ma Archives - Beasley Direct and Online Marketing

Marketing Automation Audit

Andy Hoover — Thu, 24 Oct 2019 18:02:28 +0000

Five Good Reasons to Get an Objective Third Party Audit of Your Marketing Automation System

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., offers marketing automation audits of Marketo and Pardot. A marketing automation audit is an objective third-party evaluation of your Marketo and/or Pardot (Salesforce Marketing Cloud) instance. The purpose is to know how well they are working with your salesforce automation software to achieve your lead and sales pipeline goals. Marketing automation audits can reveal many aspects of underutilization or lack of staff training that, when fixed, can make a radical improvement in your company sales pipeline and measurement. Remember, marketing automation audits aren’t just for the marketing department’s benefit. It’s for the sales department too. It’s your best first line of defense to diagnose and troubleshoot lead quality, and fix scoring and reporting issues.

Many company changes can precipitate the need for a marketing automation audit. The following are five of the most common we come across.

Five good reasons to initiate a marketing automation audit:

3-6 months prior to renewal of your Pardot or Marketo instance (and for major MarTech tools)—to review structure and costs

A top admin leaves (or high turnover in demand gen staff)—to smooth out transition period

New CMO and/or Director of Demand Gen—to give a good analysis of the current install and what needs to change

Need to benchmark progress (i.e. have follow-up audits every 6-12 months)

Need an objective way to separate operational issues from sales & marketing issues

The value of an objective 3rd party audit can be in several areas and often pays for itself in cost savings with renewals:

Helps budgeting and planning for:

MarTech stack

Demand gen staff & vendors

Training and organizational alignment

Helps uncover hidden issues such as:

Missing MarTech tools

Underutilized or incorrectly utilized features

Lead leakage / loss and bottlenecks

Data that can be eliminated (and thus not included in renewal)

Helps analyze the meaning of the findings

View data with fresh eyes to point out obvious patterns

Share relevant “lessons learned” from other orgs

The four major areas our marketing automation audits cover

Our marketing automation audits cover four critical areas of analysis: contact management, data health, governance and campaign management. More details on these areas below.

1. Contact Management Analysis

Goals

To troubleshoot known issues in Pardot/Marketo to salesforce automation transfer of leads or values

To identify inconsistencies or gaps in current lead management

To define standards and rules for form creation and back end processing

To document Pardot/Marketo to salesforce automation sync (current state and post-fix)

Document any 3rd party connection synch processes

Review Prospect, Account, and Opportunity field mapping

Review use of progressive profiling

Review Pardot tagging strategy

2. Data Health and Gap Analysis

Goals

To capture current state and provide a benchmark for judging data health, e.g.

Active database

Marketable database

To define standards and rules for field mapping

Make initial recommendations for data normalization (e.g. US, United States, USA should all be US)

Make initial recommendation for list segmentation

3. Usage and Governance Analysis

Goals

To recommend new standards if necessary

To ensure compliance with data privacy rules—as appropriate by region/country, etc…

To apply more controls as to Pardot usage

Verify email deliverability

4. Campaign and Nurture

Goals

To identify what ‘clean out’ efforts are needed

To make it easier to see what’s active or not

To support better practices around template use

Troubleshoot email and landing page templates

An audit will result in a report on each of these areas and a set of observations for good findings and areas that need fixing.

Small changes often yield big results. Big changes yield even bigger results

Every marketing automation audit we’ve conducted has yielded a different set of issues and the fixes needed. We often rank the fixes needed in order of priority and help the client to determine the tradeoffs or benefits gained for investing in them. Even small data cleanups can yield big cost savings, and significantly improve lead quality. Bigger investments in fixing nurture streams and lead scoring can yield big results in ushering better leads filling the pipeline—something that will surely warm the heart of marketing and sales alike. Because the marketing automation audit isn’t just for marketing, it’s for sales too. They have a vested interest in what is being pushed over to the salesforce automation system, and a marketing automation audit is your best first defense to ensure better quality leads get there.

Need a marketing automation audit? Contact us for a free consultation.

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Where do I start with Beasley Direct and Online Marketing? They provided the exact services I needed to run my Pardot marketing automation systems, ensuring a smooth integration with Salesforce. They are very technically astute and also strategic. I enjoyed collaborating at all levels, and they are easy to work with at all times. During my time working with Beasley they accorded me with respect and diligence at their duties. I will certainly recommend their services to any organization seeking a new innovative way of managing their Salesforce systems.

