Email marketing is a cost effective, creative tool for marketers to use for lead generation, but email isn’t the only way prospects are interacting with marketers today. The same person who gets your marketing emails might also follow your brand on Twitter or visit your website. So how do you know that the “Sarah in Seattle” who follows you on Twitter is the same “Sarah” (in Seattle) who’s on your “good prospects” email list?

The ability to engage across multiple channels, track your results, and see an integrated picture of all the actions a prospect takes, is a key differentiator between marketing automation and stand-alone marketing tools. Marketing automation not only helps facilitate your email marketing campaigns, web, and social media channels – it connects the dots between them.

Connecting the Dots with Marketing Automation

Three key ways that marketers use marketing automation to connect the dots between multiple channels and actions:

1. Integrate inbound and outbound marketing efforts. You can coordinate outbound marketing, like advertising and email blasts, with inbound marketing, like landing pages and social media, for consistent, integrated, targeted messaging.
2. Measure the behavior of key prospects across all channels. Follow a prospect’s digital footprints across email, websites, webinars, social media and more, to see just what they’re interested in. Gauge that interest with scoring practices, and you’ll know exactly which prospects are ready for sales.
3. Optimize budgets and messaging based on a holistic view. Maximize your marketing dollars by testing to find what works best, so you can focus your budget on email campaigns that deliver and online ads that convert.

With the dots connected by marketing automation, Sarah in Seattle is no long a mystery. Now you know what she cares about, which makes her a prospect you know how to target, using the right message and the right channels. With a little bit of lead nurturing, she might even end up being your best customer.

Want to learn more about how you can make Act-On’s marketing automation platform work for your company? Contact our sales team! They’re waiting to hear from you.

Should you consider transitioning from using a stand-alone email marketing solution to a full-blown marketing automation platform? (As you may have already guessed, the answer is “yes,” but hear us out.)

As you’ve probably already come to realize, there are tradeoffs between the two technologies. Many small businesses (defined by Gleanster as organizations with 1-250 employees) think that marketing automation is only for large enterprise corporations. That used to be the case, but some newer marketing automation solutions (like Act-On Software) actually have small- and medium-size business marketers in mind.

Email Marketing versus Marketing Automation: Who’s Using What?

According to Gleanster, eight out of ten small business marketers currently use three or more technologies to support their marketing activities. Most of the time, these technologies aren’t integrated and customer activity can’t easily be followed between the systems.

That’s because email marketing systems are designed to be good at one thing: email. Multi-channel engagement is a key differentiator between marketing automation and email marketing. Unlike email-only marketing solutions, marketing automation enables and tracks marketing engagement across multiple channels, most often websites and social media, in addition to email.

Marketing Automation: Not Just for Marketers

Most SMBs don’t have a sales problem or a marketing problem; they have a revenue problem. While email marketing services are typically viewed as a tool for marketers only, marketing automation bridges the divide between marketing and sales by providing tools that marketers and sales can use together to achieve objectives and impact the business as a whole.

To learn more about the differences between email marketing and marketing automation, we invite you to download Gleanster’s Email Marketing versus Marketing Automation Solutions whitepaper. This Gleansight Deep Dive piece provides a core feature comparison of marketing automation and email marketing, as well as an assessment of marketing automation readiness for SMB marketers.

Ready to start deploying marketing automation today? Visit our website to learn more about Act-On Software.

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What does it all mean?



Companies with closely aligned marketing and sales departments close 38 percent more proposals than non-aligned companies. Wouldn’t we all like those kinds of results? And so, many marketers who want to better synch marketing efforts with sales goals are evaluating how automation systems might help. If you’re doing such an evaluation, you’ve likely run across lots of industry terms – “sales and marketing alignment,” “lead generation,” “lead scoring,” “lead qualification,” “lead nurturing,” “lead management,” and “demand generation,” to list just the most common.

It’s a bit easier to understand what marketing automation software can do for you if you understand these terms and concepts. To help you get started, here are nine terms every marketer should know:

1. Marketing and Sales Alignment
   Traditionally, marketing sees the world through a buyer’s viewpoint, and sales through the seller’s lens. There can be huge gulfs between them. But both departments share the same ultimate goal: to produce revenue for the company. Marketing and sales “alignment” is a process, or the result of a process, that creates mutual understanding and a partnership mentality. Marketing automation is a marvelous tool for this, offering a framework that helps sales and marketing see their common interests and agree on factors used in marketing tactics.
2. Demand Generation and Lead generation
   The concepts of “demand generation” and “lead generation” are often used interchangeably. There are no standardized definitions of the terms, and some practices can be used to support both.

