In my last blog entry, I outlined 6 steps to generating ROI from your marketing automation platform. As client investments in tools like Eloqua, Marketo, Pardot, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud continue to grow, this has become an increasing focus for us at Pragmatic: namely helping our clients turn their investment in marketing platforms into profits.
We do this by applying marketing fundamentals like actionable segmentation, objective-based design, direct response best practices, and rigorous focus on measurement and optimization to drive the desired behaviors throughout the customer lifecycle.
To help bring these concepts to life, I thought it might be helpful to walk you through a recent case study illustrating how we helped a large B2B brand turn an underperforming investment in the Eloqua platform into an ROI success story in 6 months.
Month 1 Prospect Universe Deep Dive and Quick Wins
To begin the engagement, we conducted a deep dive into the prospect universe in order to identify actionable segments based on both industry and title/role. Individual data at the contact level was combined with firmographic data and internal propensity models to identify companies and contacts with a high propensity to purchase specific products and services within the client’s portfolio.
Meanwhile, in order to fast-track the value creation process, we audited the existing lead nurture program and reviewed all the content assets available. The goals here were to deliver a set of “quick wins”: detailed, tactical recommendations for improvement to the current program that could be implemented quickly.
Pragmatic analyzed the prospect and customer databases to identify key characteristics of existing customers of each product category within the data in order to build an actionable segmentation plan for targeting future campaigns.
Pragmatic audited the existing lead nurture communications and developed a set of quick wins: detailed, tactical recommendations for improvement that could be implemented by the client’s internal team.
Month 2 & 3 Communications Strategy
As the client’s creative and implementation teams began integrating quick wins into the existing materials, we developed the strategy for a complete overhaul of their approach to nurturing leads and using their marketing automation platform (in this case Eloqua). The result was a highly segmented funnel-based approach to lead nurture encompassing 52 discrete touches leveraging existing content repurposed to drive prospects down the funnel across 4 different lines of business. Each touch had an associated content asset appropriate to the funnel stage: infographics and short videos for the upper funnel, white papers and eBooks for the mid funnel, and product sell sheets and offers for the lower funnel.
Pragmatic developed a ground up strategy for lead nurture in order to drive prospects down the funnel from Awareness of the available products and services, through the Consideration, Intent and Conversion phases of the buying cycle with a customer and content-centric journey map.
Month 3 & 4 Customer Experience and Creative Development
Once the journey and content mapping exercises were complete, the Pragmatic creative and customer experience teams developed detailed wireframes and copy for each point in the engagement experience. The end result was a comprehensive playbook for the program which drove the collaborative creative development and implementation process between Pragmatic and the client’s brand and digital implementation teams. Ultimately there were over 150 unique digital assets created, leveraging Eloqua templates to streamline the development process and improve speed to market.
Wireframes with complete copy for each email touch, landing page, and follow-up thank you email drove the creative development process.
Month 4 & 5 Implementation and Launch
Throughout the final two months of the project, we worked closely with the client’s internal development team to ensure the implementation in Eloqua accurately reflected the strategy. This included consulting on the underlying business rules and logic of the journeys themselves, and on the list selection to ensure the segmentation and targeting priorities were achieved.
Pragmatic worked closely with the client’s internal development and data teams to ensure the implementation accurately reflected the strategy.
Conclusion
Since launch, the results of this program have been truly impres sive, driving a 7X increase in lead volume leading to big lifts in pipeline value and booked revenue as well. Hopefully this has been a helpful overview of how we apply our core direct marketing principles like segmentation and analytics combined with creative best practices for driving response and conversion to today’s robust marketing platforms.
Please don’t hesitate to reach out if your organization could use help turning your investment in marketing technology platforms into profits.