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Online Ads May Not Be the Most Efficient Way to Grow Your Demand Gen Funnel

Transcript

Hi, everyone, I’m Arun, the founder of FunnelEnvy.

We help demand gen marketers increase pipeline and revenue through revenue funnel optimization

And today I want to spend a little bit time talking about why online ads might not be the most efficient way to grow your demand and a revenue funnel.

So this came about because I’ve been reading more in a lot of popular blogs, including Rand Fishkin, about something being wrong or, as he put it, rotten in the world of online advertising.

Now, in the article, he cites some pretty eye opening results from prominent brands like Chase and Uber, shedding a light on millions of dollars in an Uber’s case, about one hundred and fifty million dollars of wasted ad spend.

Now, if you bring a little bit closer to home, we work with a lot of B2B in demand gen marketers. This study suggests that about 75 percent of the advertising that B2B brands are doing are failing to produce long term growth.

So that seems like a problem. What do we do about it?

Well, let’s take a step back.

Let’s assume you’re a growth stage B2B demand gen organization, and you need to grow a pipeline by 30 percent and you need to do it fast in the next quarter or so.

Where do you invest your dollars? What do you spend on?

Well, of course, you’ve got the paid channels.

This is an obvious candidate, and the reason everyone loves them is because they’re very fast to add. But of course, the flip side of that is not only are they expensive, they’re also arguably much less efficient.

We’ll talk about why.

On the other hand, you’ve got your own channels, email, and organic search and social, these are cost effective in the long term, but of course, they’re harder and slower to scale.

Now, the one overlooked element in all of this is often the website, and the reason that it’s important is because all of these channels paid and owned funnel traffic to it. So it can be very efficient to scale, but it’s often the least optimized area. Everyone typically deals with static websites and it’s harder for organizations to execute on.

But let’s look at the impact of optimizing that web funnel.

Some data points, first off, when we look across our typical high growth customers, we usually see about 70 to 75 percent of the traffic coming to the site from direct and organic sources. And the remainder, about twenty five or thirty percent split across, you know, a handful of paid channels.

What that practically means is that if you’re trying to grow exclusively through a paid approach, you’re focusing on a single paid channel, you’re optimizing maybe 10 to 15 percent of your traffic. That makes it really hard to grow and optimize your entire funnel if you’re only dealing such a small subset of your traffic.

And of course, many of you know that at some point you start getting diminishing or negative marginal returns on that spend. A lot of the low hanging fruit, it gets carved away and you have to spend more on keywords and ad placements.

So it is possible to optimize your website funnel and grow with scale and speed.

Let’s look at a typical channel distribution in terms of traffic and conversion rates for our customers. And when we look at typical conversion rates across these channels, you get a sense of the lead volume per channel. If we were to spend our efforts growing exclusively through paid and achieve 50 percent growth through the paid channel that would be a good result. And of course, you see here that we’re getting, in this case, about a thousand more leads over the same time period.

But what Web funnel optimization allows you to do is actually distribute that growth across all of your channels. So let’s say you only produce 10 percent growth, but it’s spread across all of these different channels. You’re actually seeing a net increase above the paid channel strategy because you’re able to optimize all of your funnels.

So the point here is that improving that website funnel improves all channels and that can present a much easier path to growth.

Now, too often in the demand gen world and we think about optimizing the website, we only think about it as a top of the funnel activity.

Let’s look at what happens when you go further down funnel. Again here, we’re taking typical industry standard conversion rates through the entire funnel from visit to lead to opportunity to close one deal. And we put some numbers at the bottom that show the number of leads opportunities, close one deals and the resulting acquisition cost.

So if we take a top of the funnel strategy and you assume a 30 percent growth in the top of the funnel, the visit to lead conversion rate, and you make the big assumption of assuming that that 30 percent carries through to the entire funnel, which, by the way, is almost never the case. You get a significant improvement in close one deals and also a corresponding reduction in the acquisition costs.

But if we’re able to spread that improvement and actually improve the conversion rates down funnel from lead to opportunity as well as opportunity to deal, even if you do it in smaller amounts because you have less influence in that part of the funnel, you can see here that you get a much more significant improvement in revenue and a much more significant reduction in the acquisition costs.

