Customer Journey Archives - Act-On

How to Calculate Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Act-On — Tue, 01 Aug 2023 21:19:57 +0000

The true value of a customer is not just the size of the deal. Calculating customer lifetime value is a more reliable measure of the ROI of your sales and retention motions. Researchers estimate that it costs five times as much to acquire a new customer than it does to retain a current one. In other words, customer satisfaction and customer retention are crucial to calculating the lifetime value of a customer’s business.

It’s useful to ask if you are making money, of course, but this formula also addresses practical questions every marketer should be able to answer:

Are you finding your most valuable customers?
Are you targeting them effectively with your marketing?
Are you making the most of the relationship once you win their business?

In this blog we’ll cover these and other common questions about customer lifetime value calculation. We’ll also explain how to use customer lifetime value to assess marketing effectiveness, diagnose common problems, and make smarter decisions.

What is Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)?

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the total amount of revenue that you will receive over the course of your relationship with a specific customer. It hinges on how long, on average, you are able to keep customers.

Customer lifetime value is the key to figuring out what you’re actually gaining from each customer. If you’re great at getting deals to close and you’re making all of your monthly revenue goals, that’s fantastic. But if you’re having trouble retaining those customers that you worked so hard to get, you’re likely making much less revenue from each customer than you potentially could. The amount of money you’re truly getting out those deals is small, even if there are a lot of them. And depending on your business model, you might not see net profit on a customer until you’ve had them for a cycle or two.

How to calculate Customer Lifetime Value?

Start with three questions that every marketing organization should be able to answer (or at least know where to find the answer):

What is the average sales value of your first transaction with a customer?
How much do you typically make per year from a customer after the first purchase? (including cross-sell and upsell revenue)
How long does a typical customer continue to do business with you?

For example, a typical first sale of $20,000, a typical ongoing annual value of $5,000 and a typical customer lifespan of five years (or 5 * $5,000), yields a customer lifetime value of $45,000.

This formula can get much more complicated. Some marketers use net profit instead of simple revenue, apply a rate of discount to capture today’s value of future customer purchases, or factor interest into the equation.

^{So you’ve made your customer lifetime value calculation: how do you know if it’s good or bad?}

How do I know whether my CVL is good or bad?

Ask yourself these questions:

How much did you spend to acquire a customer?
Do you typically generate significant revenue from return/repeat customers?
How much do you typically spend to maintain these ongoing customer relationships?

Often, marketers calculate customer lifetime value based only upon the value of the first sale, underestimating the total value of the customer. Much of the value marketers get from calculating customer lifetime value comes from tracking the impact of ongoing marketing campaigns, customer service interactions, upsell & cross-sell programs, and other tactics designed to increase revenue. When you base customer lifetime value entirely on the first sale, you lose the ability to measure the success of these activities.

CLV simply lets you see clearly what you’re getting out of a customer versus what you’ve put in. Having insight into your revenue streams can help you dictate your go-to-market strategy. Additionally, CLV helps you answer one of the most important questions anyone can ask about a business: Did it make more money from a customer than it spent to acquire that customer?

How can I use CLV to make my marketing more effective?

A complete view of customer lifetime value allows you to track the impact of your customer onboarding, retention, upsell & cross-sell efforts, and loyalty programs. You can pull each of those levers, assess the results, and decide where to focus future efforts and investment.

Customer lifetime value has long been used to determine not just campaign effectiveness, but also to determine how much should be spent on marketing, on media buys, and other marketing investments. Marketers also work very hard to increase the value of a customer’s initial purchase. You don’t need a customer lifetime value to do that necessarily; average revenue per customer tells the story. Changes in initial deal value, however, often interact in interesting ways with changes in long-term customer value.

Connecting CVL with ideal customer profile

You can also use customer lifetime value to define your ideal customer profile, and pursue more customers that fit that profile. To do so, first identify and segment your ICP customers based on whatever metrics work for you and your business (industry, company size, etc.). Then, compare the customer lifetime value for that segment to your CLV on the whole. The difference should help you invest more in your ideal customers, or make the case to your leadership team that you need to do so.

Finally, a clear view of customer lifetime value allows marketers to spot and fight back against “sloppy growth.” This is often a problem when marketers choose high-volume lead-gen tactics without considering where and how to protect lead quality. Often, these customers are the inverse image of a company’s “best customer” segment: They buy less initially, spend less after the first purchase, and are less likely to renew. Falling lifetime value is a signal to adjust your lead-gen programs to target your ideal customer more carefully.

Customer lifetime value can help you craft an accurate budget

According to Ruth Stevens, President of eMarketing Strategy, “The expected lifetime value of a customer represents the maximum allowable acquisition cost of that customer. Then using those numbers, you can craft a marketing budget that is related to firm profitability versus some fussier method of budgeting for marketing expenses.”

The more predictable your revenue streams are, the better. If you know exactly how much money will be flowing through your company this year, next year, and beyond, you’re already off to a good start for budgeting and creating sustainable growth.

Marketing automation and lifetime value

Marketing automation tools equipped with reports and dashboards make it quick and convenient to review and analyze tons of customer intelligence, including demographics, campaign engagement, website visits, and purchase history. This information – often available in real time – is helpful for identifying cross-selling and upselling opportunities – great ways to increase the value of your customers! Behavior history profiles can also uncover likely follow-up sale products based on each customer’s pre-purchase and post-purchase interactions.

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

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5 Strategies to Convert Prospects into Customers

Act-On — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 02:00:00 +0000

Nobody likes to lose. When you create a strategy to convert more prospects into customers and actual sales, it’s frustrating when your results fall short. But as marketers, we also know that when a strategy doesn’t work, it’s an opportunity to learn, pivot and get better results.

Simple, right?

Well, let’s be real. We all know it’s easier said than done. So, we’re here to offer some guidance on powerful strategies on how to convert leads into customers, clients and sales. Leverage them and you can achieve the results you want.

Convert Prospects into Customers by Being at the Right Place, at the Right Time

Wouldn’t it be nice if converting prospects into customers was easy? And if all customers followed the same path to purchase? Of course! But, we know they’re much more likely to zig and zag than follow a neat, linear path. And that means that marketers have to get really good at meeting them where they’re at.

The trick to accomplishing this is cross-channel marketing.

Cross-channel marketing allows you to leverage many different platforms to market products and services across the sales funnel. Offers are customized based on the prospect’s stage in the journey across all channels.

Now, just to be clear, this is different from multichannel marketing, where you use many different channels to reach prospective customers. Most importantly, these channels don’t share information. Cross-channel marketing shares data. The content a person views is based on previous engagement activity, whether that engagement happened on your website or a social media platform. This consistent experience leads to more potential customers converting, and that’s because they feel understood.

And speaking of results, 87% of customers say they want brands to give them more consistent experiences. With multichannel marketing, content is often locked in silos creating fragmented experiences. But with cross-channel marketing, you can provide an experience that keeps pace with prospective clients along their journey.

An easy way to implement cross-channel marketing is using marketing automation. Don’t manually analyze and select the content based on prior customer interaction. Automation can send the most relevant content to the right customer at the right time based on their prior interactions and behaviors.

Align Your Strategies to Your Customer Personas

^{Getting to know prospective customers is important to closing the deal.}

Customers want to feel known. Sure, you can meet them where they’re at; that’s an excellent start. But even before that, you need to figure out how you will speak to them emphatically about their problems. That’s where personas come into play.

Convert more leads into customers by creating personas for each group of prospective customers. Dive deep into how they will benefit from doing business with you. Then identify different outreach methods and messaging frameworks. Highlight the products and features your prospects will likely find most appealing.

Use tools such as marketing automation to get really good at nurturing and, ultimately, closing more deals. For example, you can segment your audience into groups based on the personas you created and enter them into targeted automated nurture campaigns. Once your prospects are assigned to a campaign, they’ll automatically start receiving information. Content and recommendations will arrive automatically based on their interests. This in turn ,will increase their enthusiasm and confidence in your brand, products and services along the way.

Strategically Map Content to Drive Higher Engagement

We’ve talked a lot about delivering the right content, but we haven’t really mentioned what that entails on the back end. Identifying and developing quality content takes time and effort. Unfortunately, many marketers fail to realize that they need to develop specific pieces before using them for a campaign or other marketing effort, such as customer prospecting.

In this scenario, many marketers often have to change course or wait until a specific piece is created and approved before presenting it to their target audience. In both situations, marketers are vulnerable to losing their leads to a competitor that is ready to deliver the right content to their prospect at the right time.

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

Learn More

Developing a robust content library that accounts for multiple product, service and feature lines at every stage of the sales funnel can help you prepare to strike while the iron is hot, i.e. once the decision-making process actually begins.

When creating content, consider each of your customer personas and their stage in the sales funnel, and create a variety of assets that address their pain points and interests and that will help them make a final decision. If you already have some content ready to go, you can be proactive by working with your team to identify any content gaps that need to be filled. Over time, work to address these needs so you’re always prepared with the right content to engage your prospects.

