Digest...

A full quarter of companies that adopt marketing automation boost revenue between 30 and 49 percent, according to a new study by RazorSocial’s Ian Cleary. Another 20 percent of companies see revenue jump between 15 and 29 percent.

But significant errors in system selection can lead to negative ROI — and dissatisfaction.

“Picking the wrong tool, not assigning the right resources, and not managing the initial and ongoing implementation can lead to reduced or even non-existent ROI,” Cleary says. “Almost half of those who have implemented marketing automation are not sure, months or years later, whether the time, energy, and money to do marketing automation has been worth it.” That’s a striking dichotomy: significant ROI on the one hand, and seemingly inexplicable unhappiness with results on the other hand.

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Basic/ Digest...

Here are four that we highly recommend:

1. Total Leads Generated From Each Campaign

Gone are the days when marketers could run fun creative campaigns and depend on sales to bring in revenue. Today marketers are increasingly being asked to take on revenue responsibility. The first step towards that is measuring the total number of leads generated from each campaign.

2. Lead Attribution & Potential Revenue Per Lead

For starters identify the exact source from which each lead originated and each one’s revenue potential.

3. Campaign ROI

Calculating ROI for each of your marketing campaigns can be a challenging process. It takes time to build the systems and processes needed to track leads all along your funnel over an extended period of time, as they move from the marketing team to the lead qualification team to the sales team.

4. Website Visits by Keywords

Apart from all your marketing metrics, website visits by keywords is an important thing to track. It shows what keywords visitors used to arrive at your website. This helps you understand what keywords best resonate with your audience. Also get detailed information such as company name and contact details for each of those visitors. This information is particularly valuable as the free version of Google Analytics no longer provides it.

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The mobile inbox, email deliverability, and closed-loop reporting were all big focuses of the Salesforce Dreamforce conference in 2013.

Intermediate/ Digest...

1. You should care about the mobile inbox

It may not come as much of a surprise, but almost 50% of all email opens are now happening on mobile devices. Yet I am still seeing emails that are not optimized for viewing on a phone. Always test your email on a mobile device prior to sending. Most online mobile phone simulators are not 100% accurate, so be sure to test using the real thing.

2. Email deliverability is up to you

I mentioned this in a previous blog post, but it was a huge theme at Dreamforce - if you want your emails to be delivered to the inboxes of your recipients (rather than their spam folders), you need to be producing emails that are engaging.

3. Prove it's working

With the ability to fully integrate websites, marketing automation platforms, and CRM systems, closed-loop reporting is now more achievable than ever. You can trace the new business you win all the way back to the lead source and the specific campaigns that influenced the new customer. These systems come at a cost, but the reporting you get will enable to to see the return on that investment.

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► NEW: iNeoMarketing makes content marketing easy with the new Q8 Content. Q8 fills your content pipeline daily with relevant articles that your audience wants to read. Learn more and sign up for the beta program: http://www.Q8content.com.

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Intermediate/ Digest...

Here are some of the factors that go into the revenue equation so you can get a rough estimate based on data you have now:

-- >  Marketing automation programs send more targeted messages to your prospects. As a result, your current response rates will increase.

-- >  You’ll also get greater insight into your prospects’ behaviors using marketing automation software. As a result, you can better qualify leads based on patterns and indications you see over time. Better qualified marketing leads means that sales will be more likely to follow up with those leads, and thus the number of sales-accepted leads will go up.

-- >  Additionally, because sales has better insight into where leads came from and a holistic view of that prospect’s interactions with your company, they’ll be better able to sell that prospect on your product or service. As a result, your sales team can create more sales opportunities. A higher number of opportunities means that you’ll increase sales, assuming your close rate stays constant.

Here are four examples of how resources can be freed up (not just in your marketing department) with the help of marketing automation software, to create cost-savings that you can work into your overall ROI equation:

-- >  Marketing automation programs minimize the time you currently spend segmenting and cleaning up email lists.

-- >  The time it takes to deploy a well-targeted campaign with marketing automation is significantly less than a batch and blast email deployment.

-- >  Marketing automation comes with built-in reporting and tracking. This saves your tech team the time of pulling reports so they can focus more on building your product or improving your website.

-- >  The efficiencies marketing automation programs create with regards to design work can be huge, and you don’t have to be an HTML expert to enjoy these cost-saving benefits.

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► NEW: iNeoMarketing makes content marketing easy with the new Q8 Content. Q8 fills your content pipeline daily with relevant articles that your audience wants to read. Learn more and sign up for the beta program: http://www.Q8content.com.

► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html  (your privacy is protected).

Intermediate/ Excerpt...

While B2B marketers are having some trouble measuring the ROI of their content marketing efforts, they’re fairly clear on which capabilities can best improve the revenue contributions of those efforts. The recently-released 2013 Lenskold Group/Pedowitz Group Lead Gen Marketing Effectiveness Study separated respondents into two groups: those who describe themselves as highly effective and efficient (13% of the sample) and the rest. Both groups were most likely to say that marketing automation systems are responsible for improving content marketing-derived revenues.

__________________________________

► NEW: iNeoMarketing makes content marketing easy with the new Q8 Content. Q8 fills your content pipeline daily with relevant articles that your audience wants to read. Learn more and sign up for the beta program: http://www.Q8content.com.

► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html  (your privacy is protected).

__________________________________

► NEW: iNeoMarketing makes content marketing easy with the new Q8 Content. Q8 fills your content pipeline daily with relevant articles that your audience wants to read. Learn more and sign up for the beta program: http://www.Q8content.com.

► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html  (your privacy is protected).

Interested in seeing exactly what automation can do for you? Take the ROI calculator for a spin and see what your marketing and sales departments could be accomplishing.