Marketing Automation for SMB Organizations

Marketing in a smaller business can be challenging. You wear many hats, from strategist, to copy-writer, to campaign manager. It can often be hard to find the quick wins that will give you more free time in your day while making you a hero with your management team and your sales team.

In this quick (4 minute) video, Heather Foeh (@heatherfoeh) talks about some of the things you can focus on that are fast, will free up your time, and will get you the most bang for your buck.

Heather knows what she's talking about, as she heads up our SMB customer success team. Her team works with the largest and fastest growing community of SMB customers in the marketing automation space.




(If this video doesn't load, click here to watch Heather's Marketing Automation for SMB Organizations video)

Heather looks at a number of areas that are key to marketing automation success for SMB organizations:

- Auto-responders on web forms
- Simple lead nurturing
- Real-time alerts for your sales team
- Tradeshow follow-up
- Webinar marketing

And with each one, she provides actionable information on how time-strapped and resource-constrained marketers in smaller organizations can quickly implement marketing techniques that free them from ongoing work, while delivering ongoing value.

A/B Testing; What Result are you Testing Against?

Most B2B marketers today understand the importance of testing. A quick change in a subject line, some copy, or an offer can dramatically alter the performance of a campaign. At Eloqua, our own marketing team does A/B testing on almost every piece that is sent out. However, the question we all face as marketers, is what result we should be testing against. In B2C marketing, it is often significantly easier, as campaigns are often designed to drive explicit purchase behavior, and success can be measured against revenue results.



In B2B marketing, however, the revenue result is often significantly further away. Ideally in testing a campaign, one would be able to determine which drove more actual buying behavior, but with most buying processes stretching out over months, it would be impossible to efficiently test and launch a campaign in this manner. Inversely, testing against the common results of opens, or click-throughs only tells a small fraction of the story, as there is only a very loose tie between an email open or clickthrough, and the final result of a purchase.

Luckily, our options for what results we test against, in fact, span a spectrum. A careful selection of the end result to test against guides exactly what our tests will show. Looked at along two dimensions, we have the following options to test against:



Email Opens: The easiest to test against, but the least accurate by far. This is mainly an indicator of the quality of your subject line. Whereas this can be tested very quickly, it suffers from technological differences in email platforms, as well as a very limited testing scope.


Email Click-throughs: Slightly more difficult to test against as it requires tracking of links clicked, but this is common in most email platforms today. However, this also suffers from a very limited accuracy, as it does not indicate much about the recipient’s interest in purchasing


Inquiries: Tracking of which email drove more inquiries (landing page form submissions) is a significant bump in test accuracy. This now tests whether the subject line was compelling enough to lead to the email being read, the content and offer was interesting and drove a click-through, and the landing page was optimized to maximize form submission rates. This is a very comprehensive test of your campaign, and usually sees results within one or two days of running an A/B test campaign


Qualified Inquiries: Even higher in terms of testing accuracy is testing against qualified inquiries. If, in the A/B test, email A drove 100 inquiries, and email B drove 80, but most of B’s inquiries are the right target executive, while most of A’s inquiries are students and more junior staff members, clearly email B is the best option. Note that the dimension of lead scoring we are talking about here is explicit scoring, as we are just looking to see whether the right executives are the ones inquiring.


Opportunities: We do see an increase in accuracy as we move to Opportunities as a result to test against, but this also increases our difficulty significantly. There are often many more factors involved in qualifying an opportunity as being ready for sales than just one campaign, so this leads to a significant increase in complexity of the situation to analyze.


Revenue: This is clearly the highest accuracy to test against, but the length of a sales cycle means that it is prohibitively difficult to work with, and the ideal timing to run the campaign in question may have long passed by the time that the test results are available. The way we need to think about B2B marketing analysis means that, in general, it is nearly impossible to test the effectiveness of a single campaign on revenue in a meaningful way.



Each of these options has benefits and drawbacks, so it is important to consider what you are testing against when defining your A/B test. In my experience, in a B2B marketing situation, testing to determine which option produced more qualified inquiries often provides the optimal balance between ease of testing and accuracy of results.

What Exactly IS Digital Body Language?

I've been using the term "Digital Body Language" on this blog quite a lot for obvious reasons. However, I have not really taken a moment to define the term, as I realized recently after a presentation on the topic. An audience member came up to me and very hesitantly asked "I think I get the overall concept, but what exactly IS digital body language." It was a very fair reminder to me to not get so caught up in a topic that the basic concepts are overlooked.

So what is it?

What we are referring to when we talk about Digital Body Language is the aggregate of all the digital activity you see from an individual. Each email that is opened or clicked, each web visit, each form, each search on Google, each referral from a social media property, and each webinar attended are part of the prospect's digital body language.

In the same way that body language, as read by a sales person managing a deal, is an amalgamation of facial expressions, body posture, eye motions, and many other small details, digital body language is the amalgamation of all digital touchpoints.

The best physical representation of digital body language that I can think of is as seen through Eloqua's Prospect Profiler tool (pictured), which shows the spikes and valleys of activity, across all digital media, from web and email to search and forms. You can see how a perspective of what is happening with that individual can be gained from seeing this amalgamated digital insight.

However, the raw information that digital body language provides is often only the foundation. Much as each facial muscle contributes to our reading of a person's body language, the raw digital information is mainly of use when looked at through the lens of lead scoring to understand whether an individual is ready for sales, or what buyer role they play in the process.

Hopefully this clarifies what Digital Body Language is. As always, I welcome your questions or comments.