Leverage Your Data and Insights To Optimize Efforts

If you’re constantly launching new campaigns but not seeing your engagement rates rise, you’re likely not using your data and insights to optimize your efforts. Continually review data to identify trends at the root of the efforts that have succeeded and those that have fallen flat. You can then use this data to optimize how you convert prospects into customers further as you move forward. We recommend applying A/B testing to improve results.

Testing which subject lines, CTAs and content pieces perform better than others allows you to enhance your marketing to yield better results every single time. And guess what? The more engaged your audience is at every stage of the sales funnel, the higher your chances will be of converting prospects into loyal customers once they reach the finish line. This is especially true when you leverage proven tactics such as storytelling.

Use Storytelling To Convert More Prospective Clients

^{Converting prospective customers is more than just making a sale: it’s winning them over with your story.}

Converting prospects into customers involves more than just requiring your sales and marketing teams to adjust their efforts. It also takes more than the right content, the right ads and the right messaging. Your future customers want to know that your company has their best interests in mind, and they want that fact to be affirmed by your current customers.

In other words, it’s important that everybody in your network understands your goals and your prospective customers’ needs — and can speak well on your behalf. A good way to show that to your customers is through success stories and customer referrals.

Identify a few extremely satisfied customers and ask them whether they’d like to be interviewed about the success they’ve experienced using your product or service. Use these interviews to extract quotes you can use as testimonials and write success stories for your website. There might be prospects who will have more detailed questions, so having a few customers your salespeople can contact for a reference call is also a good idea.

These result-driven strategies will do wonders for your engagement and help you get on the right path toward achieving your goal of converting more prospects into customers. Will they require upfront work? Absolutely. But the time investment is well worth the effort once conversion rates begin to multiply.

How to Use Data to Inform and Improve Your Customer Journey

Tue, 05 Apr 2022 20:14:00 +0000

Marketers are collecting more and more first-party customer data, especially in the wake of increasing email and advertising privacy regulations. Yet many teams report difficulties when it comes to applying all that data to their marketing programs. One simple way to start? Use your customer journey as a lens to identify opportunities to apply data-driven improvements.

Customer journeys, by nature, are centered around your customer experience. They function as your team’s guide to the step-by-step process your audience takes as they identify a problem, learn about solutions, make a decision to purchase, and maintain an ongoing relationship with your business.

When you look at your data through the lens of the customer journey, you can concentrate your improving the touchpoints that matter most to your audience. This ability to laser-focus is likely why organizations that have and use customer journey maps are twice as likely to outperform competitors than those that don’t.

Let’s explore some practical, real-life examples of how you can use data to deliver a more personalized customer journey, using a simplified four-stage model: awareness/discovery, research/evaluation, justification/purchase, and retention/advocacy.

Using Data During the Awareness or Discovery Stage

In the awareness or discovery stage, your customer is just realizing they have a problem that needs solving. They want to learn more, and your goal is to educate and inform them through helpful content like blog posts, whitepapers, and eBooks.

At this stage, look for insights that will tell you how well you’re answering your customers’ questions or making a positive first impression. Some of these data sources include:

Organic Search and Website Behavior

Look at Google Analytics to learn whether the prospects who find your content through organic search are sticking around on your website. If metrics like bounce rate or exit rate are high for specific pages, it’s a sign your visitors may not have a clear path to deeper engagement after landing on your site. Adding relevant internal links, suggesting related content, or having clear CTAs like a newsletter signup can help improve this early step along the customer journey.

Form Fill Data

At this stage, you’re just introducing yourself to your new prospects. If you’re seeing high abandonment rates on form fills for gated content or webinar signups, you may be asking for too much information too early. Keep forms as simple as possible now, and ask for more information later through progressive profiling.

Email Engagement

See how individual pieces of content are performing in email campaigns. When you see high clickthrough rates, consider promoting these top performers in paid campaigns, or give them prominent placement on your website to help more customers discover your best content and move further along their buyer’s journey.

Case in point: when nonprofit organization Education at Work identified a powerful article on their website was underperforming, they changed its placement to make it more visible. In just two months, their media and form conversion rate rose from 6.7% to more than 40%.

Using Data During the Research and Evaluation Stage

During the research and evaluation stage, your customer understands their problem and is actively trying to solve it by learning about and comparing different solutions. The time is ripe to communicate clearly why your product or service is their best option, using content like case studies, comparison pages, customer webinars, and product demos.

It’s crucial to share targeted information that’s highly relevant to your prospects at this stage. Pay close attention to data that indicates whether your campaigns are hitting the mark, including:

Unsubscribe Rates

Be cautious about over-indexing on hard sales at this stage, or sending too-frequent emails if prospects aren’t engaging. Keep a close eye on your opt-out rate and pull back on your email cadence if needed.

Segmentation

At this stage, you should be able to identify attributes like industry or company size through progressive profiling or services such as ZoomInfo. Evaluate whether you’re sending relevant content, like case studies or webinar invites within your prospect’s industry, to communicate your brand’s value proposition to their specific use case.

For example, The Netherlands-based full-service agency The Marketing Guys uses progressive profiling to gather key information about leads during webinar registrations. They use that data to drive further engagement, such as sending a whitepaper about the key features of marketing automation platforms based on the prospect’s company size and industry.

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

Learn More

Using Data During the Justification and Purchase Stage

As your customer reaches the justification and purchase stage, they’ve learned that your product is a great solution for their needs, and they’re almost ready to finalize their purchase. Help them feel confident by setting clear expectations about onboarding and adoption, empower their internal selling, and remove friction whenever possible. This is the time to nudge them over the finish line by offering free trials or assessments, and scheduling live sales calls or demos.

Conversion is your primary focus at this stage, so focus on data that helps you fine-tune your offers and messaging.

A/B Testing

Ensure you’re testing your headlines, visuals, and templates for landing pages with high-value offers like free trials. Get more data quickly by testing assets in PPC, and then apply the winning concepts across your campaigns.

Lead Scoring

If you haven’t done so yet, set up a lead scoring program that automatically assigns points to specific behaviors along the customer journey. Lead scoring helps ensure you’re sending the warmest leads to the sales team for one-on-one conversations and live demos, when the time is right.

Case in point: for cloud service provider interworks.cloud, automated customer journeys and lead scoring work in tandem to track activities and segment their audience accordingly. Every path is designed to guide customers towards booking a demo, which triggers a handoff to the sales team for a personalized conversation. In the first year after implementing these marketing automation programs, the company saw a 20% increase in conversion rate.

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

Learn More

Using Data During the Retention and Advocacy Stage

In the retention and advocacy stage, your customer is now post-purchase. Congrats! But, they’re constantly evaluating whether to renew, upgrade, or refer others to your business. It’s time to measure and improve their satisfaction, drive their lifetime value, and encourage advocacy through feedback, loyalty, and referral programs.

Data helps you know which customers are at risk for churn and which are your biggest fans, so pay attention to metrics.

NPS or Customer Satisfaction Scores

Measuring satisfaction in a systematic way is the foundation for automated retention and advocacy programs. When customers are very happy, trigger automated referral requests. When they indicate problems, enroll them in a nurture sequence that shares knowledge base resources or send them to Customer Support for extra attention.

Usage or Adoption Data

When accounts have empty seats or unused features, they’re likely not getting the full value from your product (which leads to higher churn risk). Use this information to trigger education campaigns about overlooked features or nudge invited users who haven’t completed signup or failed to log in for an extended period of time.

Milestone Data

Customers appreciate being recognized. Create positive moments of engagement by celebrating signup anniversaries or hitting key usage milestones with special communications.

For example, leading insurance provider RSA Canada uses customer data to power a gamified leaderboard for its brokers, awarding points for specific activities, celebrating achievements, and motivating more activity with tangible rewards. Since launching their program, RSA Canada has seen a 30% increase in overall broker engagement.

Getting Started With Data-Driven Improvements to the Customer Journey

Applying data across your entire marketing strategy can sound intimidating, but using the customer journey as your guide helps you focus on simply improving one touchpoint at a time.

And you can start at any stage, based on the needs of your organization. If lead generation is your primary concern, begin at the awareness stage. If churn is a major problem, focus on retention first. The more data you begin to leverage, the more ideas will spark about where to improve next and how to continually deliver a relevant, personalized customer experience.

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

Learn More

Customer Journey Mapping: How To Create A Map That Matters

Fri, 22 Oct 2021 19:42:10 +0000

Think of customer journey mapping as your secret ingredient for marketing strategy success. The process allows you to gain a deep understanding of your customers’ needs, goals, pain points, desires and experiences. Companies that use customer journey mapping are twice as likely to outperform competitors that don’t, so it’s definitely worth discovering your ideal customer’s unique path, and using it to enhance her unique experience of your brand.

What is a Customer Journey Map?

As a customer prepares to make a purchase, he will likely have identified a problem he’s trying to solve. Next, he’s going to explore and compare potential solutions. This might include reading reviews or asking questions of different vendors. He might look for proof that the solution has worked for others, or ask for a demonstration, or walkthrough meeting. Usually, marketing and sales teams will identify three or more general stages and get more detailed in the process of building a customer journey map.

