With a platform like Act-On, you can be up and running within a month, but creating your content, setting up your workflows, and creating personalized and segmented lists using behavioral triggers will take additional time and resources. Through an analysis of thousands of customers, we’ve determined three key factors that will determine your success using a marketing automation platform. We call them the Fundamental Three.
- Properly installing the Act-On tracking beacon
- Integrating your forms with Act-On
- Regularly emailing to about 20 percent of your list
These seem fairly simple (and they are), but there is a technical component to each.
Too often, a marketing person is dependent on someone from IT or their outsourced “website guy” to install the tracking beacon, which allows you to track the engagement activity of any known and unknown visitor to your website. So when someone goes from anonymous to known, you’re able to retrieve their earlier history.
Marketers also have to convince their web designers to use Act-On forms or add JavaScript to their existing forms so they integrate with Act-On. Conversions don’t do you much good if you’re not able to collect that information.
Once you have converted that website visitor from an unknown prospect to a known lead, you want to begin nurturing that relationship and educating them about why they should do business with you. This means creating segmented, personalized email lists (as opposed to the batch and blast of a level one marketer) so your content speaks to their unique needs.
These are just a few areas where a MaaS provider can help your marketing team onboard with your marketing automation platform, get trained with the software’s capabilities, and begin creating effective campaigns.
What Does Marketing as a Service Include?
End-to-end MaaS providers, like Act-On, provide in-depth training on your new marketing automation platform, help with key integrations, and proven tips to ensure email deliverability. As a new customer, you will also receive world-class onboarding. Lastly, your MaaS provider should offer a full suite of marketing accelerators in either an a la carte fashion or as a package. This way, you can pick and choose which accelerators are most critical to your current business needs. At Act-On, we segment our accelerators into four categories.
- Inbound: Assistance building your inbound marketing programs, identifying the content you’ll need to develop, and creating the forms to convert all that content.
- Outbound: Help creating automated programs to send segmented demand generation and nurture emails to your prospects and customers. You’ll also get assistance with event promotion and integrating offline marketing activities with your online presence. Lastly, we guide you through the nuances of transactional and sales emails and create a system capable of sending both to your various email lists.
- Sales: Covers lead scoring, lead qualification, CRM integration, and setting up sales productivity tools.
- Loyalty: Learn best practices for cross-selling and upselling, developing nurture programs for onboarding new customers, and creating trigger emails based on customer behavior and activity.
So if you’re looking for help setting up your marketing automation platform and developing effective marketing strategies, contact Act-On today to learn more about our Marketing as a Service solution.