The success of any business endeavor is dependent on one thing; execution. Even the best marketing strategy will fail if the organization is incapable of executing. In the context of marketing effectiveness, execution has to do with the tactics and processes an organization utilizes to market a product or service. With limited resources and finite budget, marketers need to make sure that all marketing activities are both influencing and driving demand. While it’s critical to have access to a robust centralized marketing database, the database is of little value unless marketers use the data to increase revenue.

In order to improve marketing effectiveness, marketers need to start using the data to build more intimate relationships with prospects and customers. Research proves that mass untargeted email blasts yield an average 1-2% conversion rate.

The following questions will help determine steps your organization can take to improve marketing execution. Remember to check out the marketing automation category for more about marketing automation vendors that can help you here.

Read each question and write down the appropriate points based on an honest assessment of the current state of your marketing operations.

Do you have clearly defined segments and targets?

• Yes- Award yourself 2 points if you currently customize marketing campaigns for unique segments of prospects/customers
• Yes, but we could do a better job- Award yourself 1 point if you segment your database, but you feel you could do a better job creating customized marketing messages for these segments
• No- Award yourself 0 points if you do not currently segment or target unique segments of prospects/customers

Do you currently use any personalization in outbound marketing campaigns? Award points for each applicable answer then add up all the points at the bottom (this question could award a total of 21 points)

• Mass Email (1 Point): _______

• Segmentation and Targeting (2 Points): _______

• Personalized- Name in Salutation (4 Points): _______

• Personalized- Using other database criteria: purchase date, product purchased, etc.

(6 Points): _______

• Event Triggered- Marketing interactions are triggered by customer behavior (8 Points): _______

• Total Points:_________ (Enter in b.)

Do you have one or more lead nurturing campaigns that are designed to educate potential buyers that are not yet ready to make a purchase?

• Yes- Award yourself 2 points if you have exclusive marketing campaigns designed to nurture and educate prospects
• No- Award yourself 0 points if you do not use lead nurturing

Do you know which marketing channels result in (or influence) the highest number of leads?

• Yes- Award yourself 2 points
• No- 0 points

Can you name 3 companies that visited your website this week?

• Yes- Award yourself 2 points
• No- 0 points

Final Score

a._____+ b._____+ c._____+ d._____ +e._____ = ______

How did you score?

With the right tools and processes in place, marketing execution can be quick and painless. Without those tools and processes, it can be painful and yield poor results, possible causing you or your programs to get the ax.

• 0-6 Points: You don’t quite have the hang of it - A final score between 0 and 6 indicates you could increase marketing effectiveness considerably by increasing the use of personalized email campaigns or even basic segmentation of your marketing database. Consider lead nurturing campaigns to increase the number of sales-ready leads that are passed on to sales.
• 7-18 Points: You’re getting there, keep on hacking away - A final score between 7 and18 indicates you are using a moderate level of personalization or segmentation and probably achieve average conversion rates on outbound campaigns. Consider tracking prospect performance across multiple channels (the web, email, landing pages, keywords, etc.) By tracking prospect behavior you can more accurately predict propensity to purchase and relevant materials that will have the biggest impact on driving revenue. Automation can help deliver highly relevant marketing interactions that are triggered by prospect behavior. This increases the likelihood of delivering the right message to the right prospect at the right time.
• 19-29 Points: You’re killing it - A final score between 19 and 29 points indicates your taking full advantage of your marketing database to build more intimate, relevant, personalized relationships with prospects and customers. The question is, are you measuring performance over time to constantly improve marketing execution?

The marketing database plays a vital role in maximizing marketing effectiveness.  A lack of a centralized and complete marketing database impacts the marketer’s ability to both create and execute highly effective marketing strategy.

The marketing database feeds the marketing mix, it helps determine which targets and segments a company should pursue, and it ultimately allows the organization to consistently develop better products and services and market these products and services efficiently and effectively.

Most importantly, the marketing database is the lifeblood of marketing campaign execution.  The ability to deliver relevant, timely marketing messages to prospects and customers across one or more marketing channels is directly correlated to the quality of your marketing database.  As a result, marketers need to trust in their marketing database; therefore ensure that the data is accurate, complete and reliable.

Market leading organizations heavily rely on their marketing database to build intimate, relevant, personalized relationships with prospects and customers.

The following questions will help determine steps your organization can take to improve the quality of your marketing database and ultimately the ability to execute more effective marketing campaigns.