A customer journey map is a visual guide to your customer’s step-by-step process as they work towards a specific goal. Identifying these individual steps can give you a deeper understanding of the typical experience of your customers, and what types of information your marketing and sales teams can provide along the way to encourage the actions you’d like them to take.

Any type of action can end up in your customer journey map, including:

Signing up for a newsletter
Making a reservation
Completing a purchase
Signing up for a software trial
Using a comparison tool or checklist
Interacting with a pricing page

The goal is to create a natural-feeling customer journey that leads to a purchase, or grows existing business. In either case, the customer’s journey with your brand shouldn’t end with a purchase. It also needs to include your returns or exchange process, signing up for loyalty programs, getting support, converting on seasonal offers, and/or rewards for word-of-mouth.

Creating a customer journey map allows you to optimize the experience to create a frictionless, efficient pathway to a solved problem. Depending on the goal, customer journey maps can be very simple, or far more complex, but they offer plenty of advantages for any business. Let’s get into some of the most important benefits of customer journey mapping.

The Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping

Creating customer journey maps can take a fair amount of time and effort, but the benefits are well worth it. The main advantages include seeing the big picture, understanding points of friction, identifying gaps your marketing team needs to address, predicting customer behavior, and improving the customer experience.

Seeing the Big Picture

Customer journey mapping is a great way to make sure everyone within your team understands how a customer moves from one part of the research or buying process to another. Without a map, the CX can be very different when dealing with different departments of your business, leaving the customer with a disjointed impression. Using a map allows your team to see the big picture and ensure a consistent CX at all stages of the journey.

Understanding Points of Friction

Build your customer map from the customer’s perspective. The shift makes it easier to understand any points of friction they have throughout the journey, and you may find that the actual journey a customer takes doesn’t match up with your expectations.

Friction can slow your customer journey down and cause frustration that loses you the conversion. If someone signs up for a demo of your software, but has no access to a self-serve knowledge base where they can quickly find answers and get started, it’s highly likely they’ll give up before they have a chance to discover the amazing features that would get them hooked. Adding a content library or on-demand webinar around popular topics can help smooth this friction away.

The goal is to keep your CX as smooth as possible, so you have a better chance at optimizing sales, engagement, or other goals.

Identifying Gaps in the Path to Purchase

As you map out your customer’s journey, your team may identify gaps in the overall CX that you hadn’t noticed before. Perhaps your returns policy is unclear, or customers have urgent queries that no one responds to until the next day, by which time they’ve purchased elsewhere. You may not notice these gaps from the inside, but a customer journey map can help to uncover blind spots.

Predicting Customer Behavior

Customer journey mapping makes it easier to predict which customers will convert and at what point of the sales funnel. You may identify opportunities to help potential customers at specific stages of their journey, thus increasing your conversion rate. Knowing how your customers behave at each touchpoint can also inspire relevant content and connection points for each stage.

Improving Customer Experience

Regularly reviewing and improving your customer journey map is a great way to ensure you’re offering the best CX possible. You may uncover ways you can make the whole experience with your brand even more delightful by offering deals, surprises and value along the way. In some cases, it can be as simple as a fun animation on your website, or app. Proactively improving the experience around these helps build brand loyalty and reduce the risk that your customer decides to switch brands.

How to Build a Customer Journey Map

Use these six steps to guide the process when you’re ready to build or enhance your customer journey map.

1. Create Buyer Personas

The first step of customer journey mapping is to create buyer personas for each of your typical customer groups. Knowing the goal of each buyer persona will help you find ways to meet their specific needs. At this point, it’s also helpful to think about your goals and how a customer journey map can help you meet those while also meeting the specific requirements of each buyer persona.

2. Conduct Direct Research

Getting direct feedback from your customers is one of the best ways to find out exactly what’s important to them – and it might not always be what you expect. Questionnaires and user testing are good strategies to help you find out why customers chose your business and get insights into their experiences.

3. Identify Communication Touchpoints

Using marketing automation data to inform your customer journey map makes it possible to improve your customer experience (CX) and use advanced segmentation strategies to grow your revenue by up to 800%. One of the best places to use marketing automation data to create a customer journey map is in discovering essential touchpoints.

Touchpoints are individual interactions between your company and your customer. Identifying these interaction points in detail gives you an insight into the separate actions that your customers are taking as they move towards a specific action.

Touchpoints can occur in many different channels, including:

Your website
Email marketing
Social channels
Third-party sites

Once you’ve identified your main touchpoints, group them into three sections — pre-purchase, purchase, post-purchase. Grouping touchpoints like this helps you identify what actions are being carried out, when, and how the journey might be improved at certain stages to make the path to purchase easier and faster.

4. Uncover Positive and Negative Moments

Knowing which positive or negative moments come up repeatedly with each touchpoint can offer additional clarity on how to improve the customer journey. It’s important to consider both positives and negatives at each stage of the journey, because your customers’ opinions are likely to differ, and you’ll want to have the chance to adjust and improve either way.

Positive moments can include things like offering free shipping with orders over a certain amount, and adding a 1% discount, or other bonus at checkout as a surprise. Afterall, high shipping costs account for 44% of abandoned shopping carts, so that’s a huge opportunity to save the sale. Clearly, advertising free shipping can help customers decide to move forward with their purchase and a special surprise makes them feel like they’re getting great value for money with a brand that cares about their satisfaction.

On the other hand, negative moments can be hard to overcome. A slow-loading site, for example, can quickly become a negative moment that halts the entire journey. Multiple studies have shown the average person expects a site to load within a few seconds. Pages that take 10 seconds and more to load are dead in the water.

Offering limited channels for technical support can also lead to negative moments. If a customer’s preferred channel isn’t available, they may feel resentful that they can’t pick up the phone or send a quick chat message. This is where your direct research can come into play, because knowing which channels your customers prefer can help you better tailor their journey.

Once you’ve identified negative moments, you’ll need to decide how to overcome them by improving the customer journey, whether that’s making your returns policy easier to find, increasing the speed of your site, or adding a chatbot option to answer important questions and direct someone into a sales conversation. When you’ve uncovered positive moments, enhance them by figuring out how to duplicate across personas, channels, or stages of the buyer’s journey.

5. Travel the Journey Yourself

Now that you’ve gotten this far, the next crucial stage is traveling the customer journey map yourself. Put yourself in the place of each persona, and go through the entire journey. Another option is asking someone else to do this while you observe. Was the process easy, or can it be improved? One pro tip is to have people from different parts of your business test the journey as well, including online and offline components.

Experiencing the customer journey of your competitors can also be a valuable way to gain insights into how the experience of other brands can impact a customer’s perception of your own business. Start by visiting a competitor’s website. For example, you may sign up to receive an ebook with a similar topic to one of your own gated assets. Then, observe the emails or SMS communications you receive. If you’re invited to follow the brand on social media, follow. See what you see. Pay attention to the ads you start to see and schedule a sales call or demo when you are invited to do so. Take screenshots and recordings along the way to keep for inspiration.

6. Create a Visual Map

Customer journey mapping is a visual process, so now it’s time to combine all of your work into a visual. If you’re not sure exactly where each step of the journey goes, start out by using post-it notes to create an initial journey, with touchpoints that can be moved around.

Your map can be simple and linear or more complex, outlining touchpoints across multiple channels.

A basic customer journey may include the following stages:

Awareness → Research → Evaluation → Justification → Purchase → Retention

A more complex journey might look like:

Engagement → Education → Research → Evaluation → Justification → Purchase → Retention → Expansion → Advocacy

For each stage, add in the touchpoints you identified earlier. Then for each piece of the journey, consider:

Customer goals
What is your customer likely to be thinking?
What are their emotions likely to be?
Any points of negativity or positivity?
Opportunities to improve and enhance

It’s generally easier to lay out your stages horizontally, with a column for each bullet point above. Once you have everything in a cohesive structure, you might prefer to create a digital version, like this example from a Carnegie Mellon project for Travel Mate.

How to Implement Customer Journey Mapping Into Your Marketing Strategy

Creating a customer journey map is only the first step toward building enhanced experiences that lead to sales growth for your company. You actually have to implement your customer journey map. So, what does that mean, exactly?

Adjust Your Marketing Strategy

The most powerful way to use your customer mapping journey to help grow your business is to integrate it into your marketing strategy. Consider how you can create or improve content, offers, and calls-to-action at each touchpoint to help meet both your customers’ goals and your own.

A negative experience could occur post-purchase when a customer realizes the service they just signed up for is more complicated to use than expected. If there’s a lack of support post-purchase, the customer may feel frustrated. These negative feelings can be compounded if it’s difficult to contact the account manager for support. Resolving this could involve adjusting your email marketing to include options to book a support slot with account managers, or adding a chatbot for instant advice.

