Company at a Crossroads
Companies work with TechnologyAdvice to get noticed. They promote content on TechnologyAdvice’s vast online publication of software reviews, user case studies, and whitepapers.
TechnologyAdvice are masters of online marketing. They help clients in the tech sector reach new customers through content promotion, search ads, social media, teledemand and email marketing. They work with Oracle, Dropbox, IBM, HP, Salesforce, and more. The company could’ve picked any marketing automation platform on the planet and they chose Act-On.
We did extensive due diligence, and Act-On stood out as the right partner.
Jordan Schneider
Director of Marketing
Challenge
That means publishing content, gathering leads, emailing leads, and even calling leads. TechnologyAdvice takes a lead from cold to hot, then passes it on to clients’ sales teams for closing. It’s full-fledged lead nurturing.
Marketing this marketing service is complex. “We have clients in many different fields,” says Schneider. “One challenge we face is that we need to be able to segment our audience down to the folks we can actually help, and target our message to resonate with whatever products or services they are selling.”
To do it, the team needed a marketing automation platform that would let them personalize messages and thoroughly test subject lines and message content. Their marketing messages had been too broad and never yielded high rates of engagement. And, a large number of leads were simply falling through the cracks.
Approach
TechnologyAdvice was able to implement Act-On within a few weeks. They integrated their Salesforce database and started testing personalized messages and landing pages right away. “Personalization is baked into the fabric of every single ongoing campaign we have in our sales and marketing system to nurture leads from awareness down to close,” says Schneider. “We try to use it in every way shape or form we can.”
Subject lines, email openings, and even landing pages are all personalized for each contact. The TechnologyAdvice team also uses A/B testing extensively to hone in on the most effective messaging.
“At a certain volume it becomes nearly impossible for sales to manually nurture leads to the next phase,” says Schneider. “We needed an automated way to help leads get to the next stage of the buying process without much involvement from sales.”
Having worked with marketing technology platforms in the past, we knew we needed to have a Salesforce-integrated marketing automation platform in place to support our efforts and help us meet our sales goals.
Jordan Schneider
Director of Marketing
One challenge we face is that we need to be able to segment our audience down to the folks we can actually help, and target our message to resonate with whatever products or services they are selling.
Jordan Schneider
Director of Marketing
Solutions
Lead nurturing is also key for the team. In many organizations, leads fall through the cracks—sales teams simply don’t have the time to follow up with all of them. With Act-On, it’s all automated. There are currently 91 drip campaigns running to support the TechnologyAdvice sales team and they’re updated every four to six weeks.
“Everyone has a lot of leads in their CRM instance that aren’t being nurtured,” says Schneider. “We run them through our hot lead identifier programs, send very personalized messages that have a high rate of conversion. It saves us a tremendous amount of time.” Within just 60 days, the team was able to see positive results from using Act-On.
Results
First, open rates went through the roof. “Personalization of subject lines has allowed us to see open rates as high as 52.8 percent on some campaigns (that’s an all-time high), and click through rates as high as 12.8 percent,” says Schneider. “That was absolutely unheard of at our company before introducing Act-On into the mix.”
Act-On also saves TechnologyAdvice a ton of time. The team is consistently running 91 drip campaigns that deliver more than 6,300 emails a month. “That’s 6,300 emails that sales does not need to remember to write and send out,” says Schneider. He estimates that each email would take a member of the sales team five minutes to send. Total time saved: Close to 422 hours a month.
Lead engagement and time aren’t the only two benefits of using Act-On. Thanks to closed-loop reporting, Schneider and his team are able to track leads from the very first email through close. “In the first month of 2016, we’ve already made up 33 percent of our total costs for our Act-On installation. By the end of the year, Act-On will have paid for itself many times over,” says Schneider.