Below, we will introduce some of the basic concepts around marketing automation and ways you can get the most out of it. 

Table of contents

• What is marketing automation and why is it important?
• Key benefits of marketing automation 
• How marketing automation works
• Marketing automation best practices
• Popular marketing automation vendors
• Resources for learning more

What is marketing automation and why is it important?

Marketing automation platforms (MAPs) help automate activities across various marketing channels. The goal is to put repetitive tasks such as sending emails, posting on social media pages and managing data on autopilot. 

Marketing departments use marketing automation to ensure their campaigns generate desired outcomes rapidly and efficiently. Employees can focus on thinking through higher-level problems when automation is working correctly. It can take some time to set up initially, but the results can significantly impact your business once it is up and running.

Marketing automation is often associated with email marketing. After all, marketing automation began with IBM’s Unica email platform in the early 1990s. 

It’s useful to have an automated system for sending emails at scale to selected audiences or triggering emails in response to users’ certain actions (cart abandonment, for example). But using marketing automation only for emails can result in a disjointed customer experience. Thus, marketers must also consider its use across other channels too.

Key benefits of marketing automation

In addition to efficiency, marketing automation has several key benefits for marketing organizations:

Savings in time, energy and money

Marketing automation is responsible for increasing productivity among sales by 14.5% and reducing overhead in marketing initiatives by 12.2%. Intuitive marketing automation tools can give marketers their time back to invest in other initiatives and activities that boost a company’s bottom line in other ways.

Better targeting of audiences

A marketing automation platform that works for you will allow you to target your audience and monitor behaviors on your campaigns. Tracking real-time data and monitoring engagement allows you to capitalize on personalized communication across multiple channels. Consistent and relevant communication to your target audience results in major ROI and a boost in customer loyalty. 

Embed a seamless omnichannel experience

Remember, marketing automation takes over all the repetitive tasks when done correctly. When this happens, you can craft a seamless and personalized customer experience. Targeted emails, pre-filled forms based on user data and anticipating customer behaviors help to ensure your customers receive the same service each time.

How does marketing automation work? 

Marketing automation tools and platforms may have specific nuances to how they function, but at a high level, they automate workflows. They help us remove all the individualized sticky notes on our desks with reminders and put those reminders into a cadence that automatically gets done with minimal human involvement. 

At a basic level, marketing automation campaigns will send content to a list of contacts based on a specified behavior or predetermined criteria to get them to take a certain action. 

For example, let’s say you’re doing your last webinar before the end of the year, and you want to get some new leads into the pipeline to start January off strong. What would you typically do with marketing automation doing its part?

• You would send an invitation email to all the new leads to attend the stated webinar at a specific time. 
• You might include an end-of-year incentive to get them to participate and perhaps invite their peers.
• Those leads automatically fill out a form that will funnel them into two lists based on a “Yes” that they will attend or a “No” that they cannot attend.
• The people on the “Yes” list will start receiving an email or text nurture cadence that will keep your upcoming webinar top of mind in their inboxes and on their phones. 
• After attending the webinar, those attendees will be shipped over to the sales team to have a sales conversation about your product or service. 

As you can see, you did nothing except craft the content and inject it into the automation tool. The tool did the rest of the work until the sales call, for which people generally prefer speaking with people.   

Marketing automation best practices 

There are plenty of marketing automation tools available. The first rule of thumb is to do your research and see which one would be best for your business and which will help you reach the goals you’re trying to achieve the best. Here are a few other best practices to follow. 

Understand the journey of your buyers

For a marketing automation tool to benefit you, you must understand the journey of your target audience. 

• What do they really want? 
• What channels are they using? 
• What questions are they asking? 

If you know this information, you will find it easy to craft a workflow that works.

Ensure your content is relevant, engaging and consistent

Your audience is likely already bombarded by endless content, with most of it not being so good. How do you intend to cut through the noise? Test your content before feeding it to the automation tool. 

You want to produce what people actually want, not what you think they want. Once you have found what your audience finds relevant and engaging, deliver it to them consistently.

Avoid lengthy processes

Delight your customers but don’t bog them down with lengthy forms and overbearing popups. In each piece of content, focus on one asset, one opportunity and one call to action. The “keep it simple” rule of thumb applies here. 

Popular marketing automation vendors

Marketing automation software is very widely used by marketing automations. There are many solutions on the market.

Some specialize in B2B marketing, and as noted above, there are variations in the capabilities offered by each platform. Among the best-known and most popular are:

• Acoustic
• ActiveCampaign
• Adobe Experience Cloud
• Adobe Marketo
• HubSpot
• Mautik
• Oracle Marketing Cloud
• Salesforce Pardot

Dig deeper

A good marketing automation system keeps marketing to your target audience simple and consistent while being less time-consuming and cost-effective.  

