If you receive errors when attempting to view this white paper, please install the latest version of
Adobe Reader.
"Never again lose track of a
lead. Gain insight into lead progression at every stage of the
sales cycle. Know exactly when a lead has been qualified by
marketing, accepted by sales and turned into revenue."
Source : Vtrenz Inc.
Rules-based Marketing: Helping Companies Transform Leads into Sales
Sales Lead is also known as :
Sales Lead Management,
Sales Marketing Leads,
Free Sales Leads,
Software Sales Services,
Track Sales Leads,
Sales Lead Fulfillment,
Sales Leads Qualifications,
Sales Leads Processing,
Complete Lead Generation,
Sales Lead Expert,
Sales Lead Generation,
Sales Force,
Prospecting Sales Leads,
Generate Sales Leads,
Sales Lead Tracking,
Sales Lead Pipeline,
Sales Lead Software,
Track Sales Leads,
Sales Lead Lists,
Qualified Sales Leads,
Sales Lead Submission.
Today’s latest generation of marketing automation technologies help provide big-company results from small marketing budgets.
For years, small- to medium-sized organizations have
envied the powerful, integrated marketing campaigns
conducted by their big-company counterparts. But with
today’s new technologies, big budgets, big databases
and big marketing departments are no longer the only keys to
marketing success.
Rather, new marketing automation technologies are making it easy for
even the smallest organization to create powerful, cost-effective, rulesbased
marketing campaigns. Rules-based marketing is an automated
strategy involving predefined if-then rules, resulting in communications
that are more timely, relevant and consistent across multiple communication channels
(see Figure 1).
Rules-based marketing campaigns can be as simple as a sequence of
communications that are triggered by a specific event, such as when a
customer fills out an online form. Or they can be highly sophisticated,
involving multiple tracks of information, dynamic content and new rule
sets that change or take effect after each communication. Perhaps most
important, because rules-based marketing is triggered by actions taken
by your prospects or customers, communications tend to be highly
effective. Why? Two reasons. First, the information is highly relevant
because it’s not only based on expressed interest, but also based on
predicted areas of interest identified by actual behaviors. And second,
communications are sent to your audience at the time that’s right for
them, rather than when it’s most convenient for you.
Figure 1: Rules-based marketing is an automated marketing strategy involving predefined if-then rules.
What is Rules-Based Marketing?
Rules-based marketing is a process that allows marketers to deliver
timely, relevant and consistent communications to their prospects or
customers via email, direct mail, telemarketing or other communication
channels. Through rules-based marketing, you, as a marketer, create
“rules” that guide your marketing campaigns. These rules govern which
information is sent out when, which messages go to whom, which
prospects or customers fall into which categories and so on.
Rules-Based Marketing in Action
Let’s say you send out an email announcing a Web-based seminar. Using
rules-based marketing, you can set rules that automate the different
actions you’ll take based on the different responses (or lack of responses)
to your invitation. For instance, those who didn’t open your email may, a
few weeks later, receive a follow-up with a different subject line. Those
who opened the email but didn’t click through would receive the same
message, albeit with different benefits statements. And those who
clicked through and completed the landing page form would receive an
attendance confirmation – and perhaps other information as well.
While technology is making it easier to perfect the targeting of your
marketing message, it’s also revolutionizing the management of your
entire marketing campaign. In the past – and, according to 2005 Vtrenz
market research, in nearly two-thirds of companies today – marketers
have used disparate software tools to manage their marketing campaigns.
These tools – often called “point solutions” – may include an
email marketing solution, a survey-building tool, a custom-built landing
page and much more. However, the lack of integration between these
tools and the fact that these tools are list-based instead of databasedriven
often leads to duplication of efforts, lack of data consistency
and poor follow-up.
However, today’s latest generation of marketing automation solutions
allow you to run virtually every aspect of a campaign from
a single, integrated marketing solution. This reduces data complexity,
provides better visibility into customer marketing interactions, ensures
message consistency across mediums and enables a comprehensive,
rules-based marketing strategy.
Brian Gramer
CEO and founder of Vtrenz, has an in-depth understanding of marketing professionals’ needs and technology trends. Prior to founding Vtrenz in
1999, Mr. Gramer honed his sales and marketing skills with Michelin Tire Corp., McLeod USA and founded AnyCollege.Net.
Behavior-Based Segmentation Improves Marketing Results
As every good marketer knows, having the right information is critical
to conducting successful, profitable marketing. The more you know
about your prospect or customer and the behaviors of your prospect and
customer, the easier it is to tailor your messages to their needs and,
ultimately, make sales.