Implementing automated programs that offer relevant content to your customers at just the right point along their journey is an important part of any modern marketing program. Specific marketing strategies like personalized email automation can be used to extend each customer’s lifecycle by creating and delivering content that drives loyalty and retention. Personalized marketing like customer segmentation and adaptive sending can help result in a 10% increase in sales.

Consider how the customer journey also extends post-purchase. Existing customers are your best customers, with a 60-70% chance of making a purchase, compared to 5-20% for new customers. Nurture those relationships by using segmentation to match them with new products or services. Launching referral or advocacy programs can help drive brand loyalty as well.

Use Marketing Automation Data to Reassess Regularly

Once your first customer journey mapping is complete, it’s important to revisit it regularly. Aim to reassess at least every 6-12 months. You can collect data from Google Analytics, social media, reviews, and your marketing automation platform. Analyzing this will give you powerful insights into which points in your customer journey need to be improved.

Other points when it’s useful to reassess are when you launch new products, find that your customers are using different technology, or that their tastes are changing. Once you’ve made any changes, adjust your marketing strategy as necessary.

Customer Journey Mapping In Action

RATESDOTCA used customer journey mapping to create a more personalized customer narrative, leading to a 15% increase in annual email revenue. The financial services aggregator used customized content to accelerate the customer journey with the right information at the right time to advance toward the conversion.

Why Redefining Customer Experience is Critical to the Automotive Sector

Act-On — Thu, 24 Jun 2021 13:00:57 +0000

How can the automotive industry leverage marketing automation to redefine customer experience and drive growth?

While the pandemic hit the automotive sector pretty hard, the last two months have shown some
strong signs of recovery. And with the traditional September peak of new ‘71’ registrations in Britain
just three months away, there’s plenty of reason for the industry to be more optimistic.

That said, the industry has been the subject of significant change in recent years, not just from
COVID, but from disruptive, electric-only manufacturers, online-only retailers, and new ownership /
purchasing models. All of these changes are driving and responding to evolutions in buyer behaviour
which de-emphasizes the traditional showroom-led sales model and puts ever-increasing
importance on online activity.

A marketing-driven customer experience is critical for both manufacturers and dealerships to not
only survive these challenging times, but to thrive in an ever-changing competitive landscape.
Central to this is leveraging marketing automation to extend the experience beyond the showroom
and proactively engage customers across every stage of their lifecycle.

Attracting New Buyers

Today, most buying journeys start on your website. This is where marketing automation delivers its
first point of value by serving up appropriate online content and encouraging browsers to complete
simple forms to turn them into known contacts.

Once known, you can track and cultivate interest. Every time that potential buyer steps back to your
website, you are able to track what type of vehicles they are looking at and even gauge their
propensity to purchase through the pages visited and the content they engage with.

Armed with this information, you can leverage marketing automation to nurture this interest,
proactively sending them additional information, tempting them with promotional offers, and
securing a test drive.

This level of online engagement enables you to redefine the showroom experience. You can simplify
the process of booking a visit, collect insights into the customer’s preferences before they step foot
in the showroom, and tailor their experience to their specific needs.

Driving Lifetime Value

Managing the customer’s after-sales experience is key in generating both lifetime value and customer loyalty. This is another area where marketing automation can streamline processes while taking customer experience to the next level.

Seamlessly integrating your marketing platform with your customer data enables you to automate and be proactive in your engagement. Communication can be triggered by customer events such as a pending service or MOT, by seasonal promotions such as a winter vehicle check, or by leveraging what you know about the customer to target offers or events such as a new model launch.

Marketing automation can also play a key role in offering a digital experience, allowing after-sales services to be booked online and leveraging SMS to deliver the clever touch of reminders and updates.

Progressing the Next Sale

By utilising marketing automation and what you know about your customers, you can get smart in predicting when they may be getting close to their next purchase. Trigger points such as an impending end of a lease or finance, the average time span between purchase, or the release of a new model can automatically trigger cultivation activity. But where this gets even smarter is being able to track when the customer starts looking at information on your website or engaging with your communications indicating they are starting a buying cycle.

Other sectors have clearly shown the power of marketing and the customer experience in driving both lifetime value and loyalty. The same benefits can be gained in the automotive sector.

Deliver Amazing Customer Experiences With Act-On

Act-On has already assisted a number of organisations in this sector with streamlining customer management and driving growth with our growth marketing automation platform.

Looking to learn more about how marketing automation can help your dealership overcome common industry challenges? Download our eBook, How the Automotive Industry Can Leverage Marketing Automation for Growth and Retention.

If you’re ready to talk shop and want to see our platform in action, schedule a personalized demo with one of our marketing automation experts. They would love to show you how you can “drive” better customer experiences.

Orchestrate Engaging and Immersive Brand Experiences With Act-On’s Automated Journey Builder

Act-On — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 13:00:00 +0000

Modern marketing strategies are evolving past the attract and capture model to focus on delivering better brand and buying journeys that drive more interest, engagement, and value for both prospects and customers alike.

Generating demand will always be a critical component of any well-constructed marketing and sales funnel, but engaging your target audiences with immersive experiences across multiple channels and touchpoints throughout the entire lifecycle continuum is critical for both immediate and sustained business growth. As a way of turning that belief into action, Act-On has completely reimagined our automated program feature set and are proud to announce that we are releasing the new and improved Automated Journey Builder on October 19, 2020.

Keep reading to learn more about the Automated Journey Builder and how it provides users with an unprecedented ability to deliver exceptional brand experiences and buying journeys.

How to Move Beyond Lead Capture and Improve Brand Experiences

Before we delve into the features and benefits of the new Automated Journey Builder within Act-On, let’s get a feel for the current landscape. Chiefly, how and why the quality of the customer experience has overtaken the quantity of leads in terms of importance.

Historically, marketers have been tasked with driving as many leads as possible to give Sales the most potential opportunities. However, that model led to major inefficiencies as the majority of these leads simply weren’t ready to have a purchasing discussion or weren’t actually part of an organization’s target audience. As a result, salespeople continued to find themselves chasing “leads” that didn’t want to be caught. So, within the last few years, successful marketers have pulled back the throttle on lead generation and began shifting much of their focus toward fostering those leads into sales-ready prospects.

The way they’ve done that is by nurturing existing prospects (and existing customers) with automated buying journeys. And since most marketers are now placing an emphasis on nurturing throughout the customer lifecycle, the most successful brands have differentiated themselves by focusing on delivering better brand experiences.

This makes good sense, as in 2010, 36% of companies competed primarily on the basis of the customer experience. In 2019, that number had risen to 80% (1). In addition, according to Qualtrics XM Institute, “87% of customers who say they had a great experience will make another purchase from the company, compared to 18% of customers who had a very poor experience. (2)”

By leveraging data-driven marketing automation solutions, marketers can track engagement and behaviors to deliver on specific pain points and needs, exceeding customer expectations and differentiating their brand and offerings from the competition. Understanding where customers are in their journey and what they need to succeed allows marketers to provide timely and relevant messaging and content across multiple channels at key touchpoints. At Act-On, we’ve made this process even easier, more intuitive, and more effective with Automated Journey Builder.

What Is the Automated Journey Builder?

The completely reimagined and reinvented Automated Journey Builder is a highly visual automation environment that makes it easier than ever to plan, build, copy, share, and deliver myriad communications workflows. The tool is designed to nurture prospects into sales-ready leads and further engage your existing customers for better product and service adoption, retention, and advocacy.

According to one of our beta-testers, Daniel Schmieding (Director of Digital Marketing, AdvisoryCloud), “The new UX design looks great and aligns perfectly with recent changes to the user interface. It’s cleaner, more legible, and less busy. It’s much more clear than the old version, which makes it a lot more usable and user-friendly.”

An interactive and dynamic marketing automation tool, the Automated Journey Builder allows marketers to deliver against diverse journeys and customer pathways. And with built-in multi-channel capabilities, you can drive engagement along numerous potential touchpoints. Best of all, you can templatize and save workflows to increase efficiencies and maintain brand consistency across all of your automated campaigns.

How to Convert More Leads Into Customers

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How the Automated Journey Builder Improves Marketing Efficiency and Outcomes

Marketers are inherently creative people who want the ability to flex those creative muscles in a fun and beautiful environment. The Automated Journey Builder allows you to do just that.

Here’s what another of our beta-testers, Cara Moretti (Creative Manager, REV Group) had to say about her experience with the Automated Journey Builder. “From a visual standpoint, the Automated Journey Builder makes it so much easier to identify where prospects are in their journey and then deliver better experiences. It’s so much easier to use and follow than the previous version of the tool.”

Whether you’re creating simple or complex (or anything in between) programs, the Automated Journey Builder allows for a more interactive and flexible design experience while expanding your ability to engage across channels and touchpoints. And with a significantly improved ability to visualize program construction thanks to new zoom and pan functionality, you can build better programs in less time with increased efficiency. Additionally, updated tracking features allows you to track engagement — empowering you to identify strengths and weaknesses within each journey and adjust accordingly for consistent and sustained improvement.