For best results, follow the key points in this article and allow marketing automation to improve communication with your target audience. 

Here’s some further reading: 

• Find out if your organization needs a marketing automation platform to personalize the buyer experience. 
• Need help choosing a marketing automation platform? Here are 16 options that you can choose from. 
• When on a demo call with a marketing automation vendor, here are 15 questions you should ask before choosing one vendor over another. 
• The vendor marketplace is vast; here are several things you should expect from a B2B marketing automation platform. 

The post Why we care about marketing automation appeared first on MarTech.

There were quite a few enhancements to the landing page UX — with the biggest callout being the removal of the toggle switch (in other words, the Classic Experience will no longer be available). 

Leverage inferred attributes in operational programs

Many businesses rely on inferred attributes to identify when GDPR or CCPA compliance is required. Inferred attributes allow you to remove fields on forms and can reduce friction, yet there are downsides. 

Inferred attributes aren’t able to accurately capture VPN data. Some legal teams may prefer keeping these fields on forms to avoid any compliance issues.

Why we care: Even if the best practice for data governance policies is to request the country of new people acquired, plenty of companies still rely on inferred data to trigger processes (lead assignment, consent management, etc.). If your company uses that data for any operational program, inbound leads from Dynamic Chat would be included in the operational programs.

Roles and permissions enhance security and control

Roles and permissions were added to Dynamic Chat, enabling admins to limit functionality based on selected user types. 

It sounds trivial, but controlling your team’s roles and permissions is undervalued. Many organizations experience issues resulting from team members having too much or too little access. 

Why we care: Security starts with providing the right access to the right people. Permissions can often be neglected, so this is a great step toward security and control. Allowing admins to assign roles provides a layer of security while still enabling your team to view past chats and data records.

Unlock the ROI of Dynamic Chat through enhanced reporting

Like Email or Engagement Programs, users can select a “Dynamic Chat” program that allows them to track the success and performance of their Dynamic Chat dialogue.

Reporting on the success of Dynamic Chat, in addition to that of other marketing programs, gives users a more comprehensive view of their marketing activities. In addition, users will be able to better gauge the ROI of Dynamic Chat to their business.

Nine additional languages are now supported 

Dynamic Chat users can choose from nine additional languages to display static chat content: French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. 

Marketo sunsetting Classic Experience on landing pages 

Classic Experience on landing pages is being sunset. The new experience offers increased functionality without toggling between the two views, offering a more seamless and integrated experience. 

Why we care: The new UX provides enhanced details for individual assets, particularly the versioning of the asset. This provides a clear ability to view the current live and approved assets while working on an update in a draft version. Users will also have the ability to see in one view key information and settings about each version of the asset (approved vs. draft). 

In addition, the “Used By” tab was enhanced this month. It now lists all assets using a particular landing page template or form template. 

Asset lists in Marketo instances that use landing page templates and global forms for all assets can be long and tedious. The ability to sort assets quickly can speed up an audit or troubleshooting process.

View the complete set of March 2023 Marketo Release Notes here.

This article is presented through a partnership between MarTech and Perkuto + MERGE, a marketing operations consultancy.

The post Marketo’s March releases: A manager’s guide appeared first on MarTech.

There are ways to use additional solutions, notably artificial intelligence and journey orchestration, to take your existing marketing automation approaches to the next level. 

Challenges with legacy marketing automation

Marketers have achieved amazing results with marketing automation in the past. But customers’ shifting expectations and behaviors are pushing traditional approaches to their limits. Brands that rely on marketing automation alone find engaging with active customers on multiple channels difficult. 

Personalization in most marketing automation platforms (MAPs) is limited to simple rules-based instructions (“if this, then that”). For example, if a customer abandons their shopping cart, send them a reminder email. Or, if a customer signed up for an email list, send them a welcome message. 

This approach doesn’t allow for complex variations based on the segment a customer might be in, their propensity to buy, their past individual behavior, or other factors. While some MAPs can technically achieve this, building all rule sets can make ongoing management nearly impossible and fraught with errors based on cascading dependencies. 

As customers demand more dynamic experiences, your marketing automation approach must be augmented. This is where customer journey orchestration and artificial intelligence (AI) come in. 

How journey orchestration augments marketing automation

Traditional marketing automation can still work well in providing timely and relevant communications when dealing with a single response channel such as email. But your customers don’t rely on a single channel to interact. Instead, they are channel-switching and expect brands to keep up. 

Additionally, most marketing automation workflows are generally simple and rarely incorporate complex branching, particularly across multiple channels. 