So the point here is optimizing for the entire revenue funnel can generate significantly better incremental revenue than just focusing on top of the funnel. So don’t just think about it in terms of leads, think about it as optimizing the entire journey to revenue.

When we at funnel end we talk about revenue funnel optimization, this is our goal, optimize the entire customer journey to revenue.

So I want to leave you some takeaways here.

The first is that, of course, throwing money at paid channels is fast, and that’s why we do it. But it might not be very efficient, as we’ve seen today, and it could very well have diminishing returns over time.

The majority of your traffic is likely coming from direct or organic sources, and that also represents buyers at different stages. It’s not enough to just think about it as return traffic. You have buyers because your demand gen marketer coming at various different buying stages with differentiated intent.

And so if you’re able to optimize your website funnel across these buying stages, again, that’s what we call revenue funnel optimization, you can actually accelerate growth across every acquisition channel and have a much easier path to growth.

With that, I want to thank you for listening today, bye.

By Arun Sivashankaran|2021-06-18T05:46:59-07:00February 10th, 2021|Uncategorized, Conversion Rate Optimization, Digital Marketing, B2B|0 Comments

How Hotjar Can Help You Convert More Leads

Hotjar is a great complement to Google Analytics. Layering qualitative and visual data over the raw numbers gives you another dimension of insights.

But just like with your Google Analytics data, if you ignore key segments, you do so at your own risk.

Imagine, for example, that a heat map shows you that only 20 out of every 1,000 of visitors click on your Product Tour CTA. In fact, the scroll map shows you that only 15% of visitors even reach that section of the page.

You might conclude that the section and CTA don’t matter, and consider removing them.

Now imagine that all 20 of those visitors are leads – visitors who have identified themselves by signing up for a free trial, downloading a resource, or attending a webinar. Suppose that on average 15 of those 20 leads end up turning into opportunities. The Product Tour just went from wasted space to one of the highest-value interactions on the site!

Fortunately, it just takes a bit of work to begin segmenting your most valuable visitor data in Hotjar. Let’s look at how to do this with leads.

Why leads?

While leads might not be your most important identifiable visitor segment, for most B2B SaaS sites they deserve special attention. In fact, they’re already getting special treatment in your nurture campaigns. (Right?) And hopefully you’re personalizing offers and CTAs for them as well.

Still, the steps below will work for any segment you can identify. Target accounts, industry of interest, or existing customers can all be given VIP status in Hotjar.

Setup

Before you begin, make sure you have two things in place.

1. Hotjar Plus or Business

The free plan doesn’t support custom tags and triggers.

2. A way to identify leads on your website

Not sure how to do that? This post will walk you through it. And if you’re using Marketo, FunnelEnvy automatically syncs lead status with all your frontend tools – Google Analytics, Drift, Google Optimize, and yes, Hotjar.

Tag session recordings

Watching playback of visitor sessions is a great way to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. It’s also dauntingly time consuming. One day’s worth of recordings could take a month to view.

So clearly you need to prioritize what you focus on. Watching a half dozen leads interact with your website will yield more insight than watching a hundred anonymous visitors land, scroll, and bounce.

All you need to do is execute a single line of code when you identify a lead on the site:

hj('tagRecording', ['leads']);

Set this up, and you’ll be able to filter recordings later.

Screenshot of Hotjar recordings filtered for leads

(See the Hotjar docs for more detail on how this works.)

Trigger heat maps

Instead of mixing clicks from anonymous visitors, customers, and leads all into a single heat map, you can create one for leads only.

You’ll need to create a heat map with a JavaScript trigger, then fire the trigger when leads visit the page in question.

If you’re using FunnelEnvy for Marketo, it’s as easy as adding a Trigger to Google Tag Manager:

Screenshot of a Trigger in Google Tag Manager

(FunnelEnvy for Marketo can push visitor stage to the Data Layer, meaning you can use it to trigger any Tag)

Then create a Custom HTML Tag to fire the Hotjar code:

Screenshot of a Custom HTML Tag in Google Tag Manager

Create a custom poll for leads only

What page has the highest exit rate? What page do visitors spend the most time on? What are they looking for, and not finding?

The answer is probably different for leads compared with anonymous visitors. The only way to find out is to ask.

