Overview
I was able to create increases of 105% in open rate, a 4721% in click rate, and 2242% in Click to Open Rate with Marketing Automation and Targeted Account-Based Marketing.
Background
A client creates software for fitness clubs and gyms. Their biggest annual sales events and tradeshows are tailormade to collect email addresses and generate new leads. They use these emails and lists to create lookalike audiences, send email marketing, and fuel their new client base.
Challenge
A software firm was in a rut. Their email strategy was inconsistent, and they didn’t have enough staff to send the quantity and quality of email needed to keep their lead pool engaged. As a result, their emails weren’t gaining the kind of traction they needed to move leads along the sales path.
The company was also having trouble tracking the journey of a lead from prospect to sale, what constituted a marketing conversion, and how to track campaign effectiveness across an increasingly digital sales process in a competitive space. Due to the nature of their industry and the type of investment required to make a change in software, their sales cycle can be a long and drawn-out process. They often had trouble engaging a lead over that period of time, and tracking where leads were falling out of the funnel.
My Role
As the marketing automation lead on this project, I spearheaded the design of the automation from start to finish. I wrote and developed each email, as well as created the workflow that guides leads towards booking a demo.
Idea
We proposed to attack the problem from two directions:
We needed to engage and grow the current email list, send them regular, and timely emails based on their previous interests (as defined by website interactions, software type, and services rendered (i.e. training, software conversion, or credit card processing), and new features and updates.
We needed to drive engaged leads to take the next step by booking an appointment through an integrated team calendar, freeing up the sales time to spend less time chasing down leads and more time selling. This also frees the sales team to help our marketing efforts by spending a little bit more time weighing in on what materials would be useful to them.
To accomplish this we would create a pair of automation series to target leads as they become increasingly engaged. The first drives engagement, touting features and providing case studies written from per perspective of other clients in similar positions, and the second drives an engaged lead to book a demo. We’d trigger the first series based on a small measure of engagement over a 30-60 day period (an email click, website visit etc.) and the second series would be triggered by multiple engagements with the first series (downloading case studies, visiting feature pages on the website, interacting with informational materials).
The Solutions
Engagement
We created a robust set of content repurposing, existing pieces, and developing new content to target colder leads. The content was designed to showcase features of the software, highlight competitive advantages, and demonstrate some of the software updates that had been released in the past 3-4 years (notably the availability of cloud-based software). From these content pieces we developed a series of 12 emails that would be sent to leads on a 16-week scheduled to leads higher up the funnel. The emails were scheduled (almost) randomly, so they would feel organic and not so much like a weekly newsletter over the 16-week period. Engagement would be tracked on a weighted per piece basis, and in general 3-4 engagements from the email series would bump contacts from the lead nurturing series into the conversion series.
Conversion
The next series was aimed at creating conversions among leads further down the funnel. Once a contact was proven engaged, or was manually added by sales staff, they were added into a 4 email series. The first email contains a direct appeal to book a demo with a sales team member. These are followed (on a 1-week time delay) by two informational emails with soft appeals to book their demo. These emails are designed to truly gauge interest, and if the prospect interacts with the media component of either email they’re immediately sent another direct appeal email, with more sales-oriented language to motivate buyers to move forward. If no interaction is made, this email follows in 1 week.
Putting it all together
Once we had buy-in on how to both engage and convert the leads we moved towards content, design, and development. I spearheaded the effort, writing case studies as needed, designing new assets (print and digital), and writing designing each of the 16 emails in the two series.
Results
Circling back to our problem, historically the client had fairly pedestrian statistical returns on their email marketing efforts. Their email open rate hovered at 18.46% over the 12 months before implementing our automation. Their click rate was .33%, while their click-to-open rate was 1.79%.
In the software industry averages are 21.29% open rate, 2.45% click rate, and 14.58% click to open rate according to MailChimp and Campaign Monitor in 2019.
Starting Averages (12 Mos Prior to Campaign Launch)
Open Rate
18.46%
Click Rate
.33%
Click to Open Rate
1.79%
Conversion Rate
N/A (Not Tracked)
In the 12 months since launching, we saw spikes in all of those numbers. General email marketing (newsletters, announcements, and customer retention emails) increased to 25.1% Open Rate, 3.61% Click Rate, and 14.38% Click to Open Rate; while emails sent from our two series (automated sends) have garnered a 37.99% Open Rate, 15.93% Click Rate, and 41.93% Click to Open Rate.
If some of those numbers sound high, well…they are. Everyone is happy ?.
General Email Marketing Averages
| New Percentage | Percentage Increase | |
|---|---|---|
| Open Rate | 25.1% | 35.98% |
| Click Rate | 3.61% | 992.37% |
| Click to Open Rate | 14.38% | 703.36% |
| New Percentage | Percentage Increase | |
|---|---|---|
| Open Rate | 37.99% | 105.78% |
| Click Rate | 15.93% | 4721.21% |
| Click to Open Rate | 41.93% | 2242.91% |
| Conversion Rate | .7% |
|---|---|
| Click to Conversion Rate | 1.85% |
Next Steps
While everyone is happy with the performance of the automation campaigns, there is always room for improvement! Here is what we took away from our success…
Increasing the buy-in from the sales team will allow us better tracking of exactly how qualified the leads that book sales demos through automation are, and exactly what the return on investment from the clients’ marketing dollars are in this year (and the years to come). To that end, we’ve added the sales team to the automation platform and allowed them access to monitor the status of a lead, and update records and statuses as needed. We can use this information to further refine our scoring system, and continually add new leads into the system.
Our list management needs to get better. While our overall stats are outstanding, a number of existing clients have made their way into the lead series, either due to filling out forms with new email addresses, or improper labeling on the received list. To that end, we’re working with the client to automate list exports on a monthly basis, and having the sales team update records as they close deals.
More refinement may be needed in the Engagement series to truly qualify a lead. We had great success in the period shortly after we launched our series, with the bulk of our appointments being scheduled. However, as the months have gone on and our higher funnel leads have trickled into the conversion series, we’ve noticed a bit of a drop-off in conversions. As a result, we’ve begun to retool our scoring to make sure only qualified leads make it into the conversion series, and our sales staff gets a better pool of more highly qualified leads.