This is where customer journey orchestration (CJO) can save the day. CJO was built for multi-channel communication. Thus, emails, SMS messages, mobile app push notifications, website landing pages and social advertising can be hyper-targeted.

Through branching, a series of actions can result in vast differences for one customer versus another, even if they are enrolled in the same journey. 

This way, CJO boosts your marketing automation, aligning with your customers’ growing expectations about receiving content, offers and experiences when, where and how they want them. 

Dig deeper: What is customer journey orchestration and how does it work?

The impact of AI on marketing automation

Since most marketing automation relies on a simpler, rules-based approach, AI plays a key role in augmenting these decisions in coordination with or separate from customer journey orchestration. 

Below are some ways AI can take your marketing efforts beyond your current marketing automation methods. 

Dynamic segmentation

Finding patterns in vast amounts of structured and unstructured data is cumbersome for humans. AI, on the other hand, can do this well. AI-based machine learning algorithms help you glean audience insights, turning formerly static audience segments into more dynamic ones.

These dynamic segments can group customers based on buying patterns or behavior that enable personalized content, offers and experiences to reach the right person at the right time on the right channel. That’s marketing gold. 

Propensity calculation and predictive analytics 

Adding AI capabilities can significantly enhance your performance if your MAP uses fairly simple if/then logic to send messages and take action. You can use propensity scoring and predictive analytics to route the next best action or offer to an individual. 

Personalized content generation 

The promise of generative AI tools is that content, including text and imagery, can be tailored on a one-to-one basis for the individual rather than everyone in a large audience segment receiving the same thing.

While there are hurdles to be overcome in this area, truly personalized content and images can lead to greater relevance, loyalty and lifetime value.

Dig deeper: How AI can help your marketing right now

What needs to change to be successful 

To successfully augment marketing automation with customer journey orchestration and AI, marketers must remember these three impactful points. 

Personalized journeys

Ensure your approach is customer-centric. Consider the experience an individual may want versus a one-size-fits-all approach that lumps many customers into the same buckets.

While a segmented approach is better than sending the same message on the same channel to everyone, it still doesn’t individualize the timing, channel, content and offers nearly enough to meet rising consumer expectations. 

Integrations

Better integrations can have a positive impact when using journey orchestration and AI to augment your marketing automation. 

Platform integrations

To take advantage of a true multi-channel customer journey orchestration approach, you will need to integrate several platforms in ways they most likely have not been integrated. Fortunately, because this is a core functionality of CJO tools, this can be straightforward in most instances. But, as with any integration, there can always be unexpected hitches. 

A common way to start is to use an iterative approach that builds toward an omnichannel setup, one system and platform integration at a time. This makes it easier and quicker to implement the first integration, letting your teams learn more quickly to become more efficient and produce effective results as time progresses. 

Data integrations

Platform integrations will also require your data sources to be more unified. You must ensure you are:

• Reaching the right customer on their platform of choice.
• Informed by the relevant purchase and behavioral data across multiple internal systems and platforms.
• Augmented by other demographic or psychographic information that may be beneficial. 

As you may well know, integrating all these data sources can be daunting for even the most sophisticated organizations. 

Team integrations 

Just as platforms and data can be siloed, your marketing teams can often be just as disconnected. Your email marketing team needs to coordinate with your mobile app team and SMS team and so forth throughout the organization. 

Doing CJO well and using AI to the fullest means that teams work together from the initial campaign and content creation to the measurement and optimization of your collective efforts. 

Omnichannel approach 

Finally, it is time to evolve your customer experience approach toward omnichannel and customer-centric instead of reactive and marketing-driven. Customer journey orchestration was built to be multichannel, and AI applications thrive in processing structured and unstructured data sources.

Improving upon your marketing automation means keeping these approaches in mind as you find more effective ways to provide tailored customer experiences. 

Conclusion

Using customer journey orchestration and artificial intelligence-based approaches to augment your current marketing automation efforts can dramatically impact your ability to deliver valuable experiences for your customers and your brand. 

The post Using AI and journey orchestration to boost your marketing automation appeared first on MarTech.

It’s time to prioritize a strategic and holistic view of your company’s martech stack and create a lean, efficient, results-driven marketing technology infrastructure.

Learn how a marketing technology optimization framework benefits marketing organizations, enhances the customer experience and drives real ROI. 

Marketing technology optimization: A paradigm shift

Marketing technology optimization (MTO) emphasizes:

• Evaluating current marketing technology tools and platforms.
• Identifying gaps or redundancies.
• Making data-driven decisions on eliminating existing or implementing new martech solutions. 