Lucky for you, you can trigger a custom poll with the same code that triggers custom heat maps.

So if you’ve added the Google Tag Manager logic shown above, all you have do to is create a poll with a JavaScript trigger. And you’re done!

Ask every visitor this question, get a lot of noise. Ask leads only, find out what matters

Where to start

There’s a lot you can do to better understand (and more effectively convert) leads on your website. As a first step, just tag and watch some session recordings to see how leads navigate your site.

This requires a way to identify those leads in the first place. Solve that problem once, though, and you open up deeper insights in Google Analytics, custom playbooks in Drift, and personalization options in Google Optimize.

If you’re using Marketo, FunnelEnvy solves this for you. No need to bring in the dev team and turn it into a multi-month project. If you’re ready to start giving leads the special treatment they deserve, just get in touch.

By Brian Hall|2020-08-03T11:54:09-07:00July 13th, 2020|Strategy, Analytics, SaaS, B2B|0 Comments

Identify, Track, and Serve Custom Experiences to Leads

You’ve decided to improve on your one-size-fits-all website content by serving personalized content to leads. You figure that a free trial user will literally never click “Start Free Trial” … but they very well might click “Buy Now.” Especially if you give them clear reasons to do so.

Great! So, how will you target these visitors?

It’s a straightforward process of identifying “leads only” behavior, then ensuring you’re able to activate this data on your site.

What do leads do?

The answer is unique to your product, but it’s not a trick question.

Here are visitor behaviors you can use to identify leads:

Sign up for a trial
Opt in for a lead magnet
Click through on an email message sent to leads only
Trigger a domain or company match to an account that’s in the pipeline
Click “Log In” on the homepage

If you’re only looking to segment out leads in your analytics reporting, this might give you everything you need.

Your “Leads” segment is the set of all visitors who carried out any of the above actions. Even if you’re not tracking “Log In” clicks or using a firmographic data provider, you’ve got pageviews on /app, or /dashboard, or /whitepaper-download-thank-you. That’s enough to define a segment.

But to take the next logical step of serving a more relevant experience to these visitors, you’ll have to have this data available not just in your reports, but on the frontend of your website.

How to activate experiences for leads

Once you’ve narrowed down the list of actions that define “leads only ” behavior on your site, you’ll need to attach some sort of identifiable metadata to the user across your website.

If you can spare a few developer cycles, setting a first-party cookie is a good option. Whenever a visitor starts a trial, or signs up for a webinar, set a cookie you can use to identify that they’re a lead. All your dev needs to know is the exact trigger (or triggers), the name and value you want to use for the cookie, and when it should expire.

Once this cookie is set in the visitor’s browser, you can use it to activate personalization campaigns, experiments, customized lead magnet offers, and whatever else you think might get leads to convert.

First party cookie targeting with Google Optimize

If you’re using Marketo, you already have a source of truth for a visitor’s status in the sales process, along with useful metadata about their site behavior, lead score, and more. All packaged up into a cookie that’s already on your site.

In that case, the easiest path forward is to use FunnelEnvy for Marketo to activate this data, which you can then integrate with Google Analytics, Google Optimize, Optimizely, Drift, and whatever else you’re using. No custom code required.

What to do next

You can start scoping this project right now. Write down the actions that identify visitors as leads in your pipeline. Forward this along to your dev team, and ask them what it will entail to set a custom cookie for visitors who complete these actions.

Or skip the back-and-forth by signing up for FunnelEnvy for Marketo. We’ll solve analytics, targeting, and activation. You can move on to designing a higher-converting experience,

By Brian Hall|2020-07-08T10:41:56-07:00July 7th, 2020|Digital Marketing, Analytics, B2B|0 Comments

Minimum Viable Personalization for Leads

Your website receives visitors in different stages of the buying process, who have varying needs and priorities. You recognize this, so you’ve installed a personalization platform. Where to begin?

First, a word on what not to do. Do not get click-and-drag happy with your platform’s audience tool, and end up creating a monstrosity like “Returning visitors from Texas using Firefox on Mobile.”

Complex audience targeting rules, X'd out

These audiences are easy to target, but hard to reason about, painful to maintain, and impossible to extract value from.

Instead, start with leads.

