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Marketing automation past, present & future: Q&A with Steve Woods on Heinz Marketing

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Wednesday, July 11th, 2012

It’s difficult to have a conversation about B2B marketing, especially for complex products and transactions, without also talking about marketing automation or lead nurturing. And while the category and its adoption has been accelerating recently, a select few stand out as both pioneers and thought leaders in the space.

Steve Woods is co-founder and chief technology officer for Eloqua, one of the leading providers of marketing automation technology to B2B and B2C organizations worldwide. As part of the launch of a new partnership between Heinz Marketing and Eloqua, Steve sat down with us to talk about where marketing automation began, why it’s so important now, and where it’s going.

As an Eloqua co-founder and author of Digital Body Language, you’ve seen the marketing automation promise & opportunity for several years. What drew you to this in the first place? What started it all for you?

We saw the general idea back in the first dot-com bubble at the end of 1999. There was a lot of excitement around e-commerce, and what the web was doing to the transaction that a buyer makes with a seller, but we saw an equal, if not greater opportunity to help with the information side of buying – especially in businesses where a bit more information needed to change hands before a buyer was ready to buy.

From there, the products we built helped organizations understand their buyers’ interests and intents – the concept of Digital Body Language – and then guide marketing or sales conversations based on that.

As we worked with the marketers who were early innovators in the space, they helped us form and shape the product to become what today is known as marketing automation; nurturing buyers based on their interests until they are ready to buy, and then passing the most qualified leads over to sales.

You have a 20-second elevator ride to explain marketing automation, and why it’s important, to a CMO that isn’t there yet. Go.

Today’s buyers have changed. They don’t come to your sales team to get educated on what your space is about, and what your products do, they get that information online. If you are not providing rich, meaningful content to those buyers, and then understanding which buyers are most interested and catering your conversation with them accordingly (including getting sales involved), you will lose those buyers to a competitor.

If you’re trying to guide the conversation’s content and timing, with each individual buyer, based on that buyer’s needs and interests, you can’t do that manually. You need a marketing automation platform like Eloqua to help you understand each buyer, and guide that unique conversation accordingly.

What do you see as the biggest barriers to adoption and successful implementation of marketing automation for most companies?

Shifting from a campaign-centered view of marketing, to a buyer-centered view is hard. It’s relatively simple to say “we’ll run campaigns on January 1, March 1, and June 1”, and then manage the creative and budgets to have that happen. It’s harder to say “these are the meaningful events in a buyer’s world, and how I will react to each buyer accordingly”. The marketer skill set is rapidly evolving to think in these terms, but it takes some time.

Most companies are used to making technology decisions through their IT department. Why is it so important that the CMO becomes a technology buyer today?

With Software as a Service (SaaS), the aspects of a technology purchase that used to require IT – like servers, networks, data centers, etc – are now not required. What is required, however, is thinking through the business changes that a new platform like marketing automation will require. New processes, new skills, new metrics are all possible. A CMO needs to own how their organization engages buyers, and in today’s world, that requires technology.

Much of the marketing automation conversation has centered around the sales process, but there’s at least an equal opportunity to optimize revenue and lifetime value after the purchase. Do you agree?

Absolutely. Purchasing one product is a highly meaningful event in the lifecycle of a customer. There are great opportunities to have them onboarded, brought to success, and potentially sold more products. We’ve seen a lot of successful organizations do exactly that to great success. Similarly, managing the renewal cycle for any customer engagement where there is an annual renewal or similar, is a large area of opportunity that many marketers are exploring successfully.

I’ve seen multiple statistics indicating that a high percentage of marketing automation users aren’t yet making use of the full lead nurturing features. How do you recommend they invest in the baby steps to get started and start seeing value quickly?

First, think of the world through the eyes of your buyers. How do they educate themselves, how do they find information, how do they discover new perspectives? For each of those, will you be discovered by them when they look? That will lead to great conversations around both content that is needed and the lifecycle of a buyer that can be managed.

Start simple, with the most obvious customer lifecycle event you can see in your business and build a communication path from that. From there, you can identify a few more customer lifecycle events and begin to evolve and experiment.

