A recent blog from marketing guru Seth Godin got me thinking about the concept of eating your own dog food. Dogfooding (as it is sometimes called) is when a company uses its own product internally, with the implication being that what’s good enough for the customer is good enough for the company. Originally the idea came from Alpo dog food commercials, in which spokesman Lorne Greene earnestly assured us that Alpo is so good, he feeds it to his own dogs. Since then, and one famous Microsoft memo later, the term has become common among software companies that feel it beneficial to use their own product internally.
Pardot uses our own product internally for the same basic reason our customers do: to enhance our Sales team’s efficiency and maximize ROI. Just as you do, we use Prospect Insight to identify visitors to our website, track prospect activity, and score and grade leads. Our Marketing team can then pass on the most qualified leads to our Sales team so that they concentrate their efforts accordingly, while Marketing can continue to nurture other promising prospects until they’re ready to be handed over to Sales. Prospect Insight’s real-time sales alerts help the Pardot Sales team stay constantly updated on new prospect activity, and our Marketing team uses it to manage and qualify tradeshow leads for targeted follow-up. It’s a great set of tools that suits all of our marketing automation needs.
But there are other reasons as to why we eat our own dog food here at Pardot. Using our own product:
- Synchronizes our interests with those of our customers. Customers want an oustanding product–and so do we, because we use it too!
- Helps us continually improve the product. Using PI internally makes it easy to identify possible improvements and cool new features that enhance both the user experience and the product’s overall value.
- Demonstrates, in a tangible and unambiguous way, that we stand behind our product and think it’s a good one. We could use any product but choose to use Prospect Insight because we think it’s the best marketing automation solution out there.
At Dreamforce I had the chance to attend a great session for marketing professionals on best practices in search engine marketing (SEM). Here are some of the key takeaways I jotted down:
- This of your search marketing strategy as a stereo – it is only as good as its weakest component. You may have great keywords but bad ad text or strong ads but poor landing pages. In order to get maximum results, you must work on perfecting all the different cogs of the machine.
- Set your ads to rotate. If you let Google optimize for you, your ads will be optimized by click-through rate, not based on the more valuable conversion rate or cost-per-opportunity. Give all your ads equal play time until you can collect enough data via your marketing automation reporting to determine which ads bring in the best traffic instead of just the most clicks.
- Always be sure to link to unique landing pages with content that matches your ads, rather than just linking to your homepage.
MarketingProfs recently posted a great article on the advantages of moving print communication pieces to email. Making this transition not only helps the environment and shows your customers that you are concerned about the planet, but also reduces the cost of the direct mail process. Below are a few more advantages to using email over print for pieces such as newsletters, statements, and promotions:
Advantages for Customers:
- Allows them to review the content, easily retrieve it later, and save it for easy reference.
- They can respond immediately to your message by clicking on links rather than mailing back their response.
Advantages for Marketers:
- The time and resources for the “conception to distribution” process are reduced.
- Messaging can be customized easily with personalized content to increase relevancy for each recipient (and hopefully increase response). List segmentation allows you to send the most appropriate content to your customers and prospects, and variable mail merge tags and one-off emails help personalize the message for your recipient.
- The amount of time it takes to send customers the information they have requested is drastically reduced. Autoresponder emails can be sent immediately upon completion of particular actions and drip campaigns can be set up to send nurturing or follow-up messages.
- Activities are easily and quickly tracked (through unique links), which helps qualify your prospects and measure the effectiveness of your message.
- Other information can be collected by directing recipients to complete forms on your site. This information can then be used to customize campaigns and future messaging and qualify your prospects.
To maximize the effectiveness of your email messaging, make sure you follow best-practices to ensure the content is pleasing and relevant and renders properly for the recipient. There are also a few things to consider and steps you can take to make the transition from print to email as smooth as possible:
- Include a subscription link in your print pieces to help drive customers to your site to opt-in to your email communications.
- Tell your customers/prospects about the benefits of “going green” with email rather than print and promote your “Green Initiative” on your website and in your direct mail pieces.
- Offer an incentive to start receiving your message via email rather than direct mail – i.e. a discount on a future purchase, access to a VIP area on your website, etc.
- Include a “Sign Up Today” link on every page of your website to help capture new prospects.
Finding the right customers can be a lot like looking for love. Where should you look? Who should you pursue? What are the best strategies?
