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Google Analytics & Customer State Marketing Automation

A Winning Combination That Allows Etailer To Optimize Banner Ad and Landing Page Effectiveness.

Recently, a new client approached us to help them optimize their online marketing spend. What they want to know is what banner ads are the most effective at generating profitable leads, what landing pages are best at converting those leads into customers, and what is the best messaging strategy to stimulate repeat purchases. We are talking to a sophisticated etailer who is looking to improve the effectiveness of their marketing effort. To date they have been limited by their ability to track this complex combination of variables: banner ad, landing page, and messaging. This project was amazing because it allowed me to provide the Lead and Sales reporting they are looking for through a simple orchestration of the flow of events and actions between an ecommerce site, Google Analytics and Cakemail. (See Dip into the data pool)

This particular customer state marketing ecosystem coordinates the sending of 28 different email communications. There are four customer segments: Prospects; New Customers; Repeat Customers; VIP Customers. Depending on where the contact is in the marketing process they will receive one of these 28 personalized emails according to their ongoing behavior (whether they buy or stop buying for a period of time). One interesting feature is that we are using eight versions of the Reminder email that is sent out when a customer stops buying after a period of time. As soon as they purchase again a Thank You email is sent and the stops buying timer is reset. The Reminder emails start up again according to the contact’s segment and state; however the sequence of emails picks up where it left off, therefore the contact does not receive the same email twice unless they have gone through all eight different Reminder emails. The opportunities for testing are immense!

One of the goals of this ecosystem is to attribute the sale to the last email sent in order to determine the most effective messages for getting contacts to buy. Over time, this information will allow the etailer to improve email content leading to higher sales.

The attribution of the sale to the last email sent is done by the customer state marketing ecosystem and is reported in near-real time using Google Analytics. The client can view the effectiveness of the marketing program in terms of the number of sales, total sales and average sales for specific time periods. This gives them great flexibility to try different email content strategies without the need to rebuild the ecosystem.

The etailer is also testing out various banner ads and landing pages. They wish to know which combination provides the best results in terms of number of sales, average value of sales, and lifetime customer value. The results are easily reported using a simple Excel Power Pivot table, and the etailer can add new banners and landing pages without having to modify the ecosystem (i.e. Involve IT).

Best of all, the entire ecosystem took me a total of three days to design, build and test! Once the client had set up all of their email templates in Cakemail it was a simple process for me to connect them. Ran one final test and put the ecosystem into production.

The real measure of a marketing automation system to me is how fast the marketer’s solution can be built, how flexible the solution is so that it is easily modifiable, and how agile the solution is in terms of integrated marketing in multi-channel environments.

 

 

 

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Super States: Making the simple even simpler!

Super States: Making the simple even simpler!

Readers of my blog will know that I am always going on about how easy marketing automation is using Customer State Marketing. Hard to believe that it could get even easier, but it is true! The addition of Super States (i.e. a master state) means that it is no longer necessary to include “housekeeping” events in root automation processes. Using email as an example, it was necessary to track if the contact was optin for email when considering how to respond to a customer event (e.g. contact does not open email). Now there is no longer a need to include an Unsubscribe event in all the scenarios where you want to interrupt the process whenever a contact unsubscribes – Instead you now just need to specify a “Subscriber” Super State that encompasses child scenarios. As long as the contact in in the Subscriber Super State the child level processes (i.e. processes that are dependents of the Super State) will execute. As soon as the contact moves out of the Subscriber Super State then all child level processes stop.
As a result the scenarios are a lot less crowded as there is no longer a need to include the “housekeeping” events.

Another benefit of this approach is that it makes reading and understanding the hierarchy of scenarios (remember that a contact can be in a different state in different scenarios) even easier because the housekeeping noise has been removed. It also streamlines the construction and modification of scenarios. Now the longest part of creating Customer State Marketing automation solutions is the documentation of the scenarios (excluding waiting for the customer’s creatives, of course – i.e. It is no longer the bottleneck). This documentation issue will be solved in an upcoming release of the software. I can’t wait for that one because I estimate it will further reduce my workload by half!