   We asked marketing expert David Raab from Raab Associates for his personal definition of the terms. He responded that, “’demand generation’ classically means to actually create demand for a product by educating potential buyers about why they need it and who they can buy it from.” Generating this awareness and interest can involve a wide range of activities, including magazine, TV, radio advertising, direct mail, email, and all kinds of inbound and outbound marketing activities, such as sign-up opportunities for email newsletters, webinars, whitepapers, e-books, and so on.

   “Lead generation’ is a narrower term,” advised David, “involving getting potential buyers to identify themselves and agree to be contacted by the company; to, in effect, ‘raise their hands.’” An example of lead generation is advertising that draws people to a website where they can indicate strong interest or receive something of value (a newsletter subscription, webinar registration, etc.) by providing some form of identification, usually an email address at the minimum.

   An offline example of lead generation could be something as simple as people putting business cards into a fishbowl in hopes of winning a prize. All those business cards are leads – with name, company, phone number, email address and more.

3. Lead Qualification

   People identified as leads will be at different stages of readiness to buy, from just beginning their research, to being ready to buy as soon as they get the right offer. 
Lead qualification is a process for determining which stage a lead is at now, so that the prospect can be sent the correct offer at the right time to move him or her closer to a purchase. Automation takes the manual labor out of this.
4. 

Lead Scoring

   Some companies find it useful to qualify leads with a ranking system that tells salespeople how close each lead is to a purchase. That helps the company decide which offer to put in front of the lead next; it also helps the sales professional prioritize their time by focusing on the hottest leads. Usually the ranking is an aggregate of scores earned through prospect behavior such as click-throughs, website visits, or webinar attendance. Automation makes this much easier.
5. Lead Conversion
   Lead conversion is the term used to indicate that a buyer has taken a step in the buying journey. For example, depending on your organization’s terminology, a prospect could convert to a lead; a lead could convert to an opportunity; an opportunity could convert to a sale; and so on. Marketing automation tracks conversions automatically.
6. Drip Marketing
   Drip marketing is the practice of sending messages and offers on a schedule, “dripping” out over time. With marketing automation, you can create a drip program that triggers in response to a specific action by a prospect.
7. Lead Nurturing
   Lead nurturing is a specific type of drip marketing. If someone isn’t ready to buy right away, but has expressed interest, it’s a rewarding practice to keep “touching” the lead with new information or offers. Nurturing uses scheduled drip communications to keep your brand top of mind with the prospect until they’re ready to buy.
8. 
Lead Management

   While the concepts of qualifying and nurturing leads are fairly simple, execution is not. The typical marketer is managing multiple segments, multiple campaigns, and different offers across multiple channels. That’s where marketing automation comes in, with lead management tools including list segmentation, scoring, nurturing and more – to help marketers ensure that no lead gets dropped or abandoned, and that every lead gets the right communication at the right time. This not only increases conversions throughout each stage of the sales funnel, but lowers the cost per lead. It can also help document how marketing campaigns contribute to closed sales, demonstrating marketing attributed ROI. That’s nice too.
9. Marketing Automation
   Marketing automation software provides an efficient way to manage demand generation and leads, and communicate timely information with the sales department. Marketing automation systems allow a company to identify leads from the outset, gauge their readiness to buy, automatically send each lead offers that will help move them closer to a purchase, and automatically alert sales to qualified opportunities. In short, it creates greater sales and marketing alignment, and results in greater sales.

Questions about marketing automation, lead generation, lead nurturing, lead scoring or other aspects of marketing? Contact us or sign-up for a weekly demo to learn more about the power of Act-On’s marketing automation toolkit!

Imagine a wall. Your business is on one side of this wall, and a pot of gold is on the other. The gold is the higher profits you can earn with a marketing automation system. The wall is the work to get started. For many companies, the wall is too high to leap over… and marketing automation is out of reach.

