A top goal for all marketers and advertisers is to figure out how to win at demand gen. The problem is that everyone seems to have a different opinion on how to succeed. Also, how “winning” is interpreted depends on each business and its unique goals.
The most important thing is to develop a strategy that is scalable and is bound by rules and methodologies.
Our recent Marketo webinar took a closer look at this, sharing Marketo’s top demand generation secrets — primarily, details on how they use A/B testing and marketing automation to achieve results like an 833% increase in click-through rates.
Here is a quick recap:
3 Key takeaways
1. A statistical significance calculator ensures you can use the results from your A/B tests
One of the most important aspects of A/B testing is proving that the results are statistically significant. For this, you’ll need a statistical significance calculator:
The left column contains the number of page visits, and the right column is the number of conversions. When you run an A/B test, the results show whether variation A or variation B experienced the higher conversion rate.
It also provides a confidence interval that the test will positively impact a campaign. The statistical significance calculator above, for example, shows that this particular test will impact conversion rates by 33%, with 99% statistical significance.
2. Using triggers to send emails to website visitors drives 3x more engagement than nurture emails
Nurture emails are batch emails designed to tell a story over time. Trigger emails, by contrast, are delivered to customers based on their behaviors on your website. They send content in real time, that’s both personalized and relevant to their website experience, driving 3x more engagement than nurture or batch emails.
Comparing trigger emails vs. batch and nurture emails, Marketo experienced 261% higher open rates, 157% higher click-to-open rates, and 833% higher click-through rates with trigger emails:
All of these improvements combined lead to one main idea: trigger emails are 7,675% more efficient at generating a sales opportunity than any other type of email.
3. Something as simple as bounce management can improve your email open rates
In just a 9-month period, January 2016 to September 2016, Marketo’s deliverability rate dropped from about 95.5% to about 93%, and open rate went from nearly 16% down to approximately 13%:
In September 2016, the company set up two soft bounce management campaigns as an attempt to tackle the problem:
- A batch cleanup campaign to spot emails that soft bounced at least 10x in the last 90 days
- A trigger campaign to look for emails that soft bounced at least 6x in the past 30 days (to reflect real time)
Marketo’s results were outstanding, with an immediate lift in both deliverability and open rates worldwide. Deliverability rates increased from 93% to 99%, and open rates jumped from less than 13% to over 17%:
The biggest takeaway is that something as simple as bounce management can easily improve email deliverability, increase clicks and engagement, and drive significant revenue. The results above came from simply running operational trigger campaigns to catch problems in real time.
2 Great questions & answers
Q: Why is A/B testing so important?
A: It increases engagement with your buyers, enhances campaign effectiveness, and makes you a better marketer.
First, A/B testing increases engagement with your buyers. By rolling out split variation tests of your Google Ads, post-click landing pages, emails, or other campaign components, you’re able to identify which campaigns customers react to more favorably. Then, by altering your strategy to reflect these results, you can create more appealing content to attract target customers.
A/B testing also enhances your overall campaign effectiveness, whether you end up with reduced bounce rates, increased conversion rates, reduced cart abandonment, or increased sales. No campaign is perfect, and there’s always room for improvement through split testing.
Above all else, A/B testing makes you a better marketer. By learning more about your audience — what people prefer in each campaign, what time is best to email them, etc. — you become more in tune with their needs, which ultimately makes you a more effective marketer.
Q: Is an MQL model just set it and forget it?
A: No. You should be continually revising with your team to ensure your MQL model is up to date and effective for your company.
Marketo’s MQL model is broken up into three different requirements that need to be met to be considered a marketing qualified lead:
The first is target status, meaning the lead has the right job title, a known first and last name, and a valid email address, phone number, and company name.
The second is behavior score, which includes aspects that marketers have more control over: email clicks, form completions, demo views, report downloads, events attended, etc. There is also a scoring decay component with the behavior score. If a lead is inactive for a certain amount of time, the behavior score is reduced to reflect this.
Third, is the account score. This number looks at all of the accounts in Marketo’s database, considers up to 5,000 different account-level signals (annual revenue, funding, hiring trends, employee size, technologies used, etc.), and gives each account a score from 1-100 based on readiness to buy.
None of these MQL components or scores should be set in stone. You should be continually revising with your team to ensure your MQL model — especially the behavior score qualifications, since they allow the most control — is up to date and effective for your company.
1 Quote
Michael Madden, Director, Commercial Demand Generation, Marketo:
Content is all about investment. Give people what they want, when they want it.
Learn more from the Marketo webinar
Every demand gen strategy varies because no two business’ goals are identical. However, having a strategy that scales and is bound by rules and methodologies can help reach any business’ objectives.
Watch the Marketo webinar replay to learn more tactics like A/B testing and trigger-based emailing to achieve better click-through rates, conversion rates, and more.
