For the productive marketer, spring cleaning has involved updating the company’s marketing materials (white papers, email templates, etc.) – the main part of the house – to reflect product improvements and service upgrades. But chances are that your marketing automation vendor has also been busy this past year rolling out new features to make your life easier. So, instead of taking Sunday afternoon off, finish up all of your spring cleaning and revamp your marketing automation strategy to take advantage of all of the new features.

Key Marketing Automation Upgrades

• Compatibility – A versatile marketing automation solution strives to integrate with as much technology as possible. You may have been reluctant in the past year to upgrade your software in fear that your marketing automation solution would be incompatible. Take the time to find out if your vendor has achieved compatibility with the latest web browsers, email connectors, and CRM solutions.
• Reporting – Given that a huge selling point of marketing automation is marketing ROI, it’s important for marketers to be using the latest tools to demonstrate the value of their marketing efforts. Most vendors know this and are constantly updating their reporting features to let marketers create better tables, charts, and graphs for the higher-ups. Often when you first implement a marketing automation tool, you get caught up in the tactical campaign elements and you don’t spend time understanding how you can report on your data. With the end of the quarter approaching, this is a great time to think about how you can use reports to show that your hard work is paying off.
• CRM Integration – Most marketing automation vendors are continually improving their integration with the different CRM systems. Because each CRM has its own API and functions differently, the engineers are having to learn each system and figure out ways to implement the new features. This means that little upgrades are constantly being made to better improve CRM integration and you may have overlooked some. Now is a great time to revisit your vendors blog or feature list to find out what new improvements have been made. Often, to take advantage of new features you need to update your integration package, so be sure you’re working with the latest and greatest edition of your tool.
• Automation – The key to marketing automation is the ability to take time-consuming tasks away from marketers and automate them. Ideally, when you first started marketing automation you handled the basics of automating scoring, grading, drip nurturing, etc. It’s probably time to take automation to the next level and really see what the possibilities are. Think through what other areas of your marketing campaigns you may be able to automate, and work with the sales team to find out how you can use automation to help them as well.
• Other Features – Luckily for marketing automation customers, the industry is continuing to grow and the landscape is getting more and more competitive. The only way for vendors to succeed is to innovate and differentiate their offerings. Keep tabs on your vendor’s blog and other outgoing news to be informed of the next big announcement. For instance, your company may have recently added connectors to plug in to other marketing resources like a chat solution to sync on-site chats with with prospect activities or a Jigsaw connector to help you find more information about people in your database.

With your marketing automation strategy revamped and your marketing materials refreshed, your company is ready to generate some great leads and exceed quarterly goals.

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Many businesses rely on their online forms – whether on their own site or on landing pages – to help bring in new leads for their sales team. From contact forms to white paper requests to free trial sign-ups, forms are an important part of collecting information on your potential customers. However, not all forms are created equal. Having effective forms can help reduce your abandonment rate and bring in more leads.

Forms can be “smart” in two different ways – through form design and form technology. Here are some examples of “smart form” characteristics in each category.

Form Design

• Forms should be short and to the point. Do you really need that fax number?
• Forms should use “Thank You Content” that directs people to view or download additional information after completion
• Forms should include an autorepsonder that quickly sends out the requested materials. In the case that personal follow-up is required, set up form alerts so that the sales person knows as soon as the form is completed and can respond in a timely fashion.

Form Technology

• Look for forms that offer progressive profiling. This is the ability to ask for a few fields on your first form (remember, we want to reduce abandonment) and then automatically ask for different fields upon a return visit (so that you can continue to build your lead profile).
• Forms that include the ability to de-dupe leads can help keep your CRM system from getting filled with junky, duplicate leads.
• Hidden captchas are more user friendly and still prevent spam bots from filling out your forms. Is it just me or are those little, distorted captcha boxes getting harder and harder to read these days?

In an article on Search Engine Land, three different types of searches are described.

Ad-Hoc Search is the most common search type. This is when you’re doing a very broad search, usually for some type of research. Example: digital cameras, digital camera reviews

Known-Item Search is when someone knows what they are looking for – usually because they’ve been there before or heard about it from someone – but they aren’t sure how to find it. This is a slightly more specific search. Example: official Star Trek site

Named Page Search is an even more specific search. The person knows exactly where they want to go but maybe they can’t remember the address and don’t want to search through the site to find it. This type of search is probably less common for small and medium sized businesses, as typically they have less complex websites. It could still apply, though, if someone is searching out a pricing page, a free trial or a customer log-in page. Example: google adwords keyword research tool.

Because prospects search in different ways, you want to make sure you’re putting yourself in their shoes and optimizing for different types of searches. Using key words and phrases can help you optimize both your corporate site and your landing pages. Marketing automation tools provide a way for you to start understanding how people reach your website through search reporting. You can tell not only which searches are the most popular, but also start to see pattens in which searches lead to qualified prospects and meaningful interactions.

