Note:  Few people know this, but Aprimo offers an excellent Lead Management system as part of its Multichannel Campaign Management capabilities.  I have personal experience implementing it for a few happy B-to-B marketing customers.  Aprimo Lead Management functionality includes a lead portal to view and screen leads, an integration with Sales Force Automation (SFA) applications like Salesforce.com, territory lead assignment rules to assign leads to sales, a method to score leads, and a process flow designer to define how leads are managed and routed.  It is designed for marketers to collect prospect information and generate leads for the sales team.  This blog discusses one element of Aprimo Lead Management: lead scoring and lead quality.  Now back to our regularly scheduled blog entry . . .

Anytime marketing delivers leads to sales, there seems to be an age old conflict where sales complains that the marketing leads are not good enough and marketing says sales is not working the marketing leads hard enough, or at all.  In sales' defense, and I hate defending sales, marketing does collect a lot of leads, often from any response to a web form, and throws the leads over the wall to sales.  In marketing's defense, marketing is often incented and measured based on the quantity of leads generated - not quality.  This troubled relationship may be a product of out-of-sync objectives and performance metrics.  Aren't we all really just working within our little mazes to find the fastest and easiest way to the cheese?  That was a rhetorical question, and the answer is yes.

Lead scoring is considered a way to remedy this issue - at least a way for marketing to generate better quality leads.  The lead score is a numeric value built from a couple of types of information - profile and historical activity information.  Profile information is information about the contact or the company like title (VP, CEO, CFO, Manager) and industry vertical (technology, financial services, healthcare, etc.) and company size (greater than 1000 employees).   Historical activity information includes the contacts past web form responses and even past web site page visits.  The historical activity score can increment higher based on each web site visit to a product page or a past request for a white paper or even a specific response to a set of qualifying questions on a web form.  When the lead score goes beyond a specified threshold, based on both profile information (best fit) and history (most interest), a lead is generated for the product category of interest.

In theory and in practice if the score is built well, the higher the score then the better qualified the lead.  The contacts from the best verticals and departments with the best titles will be scored higher then the contacts from poor verticals, unrelated departments, and with inappropriate titles.  Also, the contacts that have answered qualifying questions favorably will be given higher scores then those who did not.  Contact that have recently attended a webinar or downloaded a whitepapers, filled out a form, and/or browsed the corporate web site will be score higher than someone whe just filled out a web form.


Challenges to consider when implementing lead scoring

The number of leads generated will initially go down.  I will let you in on a little secret regarding scoring leads that my clients are often surprised about when it actually happens.  If you currently send most all your marketing responses out as leads to sales, after you implement a lead scoring system the number of leads will go down.  It will go down because you went from little to no qualifying criteria to a set of more stringent qualifying rules to build the lead score that must be met before the prospect can qualify.  Lead volumes can return to the previous levels if your marketing activity increases to compensate for the tougher qualification. 

A previous client was unsuccessful implementing a lead scoring system, but not lead management, because of this issue concerning lead volume decrease.  This marketing organization was measured and incented on generating a specific number of leads per campaign and generating a specific volume of leads per quarter.  The lead scoring system started to drop these volumes.  Because of this drop, the marketing department quickly abandoned the lead scoring system because it did not allow them to meet their metrics for the number of leads generated in a campaign or quarter.  Even the sales organization was part to blame here, because sales had become dependent on these higher lead volumes and was staffed to handle a flood of leads.  They were also incented, trained, and accustomed to churning quickly through a bunch of suspect leads.  So, any drop in lead volumes with an improvement in quality would also mean that sales would have to alter their staffing plans and how their sales team works leads.

How can you manage this?  Prepare the organization for the quality of leads to go up and the quantity of leads to go down.  Revise target metrics for marketing leads generated down while increasing the quality metric targets up like percent qualified, contacted, interested, opportunities generated, and closed sales.  Manage change within the sales organization to start working leads differently to work every lead, spend more time on each lead with more contact attempts and time invested per lead, and provide better notes or information on each lead.  Also, make up for the smaller volumes of better qualified leads with sales follow-up calls for marketing campaigns and seminar and event drives.

Lead generation qualification will become more complex.  If you are an organization that offers a wide rage of products across numerous categories, lead scoring may be more complex for you to implement.  The reason for this is around how you score historical activity.  If prospect "Mr. A" downloads a white paper for product Z in category M and then fills out a form expressing an interest in product X in category O, then what will "Mr. A's" lead score be and will a lead be generated for product Z and or category M or for product X and or category O?  There is no right answer here - so it depends on your rules.  That is what makes lead scoring complex.

To remedy this, generate marketing leads specific to a product or product category, then you will want to track activity like white papers downloaded, demos downloaded, webinars attended to a specific to a product or product category and lead score.  In a nutshell, you would not want to generate a lead for sprockets because that was the last web form the prospect filled out after they have been researching widgets for 3 months.  They should be contacted regarding widgets.