Common and Effective Automated Journey Builder Use Cases

The best part about the new Automated Journey Builder is its versatility. For years, marketers have been frustrated by limited multi-channel messaging program functionality within their marketing automation platform, but our reimagined feature allows for unparalleled campaign dynamism.

Here are just a few examples of how you can leverage the Automated Journey Builder to deliver truly exceptional brand experiences and buyer journeys.

Prospect Nurturing

By tracking entry points and engagement at multiple touchpoints, you can leverage scoring, intent, and segmentation to construct efficient and effective automated prospect nurturing campaigns. When you understand behaviors and identify patterns, you can add more relevant messaging, content, and calls-to-action to these programs for further engagement. These data-driven approaches will improve and accelerate the lead-to-conversion process. And by adding if-then logic and dynamic content, you can guide prospects along a uniquely tailored experience that will exceed expectations and leave a lasting impact.

Customer Marketing

Extending and expanding customer relationships is a critical aspect of scalable marketing for sustained growth. Once a lead becomes a customer, you can continue the conversation with prompt and thorough welcome and onboarding campaigns, product and service adoption programs to drive satisfaction and retention, and even promotional journeys designed to drive additional opportunities and sales. Lastly, you can build simple or complex campaigns that evangelize your customer base and encourage advocacy and referrals.

Lifecycle Engagement

Modern growth marketers transcend the traditional buying funnel to engage with target audiences across the entire lifecycle — regardless of channel, medium, or stage. The Automated Journey Builder allows you to deliver throughout the lifecycle with progressive and consistent messaging and content that is entertaining, educational, and engaging. Choreograph and orchestrate across numerous touchpoints based on numerous behaviors and real-time data points to nurture prospects and upsell existing customers with sneak peeks, free trials, and exclusive promotions.

Improve the Brand Experience With Act-On’s Automated Journey Builder

Whatever your organization’s goals may be, the reimagined and reconfigured Automated Journey Builder allows you to delight your target audiences at every turn — anticipating their needs and delivering value at critical points. The new interface is extremely intuitive and interactive without compromising power or functionality.

If you’d like to see the new and improved Automated Journey Builder in action, please schedule a 20-minute demo with a marketing automation expert today. If you’re not quite ready to have that conversation, you can click here to take the interactive tour of our proven and innovative platform.

Still learning about marketing automation or researching the best fit for your organization? Click here to learn how to make marketing automation a reality!

How to Make Marketing Automation a Reality

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How to Identify Your Ideal Marketing Audience to Provide the Best Customer Experience

Act-On — Tue, 22 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Great marketing isn’t easy, but the general premise is simple enough: right person; right message; right time. That’s really all it comes down to in the end.

The tricky part, of course, is learning how to identify your ideal audience in the first place. From there, you can begin to drill down on messaging and timing.

It gets even trickier, however, when key stakeholders insist that they’ve already solved for each of those three elements based solely on their personal beliefs about who and what that ideal audience, message, and time actually are — usually based on intuition and anecdotal experience. That might be a great way to miss the mark and lose a boatload of money doing so, but it’s not the right way to market to your ideal audience.

Understanding your prospects and customers and delivering the perfect messaging at opportune moments takes a lot more than a gut feeling; it requires marketers to have productive conversations with Sales, develop thorough customer personas, gather and analyze relevant data, and then test their messaging with different audience segments on numerous channels at different stages in the buyer’s cycle. In short, it takes a lot of work.

If you’re ready to start delivering great customer experiences to prospects who are legitimately interested in your products and services, you’re in luck! Keep reading to learn how to identify your ideal audience and capitalize on their needs and pain points.

Lead Segmentation

As is usually the case, putting your best foot forward means looking to the past for inspiration — and this is especially true when it comes to identifying your ideal audience. But how can you possibly make sense of all the data at your disposal and all potential buyers in your pipeline? Well, you can’t, but you can certainly try — and in that attempt, you’ll uncover tons of useful breadcrumbs that are most reflective of your ideal audience and can be used to build personas and segment your leads.

Ask yourself, historically:

Who have been your best customers?
Which products and services have they been most interested in?
What is their background?
What is their job title and responsibilities?
Do they have decision-making power within their organization?
What are their main concerns, challenges, and pain points?
How have they interacted with your traditional, digital, and event marketing campaigns?

More than just asking yourself these questions, ask your sales team as well. Review the data in your CRM or marketing automation platform to cross-reference these discussions. Check Google Analytics or whichever tool(s) you use to gather great digital insights. Create surveys for current customers or poll those in the market for your offerings. Collect and gather all possible data points, look for similarities and patterns, and then use this information to begin crafting detailed buyer personas.

Once you’ve built your personas, you can begin grouping existing leads and customers into your marketing segments — smaller groups of similar consumers. The number of segments will vary based on the size of your company, your range of products and services, and the behavioral and demographic diversity of your ideal audiences. Then use these segments to tailor your marketing efforts based on each group’s shared characteristics.

For instance, you can create PPC remarketing campaigns to target people who have visited your website without taking your desired action (such as completing a form or making a purchase). Or, depending on your company size and objectives, you can segment your email marketing campaigns based on location to increase personalization and drive better engagement.

Lead Tracking

Now that you’ve sorted out your various audience segments based on your buyer personas, it’s time to start creating and launching your campaigns. But your work developing your ideal audience isn’t done yet! (Hint: it never is.) In fact, once your campaigns are live, you should be closely tracking your leads and taking note of how they’re engaging with your various marketing and sales initiatives.

Lead tracking is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: documenting lead interaction and engagement across all of your marketing channels. When you’re tracking lead behaviors, you’re able to score them more accurately to better understand exactly where they are in the sales cycle. Not only that, but you’ll develop a solid understanding of which marketing strategies and tactics are working best across which marketing mediums and channels and gain a better understanding of how different audience segments make purchasing decisions.

As it relates specifically to curating an accurate picture of your ideal audience segment, lead tracking is absolutely essential because it allows you to aggregate key data points in real-time to consistently monitor and update your segments. Your ideal audience is likely constantly shifting, especially if you regularly release new offerings or expand your business into new locales, so your segments should never remain stagnant. That said, when tracking your leads, you should be paying close attention to each consumer’s:

Recency: When was the last time prospects or customers within this segment engaged with your brand or made a purchase?
Frequency: How often do the prospects or customers within this segment engage with your brand or make a purchase?
Monetary: What is the average purchase selection, amount, or cost per acquisition within this segment?

Segmenting consumers according to recency, frequency, and monetary (RFP) engagement lets you get at the heart of your current customer base and serve up relevant content and product recommendations.

Smart Content Mapping for Maximum Engagement

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Analyze Consumer Behavior on Your Website

Tracking your leads is great, but analyzing those behaviors to create actionable segments that lead to more relevant campaigns is where the rubber really meets the road. It’s impossible to know how to segment and deliver better experiences to your ideal audience segments without installing the proper data collection tools and having a skilled marketer monitoring and analyzing all of this information.

So it’s essential that you set up:

Google Analytics: This is a fairly straightforward process, and most of you have probably already done it, but if you haven’t, you should stop reading and do so now. Google Analytics is free, super easy to set up, and gives you granular insights into your website visitors, where they’re coming from, and what they’re engaging with. It’s the granddaddy of them all when it comes to tracking digital data.
UTM Tags: To better understand precious campaign and referral information, you should add UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters to your URLs to track where each lead finds and engages with your brand. This way, you can have full visibility into the pages and pieces of content that are working — and which aren’t.
Funnel Insights: Your sales and marketing teams should be tracking essential funnel insights to better understand the visitor you’re collecting throughout the buyer cycle. This will help you grasp lead flow and velocity, as well as identify potential information and/or content gaps along the customer journey.

As you continue down the evolving path of identifying your ideal personas, segments, and audiences, you should pay especially close attention to the Behavior Flow Report in Google Analytics. This feature paints an accurate and detailed picture of how your customers are navigating throughout your website and digital properties, so you can use it to understand exactly where users are choosing to bounce from your site or continue on with their journey. Simply put, it tells you what’s working and what’s not and provides answers to crucial questions, like:

What is the most common entry point, and is it effectively moving users throughout the site?
What are the most common usage patterns, and do they align with your sales and marketing goals?
Is there a way to reroute popular pages with less value to less popular pages with higher values?

If you’re already using the Act-On platform, you can get even more granular with this analysis with IP Lead Tracking. This feature allows you to see how your anonymous prospects are interacting with your website and content on an individual level, providing Marketing and Sales with an abundance of useful insights they can leverage once that lead becomes known and qualified.

Gleaning the answers to these vital questions will give you a much better understanding of your customers’ intentions and behaviors, which will allow you to continue tweaking your segments over time based on your website’s strengths and weaknesses. Of course, the ancillary benefit here is that Behavior Flow Reports also give you the chance to make positive updates to your website to improve the overall user experience.

Apply Your Knowledge to Create Personalized Customer Journey

It used to be the case that segmentation allowed you to tailor the customer journey in broad strokes. Today, segmentation allows you to actually personalize the customer journey at the individual level. Modern data collection and analysis allow us to deliver individualized messages and campaigns to prospects and customers alike. In this way, personalization can be seen as the next logical step in the evolution of targeted customer experiences.