Why leads? (And what’s a lead?)

The exact definition will depend on your customer journey, but broadly speaking a lead is any visitor who has identified themself on your website.

This might include:

Free trial users
Whitepaper downloaders
Webinar attendees

Put another way, leads are visitors who are neither paying customers nor anonymous.

As for why you should provide a personalized experience for them, there are three main reasons:

You can. They’ve signed up, so you know something about them.
They’re your second-most-valuable visitor segment. (Customers are #1, but that’s a topic for another day.)
Your current website is probably dominated by top of funnel content that they’ve already seen, and no longer find valuable.

Given how important this group is, it makes sense to provide an experience that’s relevant to them. But how do you do that without rewriting your whole website?

Where to personalize

Meet your leads where they’re already spending time. Finding out the answer to this question is as simple as segmenting your analytics data by leads, then looking at top pages.

The answer is probably “the Homepage and the Pricing page” but don’t take my word for it. Let the data tell you where to focus, and what kind of reach you can achieve.

Google Analytics screenshot of top pages visited by Leads

Once you’ve identified the top pages visited by leads, you can further prioritize by focusing on the elements they see and interact with.

For example, Hotjar allows you to trigger heat and scroll maps with custom code. That means you can create a “Leads only” heat map of your home page. (If that’s too hard, just keep your focus above the fold.)

How to personalize

This step is where the magic happens. What unique questions do leads on your website have? What tasks do they prioritize? What does activation look like?

To help structure your ideas, look for chances to do three things: Educate, remove friction, and nudge.

Educate

Does your homepage hero heading tout your product’s core value proposition? That’s great, but your leads probably know it by now. Can you change it to outline an important differentiator?

Does the homepage hero CTA still say “Free Trial”? You definitely don’t need that. Does it make sense to link to your knowledge base, or a quick start guide?

Remove friction

A simple improvement you can make is to show your free trial leads a more prominent “Log in” or “Visit My Dashboard” button. There’s a good chance that’s what they came to click.

You can also disable widgets and popups focused on lead generation. Those elements, by definition, can’t provide you with a new lead in this context. All they can do is annoy an existing lead.

Nudge forward

What steps does a visitor have to take before obtaining value from your product? Configure an integration, view a dashboard, import contacts?

When they were new to the site, pushing them toward this would’ve been overwhelming. Now that they’re more familiar with your product, though, they need this guidance.

Does your chat widget still ask “New here? Got any questions?” Why not start an onboarding-related conversation instead? A simple script along the lines of “Have you imported your contacts yet?” can transform this chatbot from a nuisance to a touch point for upgrades.

Stuck for ideas? Here are a couple of suggestions for websites we at FunnelEnvy know and love.

What you can do today

The first step toward obtaining value from a personalization strategy is convincing yourself that it’s worth the effort. So, start there.

What is the single highest-traffic page for existing leads? How many visitors does it get each month?

What’s the single most impactful element on that page? If you’re not sure, start with the hero heading copy and CTA.

What’s the current experience for leads? Is it relevant at all? Can you think of a message that would easily be 10 times more helpful?

If so, you’re onto something.

The good news is that the technical hurdles involved in making this change are solvable in any number of ways.

Your personalization tool might support targeting based on past visits to the /dashboard page. You might convince a friendly dev to set a cookie for new signups. If you use Marketo, FunnelEnvy lets you target by Smart List.

So take your newly acquired vision for a better lead experience, share it with the team. You’ll be hard pressed to find someone willing to fight to keep redundant CTAs on the page. I doubt anyone will argue that converting leads to sales is a wasted effort.

Starting personalization with a well-defined, high value, high reach, and observably different audience segment will make the difference between real ROI and a cringe-inducing vanity metrics report. So let’s go nurture some leads!

By Brian Hall|2020-07-10T09:40:07-07:00July 2nd, 2020|Analytics, SaaS, B2B|0 Comments

How to Effectively Personalize your Website using Account Data for Anonymous Traffic

Unlike consumer marketers, B2B revenue teams often reason about their market at an organization or account level. That may be based on specific named accounts or company size, industry or other related firmographic attributes.

