for customers, such as confusing calls to action or redundant steps.
• Time-consuming, manual processes: Steps that, if automated, would benefit both the customer and your team, such as appointment confirmations.

Fixing these challenges is not easy when you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of contact records. That’s where marketing automation comes in especially handy. Unlike batch-and-blast email tools that offer minimal configuration options, marketing automation tools are built to enable highly customized, rule-based journeys that align with customer and internal objectives.

Marketing automation enables your company to systematize your processes and scale them to keep pace with growth. The net result? Better informed customers, less friction in the buying process, and improved efficiency.

4 marketing automation tips for a better customer journey

So, what’s the best way to align marketing automation with your customer journey? Consider these four tips.

1. Collect raw ideas & develop your automation strategy

Resist the temptation to start “doing.” Instead, invest time into the process and develop a game plan. Go back to your customer journey map and note any content gaps, broken processes, and improvement opportunities, such as:

• Implementing auto-responder emails for form submissions
• Automating the distribution of blog content to subscribers
• Regularly following up with leads who have requested pricing but failed to buy
• Accelerating the onboarding experience for new customers
• Asking customers to post reviews on social media and review sites

Ask key stakeholders in sales, support, marketing, and other departments for feedback. Aim to understand how much time and effort is involved in supporting existing processes and workflows. Quantify the potential business impact that could be realized through automation.

2. Sequence your work

Take all of your automation ideas and organize them into a central location. You can use kanban boards, which are visually intuitive and make it easy to organize projects into a sequential order for implementation. Start with the project that represents the largest value and least effort. Or, if you’re completely new to automation, perhaps it would be best to start with a very small project with minimal impact. This way, you can familiarize yourself with the marketing automation platform and reduce the risk of unexpected delays.

One additional note about sequencing: If everything is in-process, nothing is in-process. Therefore, it’s best to implement one automation project at a time. Focus on using automation to add value to the customer journey—rather than maximizing the amount of work.

3. Gain a clear understanding of your marketing automation technology

There are a variety of marketing automation systems on the market today. Some offer visually intuitive user interfaces, while others are somewhat antiquated and tedious to use. Some are natively integrated with your CRM, while others require a third-party integration. Regardless of the technology that you intend to use, it’s vital to read support documentation and familiarize yourself with the platform, UI, and terminology. (If you haven’t selected a marketing automation system, check out Insightly’s marketing automation checklist.)

Insightly Users: Insightly Marketing users should read What are Journeys? and brush up on important definitions, such as prospects, lists, steps, actions, triggers, and checks.

4. Use data to measure impact, avoid issues, & inform future decisions

As you automate various aspects of the customer journey, be sure to refer back often to your marketing automation system for data and insights. In addition to top-level campaign metrics, drill down into specific steps in the journey. Your system should make it easy to understand:

• Total number of deliveries, opens, and clicks for each email
• Top-performing and under-performing steps in the journey
• Opportunities to continuously improve the journey

One final note: Your business is continuously evolving—and so is the customer journey. Therefore, you must regularly update your automation rules as things change. Set a goal to review all active automations on a regular basis. Monthly or quarterly is probably a good cadence, depending on the amount of automation. Check for any automated workflows that overlap or detract from the customer experience. Look for ways to consolidate and simplify.

Automate your customer journeys, one step at a time

Automation can be tremendously beneficial to the customer journey. It can also be a little overwhelming, especially if your company has been slow to adopt new technologies. As you begin to formulate your automation strategy, don’t try to do too many things at once. Remember, any incremental improvement will be a net gain for your customers and team.

Keep it simple, focus on value, and keep iterating.

If you’d like to learn more about Insightly’s unified platform for sales and marketing automation, request a demo and get a free needs assessment.

Request a demo

The post How to automate customer journeys 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.

Digital marketing tools and advancements have made this conundrum a thing of the past. For modern marketing teams, value and return are key indicators of success. Now, marketers are responsible for understanding their business impact. Today, marketers are able to track online customer behavior and have an extraordinary opportunity to learn about their market position and reputation.This gives us unprecedented ability to understand how marketing contributes to company profit.

Why should you track marketing performance?

It’s no secret that marketing impacts your company’s bottom line, but how? An efficient marketing process drives customers, lowers costs, and shortens the sales cycle. Marketers are responsible for tracking performance to improve the health of the business. This means returning the investment made into marketing programs at a growing rate.

What is marketing ROI?

Marketing ROI, or return on investment, is revenue generated from marketing programs, less the cost of these programs.

Many companies make strong investments into marketing. These include direct costs, like ad spend. They also include indirect costs, like marketing team salaries. Marketing ROI shows that these marketing expenditures contributed to revenue the company generated. Marketing ROI is presented as a percentage.

The marketing ROI formula is (total revenue – marketing expenses) / marketing expenses.

If you spent $20,000 on marketing, and your company generated $100,000 in revenue, your marketing ROI would be 400%. Put another way, for every dollar invested in marketing, the company made 400 dollars.

But, what if you make a marketing investment and you see the value of it later on, or over time? For most companies, calculating marketing ROI is not a simple equation. Instead, it is a process of strategic decision making and analysis.

