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.

We recently completed audits for two companies and found two completely different sets of results and issues. Surprisingly, a major tech company using Marketo for six years was using fewer features and functions than most companies that have used it for only 12 months. We began to train their staff on new features to organize, segment and track campaigns. And with further analysis of the data, we found we could save them $60,000 per year on their Marketo contract renewal through some pretty simple data cleanup. Wow!

And for the other audit—a smaller healthcare device company that was using Pardot for three years—we found a surprisingly organized set up. However it was paired with an inexperienced demand generation specialist in desperate need of training. The result was management’s unfulfilled desire to score and nurture new leads. We set out to fix these things immediately.

Changes that can precipitate a marketing automation audit

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 marketing automation audits cover

A marketing automation audit typically covers four critical areas of analysis: contact management, data health, governance and campaign management. We will explore each of these areas below.

1. Contact Management

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

Focus

• Use of forms (type, consistency)
• Form field capture, and back end form processing (hidden fields, UTMs etc)
• Lead routing workflows and salesforce integration
• Lead statuses triggered or converting as expected
• Lead scoring (document profile / behavior score system)
• 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

Focus

• Database size
• Marketable %
• Unresponsive data / junk data / duplication
• # and % of unsubscribed
• # and % of opted in contacts (with opt in date)
• # of fields, default / custom fields, field values, and field type
• Audit lists (document, size, last used)
• % of duplicate records
• CANSPAM, GDPR, etc. validation and recommendation
• Create list of top 20 values in each field to support normalization

3. Usage and Governance

Goals

• To recommend new standards if necessary
• To ensure compliance with data privacy rules&emdash;as appropriate by region/country, etc…
• To apply more controls as to Pardot/Marketo usage
• Verify email deliverability

Focus

• Review Naming convention and folder hierarchy
• Check for Explicit opt in management
• Review Current users and permission levels
• Review and recommend tag normalization
• Document and recommend archiving of lists, templates, forms, campaigns, etc…
• Test deliverability to ensure the domain is not identified by Spam blockers
• Inventory and review all email and landing page assets

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

Focus

• Document a full list of all Pardot/Marketo assets: forms, landing pages, templates, campaigns, and engagement streams
• Current status of all assets (archived, draft, active, not in use)
• % of duplicate records
• 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 in 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.

By Laurie B. Beasley

The post Five Good Reasons to Get an Objective Third Party Audit of Your Marketing Automation System appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

Laurie Beasley, President of Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., will be teaching a live online email marketing workshop for the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California.

Improving Email Marketing Response Rates: Winning email marketing strategies for acquiring and retaining customers

(Wednesday, March 20, 2019. 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM Pacific Standard Time)

Email marketing requires immense effort to make it work effectively these days. Small (or large) creative and strategic missteps can cost you dearly in your response rate. You need to have all of your bases covered in terms of creative, list and engagement strategies.

This class presents winning email marketing strategies for acquiring and retaining customers in a world of crowded email inboxes and mobile viewers. We’ll talk about best practices for email copy, design, and implementation. We’ll cover offer strategies, writing winning subject lines, which day of the week to send and frequency, and how to design emails for mobile using responsive design. The class lays out a complete strategy on how to build your engagement score by implementing onboarding and engagement playbooks. We’ll also discuss strategies to improve your deliverability and how to avoid spam filters. Learn more.

About the DMAnc.org (www.DMAnc.org)

The DMA of Northern California was formed to educate, inform and provide networking opportunities for Direct and Online Marketing professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area.

We hold monthly luncheon meetings, workshops, periodic half-day seminars, and provide opportunity for the best in learning and job networking in the Northern California marketing community.

About Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is known for bringing the latest marketing strategies to online and direct marketing. We provide services in inbound and outbound marketing including: content creation, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), print advertising, social media advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, Amazon Marketing Services (AMS), website design, media planning/public relations, direct mail marketing, lead generation and nurture campaigns, and database management. We help clients in both B2B and B2C marketing and are privately held and headquartered in the Silicon Valley suburb of Morgan Hill, California. For more information, go here.

Do you need assistance determining your lead funnel requirements to hit your sales goals? We can help. Request a free Sales Funnel consultation here.

For digital marketing case studies, go here.