How can you manage this?  If you have a small number of products or product categories, then you can probably build separate historical activity component of the lead score by product or product category.  If you have lots of products and a few product categories, then create a few historical activity lead scores by product category.  In situations where there is way too many products or product categories, then consider building the historical activity component of the lead score on demand.  For example, Mr. A responds to a marketing campaign for product Z.  Build the score from Mr. A's profile, from his current web form responses plus add a query to look at historical activity for the same product or product category in the last 30 - 90 days.  The historical activity component increases with the amount of recent activity for the same type of product.

Another prositive effect of the ad hoc building of the historical activity score is that the lead is created in the context of a campaign and for a specific product or effort.  Lead scoring is often divorced from any specific campaign, because a lead could be generated from activities or responses across many campaigns.  This is challenging when you want to report which campaign generates more leads than another.  The ad hoc building of the score per campaign still tightly associates the campaign with the response and subsequently the lead while allowing the marketer the capability to impute interest based on past responses for the same or similar products.

Other things you can try first to improve lead quality to sales
First, reduce duplicate leads for the same contact.  Aprimo automatically merges duplicates. but many systems treat each response as a separate lead and contact.  Buy Aprimo or add a merge and duplicate reduction system to your prospect to lead processing.

Second, make sure all leads have the minimum required contact information.  Any leads passed to sales should have some minimum required information like name, email address, and phone number.  There is a trade off here, the more information that you require then the lower the response.  But the more information that you require, the higher the quality except for bogus entries like Mickey Mouse.  At least look at the amount of information provided as an element of the lead score (quality score) with the score going higher as the profile information is fully populated.  If you can ask for name and address information and validate the address - that is an even better indicator of quality.

Third, create and use your qualifying questions and definitely score the qualifying questions. If someone says that they have a budget and he or she has to make a decision in 30 days make sure you score this so that these leads are immediately sent to sales.  Talk to sales and let them tell you what qualifying question responses should be sent to sales immediately and which ones should be nurtured.  Also, when someone says that they are making a decision in 9 months or a year, then send them an email 3 months before that time to see if they would like to talk with a sales professional or change their level of interest.

This last point is going to seem obvious, but hey doesn't most everything I write about here seem obvious after you read it.   Fourth, do not create a lead for a prospect's first response.  Duh.  Unless the individual answers a qualifying question high enough on their first web form, do not send them immediately to sales to become a lead.  Look for some minimal level of activity over the last 30 - 90 days.  So, make sure the individual has demonstrated a pattern of activity over time that shows they are really interested before creating a lead for that person.

In closing
I can't promise you that if you implement lead scoring or any of the above steps to improve lead quality that the sales people will start inviting you out to their summer homes or boats.  However, marketing should take steps to improve lead quality and take the emphasis off of lead quantity.  Also, you might be wondering what do you do with all those other prospects that responded but did not qualify to become a lead.  Well, these known prospects have provided you with product preference information and contact information for marketing to keep nurturing them until they are ready to talk with sales.  Aprimo is designed to maintain these prospects and maintain a dialogue with them until the prospect self-qualifies as a lead.  Good hunting.

Marketers on the street often come up to me and ask, "How many times can I contact my customers and prospects?"  Actually, marketers do not come up to me and ask me this question, but they should be asking someone this question.  Actually, I decided to write this blog because I am surprised how many organizations do not manage the number of time  customer and prospect communications much at all.  In some cases customers and prospects are being barraged with marketing communication to the point that the communication is becoming less and less effective.

Opt-Outs First
There are customers and prospects that you should not be contacting at all.  These are individuals that have asked to be removed (opted-out) from your marketing communication.  If someone asks to no longer receive your marketing messages by all channels, or by a specific marketing channel of email, mail, or call, then they are probably not interested in your messages or in receiving your offers via that specific channel.  The customer or prospect by providing you this information has just saved you money, increased your response rate, and has provided you a preference. So, you should use that information.

Managing these opt-outs is not JUST a good idea, it is the law.  There are a variety of regulations enforcing opt-outs.  The CAN-SPAM act covers email marketing and requires that you provide a way for your customers and prospects to opt-out of future marketing emails.  The opt-out method can be a link to an opt-out web page or a reply email with unsubscribe in the subject line.  CAN-SPAM applies to commercial emails focused on advertising or selling products and services.  Transactional emails reporting account balances, shipping, and other information are not covered by CAN-SPAM and do not have to provide an opt-out method.   Also, I am not legal council, so please check with your legal professional regarding the specific opt-out requirements for your organization and marketing.

There are other regulations covering telemarketing opt-outs (TSR or the Telemarketing Sales Rule) that require marketers to apply the National Do Not Call list and maintain and use a do not call list for your organization.  For direct mail, there are no do not mail regulations, yet.  However, because of the high cost of direct mail every direct mail marketer should have their own do not mail list and use it.  The DMA also offers its own national do not mail suppression list to members.  For this and other compliance information, check out the Direct Marketing Association's compliance portal here.  Please note, I am only discussing U.S. regulations in this blog.  Each country and/or economic region will have its own regulations.  As I said before, check with your own legal council about these compliance issues.

