This is a primer on Marketing Automation I gave to SFSU's MBA digital marketing class. It gives a high level overview of everything a well implemented marketing automation system can accomplish for a business.

1. MARKETING AUTOMATION

2. 2
WHAT’S MARKETING AUTOMATION?
▸ Think of Marketing Automation as
a robotic shopkeep.
▸ Analyze and segment humans.
▸ Interact with humans.
▸ Track human activity.
▸ GAIN TRUST OF HUMANS
▸ ACQUIRE AND RETAIN
HUMANS

3. USING MARKETING AUTOMATION
INCREASES CONVERSION RATES
53% MORE THAN NON-USERS.
Aberdeen Research 2012
3

4. COMPANIES THAT EXCEL AT
NURTURING GENERATE 50% MORE
SALES-READY LEADS AT A 33%
LOWER COST.
Forrester Research 2013
4

5. 5
I, FOR ONE, WELCOME OUR NEW ROBOT OVERLORDS
1. MA happily does otherwise tedious tasks like:
1. Follow-up and reminder emails
2. Audience segmentation
3. Reporting
2. Well programmed MA can also:
1. Score leads
2. Personalize buyer journeys
3. Predict sales

6. PROGRAMMING YOUR OWN
MARKETING ROBOT.

7. 6
BASIC PROGRAMMING
▸ WHO
▸ Everyone we met at the
tradeshow.
▸ People that downloaded a white
paper on X date.
▸ Our 1,000,000th visitor.
▸ WHAT
▸ Send an email.
▸ Update status.
▸ Append information.
▸ Send an alert.

8. 7
SEGMENTATION
▸ Modern data-mining
tools, coupled with
good marketing
automation and CRM
data hygiene, can give
you an ability to launch
highly targeted
campaigns.
▸ Right audience for
sales, most receptive to
communication, able to
tailor relevant content.

9. 59% OF COMPANIES WITH MARKETING
AUTOMATION ARE ABLE TO USE
INTELLIGENT TARGETING TO TRIGGER
CONTENT, COMPARED TO 17% WITHOUT.
Lenskold and Pedowitz Groups 2013
8

10. 9
NURTURE CAMPAIGNS
▸ The most prevalent types of MA
campaigns are Nurture Campaigns (aka
‘Drip Campaigns’).
▸ The goal of a nurture campaign is to
stay top-of-mind with a prospect.
▸ These can be linear, or a multi-path
“Choose Your Own Adventure”
campaign.
▸ Most commonly seen as an
annoying string of emails that you
didn’t ask to get.

11. SOAPBOX MOMENT

12. 12
THINK OUTSIDE OF THE INBOX
▸ Nurture campaigns are NOT just email anymore.
▸ The buying environment has changed:
▸ Media is limitless
▸ Accessing information is completely different
▸ The buyers themselves have changed:
▸ They are always on
▸ They want instant gratification
▸ They are hyper-reactive to cheap/annoying sales pitches

13. 13
THINK OUTSIDE OF THE INBOX
▸ Drip email campaigns may work, but they are often not
awesome.
▸ Use social media, video, infographics, paid advertising,
and good old fashioned human interaction to create an
awesome experience for buyers.
▸ Good marketers don’t try to send great emails, they try
to create great journeys.

14. PEOPLE HATE TO BE SOLD TO,
BUT PEOPLE LOVE TO BUY.
Some Dude
14

15. 15
THREE TYPES OF DRIP CAMPAIGNS
▸ CANNED
▸ A set track that is seldom altered and
has a definite goal in mind.
▸ e.g. Demo Request follow-up drip
campaign.
▸ FRESH
▸ A generalized, en masse that changes
based on circumstances.
▸ Especially useful in content
marketing or products with quick
cycles.

16. 16
THREE TYPES OF DRIP CAMPAIGNS
▸ Individualized
▸ Welcome to the grey side of marketing automation
▸ Using an email address and a few tools, you can easily find out things like,
company, city, phone number, title, even what technologies they’re using.
▸ All that information, plus the fact that you’re tracking every move they make,
means you’ve got a lot of powerful segmenting and scoring power - use it wisely.
▸ “Right time communications” are hugely valuable.
▸ Triggering communications based on user behaviors is amazingly powerful, but
it can get a little creepy.
▸ Triggering an email to send when a user visits a pricing page might be a little
uncomfortable.

