Acteva and Marketing Automation Software

Acteva is an online ticketing, registration, and payment management solution. The service is available for no cost for free events and its management solutions, as well as solutions for events, meetings, webinars, fundraisers, conferences, tradeshows, classes and training programs. Acteva is used by more than 25,000 event organizers for more than 500,000 events. Its customers include Sears, Wine & Spirits Magazines, and the American Red Cross. The service integrates with Salesforce, for easy customer relationship management functionality.

Acteva provides a valuable service to their clients by managing events, however the company itself was not managing its own leads well until they partnered with Marketo, a marketing automation. Marketing automation is a relatively new and evolving concept in the field of marketing. Companies like Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, and others have developed software to automate repetitive tasks and better manage leads. Below is an image that demonstrates all of the many components of the marketing automation puzzle. 

(“What is”, n.d.)

About the Features of Marketing Automation

Most marketing automation software programs include the following features;

· Integration with CRM tools to better align marketing and sales data

· Web analytics including activity of leads and prospects across a consumer-facing website

· Lead nurturing tools to automate responses to leads to increase customer engagement and turn prospects to customers quicker

· Lead scoring to identify and qualify potential customers

· Email Marketing

· List management tools to segment markets for customized campaigns

· Reporting to measure response rates (“What is”, n.d.)

About Marketo

Marketo’s marketing automation software helps to “generate more high-quality sales leads and win more business with less manual effort” by focusing on marketing techniques such as;

· Email and event marketing

· Lead nurturing and scoring

· CRM integration

· Data cleansing (“Marketing automation”, n.d.).

With lead scoring lead scoring companies can identify which prospects and leads are the most engaged and meet the criteria identified by a company as the appropriate target market. Scores for frequent website visits, downloading content, opening emails, and other activities will move leads up in rank as qualified prospects who are ready to convert. Scores may be based on demographics, behavior, product-specific scoring, or by individual sales reps allowing for flexibility and customization (“Lead scoring”, n.d.).

How Marketing Automation and Web Metrics Improved Acteva’s Business

“While it was developing leads for its customers, Acteva had been operating in the dark in terms of tracking leads for its own business” (Gaffney, n.d.). The company had not put any processes in place to track the selling process until it was very late in the process. By using Marketo the company could now identify leads earlier in the sales cycle and convert those leads to customers more effectively. Acteva has seen a significant increase in campaign output since using marketing automation. “Acteva’s Director of Marketing, Elias Terman, estimates the company has increased its marketing volume by 300%, through the ability to quickly create landing pages and email campaigns. By automating previously manual processes, Terman says the technology has acted as an extra arm in the marketing department” (Gaffney, n.d.). Since deploying the Marketo software, Actevo has been able to create lead nurturing campaigns with unique landing pages to track, score, and nurture leads that come to each landing page across its website. This has resulted in a significant increase in high-quality, sales-ready leads, due in large part to the landing pages and lead nurturing campaigns that Acteva created with Marketo. The company expects to see a 100% improvement in landing page conversion rates for the year (Gaffney, n.d.).

By using increasingly complex campaigns with marketing automation the company has been able to convert leads in a shorter amount of time and seen a significant return on investment. Marketing automation software has allowed Acteva to sign up five new partners per month (Gaffney, n.d.).


References 

Gaffney, A. (n.d.). DemandGen Honors Top 10 Firms Using Automation Tools To Fuel Business Growth. The DemangGen 10. Retrieved December 9, 2012, from http://www.amberroad.com/pdf/DemandGen%20Honors%20Top%2010% 20Firms.pdf

Lead Management Research & Best Practices. (n.d.). Marketo. Retrieved December 10, 2012, from http://www.marketo.com/b2b-marketing- resources/best-practices/lead-management

Lead Scoring Will Increase Deals Won For SMB’s. (n.d.). Marketo. Retrieved December 10, 2012, from http://www.marketo.com/small-medium- business/marketing-automation/lead-scoring.php

Marketing Automation Solutions Bring SMB’s Quality Leads. (n.d.). Marketo. Retrieved December 10, 2012, from http://www.marketo.com/small- medium-business/marketing-automation/

What is Marketing Automation? (n.d.). LoopFuse. Retrieved December 10, 2012, from http://www.loopfuse.com/marketing-automation.php

Google Goals, Funnels, and Filters – Oh My!

In everything we do we must plan with the end in mind and set goals for what we hope to achieve. For my blog I have identified a few goals 1) I would like for my visitors to spend a few minutes reading one or more posts 2) I hope that my visitors will find the information relevant and interesting so that they will want to read other posts and return to the blog in the future 3) As the posts are short, 1,000 words or less, I expect that the average visit duration would be relatively brief – but at least two minutes or more. Given that, this week I set up two goals for my blog which included visit duration greater than two minutes and thenumber of page visits greater than one. 

