White Noise

From my MediaPost weekly Column:

The holiday season — or “peak season,” as we love to call it — is upon us again. We are projecting increases across the board for email marketing: increases in the volume of email and campaigns sent, in number of segments within each campaign, and of course a dramatic increase in mobile viewership.

Breaking this down helps us draw a few conclusions. First, the rise in email volume is not surprise, as we’ve seen this persistent increase year-over-year for the past four to five years. What’s interesting is the correlation to growth in volume to the increase in number of campaigns sent. The two rates of growth are traditionally closely aligned, yet this year we see a rapid rise in the number of campaigns sent and number of segments used per campaign.

More email, more campaigns and more segments, yet you have the same industry growth rate projection for next year: the 12% CAGR that we’ve seen the last four years. Innovation would dictate as an industry grows, efficiencies in technology and processes would allow you to do more with less. Yet in email marketing, more campaigns and more segments typically translate to more resources needed to develop content, stage campaigns, and apply quality controls to campaigns. Budgets will have to give at some point to accommodate for this shift in practices by conventional wisdom.

One would presume that if marketers are programming more campaigns to run through automation (triggers, lifecycle automation, API-driven campaigns), you would see more campaigns that require less resource involvement on a day-to-day basis. One could also presume that with the rise of mobile viewership and the inability of most ESPs to detect and render mobile-optimized content, marketers are opingt to segment mobile viewers and set up as separate campaigns. One may even presume that, with the drive to improve testing tools, marketers are still learning how to apply testing at scale. And lastly, with the integration of retargeting, Web personalization and real-time content technologies, we presume that having more behavioral options means marketers are beginning to shift how they’re creating and executing campaigns and segmentations in general, expanding options.

While this growth bodes well for the industry and technology/service providers, traditional performance metrics used to measure success are inverse to this growth rate. There are many arguments regarding the merits of the “open rate” (impressions) as a proxy for success,or even whether it’s worthy of tracking as a trend due to the inconsistency at the ISP level. But how do you account for the decline in click-through rate year over year?

Most would assume, if you are more targeted and more methodical in how you program email campaigns that would translate to an increase in performance. I think the shift in the mobile consumer and how programs adapt to time and place shifting experiences will allow marketing programs’ performance to catch up with the growth in practices — but as with any new shift, you’ll see more activity before you’ll see direct results. We just haven’t gotten there yet, but are making progress.

I believe performance will make a turnaround next year. You will see an increase in click-through rates and rate of conversion. Given email is not solely a conversion channel, I think you’ll see lift and better association with brand metrics, something we’ve never been closely associated with before.

The next stage in this growth will be optimizing timing. Not day 1, day 2 and day 7, but optimized “daypart” timing. I believe we are getting close to the “perfect email” sent to the right person, right content, right context and right time. How our industry adapts to the optimization of consumption patterns and device experiences, will dramatically impact our industry both in practice and performance.

Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/185167/email-growth-and-practices.html#reply#ixzz29ZYlVyoa

My MediaPost Colum today:

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=154223

I figure if you have a database of customers that represent more than 30% of your entire database, you’re more than likely to have thought about this topic. You have an asset: an email address! How do you account for this asset? Is it a cost-saving proxy? Do you see it only as a channel proxy? But what does each individual email address mean to the value of a customer record?

I expect many look at cost compression as the first way to solve their budget and growth challenges and defend the costs of their operation. This is why we’ve seen such compression in the CPM space over the past three years.

An email address can be a cost-saving proxy. It can be accretive in revenue to all the other channels. It can be a combined asset value, as it drives engagement while other channels convert (email and on-store or email and search). It can be a lifetime value indicator that helps illustrate increased purchase frequency and a lower cost of sale. The value of an email address can be funnel-driven as well. You can look at it from an early lifecycle approach and derive a proxy that shows a prospect to customer and the incremental value of the email address through this stage. You can also use a late lifecycle proxy – like loyalty engagement.

