BSCOM/250T: Communication Technology (Week 4 Discussion – Filling and Running a Marketing Funnel)

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BSCOM/250T: Communication Technology
Week 4 Discussion – Filling and Running a Marketing Funnel
Materials
Gray, P. & Rackham, S. (2021). Communication technology (1st ed.). MyEducator, LLC.
This week, your textbook covered the finer points of digital advertising and setting up
marketing automation. Marketing automation exists to make life easier for marketers—
freeing them up to focus their time on strategy. However, the most important purpose of
marketing automation is actually centered not on the marketer, but on the lead. It
is about strategically using advanced technologies to create a customized, seamless experience
for prospective, current, and returning customers. Marketing automation allows you to
simulate a personal connection at scale.
Think about your own experience getting automated emails as you respond to the following
questions: 175 Words
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Explain why it is helpful for brands to set up some level of marketing automation.
Evaluate why it might be important to help customers feel like they are being treated as
individuals rather than one of thousands of customers.
Describe an experience you have had where a company sent you an email that seemed
out of place or just incorrect because its marketing automation had not been set up
correctly. How did that make you feel as a customer or potential customer?
Describe a business where a mistake in marketing automation could actually result in
angry customers and even loss of business.
8.1Introduction
Topic 8 Introduction Transcript
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In the previous topic, we discussed long-form content—what it is, how to create it,
and how best to put it to work supporting your marketing initiatives. And although
there are many different kinds of long-form content, they all have something in
common: They are all effective options for bringing leads into your email marketing
campaigns. And that brings us to marketing automation.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is a blanket term that describes any process that uses
software to perform repetitive marketing tasks with the goal of personalizing
marketing messages and content to guide leads through the marketing funnel.
Marketing automation exists to make life easier for the marketer—freeing him or her
up to focus more time on strategy. However, the true purpose of marketing
automation is actually centered not on the marketer, but on the lead. It’s in
strategically using advanced technologies to create a customized, seamless
experience for prospective, current, and returning customers.
How effective is marketing automation? A 2019 report by Nucleus Research
suggests that marketing automation improves productivity by 20 percent on average,
and the Lenskold Group reports that 80 percent of marketers credit automation as
one of the top contributors to success.1 Marketing automation software is powerful,
and when used correctly, can produce staggering results.
Unfortunately, when it comes to creating a custom experience for a wide audience,
many companies run into problems.
In this topic, we will take a deeper dive into what marketing automation is, how it
works, and how even smaller businesses can effectively integrate it into their lead
generation and nurturing strategies for a consistently engaging customer experience
from start to finish.
To do that, let’s first take a look at the history of sales and marketing.
8.2History of Sales and Marketing
Sales, as a discipline, is likely older than human history. In its earliest forms, it
involved bartering; one individual would exchange an item or good to another
individual for an item or good of similar worth. The idea behind bartering is that one
person may have something that another person needs, and the “sale” would involve
determining what item, items, or services that person would be willing to exchange. As
civilizations developed, early forms of currency gradually began to supplant traditional
bartering, and the concept of money was born.
This continued throughout the world for most of recorded history (and continues
today); goods and services are exchanged for money, which can then be further
exchanged for other goods and services.
One thing to make note of is that up until relatively recently, sales existed as a purely
one-to-one interaction. A salesperson and a prospective buyer would come together to
discuss the possibility of making a trade in the hopes that they would be able to reach
an agreement that would benefit both.
The advent of marketing and advertising expanded that interaction to include many
prospective buyers. A single ad could be strategically placed to connect with a large
audience, with the end goal of inspiring members of that audience to make a
purchase. But with this advancement came a disconnect—the one-to-one relationship
that had so long been associated with sales was no longer possible, and while
speaking to a large audience allowed marketers to cast a wider net, it made it
incredibly difficult to speak to their leads as individuals and offer a customized sales
experience.
Enter marketing automation.
Marketing automation, at its heart, is an attempt for salespersons and marketers to
have their cake and eat it too. It’s a best-of-both-worlds approach that reaches out with
the potential to connect with a nearly limitless audience while still providing the
personalized, focused messaging of an in-person sales experience. In other words, it
combines all of the advantages of a one-to-many marketing model with all of the
advantages of a one-to-one sales model.
Marketing automation took its first, hesitant breaths with the rise of home internet in
the mid-1990s. As communication technologies and the associated customer bases
expanded exponentially, marketers needed a way to nurture a large number of
possible leads all at once. The marketing automation industry began to emerge in the
early 2000s, eventually growing into a multibillion-dollar industry.