How to calculate marketing ROI

Measure your marketing spend.

The first step of understanding return on investment is understanding your investment. Your investment includes ad spend, marketing software, team salaries and agency fees. Additionally, consider if you’re spending on marketing outside of your traditional team. Is your customer success team using social media to connect with customers? Is your CEO flying across the country to speak at events? These costs are nebulous and need estimation, but are still marketing investment.

Attribute revenue to marketing efforts.

For companies that broker one or two enterprise deals per year, this is easy. You ask your customer how they heard about the company. Then, you can attribute revenue to the marketing channel they mention.

For many companies, the volume of leads is too great to ask each customer about their journey. Further, online consumer behavior is fraught. Many customers would not even remember how they first learned about your brand.

With technology like Insightly, Google Analytics, and Looker, customer journeys can be tracked through the marketing funnel. You can learn which ad a customer clicked on, which blog posts they read, and how they purchased your product. Then, you can give a marketing effort proper ‘credit’ for the revenue it generated. The team at Marketing Evolution terms this ‘person-level marketing,’ or marketing attribution.

If a customer has many marketing touchpoints, how do you assign credit? Your team should choose an attribution model. An attribution model designates a consistent method of measuring marketing revenue. A common model is first-touch attribution, crediting the initial interaction a customer had with the company. Many companies also use last-touch attribution, ascribing value to the final interaction before purchase.

Whichever attribution method you choose, you measure your marketing ROI by knowing which efforts resulted in revenue. Your team can measure investment by program, and calculate the return that each program generates. Depending on your volume and model, you may be able to calculate ROI with more granularity.

How not to measure marketing ROI

Measuring marketing ROI with an attribution model is somewhat novel. Most firms are just beginning proper implementation, attribution and optimization that allows for calculating marketing ROI.

Here are some of the biggest mistakes made about marketing return on investment.

Don’t undercut long-term impact by focusing on short-term value.

Consider this situation. Your team makes an unprecedented investment into creating a professional report. You research, write and design a 20-page book explaining trends in your industry. You publish this report on your website March 1st. By March 31st, it’s received a paltry 25 views and hasn’t brought in any leads. When you’re calculating your marketing ROI for March, you chalk it up to a major loss.

In April, your team adds a few keywords to the report and distributes the piece to some industry analysts. Your sales team starts to use the report for lead engagement. It starts to gain traction. You double your web traffic, and you start to notice a few leads attributed to the piece. Even though you published the piece in March, it’s providing value in April. In each subsequent month, the value of this report grows. Ultimately, the revenue it brings in dwarfs the investment.

Marketing compounds. Online, digital marketing efforts live forever and gain traction over time. What looks like a loss in the short term has the potential to be a long-term gain.

Don’t fall for vanity metrics.

When you begin analyzing your marketing, it can be easy to get excited by the biggest numbers. For example, say you published a short blog post about the best restaurants near your new office. The piece generated high web traffic from tourists in the area looking for lunch spots. This high number might tempt you to divert marketing efforts away from product posts. Instead, you can increase your traffic by focusing on lifestyle topics. If you’re casting a wide net, you can cross your fingers that some users actually want to become customers.

But, like every teen movie has taught us, popularity isn’t worth it. Metrics like impressions, web traffic, and “likes” worsen your marketing ROI. The exception is if these metrics correlate to revenue, like if your site is ad-supported.

Daniel Hochuli of Content Marketing Institute sums it up, “It’s the act of counting vanity metrics as evidence for success that is a problem.” Vanity metrics muddle marketing ROI. They are investments untethered to returns.

Don’t get tricked by ‘sunk costs.’

In the example of the industry report, a rookie marketer might chalk it up as a loss. They will move on, and never create another industry report again.

A savvy marketer would likely see an underperforming marketing effort as an opportunity.

You can always optimize, improve and iterate on your marketing efforts. You can bring value into marketing programs, even if they seemed hopeless. By growing the return over time, you minimize the impact of the investment.

Measuring short & long-term marketing ROI

Marketing isn’t a simple input-output, and neither is marketing ROI. Marketing teams need to measure both short and long-term investments and returns. Here are two schemas for understanding marketing ROI over time:

Short term: marketing spend per customer.

If your marketing programs are new, you may not have the luxury of proving marketing ROI over time. You are looking to show the value of your programs quickly. The fastest way to show marketing value is total marketing spend per customer. This is also called total customer acquisition cost.

This metric takes into account all marketing spend across all customers. Because of this, you can be sure that all your marketing efforts are being accounted for. Over time, your total marketing spend per customer should decrease. Understanding total customer acquisition cost is crucial for short and long-term marketing planning.

Long-term: cohort analysis.

Mature organizations have historical data, and opportunity to plan for the long term. These teams want to optimize marketing efforts for efficient value. The best way to do this is with cohort analysis.

A cohort of your users are those who come into your website through the same channel, ad, or piece of content. For example, users attributed to your industry report, mentioned above, are a cohort.