There are plenty of marketers that pursue the “Dive Bar” strategy of lead generation — they’ll get phone numbers from anyone and everyone, anytime, and pass these unqualified-leads-on-cocktail-napkins on to Sales in the hopes that one or two might become a customer “love connection.” But what really happens is that your salesperson goes on a cold-calling binge and ends up hating themselves in the morning, leaving you, their Marketing BFF, feeling like you should have done something differently…like setting them up with nicer, more respectable leads that you met at your grandma’s church picnic.
Don’t stoop to this level. Be intelligent about your search, and know when to pass on less-than-ideal opportunities. Don’t just throw yourself at every lead that walks by. Your company and product deserves better than a dive bar.
Pardot strongly suggests that you follow the “Match.com” strategy instead. Start by devising an “Ideal Customer” profile. Who is your “dream-date” customer? What qualities do they need to have to make your business relationship work for the long haul? What are their needs, and how can you satisfy them? Just as being choosy with your prospective dates can yield huge relationship dividends later on, so can scoring and grading leads help you separate the wheat from the chaff and pursue those prospects that would make the most ideal customers.
Check out some of our knowledge base articles to read more about:
How grades are defined
Selecting your grading criteria
How prospects are scored
How to customize prospect scoring
Stop looking for sales love in all the wrong places, and let Pardot help you make a customer “love connection.”
Jame Ervin posted 3 great tips for email success on her blog yesterday. While these may seem like pretty obvious guidelines, it’s surprising how many marketers out there aren’t following them. Jame’s tips are:
Make sure you have permission to email your subscriber. This one pretty much speaks for itself.
Match your email frequency to what you promise in your subscription form. If you say weekly, don’t exceed 6 messages in a month. You don’t want to overload your prospects (or customers) with too much messaging, especially when you promise a particular frequency when they opt-in.
Test all of your links. Jame received an email newsletter with multiple broken links (http://www.href=.com/). The ads and links to white papers worked fine, but all of the content was broken. This definitely could have been avoided by sending internal test emails and clicking on all of the links before sending out the blast.
Jame also mentioned she received emails from one particular company for their whole line of products. Using lists to segment prospects and then targeting the email content to the relevant lists (rather than sending blasts on all products to all prospects) would help eliminate this issue and hopefully reduce the number of unsubscribes.
When creating a drip program to nurture your prospects it is vital to remain control over when these drip emails are delivered. In order to remain control, it is best to trigger nurture elements through means by which the marketing team controls rather than the client. The marketing team can’t control when a prospect is last active or last touched by a campaign, but they can control when a prospect is added or removed from a list.
Basing all drip actions through filtering by a list allows for the most predictable drip sequence. This will ensure the scheduled intervals will take place as intended by the marketing team. The criteria for being added or removed from a list can be controlled through various rules like a prospect filling out a particular form or landing page or by entering a certain form field value. This will guarantee that a prospect will begin to receive drip communications at the appropriate time. In addition, prospects can be removed or transferred to another drip program at an appropriate time if they take an action like purchasing the product or move to a different phase of the buying cycle.
In keeping with the theme of my previous post Making the Most of Your Marketing During Rough Economic Times, below are a few tips from a recent article on MarketingSherpa for adapting your lead scoring and nurturing during the current economic downturn:
- Quality is better than quantity when it comes to leads – An over-inflated lead database can give you a false sense of security and can end up costing you when you’re sending out email blasts and mailers. Tips on qualifying your prospects:
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- Scrub your lists – Create new rules to filter prospects rather than passing all of them into your CRM or lead-nurturing system. Determine what criteria you would like in your ideal customer and grade prospects accordingly. Check out our Knowledge base for more information on rules and grading in Prospect Insight.
- Use qualifying questions or online tools to segment your prospects – Ask for information to help segment and qualify your leads. Be cautious to not ask for too much information from your prospects at once though. In Prospect Insight, you can set up conditional profiling and only ask for particular fields once others have been submitted.
- Look beyond conversion rates – While initial conversion rates can be informative, you should also look at other reporting aspects, including rates for conversions from leads to opportunities, cost per opportunity and cost per deal.
- Look at recent sales activity to uncover trends – Analyze recent sales proposals (i.e. from the last 3 months or so) to determine which criteria factored into whether the opportunity was won or lost (company size, location, prospect’s job title/department, etc) and then use these criteria to grade your prospects.
- Use 3rd party data to validate your grading criteria – More general economic data, such as the Federal Reserve Bank’s Beige Book, as well as more specific information (specific industry reports, etc) can be helpful in validating your target criteria.