Much of the traffic coming to the website is of course, “anonymous” meaning that they haven’t shared any contact information. There are however a number of vendors that sell firmographic data that can deliver this information even for anonymous traffic. This is possible because every web request must contain the source IP address and these vendors have mapped many (though far from all!) of them to specific accounts.

Traditionally used for sales teams, some of these solutions can be integrated in real-time into the website. This opens up some interesting opportunities to improve the traditionally static experience – such highlighting industry specific offerings, enterprise plans, or even targeting customers of competitors and highlighting differences.

A word of caution is warranted here, however. This approach to personalization is an investment that goes beyond just the vendor costs and we’ve seen a lot of campaigns where the return did not materialize. So let’s go into the more effective use cases, selecting a vendor and how to integrate it into FunnelEnvy audiences and predictive campaigns.

Beware Vanity Experiences

Personalization over email is useful because it helps the recipient understand that it’s not a mass-emailing robot on the other end and that the message has been tailored to them. Website visitors have different expectations and what works over email can cross the line or be creepy on site.

Website personalization is most effective when it helps the customer by presenting them with an offer (next best action) that’s most relevant for them in their journey. That offer could be content, starting a free trial, contacting the sales team or whatever is both most relevant for them and maximizes their likelihood of conversion.

Although it may sound obvious, where we’ve seen campaigns underperform with reverse IP personalization is where it doesn’t meet these customer-centric goals. Consider the following:

Injecting the account name in the copy – Doesn’t the visitor already know where they work?
Crafting experiences based on visitor industry when there’s no industry specific features to the product or service.
Serving pages that are specific to individual named accounts. The volume is generally too low to make a difference and again the customer already knows where they work!

These sorts of experiences are self-serving and what we call Vanity Experiences.

Vanity experiences, including one on FunnelEnvy.com. It’s no coincidence that these companies also sell the products that let you do it!

On the other hand reducing friction and targeting a more relevant direct-response offer based on firmographic data can be very effective. In some cases you could even skip steps in the journey – such as eliminating the pricing page for enterprise visitors.

Firmographic Vendor Considerations

There is no vendor that will be able to match all of your traffic, in fact match rates are typically in the 10-30% range. A variety of factors can influence that, but probably the most important factor is who you’re selling to and the types of accounts that are visiting your site.

Large enterprises, universities and governments often secure well known blocks of IP addresses which are much easier to identify. On the other hand smaller businesses often use shared office space and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) which make identifying them much harder. If you’re primarily selling to small business it’s unlikely that you’ll match enough accounts for this to be a cost-effective strategy.

If however you do sell to larger organizations then even if you have a low overall match rate it could still be worth pursuing. The effective match rate for the larger accounts is likely to be much higher and most B2B companies generate from enterprise customers.

Aside from the match rate the actual performance (time to return a match response) is an important factor on the website. If the integration is too slow the page may render before you have an opportunity to personalize, making for a sub-optimal “content flicker” on the all important first page view.

Activating Reverse IP Data with FunnelEnvy

FunnelEnvy’s platform has out of the box support for three leading firmographic vendors – Clearbit, Demandbase and Kickfire. Once you’ve selected one of these vendors, integrating into the platform and using the data for segmentation (audiences) and directly within 1:1 predictive campaigns can be done in a few minutes and requires no IT involvement.

Data Source Setup

Each of these firmographic vendors is a Data Source in FunnelEnvy, and activating any one of them is as simple as going into the integrations, locating the appropriate data source and clicking on the activate checkbox.

Once activated and saved the data source will appear in the list of active integrations.

Since these data sources return data in the browser the FunnelEnvy javascript snippet must also be present along with the reverse IP vendor snippet. Data collection happens automatically without additional setup and can be used immediately for creating audiences and in predictive campaigns.

Audiences

In the Audiences section of FunnelEnvy you can create conditions based on the activated provider. The rule builder will include all of the individual data attributes from the provider and rules can be AND or OR’d together for flexibility.

As with any of our data sources conditions can be combined with other sources (behavioral, Marketo, etc) to create audiences defined from multiple data sources.

From the audience builder you may want to report on visitor behavior from a particular firmographic segment (e.g. SMB or Enterprise visitors). This can be accomplished within the audience through the Google Analytics integration by setting either a custom dimension and / or sending an event.