You’ve probably been reading and hearing a lot about personalization, but you might not yet be convinced of its power or efficacy. Make no mistake, personalization is the defining marketing tactic of this decade.

57% of consumers are willing to share personal data in exchange for personalized offers or discounts (1)
Personalized emails deliver 600% more traction (2)
Marketers have used personalization to improve their overall customer experience by 61% (3)
That same poll revealed an increase of 63% in conversion rates and a 57% increase in visitor engagement thanks to personalization (4)
74% of customers feel frustrated when website content isn’t personalized (5)
91% of consumers are likely to shop with brands that deliver personalized recommendations (6)

Think about it this way: your audience is constantly bombarded with messaging from every angle and at all times. After a while, all of this messaging turns into white noise, and consumers completely check out. They know when they’re being sold a blanketed offer, and their simply not interested. Personalization, however, allows you to get ultra-targeted in how you address your customer base, the content and products you serve them, and the way in which you position those materials.

So now that you’re focusing on segmenting your ideal audiences at a more granular level, you should use the information at your disposal to create dynamic content, emails, and landing pages that speak directly to their needs, challenges, and pain points. Start with your most common and lucrative audience segment and create 1-2 collateral assets. Then use these content pieces to build organic, social, and paid campaigns that speak directly to the end-user as you nurture them through the customer journey.

Follow these best practices to achieve great results:

Too Much of a Good Thing: Remarketing campaigns are awesome because they allow you to stay front and center throughout the customer journey. But don’t get carried away. Many people find this sort of advertising creepy, so keep it to one campaign per segmented audience.
It’s Not About You: Modern marketing means moving beyond self-promotion toward a more customer-centric approach. Focus on consumer wants and needs by providing thought leadership content and intelligent product recommendations — without all the salesy nonsense.
Tweak the Messaging: Even if you have your personas and segments nailed down perfectly, you might have to experience with the messaging a bit to really knock this whole personalization thing out of the park. A/B test your campaigns and keep your content team on standby to update your materials and positioning at a moment’s notice.

Attract, Nurture, and Convert More Leads With Marketing Automation

So, one caveat here… segmenting, tracking, analyzing, and improving your customer personas and journeys is extremely difficult to do the right way without the proper software. For instance, basic email service providers like Mailchimp and Constant Contact might help with some basic manual segmentation, but they’re not intuitive or powerful enough for:

More granular segmentation
Accurate tracking and scoring
In-depth analysis and reporting
Content mapping to improve the customer experience

Thankfully, Act-On can do all of this and more! Schedule a demo with one of our marketing automation experts today to learn how!

If you’re not quite ready for all that just yet but would like to learn more about how marketing automation can help you reach the right people at the right time with the right message, please download our eBook, “Smart Content Mapping for Maximum Engagement” today!

Smart Content Mapping for Maximum Engagement

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The Importance of Customer Obsession in Product Development

Act-On — Wed, 11 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

At Act-On, we pride ourselves on continuing to innovate a platform that is easy to use and can grow with the needs of our customers. But we wouldn’t be able to deliver on that promise if we didn’t believe in the importance of customer experience optimization in everything we do — especially product engineering. So we reached out to Act-On’s new CPO, Aaron Johnson, to get the scoop on how he and his team are making the Act-On platform even more powerful and effective.

Aaron comes to us from New Relic, where he most recently served as the Senior Vice President of Product Management and led the product management and product marketing teams. Before that, he spent nearly 10 years at Jive Software — where he looked after the engineering, QA, and design teams — and made significant contributions to the organization during a period of massive growth.

Needless to say, Aaron brings a wealth of experience and knowledge to the table, and we’re excited to see how he’ll help us continue to achieve our mission to deliver our customers with the most innovative marketing automation solutions.

During our chat with AJ (as he’s affectionately known around the office), we learned that his marketing background and commitment to a great customer experience both inform his approach to product development. We also learned about the changes he’s implementing and the projects his team is prioritizing to make Act-On even more accessible, efficient, and effective for customers.

Read the interview below to learn more about AJ, his approach to product development and innovation, and his hopes for improving the Act-On platform moving forward.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself and describe your role at Act-On?

I graduated in the ‘90s from a small liberal arts college in Southern California called Biola University with a degree in marketing — which, at the time, focused on a very analytical view of marketing. Soon after graduating, I realized it was going to be very difficult finding a job within that field, so I taught myself how to write code and create web pages and ended up working for a number of web consulting shops. I eventually found myself working for Acushnet Golf, the largest golf company at the time, in their marketing and advertising department. My job there was to oversee and manage the technical backend of over 30 websites in multiple languages.

In 2006, my wife and I had our first child and decided it was time to move back to Portland, and I joined Jive Software as a software engineer. While I was there, I ended up helping the company grow from 22 employees to over 700. During my time at Jive, I led all of the engineering, design, and QA for a number of years. Then I took a job where I ran a very small team that was in charge of fixing performance and scalability issues for all on-premise and cloud customers.

Through that experience, I got to use and became very familiar with a tool called New Relic. Since I knew the tool well and knew a few people working at the company, I eventually found my way to New Relic and led a small team there. After my boss left, I took over product management and product marketing and did that for a couple of years.

Now that I’m at Act-On, I’m excited about the opportunity to combine both my background in product management and engineering to lead this team.

What attracted you to this position at Act-On?

It was primarily the fact that I would be able to focus on both engineering and product management. Also, my previous experience made me feel like I could help take Act-On to the next level. For example, when I started at Jive, the company was in a very similar position to where we are now, and I was able to contribute to and experience many of the transitions that happened at that company. I also liked that I’d be able to use the product management experience that I attained at New Relic. Lastly, I had previously worked with many of the same folks in our leadership at other companies, so Act-On just seemed like a great place for me to land.

How have you enjoyed your time so far and what are you looking forward to the most?

Some of the best days in my career have been when you see a graph moving up and to the right or down to the right, such as making changes that help performance response time go down or contribute to pipeline growth. In the three months I’ve been here, it has been gratifying to take a lot of metrics and put them front and center and make changes to our platform that are really helping our customers see results. For example, we’ve made significant improvements to CRM sync time and response time and other features that make the daily jobs of our customers so much easier.

Can you tell us a bit more about your approach to product development?

Sure! There are three things that I’ve seen in the past that have worked really well that I want to bring to our team here.

To start, I believe that technology takes a backseat to customer experience. As an engineer, it’s very cool to use new tools and learn new things, but none of that matters unless you’re optimizing the customer experience. If our customers aren’t enjoying using the platform, then we’re not doing our job.

The second thing is that there is a tendency at every organization to work on things that are easy and fun. Sometimes for engineers, it’s easy to ignore complicated things (such as old code) that were done in the past and focus on creating new features. I prefer that we look at things that are hard and will be valuable to our customers instead of focusing on small deliverables that will have minimal impact.

Third, I believe we will establish better credibility with our customers if we work on things incrementally and deliver them on a more regular basis instead of focusing on projects that will take a long time to complete. This gives us an opportunity to see what’s working with customers and what’s not.

How has your background in marketing influenced your approach to product development?

I think that because I come from a marketing background instead of CS, one of the things that has always mattered to me is the customer experience, and that is something I’m trying to bring to our team. It’s important to me that we empathize with customers, learn what needs and pain points they have, and brainstorm how we can solve them. I want to emphasize to our engineers that it’s not just our work on the backend that matters but also how customers experience our platform on an everyday basis.

How do you think Act-On stands out or can do to stand out from other marketing automation solutions?

One of the ways we stand out is that our support team has done a lot of work to understand the needs of our customers. As some of our competitors are getting bought by bigger companies, charging for things such as SSL, and seeing a sharp decline in their level of customer service, I think we can stand out by having a commitment to listening to our customers, providing excellent service, and delivering innovative updates as fast as possible.

What are your priorities in terms of product innovation to make Act-On an even more competitive platform?

One of the things that I’ve seen in my career is that there is a tendency for companies to focus on too many objectives, and that’s something that I saw with my team when I first came on. I’ve made a change to have us focus on a smaller set of priorities that will have a much bigger impact. For example, as I previously mentioned, this quarter we’re really focusing on CRM integration. We’ve also added the contact search feature so that our customers can easily find individual contacts. We’ve rolled that out as a beta feature to a few customers and plan to continue to roll it out to more over the next several weeks.

There is also a lot of work that we can do to make our platform work more seamlessly. For example, many of our competitors (such as MailChimp and Marketo) charge you for implementing SSL certificates. Not only do marketing teams have to pay for these certificates, but whoever is in charge has to talk to their IT team and figure out a very technical thing — which isn’t something most marketers feel very comfortable doing. As a team, we realized this was a huge pain point for our customers, so we’ve made the SSL certification process much easier to remove this blocker.

Without giving too much away, what things are you gearing your team to accomplish in the next 3 months? 6 months? Year?