- Utilize recent activity in your lead scoring – Increase scores for prospects that have been active recently (in the last 3 months). Decrease scores for those that have not been active recently, but still keep them on your nurturing lists until their activity increases again. Set up rules to “fast track” prospects that are especially active very recently (downloading multiple whitepapers, many page views on your site, etc) so that someone from your sales team can follow up with them right away. Users in Prospect Insight can opt-in to receive daily notification emails that show which prospects and visitors have been active.
- Talk to your prospects – Utilize data obtained through your lead-nurturing and qualifying systems to guide conversations between your sales team and your prospects. A good conversation is still the best way to determine the quality of the prospect. One thing to be mindful of is to use the database information to *guide* the conversations and not to be creepy with it. It’s fine to bring up topics you know the prospect is interested in based on the information you’ve gathered but it’s usually not a good idea to indicate that you’re aware of all of their actions on your site, etc.
Pardot offers connectors to many popular third-party applications to all Professional and Enterprise Edition Prospect Insight accounts. Connectors provide the essential links needed to sync your own prospect data with external information you might glean from various sites and apps. Connecting the dots between these scattered bits of valuable info can help you get a more complete picture of your prospects and their tastes and motivations, maximizing the efficiency of your marketing automation activities and thereby enabling you to better address their needs with appropriate solutions.
Pardot currently offers connectors for the following applications:
CRM connectors
- NetSuite
- salesforce.com
- SugarCRM
Other connectors
- Google AdWords
- Google Analytics
- LinkedIn
- Jigsaw
- Twilio
Once you’ve run through a quick setup, these connectors make information from the above applications available instantly when you are viewing a contact’s information in Prospect Insight.
But how do you really make the most of connectors to enhance your marketing automation system? CRM connectors are perhaps the most fundamental, as they allow you to connect your CRM with Prospect Insight’s marketing automation tools. However, the connectors for other applications can help you get a more complete picture of a prospect.
Do a little detective work about a prospect by using the LinkedIn and Jigsaw connectors. For example, if you wanted to know more about a particular prospect’s professional credentials, or perhaps more information about his or her company, the LinkedIn connector is the ticket — once you’ve set it up, just click on the LinkedIn icon in a prospect’s profile to get instant access to their LinkedIn profile. You can likewise get the Jigsaw results for a prospect or their company simply by clicking the Jigsaw icon in their profile.
Crunch some numbers with the Google Analytics and Google AdWords connectors. The Google Analytics connector lets you share keyword tags with Prospect Insight and create campaigns based on your Google Analytics campaign tags. Connecting to Google AdWords lets you find out how prospects reach you through paid search; using the cost data from AdWords with info from your CRM will help you calculate search engine marketing ROI.
Reach out to promising prospects with the Twilio connector. Twilio is a pay-as-you-go service that helps you instantly follow up with prospects by phone and can be invaluable when used in conjunction with certain features of Prospect Insight.
Sometimes prospects show interest but are just not ready to buy. How should you deal with this kind of prospect? This is where Pardot’s lead nurturing features can really come in handy. Knowing when and how to start borderline prospects on a drip campaign is a crucial part of making the most out of your marketing automation solution.
Lead nurturing begins when you triage incoming leads, just as an ER nurse must triage incoming patients. Critical patients who are obviously in need of immediate attention (qualified leads) are routed directly to doctors (Sales), while folks with sore throats (unqualified leads) are asked to wait indefinitely. Those patients in need of stabilization (promising, but non-sales-ready, leads) are put on an IV drip (drip campaign). At first, the IV drip must deliver a sizable infusion of essential vitamins and nutrients in order to stabilize the patient. Once the patient is stabilized, it can be determined just what kind of IV is necessary to remedy their condition. This is lead nurturing in a nutshell.
Just like a patient on the mend, your not-yet-sales-ready prospect needs different types of information, as well as conversion opportunities, to help them to “remedy” their ambivalence about buying. Think of drip campaigns as an IV drip that feeds your on-the-fence leads essential “vitamins” (bits of info) to help strengthen their product knowledge. Good conversion opportunities are like much-needed medicines which, if administered correctly, can be successful in “curing” your leads of their hesitation to buy.
Set up the content and frequency of emails before the fact and set your treatment plan in action with a drip campaign. This puts prospects on a predetermined rationing of information–an email for each stage of your campaign, with content tailored to this particular group of prospects. Prospects that remain ambivalent should stay on the drip until they “get well” and convert.
As any doctor can tell you, the tricky part is getting the IV just right and determining exactly what sorts of nutrients the patient needs. Get some ideas from Pardot’s three-part guide to drip campaigns:
Drip Campaign Guide – Part 1
Drip Campaign Guide – Part 2
Drip Campaign Guide – Part 3