Read each question below and write down the appropriate number of points according to your answers.  Once you’re done, add up your score to determine if you are a database slacker, an average Joe database marketer, or a database jockey with the right customer and prospect data at your fingertips all day, every day.

Rate the quality of your marketing database?

• Complete- Award yourself 4 points if you are confident in the quality of the marketing database you rely on execute marketing campaigns
• Room for Improvement- Award yourself 2 points if you feel fairly confident in the quality of your marketing database but there’s still some room for improvement.
• It’s in bad shape- Award yourself 0 points if you are confident in the fact that your database marketing practices are less than desirable and leave room for significant improvement.

Do you currently have a centralized marketing database that provides one source of the truth for marketing, sales, and service?

• Yes- Award yourself 2 points if you have a centralized database that delivers a 360 view of customers across marketing, sales and service
• No- 0 points if you are still operating multiple siloed databases or worse excel spreadsheets

Do you augment your marketing database with information to enhance, authenticate, or supplement your marketing database?

• Yes- Award yourself 2 points if you enhance the quality of existing data through third party data sources or marketing database integration tools.
• No- 0 points if existing marketing database is rarely enhanced

Do you regularly scrub the database for erroneous or outdated information?

• Yes- Award yourself 4 points if you constantly monitor the quality of the data (regardless of whether it’s manual or automated)
• No- 0 points if you can’t remember the last time you acted on the quality of your marketing database.

Do you collect multi-channel information to build customer profiles?

• Yes- Award yourself 2 points if you supplement individual leads data with information from two or more marketing channels: email campaigns received, click-through history, website visits, landing page form captures, survey questions, direct mail, etc.
• Sort of- Award yourself 1 point if you supplement individual leads data with information from one marketing channel
• No- 0 points if you have yet to integrate multi-channel activity at the customer account level.

Final Score

a._____+ b._____+ c._____+ d._____+ e._____=  ______

How did you score?

• 0-5 Points: Database Slacker -  A final score between 0-5 indicates you need to spend more time focusing on your marketing database.  Your competitors and peers are utilizing marketing database techniques that will give them a competitive advantage.  Your marketing database can become outdated and erroneous rapidly; particularly with the rapid growth in digital marketing channels.  The most effective marketing creative is useless if the customer or prospect never sees it, and poor data quality in personalized campaigns can erode brand reputation.  Consider devoting organizational resources to (1) manually scrubbing the marketing database for duplicate data, erroneous data, or missing data and (2) refreshing the marketing database through a third-party marketing data provider.
• 6-12 Points: Average Joe – A final score between 6-12 indicates your marketing database is in reasonable shape, but you should consider initiatives to improve data quality.  This could include augmenting or validating the current marketing database with a third-party data purchase or assigning resources to manually scrub the database by hand.  Consider cross-checking bounced email addresses from outbound email campaigns and removing these email addresses from the database.  Likewise, make sure you are constantly offering customers an opportunity to opt-out of communications.
• 12-14 Points: Database Jockey- A final score between 12-14 points indicates your marketing database is in great shape.  The question is, what are you actually doing with this robust marketing database to improve marketing effectiveness?

What is Marketing Effectiveness?

We’ve spent the last few weeks getting to know our marketing automation partners and friends.   They all share the goal of increasing marketing effectiveness.  This got me thinking, really what IS marketing effectiveness.

Wikipedia defines marketing effectiveness as the quality of how marketers go to market with the goal of optimizing their spending to achieve good results for both the short-term and long-term.  So essentially, effective marketing must grow top line revenue while minimizing the impact on bottom line cost.

There are three fundamental ways marketers can influence marketing effectiveness:

• Marketing Strategy: How you will engage customers, prospects, and competitors in the market.  This includes the marketing mix, product development, positioning and segmentation / targeting.
• Marketing Execution: The people, process and technology that enable effective execution of marketing strategy and highly impactful creative.  Successful execution of a superior marketing strategy increases marketing effectiveness.
• Marketing Measurement: Good marketers are expected to understand marketing analytics and use marketing performance as the basis for allocating budget effectively.  As a result, marketers must measure metrics that matter; metrics that can translate to strategic actions and drive accountability.

At its core, marketing effectiveness is about increasing revenue.    Higher returns on marketing investments are a byproduct of effective marketing. However, calculating a true return on marketing investment is no easy task.  With today’s multi-channel marketing strategies, it’s difficult to accurately allocate measurable returns to marketing spend.

By scoring best practices across these three areas, organizations can rapidly measure and identify immediate opportunities to improve marketing effectiveness.  But, remember the effectiveness of marketing is tied to marketing and sales agreeing on WHAT is handed off and at what stage. If this definition and agreement are NOT in place, marketing effectiveness and overall marketing ROI can go quickly to zero.