A cohort analysis report tracks the behavior of a group, and the revenue they generate. For the ‘industry report’ cohort, you credit their revenue to March’s marketing investment. This cohort analysis also allows you to value recurring revenue by marketing investment

Cohort analysis requires an investment of both time and resources. Yet, it is crucial in reporting on long-term marketing gains. By laying this groundwork, you validate your efforts and investment. In her explanation of cohort analysis, Maria Calvello of G2 explains, “since the process of cohort analysis involves taking a deep-dive into groups of people and observing their behavior, it’s an ideal way to improve your customer retention.”

Conclusion

Marketing ROI is both a simple formula and a long-term analytic process. It is assessed in both the short-term and the long-term. It can impact an organization immediately, or over a period of time. This enigmatic nature can make calculating return on investment a daunting task. Yet, it’s a crucial step in understanding how  marketing contributes to the bottom line.

Sources:

Cohort Analysis: An Insider Look at Your Customer’s Behavior. Maria Cavello. G2. February 28, 2020.

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Gerald Chait. B2B Marketing. March 18, 2015.

The Right and Wrong Ways to Use Vanity Metrics. Daniel Hochuli. Content Marketing Institute. February 10, 2020.

The post How to measure marketing ROI appeared first on Insightly.

Multivariate testing allows you to experiment with granular variations of the same email and zero in on which variation is more effective. It’s best used to identify the right tactic for a smaller segment of your audience, not your entire contact database.

The goal of multivariate testing is to improve audience engagement, conversion rates, and increase revenue generation through your digital marketing efforts. Let’s dig in, starting with the basics.

What is multivariate testing?

Multivariate email testing involves a complex and advanced approach to tactical email evaluation. You can test several combinations of the same email. With the ability to swap out email subject lines, email body copy, images, the sender “From” name or address, send time, and more, you have many options to play around with. This is where it diverges from a very similar approach, A/B testing.

How is multivariate testing different from A/B testing?

A/B testing experiments with two elements of an email. Multivariate testing experiments with up to four elements in an email, in multiple combinations, to determine the best performing combination.

For example, Insightly’s multivariate testing feature—among its new marketing automation features—lets you compare four variables in up to eight versions of the same email. You can test Subject Line 1 with Email Body 2, Sender Name 3, and Send Time 4. That’s just one combination and you have eight to play with, providing deeper insight to drive future email campaign success.

In some scenarios, A/B testing is all you need, while in others, multivariate testing is called for to generate deeper, actionable insight (more on that below).

How do you run a multivariate test?

Much in the same way A/B testing lets you select two options of the same email element; multivariate testing lets you choose multiple options. Ultimately, this is all done in your marketing automation solution and is quite easy to pull off.

Set up is fairly straightforward. We’ll use Insightly Marketing to explain. When you select the multivariate testing option for an email campaign, system workflows guide you through the process of selecting which elements you want to test and let you select what each respective combination of elements looks like.

Once this is set up, all combinations are sent out to a test group of your target audience. In the case of Insightly, the system automatically monitors the engagement levels of each email version sent to the test group. It then examines the resulting metrics, determines the “winning” combination, and routes that version to the rest of your target audience on the assumption that it will produce the best results.

Because the process is automated, you simply select the combinations you want to test then sit back and wait for the results to come in. Your unified CRM with marketing automation does all the heavy lifting while you focus on strategy.

What do you need to run your test?

First and foremost, you need the right technology. If you use a unified CRM that includes both sales and marketing automation capabilities, all your data is stored under one roof and the process is exponentially easier.

If not, you at least need a marketing automation solution that can run this kind of test. Without the right software, multivariate testing is virtually impossible.

Additionally, you need to know what insight you aim to gain from your test and which problem or challenge you’re trying to solve. Below are some tips and questions to ask yourself to gain the insight necessary to run an effective test.

Tips for effective multivariate testing

Multivariate testing is used to solve a problem or address poor performance in a given area. When planning and setting up your test, it’s important to:

• Identify the problem you’re trying to solve or question you want to answer
• Define your hypothesis
• Decide which combinations you want to test
• Calculate the correct sample size to give you statistically accurate results
• Run a test on fake leads first to ensure every automated, triggered action is set up correctly
• Monitor the test as it progresses with real leads to ensure no unexpected hiccups occur

Asking questions before you start

A good way to get the most out of your multivariate email campaign testing is to ask yourself some preliminary questions. Below are a few good questions to ask yourself during the planning stage—these will help put you in mental testing mode.

• Does my audience prefer creative or short, direct subject lines?
• Does asking a question in the subject line result in more opens?
• Are recipients more likely to click a call-to-action button (or image) than hyperlinked text?
• Are they more likely to open an email from [Company Name] than an individual?
• What is the best time to send emails to my target audience to get higher open and click-through rates?
• Are concise bullet points more effective at driving click-throughs than text in paragraph format?

I could go on and on, but you get the point. It’s important to approach multivariate testing with an inquisitive mind. Digital marketing must adapt to shifting customer expectations and testing new tactics is a great way to adapt.

When should you use multivariate testing vs. A/B testing?

A/B testing provides sweeping generalizations about the efficacy of one specific element of an email (or another marketing asset). This is high-level insight that tends to apply across the board and inform large shifts in your digital marketing strategy.