You may ask, why would I need to do this in the first place? I already drive revenue through the channel, create brand engagement through the channel, and have an active reader and responder base. So, I challenge you to present this to your CEO and explain how this extends customer value to the business. To pull this off, you need to think about things a bit differently.

1. Negotiate what the asset really means to your company. Meaning, if you tried to sell the asset tomorrow, what would it be worth in the open market?

2. Be creative in your business model. Be prepared to add in other “monetization” options that add value to the asset – for example, could you sell ads to this audience?

3. Negotiate the math. Your assets will have a present-day and a future value. You have to have variables that account for all the things we talk about every day (cost of acquisition, retention rate, deliverability rate, engagement rate, conversion rate, list tenure, churn, etc.) They must be factored in to model this out accurately. Churn models alone don’t tell the business impact story.

4. Add in scenario analysis. What if mobile really does become predatory of the inbox? What if the social inbox drives the value out of consumer inboxes? What if there is another security scare? You have to consider industry scenarios that that could create changes to impact your asset value.

5. The inbox is the inbox — whether it’s mobile or social. Try to combine the proxies till these other experiences reach scale on your database. We all know that mobile addresses represent a small subset of the customer database and are not yet persistent to all brand strategies.

6. Build a proxy that is manageable monthly, not annually. The problem with lifetime value indicators is they are so hard to do anything directionally with on a persistent basis. The problem with developing a channel proxy is, how do you influence, track and manage this over time? It should be a meaningful proxy. I’ve seen so many different meaningless proxies. Your planning and strategy should represent this, not just campaign and seasonal marketing calendars.

This proxy can help you do the following:

· Integrate email into a broader company asset story.

· Drive C-Level discussions that can be translated into terms your execs can get behind.

· Provide a proxy that is tied to asset building value, not channel proxy value. You need to grow your database, derive assets, decide which assets drive the most predictable business outcome — and you must have a defensible position. Most don’t!

I haven’t seen many brands that can defend their asset. When this is the case, the discussion usually migrates to “What do we do next?” or “What is the silver bullet?” or “What do we do with social?” The discussion should be centered on asset building strategies that drive these tactics.

I will warn you, this isn’t easy! It takes a quant person. It takes a business mind (get out your MBA hats). It takes industry insight. And it takes a brave person to drive this through a company continually barraged with new channels and cool new toys. But if you take it on, it will evolve your thinking and ambition!

By David Baker. Published in Email Insider Monday, October 18, 2010.

Did you know that the unconscious mind controls 95% of human behavior? Imagine how many times you were driving to work and you arrived and didn’t remember the last few miles of the trip. How many times you bought that vanilla latte and handed over your credit card and didn’t even think about the $3.78 you just spent. There is a great book called “Habit” by Neale Martin that is a must-read for the budding marketer or savvy marketing veteran. It explores what we think is true — and then puts a spin on it! We think, “The customer is aware of what they are doing and they know why they do what they do.” If you believe this, you’ve been classically trained in marketing and have likely spent a lot doing research and behavioral modeling. But do consumers really know what they are doing? Consciously?

Today, as marketers, we have amazing methods to track, monitor, research and listen to the consumer, yet we market to the executive mind, and most of our decisions are made unconsciously. Recent research an ISP did on the consumer and email use found that many consumers managed email in an unconscious way. Some knew very little about what they really did with email, from deleting bulk email, scanning to sale items to reporting spam — and could only remember a few brands, even though they had hundreds of emails a day. While consumers’ purchasing habits are shifting, the channels habits are shifting as well. The shift in email use, mobile use, search engines, comparison sites, brand sites, and social sites all tie into consumers’ formation of habits.

Think about your last car purchase. You may have researched and had a Car Fax with you, but when at the car dealer, you were unconsciously thinking about getting the best deal, watching body movement, worried about not getting sold the extra warranty. This is the unconscious mind at work.

Now shift to something you frequently buy that isn’t a high -priced item. How about lunch or coffee? To create loyalty, marketers must create habits. Do rewards bring loyalty? Are habits a derivative of rewards and incentives? Are rewards and incentives part of the unconscious mind or executive mind? Early in a lifecycle pricing may be very much a part of a decision. This is where rules-based habits are formed.