17. RELEVANT EMAILS DELIVERED
THROUGH MARKETING AUTOMATION
DRIVE 18X MORE REVENUE THAN
EMAIL BLASTS.
Jupiter Research 2015
17

18. 18
A QUICK THING ON LEAD SCORING
▸ Way to go, you generated 1,000 leads for sales!
▸ (Sales is super pissed about that.)
▸ Lead Scoring maps demographic, firmographic, and observed behaviors to a scoring
framework.
▸ Lead has right title? +10 Points
▸ Lead attended our webinar? +5 Points
▸ Lead left our webinar 10 minutes after it started? -3 Points
▸ Lead works for a Fortune 500 company? +7 Points
▸ Lead works in the Brazilian branch of Fortune 500? -5 Points
▸ A lead scoring framework is an organism that needs to be constantly refined in concert with
the sales team.
▸ Typically, marketing will only turn over leads that have hit a minimum lead scoring threshold.

19. 19
ADVANCED APPLICATIONS
▸ Real Time Personalization
▸ Conversion Rate Optimization
▸ Sales Intelligence
▸ Multi-Attribution Intelligence
▸ Retargeting
▸ Predictive Analytics
▸ Lead Lifecycle

20. 20
CARE AND MAINTENANCE
▸ Two crucial elements of a consistently functioning MA
tool:
1. Organization
‣ Think of this as how you communicate with your
robot.
‣ Non-competing campaigns.
‣ Well curated segments.
‣ Clearly grouped and labeled assets.
2. Great Content
‣ What (and how) you say to
your humans.
‣ Depending on cycle length, you might need a
little or a lot of fresh content.
‣ Every interaction needs to earn its right to be
there.

21. 45% OF COMPANIES WITH MARKETING
AUTOMATION REPURPOSE CONTENT FOR
EFFICIENCY, COMPARED WITH 28% OF
COMPANIES WITHOUT MARKETING
AUTOMATION.
The Lenskold and Pedowitz Groups 2013
21

22. 91% OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL USERS
AGREE THAT MARKETING AUTOMATION IS
“VERY IMPORTANT” TO THE OVERALL
SUCCESS OF THEIR MARKETING ACROSS
CHANNELS.
Marketo and Ascend2 2015
22

23. INCREASE FREE TRIAL SELF-
SUBSCRIPTION THROUGH MA.
CASE STUDY

24. 24
FACTS
▸ The company makes web-based software used to post jobs, organize applicants, and
collaboratively screen candidates.
▸ The company offers a 7-day trial of their lowest-tier offering.
▸ Because the price point is so low, self-conversion (i.e. signing up for a monthly subscription online, as opposed to going
through the sales organization) is the only viable way to achieve upside at this tier.
▸ The company’s data science team ran a conversion regression study and determined that three
distinct behaviors exhibited during the 7-day trial window increase propensity to buy by
almost 50%.
1. Posting more than one job
2. Adding more than one user
3. Buying at least one premium job posting (i.e. “Featured Jobs” on LinkedIn)
‣ All of these behaviors are observable in the marketing automation tool.

25. 25
THE CHALLENGE
▸ Using marketing automation to observe and react to
behaviors, design a drip campaign that increases
propensity to buy.

26. 26
WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED
▸ Developed a cadence of emails
and display ads based on last-
known activity.
▸ Users receive welcome email
encouraging them to take two
most imperative actions: post a
job and add more users.
▸ Supplemented with general,
non-sales content to help users
achieve results.

27. 27
WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED
▸ Triggered follow-up emails as soon
as a desirable behavior was
observed.
▸ These emails encouraged
visitors to take the next most
impactful step.
▸ In-app notifications were also
used as reminders. Links in
those notifications were tracked
through MA to measure CTR.

28. 28
WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED
▸ Inactivity emails were also
triggered if a trial was abandoned.
▸ If a user came back, they were
put back on to the initial trial
track.
▸ If they didn’t, they were put into
a sale-save track.

29. 29
WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED
▸ CTA emails were schedule the day
of and the day after the trial comes
to an end.

30. 30
WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED
▸ Prior to an integrated email
campaign, the self-subscription
rate was 12% per monthly cohort.
▸ After implementing the campaign,
the subscription rate popped to
24%.

31. 31
THANKS GUYS
▸ Hit me up!
▸ justin.keller@mac.com
▸ @justinkeller
▸ in/justindkeller