Number of contacts - There is no silver bullet
Once you can drop the prospects and customers that do not want to be contacted at all, you can concentrate on how often you communicate to the others.  Okay, if you are looking for the silver bullet answer to this question here, you won't find it.  It doesn't exist.  But you can start finding it for yourself.  It is a complex issue.  There is a delicate balance between the power of repeating a message and overwhelming and diluting your messages with too many messages.  You definitely don't want to compete with your own messaging or worse start increasing the number of people who are opting-out or unsubscribing from your marketing messages all together.

The first step to implementing a contact management strategy is to define some basic contact management rules.  The rules should specify how many times your marketing organization will contact a person in a set period of time.  The best rules are marketing channel centric, that is a rule defines how often you will contact the person via email, call, and mail per week or month.  Do not create a rule with large time frames like 10 times a year, because this would still allow a marketer to contact the person 10 times in one day.  This seems obvious, but a client once asked me to implement an only contact 10 times a year direct mail rule. 

At this point, you can use some customer research or anecdotal evidence or gut feel to define your initial rules.  I usually suggest something like no more than 1 email per week, a direct mailing once every two weeks, and a telemarketing effort (could include multiple attempts) only once a month.  Once you have your initial contact management rules implemented and established, you can start testing variants.  You can pull a segment of customers and market to that segment more frequently and compare overall results versus your baseline.  Whenever changing your contact management rules, monitor your opt-outs from the test group as well as response rates.  You want to increase response rates without significantly increasing opt-outs.

Exceptions -every rule has one
There are exceptions to every rule even contact management rules.  Usually, informational messages from marketing are required for regulatory purposes or other reasons.  These messages are not counted as a contact and they are not suppressed because of contact management rules either.  The customer or prospect must receive this information because it is important or required.  It is not promotional in nature.   Really, these informational messages should be rare from marketing. 

Subscriptions are another special case.  Opt-in subscriptions are not counted against the total number of contacts because the prospect or customer has chosen to receive those messages.  Subscriptions are also semi-promotional and informational in nature.  The customer or prospect wants to receive these messages and if they did not, the individual can unsubscribe from them.  If you enforced and counted these contacts against your contact management rules, then the subscribers would not receive their subscriptions and marketing could not reach the subscribers - your most engaged individuals - to make them offers.  So, subscriptions are a special case.

Responses to customers and prospects asking for more information are another exception.  If the customer or prospect asks to have a white paper emailed to them, these emails should not count against the individuals' totals or be suppressed because the customer or prospect received too many emails.  I would also argue that confirmation messages, usually emails, and thank yous are not counted as well. 

What you want to regulate and control with contact management rules are the promotional and unsolicited marketing messages to your customers and prospects. 

Another Exception - Communication plans
There is another unique exception that requires some special handling and some variation to your contact management rules.  In some cases, you will want to run a customer through a series of messages to completion without interruption.  This could be a series of welcome emails, a renewal series, or multiple invites to an upcoming seminar via mail and email.  During this time, you want the customer or prospect's undivided attention.  You do not want other random messages to appear.  The contact management rules would only apply at the beginning of the multi-touch communication plan, but no contact management suppression rules would be applied after the first contact in the series.  Also, the records would be locked for a longer period of time then your normal contact management rules - weeks or months even.

This lock period can be managed by setting a lock date for each individual in the campaign.  Standard exclusion rules applied to each campaign could then suppress these locked individuals. This will prevent the individual from being promoted by other campaigns until after the specified lock date.  This lock date could also be used to reserve control groups that are held back from all marketing promotions for baseline comparisons of marketing lift.  What is marketing lift you ask?  Marketing lift is the amount of additional revenue or responses that marketing promotions to individuals generate compared to the control group that did not receive any marketing promotions.

Technology
Multichannel Campaign Management and eMarketing systems, like Aprimo, provide capabilities to manage opt-outs and to manage contact management rules.  In fact, these applications make it easy to manage your opt-outs, contact management rules, and contact strategy.  The components of the system are simple.  A contact history table or communication log to track which customer or prospect received which marketing message or offer via which channel and when.  Also, the ability to apply predefined filters or queries for each contact management rule to suppress records that have already been contacted more than the allotted time.  A lock table can also be created and written to in order to use in queries to enforce promotion blackout periods for specific individuals.  Multichannel Campaign Management solution has these components out of the box, all you need to provide are the contact management rules.


Think about it
So, I have not provided you with any silver bullets regarding implementing a contact management strategy.  However, there are some guidelines and practices to consider.  The only limitation to putting a contact management strategy in place is the internal discipline and processes of marketing.  Technology, like Aprimo, simply makes it easier to execute and manage.

Thanks to Joel and James for a thought-provoking event on Wednesday - Pull Marketing, Social CRM and Influencer Marketing - Twitter Tag #b2b21c

Stephen Mills from O2 advised that you only have 4 seconds to capture interest so RELEVANCY is key if you want to drive campaign results.