The post Join Laurie Beasley, President of Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., in a Live Online Workshop on “Improving Email Marketing Response Rates” appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., a Northern California-based full service direct and online marketing agency, has been appointed as a demand generation and marketing consulting agency for Frank, Rimerman Consulting, a business systems consulting division of Frank, Rimerman + Co. LLP, one of the largest locally owned CPA firms in California.  The initial work will focus on the following: analyzing the sales lead funnel and recommending demand generation campaigns, executing email campaigns on the Pardot marketing automation system, and content creation.

About Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is known for bringing the latest marketing strategies to online and direct marketing. Beasley provides services in inbound and outbound marketing including:  content creation, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), print advertising, social media advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, website design, direct mail marketing, lead generation and nurture campaigns, and database management. Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., helps clients in both B2B and B2C marketing and is privately held and headquartered in the Silicon Valley suburb of Morgan Hill, California.

About Frank, Rimerman Consulting

Frank, Rimerman Consulting (FRC) is the business systems consulting division of Frank, Rimerman + Co. LLP, one of the largest locally owned accounting and business consulting firms in California with offices in Palo Alto, San Francisco, San Jose, and St. Helena.  FRC serves a growing list of clients globally,  delivering SaaS Corporate Performance Management (CPM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions and value-added consulting services to organizations of all sizes. With deep finance, technology, and industry expertise, FRC helps clients gain operational and cost efficiencies.

Press contacts:

Laurie Beasley
President, Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.
lbeasley@beasleydirect.com
408-782-0046 x21

Steve Wolford
Partner, Consulting Group
swolford@frankrimermanconsulting.com
408-535-8071

Learn more about Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., demand generation services here.

The post Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is Appointed as Demand Generation and Marketing Automation Consulting Agency for Frank, Rimerman Consulting appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

The dissatisfaction came in three major areas:

1. Lack of customer/technical support.
2. Complexity of the product for new team members to learn.
3. 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 post Why we are Predicting a Major Shake-up in Email Sending and Marketing Automation Platforms for 2018 appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

News Facts: Laurie B. Beasley, president of Beasley Direct Marketing, Inc., will be teaching a six-week, live online course on Demand Generation & Lead Conversion for the National Direct Marketing Association starting May 2, 2014. Register now.

The pressure for B2B marketers is on. Modern B2B buyers have an increasing tendency and capacity to research purchasing decisions online long before they engage with Sales. They are empowered with information, and winning over modern B2B buyers requires organizations to revolutionize their marketing approach. This course will help today’s B2B marketer set goals with the Sales department, manage the touch points for lead qualification and optimize communication channels.

Practical challenges will be addressed, such as:

Challenge: Did you know? On average, it takes 6.8 people to make a decision in a 100 person company. The buying committee is changing marketing.

Solution: Learn how to segment your lists and craft messages to better target decision makers during this six-week course.

Challenge: Sales teams demand higher quality “sales-ready” leads to hit their numbers. It can take 7 to 13+ big touches to generate a qualified Sales opportunity. The marketer is on the hook to manage and deliver qualified leads.

Solution: We’ll discuss what marketing automation can do to help the process, and more importantly, how to make it fit in with your strategic goals.

Challenge: Is lack of resources your go-to excuse for lack of effective lead generation campaigns and qualified leads?

Solution: We’ll also talk about the analytics and reporting needed to track your efficiency and adjust resources.

Join Laurie Beasley from the comfort of your own desk, for an interactive, hands-on 90 minutes filled with case-studies, six Fridays, beginning May 2nd through June 13th to gain the skills you need to meet your strategic goals. Register now.

Instructor Bio:

Laurie B. Beasley

Laurie B. Beasley is co-founder and president of Beasley Direct Marketing, Inc., a Silicon Valley direct marketing agency that has managed search, email, online, and demand generation campaigns for over a hundred companies. Ms. Beasley serves as president of the DMA Northern California Chapter.

 
 
 
About us:

Beasley Direct Marketing, Inc. (www.BeasleyDirect.com) is known for bringing the latest marketing strategies to online and direct marketing. Beasley Direct provides services in email marketing, search engine optimization, social media, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, website design, media planning, direct mail marketing, lead generation and nurture campaigns, and database management. Beasley Direct Marketing, Inc. helps clients in both B2B and B2C marketing. Beasley Direct Marketing is privately held and headquartered in the Silicon Valley suburb, Morgan Hill, California. For more information, go to www.BeasleyDirect.com or call Laurie Beasley, President, at 408-782-0046 x21 or email lbeasley@beasleydirect.com.

The post Laurie Beasley to Teach 6-Week Online Course on Demand Generation&Lead Conversion for the National Direct Marketing Assn. appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.