The earliest examples of marketing automation were focused purely on email
marketing, which remains a major staple in marketing automation even today. It
brought together email and marketing resource management with web analytics
technology to help businesses connect with qualified leads. New tools and platforms
emerged, allowing for more efficient outreach and better returns. Eventually, improving
internet speeds and new technologies allowed marketing automation to expand
beyond just email to encompass nearly the entire customer journey through the
marketing funnel.
Through marketing automation, marketers can reach out to leads and customers en
masse, providing them with email content created specifically to address their needs
and speak to them as individuals. It also allows for customized landing pages,
automatically created to help guide a specific lead through the funnel. Personalized
welcome messages, abandoned cart reminders, product suggestions, automated
retargeting—marketing automation makes it all possible.
Today’s marketing automation has grown well beyond what it was only a few decades
ago. According to Grand View Research, the marketing automation market size was
valued at USD 4.06 billion in 2019 and is expected to continue to grow with a
compound annual growth rate of nearly 10 percent.1 This can be attributed to what
marketing automation offers both marketers and leads: The power to build positive
customer relationships across a wide audience.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at the areas where marketing automation is most
valuable for businesses.
8.3What Needs to Be or Can Be Automated?
What Needs to Be or Can Be Automated? Transcript
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Given the reach of today’s technologies, automation is essentially limitless. That
said, it’s not always a good idea to trust your entire marketing funnel to algorithms,
no matter how intelligent they might be. Fully automated marketing can end up
falling short of actual human interaction, producing a robotic, impersonal experience
for potential customers.
So, when is it appropriate to automate? An easy answer is that it all depends on your
marketing campaigns and the products or services you are offering. Marketing
automation allows you to simulate a personal connection, but be aware that it may
fall short. When there is a lot riding on your messaging or your lead needs a few,
final, personal touches to bring them across the finish line, then it’s usually safer to
ditch automation and bring in a real person.
That said, there are a number of areas where marketing automation has been shown
to provide significant returns. Here, we list and discuss six such areas:
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Welcome Messages: Often, the most important email you send to your
customer is the first one. In fact, according to research by GetResponse,
welcome emails have an open rate of over 80 percent and a click-through
rate of over 25 percent (compared to the average open and click-through
rates of all email types across all industries, which are 22.15 percent and
3.43 percent, respectively).1
Automation allows you to create personalized email messages that
automatically incorporate relevant user information and are sent to leads as
they complete the sign-up process. By immediately creating and sending an
email, you can keep your business top of mind, and maintain customer
momentum. The welcome email can be as simple as a confirmation, or
something more complex. You may also choose to follow your welcome
email with other messaging, creating a “welcome series.”
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Email Marketing: Email marketing is uniquely suited to benefit from
automation. Based on predetermined triggers (such as time or visitor
website actions), an automated email campaign can send email sequences
to prospective customers without any marketer having to get directly
involved.
For example, when a lead provides their contact details to download a
piece of gated content, an automated email marketing campaign can
automatically reach out to the lead with a welcome message and a prompt
to learn more by checking out related content. Subsequent emails could
walk the customer through the uses and benefits of the available products
or services, and share social proof to help calm any purchase anxiety.
By incorporating the available customer information, these emails can
speak directly to the needs of the lead. As customers interact (or fail to
interact) with the emails, they may be shunted to different email sequences
that better address their individual needs.
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Landing Page Creation: A landing page is a page on your site that is
specifically designed to convert visitors into leads. The landing page offers
a valuable resource (such as downloadable long-form content), and, in
exchange, requests that the visitor fills out a form to share their contact
information. The most effective landing pages are the ones that focus on a
particular traffic stream, and the audience it represents. For example, if
your email campaign is directing visitors to your landing page, it should
address the issues that those visitors care about.
Automated landing page creation makes it possible to adapt existing
landing page content to better speak to the visitor. Automatic page cloning
allows you to create landing pages optimized to individual campaigns,
keywords, and customers, thus increasing conversions in the process.
Just be aware that while page duplication is fine when coupled with social
media, PPC, and email campaigns, it is frowned upon when used to boost
search rankings. Include a meta tag on your pages to tell Google that these
cloned pages are not to be indexed for search.
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Product Retargeting: There’s a big difference between site visitors who
aren’t interested in becoming customers, and site visitors who aren’t
interested in becoming customers right now. Sometimes the timing is off, or
visitors get distracted and end up having to leave your site before they can
commit.