Given the volume of communications that we are all trying to manage, you can see why Marketing Management Technology is so popular right now.

Will Schnabel explored the shift of power from vendor to buyer in the sales process - the hunted become the hunters and use multiple channels to inform themselves (Tom Chapman advised that 1 in 5 tweets mentions a brand, product or service). With 70% of leads not being "ready now", event trigger marketing and lead automation are no longer optional tools for the B2B marketer.

Katie and Pamela from Volume informed us that 69% B2B decision makers use social networks and 90% participate in video - thanks for sharing the Oracle case study on Enterprise Performance Management TV.

David Beard re-enforced the message that Sage don't just do finance software! They are doing a great job "keeping the conversation going" around their CRM solutions and interacting with any interest they observe.

"Too much noise" was the message from James Hanson. Every prospect you are speaking to is likely to have at least 5 influencers. Empathy is key - understand what drives the influencers and adapt your marketing plans accordingly. Thanks to Drew Nicholson for sharing the influencer experience at Cisco Webex.

Great energy from Prof Merlin Stone. Are we approaching a tipping point similar to the explosion of telephone marketing 20 years ago? Web 2 has given the customer parity with the supplier this time. Hyper-competition makes planning very difficult - best to be guided by how you would like your customers to talk about you.

A stimulating debate, led by Scot Mckee from Birddog and Steve Kemish from Cyance, forced us to consider whether traditional forms of B2B marketing were dead and that we all need to migrate to digital. Despite protestations from Joel, the panel - and audience - migrated to the middle ground and the much maligned word "Integration".

Guess I'll have to be careful about how much I reference the ability to integrate all your marketing efforts in Aprimo Marketing Studio!

This blog may sound like a blatant pitch for investing in enterprise marketing management software, a category that encompasses both multichannel marketing and marketing resource management software.  I cannot pretend that this is a completely "fair and balanced" view given my employer (Aprimo).  However, the concept for this blog came from my marketing clients and prospective clients.  It is not an artificial idea.  It was organically grown.  Read it and see if it resonates with you.

The New Economy gives way to the NO Economy
Remember the New Economy.  It promised that globalization and the rapid movement of ideas, technology, resources, manufacturing, and financing through the power of the Internet was going to fundamentally change the way we live, do business, and market.  It was going to improve everyone's lives. 

Well, the new economy has been foreclosed on, though its structure is still there.  The New Economy is empty, has growing weeds, contains some broken windows, and needs some attention.  What we are left with now is a NEW economy that actually resembles the old economy of the frugal and considerate consumer.  I will call this the New Old (NO) Economy.  The NO Economy is not built on instant financing with no money down, creative investment vehicles, outsourcing everything, and ponzi schemes.  It is an economy based on a frugal, responsible, and value conscious consumer - the NO Consumer.

Marketing in the NO Economy to the NO Consumer
This NO Economy and NO Consumer has changed how company's market as well.  The days of if you build it, the customers will come are gone.  Or, if you offer it, the customers will respond.  Even in this recovering economy, the NO Consumers are more skeptical and less impulsive.  You can see this consumer behavior effecting most every industry - automobiles, hotels, gaming, software, airlines, media, manufacturing, etc.  Economists are seeing this as a fundamental change in the consumer.  This consumer behavior makes it much more difficult to get your prospects and customers to respond to your offers, no matter what you spend in marketing.  In addition, in order to deliver more value to acquire consumers, companies are compressing prices or delivering more for the same price.  This is putting pressure on margins and in turn reducing marketing budgets.  The marketing department is under siege both internally (budgets slashed) and externally (customers not responding).

It is time to invest in your marketing department
In periods of growth, when consumers were spending as fast as they could refinance their property, your marketing could be as targeted as a shotgun blast and as inefficient as a giant SUV.  It really didn't matter what marketing did, because the consumer was unstoppable.

It is time to invest in your marketing department to change with these leaner times and equip it to better manage this consumer behavior.  Investing in marketing does not mean giving marketing more money to hire more coordinators to send out more marketing messages, more emails, spend more on advertising. etc.  Investing in marketing means putting in the marketing systems, technology, and process improvements that will create a more efficient marketing department.  A good place to start would be an Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) system.  This investment could be in a complete or even a partial EMM system.  Small incremental improvement with a partial system is better than standing still and doing nothing. 

An EMM system can help your marketing department produce targeted messages more quickly with fewer review cycles.  It can allow marketing to control and track marketing costs for those messages and deliver them to the right customer in the most cost efficient manner (personalized email, mail, web microsite, point of sale, etc.).  EMM systems combine marketing planning, financial and production management along with campaign, offer, and emarketing management all in one platform.  EMM allows you to reduce costs to improve your bottom line while also improving your top line revenue generation with more effective targeting and automated, personalized communication.  An EMM system will allow your marketing to be focused, more efficient, and more persistent to pry the NO Consumer out of his or her anti-spending cocoon. 

