Modern marketing is digital marketing. Its broad scope spans outbound and inbound tactics, lead generation and nurturing strategies, and customer lifecycle optimization and advocacy programs. To succeed, marketers need a digital marketing solution that’s capability-rich, flexible, interoperable with other systems and tools, intuitive, easy to use, effective, and cost-efficient.
Additionally, 90 percent of businesses worldwide are smaller, and so are their marketing teams. However, most comprehensive marketing automation solutions aren’t designed to meet the needs of smaller organizations or the smaller marketing teams frequently found inside big enterprises. Companies that use marketing automation see 107% better lead conversion.
Act-On Marketing Automation Solution Overview
Act-On provides a software-as-a-service, cloud-based marketing automation solution that allows marketers to engage with buyers across the customer lifecycle. Its platform is purpose-built to give small and medium-sized companies all the value of an enterprise-level marketing automation system without the complexity and IT resources typically required.
The Act-On platform allows marketers to execute sophisticated marketing campaigns across web, mobile, email, and social. It includes capabilities for email marketing, website visitor tracking, landing pages, forms, lead scoring and nurturing, social publishing and prospecting, automated programs, A/B testing, CRM integration, webinar management, and more.
With Act-On, marketing efforts can be measured and optimized based on hard data rather than gut feelings. Marketers can easily:
- Manage and optimize all the stages of the customer experience;
- Attribute marketing spend to revenue;
- Track prospect activity from initial engagement and conversions to closed sales and repeat sales;
- Report on campaigns, from high levels to detailed drill-downs.
The Act-On platform stands apart primarily for its usability and unrivaled customer support: users are typically up and running their first campaigns in a matter of days (legacy systems can take weeks or months) and receive dedicated support (phone/email) at no additional cost.
Act-On is also unique in its ability to address the needs of today’s modern marketers by accommodating all the stages of the buyer journey and enabling marketing to touch all stages of the customer lifecycle (from awareness and acquisition to customer retention and expansion). Additionally, it allows marketers to integrate best-of-breed applications with the tools they already use, so they have the flexibility to customize their marketing stacks to suit their own evolving business needs.
Act-On’s research shows that marketing programs customized for the needs of an industry yield significantly higher results than those that are not. In light of this, Act-On recently announced the launch of Act-On Industry Solutions, customized for various industries, including healthcare, travel, finance, manufacturing, and retail, with more to come. Designed to deliver improved ROI and faster adoption of marketing automation, Act-On Industry Solutions provides:
- Content – Industry-specific templates for emails, forms, and landing pages with multiple campaign examples that can be easily imported/exported across accounts;
- Programs – Pre-built automated workflows to support multi-step nurture and engagement campaigns;
- Benchmarks – Access to aggregated performance results for marketing activities in various industries.
Act-On Engagement Insights
Engagement Insights is a reporting tool that provides real-time access to marketing campaign analytics through exportable and live-updated templates for Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel.
Although data-driven marketing has become vital to campaigns nowadays, data management remains a key challenge for most B2B marketers, according to a recent survey. Engagement Insights makes it easy to view, export and share data, which enables marketers to improve and optimize their campaigns and also makes marketing data more accessible to other teams across the organization.
Marketing Automation Best Practices
74% of companies that adopt marketing automation see a positive ROI in 12 months or less. Every company will have unique goals that support its specific business processes, but there are established best practices that can help make the most of your marketing automation system:
- Develop a formal lead management framework that describes the role and relationship between these six vital marketing tools and processes: data, lead planning, lead routing, lead qualification, lead nurturing, and metrics. Make sure sales and marketing agree on each step, and use the same language to describe it.
- Align marketing processes and goals with the sales department. Customers enter the sales funnel later in the decision process than ever before. This is true for both B2B and B2C companies. This means marketing cannot simply hand off verified names to the sales department.
- The marketing automation library must include content that engages the educated buyer, and the organization must be agile enough to connect with prospects as soon as they signal intent to buy.
- Look for marketing automation solutions that emphasize tools and capabilities for marketers rather than the IT requirements. Marketing professionals, not the CIO, should lead marketing automation.
Act-On serves over 3,000 companies ranging in size from small and mid-size businesses to departments of large enterprises across various industries (including financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, software, education, and technology). Current customers include Xerox, Swarovski, the University of Ohio, and the ASPCA, with one of the more compelling use cases being LEGO Education.
Marketers are under more pressure than ever to deliver results across all aspects of the customer lifecycle. Our technology empowers marketers to use data to drive decisions and is reshaping the way brands engage with their buyers. As a result, marketers today are more accountable and effective, contributing directly to revenue growth and customer satisfaction. Andy MacMillan, CEO, Act-On Software
Marketing Automation Case Study – Act-On
Working with educators and administrators from K-6 to develop solutions and resources for interactive classroom learning, LEGO Education turned to marketing automation after realizing its email marketing solution couldn’t scale with the company’s growth. Act-On soon proved the best fit for LEGO’s unique needs, thanks to its flexible pricing and robust lead scoring capabilities. It was put to work quickly – instantly yielding insights into LEGO Education’s sales pipeline and helping the division’s marketing team prioritize incoming leads better.
With Act-On, LEGO Education has deployed 14 automated campaigns a year (up from the previous two manual email programs), and now enjoys a 29 percent prospect-to-conversion rate.
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