On the other hand, multivariate testing provides more granular insight into a tactic. Use it when you need to optimize smaller elements with precision as they relate to a segment of your audience.

In short, if you want insight into how effective a tactic is to your audience as a whole, A/B testing is the way to go. If you’re looking to discover which tactic best engages a specific, targeted segment of your audience and why, go with multivariate testing.

Ready to run your own test?

We strongly encourage you to do so. If you don’t constantly evolve your digital marketing practices and engage in experimental, disruptive marketing, you’re likely to be overtaken by the competition. Luckily, with marketing automation today, it’s easier than ever to engage in multivariate testing and A/B testing.

After all, with this technology at your fingertips, you no longer need to rely on guesswork to find the most effective digital marketing tactics. It’s increasingly easy to use data instead of intuition in business decision making. Get the right tools, the right mindset, and see what your experimentation uncovers.

Would you like to learn more about how multivariate testing could help you ramp up your digital marketing efforts? We’re happy to provide more details and answer your questions. Just request a free demo and we’ll provide the information you need.

Request a demo

The post What is multivariate testing? When & why you should use it appeared first on Insightly.

As marketers, we’re charting new territory and are forced to constantly experiment with new, innovative tactics to remain competitive.

Luckily for us, the marketing automation (MA) systems we use provide tools that facilitate this experimentation. An effective way to evaluate new marketing tactics is through A/B testing.

A/B testing lets us deploy two variations of the same marketing tactic, side-by-side, and compare results. In this way, we discover which of the two is more effective. This removes part of the guessing element from our disruptive marketing experimentation and allows us to determine which new tactics to focus on based on data rather than intuition.

Below we dig into A/B testing, discuss when you should use it, and delve into a few best practices for mastering A/B testing in your marketing organization.

What exactly is A/B testing?

With A/B testing, we leverage marketing automation to execute two approaches to the same marketing tactic simultaneously. The best marketing automation solutions let you get pretty granular with A/B testing.

How does it work from a technical perspective?

We can use email marketing as an example to explain the process. When testing two versions of the same email, your MA system will send a sample of each version to two subsets of your overall targeted audience.

Your system will then wait a specified amount of time to measure how each of the two performed. Which had the highest open rate? Which saw the most click-throughs? Which resulted in the most unsubscribes?

Once it has enough data to determine which version is more effective, your system will push that version out to the rest of your target audience.

Why should you use A/B testing?

It’s important to know which marketing tactics best engage your audience, attract new leads, and drive the most lead conversions. If you’re testing an email campaign, A/B testing will tell you which email versions generate the highest open rates, click-through rates, and which generate the most marketing qualified leads.

Experimenting with an email campaign

When applying A/B testing to an email campaign, you can experiment with the subject lines of your emails, the copy of the emails, or the images you use. You can experiment at a more granular level by testing two different font types, font colors, email template designs, headers, sub-headers, names in the email “from” line, and so on.

Testing elements of a marketing campaign

You can also use A/B testing in various parts of a digital marketing campaign. Compare the results of two different landing pages, lead generation forms, or calls-to-action. Moreover, you can test two different marketing campaign sequences to determine the optimal cadence for campaign touchpoints.

Don’t forget statistical significance

When you’re A/B testing new tactics, be sure to apply your test to sample sizes large enough to produce statistically significant results.

If your target audience is 3,000 leads and you only send your initial test versions to subsets of 10 people, your results won’t be reliable enough to represent your entire audience. Sample size (n) is key to effective A/B testing.

Need a quick refresher on statistical significance? Brush up on the subject.

How do you plan & execute an A/B test?

The point of A/B testing is to generate data that leads to actionable insights and empowers you to confidently apply the tactics that are most effective with your target audience. What works for one industry may not work for another.

When planning an A/B test, it’s helpful to follow a set process and stick to it. This produces consistency in your results and strategies. Here is an example of an effective step-by-step process to follow:

1. Define your hypothesis

Determine the question you’re trying to answer. For example, should I send this marketing email from “The [Company Name] Team?” Or, does it make more sense to send it from individual sales executives? You’ll have an assumption of which will be more effective, but that’s just a hunch. Your A/B test will (or won’t) validate your assumption.

2. Determine which & how many tactics to test

Are you going to keep it simple and test two email subject lines? Or are you going to also test send dates to see which day of the week generates the most email opens? If you’re new to A/B testing, we recommend starting by testing one variable, such as an email subject line. It’s best to ease your way into the process and learn as you go.

3. Calculate a statistically significant sample size

Do the math and determine the appropriate sample size for each subset of your test so your results can reliably tell you which tactic to deploy. If you don’t, you’ll be wasting your time because your results won’t accurately predict the results you can expect when you push your tactic out to your entire target audience.

4. Test your test

Quality assurance (QA) is vital to effective A/B testing. Run a test drive of your experiment with some test leads in your CRM database. Be sure you are in that group of test leads so you can walk through the process yourself and ensure everything is set up correctly.

Click every link, complete every form, open every email, and so on. Then check the results to verify that the actions you took are properly represented. If there’s a broken piece of the process, you want to identify it before you execute your test on actual leads or customers.

5. Set your timeframe

How long will you wait, while the test group data is being compiled, before you determine the effective tactic and push it out to your entire audience? The answer is that there is no definitive answer.

