How do Hubspot trends translate?

Transcription

1 november 2016 How do Hubspot trends translate? The amount of information online about how to market your business is overwhelming! Everyone has an opinion and has tried most everything. But what does it all actually mean to YOUR organization as a Microsoft Dynamics Partner? Can you rework best practices from other industries and see immediate success? In some cases, YES! In other cases, it is a wiser decision to learn from your peers who have tried a similar tactic within the same community. Our monthly Marketing in the Microsoft Dynamics Community reports will share examples of how fellow Partner organizations make online marketing advice work for their business, along with research on particular marketing, sales, and business topics.

2 this month s topic... Beware of Graymail Graymail is a term used to describe contacts in your subscription list that do not open your s. They may not bounce, but there is absolutely no engagement with you. This can surprisingly count against you and put your marketing efforts at risk. According to Hubspot, Graymail (blog.hubspot.com/marketing/what-is-graymail-ht) is you technically opted in to receive but don t really want. If you have a hefty list of prospective customers, current customers, and other contacts, you ve likely struggled with keeping those contacts engaged, not to mention up to date. People change jobs. Companies acquire other companies. Addresses change. There is a constant in the world of business, and that constant is change! After years of being on your list, many of these contacts are no longer viable. There may be the temptation to just purge it all. Start over so you know what you have. BUT there is a fear associated with dumping contacts, and rightfully so. We re in an industry where the sales cycle can take months, even years. You don t want to lose prospects and especially don t want to write off customers, even if they rarely engage with your s. Although Hubspot s article (blog.hubspot.com/marketing/ blog-subscriber-graymail-purge) shows an example of purging a large chunk of their database, your situation may differ. This report will share three examples of how fellow Microsoft Dynamics Partners have solved and continue to solve these ever-present and ever-changing challenges. Thank you to Haley Martin (AvidXchange), Kim Haythornthwaite (Nolan Business Solutions), and Kaitlyn McKendry (Vicinity Manufacturing) for sharing their stories in this month s report.

3 Haley Martin AvidXchange To The Extreme Clean Imagine, if you will, a CRM system filled with 330,000 contacts. You likely don t have to imagine that hard, given the business that you re in. This system of 330,000 contacts contained old data acquired by random list purchases over the past 10 years. Haley Martin, director of Partner marketing at AvidXchange, shares, It used to be very popular to purchase lists, and we didn t do any clean up or qualifying during that time. They were mass uploaded into our CRM without even a phone call. You may think more is better, but not in this case. From a marketing perspective, this large number of contacts poses quite a few challenges. The Challenge Large percentage of the list was inactive Garbage in, garbage out No engagement The Research Haley had been wanting to purge AvidXchange s list for a long time. When they made a marketing automation software switch from Pardot to Hubspot, it was the right time to go for it. First, they had to do their research, which included benchmarking other companies and reporting on current statistics like open and click-through rates (which, were WAY below industry averages for marketing) Industry Averages FOR MARKETING soft Hard Industry Open Click Bounce Bounce Business and Finance 20.98% 2.77% 0.69% 0.58% Computers and Electronics 21.00% 2.25% 1.04% 0.72% Consulting 19.34% 2.28% 0.94% 0.74% Creative Services/Agency 22.16% 2.62% 1.10% 0.90% E-commerce 16.69% 2.41% 0.31% 0.25% Education and Training 21.66% 2.66% 0.56% 0.48% Marketing and Advertising 17.85% 1.96% 0.78% 0.64% Media and Publishing 21.95% 4.67% 0.29% 0.19% Professional Services 20.49% 2.50% 0.91% 0.73% Software and Web App 20.98% 2.32% 1.08% 0.88% Graph supplied by Mailchimp (mailchimp.com/resources/research/ -marketing-benchmarks)

4 numbers From The 330,000 Started with 330,000 contacts acquired by years of list purchases 5,000 After reengagement campaign, down to 5,000 contacts 14,000 It took nine months to grow organically to 14,000 contacts 44,599 Today, they have 44,599 contacts and much better open and click-through rates their research, AvidXchange found that inbound leads close at a higher rate and value for their company. They also discovered that a high percentage of their current list was not viable. Haley and her team used that data to make their decisions, and although the numbers were there, they also had a gut feeling it was the right thing to do. We work for an innovative company that encourages us to try new things. Sure, we were nervous that we wouldn t get the results we expected, but I was never in fear of losing my job, Haley recalls. I am proud to say our engagement has skyrocketed, and we can now focus on organically growing our lists and ultimately improving our sales as a result. The Plan It s important to note that Haley and her team did not dump contacts out of their CRM. Instead, they started with zero in Hubspot and launched a reengagement campaign that included soft offers sent out through four weekly s. The last stated, This is your last chance. Unless you respond, we won t be ing you anymore. After all that was said and done, they had around 5,000 clean contacts in Hubspot. When a contact downloaded their offers, they entered their name, company name, and on a Hubspot landing page. From then on, the marketing team executed regular campaigns with content offers, landing pages optimized for search, pay-per-click (PPC) ads, Partner marketing activities, and tradeshow marketing. During this time, they also fine-tuned their data by identifying buyer personas. As a horizontal business, their personas include CFO, controller, AP manager, and IT operations. The Results In nine months, AvidXchange grew their list organically to 14,000 contacts who had actually opted into receiving s. Their average open rate is 35 percent and click-through rate is 8 percent, which is a drastic improvement from what they had before. The Tips Although timing was right for AvidXchange with their operational shift, Haley would recommend spreading out this sort of campaign and maybe make it a different time of year, not around the holidays. Maybe you re overwhelmed by your CRM data, but that shouldn t stop you from being able to market to the right contacts. In Haley s case, their Hubspot solution only talks to their CRM. AvidXchange turned off the automatic sync between the two because their CRM isn t as clean as they want it to be. But when sales reps get a call, they can still see all the updated info within CRM. Therefore, CRM is still AvidXchange s primary report generator.