For personalization Audiences can be used within the targeting section of campaigns operating in both A/B/n or predictive mode. If an Audience is selected in the campaign targetings visitors must meet both the page and audience targeting conditions to be eligible to see a variation.

Even if you don’t create any audiences the underlying firmographic data is used in our real-time predictive campaigns.

1:1 Predictions with Firmographic Data

Firmographic data sets are excellent for our predictive campaigns because they’re generalizable and often highly correlated to experiences and outcomes. There are only so many audiences you’ll be able to create but every data point from these providers can be used by our algorithms to predict which experience is most effective on a 1:1 visitor basis.

You can see the effect of this in our campaign signal report which shows how strong the predictive signals are and how much they correlate to uplift and revenue. Individual firmographic attributes are often highly represented in successful campaigns.

A great example of this in action is a homepage campaign with different variations for the SMB or Enterprise journeys. Since reverse IP data is available even on the first page visit, our model can identify patterns in the visitor profile and serve more relevant experiences to your customers.

Getting Started

It is possible to improve upon static website experiences with reverse IP firmographic data and help your customers while at the same time increasing your conversion and revenue KPIs. If you’re a FunnelEnvy customer and want to explore firmographic personalization for anonymous traffic let us know.

If you need help selecting a vendor we can help with that too. You can contact us here anytime: https://www.funnelenvy.com/contact/

By Arun Sivashankaran|2020-03-16T07:09:28-07:00March 16th, 2020|Strategy, B2B, Conversion Rate Optimization, Digital Marketing|0 Comments

Real-Time Personalization with Marketo and FunnelEnvy

For many organizations, Marketo serves as the real-time customer database for marketing. Unfortunately, for most organizations today this rich intelligence living in Marketo is not being leveraged to drive personalized user experiences across your site which is one of the most valuable opportunities with this data.

The good news is that when it comes to personalizing with Marketo, you don’t have to be limited to just personalizing your emails and Marketo forms. You can actually use all that valuable customer centric Marketo data to drive your website personalization programs.

Why might you want to do this? Instead of showing everyone the same lead capture experience, you could show prospects who have already filled it out more product content. Or show existing customers opportunities to expand. Maybe even segment your experiences and customer journey by company size or industry.

With FunnelEnvy’s Marketo integration you can use your rich Marketo data in real-time to deliver personalized experiences across your site.

Setting up the Marketo Integration in FunnelEnvy

Within the FunnelEnvy user interface you can activate and configure the Marketo integration. FunnelEnvy fetches Smart Lists periodically from Marketo and automatically keeps these updated with Marketo. Configuring the integration also lets you setup offsite goals triggered by Marketo webhooks such as Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs).

The Data Filtering interface lets you choose which fields to import, and exclude PII or other data based on your compliance policies.

Typically these four steps are done by the Marketing Ops team that manages the Marketo instance:

Activate the Marketo data source.
Authorize FunnelEnvy to access Marketo
(Optional) Configuring Data Filtering
Selecting Smart Lists to Import

Step 1: Find and activate Marketo under the Integrations settings. You should see it as an activated Data Source.

Step 2: Authorize FunnelEnvy to access the Marketo REST API with API keys.

Step 3: Optionally configure data filtering rules. When fetching lists FunnelEnvy will only import lead attributes that are selected.

Step 4: Select Smart Lists for Import. Assuming your API credentials in Step 2 were correct, you should see a list of Smart Lists available for import. Note that it may take up to an hour for this list to reflect any recently added Smart Lists.

Once you’ve configured the Smart Lists for import you’re done! FunnelEnvy will refresh the lists every few hours, retrieving leads and refreshing the local copy of Marketo data, which is then available immediately for audiences, predictive campaigns and offline Marketo-triggered goals.

More details on setting up the integration can be found in our knowledge base article.

Using Marketo for Site Personalization in FunnelEnvy

Once you’ve configured the Marketo Data source you open up a number of valuable personalization use cases. Below are three ways you can use FunnelEnvy and Marketo together to better target, personalize, and measure your personalization initiatives.

Target Experiences and Offers using Lead Attributes and Smart Lists

Stop serving a static one size fits all website experience to all your visitors. Want to personalize your site experience only for prospects, or to specific accounts, or members of specific campaigns?