In the next quarter, we’d like to move to a more modern contact management system and continue our work on CRM. I’d also love to have a product that has even better funnel reports, revenue attribution reports, and data that customers can use. I think there is also a way for us to use those reports to improve the way that we show the value to our customers — either within the platform or by email.

In addition, I believe marketing automation is the core of what we do, and I want to find ways to make our product stickier with our customers so they can fully leverage all of its capabilities. We’re brainstorming ways in which we can make tasks, such as setting up automated programs, even more intuitive.

On top of adding new features, there are always security and regulated industry concerns that we need to address as we develop the platform.

Can you talk about how we’re rolling out new updates by time zone or our recent work with automating SSL certifications for our customers?

I have a product delivery philosophy of releasing things incrementally instead of waiting six months to get something out the door. When I came on, the team was rolling out to our entire customer base every other Tuesday at 6 PM. In the course of the next few months, I want to get to the point where we roll out on a daily basis. Right now, we are also rolling out changes in smaller batches instead of to our entire customer base, so that we don’t have to do a complete rollback if things don’t work out.

The goal for the SSL certificate process is that it’s out of the box and it just works for our customers. That update is currently in place for new customers. We also have a program that we’re working on with Sarah Moore, our Senior Customer Marketing Manager, to notify current customers that have upcoming renewals of this more streamlined process.

What is your approach to collecting customer feedback? What role do customers play in helping you decide the most important projects to work on?

One of the best days I had in my career at New Relic was when we had a project manager from Amazon come talk to us for a half day about all the different ways they gather user feedback to understand what customers are doing (and why) and focus on meeting those needs. Something that stuck with me was that for every new feature they did a minimum of 50 1:1 customer interviews.

One of the things I’m asking my team to do is increase the number of customer conversations they have, and we’re even working on building a customer advisory board to help us collect customer feedback. This will help us better understand what our customers are trying to do and build software that allows them to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively.

We are also sending emails to customers asking them about their experience during the beta process. An advantage of releasing a big feature to a small group is that we can incrementally collect feedback from users, which helps us test for reliability as we scale these changes.

Lastly, what do you like to do when you’re not working on making Act-On an even more accessible and powerful marketing automation platform?

My wife and I have three boys, so I keep very busy with them. We also recently adopted a 130lb dog, an Anatolian Shepherd and Pyrenees mix, which I guess makes four boys, and we all spend a lot of time together outdoors.

When I’m not doing that, I’m looking at charts!

How to Create CTAs That Convert

Act-On — Tue, 10 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Results-focused marketers know that their marketing efforts are only successful if they contribute to their organization’s bottom line. That requires them to go beyond focusing on brand awareness to develop marketing campaigns and collateral that attract, nurture, and, most importantly, convert leads into customers. In other words, our job, as marketers, is to motivate our target audience to keep wanting to learn more until they reach the finish line.

Whether the marketing materials you are leveraging to attract, engage, and keep your customers moving along are part of an email, social media campaign, or landing page, one thing always rings true: clear and attractive calls to action (CTAs) are crucial for generating conversions. However, crafting a CTA that convinces your customer to fill out a form or schedule a demo can be way more difficult than it sounds. Everything from wording, placement, and relevance can influence whether your customer decides to take that action. And, unfortunately, finding a recipe that works often involves a lot of trial and error.

While we definitely recommend you A/B test your CTAs and other elements of your marketing efforts, the process of refining and enhancing your marketing campaigns is easier when you already have a good foundation to work with. And while there are a variety of factors that can influence whether your target customer clicks on a CTA, there are definitely a few best practices you can follow to improve your chances of piquing your audience’s interest. To help you on your way toward marketing success, we’ve compiled the following tips to help you craft CTAs that are sure to convert more leads.

Be Clear About What You Want Your Customers to Do

The worst mistake that you can make with your calls to action is to not be direct about what you want customers to do and what they will get if they do. If your call to action is not clear from the beginning, you risk having your email recipients or web visitors ignore your plea and navigate elsewhere. Or, even worse, if your prospect does decide to click through, they might be disappointed if they aren’t met with the offer or asset they were expecting to find. This is a surefire way to set the wrong tone and might lead to lack of engagement or unsubscribes and spam complaints down the line.

Setting clear expectations about what you want your customers to do and what you will deliver when they complete that action allows you to prevent any confusion and improves your chance of success. So, if your goal is to get your prospects to fill out a form to download an eBook, place a button below the form that says “Download the eBook!” instead of “Submit.” This format indicates to your prospects that the eBook will be their reward for filling out the form.

Emphasize the Value Your Offer Provides Your Customers

Whether you’re asking your target audience to download an eBook or make an appointment to talk to an expert, you have to offer some sort of incentive to complete the action that you’re asking them to do. That doesn’t mean that you need to start handing out Amazon gift cards or sending personalized gifts. Instead, you need to ensure that whatever they get when they click a button or fill out a form provides some sort of value.

For example, if you’re offering your audience an eBook, you should use your blog or email copy to clearly explain the type of valuable information they’ll gain if they choose to download and read it. Chances are there’s plenty of easily accessible content on the same topic available online, so your users and recipients will be more inclined to check out what you have to offer if they know what makes it unique. Or, if you’re asking them to schedule a demo with one of your salespeople, make sure to highlight the value of your product or service so they’ll be enticed to clear some time on their calendar to learn more about what you do.

Make Sure Your CTAs Stand Out and Are Easy to Find

It should be common sense by now that a customer cannot complete an action if they can’t find your CTA to begin with. Yet, we’ve all received that confusing email or come across a landing page where we learn about an incredible offer but have no way of knowing where to click in order to access it. In these instances, both the marketer and the prospect end up losing out on a good opportunity.

To avoid this fiasco, design the layout of your email or page so that your CTAs stand out and are easy to find. Don’t hide them on other pages, tuck them beside small-text telephone numbers, or make them available only after multiple clicks or searching.

Where you place your CTAs on a page or email can also influence whether your audience decides to click. Placing your CTAs in the following locations will make them more visible and increase the chance of having your prospect follow through.

Above the fold: Putting a CTA “above the fold” on your site or email means placing it where it can be seen immediately without scrolling. Include a CTA above the fold on the first page of your site, landing page, email, or other digital property. For emails, we recommend using a responsive template to ensure all recipients can see your CTA regardless of their device.
In the navigation bars: A “Get Started” or “Learn More” button in the navigation bars at the top or bottom of your page can encourage visitors to take action.
To the side: You could include a signup button or offer along the side column of your content where readers will see it as they scroll. (This is an especially good tactic for blogs.)
At the end: The end-of-page CTA can be a good anchor for your page, providing a reason for site visitors to take an action while the information they’ve just read is still fresh in their minds. If they’ve read all the way to the end of your page or email, they are likely interested, so you should take advantage of this opportunity by providing them with a way to further engage with your brand.

Provide More Than One Opportunity for Prospects to Respond to Your CTA

If your CTA is located within the body copy of an email, for example, you can improve the chances of getting your recipient to convert by providing more than one way for them to respond. In this case, you can insert a link to your offer in the header of your email, the body copy, and in a button at the end of the body copy. The reason this works is because some recipients will be immediately ready to learn more while others might want to read your email through to get more context before making a decision.

If the opportunity calls for it, you can also have more than one CTA. We recommend this tactic with middle-of-funnel customers who may either be at the stage where they want to talk to a sales rep or keep learning more before committing to a real discussion. Providing them options offers them the opportunity to keep engaging regardless of the path they choose. In these instances, however, prioritize your CTAs so that your audience doesn’t choose the option that would be least beneficial for you.

Provide Personalized Recommendations

Even if your calls to action are clear and you do a great job of describing the value of what you’re offering, prospects will not complete an action if neither of these are relevant to them. Your CTAs should coincide with your customers’ stage in the sales funnel, their industry, and overall pain points or interests.

For example, your prospects are more likely to schedule a time to talk to an expert as they’re entering the decision-making stage than they will be if they’re just starting to become acquainted with your brand. Similarly, you have a better chance of getting a professional who works in manufacturing to download an eBook about supply chain technology than someone who works in the insurance industry.

Providing every single customer with a targeted experience might seem like a handful, but it doesn’t have to be if you have the proper tools. A marketing automation platform (such as Act-On) can help you segment your audience based on where they’re at in the buyer journey, their product interests, pain points, and more, so you can improve your ability to target them with relevant information via email. Better yet, tools such as adaptive forms and lead scoring can help you uncover the insights you need to provide a more targeted experience.

Keep the Momentum Going With Adaptive Web

Speaking of personalized recommendations, you can improve your ability to drive conversions if you continuously provide your audience with multiple opportunities to engage as they browse (instead of relying on a single CTA). Act-On’s Adaptive Web allows you provide each prospect with a personalized web experience by delivering the right content at the right time. This not only allows you to keep your customers moving through the sales funnel and present them with multiple CTAs, but it also provides you an opportunity to keep collecting valuable insights so that both marketing and sales can nurture (and eventually convert) better leads into loyal customers.