The good news for today’s marketers is that new marketing automation
technologies are making it easier than ever to segment customers
and prospects based on their actions and, in turn, create new
and more powerful rules-based marketing campaigns.
These marketing campaigns can be as simple as a sequence
of communications that are triggered by a specific event –
such as when a customer fills out an online form – or they can
be highly sophisticated, involving multiple tracks of information,
dynamic content and new rule sets that take effect after each
communication.
Cracking the Segmentation Code
In the past, a major stumbling block to rules-based marketing was audience
segmentation. Historically, segmentation was limited to relatively
basic demographic, geographic or firmagraphic information. Sure, that
information was enough to create good marketing campaigns back in
the 1990s. However, faced with intense competition, a downward trend
in response rates, tight marketing budgets and more accountability for
measurable results, today’s marketer needs even more.
Enter behavior-based segmentation. As its name implies, behaviorbased
segmentation allows you to segment your audience and tailor
communications to many different audience segments based on actual
behaviors your prospects or customers have exhibited (see Figure 2).
The biggest advantage to behavior-based segmentation is that it
increases relevancy because the information you send is triggered as
a result of real actions taken by your audience. You can then create as
many different segmentation rules as needed and integrate those rules
into your business process.
Figure 2: Today marketers can use marketing automation technologies to segment
and trigger communications based on prospects or customer actions.
Behavior-based segmentation generally falls into three categories:
- Transactional –These are customers or prospects who have
conducted a transaction with you, such as making a purchase.
- Event-driven –These audience members have taken a specific
action, such as downloading a white paper, clicking on a link or
opening an email you’ve sent them.
- Response-based –These respondents have taken action by
completing a form with a defined response or providing response
information that has met some type of qualification criteria.
Behavior-Based Segmentation Meets Rules-Based Marketing
Let’s say a prospect responds to a white paper offer you’ve made, and
indicates that his firm is looking to purchase new software within the
next nine to 12 months. By responding favorably to your offer, he’s
shown a willingness to consider purchasing your product. Better yet,
he’s provided an actual time frame for doing so.
This information, coupled with today’s newest marketing automation
technologies, allows your rules-based marketing to kick into
high gear with the right message and timing. With it, you know
precisely when to send additional marketing information about your
product, when to pass his information along to your sales department
and when to have a member of your sales staff call on the prospect.
As we’ve seen, an automated marketing solution that provides the
right information can help your organization tailor its marketing efforts
to those individuals or groups with high propensity to buy – ensuring
future sales and continued profitability.
Weblink
Read about the profit potential of marketing to the affluent
masses in “New Rules for Marketing To the Mass Affluent”
in this book.
Automated Campaign Execution Helps Transform Leads Into Sales
In 2003, the Meta Group estimated that a staggering 70 to 90 percent of
marketing-generated leads are not acted upon because sales finds them
unqualified (an often-provided excuse for not making sales projections).
What’s more, those that actually are acted upon often aren’t followed up
with in a timely manner.
As we all know, leads that aren’t followed up on don’t turn into
sales. And the greater the time lapse in contacting a prospect, the less
effective that follow-up tends to be. As a marketer or company decision
maker, these facts are undoubtedly horrifying to you – and likely raise
a critical question: What can our organization do to ensure that our
sales leads are followed up on quickly and converted into sales?
The answer, thanks to new marketing automation technologies,
is to employ rules-based marketing along with automated campaign
execution. In addition to automating follow-up communications,
marketing automation technologies also manage the workflows for
dynamically routing qualified leads to the right salesperson at the right
time. This potent combination overcomes many of the factors that lead
to marketing breakdowns and gaps in the sales cycle – factors that
include a lack of coordination between sales and marketing, poor timing
and even basic human forgetfulness (see Figure 3).
Figure 3: Marketing automation technology allows you to set up a wealth of automated customer communications.
Rules-Based Marketing Meets Marketing Automation
When you combine rules-based marketing with marketing automation,
you can begin to bridge the gap between initial customer
interest and readiness to make a decision. Using today’s latest
marketing automation technologies, your company can quickly design
workflows that automatically execute the steps necessary to run an
effective rules-based marketing campaign. These automated workflows
allow you to do more sophisticated marketing with fewer
resources. Plus, automation eliminates slow, costly and error-prone
human intervention and helps ensure that you can conduct even the
most complex multistep, multichannel campaigns quickly, consistently
and on schedule.