“Goals are a versatile way to measure how well your site or app fulfills your objectives” (“About Goals”, n.d.). Goals must be associated to a measurable action such as downloading a whitepaper or completing a form. Goals may be associated with several business objectives such as a building awareness, brand loyalty, generate leads, and increase sales. 

To start I solicited my friends and family through Facebook, text message, and email to please visit my blog so I may review the success or failure of my goals. For my first goal, based on visit duration, I had just one visitor who stayed for longer than two minutes and a 14.29% goal conversion rate. While I would have hoped visitors would stay longer, I am not surprised given that many of the people whom I asked to visit do not have any background in marketing or web metrics and the content may not be of particular interest to them. My second goal, having visitors visit more than one page, was slightly more successful with 4 conversions and 57.14% goal conversion rate. I had slightly skewed my own goal numbers by experimenting with filters. One filter I had used was a “Washington D.C. metro” filter which included visitors who lived in either Maryland, Virginia, or the Washington D.C. area. As a result, I eliminated a few friends and family in New Jersey, Florida, and North Carolina who had told me that had visited my blog. It was informative to discover all of filter options available and consider how this might be better used in the future. 

While the number of visitors is less than I hoped for it led me to think how goals, filters, and funnels could be valuable in my daily work outside of school. 

Filters 

My colleagues and I spend a lot of time on our company’s website using the current content on the website to create new content based on existing marketing content. We are also frequently looking for updates and changes that need to be made. Given that, our website metrics are slightly skewed based on internal visits. By using Google profile filters I can remove the IP address of our internal offices and even those of our consultants who work about the country to give a better read of how our consumers are interacting with our website.

Goals and Funnels 

One key component to our marketing mix is our e-newsletters. We send out to monthly e-newsletters to about 17,000 subscribers. Given the vast audience, all of whom have opted in to this publication and the time spent creating them, I would like to evaluate whether our e-newsletters are resulting in conversions and ultimately sales. In order to accomplish this I would create a funnel with the anticipated outcome we would like our visitors to have when viewing our e-newsletter. For this past month’s newsletter this order would include: 

• Visiting the e-newsletter on our website, most likely via a direct referral from our e-mail announcement. The first goal would be a visit duration goal, for readers to spend between four and six minutes on the page, about the time it requires to read through the entire e-newsletter on our website.
• Setting up a funnel to identify the next steps we hope for our visitors to take upon viewing our e-newsletter. “A Funnel lets you specify a path you expect traffic to take to reach a Destination Goal. When you specify steps in a Funnel, Analytics can the track where visitors enter and exit the path on the way towards your Goal, giving you valuable insight about your site”(“About Goals”, n.d.) In this case, at the end of the e-newsletter we typically focus on one or two products which compliment the topic of the month, for example if we are writing about Response to Intervention, we would link to our book or Professional Learning Community (PLC) Pack for Meeting the Needs of Diverse Learners. The goal would be to have readers click on this link and learn more about the product
• Once at the product page, they may read the product description or download a Sneak Peek of the product.
• The ultimate goal is to purchase the product. In order to do so there are several steps to completing an online purchase. 1st) They must add the item and desired quantity to their cart. 1.) Once they are ready to purchase they have to either login or create a new account. 3) Once their account is created they will enter their billing and shipping information, then payment information, and confirm their purchase.
• The last page, or goal destination page, is the confirmation page, which would be the end measure of success. Given that, there are several steps from the newsletter to the goal destination page, and many opportunities for distraction, I would be interested in seeing how my vision for the funnel would look versus actual process.
• There are possibly obstacles, for example many of our customers work with large school districts and district-wide purchases must go through the appropriate channels and often times are submitted via email or fax by way of a purchase order. In this case we find that our marketing automation software, Pardot, does a good job of tracking the conversion rates of identified users.

Another goal I would like to track in the future is downloads of product Sneak Peeks (a 10-15 page preview of our books) to better determine the effectiveness of these tools and if these downloads result in sales. One way we used to track this was by offering unique coupon codes on our Sneak Peeks which would help us to determine if users had purchased as a result of viewing the Sneak Peeks. However we recently decided we were offering too many discount codes and it was diminishing the perceived value of the product. I believe using Google Analytics goals will help us to effectively track the conversion rate without offering a discount code. 



About Goals - Analytics Help. (n.d.).Google Help. Retrieved December 4, 2012, from http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1012040