Automated retargeting campaigns exist to remind one-time visitors that your
products and services are still available. When a subscribed contact views
an item in your store but does not purchase, they automatically receive a
follow-up email including a reminder that the item is still available. This
email may also include links to other available products customized to the
visitor’s preferences.
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Abandoned Cart Reminders: It’s easy to add an item to an online
shopping cart, but clicking that button to finalize the purchase is a bit more
anxiety-inducing. According to the most recent data from Baymard Institute,
the average shopping cart abandonment rate across all online industries is
a staggering 69.80 percent—that’s a lot of items sitting untouched in virtual
carts.2
Automatic cart reminders create and deliver emails designed to remind
visitors that their product is still waiting for them and that they’ve already
completed at least a portion of the checkout process. These emails can be
automated to be sent after a predetermined length of time, and include
relevant product details (name, image, and price), social proofs (customer
reviews, product ratings), and other information to compel the recipient to
complete their transaction.
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Personalized Product Recommendations: With the right learning
algorithms and customer data, it is possible to create a detailed, accurate,
and targeted list of product recommendations for individual site visitors.
This form of automation takes your product purchase and search history
and then compares it to other similar customers’ purchase and search
histories. It then compiles a list of recommendations, which is shared with
visitors via email or displayed directly on the site as they browse.
Automated product recommendations not only help visitors find items that
they may not have known they wanted, they also provide a peek into what
other people are buying, providing social proof that helps visitors feel
confident in their purchases.
Previous
8.4Marketing Automation Software Selection
Marketing automation is an effective way to personalize marketing messaging to better
target individual leads and nurture them further along through the funnel. At the same
time, automation is valuable in analyzing customer behavior and evaluating campaign
performance. To accomplish these tasks, most marketers use third-party marketing
software.
Finding the right marketing automation platform for your business can be a difficult
task. The good news is that you’ll have a wide selection to choose from; there are
literally thousands of different solutions available. The better news is that most
successful marketers tend to stick with a much shorter selection. Here, we identify and
briefly discuss the current leaders in marketing automation:
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HubSpot: Offering comprehensive, end-to-end solutions, HubSpot is an
easy-to-use suite of marketing automation tools. These include sales,
marketing, and support software, which are all designed to operate in
conjunction with the HubSpot CRM. HubSpot is user-friendly, and it includes
a workflows tool that allows users to automate a variety of marketing
functions. HubSpot regularly tops lists of the most popular marketing
automation software.
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Marketo: Geared more toward enterprise clients, Marketo is a powerful (if
somewhat pricey) marketing automation solution. Marketo is a part of the
Adobe enterprise marketing cloud and thus integrates with Adobe Analytics
and Adobe Target.
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Klaviyo: Klaviyo marketing automation is designed primarily for e-commerce
sites. It easily integrates with both Shopify and WordPress. Klaviyo is both
complex and easy to use, and is also free, provided that your email list is
smaller than 250 names. However, Klaviyo’s system is generally not for
beginners; it is designed for those who already understand the basics of
email marketing.
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SharpSpring: SharpSpring is sometimes viewed as the budget alternative to
HubSpot and Marketo, but don’t sell it short. Many marketers actually prefer
SharpSpring, not only for its lower price but also for its flexibility, user
interface, and insights into competitor offerings.
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Pardot: Pardot is the Salesforce answer to marketing automation, integrating
easily with the rest of the Salesforce ecosystem. Pardot provides the tools
and support to automate communication and track website interactions and
results effectively. The downside is that Pardot is more accessible to
enterprise businesses with greater resources and more time to learn the
platform—startup and small businesses may not be able to afford it.
8.5Setting Up Funnels and Workflows
Understanding what you should be automating and which marketing automation
platforms are worth considering are only the first few steps. Before you can put your
automated campaigns to work, bringing in leads and increasing conversions, you need
to establish the paths that your leads will follow as they move toward conversion.
This takes us back to the concept of the marketing funnel, while also introducing the
idea of workflows.
Marketing Funnel Definition (Review)
As we discussed in Topic 6, a marketing funnel is a set of steps or stages describing
the customer journey to conversion. Modern marketing funnels focus on attracting new
leads, educating and informing them on the benefits of the product or service,
providing social proof and addressing pain points, and helping the lead transition into
an ongoing, lifetime customer.
On the surface, marketing funnels may feel abstract. However, customized marketing
funnels, integrated to specific marketing-automation campaigns, help ensure that your
leads are encountering the right content and support at the right stages in their
journey.