To be sure, automating your marketing efforts is nothing new. Fill
out a form on almost any website, and you’ll likely receive an automated
email response. But with today’s rules-based marketing automation
solutions, an automated-response email is just the beginning of a series
of communications you can send to your customers or prospects at
specified time intervals or on specified dates.
Q & A With Brian Gramer
Brian Gramer
Vtrenz
CEO and Founder
Brian Gramer has an indepth
understanding of
marketing professionals’
needs and technology trends.
Prior to founding Vtrenz
in 1999, Mr. Gramer honed
his sales and marketing skills
with Michelin Tire Corp.,
McLeod USA and founded
AnyCollege.net.
Brian Gramer explains how marketing automation
software allows companies to manage, design, automate
and analyze integrated marketing campaigns.
Defying the Limits: Can you explain what ondemand
marketing automation software is?
Brian Gramer: Marketing automation software
allows you to perform both campaign management
and execution. It helps marketing
executives plan, create, manage, execute,
automate, track and analyze their entire
marketing portfolio from one central business
system. Unlike email-only point solutions or
CRM solutions, best-of-breed, on-demand
marketing automation allows you to manage
and execute multichannel permission-based
marketing campaigns, both online and offline.
DTL:What’s different about automation software
as opposed to the old systems?
BG:
In the past and still today many businesses
use either CRM systems or marketing
point solutions such as email-only tools to
manage or execute campaigns. However,
neither CRM solutions nor marketing point
solutions have the necessary functionality
to allow you to manage, design, automate
and analyze multichannel permission-based
marketing campaigns. Most CRM systems
have a campaign management component
but not the necessary execution components.
Most email vendors give you limited
execution capabilities but rarely any campaign
management capabilities. Neither the CRM
industry nor marketing point solutions do
a very good job at campaign automation.
Consequently, marketing departments have
had to do complicated, expensive integrations
among several point solutions in order to have
the necessary capabilities for them to manage
their entire relationship marketing process.
The limitations of current CRM systems
and point solutions is evident in the fact that
almost all CRM systems allow integration
by third-party vendors in order to execute
marketing campaigns. The problem with this
option is that it often requires integration
of two to four point solutions into a CRM
system to do what iMarketing Automation
can do, and marketing professionals are
finding this to be difficult, expensive and
time-consuming to manage – especially
at the SMB level. Email-only tools are
the most common tools for integration
into CRM solutions. However, because
email-only tools are not built on a relational
database, you cannot get historic campaign
reporting nor can you manage multichannel
campaigns and therefore do not have all
the functionality needed to truly automate
your marketing processes. For example, you
need certain components in a marketing
automation product in order to plan, create,
manage, execute, automate, track and
analyze multichannel permission-based
marketing campaigns. Some of the
components needed include: a survey or
form tool, a landing page or microsite tool,
an email tool, a direct mail tool, a relational
database, a segmentation tool, an analysis
tool and much more.
All those components should be tied
together when you develop a campaign so
that your analysis of the campaign provides
a macro- and a microperspective. This allows
you to see the results of the campaign as a
whole. The level of reporting is crucial in
order to make future decisions on product
enhancements, pricing changes and who a
company wants to market to. With a fully
integrated marketing system, I can see who
responded to the form that I embedded in
the email sent to X group of people and how
they responded to that campaign. I can see how
many people opened the email and what actions
they took within the email such as clicked on a
link to download a white paper. I can see how
many emails bounced and many other details.
Tying in the automation component then allows
the user to automate the delivery of additional
communications via email or other channels
such as direct mail to recipients of a campaign
that have taken an action within the original
campaign. Triggers can be set up based on
campaign behaviors, demographic information
or any other information
collected on the customer or prospect. The
marketing automation product allows you to
have all those components in one tool and
manage it from your desktop.
You can integrate iMarketing Automation
into a CRM system much like a point solution,
and still have that relational database underneath
it. However, you don’t need a customer
relation management system; iMarketing
Automation can also be used stand-alone.
DTL:
How was it developed?
BG:
iMarketing Automation was developed by
a team of marketing and technology experts,
based upon years of research in the
marketplace. We talked to marketing people
to find out what it is that they want when
they’re managing and executing marketing
campaigns. It’s almost like CRM exclusively
for marketing people. It’s a component of
CRM, a cousin to the CRM industry, but it’s
much different because it was designed from
the perspective of marketing professionals.