How will this technology evolve over the next few years?

Marketers can now understand who a buyer is, and what that buyer is interested in, based on their Digital Body Language. Now, however, we need to also understand who they trust. Understanding who a buyer is connected to, who they trust, and where they get their information from is critical to understanding their interest in making a purchase.

The connectivity between solutions is also very much of interest. In today’s world of modern SaaS software, it’s much easier to connect systems together than it ever has been. Today’s marketers must look for platforms that allow them to add in simple “Apps” to integrate webinar data, event data, social data, video data, etc. Without that, the marketers will be blind to a broader view of buyer behavior than they need to succeed.

Learn more about Heinz Marketing’s marketing automation services here.

Categories : Eloqua, Marketing Automation

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Zephyr 47 Client Isilon a Finalist for 2011 Eloqua Markie Award !

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Friday, September 16th, 2011

At Zephyr 47 we are incredibly excited that one of our clients has been named a finalist for a 2011 Eloqua Markie Award in the Event Nirvana category! We have worked with Isilon throughout 2011 to support their extensive field marketing efforts in North America.

Congratulations to Isilon! We are very happy that you are receiving this recognition!

For more information on the Eloqua Markie finalists in this category, you can visit here.

Categories : Eloqua, Eloqua Markie

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Evolve or Die: 5 Ways Communications Pros Must Adapt (Guest Blog from Eloqua)

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Monday, August 30th, 2010

(Intro-Note: Zephyr 47 is proud and honored to post this guest blog from Joe Chernov who is Eloqua’s Director of Content. Joe is pioneering new methods to develop and deliver content in ways that connect businesses with customers. An example of his efforts is the brilliant Eloqua Content Grid infographic he developed with JESS3. We look forward to your comments and feedback on this post! -BH)

Evolve or Die: 5 Ways Communications Pros Must Adapt

By Joe Chernov, Director of Content, Eloqua

Joe Chernov - Eloqua's Director of Content

The publishing industry is like a keystone species: It has a disproportionate impact on its ecosystem. As magazines and newspapers find themselves on the endangered list, the survival of surrounding industries – most notably corporate communications – relies on their ability to adapt. Without newspapers and magazines through which to tell their employers’ stories, PR professionals have migrated to the social Web (thus the staggering numbers of self-described social media experts). But to focus solely on social media is to miss the larger impact that publishing’s decline is having on the marketing ecosystem. Following are five ways the communications industry must adapt if it’s to survive.

1. Aesthetics. Ironically, the demise of print publishing has given rise to more channels than ever before. In fact, every marketer has the potential become his own distribution outlet. This surge in channels has, predictably, created a white noise effect: the more people are talking, the less they are listening. Rather than “talking” louder (e.g., issuing more press releases), communications professionals should learn a new language: design. The way content looks correlates positively to its perceived value, which in turn, causes spread. PR pros should refashion themselves as “’aestheticizers’ of content” if they are going to be heard in the crowded auditorium.

2. Celebrity. Traditional advertising has corroded trust. Ads have lied to consumers for too long. The next era of communications gives companies a fresh opportunity to repair this relationship. But businesses can only do so by becoming more “human” themselves, and the most direct path is to catapult select staffers to celebrity status. Ford Motors has a market cap of nearly $40 billion, yet hundreds of thousands of people trust the company just a little more because of one guy: Scott Monty. The idea that an everyday employee could have a tangible impact on the trustworthiness of a brand was inconceivable just a couple years ago. Ford understands that people trust people much more than they trust logos.

3. Question. Traditionally, the role of the PR person was to answer questions, sometimes sensitive questions that were not in the best interest of senior executives to answer (thereby earning the nickname “flack”). But the next generation communicator must also be proficient at asking questions. Posing public questions to customers, influencers and even competitors is a trigger to get other people talking about the brand. It’s fire-starting in its most basic form.

