Intelligent Demand Generation / eTrigue Corporation

The world has gone on-line, but many companies haven’t grasped the fact that for most of your potential customers, the front door to your company isn’t the one you walk in every morning–it’s your web site! You wouldn’t ignore a customer to your physical office, so why do companies fail to engage with potential customers that come to through their online front door?

I initiated this discussion at dinner the other night. A…B…C… Always Be Closing… I asked how many of the seven companies represented were actually tracking web activity down to the email address of the visitor. Only two of seven were using an automated marketing solution to track prospects and automatically follow up. They were instantly the best salesperson a guy could have. Even better, one was already a customer using eTrigue.

And while we take an educational approach to the sales process here at eTrigue, these marketing automation “converts” took a completely different approach. FEAR! “If you’re not tracking who is on your website and following up immediately, your competition is going to win the business” “No ifs ands or buts about it” It was actually fun to watch as these two street wise marketers, after a couple of drinks, school their colleges on the realities of marketing in down economy.

It gave me a new perspective on the nature of our current economy and how the strong/smart will survive. It’s becoming a competitive imperative that companies understand who is walking in their on-line front door, and more importantly following up with relevant communications. 85% of all B2B buyers use the web to research their buying decision. If your competition is reaching out to their saleable market with emails and tracking every move the recipient makes on their website and you’re not… Well, yes you do stand a good chance of losing. They know more about that prospective customer and are likely calling them within minutes of their web activity. The odds of contacting a lead in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes after a prospect engages with your company drops by 100 times according to an MIT lead management study.

Are you losing customers by not engaging with them as they tour your web site?

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.