The amount of time you should wait depends on how long it will take to accumulate enough data for your results to be statistically significant. That depends on your audience size and how quick they are to act. It’s important not to push out either tactic to the entire group prematurely.

6. Deploy, measure, & analyze

Once you push out the winning tactic, wait an appropriate amount of time, then measure the results. You may find that although Tactic 1 was more effective during your trial test, the results it generated when deployed to the entire audience varied significantly.

If that happens, you might want to run another test, comparing that same tactic with another one, to confirm that it is an effective approach to engaging your audience. There’s no harm in re-testing a tactic because you must understand why a particular tactic was successful.

When should you use A/B testing?

Don’t A/B test any random tactic out of curiosity. You need to set a goal when A/B testing because it is most helpful when you’re trying to solve a problem or improve upon something that’s not working as you need it to.

For example, if conversion rates have been dropping, it’s time to start A/B testing new tactics. If customer retention rates start to fall, pull out your A/B testing playbook. If you simply can’t generate new leads, it’s probably time to experiment with new tactics.

What do you need to conduct A/B tests?

First of all, you need the ability to measure specific metrics—the majority of which can’t be measured without technology. You can’t measure email campaign click-through or open rates without software that automates those processes.

In short, you need a CRM that stores customer and lead data as well as a marketing automation solution with the ability to conduct A/B testing. Some CRMs, like Insightly, include built-in MA capabilities to form a unified CRM system. These are the best kind of solutions to conduct effective A/B testing.

Final thoughts on A/B testing

Now that you understand the basics of A/B testing, as well as why, when, and how to conduct A/B tests, it’s time to get to work. Start thinking about when you might want to run your maiden A/B testing voyage.

If you don’t have the right technology in place to run A/B tests, now’s the time to start thinking about implementing new software—such as a unified CRM—in your organization. Such software does a lot more than allow you to test new tactics. It automates loads of manual processes, ensures data integrity, and allows you to deliver a better customer experience, along with many additional benefits.

If you need to learn more about CRM and MA software, feel free to schedule a free demo with Insightly. We’ll walk you through the benefits you receive from using a unified CRM with built-in marketing automation.

Request a demo

The post A/B testing: How to identify the most effective marketing tactics appeared first on Insightly.

Digital technology and access to customer data are constantly reshaping the role of marketing, and as more and more businesses are reorienting toward a customer-centric focus, this extremely valuable customer data becomes a big part of that shift. Marketing is now a research hub, a creative lab and a growth engine—all in one. Marketing’s ability to make data-driven investments and accurately measure and analyze the success of those investments in driving sales and revenue has earned marketers a strategic seat at the decision-making table.

Yet, so many businesses are still struggling to determine where exactly and how much to invest in marketing, and how to measure the success of those dollars. As the CEO of a tech startup, I have my own perspective, which considers three major forces that shape the role of marketing today: leadership, technology and strategy.

Leadership & team alignment

While technology allows us to constantly push marketing boundaries (marketing automation, customer and behavior analytics, social media, etc.), it can quickly become overwhelming and costly. On the flip side, the delayed adoption of marketing technology can cost you customers and revenue. That’s where leadership comes in. When you make marketing technology decisions, hire staff and set expectations, think about it as an investment in growth. With marketing automation, including built-in customer and behavior analytics tools, marketing now owns a significant part of the customer journey and can provide strategic insights, such as brand sentiment, buyer intent and customer satisfaction levels, to sales and customer service. So instead of treating your marketing as mainly a lead generation machine, use its insights and capabilities to amplify efforts, iterate and pivot when needed.

Your customers see you as one brand: whether they get a marketing newsletter or talk to a customer support rep, they might form an opinion on your entire business based on one interaction at any point in their journey. Align your teams around the customer journey and your brand to ensure your marketing investments pay off. Just one bad customer experience or off-brand communication can ruin a brand image much faster than your team can build it.

It’s easy to spend money on marketing, but today you have the ability to plan, track and measure marketing’s contribution to revenue. Develop key performance indicators (KPIs), which can cover everything from email click rate to cost per lead to conversion rate (the ultimate performance indicator). Monitor results and use data to make decisions.

Marketing automation technology

It seems like every day there’s a new marketing tool or platform that promises to engage your customers like never before and set you apart from your competitors. Stay focused. Broadly speaking, your marketing technology should help you to address two needs: customer acquisition and marketing performance measurement. Customer acquisition encompasses everything from email marketing to advertising to content marketing, social media and more. In order to know what works and what doesn’t, you need to be able to track and measure the performance of each channel and individual campaign. The right marketing automation tool can help you to do that.

There are a number of modern marketing automation tools that are easy to use and more affordable than legacy systems. When evaluating a marketing automation system, make sure it addresses all your key requirements and easily integrates with sales and other business tools you use. Remember, you can’t unify your teams without the technology that allows them to coordinate activities, centralize and share customer data, and track performance. At the heart of your marketing and sales integration is lead disposition, or the process of moving a sales qualified lead (SQL) to an opportunity, disqualifying it as inappropriate or returning it to marketing for further nurture. Use marketing technology that allows you to set up a proper lead disposition process. This way, you can make the most out of your marketing dollars spent on lead acquisition and accurately measure marketing’s contribution to revenue.