Recently, Act-On presented a webinar titled Marketing Automation: One Step at a Time, in which David Raab of Raab Associates Inc. outlined an incremental approach to deploying marketing automation.

Deploying Marketing Automation: An Incremental Approach

Marketers have been told that in order to implement marketing automation they’ll have to reinvent their programs and processes, causing disruption and uncertainty. But David showed us how using a gentle, incremental approach transforms marketing automation adoption from a demanding leap to a manageable flight of steps. The steps include:

• Deploy the marketing automation system by duplicating your existing programs
• Identify improvements that will be easy to deploy, easy to measure, provide high return, and will be gateways to further change
• Measure your results
• Tackle the advanced stuff in small steps
• Keep looking ahead

If you missed the webinar, David Raab has also written a whitepaper, Marketing Automation: One Step at a Time, that we invite you to download.  You’ll learn why incremental adoption is a less disruptive, less demanding transition, with a higher probability of success, and get the full scoop on  a step-by-step path for a successful incremental approach to adopting marketing automation, including how and where to begin, which changes have the highest potential, how to tackle the hard stuff, and the three key success factors.

Ready to start deploying marketing automation today? Visit our website to learn more about Act-On Software.

 

 

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2011 was a breakout year for Act-On Software. Just to look at Q4′s record results, we added 171 new customers and reported a 405 percent increase year-over-year in annual recurring revenues.

Customers continue to choose Act-On for our platform’s potent capabilities, ease of deployment, and ease of use. “We needed something that was easy to use, that we could deploy quickly without involving a lot of IT’s time,” said Curtis Preston, founder and CEO of Truth in IT, one of our newest customers. “It had to be powerful enough to deliver better results right now, but also have capabilities that we could grow into incrementally. Act-On is the first and only SaaS provider that we’ve implemented that actually does what the sales person told me it would do — and without adding additional charges every time we turn around. Act-On has exceeded our expectations.”

In addition to new customers, we also welcomed new employees (an increase of more than 600 percent year-over-year), received industry recognition, and continued to grow internationally. Here’s a snapshot of our Q4 accomplishments.

Act-On Q4 2011 Highlights:

• Act-On included on Silicon India si100 list
• CEO Raghu Raghavan and Shawn Naggiar, Act-On’s Chief Revenue Officer, named to the Sales Lead Management Association’s “50 Most Influential People in Sales Lead Management” list
• Act-On joins the Marketing Automation Institute’s Vendor Council
• Act-On opens a new office in Bangalore, India. This office’s seasoned team will support Act-On’s rapidly growing international business in the U.K., Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Austria/New Zealand.

Interested in growing your revenue in Q1? Contact us to learn more about marketing automation and how Act-On can help grow your business!

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Content is still, and always will be, king… relevant, targeted, personalized content, that is. You probably don’t want to blast the same message or offer to all your prospects, so segmenting your list by interest factors or stages in the buying process makes sense. What if you could easily target your marketing campaigns, including email marketing, to appropriate segments? And what if those segments dynamically, automatically, added new prospects on the fly? (Spoiler: You can, and they will.)

With Act-On’s simple, powerful list management tool, you can easily create tightly targeted segments. Combine a range of profile attributes (e.g., title, department, and location), with observed behaviors (e.g., visiting specific web pages, attending a specific webinar, downloading a specific document), and a time frame, to get as narrow a segment as you wish.

For example, you might define a segment as: “Marketing directors in New York who visited the pricing page in the last 30 days and also attended the January 4th webinar.” Or perhaps as “Everyone who downloaded the free trial in the last 30 days and did not submit the subscription form.”

Once you’ve defined a segment, it becomes dynamic. As your Act-On database adds new prospects, any prospect fitting the profile will automatically be added to the segment, so every time you reach out to that segment, you’re reaching everyone. How handy is that?

Creating your own dynamic list with Act-On is so easy that you can watch the whole process in less than five minutes. Check out this short video.

Ready to start using marketing automation to segment your lists, give prospects more relevant content, and deliver ready-to-convert leads to sales? Contact us to find out how you can start using Act-On Software today!

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According to Forrester Research, US firms alone spent US $1.51 billion on email marketing in 2011. Spending on email marketing is projected to grow to $2.468 billion in 2016.