Blasting an email four times a year is not a Relationship Marketing Program

Relational marketing (or relationship marketing) is a term many marketers use today to indicate that they send email blasts to their customers. It seems that whenever I meet a new prospect or client and ask them if they do relational marketing they nod their heads, smile and say emphatically “Yes, we group our customers into four segments and send each one of them a personalized message.” If I am foolish enough to follow that question up with “And how do you measure the effectiveness of your program?” I usually get a response such as “We check the open rates” or “Our bounce rate is very low”. Very rarely do I get an answer such as “Our sales rise about 10% in the week that follows each mailing”.

This is the business environment that is being actively targeted by “Marketing Automation” vendors (see my blog Eloqua, Marketo, and Aprimo are not Marketing Automation for my rant on this subject http://whatsnexx.com/2011/02/eloqua-marketo-and-aprimo-are-not-marketing-automation/)

It should not be surprising then that many “Marketing Automation” solutions do not live up to the hype, as many are being used as glorified, and expensive, email marketing systems. It is really hard to generate a very compelling business case with a high ROI when the cost of the software, implementation, training and on-going support accumulate into a significant amount, and the returns or profits derived from the solution are a long way downstream.

The key to a high and rapid ROI: Low investment and fast implementation. A rapid implementation cycle, such as seen when using an Agile Marketing approach, means that costs are relatively low (as long as you can avoid that high priced marketing automation consultant fee) making it easier to generate a high ROI.

So where to start if you fall into the “I blast four times a year category”? The best place is to start with what you are already doing today; however why not turn those punctual campaigns into ongoing programs? For example, if you are currently pulling a list twice a year to blast a reactivation offer to all customers who have not purchased in the last six months, instead automate it so that a reactivation offer is sent whenever someone has not placed an order for six months (i.e. ongoing reactivation program). If you currently blast a “Back to school” offer to all your customers and then wait to see the results at the cash register at the end of the month, instead blast the offer and then automatically send reminders to those contacts who did not open it within three days (note: you should be doing this for all your emailings), and follow that up with an automated survey to anyone who did not open the email at all.

These are simple first steps you can take to graduate from “Batch and blast” automation to “marketing operations” automation.

Good luck.

B2B vs. B2C vs. Customer State Marketing

The B2B sales cycle focuses on the sales funnel: How to nurture and qualify prospects in order to turn them over to Sales at the opportune moment. The rationale for this is that sales reps are an expensive commodity with limited availability. The objective is to have these expensive resources talking to the prospects that are most likely to close. A lot of time and money are spent on achieving this goal. Big dollars are invested in purchasing and implementing marketing automation software, centralizing data, training personnel, creating business rules in the marketing automation platform, and in paying for consultants to implement the more complex and obscure portions of that marketing automation platform.

The B2C sales cycle focuses on the buyer’s journey: detecting what the buyer is doing and determining the context (e.g. is the first purchase, the third complaint this month, the second request for information…) of the buyer’s activity in order to respond in the most appropriate manner . The focus of B2C is on ensuring that the right offer is sent to the right person at the right time using the right channel. This is in contrast to nurturing and turning a qualified lead over to a direct sales representative. B2B marketing automation tools are very poor at B2C implementations because the customer’s journey is non-linear. B2B is designed for a linear sales funnel path from general inquiry to  properly qualified prospect. B2C requires flexibility in order to deal with buyers who move back and forth in what may appear as a random path from awareness to purchase. B2C must continually integrate new sources of information, new channels and new media. This continual integration challenge is why B2B marketing automation platforms have a problem with B2C – it would take too much of their development budget to continually integrate, test and ensure a consistent platform experience to its users. It is also the reason that there are so few affordable B2C marketing automation solutions available.

Customer State Marketing focuses on the context of the customer event/action dynamic. Customer State Marketing allows the marketer to follow each individual customer along their own unique journey. Whether it is a B2B or a B2C journey is immaterial. What counts is the customer’s state at the time of the event. For example, what is the proper response to:

1)      a white paper download event

2)      an abandoned shopping cart event

3)      one week of contact inactivity

The correct answer is “It depends on the context”! If this is the first time the contact downloads the white paper then the response is different than if it is the third time they download a white paper. If the contact abandons a shopping cart the response is different if this is the first cart they have ever abandoned vs. someone who always abandons a cart. If the contact is inactive for one week the response is different if you are sending them a confirmation email vs. a newsletter.

As you can see, the context of the event (i.e. what State the customer is in) determines the correct response. Only Customer State Marketing provides an easy and effective way to build marketing automation scenarios that take the customer’s state into account at the time of the event, whether it be B2B or B2C.