A great example of a monster we created in the online space is “FREE SHIPPING.” It is no longer a reward, it is an unconscious buying criterion that has less value when received, but enters the executive mind when taken away. These habits rely on mental rules we’ve developed as consumers over the years, most of which are unconscious.

Think of all the unconscious rules marketers have imposed on the consumer through direct marketing and shift in strategy. When you send that email for 50% off or Buy One, Get One Free, are you thinking about the long-term effects of continually perpetuating a buying experience/habit and expectation that can take years to change? Or are you thinking about revenue by Friday? Are you thinking about multichannel messaging and how this really impacts consumer habits, or are you reinventing every year and quarter?

If we believe that our world is going to become dimensionally more difficult as marketers, shouldn’t we reevaluate what we do that can help consumers rationalize their executive mind but react unconsciously? I realize this is pretty “far-out” thinking, yet fundamental in other ways.

The key to habit formation is to “create a framework to maximize profitability, while keeping purchase and use decisions in automatic mode.” Customers who are consciously paying attention to price will not likely adapt habitual use. You must be able to establish “a value commensurate with the price” that must survive the executive mind scrutiny.

As marketers, we need to be careful about direct response and the speed with which we operate. I’m a little concerned about digital marketing channels. It’s become really hard to remain persistently in-message when managed by different departments and different agencies, while each own a portion of the customer lifecycle and a thread of the transactional view. The same applies to measurement; there’s too much to measure, no universal measurement and fundamental flaws in our fragmented view of the consumer, all leading to chaos and too-large budgets.

We are doing ourselves a disservice by not stepping back and thinking about reorganizing marketing for tomorrow, how our efforts shape consumer habits, and how we need to invest to stay competitive. The next-generation industry leaders will recognize this and transform.

David Baker, Sep 13, 2010

Readers of Email Insider relish the vision of relevant communications with the fundamental belief that the consumer is waiting for the email to arrive and is expressly interested in the communication. While all the trends suggest there is a shift in the how consumers triage their email on a personal and professional level, email marketers still have the challenge of creating instances, albeit brief, that build value in the brand and buying experience. While we’ll forever have challenges with the right message and the right context to send it, we are now facing more pressure focused on the inbox itself, the types of messages consumers will consume regularly and the impact on direct response that drives many of our channel goals.

First of all: the Inbox. We can argue all day about what the inbox is. To me, it’s the place where we consume messaging, whether email, text messaging, social networking communications; it’s a repository that operates very similarly in all environments. I believe we think too arbitrarily about how messages are delivered into the inbox, rather than the context of how they’re received.

The real problem is, consolidation of email is too easy and inboxes are becoming confusing. Many of us have a universal email client that can support feeds from all our email addresses, to be reviewed on many different devices (wired or wireless), and soon the ISPs will all feature universal messaging centers that support all feeds. With filtering changes that will impact how email is filtered in the inbox based on how consumers respond, open and assign value to an email, marketers will need to be more diverse in their messaging strategy. You won’t be able to game the inbox! You will have to redefine the inbox, apply multichannel coordination to messaging strategy, and be very rigorous in optimization, which so few do well today.

While I don’t want to belabor the concept of the “message,” I think we all get it. We must remember that the message must match the medium. If you buy into the premise that messaging will be integrated, this will put stress on organizations to find the functional value of types of messages and apply those to lifecycle paths. While I agree consumers love the theory of self-management of brand engagements, the critical mass don’t do it well and will always be challenged to keep this active.

We, as marketers, must make smart decisions about the shifting consumer, the points of influence where a brand can really add value and take chances on these brand connections. If you can’t establish this first line of trust and value, you’ll never achieve that perfect viral storm we are striving to evolve in direct response.

I try to think of the message as a container that must be in a form the consumer understands easily, must have value, be universally recognized, and packaged in a way that’s portable. This all stems from “value.”

