Lone Beacon is a full-service marketing partner designed specifically for independent financial advisors. Their mission is to bridge the gap between Baby Boomers in need of financial advisors and their stellar clients by providing fully customized solutions marketing solutions. Despite years of experience offering wealth management services and support, Madrona Financial Services was struggling to distinguish themselves from the competition.

To tackle and overcome these challenges, Madrona enlisted the help of Act-On and partner agency, Lone Beacon.

Before using Act-On, we could only guess when and how people were engaging. Now we can visualize actual media and buying consumption patterns.

John Capuano

Founder/Owner, Lone Beacon (Agency Partner)

Overview

They hadn’t firmly established their brand and were struggling to deliver targeted lead nurturing to their ideal personas. Additionally, their lack of reporting and engagement insights was hindering their efforts to relaunch their website and deliver tailored customer experiences.

Together, they developed a clear set of objectives to help Madrona reach and exceed their goals. However, launching and executing this comprehensive digital marketing strategy required a robust marketing automation platform.

Challenge

Madrona Financial Services wanted to better understand their audience’s pain points and motivations and then leverage that knowledge to revamp their website as the foundation for creating more effective customer journeys.

Using the Act-On growth marketing platform as their own digital marketing laboratory, they began to collect and analyze engagement data, develop unique scoring models based on demographics and digital behaviors, and deliver targeted messaging informed by advanced segmentation.

Approach

Before creating their new website, Madrona needed to understand the state of their existing site and how digital customers were (or were not) engaging with their brand online. They also needed to better identify high-value content for each persona. To accomplish these goals, they first installed the Tracking Beacon to integrate Act-On with their website.

Doing so allowed them to track digital behaviors and turn anonymous visitors into known leads. This information flowed into Act-On’s Website Prospector tool, which the team used to configure real-time alerts every time a known lead visited a webpage, as well as daily summaries of all user behaviors across their site.

To gather even more insights, they built user surveys in Act-On to gain a thorough understanding of which site elements were working, which ones weren’t, and what investors most wanted to see and learn. They built email campaigns in Act-On to distribute these surveys and gathered the data using Act-On Forms.

By using Act-On’s reporting tool, Data Studio, Madrona was able to get a comprehensive view into every prospect engagement along each digital channel — including email, landing pages, and form-fills.

The real-time engagement alerts help us evaluate our overall marketing more strategically and even gives us critical information as it happens.

John Capuano

Founder/Owner, Lone Beacon (Agency Partner)

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

Solutions

Knowledge such as the way users navigated Madrona’s site, the time these users spent on each page, and which content they downloaded and engaged with helped guide the development of their website’s new site map, wireframes, information architecture, and overall user experience. They continue using this approach to inform their inbound and content strategies — an ongoing process they undertake to ensure they’re delivering relevant messaging and resources at all times.

Not all of Madrona’s prospects are ready to have a serious discussion, so Madrona needs the ability to quickly identify which leads are qualified, which leads need further nurturing, and how to tell the two apart. Based on this intelligence, they can more easily and accurately segment their audiences to increase engagement and home in on qualified leads. To accomplish this, they implemented lead scoring rules using Act-On’s multiple score sheets to calculate and assign lead value based on behavior and engagement such as media consumption patterns, timelines, and which types of content they were most interested in. This helps them optimize their funnel, develop more proactive and productive lead nurturing tactics, and segment by persona and online behavior.

As a result of this advanced segmentation, Madrona can now develop more targeted email campaigns based on their prospects’ actual habits rather than having to play the guessing game to nurture and engage current customers and leads. Thanks to these efforts, Madrona has achieved an outstanding email deliverability reputation with above-average open rates of 33% and click-through rates of 20% (up 13% and 11%, respectively) — all while maintaining minimal bounce and opt-out rates. Brian Evans, Madrona Financial Services’ CEO, notes that segmenting based on highly engaged users (indicated by behavior and intent) has been extremely valuable in helping the financial services firm get to know their customers and their decision-making processes.

Results

It’s also helped them deliver more targeted messaging to specific users based on demographics, firmographics, net available assets, and the behavioral segmentation mentioned above. In fact, since implementing advanced segmentation through Act-On, Madrona has grown their assets under management by 1,000% over the course of five years. Said Brian, “Before we used Act-On, we could only guess when and how people were engaging. Now we can visualize real media and buying consumption patterns. The real-time engagement alerts help us evaluate our overall marketing more strategically and even gives us critical information as it happens.” They’ve built an integrated ecosystem of content creation and distribution, website tracking, advanced segmentation, and targeted outbound communications. And Act-On is at the center of it all.

Act-On has been able to provide Madrona Financial Services with immense value. The digital marketing efforts implemented through Act-On have helped Madrona grow annual sales by an average of 20% over the past 6 years. The growth marketing automation platform helps them understand their audience, track prospects’ unique behaviors, establish lucrative segments, and deliver relevant messaging to drive a major increase in their assets under management. On top of that, they’re consistently achieving over 30% open rates across their outbound communications — an impressive 300% above industry averages.

Most significant is the ROI they’ve realized. Five years ago, Madrona held roughly $8 million in new assets under management. Last year, that number had grown 10x to $80 million.”All of these amazing results are based on the marriage of good strategy with good marketing automation, “said John Capuano, CEO of Lone Beacon. “By blending granular segmentation with a sharp focus on deliverability and great content development, Act-On ensures that we’re able to execute a truly holistic vision for Madrona Financial Services and many other clients.”