This approach helps align the martech stack with the company’s overall business, marketing and customer experience goals, creating a streamlined and efficient set of tools that drive real ROI.

Further, MTO integrates ongoing optimization with the maintenance of the martech stack, preventing unnecessary spending and fostering maximum utilization of the tools. By adopting MTO, marketers can avoid the pitfalls of an unwieldy and bloated martech stack and focus on driving results with lean and efficient tools and platforms.

Dig deeper: The secret to building a useful martech stack

MTO benefits for the C-suite: More than just marketing

Marketing technology optimization offers unique advantages for CMOs, COOs and CFOs in driving ROI and improving customer experience.

For CFOs, MTO enables more effective budget allocation towards marketing technology, ensuring higher ROI and optimizing company performance. For COOs, MTO can lead to cost savings, enhanced team collaboration and reduced resources required for maintenance and support.

In addition, MTO supports compliance with industry regulations and data privacy laws. It empowers CMOs to adopt a proactive approach to compliance rather than reacting to data breaches or regulatory violations after they occur.

Change management and organizational buy-in for MTO

Creating a culture of marketing technology optimization within an organization requires effective change management and buy-in from key stakeholders. Strategies to foster a culture of MTO and obtain organizational buy-in include:

Establish clear goals and objectives

Set well-defined objectives aligned with business, marketing and customer experience goals to foster a shared understanding of MTO’s purpose and value.

Communicate benefits consistently

Share MTO’s advantages with stakeholders to build momentum, engagement and commitment. Emphasize improved efficiency, ROI, customer experience and compliance.

Involve stakeholders in decision-making

Actively engage stakeholders in assessment, strategy development and implementation for a sense of ownership and support, leading to better decision-making.

Provide ongoing training and support

Equip team members with skills and knowledge to manage the martech stack effectively. Demonstrate commitment to MTO and continuous improvement through training investments.

Celebrate successes

Acknowledge and celebrate MTO achievements to reinforce their value, motivate team members and encourage ongoing innovation and improvement in marketing technology optimization.

Budgeting and resource allocation for MTO success

Allocating financial resources and personnel to support MTO initiatives is crucial to ensuring ongoing optimization and maintenance of the martech stack. Best practices for budgeting and resource allocation in MTO include:

• Align budget with overarching goals: Focus on the business, marketing and customer experience goals to direct financial resources towards impactful initiatives.
• Consider the total cost of ownership (TCO): Account for acquisition, implementation, training and maintenance costs for comprehensive budgeting and informed technology investment decisions.
• Allocate resources for continuous optimization: Dedicate resources to regular assessments, updates and refinements, ensuring up-to-date marketing technology and sustained ROI.
• Invest in training and development: Equip personnel with the necessary skills to maximize marketing technology investments and contribute to MTO initiatives’ success.
• Assign “owners” for each tool or platform: Enhance accountability and encourage ongoing optimization within the martech stack by designating responsible leaders.
• Establish cross-functional teams: Collaborate with members from marketing, IT, data analytics and other departments to optimize the martech stack, improve decision-making and boost organizational performance.
• Monitor and adjust budget/resource allocation: Use data-driven KPIs and metrics to make informed decisions, adapt investments and maintain a cutting-edge martech stack that delivers sustained success.

Measuring and reporting on MTO success

To measure the success of MTO initiatives and demonstrate ROI to stakeholders, C-level executives should track key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics aligned with the organization’s overall business, marketing and customer experience goals. 

Some key KPIs and metrics to track include martech stack efficiency, marketing campaign performance, integration and data quality, compliance and data security and customer experience.

Embracing marketing technology optimization

Adopting a framework like marketing technology optimization becomes increasingly important as businesses evolve and adapt to the ever-changing digital environment. By embracing MTO, organizations can foster a culture of continuous improvement, stay ahead of the curve and maintain a competitive edge in digital marketing. 

Focusing on efficiency, agility and alignment with organizational objectives can help marketers unlock the full potential of their martech stacks, maximizing return on investment and enhancing the customer experience.

Dig deeper: 3 steps to building an effective martech stack

The post Marketing technology optimization: The path to peak martech stack performance appeared first on MarTech.

The rapid adoption of generative AI has increased the excitement volume to 11 for martech professionals. AI-enabled enhancements to the core uses of marketing automation platforms — data management, campaign/lead management and workflows/integrations — are being introduced by Salesforce, HubSpot and other market leaders. They will alter the mix of tasks marketers tackle daily and impact planned improvements to customer experiences and satisfaction.

This quote sums up the scale of AI’s impact:  

“Next-gen marketers know that in order to deliver the personalization and experiences modern consumers expect, marketing must become smarter. It must become marketer + machine.”

– Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput, Marketing Artificial Intelligence

This statement could have applied to the mainstream adoption of marketing automation platforms (MAP) as the original natural language processing for martech. They experienced an inflection point — similar to the one we’re seeing with AI today — of their own 10 years ago. Widespread adoption of marketing automation set the stage for the exponential growth of martech applications, which increased to over 10,000 in 2022 — a 6,000% increase compared to 2011. 

Why it matters. New capabilities will emerge by infusing MAPs with AI, further expanding the influence of the foundation of most organizations’ martech stack: core MAP integrated with CRM. Therefore, martech leaders should invest in discovering use cases that can be modified to incorporate new AI capabilities. AI-powered, tried-and-true best practices will drive value in 2023 and beyond.

Here’s how AI will be applied to the three core marketing automation uses. Each of these three will be the focus of a deeper dive follow-up piece over the coming year. 

Data quality will be even more important when our data are used to train company-specific AI models. 

Underlying data about customers and prospects is table stakes for personalizing marketing. As the amount and variety of data captured increases, it will require re-focused efforts to adjust to more natural language standard values in drop-downs, form fields, etc., to describe customer engagements. AI will enable marketers to understand, process and analyze data more effectively.

Campaigns and lead management. AI will enable new campaign approaches within existing workflows. Generative AI will power these approaches by choosing between content AI integration prompts or asking an AI assistant to help “codify” business processes. 

Workflows and integrations. Previously assumed scope limitations for broader operations and orchestration will be tested. If generative AI can help coders correct code, it’s just a matter of time before it can help extend an open API beyond a native Integration.

Native platform integrations were the original natural language for field mappings and workflows between the CRMs and marketing automation platforms. Instead of asking an IT team to build a custom API, we could use natural language software interfaces to set them up. 

Although the overall AI trends are moving at an unprecedented pace, re-investing in these core MAP processes will prepare your organization to adapt to these new AI-infused capabilities quickly. 

Check back for part two of this series on the AI infusion into data quality.  

Can’t wait for more? Check out my presentation at the MarTech Conference next week, “New School, Old School: Navigating the Current Marketing Automation Landscape.”

The post Looking at AI’s rapid infusion into marketing automation platforms appeared first on MarTech.

Create custom goals based on any property 

To better hold your customer-facing teams accountable and track progress on department goals, HubSpot Sales and Service Enterprise now allows you to make custom goals based on any property, not just default properties. 

Set notifications for when goals kick off and when they are achieved, exceeded or missed so you can better track, reward, or improve your team’s performance.

Build custom reports using marketing email analytics (beta)

Report on your marketing email performance in new and more relevant ways now that the marketing email analytics are a data source option inside the custom report builder.

Metrics such as open rate and click-through rate were previously only available in the marketing email tool’s analyze space or exported and pieced together in an Excel sheet.

Using marketing email analytics in the custom report builder can tie email performance to other CRM data without using multiple tools. Example reports could include:

• What day of the week has the best open rate.
• What content has the lowest click-through rate and should be reconsidered.

These reports can be added to a HubSpot dashboard where you may view your other manager reporting.

Use HubSpot Subscriptions with free trial offers

Does your company offer a free trial period for a recurring revenue product or service? You can now use HubSpot Subscriptions by scheduling the subscription on a delay during checkout.

For example, the customer would input their payment information today but receive their first recurring expense 30 days from now. (See this video at 1:45.)

Using a subscription this way may solve a common issue where free trials were previously activated within a product app (outside of HubSpot) that may not be integrated adequately enough with HubSpot to seamlessly track and transition those customers from the free trial into their payment period.

Add a terms of service link to HubSpot Payments

If your finance or legal team previously did not approve using HubSpot Payments, you may win them over now that a terms of service link can be added to the Payments links.

You can mandate that customers agree to the terms before allowing them to complete a checkout.

Schedule meetings faster using calendar view

Inspire more adoption of HubSpot meetings to track and use data better now that there is a calendar view when scheduling a meeting on a contact record in the CRM.

Previously, users could not view their calendar’s availability inside HubSpot, so scheduling meetings required multiple tabs and tools. 

Get a more complete view of customer interactions with inbound calls (beta)

Prevent the loss of valuable data and the stress caused by juggling multiple devices and systems by using the new release to accept inbound calls within HubSpot. This release includes managing missed calls and voicemail. 

Having all the call data in HubSpot will provide a complete view of the customer’s interactions with your company and give more context to your team members for a better chance of selling to or delighting the customer.

Manage user security in one view

Understand your risk of security incidents in your HubSpot account using the new Security Center‘s score, built off a checklist or security criteria related to the users and permissions.

