Closed Loop Marketing Automation
We’re doing many presentations with new prospects these days. One of the most challenging terms for many of them to grasp is the concept of closed loop marketing automation. The idea of a “closed-loop” is especially confusing for companies using email marketing as their primary (and usually only) marketing solution. Traditional email marketing solutions do not give companies and their sales and marketing team a deep level of insight into prospect activity. Consequently, sales people only see present activity and have no way of closing the loop on prospect’s other activities.
Closed-loop marketing automation is the process of identifying a prospect’s, customer’s, competitor’s or partner’s past, present and future engagement with your brand and tying that activity to the first step (lead source) and last step (revenue) in your revenue cycle. Past activity could be anonymous website visits, present activity could be real-time lead scanning to identify who’s on your website and what they’re interested in and future activity could be future website visits. Once a lead converts (changes from unknown/anonymous to known – we have a name) closed-loop marketing automation can associate past, present and future activity with the known person.
Let’s look at a simple example of Tom who is an IT manager at Microsoft. Suppose Tom is interested in finding IT solutions for Microsoft’s IT network and begins his research online – where most B2B buyers start. Let’s also assume your company’s name is IT ‘R US and you’re selling IT solutions and using Lead Liaison for your closed-loop marketing automation system.
1. Tom types “Intel Hyper Thread Servers” into a Google search and sees a Google PPC ad for “IT Solutions” from IT ‘R US. He clicks on the link. Lead Liaison automatically tracks the Lead Source as PPC, adds the prospect to the “November Marketing” Program and “Google PPC – IT Solutions” Campaign and tracks the keywords Tom used to find the Google PPC listing.
2. Tom clicks four pages during the same visit then moves on to his next search. He never fills out a web form. Lead Liaison automatically tracks Tom’s pages viewed, how long Tom spent on the site, his status (online/offline/chatting/exact page he’s viewing) in real-time and much more.
3. Tom comes back six days later and visits IT ‘R US’ website again. This time he views five pages and finds an article named “Are Your IT Solutions Up to Snuff?” The article leads Tom to a landing page where he downloads a checklist document. Tom fills out the short form to get the document. Lead Liaison knows the same visitor six days ago was Tom and associates his present visit with his past visit to compile a holistic view of Tom’s interest. As an added benefit – Lead Liaison allowed IT ‘R US to visually build the web form and landing page in less than 60 seconds by dragging/dropping items. Lead Liaison’s tracking technology changes Tom’s name from “Anonymous” to “Tom Sanders”. All other form field information such as company name, email, etc. is captured, tracked and tied to his profile.
4. Tom is still not ready to speak with a sales person at IT ‘R US yet so he waits five more days and visits IT ‘R US’ website one more time. Once again, Lead Liaison tracks this activity (future activity) and associates it with Tom’s profile.
5. When Tom finally reaches out to IT ‘R US the IT ‘R US sales person will have lots of information on Tom before they speak. The sales person will know what Tom was looking for (search words – “Intel Hyper Thread Servers”), what interests Tom (pages viewed), what documents Tom has (landing pages and forms submitted) and now understands how Tom engaged with IT ‘R US. Marketing also benefits by being able to measure the impact of their contributions (marketing ROI).
Marketing delivered sales a wealth of pre-sales information, sales was more effective in their sales cycle and Lead Liaison’s Revenue Generation Software™ provided organizational efficiency and sales effectiveness. Check back next week and we’ll publish part two of closed-loop marketing automation which will expand on the use case above.
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