4. Links. The “clip book” – a binder containing all of the articles secured on the PR person’s watch – has become so obsolete that the words alone look anachronistic. But that doesn’t mean communications leaders shouldn’t keep score. There is simply a new point system: links. One of the new and varied responsibilities of the PR pro is to create and inspire others to create inbound links, anchored off of a company’s most vital terms, throughout the Web. Think of it as the clip book 2.0.

5. Support. Customer support and corporate communications once represented opposite points on a string: the former consisted of a specific message delivered to an individual, whereas the latter employed a broad message broadcast to many. Social media has bent that string, bringing those points together. Because support now takes place in public, it has become its own form of marketing. Marketers need to align with support staff, because they are the same team. PR agencies should develop a service that caters specifically to their clients’ support departments.

Evolve or die. It’s not only the law of nature, but also the law of business. My question to marketing and communications professionals is this: As print publishing nears extinction, how are you planning to adapt?

Z47 Editor’s Note: Joe can be followed on Twitter @jchernov

Categories : Communications, Content Marketing, Content Publishing, Content Strategies, Eloqua, Expert Guest Blog

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Undeliverable Email – Soft Bounce and Hard Bounce

Posted by: Brian Hansford | Comments (0)

Friday, May 28th, 2010

Are your emails bouncing like balls?

Email marketing is still a relatively young practice that many small businesses manage manually. There are a number of risks and problems that arise if the proper tools and technologies aren’t used to increase email marketing effectiveness.

One of the more common problems is undeliverable email. Two types of undeliverable email are soft bounces and hard bounces. In the realm of email marketing, these terms are grouped under “Bounce Rates”.

A hard bounce is one of the most dreaded occurances in email marketing because it means a contact is likely lost. A hard bounce occurs when an email address simply doesn’t exist. This can happen if your contact has left a company or an email account is deleted.
A soft bounce occurs when an email is being analyzed are stalled because it may be viewed as potentially harmful with viruses or spam. The message may still be delivered to the inteded recipient but the process is delayed until trust is verified.

Simply using a desktop email client like Microsoft Office Outlook or email services like Google’s Gmail, Microsoft Hotmail and others greatly increase the problems of email bounce rates. Risks from poor email management are lost revenue opportunities and a damaged reputation! Here are some suggestions to help small businesses (and even larger enterprises) manage the valuable email list and reduce bounce rates.

1. Find the right tools or technologies designed to help with email marketing. (A service perfect for small businesses is Constant Contact. A fantastic service for larger enterprises is Eloqua. )

2. Send confirmation emails to contacts who subscribe or opt-in to your emails. This will help confirm the contact really wants your email and that you have the right address.

3. Send regular and relevant emails to your contacts. BUT, don’t OVER-EMAIL! Sending regularly scheduled email using a recognized service provider like Constant Contact helps prevent soft bounces and keep the list up to date.

4. Use common sense with subject lines. We all get spam with terrible grammar, symbols, ALL-CAPS and ridiculous promotions. Spam filters and junk email folders will commonly block, delay, filter and even delete emails with spam-like subject lines. Put yourself in your contact’s place. Would YOU open the email?

5. Provide a method for your contacts to opt out or unsubscribe from your email. Always remember your contacts have given you permission to email them. Don’t abuse that honor. This is a best practice and quite often a legal requirement that follows anti-spam laws and regulations.

6. Provide a “Sent-By” email address that is relevant to your message and business brand. Again, would you open an email from an unknown person?

Desktop email clients or free services like Yahoo! or AOL make email marketing very laborious for a small business. Find a reputable, reliable, and economical email tool or service that easily automates the process and increases effectiveness and connections with customers. Eliminate the BOUNCE!

Additional Resources

White Paper – 10 Keys to Maximize a Marketing Automation Investment

Categories : Constant Contact, Eloqua, Email Marketing, Manticore Technology, Small Business Marketing

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Email Contact Governance with Marketing Automation

Posted by: Brian Hansford | Comments (1)

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

I recently wrote about the importance of Contact Cadence when developing and implementing a customer marketing campaign strategy. The benefits of contact cadence ensure a database of customers will receive the right information at the right time without being exhausted by excessive and uncoordinated communications.