Why now?
Well before your marketing department was too busy generating revenue to implement a new marketing system.  Why not use this downturn in the economy to retool your marketing department.  This will allow your organization to survive in this bad NO Economy.  Then later, when the economy steams back, which economies always do, your company will be ready to take full advantage of the opportunities the next new economy will bring.

There seems to be a lot of confusion out there in marketing land, the real world from my technology vendor land, about how to get the best return from your Multichannel Campaign Management (MCM) system.  Just to be clear, this MCM super category includes list selection, eMarketing,  email marketing, and lead management functionality.

Insanity
They say, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.  This is the same with MCM.  If you market the same way after implementing MCM as you did before implementing it, you are not going to get significantly improved results just because you have a system now.

Your marketing has to change to take advantage of the strengths of the MCM system.  For example, a marketing department that performs a lot of small ad hoc or one off campaigns and then continues to perform a lot of ad hoc and one off campaigns after the implementation will not enjoy any significant efficiency gains from MCM.  The marketing department  will just be doing the same marketing in a new system.  Sure, the marketing department will be more organized and eventually gain some productivity improvements, but not the double digit percentage improvement that was projected in the business case.


How can you get more value from your MCM implementation?

1. Automate.  Start thinking about what marketing programs can run unattended or automated.   MCM is your never tiring, unrelenting, marketing cyborg that will keep chugging until the chip is ripped from its server.   Leverage this capability as much as possible.  Good candidates for automation include - New Customer programs, eShopping Cart abandonment programs, automated information request, eFulfillment of white papers and newsletters, eSurvey marketing programs, lapsed customer programs, lead nurturing or research, alerts, renewals, new product notices, etc. 

2. Communicate.  Stop thinking about marketing in increments of a single email or touch point and automate the entire communication plan across all marketing channels.  The overhead of lots of one off emails or mailing pieces makes these small campaigns inefficient.  Also, your marketing can improve if you change from singleton efforts to having an ongoing conversation with your customers.  This multi-touch communication process through repetition makes your target customers gradually more aware of your company and more comfortable with your marketing.  They retain your message better, and it gives them more opportunities to respond.  This all adds up to improved response at lower cost.  Many MCM systems are designed to run these types of multi-touch programs.

3.  Consolidate and Integrate.  In with the new and out with the old.  If you want immediate efficiency gains for your marketing team, think of the many diverse systems with which your team interacts daily or weekly that can be eliminated and replaced with one marketing platform (cough, like Aprimo).  This is simple math, each redundant system eliminated also eliminates the costs of supporting the systems - licensing, support and maintenance, and administration costs. 

Also, look at systems that your marketing team must update that often require manual effort or double entry.  These systems are great candidates for integration.  Think of the time that could be saved by eliminating the double entry of invoices, the manual uploading of leads in the SFA system, the manual loading of lists into a campaign from other internal marketing data sources and/or the manual uploading of offers into your customer service system.  With a few targeted integration projects, you can make your team more efficient.  MCM systems, those based on a marketing platform, can become your integrated marketing information hub.  Hah!  You can't do that in a spreadsheet.

4. Personalize-ate.  Okay, I could not think of another word ending in ate.  MCM systems provide marketing greater access to your data and it is designed to deliver more personalized content.  I am not talking about just being able to slap a first or last name in the email text or put in a different picture in an email based on the customer's demographic.  That personalization is very cool and powerful.  The personalization that I am talking about is more about getting personal with your customers. 

MCM offers you greater access to your customer data, especially transaction data like purchases or web visits.  Use it to answer questions about your customers.  What products or product categories does your customer purchase most often?  What did they purchase last year during the Christmas season? When do they purchase?  Did they stop purchasing?  What do they view on your web site most often?  Did they move or change titles recently?  Answer these questions and others to better target your customers with the right message and offers.  Also, build models and scores using tools like SPSS/IBM Modeler to mine for hard to find patterns in your data.  Access this wealth of customer behavior with your MCM system to deliver more personal and relevant messages to your customers.


Don't Procrastinate.  These headings are getting a little silly.  Good news.  This is the last one.  Start planning now for how your future multichannel campaign management system will allow you to do more and make more.  Or, if you already have an MCM system, think of ways to further leverage its capabilities to your company's benefit.  There are so many opportunities to gain value from an MCM system, now just do it.

I often hear things like, I need help with my (pick one) marketing budget, project managment/workflow, creative reviews, job requests, campaign planning, asset management, etc.  As we get into discussions around other processes like online marketing, people are surprised that Aprimo offers one solution that manages all of their marketing processes and it is easy to use.

Aprimo Marketing Studio is new to the marketplace but the demand is not new at all.  I'm hearing people talk about their company having lots of different vendors and technologies trying to do what Aprimo Marketing Studio already does.  They're still looking for a better solution because....all the different things they have in place right now aren't working for them.  They say they don't know how effective their email campaigns are because they have no way to measure them.  They have no idea how much they're spending on each campaign, they need visibility into their proejcts, etc.  Their stories go on and on. 