The final element of this story stems from the shift in direct response. While I still believe email has direct response value, it will be a challenge to stay afloat with today’s conversion and response numbers as consumers shift patterns, doing the same things we’ve done in the past. It will be more challenging to apply proper attribution to the channel for a direct marketer, where email is often in a land of its own. New challenges to marketers include the fact that consumers are shifting how they consume, how they buy, how they shop, how they make buying decisions, and who influences buying decision – along with the emergence of “out of home” device-centric personal management and extended connected digital communities.

While it seems daunting to match consumer to channel and the shifts happening, these are all much-needed changes for consumers and marketer. We have so much more visibility into connected consumers, dynamics of communities, how they form around brands and for causes, and we’ll soon begin to pattern behavioral elements that help us understand how to be great brand stewards that balance value and convenience with consumer privacy. This is what gets me up in the morning, thinking about the possibilities!

David Baker, Aug 16, 2010

If you had the opportunity to rewrite the script, and you had 90 days to set this in motion, would you work differently than you do today? The key messages I hear from directors and VPs alike are stem from the same statements:

- I have a fixed budget in a variable world

- I need more fluidity in how I navigate the financial and market challenges

- I need a method of better translating what works to the C-Suite

- I have responsibility with shared accountability

- “Less is more” is my operational model

While none of these statements mention eCRM or email, they all speak to the world you live in today. There is a supply chain to these problems. It begins with the business and filters down through marketing and sales, which puts pressure on agencies and suppliers, and ultimately ends with the consumer. Don’t forget the consumer’s responsibility – it’s just like the concept of insurance. If I have an accident, only portions of the repairs or replacement come from me. Ultimately it is a shared expense across all parties, affecting the entire supply chain. The same concept applies to this marketing supply chain. If the consumer buys less, it forces the marketer to spend more to drive consumption, which in turns puts pressure on the entire supply chain to do more with less. This often surfaces with media more than with email and CRM, but all are affected to some degree.

So, again I say, given all these problems, if you had 90 days to reinvent your world, organization, people, process, technology decisions, etc., where would you start?

This isn’t a year-end mentality, where you ask, “How did we do?” It’s not a planning cycle, where you ask “What we are going to do next year?” It’s a restatement of vision, without bias to your surroundings.

If I could reinvent marketing, my top 5 BEHAGs (Big Enormous Hairy Audacious Goals) would be:

- Translate the customer experience so the entire organization understands the levers and interdependencies within the business units. Too often it’s a silo with independent thinking, strategies and accountability.

- Form cross-departmental cooperative and fluid budgets that rely on variability and shift, all driven from these guiding attribution principles: everything is measurable. and everyone is accountable for the spend. Imagine if you were only paid on performance; I think you’d spend a lot more time designing clear attribution.

- Build a team that supports the vision, not compliance marketing. Skill gaps are some of the greatest challenges you’ll face — so build a team and sourcing culture that support a healthy balance of internal development and outside influence.

- Introduce a new performance marketing culture and financial culture (we all get paid on results!) including the supply chain. Think like Wal-Mart! There’s risk to play their game, for all suppliers.

- Make investments in technologies and technology companies that will enable your organization. Several key equity investments could go a long way toward shaping platforms and enabling solutions for many companies so reliant on infrastructure to drive markets/channels. With companies so vested in technology to operate, I’m amazed how little investment is actually put to work.

These may be lofty ideas to some, and many will likely not happen in my lifetime, but the shift in ideation from what we can do today vs. how we evolve to tomorrow as a business is critical to setting change in motion. Translate your needs to a vision that extends more broadly than your influence today, and you’ll find that you may get that seat at the table that you covet.

David Baker, Aug 02, 2010

As we are flooded with articles about what marketers are tracking at the consumer level, we continue to walk the tightrope of what are relevant experiences and what is “freaky” to the consumer. Where would our world be if we didn’t mine behavioral insight? You would visit ESPN’s site and see ads for diapers. Nothing ruins my morning sports fix like reminders of changing a baby’s diaper. The email you get would be so irrelevant, everything would seem like a get rich-media ORDER NOW message, and sale alerts would have no context to what you’ve bought.

