For the past 15 months, I’ve written a new blog post each month about marketing automation. But so far, they’ve all been focused on the “how-to,” strategy, and best practices of using marketing automation — encouraging you to take advantage of this software and explaining how to get the most out of it. That’s definitely not a bad thing, but with marketing automation post #16, I want to highlight some of the results our clients are seeing with marketing automation as a key part of their lead development ecosystems.
Below, I’ve included two examples of Newfangled clients who have bought into the lead development ecosystem and are using marketing automation in conjunction with a content-driven, conversion-focused website to drive new business development. I hope that by viewing these examples, you will see the tangible benefits of marketing automation and set your expectations accordingly.
Marketing Agency Lands New Client via Automated Program
Newfangled just finished building a new website for Franklin Street Marketing, but we began working with them on marketing automation in July 2013. We trained their staff on marketing automation and helped implement Act-On into their existing website and their blog-based micro-site, gojunto.com.
With our help, Franklin Street integrated all the web forms on the Junto website with Act-On so they could effectively track conversions and website data. Once that was in place, we worked together to build a few automated programs designed to send timely and relevant information to their prospects. I’d like to highlight one of them.
If you visit the Junto website and sign up for “The Next Idea,” a monthly email that delivers their latest insights to your inbox, you will be entered into an automated program. Not only will you begin receiving the emails you signed up for, but you will also get two other messages that will encourage you to take further action.
First, shortly after signing up, you will receive an email from the CEO of Franklin Street thanking you for your subscription and recommending that you take a look at their library of white papers and ebooks. That is, unless you have already signed up for those as well, in which case you would not get an email with this recommendation.
Seven weeks would go by, during which you would continue to receive “The Next Idea” email you signed up for. Then, you would receive one additional email from Franklin Street. It would be a friendly email, again from the CEO, just checking in to see if you have been enjoying your subscription. He’d ask if there are any other topics you would like to see them cover, and he would tell you to feel free to reach out to him directly if you ever wanted to discuss their service offerings.
And that’s it. That’s the automated program. Simple. Two emails. Timely to your subscription, relevant to the action that you took, and — most importantly — crafted carefully to encourage you to take additional action.
So, what were the results?
Since beginning this program, Franklin Street has seen 15% of new subscribers clickthrough the first email to view the whitepapers and ebooks, and out of all TNI subscribers, 32% have also completed a form to download a whitepaper or ebook.
Great! Franklin Street is getting more eyeballs on their content and, with increased form submissions, more information on their leads, too. But where it gets really interesting is after that second email, the seven-week check-in.
From this second email, they have received several direct replies. And in the four months that this email has been going out, Franklin Street has already landed a new client that started from a reply to this email.
“What is especially encouraging to us is that we would not have had this opportunity without the automated program. This prospect was not on our radar, and we bypassed the traditional RFP process altogether.” – Stephen Moegling, Executive VP, Franklin Street Marketing
Additionally, consider that this email has only been sent to 91 subscribers thus far. That means 1.1% of the people who received this email turned into clients. If you could turn one out of every 100 subscribers into a client, wouldn’t you?
Record Label Increases Sales Through Use of Targeted Email Campaign
Merge Records is an independant record label that utilizes e-commerce on their website to sell music and merchandise for their various artists. Because of the e-commerce component, we can easily measure the dollar-value impact of each of their various email campaigns.
Over the past couple of months, two of Merge’s artists have released new albums for sale on the website. To help promote the albums and drive record sales, Merge created a campaign to send out targeted album announcement emails to all customers who had previously purchased music or merchandise by the same or similar artists, encouraging them to visit the store to pre-order or purchase the new albums.
These messages were relevant based on the previous actions of the customers, and they were timely to the new album release. Because of this, we saw some fantastic results from this campaign.
These emails have seen very high engagement:
- 50%+ open rate
- 10-20% clickthrough rate
- 0 spam complaints
- very few opt-outs (less than 1%)
The bigger item to note is that, in the first few weeks of the two new albums’ releases, 52% and 34% of album purchases, respectively, came from recipients of these email campaigns. Getting the right message in front of the right people at the right time has resulted in a noticeable increase in sales for these new releases.
These are just two examples of the types of success we are seeing on a daily basis through marketing automation. Not only are we seeing success, but we are also able to measure and quantify that success thanks to the use of marketing automation.
So, how has marketing automation helped your business? I would love to hear your marketing automation success stories. Hit us up on Twitter and share your thoughts!