Realized Business Value

  • Strict data hygiene practices result in better understanding of prospect interests and intent for more efficient lead nurturing campaigns.
  • Strong Salesforce CRM integration provides clear insights into customer behaviors and prompts targeted segmentation for personalized messaging.
  • Creative use of Act-On landing pages and NPS surveys reveals customer satisfaction, driving more effective customer marketing and PSO initiatives.

What I love most about Act-On is the flexibility of the platform. Creating segments and building out the automation with conditional logic is easy and intuitive.

Kevin Butler

VP of Strategy

Challenge

Goose Digital is an award-winning Act-On partner agency with offices in Toronto, Edmonton, and Vancouver, Canada. The experts at Goose are driven to help marketing teams move their digital strategies forward through automation. Whether you’re part of a large marketing team or a one-person department, Goose Digital strives to accelerate your growth and increase your brand’s momentum.

As certified experts in marketing automation and digital marketing services, Goose Digital has a deep knowledge of several marketing automation platforms and CRM systems. While they specialize in helping insurance agencies adopt and improve holistic marketing strategies, they work across all industries (tech, manufacturing, retail, etc.) and are remarkably effective and efficient in helping new customers achieve rapid success with a combination of great marketing technology, planning, and execution. 

Goose is agnostic in its marketing technology recommendations, always basing their suggestions on each client’s unique needs. However, they frequently recommend Act-On for businesses of all shapes, sizes, and industries — and they use our growth marketing platform for all of their organization’s marketing efforts. 

We recently spoke with Kevin Butler (VP of Strategy) and Mark Finnegan (Manager, Marketing Programs & Partnerships) to discuss how Goose is using Act-On across the entire customer lifecycle and how Act-On’s seamless integration with Salesforce helps their marketing team deliver automated buyer journeys that attract and nurture new prospects and delight existing customers.

Data Hygiene

According to Kevin, a company’s CRM is the foundational element of their sales and marketing efforts. As the system of record for any successful organization, an effective CRM empowers Sales with the data and insights they need to power meaningful sales tactics and discussions. However, he stresses that, for best results, businesses should implement appropriate marketing automation solutions and connect their preferred platform with their CRM system — both of which will vary according to each organizations’ unique needs. 

Act-On gives us all the data intelligence we need to execute on our lead generation strategy without feeling the absence of a CRM platform.

Kevin Butler

VP of Strategy

Pain Points

  • Marketing intelligence
  • Lead tracking in the absence of an integrated CRM
  • Compelling personalized email templates
  • Improved deliverability
  • Growth in web traffic
  • Higher click through rates

Salesforce

As stated above, Goose uses Act-On for their organization’s marketing initiatives and Salesforce for their sales operations. Their streamlined integration with Salesforce is highly structured and highly organized, which means they have a crystal clear understanding of their data. This helps them leverage this information to deliver holistic customer experiences that are orchestrated across the entire lifecycle. But this wasn’t always the case. Early on, the team at Goose knew they had to thoroughly cleanse their data for optimal engagement. Marketers are often quick to look for silver bullet solutions to complicated problems, but according to Kevin, hard work and following data hygiene best practices is the best recipe for success. “The key to good engagement and good results is a strong marketing list,” he said. “And your lists are only as good as the contacts that are in it.”

Advanced Segmentation

Goose uses the actionable data gained from their demand generation campaigns to nurture their leads with segmented 3-step automated email programs. The goal of these email campaigns is to better inform their audience about their services and the powerful synthesis of marketing strategies and technologies. Each email features a primary CTA meant to educate their contacts and a secondary CTA to schedule a free marketing consultation. If and when a lead either books an appointment or reaches Goose’s predetermined lead scoring threshold, they are passed to Sales for more direct discussions to secure an engagement. Meanwhile, leads continue to receive Goose’s monthly newsletter and are returned to the marketing nurture cadence if the opportunity is closed without a deal in place.

To power these campaigns, Goose segments their leads based on lead scoring, contact and account characteristics, and engagement metrics — such as email opens, website behaviors, and webinar registrations. As an agency specializing in the insurance industry, Goose prioritizes these leads by assigning them a higher initial score, but they nurture every lead that performs actions that signify intent — including email engagement and digital interactions on their website. As a result of their lead nurturing efforts executed through Act-On, Goose has enjoyed 66% growth in new business revenue over the last two fiscal years.

Goose Personalizes the Customer Experience

Most marketers are heavily focused on (and invested in) promoting their brand, driving traffic to high-performance landing pages, and generating pipeline from legitimate leads. And while Goose does use Act-On’s demand generation features such as the website  tracking beacon, landing-page builder, and intuitive web forms with progressive profiling to drive traffic and leads, they’re just as invested in their existing customers as they are in attracting new business. According to Kevin, “When it comes to customer marketing, we don’t try to overcomplicate things. Based on the engagement data we collect and share between Act-On and Salesforce, we know exactly which customers want (and need) which information.”

Putting this philosophy into action, Goose develops customer campaigns based on customer type. As an agency, they distinguish between “active” and “inactive” accounts. As you’d expect, active accounts are those with a current marketing engagement with Goose, whereas inactive accounts are previous customers that are still on Goose’s master marketing list. While inactive accounts continue to receive a monthly newsletter (either insurance-specific or more broadly B2B) and holiday emails, Goose digs deeper with active accounts to understand which services they’re using. From there, they can further segment and send more personalized communications based on these criteria.

In addition to their personalized marketing communications, Goose also uses Act-On surveys to better gauge customer satisfaction. Kevin and his team use Act-On landing pages and forms to build customer surveys that are triggered following each customer’s initial 6-week onboarding process. The results are automatically synced back to Salesforce, which helps the marketing team share customer NPS insights with Sales at the contact level. More importantly, this feedback helps Goose’s Professional Services team improve their welcome and onboarding efforts for more enthusiastic, engaged, and loyal customers. 

Results

Using these customer insights, Goose is able to identify prime upsell and cross-sell opportunities. As stated above, their Professional Services team does an excellent job of onboarding new customers and ensuring they’re set up for success, but Goose takes that initial implementation period a step further by offering extended strategy, technology services, support. 

Whenever a new Goose customer completes the onboarding process, they are sent an email congratulating them on their successful implementation and informing them of their additional services. Since this is already a highly engaged audience, this tactic provides a great opportunity to further deepen relationships with relevant upsell and cross-sell offers and promotions. As a result of these customer onboarding, loyalty, and upsell efforts, Goose Digital has achieved 86% growth in customer-driven revenue over the last three years.