Go-to-market strategy

With the ability to measure everything from customer sentiment to revenue contribution, marketing is no longer a creative function or an expense. Marketing is now your growth engine, with a goal to attract the right customers through the right channels at the right time with the right message. To make sure marketing serves its purpose, create a go-to-market strategy. Your strategy should define your target audiences, problem-solution fit and messaging. It should also outline channels and tactics you’ll use to reach your buyers and align sales and marketing around your business goals.

The strength and success of your strategy depend on the data you use and your ability to execute as a team. It all comes together here—team alignment, technology and leadership. A go-to-market strategy is your map and framework to address all the moving pieces, including your marketing investments. There’s a lot more to developing an effective go-to-market strategy, but the key point here is to show the extent to which marketing today can inform, guide and help execute your business goals.

Marketing technology can help collect data to build a picture of each customer and their interactions with your brand, allowing you to become a far more customer-centric company. Modern marketing is a lot more than a lead generation machine; it is now a more holistic revenue growth driver across the entire customer life cycle. I hope this article provided you with a renewed perspective on marketing and how it can best contribute to your business success.

Read more like this:

• How to approach digital transformation in the new normal
• What is disruptive marketing? Why is it so important today?
• From recession to growth: a historical perspective
• How to improve customer experiences using data analytics

The post Marketing’s role in building a customer-centric company appeared first on Insightly.

The new features address two big challenges that many marketing teams face today. The first challenge is adjusting to a fully remote work and organizing all creative and analytical work in a productive and engaged manner. The second challenge is finding ways to reach and convert the right customers at the right time with relevant and meaningful messages.

Watch Q3 2020 Product Release Webinar where Insightly CEO Anthony Smith showcases all new features and improvements.

Watch the webinar

Landing Pages

Use drag and drop to create landing pages with minimal effort. The feature comes out of the box with a selection of templates. You can also build your own branded landing page templates.

All landing pages include full analytics, so you can see who visited them and where they came from (ads, social media, search engines, referral websites, etc.).

Easily embed an existing form into a landing page or create a new one right in the wizard. Set up automatic follow-up actions for anyone who fills out a form: send an email, add them to a journey, or notify the sales team.

Access more than one million free stock images in the built-in image editor. Crop and customize images with text and filters.

Embed YouTube videos into landing pages and measure the engagement.

Publish your new landing page with just one click. Insightly will automatically make it discoverable and available to search engines. Add a SSL certificate to the page for encryption and have all your landing pages accessible via your custom domain name.

The new landing pages feature is available in Insightly Marketing now.

A/B & Multivariate Email Testing

The next two big features in Insightly Marketing Q3 release are A/B email testing and multivariate email testing.

A/B email testing is freely available on all plans and allows you to test different versions of an email with a percentage of the audience you’re sending to. See which email version gets more engagement in either opens or clicks, then automatically send the most engaging version of that email to the remainder of your audience.

Get real-time reporting of email engagement statistics and learn exactly which versions of your email were more engaging and why.

With A/B testing you can test up to three different combinations of:

• The email subject line and preview text
• The email body content
• The email sender name and address
• The send time and day

Insightly automatically keeps track of the engagement statistics of each email version sent, determines the winning version, and sends that winning version to the remainder of your list.

Multivariate email testing is the more advanced version of A/B testing and allows you to simultaneously test up to eight different combinations of the email subject, body, sender address, and the send time.

Both A/B testing and multivariate email testing are available in Insightly Marketing now, with Professional and Enterprise plans.

Automatic Prospect Scoring & Grading

The prospect score calculates how interested any prospect is in your products or services. The prospect grade designates how well that prospect fits your ideal customer profile.

For example, if a prospect is interested in your products or services, and they match your ideal customer profile, they can be automatically passed to sales for a follow-up.

The prospect score is a numeric score that is calculated for every prospect based on the interactions they have with your marketing assets, like filling out a form on your website, reading a blog post, downloading a white paper, opening and clicking on emails, attending webinars, or clicking a link in a social media post.

Assign a specific value to different marketing assets, and Insightly will automatically calculate the score for each prospect as they engage with more of your marketing assets, or degrade it over time if they are not showing interest. If the prospect is showing a lot of interest and has a high score, you can pass them to sales, add to a custom list, tag, and/or follow up with them.

The prospect grade is a little different—it is not a numeric score, but rather a school type grade with A+ through F range. The grade is assigned based on how closely the prospect matches your ideal customer profile. You can use specific job titles, geographical areas, industries, or any combination of things to grade your prospects.

You can set thresholds for both score and grade before a prospect is passed on to sales as a lead. If a prospect has a high score and has a high grade, like an A+, they could be your next customer.

Scores and grades are constantly recalculated in the background for all prospects.

All versions of Insightly Marketing offer scoring and grading, but Insightly Enterprise Marketing customers can develop multiple scoring models and grading profiles. The scoring model feature will be released later in October 2020, but the grading feature is available now.