And because it was designed for marketing
professionals, it allows you to blend
campaign management with execution to do
rules-based marketing, which is truly marketing
automation. Rules-based marketing
allows you to take the way people respond
to a campaign, and based on business rules
that you establish, send additional communications
to them. You can even send them
different content based on how they respond.
It is impossible to efficiently execute and
analyze the information if you don’t have a
management tool and an execution tool
integrated on top of a relational database
platform. There’s no way that you can
effectively manage and automate integrated
marketing campaigns if you don’t have these
tools working together.
"There’s no way that you can effectively manage and automate integrated marketing campaigns
if you don’t have these tools working together."
DTL:
What are the chief advantages of the
technology?
BG:
One of the chief advantages of marketing
automation is that it allows you to put your
marketing execution into a repeatable, proven
process that actually runs itself. You set up
the business rules, you set up the content
and all you need to do from that point forward
is edit the content and review your results.
Combine this with the advantages of an ASP
(application service provider) or on-demand
model in which you don’t incur the capital
cost of hardware or software or the expense of
IT people to manage it – and you can literally
be turned on and be using the product within
minutes. You can customize it to your specific
marketing needs, or it’s ready to go as is. All
resulting in a quick return on your marketing
investment.
Most companies push customers to their
website where they capture leads. They
may have thousands of people visiting their
website each day. And, sometimes they are
not even collecting the visitor information.
If they are collecting the information, they’re
doing it through one form, or maybe even
two forms. These forms collect some basic
information, and then typically an email
notification is generated and routed to somebody’s
inbox within the company. Somebody
then has to manually take that email and
either print it off or forward it to somebody
else in the organization to get that visitor
the information they need. That process
is antiquated.
We find that it frequently takes weeks,
sometimes up to a month, for anybody to
follow up to a prospect or customer. In fact,
in 2003, META Group (Gartner Group)
reported 70 to 90 percent of leads generated
from marketing activities go uncalled on
by the company’s sales department. If your
marketing plan is to drive potential customers
to your website, why not have a system
that automatically segments visitors and
immediately sends not just a single generic
auto responder email, but a series of autoresponses
with highly relevant information
that they want?
Sending relevant content to the right
people at the right time is the key to turning
suspects into prospects and customers into
repeat customers. iMarketing Automation
allows companies to manage, track, easily
access and utilize all data being collected from
your website so that you can provide relevant
information back to prospects and customers
in real time.
DTL:
How is this approach changing the
marketplace?
BG:
People are realizing it’s just too expensive
to pay for custom-built tools. The cost of
paying a custom development company to
write your back-end business rules and update
your back-end database, and to implement
some marketing tool isn’t comparable to the
cost of iMarketing Automation. Marketing is
fluid, so every time you design a campaign,
if you use the custom development model,
you’ve got to go to a custom developer and
tell them what you want to do. They’ve got
to custom develop the online forms and the
business rules that tie it to the database, and
by the time you’re done with that, you’ve
spent thousands of dollars.
To do some simple marketing activities
requires many companies to commit thousands
of dollars to their IT people, outsourcing and
manual marketing activities. With iMarketing
Automation, you can plan, create, manage,
execute, automate, track and analyze all of
your multichannel permission-based
marketing activities with one system, starting
at less than $1,000 per month, depending
on your specific marketing needs. Custom
development shops can’t compete.
In addition, ad agencies are changing
the way they do business. In the past, a
traditional ad agency only focused on
branding, content, creative and delivering
the communication via traditional mass
mediums such as TV, radio, print, billboards,
etc. You would get these big bills from your
ad agency and it was hard to determine
whether or not you were getting ROI.
Now, an ad agency can use iMarketing
Automation to help their clients build
permission-based marketing communities
by driving prospects from traditional mass
mediums to campaign-specific landing pages
or Internet portals. Through these portals,
companies can interact with their prospects
and customers and provide them with
relevant information at the right time in
an effort to more efficiently move them
through the buying cycle.
In addition, by creating a separate landing
page (portal) for each media used – or by
utilizing click sources to track the point of
origination – allows advertising agencies the
ability to better track ROI. If they do direct
mail, drive them to a landing page. If they do
TV, drive them to a landing page. If they do
radio, drive them to a landing page. With that
approach, you can analyze what media is
working best for you. So we’re changing the
way ad agencies work in that we’re changing
the way that they’re accountable for what
they do. We’re also providing the ad agencies
with additional revenue streams. For example,
an advertising agency can do all of their
offline and online multichannel permissionbased
marketing campaigns utilizing Vtrenz
iMarketing Automation. Vtrenz provides the
technology platform for advertising agencies
and then they can provide marketing solutions
to their clients.