And why not? Email marketing is reportedly second only to search marketing as the most effective online marketing tactic. Return on investment can be tracked. Email scales; and it can serve as the solid center of a multi-channel integrated marketing program. Best of all, it’s an effective way for marketers to build personalized, interactive relationships with prospects and customers.

Email Marketing Tools

Act-On provides simple but sophisticated email marketing tools that help marketers execute all the tasks necessary to create and deliver an effective email campaign:

• Create email: It’s really easy to build an email from scratch, adapt an Act-On template, or re-use a proven performer. Format text and add graphics to extend company branding. Get interactive with forms, surveys, and documents; embed audio and video, link to webinars, and more.
• Address email: Slice and dice lists; take advantage of behavioral segmentation and lead characteristics to target the right audience. Suppress by the same factors, with the same ease.
• Send email: Act-On checks for personalization errors, CAN-SPAM compliance, and spam filter issues. The platform automatically suppresses duplicates, opt-outs, and previously bounced addresses. With a simple Litmus integration, Act-On can even help proof how a message will look in various email programs. Send immediately or schedule deployment; messages will go out in both email and plain text.
• Track email: Act-On’s dynamic reporting tool shows you how many opens, click-throughs and bounces your email is getting. Drill down into any recipient’s profile to see the full history of that lead’s engagement with all your campaigns and your organization.

Want to see for yourself how easy it is to create and deploy Act-On email? Watch this short video to see the whole process in less than six minutes.

From content creation to launching campaigns to real-time reporting and from integrating with CRM systems to promoting to webinar management – Act-On’s proven tools help you implement integrated campaigns from start to finish. Visit our website to learn more about Act-On’s email marketing services today.

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Marketing automation is hot, no question. But why? Is it is really a breakthrough new technology that warrants all this love or is it simply the value prop of gold at the end of the rainbow that has marketers flocking to vendor sites wanting to learn more?

Having posed that question, it’s worth noting that marketing automation technology has been around for well over 10 years. This is not some new technological breakthrough suddenly appearing to capture the hearts and minds of marketers around the globe. What is new is the type and quantity of companies in which marketing automation has gained traction.

Online Marketing Goes Mainstream

The reason marketing automation is being embraced by entirely new varieties of companies is as simple as Everett Rogers’ technology adoption curve. When it comes to marketing automation, the early adopters were the most tech-savvy large enterprises. These organizations not only had the capital to implement this new technology, but also needed to prove that the results of online marketing programs could actually be quantified.

Fast-forward to today, and everyone—including old-line companies that didn’t even have websites five to ten years ago—are emailing often, running webinars and becoming fluent in SEO, SEM and social media. The goals of these companies: to gain competitive advantage and fill their sales funnels.

I actually saw a company that sells toilet seats marketing on Twitter last week. In other words, online marketing has become mainstream.

Core Capabilities of Marketing Automation Systems

As new companies begin to implement online marketing campaigns, they eventually start to feel the pain that early tech adopters and large enterprises felt years ago when first implementing marketing automation software. These new prospects tell us every day that that they are confused, frustrated and discouraged the deeper they dig into this technology and its vendors. All the conflicting vendor claims, mile-long feature checklists and the bombardment of emails, webinars, eBooks, and whitepapers are compounding the confusion. In the scramble to differentiate, every vendor has a list of off the wall features in the “go-to” sales handbook that they relentlessly hurl at prospects around every turn to differentiate themselves.

Salespeople, who are as confused as anyone, are saying yes to everything and checking feature boxes like Keno cards so they can hurry and follow up on the next lead.

Ok, time out. Hit pause on the webinar and put down the eBook for a moment. Here is my attempt to break down the value proposition of a marketing automation system into three core capabilities. It doesn’t have a clever, well-crafted three-letter acronym, nor does it promise a 7000% ROI, but here it goes:

• Integrated Marketing – Arguably the number one pain point that has marketers looking to marketing automation vendors for help. Bringing together all of your online marketing channels into one execution platform with centralized reporting and analytics (email, website analytics, web forms/landing pages, document downloads, webinars etc.). In short, marketers are tired of managing multiple systems with disparate data without access to high-level information on what is happening across all their marketing channels and how those channels relate to each other. They want to know if the prospect that clicked on the email also showed up on the website, or if someone that attended an event also downloaded a whitepaper. In brief, they want to see all the prospect’s actions in a single consolidated, integrated profile.