If you are looking for ONE solution to handle your marketing needs, call me at 317.860.2424.  I would love to speak with you about your specific needs and share how Aprimo Marketing Studio can help.  You can also reach me via Live Chat at our Web site, aprimo.com.

Kim Collins, Managing Vice President at Gartner Research, a leading industry analyst firm, will speak about marketing process to a lunch crowd of 30 on October, 6, 2009, in Rosemont, Illinois. Aprimo is excited to showcase Kim's market expertise to this group of marketing and IT professionals who are looking for ways to increase revenue and reduce costs in a challenging economic environment. And these professionals are excited, too! They will learn how to increase ROI in marketing from one of the country’s leading marketing analysts. Kim will discuss:

• The top three tips for marketing process management to drive revenue through enhanced customer communication.
• The top three tips for marketing process management to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, and eliminate waste.
• How can companies assess technologies and derive value from marketing process management?

Gartner recently featured Aprimo in the "Visionaries Quadrant" of the Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Marketing Management (July 2009). We're not just tooting our own horn here!

If you could sit down with Kim Collins, what would you discuss? What problems are you trying to solve? They might be related to marketing process management, or more specific to lead nurturing or marketing financial management.

In a September 23, 2009 post entitled "Working in Marketing for Technology," Kelly Turner of Aprimo writes, "As a marketer – I want the cutting edge technology to simplify my personal life... I now work in the IT industry as a marketer and can use great, interactive technology in my professional life. Best of both worlds." Hannah Montana, is that you?!

I love Hannah Montana. The character, the show, the music. Miley Cyrus is one heck of a talented teenager. To be more accurate, I love all things Disney Channel. I get excited when yet another Disney child star hits it big on network television or the silver screen. I feel like I can say, "I knew them when."

Examples: Lindsay Lohan, Hilary Duff, Shia LaBeouf, Selena Gomez, the Jonas Brothers. Amanda Bines (Hairspray), Michelle Trachtenberg (Gossip Girl) and Kenan Thompson (Saturday Night Live) got their start on Nickelodeon. Close enough.

My love of the Disney Channel reinforces that my inner child, or teeny-bopper, is alive and well. My inner marketer, which is far more "outer" than "inner" because of my day job, enjoys the Disney Channel, too, because they know exactly how to market and talk to their audience. There are no traditional commercials on the channel, but Disney advertises their shows, movies, environmental campaigns like Friends for Change, and highlights ordinary kids around the world doing extraordinary things.

Now there's a tangent for you. Focus, Kati.

The best of both worlds. That's what we, the marketing department at Aprimo, get. We can easily sympathize with marketers who are struggling with campaign planning and execution, attempting to track marketing finances and measure ROI. But we don't have to struggle with these campaign management issues. As a provider of marketing automation software, we feel a responsibility to lead by example. "You want to buy our software? Great! Good luck figuring it out." No. We want to showcase how global marketing organizations can solve their toughest issues. Understanding our customers' pain points, yet avoiding them ourselves? Definitely the best of both worlds.

Miley, let's do lunch.

Internally, there is debate on how we price our email software.  For Aprimo Marketing Studio, for our email marketing software, we charge an aggregate fee for the amount of email you send (the more you send, the higher the fee).  Some of our competitors charge by "CER" or customer equivalent records.  The issue is, which model is better for the customer?

Our competitors like to point out (I am sure they are just being helpful) that charging for emails sent, penalizes the customer for success.  In essence, the more you send email (or use the system), the more you pay.  Wouldn't it be better to just go to an "all you can eat" model instead for email marketing?  It just so happens, they believe they represent such a model.

This argument brings me back to the lure of the all inclusive resort.  The idea is, pay one fee, and you can eat and drink, as much as you want, anywhere on the resort for "free."  It does not matter if you are a big eater or a small eater.  The ultimate "all you can eat" setup.  The "free" in this case, being covered by the fee included in your resort charge (just like our competitors seem to forget where their "free" is located - this fee is often more expensive than the per meal plan - but lets set that point aside).  

The problem with this setup from the vendor side is that there is real cost to serving food.  Given the real costs in purchasing and serving food, and by including all such items outside of a direct fee, the resort becomes challenged in justifying spending too much money on food.  They have taken what should be aligned to revenue (food) and make it a pure cost center.  The result, all that "free food" on the resort starts to taste like it, as the company seeks creative ways to cut costs and improve margins on what is now managed by the concept of "what can we get away with for food and still sell resort fees."

There is also real cost in managing email deliverability.  There are real investments in people and technology that are directly related to the volume of email being sent.  Once you take away any direct revenue tied to these expenses and move them to a pure cost model, the same issue occurs.  The email software company continues to find ways to "cut cost" from their email deliverability services and it becomes a "what is the minimum we need to do to cover deliverability and still get away with charging our software fees."  The result, all the "free" email starts to taste (I mean bounce) like it.