Interested in how you measure up?

Be sure to stop back here next week for a few quick assessment quizzes to identify areas of improvement and the overall ability for your organization to maximize marketing effectiveness.

This post comes to us from one of our friends at ExactTarget, Joel Book.

Having observed how email has become the backbone of successful one-to-one marketing solutions, I have 3 guidelines that will help you use personalization for more effective B-to-B email.

1. Remember that People buy from People.

With all due respect to brand marketers, creative directors, and copywriters, it’s important to remember that nothing is more important in selling than the customer’s relationship with the person with whom she is doing business. That person may be a dealer, an agent, or a field sales representative.

When you send email, send it on behalf of the “relationship owner” and include that person’s photo and contact information so it’s easy for the customer to contact him. This type of personalization dramatically improves email marketing campaign performance.

2. Serve. Don’t Sell.

Customers don’t want to be sold. But they do want to be helped in making their buying decision. That’s why using email to deliver information and offers that aid the customer’s decision-making process is the best way to support – and accelerate – the buying process.

Once a person has been attracted to your web site, use email to engage with and move the prospect through the consideration and evaluation stages . . . all the way to purchase. Serve your subscribers well, and they will reward you with their business. In fact, Forrester Research reports that “those who buy products marketed through email spend 138% more than non-readers of email.”

3. Put the Customer in Control.

One of the smartest things you can do to maximize email marketing performance is to personalize email content to the subscriber’s needs. When a new subscriber opts in to receive email from you, invite her to go to your preference center where she can check off her needs and topics of interest relevant to the products or services you offer. Then, use the Dynamic Content feature in ExactTarget to deliver content that’s relevant and timely. This is the essence of ExactTarget’s Subscribers Rule mantra.

If you haven’t noticed by now, we think of Mashable as THE source for all things social media (and generally cool tech stuff).  I came across an interesting article on Mashable by Ben Parr yesterday, Twitter’s Value: 5 Eye-Popping Stats.  Check these out:

1. According to PEDC’s numbers, the price of a single share of Twitter has increased by 239,619%, from a measly $0.00667 per share to a much stronger $15.9824.

2. Twitter’s $100 million round is over 1025 times the amount of money they raised in its very first round of funding. In July of 2007, Twitter raised $97,500.

3. In five rounds of funding, Twitter has raised an estimated $153 million (some peg it a few million dollars higher). Since the day of its initial round of funding, Twitter has been given an average of $187,356 per day by its investors.

4. Using that same time frame and its current $1 billion valuation, Twitter’s worth has grown by $1,223,990 per day. If you start with the day of Twitter’s inception (the first tweet from Twitter’s Inventor and Chairman, Jack Dorsey), then Twitter’s worth has grown by around $772,797 per day.

5. Twitter has yet to make a single cent in profit. We’ll let you be the judge of what that means.

Having worked for more than my fair share of start-ups, these are some incredible stats.  The most unbelievable is the last; they have yet to make a dime.  Lots of Twitter Apps are profiting, so if I am an investor in Twitter, I would be saying “Show me the money!” very soon.  And if their investors are not asking that, then wtf?

Our customers, prospects and B2B Lead followers often ask us about marketing automation.  Since ReachForce targeted role-based leads are fed into many of these solutions we decided to give each of them an opportunity to explain their key benefits and features in their own words. Thanks to Colby Cavanaugh at ExactTarget for this post.

What is ExactTarget?

ExactTarget gives B2B marketers the ability to harness the power of one-to-one communications to nurture leads, engage prospects and improve customer relationships. ExactTarget supports the backbone of your B2B marketing strategy with:

• The ability to automate emails, processes and programs—from lead nurturing campaigns to welcome emails—with ease.
• A single management console that triggers mission-critical messages across emerging digital communication channels, including SMS, Voice, and Email.
• Robust integration capabilities that offer an opportunity to improve customer value management and seamless integrate your business systems, no matter how many disparate data sources you may have.
• A scalable architecture to ensure your time-sensitive emails are delivered.  Whether you’re processing hundreds of transactions an hour or millions a day, our system is designed to scale as your demand dictates.
• Precision targeting tools to reinforce local relationships and dynamically turn your emails into powerful marketing messages that your customers want to receive.
• A powerfully reliable data center that takes the worry out of your data storage and availability, no matter how much data you have.

Use what you know about your prospects and customers to improve customer relationships and increase conversion.