With FunnelEnvy you can create very rich audiences that can be built off Marketo data and that can also be used as part of more advanced audience segments that combine Marketo data with firmographics and/or real-time user behavior as well.

In the condition builder interface you have access to all of the Marketo lead fields that were imported, and can define logical conditions based on them.

These conditions can also be combined with other data sources. In the audience screenshot below we’re combining a Marketo condition with a user’s behavior (but this could also be Demandbase, Clearbit or any of the sources we support).

And just like any of the FunnelEnvy audiences, these can be used for targeting within predictive campaigns or A/B Tests:

This flexibility allows you to setup a dynamic “always on” personalization strategy that targets the right user segments in real-time based on that visitor’s stage and their relationship with you.

Personalize Experiences at a 1:1 Level with Marketo Data

While targeting is a powerful first step in executing your personalization strategy, the more powerful opportunity is to use all that rich user data to predict the best experience to serve each visitor.

Choosing in real-time which experience to serve each user based on their full user profile truly allows for 1:1 marketing. That is where the personalization magic really happens.

FunnelEnvy uses machine learning to predict which experience will likely convert best based on all the data we see for that user, including their Marketo data and based on the history of how similar users converted over time.

And unlike A/B tests where a specific experience is randomly assigned, or rules based personalization where you fix a specific experience to an audience, FunnelEnvy allows you to take advantage of all the data you have on that user and serve the experience mostly likely to convert for that user.

This allows you to avoid the manual analytics effort of trying to identify and capitalize on all the possible experience and segment combinations that perform best. As a marketer you can stay focused on the message and offer and allow the algorithms to optimize the segment/experience matches.

As the report below shows, we are scoring/weighing the effectiveness of every attribute we see for every user by experience.

Here, Marketo audience data along with all the other behavioral and firmographics data is used to predict the best possible outcome for each and every user and experience combination.

This allows us to use all the data to our advantage and serve the right experience that will most likely result in revenue.

The best part is that there’s no additional setup required here. Once we have the Marketo data within our profiles we’ll use it as long as the decision mode on your campaign is set to “Predictive”.

Measure and Attribute Personalization Campaigns by Revenue (not Form Fills)

With personalization, one of the bigger challenges is being able to measure the program’s contribution to revenue and business outcomes.

It can be done, but often requires integrating data sets or pulling reports from multiple systems and generating manual reports after the fact.

WIth FunnelEnvy, once you set up your important online, MQL, and any other revenue goals you then start tracking and attributing success to each personalized experience. Below is an example where we created a MQL goal based on a Marketo List and assigned a specific MQL value to it.

To setup this, ensure that the Marketo Data Source is activated and configured and create a new individual goal. Under “API Triggering” you’ll should see an option for Marketo. Once selected, this is the URL that your Marketo instance will hit via a webhook to trigger the goal conversion. More details on setting up these webhooks is available in our knowledge base article.

Once that’s done the Marketo goal will shows in real-time in our campaign reporting dashboards.

It now becomes much easier to tell the story of how specific tests or personalized experiences are driving down funnel goals like MQLs, SQLs, opportunities, and deals won in addition to top level goals like trial signups, demo requests, or engagement.

This makes it much easier to attribute the positive impact personalization has on the organization’s revenue outcomes. Now instead of talking about form completes you can talk the language of sales which is revenue.

Getting Started

As you can see, integrating Marketo into your personalization program is very straightforward and can unlock some very valuable use cases and capabilities. The best part with this approach is that there is no custom development or IT involvement to get this up and running. You can setup the integration and be live with your first campaign on the same day.

If you’re not yet using FunnelEnvy but are interested in personalizing your website to Marketo Leads and Contacts we’d love to hear from you! You can contact us here: https://www.funnelenvy.com/contact/

By James Niehaus|2020-03-16T07:03:39-07:00March 4th, 2020|Digital Marketing, Testing, Strategy, B2B, Experimentation|0 Comments

The Importance of Context with Marketing Experiments

By now most marketers are familiar with the process of experimentation, identify a hypothesis, design a test that splits the population across one or more variants and select a winning variation based on a success metric. This “winner” has a heavy responsibility – we’re assuming that it confers the improvement in revenue and conversion that we measured during the experiment.