Workflow Definition
The term workflow is sometimes used synonymously with “funnel,” but they are not
exactly the same thing. A funnel represents the stages of the customer journey and
the actions, content, and guidance needed at each stage to help your leads progress.
A workflow is a set of automated conditions, filters, and actions that work together to
improve your communication with your audience. In other words, workflows represent
the pieces within the funnel that automatically trigger when the right conditions are
met.
Workflows allow organizations to “fire and forget” a number of important business
processes. The work flows on its own, freeing up human operatives to focus on other,
more demanding tasks. Workflows empower teams to spend more time on the actual
work, and less time on the supporting processes.
To better understand workflow, let’s consider an example:
Workflow Example
Let’s say that you are interested in learning about communication technology (a
stretch, we know, but let’s just pretend). You begin your search online, and you come
across a site that is offering “The Ultimate Guide to Communication Technology.” The
guide appears insightful and valuable, so you fill out a form with your contact details.
Upon completing and submitting the form, your download begins. In a short while, you
have full access to “The Ultimate Guide to Communication Technology.” But the
process is far from over.
After completing and submitting the form, you notice that you now have a new email in
your inbox. The subject line reads something like “Thanks for Downloading the
Ultimate Guide to Communication Technology.” This is an intro email (also called a
welcome message). The email may include links to other related content, such as blog
posts and social media accounts. There is also a CTA with a link to download a demo.
You enjoyed the guide, so you take a quick look through the welcome email. You
check out some of the other blog posts and browse the social media feeds, but you
don’t go so far as to download a demo. Then, a few days to a week later, you receive
a second email.
This continues through several emails. Each email includes content and possibly
social proofs to help promote the product or service the company is offering. The
emails also include customer-support contact information and CTAs to download the
demo. After several emails over the space of several weeks, you are prompted to
download “The Ultimate Guide to Communications Technology: Part II.”
At some point, you decide to take the next step and really see what the product has to
offer. So, you click the link to download the demo. From there, you begin to receive
emails and messaging tailored toward users who have experienced the demo, with
CTAs to take further action toward becoming a customer.
In this case, the automated workflow determines what content the user receives, when
they receive it, and what email sequence they belong in—all dependent upon the
actions taken by the lead.
Setting Up Workflows
Setting up email workflows generally requires automation software. But the software
can’t handle everything, and it doesn’t know your products, audiences, or goals nearly
as well as you do. As such, it’s up to you to provide your software with the workflow
itself, taking all use cases into account.
Here, we cover the basic steps to creating an email workflow:
1. Know whom you want to include.
Depending on your campaign, you may wish to include different segments of
your audience. Whether you plan on including new leads, existing customers,
return customers, and so on, you can make your criteria for targeting as specific
as your available data will allow.
2. Set goals.
Without goals in place, you won’t be able to determine the effectiveness of your
strategy. What is it you want your recipients to do once they’ve received your
email? Similarly, set conditions where users can be redirected to new email
sequences that better fit their position in the funnel. This should include
conditions where your lead converts before reaching the end of the sequence,
automatically disqualifying them from receiving the remaining emails in the
sequence.
3. Determine enrollment criteria.
What determines when a contact is added into your workflow? What qualities
need to be met? Enrollment criteria determine what customer or lead actions
qualify them for inclusion. For example, these criteria may include submitting a
form, clicking on an ad, accessing an email link, and so on. For contacts in your
database, you can get very granular in your criteria—again, depending on the
available data.
4. Choose what actions need to be taken on your end.
Once a customer or lead has met the enrollment criteria, what are your next
steps? How should the workflow automation proceed? This includes sending
specific emails, establishing sequence branches, and setting time delays.
Essentially, you’ll need to tell your software what actions to take in response to
specific events.
5. Create your email content.
Before you can set your workflow loose, you need to create and assign all
necessary assets and load them into your software. As you develop the content,
be sure to pay special attention to design, tone, and audience; the software will
be responsible for connecting your emails with the right customers or leads, but
it is the email itself that will determine whether they choose to take further
action.
6. Implement logic to your workflow.
Remember: Even the most advanced software still needs direction. With your
strategy laid out, your next step is to assign which actions are tied to which
triggers, and in what order.
7. Do a final check to make sure everything is working.
With the workflow logic implemented, your automated workflow is complete.
However, it might still not be ready. Before you roll it out, double-check
everything for errors. Some workflow software include a “test” option where you
can fire off your scheduled emails to a specific address (such as your own) to
ensure that everything is operating correctly.