New Journey Builder Capabilities

Get more out of Insightly’s customer journey builder with nine new check steps.

Track more actions right within a journey to better understand your website visitors’ or prospects’ behavior and intent. From tracking webinar registration status to content downloads to interactions with social posts and ads, you can now check user actions within a specific time frame.

For example, you can check if someone has visited the pricing page of your website in the past four weeks, filled out a form, or downloaded a white paper from your website. You can even check if a provided email address is from a business or personal email account.

Use merge tags in the subject and description of CRM Tasks inside journeys to easily share more context and data with task assignees and facilitate a better informed follow-up with a prospect.

These improvements will be available to all Insightly Marketing users later in October.

New Spam Control Measures in Forms

Control the quality of form submissions on your website to make sure they are not from bots or other automated spam tools.

Insightly now checks and performs heuristic mapping on form submissions to block a flood of form submissions within a short period of time from the same bad actors.

The new checks also ensure the validity of the domain name of an email address and server. You can also turn on “corporate email addresses only” to auto-reject submissions with email addresses from free services, such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, etc.

With the help of a honeypot field—or a hidden field on a form that a human would not be able to fill out, but bots would—you can now discard all spam submissions.

You now have an option to include Google’s reCAPCTHA on your forms, adding an extra level of verification on your form submissions.

These new spam prevention measures are available now.

New Capabilities in Insightly Analytics

Get more insights and improve your marketing with Insightly’s new analytics capabilities.

If you have YouTube videos embedded on your website, blogs, or landing pages, Insightly can automatically track and log your prospects’ engagement with the content. You can see who started playing the videos, how many prospects got through watching the entire video, and how often they watched it. That data can be logged to prospect timelines. Just click one checkbox in the settings to turn on that capability.

Track interactions with your forms, even if the website visitors don’t submit the form. So, if a visitor or prospect partially fills out a form and then navigates away from your website or loses their connection, Insightly still captures all the info provided on the form and saves it in the analytics database. You can use this information to determine just how many questions users will fill out before abandoning the form.

Finally, log custom events from your visitors or prospects into Insightly Analytics pipeline. By default, Insightly Analytics records page views. Every time one of your site visitors views a web page with the analytics tag, we record that page view.

Now you have an option to record other events in Insightly Analytics: custom events, like calls to action, e-commerce events, like ‘add to cart’, product configuration settings, IOT events from internet connected devices, and other events you would like to see in a prospect’s timeline.

The new Insightly analytics features will be available in October 2020.

New Static & Dynamic List Capabilities

Segmenting your prospects and customers into lists that you can target with your marketing activities is one of the core things that marketers do, and Insightly is bringing more list creation capabilities in this release.

You can now filter the prospects in your lists based on more than 25 new filter types.

The first set of new filters is based around the CRM data that is linked to the prospects in Insightly Marketing. Quite often your prospects are linked to either lead or contact records in the CRM, which in turn are linked to organization records.

You can now filter prospects in Insightly Marketing based on fields in the linked lead, contact, or organization records in CRM. For example, you can easily filter your prospects based on the address/country of the linked contact records. Insightly filters the prospects automatically in real time.

You can also filter prospects based on any activity or interactions they’ve had with your marketing assets. For example, create a list of all prospects that have received one of your marketing emails in the last four weeks, have visited your website in the past 14 days, and attended your last Zoom webinar back in June.

If you make that a dynamic list, it will be kept up-to-date as new prospects match the filters or fall out after they no longer match the criteria.

Use filters for some of the new Insightly Marketing capabilities, like filtering prospects based on if they have viewed one of the YouTube videos on your website, filled out a form recently, or visited the brand new landing page you created with the new Insightly Marketing landing page builder, clicked a call to action link in the e-newsletter, and/or downloaded a white paper in the past three months.

The ability to create specific lists of prospects with fine-grained filters based on their actions allows you to reach previously unknown or inaccessible audiences. For example, prospects that attended last year’s trade show who live in San Diego, but have not visited your website’s new product section, can now be added to a list and invited to a virtual demo of your new product.

The new list filters will be available to all Insightly Marketing users in October 2020.

Other improvements in Insightly Marketing

Here are a few updates in email authoring and sending experience.

Finish actions on list emails

List emails or batch and blast emails can now have finish actions that run after a prospect opens the email, clicks on one of the links in the email, or unsubscribes. Finish actions are a great way to automate tasks, like adding tags to the prospect, sending them an email, adding them to a list, registering them for a Zoom webinar, or running a Zapier integration.

Edit plain text version of email in email wizard

Insightly automatically generates a plain text version of an email for those recipients who can’t view the HTML version. Now you can also review and manually edit the plain text version of an email before the send.

Add emojis to subject and preview line

Use a new emoji picker to easily select emojis for your email subject line or preview text.

Use new email themed templates

We added quite a few new email templates in this release, so you have more to pick from when designing new marketing emails or looking for inspiration.

These new features are all available now.

To learn about user interface and productivity improvements across all apps, please read this post or watch the full webinar.

Ready to see all new Insightly Marketing features in action? Request a demo.

Request a demo

The post New: easily plan, create, test, & track marketing campaigns appeared first on Insightly.