Industry leading research shows that integrating sales and marketing technologies can help organizations deliver more relevant communications—and improve their return on marketing investment by delivering the right message to the right subscriber at the right time. ExactTarget offers a variety of tools to help you integrate your critical business systems and allow for seamless, pain-free Marketing Automation. From customer relationship management (CRM) tools (e.g. Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM) to web analytics applications (e.g. Omniture, WebTrends, Coremetrics, and Google Analytics), we’ve partnered with the leaders and done the difficult integration work so you don’t have to.

Get the support and expertise you need to be successful.

ExactTarget provides our clients with the email marketing support they need to solve complex marketing challenges. Our team combines both marketing and technological expertise with a proven approach to understanding our client’s objectives to help you develop the best possible email marketing strategy.

Serve your subscribers well and be rewarded with their business.

At ExactTarget, we believe it is the duty of every Email Service Provider (ESP) to help marketers deliver permission-based email and digital one-to-one communications to their customers, prospects, and partners. To better convey what we feel is our best-in-class approach, we have developed our SUBSCRIBERS RULE! philosophy which consists of three simple tenets:

• Serve the individual
• Honor each individual’s unique preferences with regard to communication, content, frequency, and channel
• Deliver subscribers timely, relevant content that improves their lives

We not only embrace the reality that subscribers own the inbox, but we also work diligently to develop products that provide consumers control over the manner and frequency by which companies communicate with them. By helping clients pursue more strategic segmentation and personalization efforts, we help them better deliver on the true promise of one-to-one communications—the right message, to the right person, at the right time, through the right channel.

Interested in learning more?

To learn more about ExactTarget, we invite you to visit www.exacttarget.com. You can also get tips, best practices and other marketing insight from our blog and featured whitepapers.

Having trouble seeing the good in your database?  Separating the diamonds from the dirt can be tough and time intensive, but if you map out a plan ahead of time it can save you time and sanity!

• Create a CRM data standard sheet and separate the data elements into three categories:
  • Information that must be there and must be correct for all of your systems to align properly (i.e. key ID’s, emails, etc.)
  • Information that should be correct for rules within your CRM system to work – if you have set up custom validation rules surrounding addresses for instance, outline what those rules are and what format data has to be in to fit within those rules.
  • Information that people have asked for to make marketing, sales, and customer support, etc. work better.
• Determine what data needs to look like within all of the key fields idenitifed above.  (I.E. – State should always be two-letter abbreviation instead of the full name, make a designated location for name pronunciation guides (input by sales) so they don’t clutter the name field, etc.
• Next, do a quick data quality analysis on each data element in these three categories. Score the data quality by answering questions such as:
  • Does this data element have an undisputed owner? Is it updated by a team member as a natural step in a key business process? Or can nearly anyone update it at any time?
  • What percentage of the CRM records has this data element missing, clearly incorrect, or duplicate? Determine the best course of action for filling in the gaps, do you have the resources in house or do you need to find a vendor who can do this?

Based on the results of your scoring (step 3), you’ll have a better idea of who you can assign items to for fixing and where you need to focus your efforts in terms of filling in the gaps.  Assign them out to the people who can fill in the gaps and make sure to supply everyone with the same set of ‘rules’ or standards for what the end result should look like.

Once you’ve got your data cleaned up, make sure your data standards sheet is up-to-date with any changes in process you may have made during the clean up process and then circulate it.  Your teams will be much more likely to keep the data looking the way it needs to if they know what the standards are.

In the Boston Area?  You should be at the Marketing Sherpa event Monday and Tuesday

We’re still trying to get caught up after being out last week at the Marketing Sherpa event but WOW was it worth it.  It’s always great to be able to spend time with peers experiencing the same challenges we are every day.

For those of you out west who missed the event.  Marketing Sherpa posted 8 key take-aways from the event in their  San Francisco Event Wrap Up.  You should definitely check it out.

If you’re in the Boston area, there’s still time to register for the Marketing Sherpa event starting on Monday.  Register now and save $400.

If you can’t make it you can also follow the Twitter conversations at #sherpaB2B09 or watch live video streaming via Hubspot TV.

