Marketing Automation is widely known for its demand generation focus, while this drives awareness and interest to your businesses products and/or services which is highly valuable, it does not only have to be used for that purpose. Users of the tool do not realise how much they are missing out on and they aren’t aware of all the benefits of what the tool can actually do!!

There are three elements to the Marketing Automation journey with Act-On, these are Brand Awareness, Demand Generation and Customer Marketing. By utilising all three of these elements you will not ony attract new business but retain current business.

Businesses are relying heavily on marketers to promote their brand in the right way. The marketers are in control of how the outside world views the company and they want to be viewed as reliable, trustworthy and consistently productive as this will not only help with bringing in new business but will also help with customer retention.

Marketing Automation allows you to achieve your branding objectives by ensuring that your brand is consistent across all marketing channels. Act-On allows you to control the look of your logo and font usage as well as allowing you to create approved templates that are available for use. With templates being available for all users this will then eliminate the need for individual templates to be created thereby ensuring that the brand is seen as consistent and not varied depending on who created the template.

Demand Generation tasks can include marketing activities such as lead generation, lead nurturing, lead scoring, sales alignment and content and field marketing. Marketing Automation can be used to effectively increase all of these. Some examples of how to do this with Act-On are that you will have the ability to run SEO on all of your web pages including landing pages and forms this will ensure that they rank highly with search engines which will ultimately mean that you can capture more leads. Another way to effectively market with Act-On would be to use AB testing to see which landing pages/forms etc work best and which ones bring in the most valuable leads, thereby increasing the number of qualified leads you can capture. Finally, it’s best practice to ensure that your Marketing Automation tool is integrated with your CRM, such as SugarCRM, this will then mean that as soon as a lead is captured it can go straight into the CRM and the sales team can continue to work with that lead. It’s a good idea to use the lead scoring function within Act-On and sync this information over to SugarCRM,  the sales team can identify by looking at the Act-On score which leads they should prioritise to following up with.

Marketing Automation tools aren’t there to only be used to gain new leads, they can also be used to help retain current customers. One way to keep current customers actively involved with your business is to set up drip campaigns in Act-On, these could be used to send current customers hints and tips or they could be used to announce new features which could be possible upsell areas. Keeping current customers in the loop makes them feel valuable to your company. Another great way to keep current customers involved could be to invite them to any webinars that your business is giving, you can set the webinar up in Act-On and automate all communications around these events. You can then trigger communications to be sent based on the results, for example, those that attended may receive a questionnaire asking for feedback on the webinar thereby providing valuable information for your business and those that were unable to attend could receive a different communication with an invite to a similar event that is coming up.

Marketing Automation measures the overall success of the customer’s lifecycle, build your brand, attract new leads and deliver a customer experience that sets you above the competition.

What to learn more about how Act-On can help you?

The post Do more with your Marketing Automation Tool appeared first on Sugabyte.

If a lead is not showing a lot of interest through their interactions on your website or through emails, then putting any marketing effort into them may lose you money, time and resources. As a marketer but also as a sales person you will want to be able to select the good from the bad. Implementing a Lead Scoring system can alleviate that pressure and you will be able to invest in your leads more accurately.

Act-On provides a Lead Scoring tool that is easy to set up and use. All you need to do is navigate in the menu bar to ‘Contacts’ and then select ‘Scoring Rules’. You will find predefined scores for interactions and activities such as email clicks, form submissions and web downloads but you can change or add further scoring rules to the existing list.

However, it is not just as easy as assigning points to activities. The scoring system needs to be well researched and thought out in order to be effective.

3 Top Tips to consider when designing your Lead Scoring system

With Lead Scoring you can assign points to potential customers based on key characteristics that are most often associated with potential and current customers. Therefore, the main consideration should be ‘Who is my typical buyer?’. If, for example, you offer your products and services in the UK only and you have a website visitor with high activity but with a location outside of the UK, then you want to take this demographic factor into consideration when applying a lead score.
Thoroughly identifying who your target customers are will help you establish a more accurate scoring system for website visitors and email recipients.

The Lead score will only be beneficial if the points given are based on interactions that are valuable to your business. You might want to allocate a visit to your products page with 10 points. If a document is downloaded, this might be an additional 20 points and if an enquiry form is submitted, you might want to add another 30 points to the visitors score.
But a visitor with high website activity does not necessarily mean that there is a potential interest in your products and services. If the focus is lying on your careers page then it is likely that their interest is not in becoming a customer of yours and this should therefore be highlighted as such by deducting for example 50 points.
Take your time in defining which points you want to allocate to activities and interactions on your website or through email to determine who your top leads are. The higher the leads’ point value, the more focus and effort you should put into selling to them.

Keeping your scoring system simple will make your Lead Scores more valuable and easier to interpret. Masses of segments would obliterate this as less relevant collected data will make it more difficult for you to identify the actual valuable interactions.
When setting up Lead Scoring in Act-On, it is important to concentrate all initial efforts on analysing interactions on your website and through emails and finding out which pages, links, and forms show the most interest in your company and which pages perhaps are irrelevant in knowing if those visits are linked to people wanting to become customers. Not every page on your website has to be scored in a different way. Remember to start simple with only a handful of segments. You can always add more to your scoring system.

