The Online Marketing Cycle and Marketing Automation Software, cont'd

As I described in my post yesterday, we've had great success in putting together an online marketing process, based primarily on search engine marketing, and using a marketing automation software as a service (SaaS) package called Marketo for follow-up and activity tracking. The results have been a flood of conversions (new contacts asking for information) in the last couple of months. However, we had previously had trouble in handing these contacts off to our sales team, as the quality varied widely, and the sales team looked with a jaundiced eye at the "leads" we were passing them. So what to do?

Marketo and other marketing automation packages have one solution for this. It's "lead scoring" which allows you to assign points to different activities, and track them for individual visitors to your website. For example, they might get 5 points for visiting the site, 10 points for downloading a brochure, and another 10 points for a repeat visit. It's not limited to the website, either; we are using Marketo extensively for intelligent direct marketing programs, and clicking on a link in an email newsletter can also cause points to be added to someone's score. You can then set up the system so that when someone reaches 100 points, for example, it automatically raises a flag and the lead gets forwarded to sales for follow-up.

While this sounds like a great solution, and can help you uncover people who are really interested that you might otherwise miss, it takes some time to get your scoring system set up, and for your targets to accumulate enough points to trigger the follow-up events. So what can you do in the meantime?

Our solution, while not the most elegant, has helped us reap great rewards very quickly. We hired someone to call all of the new contacts that are in our geography and "qualify" them with a series of questions. This isn't cold-calling, isn't a sales job, and isn't compensated the way sales reps are (no commissions). Instead, we hired an intelligent young woman with a very nice phone voice and manner to call them up, ask them a series of questions, and pass along those with real interest and real projects to our sales team. She also contributes to our direct marketing program, has been working with the rest of the team on automating different processes (e.g., automatic responses to those out of our geographic areas), and other work that requires

The results in the first full month of operations have been great. Out of the 800+ conversions, a little more than 5% turned into qualified opportunities that we passed along to sales. (Everyone else stays in the marketing database and receives newsletters and special offers on a regular basis.)

So our numbers went like this:

Pre-project:
10,000 unique web visitors per month, leading to
100 conversions per month, leading to
unknown number of qualified opportunities per month (but less than 5)

Post-project:
30,000 unique web visitors per month, leading to
800+ conversions per month, leading to
40+ new qualified opportunities per month

Just after the first full month of this program, our national sales manager came into my office and high-fived me for the number and quality of the leads his team was receiving. For marketers, how often does something like that happen in your career?

There have been plenty of bumps in the road, and there are still lots of areas for improvement and cost savings, and I'll go over those in my next few posts.