So, will we always have the same revenue model for email?  I am not sure.  If the customer ultimately demands the all you can eat resort and can tolerate a "cost center" approach to deliverability, we might eventually need to change to market demand.  I believe you are always best served when your vendor's costs & revenue are aligned to your end goals.  I am not sure how many email marketers really want to invest in email software that is not fully aligned to the reliable delivery of their email.

Technically, my name is Kati Dafoe, and technically, I'm an Associate Events Specialist at Aprimo. I figured before I let too much time go by, I should officially introduce myself, my background and why you should care about what I have to say!

I'm part of a two-man (well, two-woman) team that manages North American events for Aprimo. So, on a typical day, you can bet I'm working on a webinar, our annual user conference (a premier event that highlights our industry-leading technology for marketing), a smaller regional lunch meeting or thinking about our booth strategy for our next tradeshow sponsorship. And, on a typical day, I am using our industry-leading technology for marketing to make my life a little easier. And it doesn't just make my life easier, but my co-workers' lives as well.

I consider myself lucky to have gotten my start in corporate America long after computers became mainstream. My mind boggles when I hear stories of faxes and paper mounds and endless file cabinets (oh my!). Just last week, I cringed when a vendor thanked me for emailing a document but asked me to fax it instead.

What old school processes make you cringe? What present-day technology for marketing puts pep in your step?

I have a big confession to make. I am completely un-American. I say this because unlike majority of the population - I have absolutely NO interest in car shopping....not only do I have no interest, I pretty much hate it. I want a car that runs and gets me from A to B and sure - I have preferences on style, make and model, but I have no real interest in actually shopping for it. I would prefer someone take my money and go purchase me a car and say, "Here you go...drive this for the next ten years and then I will come back and shop for you again." Perfect!

I see this in companies that I work with all of the time. They are not in the driver's seat when it comes to marketing. They have no desire to do it and yet, they know that A. they need it and B. that they have a preference on how it gets done, just little interest in implementing it. These companies view marketing as a chore - enter marketing technology. Enter Aprimo Marketing Studio.

Our job here is complete those chores - be the Tylenol for the CMO. Marketers are pushed further and faster, to deliver more, in a time of budget cuts and department downsizing. You have to be effective and efficient and you can't do it all. I will be the first to say that we can't do it ALL, but our marketing software is a robust engine- it can help with social media management, web analytics solutions, microsites, and marketing lead management.

Consider it the dashboard that holds the keys to your marketing success and can drive your marketing engine.

So...let's go for a drive....

...yes it's true. 'Cover Girl' not as in a model, but as one who is constantly running for cover! I work for Aprimo, an online marketing powerhouse, as the Manager of Lead Generation.  I can tell you that more times then not, we have been bombarded through our Live Chat.  Someone comes on our Web site, probably through the assistance of our Search Engine Marketing tools and by using my web analytics tools, I can see them.  I can then initiate a conversation or wait for them to reach out to me. 

One day, this person initiates a live chat acting as the CEO of one of our competitors, (like we wouldn't know his name) and then proceeds to ask for a cheeseburger.  This technology is great, but it does release some crazies!  I wish our Marketing Software could detect the fool hearty as they hit our site so we can dispense them quickly. Now, wouldn't that be cool?  

The ability to have something instantaneous, like an answer, is something our Interactive Marketing is trying to foster.  I think we need to create a whole new lead nurturing cycle for these 'Chats'.  Yes, that is what I will work on today.  Developing my leads through multi-directional campaigns using Multichannel Marketing. Since my Interactive Marketing software tells me where my chat is coming from, all I would need from that point is their name because email configurations are usually quite easy to find.  Then, I could actually create a campaign workflow around these inbound marketing opportunities and really focus on lead nurturing and account development. 

Believe you me, it sounds a lot more complicated then it is.  Marketing Automation, you gotta love it.   How do you handle those people who hit your site to chat?  Or do you even chat?

Knowing how to best complete a chore is often the hardest part of the task. For example, take the monumental task of bringing new life to old wood floors on the cheap. For me, a purist, I find the newest ways of doing things aren't always the best. 

Take for example, rehabbing old houses, which could a be a torture tactic. One of the staples of rehabbing is refinishing hardwood floors. You could sand, sand, sand, sand and then sand some more. Get some really toxic chemicals, wear a respirator, carefully yet quickly spread the polyurethane and not walk on the floors for a couple of days.  Or, you could just get some good old-fashioned floor wax, play some old tunes from Frank Sinatra and have a good day. Less mess, no fuss.

How does polishing up old wood floors have anything to do with web analytics solutions or post campaign analysis, you ask?  You are in the right place!
 
Technology for marketing, like polishing old wood floors, can take on any number of different guises. Take for example measuring online marketing efforts with the time tested CID command. It is a simple and quick way to measure any URL, and the beauty of it all is that anyone, from event managers to marketing communicators, can use this simple but nifty tool anytime with no assistance from interactive marketers, like us.