A refresher on lead scoring

The use of lead scoring in your business cannot be underestimated. Lead scoring simply means the process of assigning scores for each of your leads. The score is determined by several factors, such as demographics, the way leads interact with your business through various marketing channels, and the probability of their conversion into a paying customer.

The lead scores can fall on a negative or positive side of the scale, in other words, how more or less likely they are to convert. Once you identify the lead scores, you can identify the current top customers.

Your top customers are your net promoters, and they are more likely to return for a purchase and help increase awareness for your brand. Using the lead scores, you can then retarget your campaigns toward leads that require more nurturing before they convert.

Because you know which leads require more attention, you can increase the productivity of your marketing and sales teams as well. Remember, generating leads doesn’t matter as much as converting them into paying customers.

Now let’s take a closer look at traditional and predictive lead scoring to help you decide which one is right for your business.

Traditional lead scoring

Traditional lead scoring attempts to measure the quality of a lead in order to determine which would turn into sales. It collects and analyzes explicit and implicit data.

Explicit data is collected through online registration forms or other demographic information (job title, company, contact details, etc.) that the prospects provide. Implicit data is collected from the prospect’s behavior on your website and other marketing channels, like the number of page views, email open rate, click rate, and others.

The marketers then manually assign a score for each of these data points. They typically use the BANT criteria—which stands for Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing—to determine the readiness of a lead for a sale.

Source: Lucid Chart

Lead scoring models can also be based on the following data:

1. Demographic: location, age, gender, professional title, company, etc.
2. Online behavior: how customers interact with your website
3. Engagement: how customers specifically engage with your brand through marketing channels

Advantages of traditional lead scoring

Marketers have long used traditional lead scoring to gather information, update and test the scoring system, analyze the results, and identify better leads. With the use of customer relationship management (CRM) tools, the lead scoring process can be streamlined and integrated with the sales team.

Disadvantages of traditional lead scoring

While traditional lead scoring is tried and tested, it is also a bit too simplified and too focused on removing bad prospects rather than identifying great ones. The real challenge is to determine and to target the best leads and to better nurture all other prospects.

Traditional lead scoring is also not as adaptive for fast-changing markets because it works with a small dataset that’s manually collected and managed by the marketing team. This method is also highly subjective because a good lead is determined by the opinions or metrics made by the marketing or sales team.

Rankings also are based on a rather small dataset that focuses on the activity of prospects and their interaction—or lack of—with the website rather than their individual needs.

Repetitive tasks and lack of conversions because of the failure to optimize lead scoring methods can also discourage your teams and result in missed opportunities and slow growth for your business.

For what type of business is this ideal

Companies that rely on sales reps and their customer insights to develop lead scoring method benefit the most from traditional lead scoring.

Predictive lead scoring

Take all the benefits of traditional lead scoring and add the efficiency and effectiveness of machine learning algorithms, and you have predictive lead scoring.

Instead of relying on small datasets and the manual metrics of humans, predictive lead scoring gathers and analyzes big data to evaluate the significant behaviors of current customers and prospective leads. These data points are then ranked on a scale to distinguish between the leads who are more likely to be converted and retained, or purchase something from the business.

Predictive lead scoring allows you to automate the identification and conversion of sales for your business, allowing you to refocus campaigns and make better use of resources for a faster ROI.

Source: Towards Data Science

Advantages of predictive lead scoring

Predictive lead scoring outweighs the benefits of traditional lead scoring, because it:

• Generates trackable metrics based on large datasets
• Provides opportunities for the marketing teams to run better targeted campaigns and maximize ROI
• Improves the productivity of sales teams by focusing their resources towards better customers and leads
• Increases rates of conversion and purchases
• Compares past and current customers to adjust information profiles of leads
• Is less prone to error
• Gathers information backed up by data to guide decision making
• Identifies patterns and connections you might have missed

Disadvantages of predictive lead scoring

This is probably more of a prerequisite than a disadvantage: predictive lead scoring is only as effective and valuable as the data you have. To get accurate and useful insights about your leads, you’re going to need a lot of accurate and organized data and the necessary technology to manage it.

For what type of business is this ideal

Because predictive lead scoring needs a massive dataset to provide the best insights, it is more appropriate for businesses that follow the online behavior and engagement models.

Aside from gathering a lot of data, predictive lead scoring management requires quite a bit of expertise and investment in order to be fully effective. Before you make the switch, ask the following questions:

• How do we want to use this score?
• What process changes should we make to share this data and information to sales?
• What obstacles or hindrances could prevent sales from using predictive scores?
• What score limits should sales focus on?
• Do we have the right tools to manage lead disposition and align sales and marketing?

Unified CRM tools like Insightly offer powerful features to streamline marketing campaigns, gather and present bigger and better data, and allow your business to provide better customer experiences.

You can’t underestimate the value of lead scoring for your business. Using the proper scoring model allows you to make data-driven decisions in lead management and to maximize ROI on your campaigns.

Read more like this:

• 7 lead scoring best practices to improve your conversion rate
• What are different types of customer data?
• How to set up a lead disposition process
• Why use marketing automation?

The post Traditional vs. predictive lead scoring appeared first on Insightly.