As a manager, you may need to ensure your team and your customers’ data is not at risk, especially if your company does not have a robust information security team. 

Onboard and change notification settings by team preset (beta)

Onboard multiple new team members and ensure current team members see the information they need using the new Team presets for settings such as homepage, language and email signature. Previously the presets had to be applied one-by-one to users.

This includes presets for notifications, which previously could only be set up by each user inside their own preferences, making compliance difficult.

When notifications are set up incorrectly, your team will either be overwhelmed with unnecessary information or not receive the information they need to succeed, especially team members who are not logging into HubSpot daily.

The post HubSpot’s January 2023 releases: The manager’s guide appeared first on MarTech.

If you’re considering a CDP, there are a lot to choose from, and they come in several different flavors. The unique quirks of any given CDP are usually determined by its origin story. Most CDPs started as something else and tacked on additional services to become full-fledged CDPs. The one that started as an email service provider (ESP) will be a different animal than the one that started as a recommendation engine. They also differ in whether they focus more on B2B, B2C, retail, publishing, etc. 

One way to cut through the fog is to distinguish these services by their back-end and front-end components. 

Back-end vs. front-end

Back-end components include the technical infrastructure and processes that are used to collect, store, harmonize, and manage customer data. This category typically includes data integration, warehousing, governance, and security features. The back-end component is responsible for ensuring that customer data is accurate, complete, and accessible, with the goal of merging disparate records from multiple sources to create a single customer view. 

The front-end component of a CDP can be divided into marketer-facing and customer-facing features. The marketer-facing side would include data visualization and reporting, while the customer-facing side might include recommendation engines, paywall management, and custom content displays. 

Some CDPs are almost exclusively back-end, with almost no customer-facing front-end features. Other CDPs include lots of front-end “activations.” To make it more complicated, all of these functions are available from stand-alone, dedicated services. 

The trick to evaluating a CDP is to figure out which components are necessary for your use cases, and which need to be part of the CDP itself. 

For example, a CDP might have a built-in ESP. That may or may not be a good thing for you. If one of your use cases requires you to send an email the moment a user takes an action on your website, you’ll either need the CDP to be able to send the email, or you’ll need a real-time connection to an external ESP. 

It’s helpful to think of a CDP the way you might think of a vacation resort. The resort owner wants to be able to say that the resort has some activity, like a water slide, so they build a token water slide on the property. It’s not going to be as good as the dedicated water slide down the road, but it’s also not down the road. It’s right there on the resort. 

In the same way, the ESP that’s built into a CDP is probably not going to have as many features as a dedicated ESP, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is which solution fulfills the requirements of your use cases. 

To make it even more complicated, there are a lot of “CDP-like” services that do some of the work of a CDP. 

To navigate this confusing mess, consider a few use cases and see how the back-end vs. front-end metric can help. 

Recommendation engines for content

Adding customized recommendations to an article on your website can enhance a visitor’s experience with your brand and increase page views. 

The functionality required by that use case depends on what data the recommendation engine will use. 

If you want to recommend articles based (at least in part) on which e-newsletters the customer receives, or which products the customer subscribes to, you’ll need a back-end connection with the ESP and/or the fulfillment system, and you’ll need the ability to merge the user’s online profile with that data. But if you only want to make recommendations based on the user’s web behavior, you don’t need that back-end function, and you might not even need a CDP. Many stand-alone recommendation engines can handle that. 

Questions to ask: 

• Does this use case require back-end data management? 
• Is the CDP’s front-end function good enough, or do I need a dedicated service? 
• Does the CDP integrate with that dedicated service? 

“Customers who bought this…”

In the retail space, vendors want to provide product recommendations, which can increase the value of each order. 

If the recommendations are based (at least in part) on the customer’s order history, the recommendation engine needs that back-end data. If the recommendations are simply based on averages across all customers, specific information about the customer’s purchase history is irrelevant. 

Managing a paywall

Publishers who don’t wish to rely exclusively on ad revenue to fund the creation of their content may offer access to premium content for a fee. This requires the creation and maintenance of accounts to manage access to this content. 

In many cases, those accounts will need to be coordinated with other accounts, such as a magazine subscription. For example, a magazine subscriber might get through the paywall for free, or at a discounted rate. In that case, the paywall management system will have to integrate with back-end data from the magazine fulfillment system. 

Landing page optimization

A/B or multivariate landing page tests can dramatically increase the success of an online store, online forms, and e-newsletter sign-up pages. Services that facilitate the creation and deployment of such tests usually do not distinguish between customers and non-customers, and that seems to work for most situations. In those cases, you don’t need a CDP. 