Targeting online behavior works. The real questions you must ask are: What do you really want to know about your customers, what types of information will you take action on, and what is your threshold to actually build and maintain programs with this source of data? As each new field of information on consumer data becomes available, I feel that many marketers become data hoarders. That will come back to bite the industry. Consumers inherently want to share something about themselves. We’ve created an industry and value currency exchange where it is the expectation to give some information about yourself in exchange for an online service, membership or content.

Measurement and targeting have a hierarchy, in my opinion. Each stage of the hierarchy is driven by a human behavioral need.

The fundamental stage is best defined as “the exchange.” Consumers are more reliant on access than ever, so there is a fair balance of service to sharing information about what and who you are. Remember the first FREE computer? It was littered with ads if you clicked on anything, an annoying experience in many respects. Has it changed that much? You are pummeled with ads on virtually EVERY service you use. At this fundamental level, consumers expect something FREE and will give limited information in exchange.

The second stage is “affiliation and membership.” We seek the need to form communities and networks — around sports, work, religion, common hobbies, interests or as simple as proximity networks (your neighbors). As such, we seek common and efficient means to communicate with larger connected networks. To do so, we flock to online services that allow us to share and stay connected with a much larger mass of people. Today we are forming many more kinds of networks than we did in the past. As businesses, we are the lurkers. We seek to see similarities in these activities, how they are formed and how our influence in these connections affects the community itself. As businesses, we must identify these communities, foster them if possible, allow our brands to be a part of the exchange and support the creation and distribution of content that helps connect and form bonds with these communities. The only way we can do this is by mining behavior and intent. This will be a key area for behavioral marketing in the future.

The third stage is “rewards and esteem.” This takes two forms of exchange motivated by two very different attitudes/behaviors. Rewards is the easy one. We provide a great deal of information to our banks, financial institutions, universities, travel clubs, and a myriad of rewards programs. This satisfies our need for “the deal,” the “status” and “self-esteem.” We have created a class of travelers that thrive in this type of world and will tell virtually anything about themselves to achieve these rewards and status. Businesses don’t have as much difficulty getting data from the consumer at this level, but we are challenged with making the information useful to a more predictive buying pattern.

We know that data helps inform our decisions as marketers. We know that targeting experiences, timing, and content to the timing and nature of the value exchange are the keys to making this work over time.

David Baker, Jul 19, 2010

Are you reading this article in the email MediaPost sent you, or from a tweet that you followed? Or from a blog or content site that linked you to it? Are you planning on adding it to your site or blog, or tweeting about it?

Content distribution is critical to any business’s success, and it relies on an entire supply chain of people developing, syndicating and monetizing the media. Email is one of the key channels involved. Email is not an “and/or” question, it’s “and … what else?”

When I hear people talk about the demise of email as a communication tool, in favor of social media sites, I usually categorize this as narrow thinking. Email, as I’ve said many times, is pervasive in our culture and has evolved in how we use it in personal and business communications, and also in terms of what we consume.

The hub and spoke of personal management systems has evolved beyond the days of a paper-based day planner as the central hub, to the use of electronic systems — computer/laptop or even mobile device, for some. Along with this shift, email and social have changed how we develop communities, how we manage these communities, and the fundamentals of business. Some of these shifts are predatory toward traditional methods of communication and how businesses market and sell their products, and some are symbiotic.

Email and social are symbiotic in many ways. While I do see generational differences in the use of email, there are several truths to email that will not change its value in our culture.

• Email is the number one business tool!
• Email will be vital to your education and evolution as a professional.
• The more money you make, the more email will be vital to your success.
• Email solves the time/distance effect of direct mail, and social won’t challenge this fundamental value in business notification.
• You’ll never be satisfied with one-liners without context or explanation (that is, Twitter replacing notification value and publishing value).
• I don’t believe businesses will ever give up control of the customer lifecycle.