Complementary to cadence is Email Contact Governance. This is the series of people and policies that determine who, how, what and when customers and prospects can be contacted using marketing automation systems. (Please note: Governance is not intended to restrict sales contact! Sales managers and reps may initially interpret this means they can’t make calls or appointments. Not so!!)

Email Contact Governance is especially critical for companies that have multiple business units that run independent campaigns. In the era of confederated business units and executives who desire to “cross-sell” and “up-sell” to other business unit customers, companies head into the dangerous territory of uncoordinated spamming and damaged customer relationships. (In some countries and U.S. states this may even be illegal email contact which is another topic in itself.) An effective Email Contact Governance Policy and Team can actually help strengthen customer relationships and support contact cadence with a campaign strategy.

Who – The Team

Corporate Executive Sponsor
Corporate Governance Lead – the one throat to choke!
Assigned Marketing Automation Pros (in the necessary business units)
Business Unit Lead/Manager
Sales Operations Lead
Legal
Channel Partner Leads
THE CUSTOMER – provide a symbolic seat at the table to keep the focus on how to best communicate with the customer!!

When – The Coordination Plan

Corporate Communications Calendar coordinated with Business Unit Marketing Automation Pros
Campaign Calendar Coordination
Authorized Communications – who can send information and how often
Team Communication – The team lead should keep everyone on the same plan and regularly review changes

What – The Content

Opt-In or Opt-Out Profiles: Give your leads and customers the information they want.
Don’t send emails to contacts who specifically opt-out of the options provided.
Send consistently planned and remarkably executed email to those that Opt-In.

Worst-Case Scenario: Mojito Manufacturer, Inc. conducts a strategically important annual customer event. The corporate communications team promotes each event up to a year in advance beginning at the current event. Communication frequency via email increases as the date approaches. Business units also run their own event communications independent of corporate often duplicating or triplicating the emails sent to customer contacts. This is where the worlds collide! Combine this activity with planned email campaigns and throw in 3rd party channel and chaos ensues! Sales managers scream at marketing managers that customers are complaining of too many emails. Believe it or not this is quite common!

Ideas to Consider:

Corporate teams should provide content for business units to include in their planned communications and vice versa.
Authorizations – limit who can send campaign or corporate email using authorizations in marketing automation systems. (This should NOT limit direct 1:1 email from sales reps, support, etc.)
Send the right corporate/campaign information to the right contacts at the right time based on profiles and opt-in information.
Don’t rely on email alone for customer communications
Use multiple channels, including social media
Customer Perspective: Think about how you would want to be contacted!

What are your experiences, lessons learned and best practices?

Categories : Contact Governance, Demand Generation, Marketing Automation, Marketing Campaigns, Marketing Communications, Marketing Operations

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Contact Cadence with Marketing Automation

Posted by: Brian Hansford | Comments (1)

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

Marketing automation with systems like Eloqua, Manticore Technology, Marketo, Pardot and others are like driving an amazing Ferrari, or even a powerful tractor trailer rig. They offer fanstastic capabilites to develop new and profitable customer relationships and tools to measure marketing ROI. With all of these capabilites comes great enthusiasm and one that must be tempered with discipline and planning.

Cadence: “A recurrent rhythmical series”

Most parents wouldn’t let an inexperienced teenage driver at the wheel or a beautiful Italian sports car without some solid ground rules, policies, and training. The same can be said for how organizations use marketing automation systems. Contact Cadence is critical to make sure all of the power is used effectively and customer relationships and repuations are kept strong. (We discuss complementary Contact Governance in another blog post.)

Contact cadence is very important to measure and manage marketing campaigns throughout the course of a year. Cadence starts with a strategic plan on implementing and using a marketing automation system. A core component of this overall strategy is developing and managing a campaign calendar that plans contacts over the course of a year. Who you are contacting with the right content and how often. This helps build the proper cadence and keeps your database and relationships healthy.

Cadence Benefits: A well planned annual campaign calendar with the proper target audience lead to increased conversion/response rates, better qualified opportunities with shorter sales cycles and strong credible relationships. If you execute a well planned campaign schedule with high value content in measured sequences, not only will your campaigns increase in effectiveness, you may find your database contacts actually look forward to your contact.