The experiments that you run have to result in better decisions, and ultimately ROI. Further down we’ll look at a situations where an external validity threat in the form of a separate campaign would have invalidated the results of a traditional A/B test. In addition, I’ll show how we were able to adjust and even exploit this external factor using a predictive optimization approach which resulted in a Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) increase of almost 70%.

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By James Niehaus|2020-01-28T08:41:14-08:00January 28th, 2020|Conversion Rate Optimization, B2B, Experimentation|0 Comments

The Activity Trap

Sales reps aren’t paid on the number of calls they make, and real estate agents don’t get commission on the number of showings they do. Activity does not equate to outcome, and conflating the two can have really expensive implications.

The same story applies to marketers. We seem to spend a lot of effort fostering cultures of activity rather than outcomes.

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By James Niehaus|2020-01-02T06:38:17-08:00January 2nd, 2020|Conversion Rate Optimization, Digital Marketing, Strategy, B2B|0 Comments

How Not Picking an Experiment Winner Led to a 227% Increase in Revenue

Is this always the case? As marketers we’re often told to look at the scientific community as the gold standard for rigorous experimental methodology. But it’s informative to take a look at where even medical testing has come up short.

For years women have been chronically underrepresented in medical trials, which disproportionately favors males in the testing population. This selection bias in medical testing extends back to pre-clinical stages – the majority of drug development research being done on male-only lab animals.

And this testing bias has had real-world consequences. A 2001 report found that 80% of the FDA-approved drugs pulled from the market for “unacceptable health risks” were found to be more harmful to women than to men. In 2013 the FDA announced revised dosing recommendations of the sleep aid Ambien, after finding that women were susceptible to risks resulting from slower metabolism of the medication.

This is a specific example of the problem of external validity in experimentation which poses a risk even if a randomized experiment is conducted appropriately and it’s possible to infer cause and effect conclusions (internal validity.) If the sampled population does not represent the broader population, then those conclusions are likely to be compromised.

Although they’re unlikely to pose a life-or-death scenario, external validity threats are very real risks to marketing experimentation. That triple digit improvement you saw within the test likely won’t produce the expected return when implemented. Ensuring test validity can be a challenging and resource intensive process, fortunately however it’s possible to decouple your return from many of these external threats entirely.

The experiments that you run have to result in better decisions, and ultimately ROI. Further down we’ll look at a situation where an external validity threat in the form of a separate campaign would have invalidated the results of a traditional A/B test. In addition, I’ll show how we were able to adjust and even exploit this external factor using a predictive optimization approach which resulted in a Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) increase of almost 70%.

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By Arun Sivashankaran|2019-08-01T15:03:11-07:00July 14th, 2019|Conversion Rate Optimization, B2B, Experimentation|0 Comments

Understanding the CMOs Data-Driven Decision Delusion

The term cobra effect describes an incentive policy that causes unintended consequences and results in the opposite effect intended. In the 1800s the colonial government of India (as the story goes), becoming increasingly concerned about the population of cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra brought in.

Although it was initially successful, the cobra population increased as entrepreneurs of the day started breeding cobras to take advantage of the bounty. When the government realized the new policy wasn’t working as intended they ended the program, causing the cobra farmers to release the snakes and further exacerbating the very problem the government wanted to solve.

I recently read Chief Marketing Officers at Work, a fantastic series of interviews of CMOs from prominent companies like PayPal, Zendesk, Domo and SurveyMonkey. These marketing leaders unequivocally championed their data-driven marketing strategies, and emphasized the need for further data-driven investment and skills in their organizations.

The root cause of many cobra effect problems is the fact that as humans we tend to more easily comprehend simplistic linear systems and cause-effect relationships. Much like rewarding people for killing cobras should result in less cobras, investing in more data-driven tools should produce better decisions and outcomes!

Unfortunately, it’s very likely that the data-driven approaches being increasingly adopted by marketing organizations are producing their own cobra effect and paradoxically reducing the quality of decisions and resulting outcomes.

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By Arun Sivashankaran|2018-10-20T22:54:43-07:00September 24th, 2018|Strategy, Digital Marketing, B2B|0 Comments

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