So, next time you are asked to track a campaign or Web page, give the requester the power to utilize their own marketing management technology tools. Tell them to add ?CID=(tracking name) to any URL. Your web analytics solutions like Omniture or Google Analytics, will be able to report the data needed. 

Well I have to admit, the notion of putting my thoughts into the open world did seem a little daunting to me. I am the technical marketing manager for Aprimo, a marketing automation software company. Seems like the word marketing is used a lot in my title and role :). A few years ago, the words technical and marketing together would have seemed strange, but its amazing just how much marketing is reliant on technology these days, especially in my world. Now, technical marketing is not a role unique to Aprimo, but it just so happens that we are a marketing software automation company.

Interactive Marketing, Direct Marketing, Digital Assets, Lead Management, Social Media - to name a few, are arenas we play in every day and all are completely online. Every day we are solving problems for marketers, andthrough the use of our software. 

I dare to think where we would be without the Internet, email or social media (I wouldn't be writing this post for one). The direct mail trend is dropping while interactive and email channels are growing exponentially. Every email sent, opened and clicked can be tracked. This is all valuable information, which is then used to further engage and target each prospect or customer. This information is gold to a marketer and its all using technology, our technology in this case. As you may have guessed I am a technology junkie and I am lucky to be involved in one of the hottest growing industries in the world. 

I believe we have only scratched the surface of what we can do with technology and marketing, and I am so excited to be part of this exciting industry. 

Being my first blog, I seemed to have waffled a bit. As you can see my passion is technology and how we can use it to solve marketers problems. If this is something that interests you then watch this space, well this blog anyway.

Before I go, I leave you with with this story that really tickled me. Sometimes I think we are not as advanced as we think.

More to come next time....

Project Definition
The goal of this post is to provide some insight into how the following interactive splash page was built to market our Aprimo Marketing Studio Microsite (sorry non-techical people, but this may bore you to death):

• http://www.aprimo.com/marketingstudio/splash/splash.html (a 3D Marketing Studio splash introduction)

Purpose of Marketing Studio Splash Page
The Marketing Studio animation was meant to excite people's interest in our temporary Marketing Studio microsite, which provided plenty of information about our new microsite software. The software includes modules such as Search Engine Management, Commercial Email, Microsites & Landing Pages, Web Analytics, etc. It contains everything a marketing department needs to run web campaigns.

The splash page included animation of a box turning from white to green, opening, and letting our icons, which represent our solution modules, out of the box. Then, text pops up mentioning that we can't wait to show you our solutions. Finally, you would fill out a form, and we would contact you with the password to view our Aprimo Marketing Studio microsite.

Technologies Used

• Blender 3D (blender.org) - create Box Animation: Output Targa
• Adobe After Effects  - import TARGA & animate icons; output FLV
• Adobe Flash - used to embed FLV and actionscript was used for the lights in the background

Challenge
The biggest challenge for me, in this case, was learning free 3D software that was brand new to me. Due to the fact that I had never used Blender, it took couple days to build the 3D box animation. The interface is nothing like Autodesk 3D studio Max or Maya, and don't get me started on the materials and shading.

While this was a challenge, the direction I received from our marketing management pointed to 3D animation, so I took initiative to learn enough about the software to create a simple animation. Though the software is the opposite of intuitive, Blender can be used as an excellent marketing tool for sharp, 3D animation with transparency.

One of my family members had surgery this week and has come through it beautifully.  She had a wonderful team of medical experts to make this happen. 

It made me think about the surgery we often need in our business processes.  I hear this in speaking with prospects looking for marketing information technologies and social media applications.  They need to eliminate the old and find something that works for them making their marketing efforts healthy and productive. 

One lady recently told me they have a complex system of marketing management processes but it doesn't give them the productivity they desperately need.  Their current process mires them down, resulting in consumption of time and money.  She was excited to know we have marketing software, both on-demand & Marketing SaaS (Software as a Service) that can streamline all of her marketing needs. Now, the hardest decision she has to make is determining which solution best suits her needs!

So, think of Aprimo as your marketing medical team.  If your marketing efforts are ailing, I would love to speak with you.  We would love to make them healthy. 

Working at a marketing for technology company, Aprimo, every day I take calls and chat online with marketers with similar woes, "My boss just asked me to do more work with no additional resources.  I am overwhelmed!  Do you think you can help me?  I am desperate!" 
Most likely, due to the economy, we're hearing this even more.  Marketers are stretched thin even before they are asked to do more with less or rely on existing resources.

Enter Aprimo. 

Whether you need assistance with interactive marketing, search marketing software, managing department workflow, calendaring, managing logos, renditions, and artwork, obtaining approvals, web analytics, or marketing budget and more, we can help. 

It's great to speak with marketers and hear the sigh of relief after only a few minutes into the conversation.  This is another part of my job I love....helping people who are searching for the marketing tools we offer.  What are you searching for in your marketing needs?  How can Aprimo help?