Intelligent Demand Generation / eTrigue Corporation

At a recent industry event I heard campaign horror stories ranging from emails without a single functional link to messaging that wouldn’t sell ice in August.  The one that really caught my attention was from a marketing manager who had run a variety of simple email marketing campaigns over the past year with good results. Using the website tracking information she gathered over several months, she segmented her database in an effort to send more targeted email messages. With four unique product offerings she was sure she would accelerate her company’s lead-flow with more focused emails and end up with a BIG pat on the back!

Unfortunately, when campaigns cross in the night, it can spell disaster.

The company she works for, which will remain nameless, as well as the marketing solution she used (not eTrigue), sells very high-end equipment. The value of each customer is substantial. Over the past few years they had built some really good relationships starting with their email nurturing program. In fact, a majority of their marketing budget was now focused on email.

And now for the CATASTROPHE!

Running multiple campaigns at once is commonplace. In this case, a slight oversight had a dramatic impact on this company’s ability to market to many of its high priority prospects. The combination of auto-response emails from landing pages, automated follow-up emails from downloaded content, and a slight miscalculation in the design of her newly created email campaigns, resulted in some prospects receiving as many as four emails in one week. And of course — opt-outs! She had just “turned-off” a large number of viable customers. Her VP of Sales panicked and in her words; her CEO was within nanoseconds of turning-off her paycheck.

As this a good example of how Demand Generation platforms, like any other tool, can be dangerous if used improperly or with inadequate attention to detail. The impact can often be huge given the power to email to hundreds of thousands for prospects with the click of a mouse.

Here are some simple points to consider when building your campaigns to help prevent catastrophe:

• Make sure you understand the logic of all campaigns that are currently running. Your platform should give you a view of all active campaigns.
• Include protections just in case you miss something. eTrigue includes the ability to restrict outbound email campaigns by the number of days since the last email, or a specific date range. eTrigue will also allow you to email, or prevent a mailing based on the subject of an email.
• Decide in advance whether it is “o.k.” for a prospect to get a thank you email as the result of an action, i.e. download, “in addition” to your other email campaigns.
• Use more small campaigns vs. complex large ones. It’s often easier to sort out the logic if you break your marketing up into modules.

Happy Marketing!

With increasing concern over the worldwide economic situation, organizations are eagerly searching for ways to accelerate sales without impacting their budget. Compounding the problem, buyers are spending more time scrutinizing each dollar — more decision makers, longer evaluations, and definitely more hand wringing. It’s times like these when each impression counts more than ever.

One of the advantages of working for a company in the demand-generation market is you get to talk to a lot of very enthusiastic marketers who really can do more with less. Over the past six months I have seen a definite trend towards several smaller, targeted campaigns vs. broad, generic ones. Marketers are rolling up their sleeves, spending more time segmenting their databases, creatively focusing each message in an attempt to prod existing prospects down the funnel. And it works!

Response rates have increased significantly, with more targeted emails focused on “pain points” by title, combined with other variables, including product interest based on web pages viewed. And while you might suggest this is something good marketers should have been doing all along, my impression is companies are focusing less on other activities, so marketers have, and are, spending more time focused on optimizing their demand-generation programs. More than one VP of Marketing commented on how digging into the data has not only improved their conversion rates but also given them a new perspective of their database – and how to more effectively market to it.

Despite economic doom and gloom, 2009 looks to be a banner year for Marketing Automation solutions. As organizations look corporate-wide for opportunities to trim budgets, marketing executives are re-thinking their marketing strategies to demonstrate measurable results – and of course, hold on to their budgets. According to the Aberdeen Group, in their recent report “Lead Nurturing: The Secret to Successful Lead Generation”, B2B marketing organizations expect to increase spending by 50% on lead nurturing and customer retention programs in 2009.

Just as Henry Ford used automation to produce an affordable car with increased efficiency of manufacture, Marketing Automation platforms are changing the way marketers drive demand with fewer resources. Solutions that automatically engage, manage, and qualify prospects have cleared the Gartner “Trough of Disillusionment,” and, with an additional push from a down economy, are rapidly finding a home in even the most non-analytic marketing organizations. E-mail and online marketing programs can be launched quickly, are cost effective, and provide immediate feedback. Whether you’re tracking responses to an email campaign or tracking each page a prospect touches on your web site, these programs are measurable and can be used to automatically trigger future more targeted messages the close more sales. Automation is key to constant and repeatable results.

Ford did not invent the concept of an assembly line, but he did perfect it. Before Ford, skilled craftsman built cars as a team, custom fitting parts and assembling them in place until each vehicle was complete. Automation reversed the process. Instead of workers going to the car, the car came to the worker who performed the same task of assembly over and over again. Ford reduced the assembly time of a Model T from 12 1/2 hours to less than 6 hours.

Marketing is one of the last business functions to embrace technology, automation, and true measurability. With internal competition for budget dollars and external competition for fewer customer dollars, the time to automate and follow the lead of Henry Ford has come.

Competition is the keen cutting edge of business, always shaving away at costs. -Henry Ford