• Automated Marketing Process – The ability to create programs or tracks to guide your prospects through knowledge acquisition, the qualification process and sales funnel in preparation for sales engagement. Another aspect of this is automating the process of moving leads from marketing to sales (with the supporting information to answer the age-old sales question of “why is this a lead?”). Another example would be taking leads previously passed to sales that didn’t go anywhere and getting those back into the marketing mix.

• Lead Scoring & Behavioral Filtering – The third core capability involves assigning logic and process to qualifying leads based on how they interact with your online marketing assets.

I might be going out on a limb here, but I would argue that the above three bullets address the major pieces of the puzzle that marketers are trying to put together when they evaluate marketing automation solutions. I will also be the first to admit that every vendor in the space can address these adequately. The difference is in how vendors approach the solution.

Marketing Automation for the Fortune 5,000,000

We are often asked what makes Act-On Software different. The short answer is that our platform was designed from inception to demystify the advanced concepts of marketing automation and make them accessible to the masses at a reasonable price point. Act-On is not some enterprise software solution with a website that lightly throws around terms like “Easy to Use” and “Quick to Implement.” We do not claim to be the most feature-rich platform, nor do we claim to make your marketing and sales people love each other once you sign up for our service. Our mission is to make marketers’ lives easier and provide the vehicle for better marketing results—without the cost, resources, time to implement and overhead.

Ready to make marketing automation work for your company? Join us in one of our weekly live demos, request a one-to-one demo, or send us an email—we’re waiting to hear from you.

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We’re proud to announce that Act-On received top honors in Gleanster’s recent Gleansight benchmark report on marketing automation.

Gleanster’s report evaluated 38 marketing automation service providers in four categories: Ease of Deployment, Ease of Use, Features and Functionality, and Overall Value. The twelve top firms in each category were ranked from “Good” to “Better” to “Best.”

The Summary of Act-On’s Rankings:

“Gleanster’s report solidifies our spot as one of the top vendors in the industry and further validates our approach to the market,” said Shawn Naggiar, chief revenue officer of Act-On Software.

According to Gleanster, marketers are implementing automation for compelling reasons including increasing efficiency; creating more sophisticated programs; measuring more factors, more accurately; aligning sales and marketing; and increasing revenue. If those sound like your company’s 2012 marketing goals, it might be time to consider implementing a marketing automation solution. Sign up now for a free weekly demo or request a one-on-one demonstration, and find out how Act-On Software can help you achieve your own marketing goals.

The full Gleansight Marketing Automation Report covers marketing automation challenges, value drivers, performance metrics, and more, along with capsule reviews of 38 vendors. Make sure to download your free copy.

Leads, leads, leads. You get them from website visitors, webinars, advertising, tradeshows, and even-more sources as multi-channel marketing grows. Some are ready to buy, while others need to be nurtured. You want to make sure that your sales team gets only the leads who are qualified as “ready to buy,” so what’s the best way to make that determination?

Lead scoring is the answer. Act-On’s simple yet effective lead scoring methodology lets marketers create scoring rules that attach numerical value to prospect activities.  Scoring lets you identify leads who are taking the actions that typically lead to short-term conversions, and get those hot leads to sales in real time, enhancing close rates.
Act-On’s easy-to-use tools let you assign your customized scores to common actions, such as:

-    Opens, click-throughs and forwards for your email marketing campaigns
-    Form views and submits
-    Visits to and click-throughs from landing pages
-    Downloads from your website
-    Visits to specific pages (such as pricing pages)
-    Webinar registration and attendance

You can also create custom criteria mapped to the buying cycle your own customers have established, to meet your organization’s unique needs.

Scoring your leads with Act-On is so easy that you can see the whole process in just over three minutes, in this short video.

 

And, for Salesforce users: Act-On’s lead scoring integrates seamlessly with Salesforce. Leads that cross the threshold and score as “ready” are immediately, automatically, effortlessly pushed to Salesforce, so sales reps can take instant action to close that ready lead.

Act-On’s lead qualification and scoring tools help marketers and sales professionals work together to manage leads more effectively—and close more sales. Visit our website to learn more about how you can start using Act-On’s lead qualification and scoring today!