8. Activate and monitor your workflow.
Once you are confident that there are no major problems, set your workflow live.
Be sure to monitor it as it runs; keep an eye out for errors or other potential
issues, but also track its effectiveness. How is it supporting your goals? Is it
effectively helping to guide leads through your funnel? If not, then consider
making adjustments to improve performance.
Workflow automation is an effective way to keep your leads from stagnating by
automatically providing the content and direction they need to continue their customer
journey. That said, workflows can’t generate contacts on their own. To be effective,
marketers must pair their workflows with the right individuals. And that requires a
contact database.
8.6Building and Maintaining a Contact Database
As the name suggests, a contact database is a digital repository for managing,
storing, organizing, and retrieving details and information related to contacts. These
contacts may include clients, contractors, coworkers, or even friends and family, but
for the purpose of digital marketing, the contact database is generally limited to leads
and customers.
Your database is the fuel that powers your workflow, providing qualified contacts that
you can then build automated sequences around. The end goal, of course, is to turn
these contacts into lifetime customers. But to do that, your database needs to focus on
high-quality, interested leads with the potential to respond favorably to your content.
Simply put, the old (and spammy) method of buying contact lists and sending
unsolicited emails out to everyone at once just isn’t effective—and it can do major
damage to your brand reputation.
So, how can you build and maintain a database of qualified contacts? Here are some
suggestions:
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Gated Content: As discussed in Topic 7, gated long-form content may be an
effective way to grow your contact database. By creating valuable resources
and sharing them in exchange for lead contact information, you gain access
to pre-qualified individuals who are demonstrating their interest and even
opting in to be marketed to! When leads share their information, they are
saying that they know and accept that you will probably be reaching out to
them. Short of having a lead contacting you directly and asking to make a
purchase, you’re not likely to find a better candidate than one who downloads
your gated assets.
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Customers: We’ve all heard that it’s easier and less expensive to keep a
current customer than it is to acquire a new one. This is particularly true when
it comes to growing your contact database. Current and former customers
have demonstrated their willingness to do business. And, as long as they
were satisfied with your product or service, these customers should have few
qualms about doing business again.
Incorporating current and past customers into your contact database helps
ensure that your original investment in generating a lead and nourishing them
across the finish line can keep paying off. And, as you continually provide
quality service, these current and former customers can easily develop into
brand evangelists.
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Referrals: People are usually more willing to trust a friend (or even an
acquaintance) over marketing and advertisements. That may not sound like
good news for marketers, but it’s wonderful news when you consider that
your happy customers are the perfect resource for bringing in new leads.
Encouraging customers to share their stories, and rewarding them when they
refer others, can help you build a database of leads who are much more
likely to become customers.
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Ads: Targeted ads are a great way to bring interested leads to your site.
Take those leads to a landing page, offer them a gated download, and collect
their information to add to your contact database—it’s relatively simple and
straightforward.
Other ads, such as Facebook’s Lead Ads, take things a step further. When a
customer clicks on these ads, the contact details that they have opted to
share on Facebook are automatically used to populate a sign-up form. Then,
all the lead has to do is click submit. These ads take a lot of the work out of
signing up and can be integrated easily with a contact database.
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Blog Content CTAs: In many ways, your blog is your ambassador to the
world. The content you share on your site has the potential to bring in traffic
by the millions. Unfortunately, even the best blog content will fail if it doesn’t
set visitors on the path to conversion by directing them toward their next step.
To grow your contact database, add a CTA to your blog posts prompting
visitors to share their information and subscribe to your newsletter.
This CTA will likely need to be more than a simple command to “Sign Up
Now.” Instead, include value propositions describing what the visitor can
expect to gain by signing up—such as industry insights, new product
announcements, special deals, and so on. Including an email CTA in your
blog posts may feel like casting too wide of a wide net, but with the right
content generating the right kinds of qualified leads, sometimes something as
simple as a CTA can produce noticeable results.
8.7Summary
Marketing automation is a great way to add a one-on-one touch to a one-to-many
marketing strategy. Marketing automation allows you to create a customized,
seamless user experience without overburdening your sales department. But while
marketing automation can simplify many marketing and communication tasks, it
demands a number of things in return. Knowing your audience, developing a workable
strategy, and finding the right software tools and support are only a few of the
considerations that you’ll need to address. Above all, you’ll need to know when it is
best to automate and when your leads may require a more human touch.
In our next topic, we will move on to writing content for paid online advertising.