However, if you have reason to believe that your customers are significantly different than the average web visitor, you might need your landing page optimization calculation to show different stats for different groups. 

For example, a website with medical content might have a split audience that includes medical professionals and ordinary citizens. You wouldn’t want the results of an A/B test on a landing page for a report written for doctors to include stats on how everyone else responded. In this case, back-end information on the audience might be crucial. 

Dig deeper: What is a CDP and how does it give marketers the coveted ‘single view’ of their customers?

Surveys

Surveys can help you understand your customers, which can help you provide better service. Many CDPs can manage surveys, but very few CDPs can compete with the functionality of a dedicated survey platform. How does this affect your evaluation of potential CDP vendors? 

Questions to ask: 

• Will my surveys be enhanced by incorporating back-end customer data? (E.g., not asking things you already know, or asking different questions to different audiences.) 
• Is it important to be able to extend the survey process over time through progressive profiling? 

Building a worksheet

I hope these examples have prompted you to imagine a worksheet somewhat like this. 

This is an overly simple example, but you can use this general idea to customize a worksheet for your specific requirements. 

The key is to start with use cases and think them through in terms of front-end and back-end functions, also considering 3rd-party alternatives. The more your use cases require back-end functions, the more you’re likely to need a CDP. And once you’ve created this document, it will make the RFP/discovery process much easier. 

The post How to create a CDP worksheet from your use cases appeared first on MarTech.

HubSpot Reporting now supports customizable fiscal years, dashboard property filters and parent-child calculated properties

Is your fiscal year different from the calendar year? HubSpot for fiscal year forecasting and goals now lets you customize reporting for your fiscal year, eliminating the need to download forecasts and goals and manipulate them manually. 

Without asking your admin for custom reporting changes, you can see the info you need for specific properties and segments of your CRM on dashboards using the new property filters (in beta). Previously, the date range was the only filter available for the entire dashboard.

If you target multi-location businesses or have other parent-child company profiles, you can now get a more accurate view of the parent company’s entire business in your reports, saved views and more using calculated properties for parent-child companies (in beta). For example, the sum of the revenue for all the parent’s child companies could be a calculated property used in a report. 

Internal communication improvements for team efficiency and centralization

Managers can make sure the most important information is stored on the HubSpot records for contacts, companies, deals and tickets by using the new feature to convert Slack messages to Notes. 

This is especially helpful for teams using Slack’s free plan, where older messages disappear and for important transaction-related communications between teams that need a date-stamped record, e.g., when a client cancels a contract. Previously, HubSpot supported sending notes to Slack channels via workflow, not sending from Slack to HubSpot. 

Remote team members can more easily contact other team members from their phones, sending you to relevant records to quickly solve a customer or internal issue, using the new internal “@” mention notifications in the HubSpot mobile app. 

Previously this feature was only available for desktops or laptops, causing a lag in communication time for team members working from mobile devices. 

To improve internal communication and customer experiences, non-admin team members can quickly and efficiently find, share or clone each other’s meeting links. In addition, managers or team leads without Super Admin access can now be given permission to create, edit and delete these meeting links on behalf of other users.

HubSpot Payments updates increase sales and adoption potential

Reduce friction for customers to increase upsells and cross-sells with the new optional products featured in HubSpot payment links. This feature eliminates the previously manual, time-consuming and confusing process of creating payment links for each product or product bundle you offer. This release may make using HubSpot Payments more effective than issuing invoices or quotes and attributing additional revenue to a specific sales, marketing or customer success activity.

Increase sales, decrease the sales cycle and reduce manual work for your team by using the new release to sell multiple subscriptions on different frequencies in one checkout experience. This feature is especially helpful for professional services firms with recurring client payments on different billing frequencies or different term lengths in one contract.

Previously, your team had to create multiple quotes and invoices that could potentially confuse customers. This functionality could increase the likelihood of your company using HubSpot subscriptions, which allows you to monitor recurring revenue from different products.

Does your finance team use QuickBooks? HubSpot Payments now supports the creation of refund receipts in QuickBooks, increasing the chance of financial approval to use HubSpot Payments to enable non-finance managers to report on revenue in HubSpot. 

Improve marketing accessibility, conversions and campaign insights

Improve your Facebook advertising performance, personalization and measurement with the new Facebook Conversions API for Forms (in beta). This functionality may lower your ad spend by linking your website and Meta’s marketing data, which yields increased control of content and times for sharing. 

Gain more visibility and efficiency into event and campaign performance by storing your marketing event data as an object in HubSpot, which you can now associate with your HubSpot campaigns. Offline events data association is not supported. 