People who make a living in the email space can easily support the value of business-to-consumer communications through email. You can’t deny the positive effects of targeting and personalization and controlling some elements of timing customer communications with business interactions. You can’t deny the business value of notifications and service to productivity, efficiency and customer service value. You can’t deny the value of electronic fulfillment of business exchanges. You can’t deny the value of email in business networking events and exchanges. There are so many inherent uses for email that I get bored hearing the talk about its ostensible demise.

What gets me up each day? People talking about the collaborative effects of email with other digital channels, and the true impact of stacking channels to inform business decisions. Next-generation attribution will find many connections between channels, points in time, contextual interactions and optimized media. All will help build and foster experiences with consumers and businesses.

The foundation of any technological innovation in the history of mankind is based on solving “time and distance.” Email is no different! It will not go away.

By David Baker

Published Monday, June 7, 2010 – Media Post, Email Insider

A 12-year-old pianist sat down to play before a venerable musician and an audience of 50 or so observers. The older musician had played hundreds of gigs around the country and was often credited with inventing jazz. The young performer played classic after classic, from Mozart to Chopin, and he was note-perfect. One of the observers leaned over to the older musician and said, “Isn’t this amazing?” The musician replied, “This kid is great at playing the piano. One of these days he’ll learn to make music.” 

I think in the marketing world we get caught in the rat race of doing the mechanics, yet struggle with putting the picture — or even part of the picture — together. This story made me think about the context of successful email marketing and online marketing in general. I’ve seen, over the years, every excuse in the book keeping marketers in the world of “urgency.” The problem with living in this world of “urgency” is that you get too mechanical and don’t take calculated risks.

I answered an RFP this past week that posed the question: “What do you believe is the most critical aspect of email marketing?” There are obviously hundreds of ways to answer this — tactically, or with a best-practice view, or restating what the analysts say. Yet it’s so contextual to the client that I chose to end the response with: “Key to GREAT email marketing is efficiency without losing strategic direction and the value these efforts drive.”

To make music with our channel, you need to consider a few things that will directly impact how you operate and thrive in the future.

1. Create operational relationships with the search team. Both support brand- and purchase-related intents. Both are driving growth in many businesses, and are key to retention and engagement. It will be the challenge of the businesses to understand the symbiotic relationship between the two and figure out points in time and channels that can be optimized in tandem.

2. Social retention marketing: while social marketing is so broadly defined these days, there are natural synergies between these experiences and how and why consumers engage with a brand. The challenge will be to hedge your bet on key social network behaviors and sites while the industry matures. You can’t sit by and wait for Facebook to take over the world; you must find out which environments can help bring about a measured return on engagement. In order to do this, take a risk and do only things that you can measure or find some retention correlation to.

3. Email and the device. The penetration of smartphones is growing so rapidly, it will reach critical mass in the next few years. The email communities need to figure out how to isolate device-specific experiences, report against them, understand the timing, and “triage” the email experience of the transient consumer. This will evolve so rapidly that companies will need to get smarter about predictive response modeling and take on more intelligent analytics in order to adapt to this very dynamic usage pattern.

While these are just a few thoughts, I believe them to be critical to the evolution of eCRM. To make music, you have to commit to the “practice,” take risks, engage with a lot of people, and yet understand the measures of your success will not always be noticed or appreciated by others. But when you do finally put it together, you’ll see an amazing shift in how you approach your business and how you express this to your partners and internal teams.

Published in DMNews ,

By David Baker, VP of CRM solutions, Razorfish

Apple is well known for its progressive digital marketing approach, and it is a no-brainer to market pre-orders to the faithful Apple audience. It’s not that different than the iPhone launch, with its sensationalized TV spots and unparalleled pre-buzz. Some would say it’s not hard to market such an innovative product, but the synchronization of marketing activities to fulfillment that sustains itself for months is what I admire most. Apple has applied its messaging and brand positioning to this launch. That simple message, consistent across media, did not waver as the skeptics and loyalists battled it out.