Abandonment Rate most often refers to purchases started but not completed; so-called “shopping cart abandonment” has always been an issue of concern for online retailers. However, you can apply this metric in other areas as well, the most relevant of which would be form abandonment. Form abandonment is when visitors to your site begin filling out a form but do not complete or submit the form. The abandonment rate is a measure of just one aspect of a website’s conversion rate.

You can’t always be certain of the reasons for form abandonment. It might be that some visitors changed their mind, but most frequently the problem lies with the form design. Forms that ask for too much information at once or are difficult to fill out lead to a high rate of form abandonment. Redesigning your forms to make them simple, streamlined, and user-friendly is the best remedy for a high form abandonment rate.

Clickthrough Rate refers to the number of clickthroughs–when a customer clicks through pages on your site–expressed as a fraction of the total impressions. Clickthrough rate measures the effectiveness of an online ad by counting the number of viewers that are interested enough to click on that ad. Because clickthroughs only represent the first step in the conversion process, this is a metric best suited to measuring medium-term marketing goals rather than the end result of a campaign.

# of Clickthroughs / Total Impressions = Clickthrough Rate

Pageviews are an expression of the number of times a webpage has is served. The pageviews metric gives you a way to measure the popularity of a website. A related metric, Hits, can be calculated by multiplying total pageviews by the number of files on a page. This measures not only popularity but is also an indicator of page design.

Total Pageviews * # of Files on Page = Hits

So what is good content?

Content should have some educational value. This doesn’t mean it can’t tie back to your product, service or sales proposition, but you want to offer something that will leave your reader or viewer with some solid business advice, best practices tips or thought provoking conversation starters.

Most companies have a variety of types of content, from case studies to webinars
to news stories about the company’s success. When seeking to increase conversions or lead activity, think about carefully crafting the right combination of these items. Put yourself in the prospect’s shoes. When you are just discovering a new product, what do you want to see?

• It’s likely that you first want to understand what the product does and how it relates to your goals (white paper or webinar).
• Maybe after you’ve learned a a bit about the product, you may be interested in learning how others use it  successfully (case study).
• Finally, if you see value in the product you may seek out alternate vendors and investigate them more deeply based on factors like industry certifications, awards and success.

Conversion relies heavily on the first stage, education. If you don’t have an arsenal of interesting  offerings, the forms you built will remain untouched, the automation rules lie still and your database sits empty. Marketing automation is a tool to help ease the pain of lead generation, but it requires a solid strategy to set the wheels in motion.

This is where the definitions of hard and soft offers come into the picture.  According to the article, a hard offer is “anything that incents the buyer to accept a call from our sales rep.” On the other hand, a soft offer gives the buyer informative information on the product.  From the buyer’s perspective, white papers or any other tutorial such as videos or webinars are usually preferred during the first steps of the decision making process.  From there the sales rep comes into the picture to really hammer home the benefits.

By offering a variety of compelling educational materials on your product or industry, you can start off on the right foot with a lead. A marketing automation tool can help you easily set up multiple campaigns to track the popularity of each offering. Then use forms and landing pages to grab information about a prospect and create drip nurturing programs that will send additional educational materials based on a lead’s area of interest.

Let’s go back to thinking like the buyer. First, you receive information about the product on your own terms. Once you’ve learned a bit about how it works, you decide the product could benefit your company and are ready to ask questions. Using the soft sell materials created by marketing, the buyer has moved from attaining readily available information to talking with an expert on the product.

Using this approach the buyer is more knowledgeable about your product, meaning sales has to spend less of their valuable time educating prospects and can focus on closing the deal. Ultimately, it benefits all involved parties when nobody’s toes are stepped on too early in the game.

ABC: Always be Closing

Make sure that your visitors have a chance to convert in every touch that they have with your company. Think about the page visitors land on most frequently — your homepage. Most companies, in a rush to provide as many options as possible,  do not do a great job of converting traffic from this page. Think about the characteristics of the typical corporate site: dozens of links, some sort of lifestyle image in a banner, and either no call to action or too many call to actions.

1. Stick to one main call to action (flash demo, product test drive, key white paper, etc.) representing the one key thing that you hope your visitors do. 
2. If you have secondary calls to action, keep them smaller and in a different design element (different color, style of button, etc.)
3. Make sure you have a call to action at the bottom of each interior page, even if it just a text link(s) to other areas of your site. Most site content simply ends at the bottom of the page leaving the reader to scroll back up to the top or click the back button in the browser. 
4. If you are linking off of your site (to partner sites, articles, etc.), set the link to open in a new tab/window to avoid losing the visitor. 

A couple of sites that I think do a tremendous job of following all of most of these principals are mailchimp.com and verticalresponse.com