Engagement Systems is one of the newer players in the marketing automation space. We let them “speak for themselves” earlier this week, but I wanted to dive further to check out some of their content.  So far they only have a few whitepapers and case studies, but I have to say I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of their content.  Their whitepaper, Influence the Buying Process with Automated Marketing, is a quick read packed with great tips.  The whitepaper promises 10 tactics for improving revenue and ROI now.  After the explantion of each tactic they offer a take-away (great idea for your next whitepaper or eBook).  Here are the take-aways from the whitepaper:

1. Don’t let prospects fall through the cracks. Protect your marketing investment and maximize resources through better lead qualification and lead nurturing.
2. Unify sales and marketing in the pursuit of common goals.
3. Continue generating leads, but put greater emphasis on nurturing activities as well as retention and winback strategies to maximize customer lifetime revenue.
4. Make sure that you have all the materials in place to be the resource for information to support your buyer.
5. Map out the buying process and help prospects and customers navigate their way to a buying decision.
6. Automate the sales and marketing process by setting event and behavior triggers that utilize intelligent marketing automation to autoexecute marketing touches.
7. Deploy one-to-one communications for more meaningful dialogue with prospects and customers to shorten the buying process.
8. Commit to an ongoing learning process; employ a valuable exchange of information to align your product and service offerings with the changing needs and interests of each individual buyer.
9. Deploy multiple means of outreach to ensure that your message is received, and to move the customer towards a purchase position relative to their individual needs and interests.
10. Establish ongoing contact with customers to preserve satisfaction, increase up-selling and cross-selling, and decrease customer defections.

Be sure to read the entire whitepaper for the full story.  It is definitely worth the read.

Our customers, prospects and B2B Lead followers often ask us about marketing automation.  Since ReachForce targeted role-based leads are fed into many of these solutions we decided to give each of them an opportunity to explain their key benefits and features in their own words. Thanks to Rob Hampton at Engagement Systems for this post.

What is Engagement Systems?

Engagement Systems helps companies leverage their CRM investment and maximize sales and marketing resources to grow sales revenue and improve ROI with an automated marketing campaign system.  The web-enabled software works with existing CRM systems to access prospect and customer information and make that data actionable to more efficiently capture and nurture leads, retain customers and win-back defecting clients.

From single communications to multi-step, multi-channel campaigns – utilizing email, direct mail, pURLS and landing pages – each personalized communication is automatically created, delivered, tracked and reported within the CRM record; eliminating time-consuming manual processes and ensuring consistent, relevant, timely communications that move prospects through the buying process and build valuable relationships with existing customers.

What Makes Engagement Systems Different?

True Multi-Touch, Multi-Channel Communications

Engagement Systems is the only CRM integration that truly automates the execution, delivery and tracking of multi-channel communications via direct mail, email, and personalized web pages (Personalized URLS) from within a single application.  Eliminates the need to coordinate multiple vendors.

1:1 Personalized Marketing

Both single communications and multi-touch campaigns can be executed to one contact at a time or to a segmented group of contacts.  There are no minimum orders.

Trigger Automation

Engagement Systems automated campaigns are governed by a set of business rules that create automatic triggers to initiate and manage what communications are sent and when. The configuration and integration is completely handled by Engagement Systems; there is no manual intervention on the client’s part to create, set up or kick off communications.  This eliminates the need for additional marketing resources or IT involvement.

Customer Lifecycle Optimization

Engagement Systems addresses the entire prospect and customer life cycle with custom-developed campaigns and programs for lead generation, lead nurturing, customer retention, and customer reactivation, up-selling and cross-selling.

Integrated Reporting

All automated communications are written back to and tracked through the CRM system. Clients have the option for custom reporting and metrics or can use the tools inherent within their CRM system.  Because of Engagement Systems’ complete integration, all data resides in a single location.

Value-Added Services

Engagement Systems makes it easy to adopt and use the system by providing a combination of optional marketing services that delivers an end-to-end solution. Unlike other systems, Engagement Systems is virtually hands free for both sales and marketing, requiring no one to upload or manage artwork or to initiate campaigns.  This makes implementation pain free, quick to deploy and low-maintenance to sustain.

Cost Effectiveness

Engagement Systems’ automated direct mail, email and Personalized URL production systems streamline the creation, execution and delivery processes, making multi-channel marketing campaigns cheaper and faster to execute.  All aimed at increasing your sales, profitability and ROMI.  This eliminates the need for additional marketing resources, consulting, IT and training expenses.  Additionally, there are no expensive recurring seat charges.

For more information, visit www.EngagementSystems.com, call 866.938.3658 or email info@EngagementSystems.com .  You can also check out an Overview Demo of Engagement Systems at  http://www.engagementsystems.com/onlinedemo.  And be sure to look at our Resources (Case Studies & White Papers) http://www.engagementsystems.com/resource-center/resource-center.html