One of the most interesting things
about iMarketing Automation is that we
are allowing small and mid-size businesses
the ability to utilize advanced marketing
techniques to increase their business. The
cost of developing a product like iMarketing
Automation internally is in the millions; no
small or mid-size business would have the
means to invest that kind of money to build
a technology platform that is going to help
them manage and execute their marketing
campaigns. It would be less expensive to
do it manually or to outsource it. But since
Vtrenz hosts the technology, iMarketing
Automation can be delivered to a range of
businesses at a nominal cost because the
business does not have to have the hardware,
software or IT people to manage it. iMarketing
Automation is truly software as a service, a
company pays a subscription fee and that’s it.
Even Fortune 1000 companies have been
utilizing our technology. They’ve been paying
millions of dollars to manage technology that
does what our model does. But now they
are realizing that it doesn’t make sense to
continue to do that.
DTL:
What do you see as the future of this
application?
BG:
I believe that all B-to-B communications
and many of the B-to-C communications are
going to be driven electronically, and they’re
going to become more and more permissionbased.
Businesses and consumers are inundated
with communications more than any other
time in history and it is getting worse. Today
we have TV, TiVo, websites, blogs, instant chat
rooms, email, Internet portals, radio, billboards,
direct mail, park bench advertising, indoor
advertising, point of purchase marketing
and so much more. People are tuning out
and deleting spammers. And email is not the
only spam medium; every mass medium is
delivering spam. Spam by definition is any
unsolicited communication that you send to an
audience. Did you know 88 percent of houses
with TiVo do not watch any TV commercials?
The marketers who are going to win are going
to be the ones that start building communities
by embracing multichannel permission-based
marketing tactics. This type of marketing will
allow companies to get their prospects and
customers relevant information at the right
time in order to move them quickly through
the buying cycle and at the same time give
them an experience that gets them to want to
tell other people. The only way that you’re
going to be able to do that is if you have a tool
that allows you to automate communications
back to people in a dynamic way that allows
the content to change based on what they’re
asking for. This can’t be done manually because
the number of requests and business rules
necessary to deal with those requests are going
to be too enormous to keep up with.
DTL:
What about mobility? Can the system
work offline?
BG:
It is mobile. For example, if your cell
phone has the ability to send email back
and forth or if you can get on a website or
touch some kind of info collection form, then
you can trigger a response from the system.
A simple way to look at marketing automation
is if you’re an airline using a form that allows
customers to register for a flight. Customers
can sign up to be text messaged via cell
phone if their flight’s going to be late. Some
airlines are already doing this, but they
are paying millions of dollars to build this
internally when they can use iMarketing
Automation instead.
Any communication coming from a
company is a marketing communication.
Communications are going to happen in all
kinds of different ways. The only concern by
industry analysts with on-demand systems has
been their view that they are less customizable
and integratable. These concerns are no longer
valid and are being proven wrong every day.
Vtrenz Company Overview
Vtrenz is a marketing application solutions provider (ASP) focused on helping companies manage
their relationship marketing process. Utilizing a talented team of designers, Internet specialists,
programmers, project managers and marketing strategists, Vtrenz helps clients develop and
implement innovative marketing programs utilizing technology solutions. Our creativity and
marketing knowledge, coupled with our technical expertise, allows us to provide leading-edge
marketing solutions including websites, e-commerce, and marketing automation.
Vtrenz is the developer of iMarketing Automation, an Enterprise Marketing Management solution
that allows businesses to execute relationship-marketing strategies by easily building marketing assets,
executing marketing plans and continuously measuring and improving results.
To learn more about our Relationship Marketing Methodology and Enterprise Marketing
Management Solution, iMarketing Automation,
visit our website at www.vtrenz.com,
emailmarketing@vtrenz.com
or call us toll free at 877-484-7704.
Visit www.results.vtrenz.com/crmwhitepaper
to get a free book: Defying the Limits: Volume 6,
valued at $695.
Published by Montgomery Research in association with Accenture, this book
contains powerful thought leadership on topics including: Making the Most
of Every Customer Contact, High-Performance Marketing: How the
Masters Drive Loyalty and Growth……and many more
marketing and sales best practice topics.
Just follow the link above and we’ll send you this
insightful book, absolutely free.