Make your content more accessible and comply with regulations for hearing-impaired access using the new video subtitles feature. 

The post HubSpot’s December releases: A manager’s guide appeared first on MarTech.

Our new report, “B2B Marketing Automation Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide” is now available for free download.

If you already have a marketing automation solution, make a list of all the capabilities you currently have (i.e., email campaign sending), those you would like to have (i.e., predictive scoring or recommendations) and those you can’t live without (i.e., plug-and-play CRM integration).

Research vendors using that list to see which ones can meet your needs. Then send them the list of what you need and set a timeframe for them to reply. Also, decide whether you need to engage in a formal RFI/RFP process.

Before deciding on a vendor, check out its online community and review sites, and speak with one or two customer references, preferably someone in a business like yours. The vendor should be able to supply you with references, but you should also ask around in professional discussion forums or at in-person conferences and networking events.

Here are the basic questions to ask of each vendor.

• How easy is the platform to use?
• Does the vendor seem to understand our business and our marketing needs?
• Are they showing us our “must-have” features?
• If we ask a specific question, can they demonstrate the answer on the demo call?

Those questions are table stakes. Dig deeper with questions like the following.

• How easy is it to integrate this software into my organization?
• What is the onboarding process?
• How long does implementation take?
• What kind of support and training are included in the base price?
• What does your partner and developer community look like?
• How do I maximize adoption in my organization?
• Will we have a dedicated account rep available to us?
• Do current customers utilize the full functionality?
• What new features are you focusing on for the coming year?
• Can we do a test run for a few days on our own (i.e., a free trial)?
• How do you protect and secure customer data? Do you have a roadmap for what you would do in the event of a hack?

Don’t hesitate to ask for a demonstration of the specific capabilities that you have identified as must-haves. Consider requesting product demos showing basic tasks and demonstrating core reports such as:

• Create and edit a new email from scratch.
• Import and segment data.
• Base data management, cleansing and enrichment options.
• Create and edit a new landing page from scratch.
• Execute a simple campaign with an email, mailing list and landing page.
• See a report showing email opens, clickthroughs and landing page conversions.
• See a report showing web traffic and/or specific leads from an email campaign.
• ROI dashboards and reports at the organization and campaign levels.
• Campaign attribution options and capabilities.

This is an ongoing relationship; it’s important to feel that your questions are being answered.

For much more detail about choosing a B2B MAP vendor, download the latest edition of our free report, “B2B Marketing Automation Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide.”

The post 15 questions to ask marketing automation vendors appeared first on MarTech.

Our new report, “B2B Marketing Automation Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide” is now available for free download.

Overall, perhaps the most compelling is the increasing demand for personalization. B2B buyers, like consumers, expect sellers to provide experiences that meet their needs and concerns. It’s hard to do that at any scale without using automation.

The personalization imperative

Personalization is an increasingly important part of B2B marketing. Salesforce’s survey of B2B buyers and marketers found 69% expect companies to anticipate their needs, while 60% are comfortable with having their personal information gathered for the purpose of personalizing their experiences.

The benefits of using B2B marketing automation

The proliferation of channels and devices makes it difficult to target prospects with the right messages, on the right devices, at the right times. The rapid shift to all-online interactions sparked by the COVID pandemic also raised the level of competition in the inbox, so relevant messaging is more important than ever before.

Prospects are managing more of the buying process themselves. They are creating short lists of vendors by researching brand websites and social channels without ever speaking to a sales rep.

Being effective in this environment means marketers must be creative, targeted and aligned with sales goals; they must also have visibility into buyer attributes and behaviors. These challenging market dynamics and increased ROI pressure make these potential benefits of a MAP more attractive than ever.

These benefits include:

Increased marketing efficiency. Automating time-consuming, manual tasks around content
creation, management and personalization; campaign scheduling and execution; data hygiene; communication with sales; and lead nurturing, which saves time and improves productivity.

Enhanced ability to generate more and better-qualified leads. Marketing automation can
combine multiple criteria with a lead scoring system to generate and identify sales-qualified leads.

A multichannel view of prospect behavior. Today’s MAPs integrate multiple channels and
devices — including social media and mobile — to create more comprehensive prospect profiles
and holistic views of prospect behavior.

Better alignment of sales and marketing goals. MAPs can help align sales and marketing
efforts to ensure that sales reps are working with sales-ready leads.

Improved lead conversion and ROI. Numerous studies have found that using a marketing
automation system can increase conversions.

For much more detail about the potential benefits of B2B MAPs, download the latest edition of our free report, “B2B Marketing Automation Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide.”

The post Does your organization need a marketing automation platform? appeared first on MarTech.