Risks with Poor Cadence: With random, excessive and unplanned marketing campaign contact, an organization risks dramatically lowered campaign conversion rates and damaged perception. Customer may perceive that you are simply “spamming” and not really providing high value content at the right time in their buying cycle. If you exceed cadence with customers, they will disengage. Very simple.

Ideas for Developing Proper Cadence with Marketing Automation

Develop an annual campaign calendar and share with your entire organization and partner channel.
Segment your audience based on their needs and place in their buying cycle. Provide the right content to the right audience at the right time.
Provide a balance of “free” content downloads and high value content where contacts fill out simple forms.
A well-planned marketing schedule allows your database “rest” to build anticipation and increase conversion rates with your next contact.

Contact cadence using a marketing automation system enables an organization to manage customer contacts and increase overall effectiveness and conversions.

Additional Resources

White Paper – 10 Keys to Maximize Your Marketing Automation Investment

Categories : Eloqua, Manticore Technology, Marketing Automation, Marketing Campaigns, Marketing Operations

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Eloqua’s Customer Success Tour – Seattle Stop

Posted by: Brian Hansford | Comments (5)

Friday, February 12th, 2010

Eloqua is getting off to a good start for 2010 with this week’s announcement on their 2009 financial performance and the kickoff of their Customer Success Tour with stops in North America and parts of Europe and Asia. For those not familiar with Eloqua, they are market defining vendor in cloud-based marketing automation technology. Information on the remaining stops for their global Success Tour is located at: http://user.eloqua.com/

The content and format provided a valuable experience which included a customer case study, breakout groups, and a informative preview of Eloqua 10. I am pleased to see Eloqua is maintaining this direct customer contact and communication even in a challenging economic climate when travel budgets are tight. To me this is important because it shows they are committed to building and maintaining strong customer relationships.

Members of the Eloqua team presented a customer case study on VFM Leonardo and how Eloqua has dramatically improved VFM’s lead flow and quality, tracking, and scoring. As a marketer, I always enjoy learning how colleagues are developing customer marketing strategies and measuring the results. Case studies are always good. However, as a minor criticism I would have preferred to have a local customer to present their own story.

Eloqua 10

The highlight of the meeting for me was having an Eloqua product manager present and demonstrate Eloqua 10. I did not attend the Eloqua conference in San Francisco last fall when many of the Eloqua 10 improvements were first unveiled. (I highly recommend attending one of the Success Tour sessions for this reason alone.) Eloqua has made a number of significant improvements with ease of use with the new interface and workflow. Users will find campaigns in Eloqua 10 easier to build, manage, and measure which will help with productivity. The response to the Eloqua 10 preview from the Seattle users (myself included) was very positive. Improvements are made in a number of areas including drag and drop menus, activity driven content management improvements, web analytics and reporting. Eloqua is also introducing new capability called Flow Mode which will deliver time efficiencies with single flow programs without filters. I am also looking forward to the new Smart Exchange they plan to make available which will offer template libraries for partners and customers.

Eloqua is not forcing customers to migrate to Eloqua 10. But I believe the interface and management improvements will motivate customers to migrate to Eloqua 10 sooner rather later. For Eloqua partners, data migration services will provide new service opportunities when working with existing customers.

Note: You can follow feedback on the tour on Twitter with the hashtag group #EloquaTour.

Let me know your feedback on other stops in the Eloqua Tour and your thoughts on Eloqua 10.

Categories : Eloqua, Marketing Automation

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Archive for Eloqua

Marketing automation past, present & future: Q&A with Steve Woods on Heinz Marketing

Zephyr 47 Client Isilon a Finalist for 2011 Eloqua Markie Award !

Evolve or Die: 5 Ways Communications Pros Must Adapt (Guest Blog from Eloqua)

Undeliverable Email – Soft Bounce and Hard Bounce

Email Contact Governance with Marketing Automation

Contact Cadence with Marketing Automation

Eloqua’s Customer Success Tour – Seattle Stop

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