Investing time in identifying who your target customers are and deciding on an accurate but simple to read Lead Scoring system will pay off in the long run as you will gain further knowledge of your potential buyers behaviour and you will be able to act on this accordingly.

The post Lead Scoring with Act-On, how can it help you? appeared first on Sugabyte.

The Forrester Wave: Lead-to-Revenue Management Platform Vendors, Q4 2016

It’s so important to find the right technology partner to support your business, that’s why companies included in the Forrester Wave were evaluated across 36-criteria of lead-to-revenue management (L2RM) platform vendors, broken out into three high-level categories – Current Offering, Strategy and Market Presence. The research, analysis and scores then went on to determine the order of the 11 most interesting solution providers in the category.

Act-On was noted for its corporate and product strategies, and for marketplace reach.

KEY FINDINGS ABOUT ACT-ON

• Act-On is the only privately owned company named a leader in lead to revenue management.
• Customers love Act-On for its ease of deployment and “above and beyond” customer support.
• Act-On is building new technology and vision aimed at “enabling marketing’s new role as the architect of multichannel engagement across the lifecycle”.

ACT-ON’S LEADER HIGHLIGHTS

• Brand: Act-On scored higher on inbound support than other vendors that coined the term inbound.
• Demand: The report places a lot of importance on the middle of the funnel capabilities and Act-On has had this focus since its start.
• Demand: Act-On also scored very highly on integration with CRM systems.
• Expand: Act-On received a high score for usability, which includes many factors including having a clean user interface.

Additionally, Act-On scored very highly in terms of corporate strategy.

Andy MacMillan CEO, Act-On
“Our standing in this year’s report confirms what we’ve always known: an investment in product is an investment in customer success. We’re grateful to be the only privately owned company named a Leader, and we’re thrilled to be the platform that mid-market CMOs count on to execute their brand, demand, and customer marketing programs, as they embrace their expanded role in the buyer’s journey.”

The Forrester Wave rankings are an independent, third-party validator that allows you to sort, filter and prioritise the vendor options that best suit your businesses needs. As the vendor is judged on the comprehensive product demonstrations, executive presentations where they share their vision and product roadmap along with a detailed questionnaire, in-depth interviews with reference customers as well as conducted customer surveys, the Forrester Wave rankings are extremely accurate and a great guide to help you choose the best vendor to provide your business with a Marketing Automation platform.

To understand how Act-On could help your marketing team, email marketing@sugabyte.com.

The post ACT-ON RANKED AS A LEADER – Forrester Wave™ appeared first on Sugabyte.

Act-On works seamlessly with Sugar providing a complete closed-loop system for multi-channel lead generation, lead management, competitive tracking and revenue contribution.

What: The Perfect Match: Act-On and Sugar

• Benefits both, marketers and sales teams
• Allows marketers to deliver more sales ready leads
• Gives sales greater visibility into their prospects activities
• increases revenue through the creation of sales and marketing alignment

When: Tuesday 13th December 2016 at 2:00pm GMT

Host: James Banbury – Sugabyte Ltd

Speaker: Brenda Ronson – Act-On

Register

The post Register: Webinar Series – The Perfect Match: Act-On and SugarCRM appeared first on Sugabyte.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH NOW

To catch up with part 1 click here.

Already seen part 2? To watch part 3 click here.

The post Missed the Act-On Part 2 Webinar? Watch The Recorded Version appeared first on Sugabyte.

Andy MacMillan, CEO of marketing automation service Act-On Software, discusses why adoption rates are so low today, why he feels adoption rates are on the cusp of exploding, and the role MA is playing in customer retention.

The post Andy MacMillan of Act-On: Marketing Automation Adoption is at its Tipping Point appeared first on Sugabyte.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH NOW

Already seen part 1?

To watch part 2 click here.

To watch part 3 click here.

The post Missed the Act-On Part 1 Webinar? Watch The Recorded Version appeared first on Sugabyte.

Act-On is the fastest growing Marketing Automation company in the world. Its broad scope spans outbound and inbound tactics, lead generation and nurturing strategies and customer life cycle optimisation and advocacy programs. In order to succeed, today’s marketer needs a digital marketing solution that’s capability-rich, flexible, interoperable with other systems and tools, intuitive, easy to use, effective and cost-efficient.

What: Introduction to our Marketing Automation Solution – Act-On

• Learn tools in Act-On
• Program flows in Act-On
• Released in 2016 – Account Based Marketing Automation with Act-On

When: Tuesday 29 November 2016 at 2:00pm GMT

Host: James Banbury – Sugabyte Ltd

Speaker: Brenda Ronson – Act-On

Register Now

The post Webinar Series – Our Marketing Automation Solution – Act-On appeared first on Sugabyte.