Why You Are Not Getting The Expected ROI From Marketing Automation (Part 4)

Your Platform Is Not the Problem

Overview: We have already discussed the “Three Ps” and how your undefined process leads to staffing with the wrong skill sets. Now let’s look at a few cold, hard facts. Eloqua conveniently provides a Benchmark section in its Insight reporting tool. This gives us a great anonymous overview of the performance of thousands of campaigns delivering millions of emails daily. And what do they tell us?

Mean Unique Open Rate:                                11.3%

Mean Unique CTR:                                              2.6%

Mean Unique Click-to-Open Rate:                    8.8%

Let’s start with this: 88.7% of your audience is not even opening your marketing emails. Your marketing automation platform is not the problem.

When it comes to challenges (business challenges or otherwise), we are faces with a two-step process to get to a viable solution. First, we must identify the problem - in this case, an 11.3% open rate. Second, we need to understand why we have this problem. Again, let’s go to our hammer factory analogy for some insight.

In our hammer factory, we probably make more than one kind of hammer: general-purpose consumer hammers, professional framing hammers, roofing hammers, demolition hammers, etc. As Demand Generation professionals, we can clearly see some buyer personas developing here. We can create segments according to our personas so we can message the right type of hammer to the right type of customer; such as a Spring sale on framing hammers, as the home construction season gears up for the warmer months. Would a framing carpenter be interested in this promotion? Likely, yes. How about the homeowner looking for an inexpensive hammer to hang a picture in drywall? She’s probably not going to see the value in a forty-dollar specialty hammer. Segmentation and targeting is one source of our problem.

Subject line is another obvious suspect in the open rate problem. There are countless tomes written on the subject, so I won’t elaborate here, but have you checked the viability of your subject lines? Are they clear, to-the-point and compelling? How do you validate those attributes?

Another component of open rate is sender recognition. Is your brand strong enough to boost open rates? The stronger the brand recognition (assuming your brand does not carry a negative connotation), the more likely your prospect will open your emails – to a point. Let’s look at some troubling examples.

Let’s imaging your brand of hammers is a well-respected brand known for manufacturing high-quality hammers at a fair price. You have decided to leverage that brand and send mass emails to a broad, unsegmented audience. After your large database of framing carpenters has received six emails in a row promoting consumer hammers, he or she might get tired of receiving these consumer-oriented emails and mark your email “junk” to get them out of his or her in box. Now your emails are showing as delivered (the email server has forwarded the email to the individual email client) but they are actually going into your recipient’s junk mail folder. It is hard to open an email when you never actually see the email.

Surprisingly, I have seen Return Path stats (for major brands) where 1/3 of all emails sent landed in the recipients’ junk mail folders. Never to be seen and, unfortunately, never to be opened or clicked. This type of “message fatigue” is more common than you might think, and is much easier to imagine when looking through the lens of an imaginary hammer factory.

Are you thinking of your Demand Center metrics in this way? What can you do to course correct if you discover your metrics are not where they need to be?

Notes:

Commit to your process first. Your Marketing Automation Platform can only do what you tell it to do. If your process is not well defined and engineered to accomplish your marketing goals, your platform will only help you make the same mistakes faster and at a higher volume.

Think small (like those extremely successful Volkswagen ads from the sixties and seventies). Your platform should be engineered to follow a process of communicating very defined messages to a very targeted audience. If you are continually sending large batches to broad audiences, you will soon email your database into extinction.

Think like a factory designer. Allow your platform to do the work it does well and let skilled specialists perform those tasks they do well.

DO NOT rely on “best practices.” The best practice for one organization may be the worst for another. I don’t even refer to best practices, but rather “best principles.”

Test, test and test some more. Are you validating your demand generation practices? Think of your optimization process as a never-ending game of “king of the hill.” The current process champion only remains champion if that process can defend against every challenger.

People, Process and Platform – the Three P’s. For the past four weeks, we’ve talked about how to conceptualize your demand center as a “marketing factory.” We’ve used the oversimplified analogy of a hammer factory (my apologies to anyone out there who manufacture hammers – I’m sure this oversimplification doesn’t nearly capture the true complexities of your process) to view the concept in a bit of an abstraction. What we haven’t discussed, however, is a critical component of any manufacturing process: raw materials. In our hammer factory, those raw materials might be wood and steel (again, oversimplified). In our “marketing factory” the raw materials are data. Data may be a four-letter word, but it doesn’t have to be an impediment to your demand generation efforts. Next week we’ll look at some ways to address dirty data.