— Kaycee Uzougbo, Director of Digital Innovation, Centric Software

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing helped us audit and improve our Marketo marketing automation system in many ways. First they chose new offers, re-wrote the copy and re-designed our entire new prospect nurture campaign series resulting in an early win of 22% higher open rates and 18% higher click rates over the legacy nurture messaging. Secondly they helped us see what our true marketable data base is so we can more quickly create accurate target lists. Lastly they streamlined the way we use Marketo so it’s more scalable and less labor intensive to operate – and made many recommendations on how to be more strategic about the features we implement, issues we address, and tools we add in the future. These recommendations will help us “use what we pay for” in terms of the newest nurturing and engagement tracking features and keep costs down, saving us potentially tens of thousands of dollars per year. We are very happy with the analysis and results of the Marketo audit Beasley worked on for us.

— Tim Zee, Sr. Director, Customer Relationship Management, Dice

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Why we are Predicting a Major Shake-up in Email Sending and Marketing Automation Platforms for 2018

Laurie Beasley — Sat, 30 Dec 2017 03:09:48 +0000

As an agency, we assist our clients with creating and sending emails on their email sending platform (ESP) and Marketing Automation (MA) tools of choice. And we also receive a lot of feedback on how satisfied (or dissatisfied) our clients are with their marketing automation platforms and email sending platforms. In 2017 there was a LOT of DISSATISFACTION. This leads me to think there will be a shake-up in the 2018 email marketplace.

The dissatisfaction came in three major areas:

Lack of customer/technical support.
Complexity of the product for new team members to learn.
And, a lack of adaptation to mobile/responsive email templates.

I’d like to explore all three of these complaint areas for a few minutes. But first a disclaimer that I will compare the complaints I’ve catalogued across all email sending platforms whether they be an ESP or an MA platform. I will not get into the differences between using an ESP vs. MA. That’s for another time.

Lack of customer/technical support was the major complaint of 2017

Many email sending platforms, like IBM Watson and Salesforce Marketing Cloud (which contains both ExactTarget and Pardot), have removed the option to call in to talk to a live customer or technical support person when you have a problem. You are asked to either fill out a support ticket or interact with a community. That puts the onus on you to frame your question just right, or you’ll get a bogus answer from either. The community usually responds within 24 hours, however you could be left hanging with a big problem for several hours until someone does answer. I predict that email sending platforms that do offer live, 24/7 customer/technical support, like the relative newcomer, Adestra, will begin to steal market share from the other ESPs.

The inability to quickly onboard new email marketing team members was the second major complaint of 2017

I noticed my clients taking a critical eye to the time/complexity it takes to train new email marketing automation team members. Training time is a real cost to the company and affects the ability to quickly replace or expand staff. Some Marketing Automation platforms are so sophisticated and complex, like Oracle Responsys, that you’re almost forced to outsource the usage of it, or at least recruit very specifically for talent with experience using it — which is a limited talent pool. I see clients opting for less complex marketing automation tools, such as Pardot or Hubspot, which have reasonably good training and on-boarding programs and seem to be easier for newbies to learn. They are also more economical for those who don’t need all of the Oracle-like sophisticated features, and who need more basic campaign setup, scoring and nurturing.

I also envision more outsourcing of email marketing operations to agencies, like Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., because the labor market will become increasingly more constrained and finding talent (even worldwide) will become more difficult.

You’d think all email sending and marketing automation platforms would support mobile/responsive design. They don’t.

The third major complaint we heard was with platforms not supporting responsive design very well. We’ve re-designed most of our client’s emails to be mobile/responsive, however not all of their email systems have adapted perfectly well to the demands this places on the email sending platform. For instance for one client, their Constant Contact email system would not allow us to drop in a new two-column email template that would re-stack into one column on mobile. Constant Contact does have hard-coded templates that do re-stack, but the client didn’t like any of them. The inability to use your own email creative is very frustrating. We wound up moving the email template over to Vertical Response to test it, just to make sure it wasn’t our code. It worked perfectly there.

With 2018 there will be big changes to market share for email sending and marketing automation platforms. We envision Adestra will steal market share from IBM Watson and ExactTarget (part of IBM Marketing Cloud) because of their live 24/7 support. We project Pardot and Hubspot to supplant Marketo and Oracle for their easier training and staffing. And, tools like Constant Contact will need to up their game or be replaced by upper tier tools who fully support responsive design.

If you need helping choosing or running your Email Sending or Marketing Automation platforms, we can help. Contact us today.

Read about creating email templates here.

The Author

Laurie B. Beasley
Founder and President, Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.
Chair, DMAnc

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