Want to learn more about how you can leverage your website to generate demand and drive conversions? Download our eBook, Personalizing the Web Experience (also linked below).

Dynamic Website Personalization: How to Use It Successfully

Act-On — Tue, 30 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Current state: You know that you need to improve website traffic and conversions. Despite having good content and a good content marketing strategy, you’re just not where you want to be. And you’re pretty sure it’s time to see what all the fuss around website personalization is all about.

It’s true. Website personalization is all the rage these days — and with good reason. There’s no better way to get great content, product, and service recommendations in front of your target audience segments.

Naturally, though, there’s a bit of a catch. Not all personalization solutions are created equal.

Some are more expensive than others.

Some are more labor-intensive than others.

And some are more effective than others.

But even the most affordable, efficient, and effective website personalization solutions can’t achieve their full potential without a thoughtful and thorough website personalization strategy.

Let’s dig a little deeper to gain a shared understanding of what we mean when we say “website personalization,” how you and your marketing team can implement and use website personalization successfully, and also a few of the main benefits of website personalization.

What Is Website Personalization?

Website personalization uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to track user behavior data and deliver tailored experiences based on those behaviors. As a result, you’re able to better target and engage your website visitors as they navigate your site. Better yet, as you review your key performance indicators (pages visited, time on page and site, and conversions), you’re able to then build and update your content strategy around what’s working — and also improve what’s not.

The idea behind website personalization is that it’s a win-win for everyone. Your consumers don’t have to go on a wild goose chase scouring your website for the information they need. And you’re able to deliver a more comfortable and rewarding experience for your website visitors while also getting awesome insight into the strengths and weaknesses of your content and your content strategy.

For example, let’s say your regional insurance agency sells a ton of great offerings that cover a variety of different policy types (home, auto, life, etc.). Your customers can either purchase individual policies or bundle their coverage. Your software notices that certain website visitors are interested in just one type of coverage, but there’s also another subset of users who seem to be viewing and engaging with content across two or more policy types. A good website personalization solution will begin serving up quotes and content related to bundled insurance offerings to this unique audience segment since they clearly have a need for (or at least an interest in) multiple insurance products.

Website personalization helps you streamline the attraction phase of your holistic marketing strategy, gather useful data for further outreach, and create stronger, more trusting relationships between you and your prospects and customers. What’s more, it gives your sales team crystal clear visibility into your visitors’ preferences and interests — empowering them to have more informed and impactful conversations with new leads and current clients.

It shortens the sales cycle, improves conversion rates, and leads to more and better closed deals.

How to Use Website Personalization Successfully

So now that we know what website personalization is, let’s examine the steps involved in learning how to use website personalization successfully.

1) Optimize Your Existing Content Strategy for a Website Personalization Solution

Since website personalization technology leverages machine learning to do its job, the heavy lift required for it to work actually occurs prior to turning it on. Before considering potential solutions and vendors, you should have a firm grasp of your current content strategy.

Here are just a few questions you should be asking:

When was the last time you performed a content audit?
Do you have any existing content gaps?
Is your content up to date?
Do you have the right assets for your target personas along each stage of the sales cycle?
Do you have a nice mix of high-level thought leadership content and more solution-based content?
Are you tracking content performance? If so, how?
Are you emphasizing productive content, updating lagging content, and sunsetting irrelevant or outdated content?

Another pivotal question you need to ask yourself is if you have the right team in place to meet and exceed your goals. Great content marketing requires more than just great writers. Of course, writing skill is paramount, but your content team should also understand SEO best practices, how content impacts demand generation, and, of course, the details and benefits of your products and services — as well as a concrete and comprehensive understanding of your industry.

If even one of these questions isn’t covered to your satisfaction, you might not be able to get the most out of your website personalization solution. So make sure your content strategy is strong across the board, that you have (or are producing) the right types of content, and that you have an awesome content team in place to help you reach your goals.

Most importantly, you need to have your content properly organized and labeled. This means you’ve created and are using a strict taxonomy in which all of your content is broken down by category, sub-category, and tags, and that all of those classifications are consistent across your website. This will impact how your website personalization tool is able to make sense of your content, so it’s imperative that this is in good shape from jump street.

2) Choosing the Right Website Personalization Vendor

If you’re serious about adopting an effective website personalization vendor, and you’re confident that your existing content strategy is in tip-top shape, the next step in the process is to begin researching and vetting potential vendors. There are a lot of helpful solutions out there, but every organization will have different needs, so your company’s industry, size, and mission should heavily influence your selection process.

Here are a few questions you’ll want to ask as you begin interacting with potential website personalization solutions:

1) How Does This Website Personalization Solution Fit in with Our Current MarTech Stack?

The different tools and technologies your sales and marketing teams use should complement and enhance one another, and the same is true of a website personalization solution. Before deciding on a platform, you should speak with vendors about how their solution fits in with your existing MarTech stack. Specifically, the tool should play nicely with your marketing automation, CRM, and CMS systems, as well as any third-party APIs you’re using. If the proposed solution doesn’t integrate seamlessly with your existing technologies, you should move on — or at least ask if they’re working on building out new integrations.

2) What Are the Capabilities of This Website Personalization Solution?

As I mentioned earlier, not all website personalization solutions are created equal, and some are better suited for specific use cases. So, depending on what you and your key stakeholders have identified as your principal needs, you’ll want to look only at those solutions that are able to meet those needs. Whoever you choose should provide flexible, outcome-based solutions and be willing to work with you to align your content marketing strategy with their platform. Most importantly, the solution should allow you to turn anonymous visitors into known users so that you can continue to market to those individuals on separate marketing channels, such as social media and paid digital advertising.

3) What Are the Limitations of This Website Personalization Solution?

Does the solution work sitewide? Can you tailor it to work in different ways on different pages? Does it work with your CMS? How much work does it require on your end? These are pivotal questions that you should be asking, and the answers will inform your decision. The best website personalization tools are dynamic and can be formatted to any site or page to provide the best content or product recommendations at the perfect time to influence buyer intent. Furthermore, the tool you choose should be simple to use and operate on rules-based logic that make sense given how you’re housing and categorizing your content.

4) What Are the Costs Involved in This Website Personalization Solution?

Website personalization solutions vary greatly by cost, so you’ll want to understand your budget limitations and make that figure clear to the vendor before getting too far in the weeds. There’s no sense wasting your time speaking with a company out of your price range. Once you’ve established a mutual understanding, you’ll need to look closely at several line items in the quoted price — including ongoing management and strategy, onboarding and training, data connections, and platform access. You’ll also want to consider contract length and potential fees for choosing to opt-out prior to completing the engagement.

5) What Is the Time to Value with This Website Personalization Solution?

The most commonly used misnomer in marketing and sales technology applications is “out-of-the-box.” I hear this phrase constantly, and the truth of the matter almost never matches the promise. And when dealing with website personalization, it’s often more misused than with other software tools. Regardless of what a vendor tells you, you need to understand for yourself what goes into getting up and running with your website personalization solution, and the best way to do that is by speaking with current and former users of each solution. You should ask them how long it took to develop their strategy, how long it took to start seeing results, and how long it took to start optimizing their content strategy based on the performance of their website personalization solution.

3) Implementing Your Website Personalization Solution and Tracking Results

Strategy… Check.

Solution… Check.

Implementation… Pending.

At this point, you’re almost there. Now it’s time to open up your new toy, align it with your MarTech stack, and let it absorb the data before turning it on. If you’ve chosen an easy and effective website personalization solution, you’ll be able to install a basic plugin to enable:

Automated content exports
Automated code placement
Admin control for recommendation display options

This should drastically reduce the workload for you and your team and get you started on the right path toward successful implementation and deployment. It might take a week or two to collect enough data for the system to start working properly, so you’ll want to install the plugin as soon as you’re able. After about 10 days, you should have enough data to turn on your solution with the confidence that it will deliver the right content to the right visitors and yield immediate results.

This is where the fun begins because it’s the point at which you’ll begin seeing some initial success. Whatever platform you choose should have its own portal with access to a reporting interface. From your dashboard, you should be able to view aggregate time on site, pages per session, and conversions.

You should also be able to drill down further to see which content categories are performing the best and even view performance by individual content assets. Best of all, these metrics are unique to those sessions where visitors are engaging with personalized content, so you’re able to see a breakdown of “participating” vs. “non-participating” traffic, which will help you measure the effectiveness of your website personalization software in isolation.

Serve Intelligent Content Recommendations with Act-On Adaptive Web

This blog was a little long, so I don’t blame you if you skimmed. Actually, that’s perfect because you’ve now arrived at the best part!

Act-On’s Adaptive Web solution is the most affordable, efficient, and effective website personalization on the market today. It’s designed to make personalized content recommendations simple, easy, and attainable for every marketer and organization. It’s easy to implement, requires no extra work for marketers, and produces serious results within weeks of installation. It also gives you the ability to manually manipulate your content recommendations to promote new and especially relevant content.

Download our eBook to learn more about website personalization and how Adaptive Web can help you “Personalize the Web Experience.”