Taking advantage of a pre-launch is the primer to trending anticipated sales. This campaign is important not for its promotional or direct response timing, but for its alignment with the cadence of customer communications to iTunes, iPod and iPhone users. Apple has created brand connections with each product and leveraged many forms of media and direct response to build consistent messaging and value that support each other. The iPad campaign created such market buzz and millions in free advertising from partners and publishers that it can easily be seen as one of the most effective, talked about campaigns of 2010.

The e-mail program may be the prompt to urgency and the reminder to buy, viewed both in the in-box and on the mobile device, but these types of promotions are only as successful as the supporting media and engagement vehicles. Countless publications were talking about this product and its implications. Apple is not a follower by nature, so you won’t see a fan page dedicated to the pure Apple brand; you’ll see social media at its best, contextual to the product. Apple makes fans segment themselves, self-selecting based on product interest. It’s a novel concept I’m sure many brands will follow. With more than 3.5 million fans on the iTunes Facebook fan page, this is a perfect platform to release and pre-release products to these dedicated and sometimes fanatical audiences. To do so, you must have good coordination with other channels to deliver on the brand promise. Apple used its digital and offline outlets to make this launch amazingly effective.

By David Baker, Monday, May 3, 2010

While many of my references come from the B2C space, I do believe that the B2B market will better inform the technological direction and focus on the marketing automation space over the next few years — more so than the vast needs of a consumer-data-driven organization. 

The foundational trends are still the same buzzwords we’ve used for years:
-        ROI and Reporting
-        Integration of social media
-        Buyer-centric content
-        The need for new analytical skills
-        Renewed focus on data quality
-        Sales and Marketing Alignment

Nothing new, you might say, but there are some pretty common observations that shift how we think about this in today’s world.   First, ROI has always been the driver in B2B marketing.  But more progressive digital channels and methods of reach, have put pressure on ROI to be measured at the lead quality stage, not just the conversion stage.  This puts more pressure on the systems and businesses to adjust lead scoring to adapt to a more complicated sales cycle and attribution.  Second, the combination of sales and marketing has always been the utopia of a business.  How to build in the right amount of integration between a sales agent and the web experience?  We research differently, we use many more sources, and we have much better filtering mechanisms these days, which make this synchronization of sales interactions and support/consideration a much more difficult challenge to manage and optimize the funnel.

We have so much more data than we’ve ever had, which creates more pressure to sustain this over time.   The problem here is data quality.  If you believe in the concept of lead recycling, then you will realize how important data quality is in taking an extended view and investment in managing leads longer, even if they aren’t ranked high in your “ready to buy” scale.  

With the emergence of socially engineered experiences and connectivity, the world of data quality got a lot harder.  Our view of a lead will change from “when will they buy and how much” to “how much influence do they have over the buying decision — and who else is involved in this decision?”  This unstructured data will present many challenges for marketing automation systems.  Can you accurately mine “intent to buy” through unstructured data sources?  How will LinkedIn and other B2B social networks influence lead scoring and value?   It’s not just a reach vehicle, it’s about real-time simulation of social networks to gauge influence and engagement.

Buyers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in how we research, consider, compare, try and buy. The sales cycle has become an amazingly complicated web of interactions.  If you have ever tried to develop a linear lead conversion program, you’ll quickly realize there are so many permutations that you are forever modifying to support optimization.  This manual task has become much easier to manage with the tools, but the analytical competence that goes into making decisions based on known facts is where most businesses will struggle.  What makes this even more difficult is the need to create buyer-centric content that aligns the experience with need and fulfillment.

We’ll face many challenges in this space, but we’ve seen great progress with the tools. With the emergence of SaaS solutions, they aren’t as expensive as they used to be.  They are much more intuitive, too, with improved modularity. Yet most will struggle with the physical management of these tools , processes and data.  

Your marketing automation program must match the intensity and sophistication of your sales cycle.

This article was inspired by the following blog post.  Definitely worth a read: http://www.leadsloth.com/blog/marketing-automation-trends-for-2010/