What marketing automation features do you really use?

I'm sure Steve has more complete data than I do, but the small survey I took some time ago showed outbound email, campaign response reporting, CRM integration and landing pages were almost universally deployed. Lead scoring, nurturing and data cleansing were less common.

Good discussion - let me quickly clarify my comment. I agree that campaign email, landing pages, etc are more commonly deployed than nurturing and scoring. I was focusing on the "automation" side of the features, although most marketing automation platforms do of course include both the basics (email, landing page, etc) and automation (nurturing, scoring)

The most-used features that we see are:

Email marketing
Landing Pages
Lead Capture Forms gating access to downloads, and storing lead information
Lead Nurturing Campaigns (some manually triggered, some automatically triggered).
Leveraging RSS for content distribution
Social sharing/tracking

We do not see a lot of lead scoring getting implemented. Interestingly, at the Online Marketing Summit this past February, I participated on the Lead Generation Panel, and when we queried a room of approx. 100 people, only 6 raised their hand that they had implemented lead scoring, and only 8 raised their hand that they were planning on implementing lead scoring this year. So that might give you an idea.

I am a huge fan of trigger-based campaigns tied to the website. In using your website as a 24x7 lead generation tool, I like to have some good resources posted online....then when someone accesses content - trigger a campaign based on which content they downloaded. The automation means I can set it and forget it...and it ensures that every lead hitting the site is exposed to more meaningful content in advance of a a rep getting in touch with them. Close second - web visit tracking. Can't live without it...for many reasons. Nothing a salesperson loves more than receiving an alert that a company in their patch has been on the website. Great stuff. b2b marketing has come a loooong way in 5 years. Looking forward to the next 5!

From our experience with dealing with small and medium businesses the most used features are

Landing page creation. Easy to use and deploy without the help from IT. Smaller marketing teams love this! They can test different version and really target their offerings

Automated campaigns (triggered and scheduled) are always useful to alert sales or nurture your prospects.

Measurement of all multi-touch marketing campaigns in a centralized location. No need for multiple tools. You have all your marketing data at the same place.

And finally CRM integration for easy lead and contact syncing

Hope this helps.

Kim,

Could that be due to the size of the customers that Genoo caters to? We see the same thing in our smaller customers. For lead scoring tobe usefull you need a volume of lead that smaller businesses just don't have.

Alexandre,

That may be true in the smaller space -- however, even when you get to a few thousand leads, you want to understand who your most responsive leads are and how they fit your ideal profile (without having to look at each lead individually) -- we're working to make that very easy to identify, so we can see more adoption. I also think it's something people make more complicated than it needs to be - and their lack of understanding about it inhibits the use of lead scoring.

In the small business space, it's all about allowing marketers to get more done with less -- because they have less money, less time, etc. and are generally spread really thin. We focus on allowing them to implement automated strategies that go beyond just automating the lead nurturing aspect. That way they can focus on the truly important items, like developing engaging content - which is essential to an effective online marketing strategy.

In that way, SMB marketers have different needs than larger companies, and how they implement marketing automation solutions.

Kim,

Totally agree.

Our experience with our clients as well as what our prospects and clients tell us, lead scoring and nurturing that is intimately integrated with their marketing automation/email marketing tools are definitely used and definitely appreciated for the very reason that they are already spread thin.

Since we've included lead scoring as part of a basic subscription for years and really made an effort to educate our users to the value, nearly all our SMB users really leverage that data whereas large companies that have more marketing and sales people are less concerned with those included tools and are more attracted to the customizable user fileds, dynamic data, and other more sophisticated tools.

Lydia,

I agree with you. We also have SMB customers who use lead scoring. But it doesn't appear to be intuitive -- and takes guidance for them to get started. Once they do, we have found SMB's to like the ability it provides.

However, we don't find that lead scoring is the reason they select a marketing automation or web marketing system. And based upon my exposure to a lot of SMB organizations, lead scoring is not the top priority for them to get their online marketing moving in an effective direction. It comes into play after the basics are in place.

I just used the feature for contact form to crm, it saved a lot of time but i'm sure a lot of companies don't really use most of the other features such as lead scoring because of the time it takes.

If you get a compatible email marketing platform that can use your crm data then that is the next most useful but still underused.

In working with clients on leveraging social media content with their marketing, the most used feature is creating compelling landing pages, and successfully taking in-coming traffic from outside social sites and managing them into the lead generation.

Those that can do this for the traffic coming to their own sites, they have an advantage. But if you can also handle traffic coming from content that's appearing on all sorts of social or other web portals, then you can convert those interested parties. This can be a huge ROI for your content, placement, and networking investments.

I suggest that marketers create a unique URL for each social-facing content to be able to easily measure the impact of getting content in front of various communities. The traffic that comes through these types of content can be powerful in that the clickers are already self-selected based on how they encounter the content, then further winnowed in terms of interest by virtue to clicking for more information.

Sending these types of interested parties to a generic web site, product page or registration page misses the potential for tailoring the nurturing process. Better to get them somewhere that takes off from the content in terms of providing more direct information. So these landing pages need to be created thoughtfully.

Then, if you can convert by gaining more information and integrating with CRM data, these tend to be prized leads. The social interactions do the nurturing at low cost. You just need to be able to harvest that interest well, and measure all along the way.

Email marketing has much appeal for businesses of all sizes.

A key facet of usage/adoption for smaller organizations where the person(s) managing the campaigns have multiple hats (i.e. - marketing is not their only job), is how easy and quick it is to get something out.

Direct intengration with their CRM/customer/prospect database is something that we feel is key. This negates the extra steps of exporting lists from the CRM, importing into the marketing tool, and then the reverse for results...

The features we see our clients use most often are:
a) the creation of email content with links to corporate pages/blogs/forms (templates)
b) list management and tracking
c) scheduled sends
d) open/results reporting
e) history logging
f) call list creation