5 Kim Haythornthwaite Nolan Business Solutions One by One Gets the Job Done Did you know a contact database degenerates about 14 to 17 percent a year? Kim Haythornthwaite from Nolan Business Solutions shared this stat with us and is the very reason they hired a resource to keep their database as up to date as possible. Kim explains in more detail, During the recession, people hung on to their jobs. Now that the economy has picked up again, people, especially solution consultants and salespeople, are moving. The Challenge In addition to receiving a lot of bounces every time they sent an , Nolan Business Solutions needed to divide their list into three categories: Microsoft Dynamics GP, NetSuite, and those users that are on both solutions. You can understand how sending Microsoft Dynamics GP customers NetSuite information could cause some problems. Keeping their contact lists clean and segmented is of utmost importance. The Plan The ultimate nirvana would be a live link between CRM and LinkedIn. As people change jobs, that would automatically update our CRM. Until then, we have made it a one-by-one manual process and hired a recent graduate who has been amazing, Kim shares. The Results The millennial generation brings many benefits to business today, and one of those benefits is the innate technology aptitude. Kim adds, This kid is a genius. All I had to do is walk him through the process, and he s 10 times faster than I could ever be searching on websites and LinkedIn. We meet once a week, but otherwise, he s on his own keeping our CRM clean. Now, Nolan Business Solutions can target their marketing and gain more traction in new and upcoming markets. canada oh, Canada s Anti-Spam Law (CASL) is a bit stricter than in the United States. Unless contacts have made the effort to opt-in, you cannot send them . Here are the three categories that Kim and her team use for their Canadian side of the business: Soft opt-in: Contacts are opted in because they are a client. Soft opt-out: Unless they take the action to opt-in, they are classified as opt-out. Hard opt-out: When a contact clicks through to be unsubscribed.

6 Kaitlyn McKendry Vicinity Manufacturing Ready. Get Set. Purge! Vicinity Brew s hyper-focused vertical on breweries doesn t generate much graymail. Kaitlyn McKendry, marketing manager, reports that this audience is a bad example because they are very active and more likely to click through and unsubscribe versus their traditional audience of formula manufacturers. When asked why she thought this was, she answered, First of all, they are a younger and more tech-savvy audience, but they re also more tight-knit and want to know what s happening in their community. It s the nature of that business. The Challenge Unfortunately, you can t get that lucky with all industries. Such is the case for their focus on formula manufacturers at Vicinity Manufacturing, where Kaitlyn is aware of too much dead weight on that side of the business. The Plan Vicinity Manufacturing has not yet conducted a major contact purge, but with two new resources on their team and a license sale in November 2016, they re getting ready to pull the trigger. When we say purge, there is a lot more where that comes from Internal and external communications: Kaitlyn and her team have started communicating the plan to purge contacts and are being very clear with contacts that if they don t engage, they will be unsubscribed from their communications. Updating subscription management: Vicinity uses ClickDimensions, and Kaitlyn recently updated the forms to be more specific so contacts could opt-in for training but out of announcements, for example. CRM readiness: In addition to updating ClickDimensions, Vicinity is making sure CRM correlates with the preferences they have on their subscription forms. They added custom role fields to help identify which messages are most relevant to specific contacts. They are also implementing a workflow in CRM that automatically adds contacts to a marketing list based on their preferences. (ClickDimensions has a great blog on this topic at blog.clickdimensions.com/ -deliverability.) Fine-tuning messages: Content is key when you re trying to make contacts reengage with your , and Kaitlyn and her team are very focused on getting the right messages to their clients and prospects. A lot of it has to do with timing, and every November, Vicinity holds a license sale. So each week during that month, Vicinity will send s around this promotion and urge contacts to update their preferences.

7 scenarios block list Missing There is no on the contact record. The recipient had unsubscribed. The address had a hard bounce in the past. The address has had four soft bounces in the last 90 days. Weeding through bounces: ClickDimensions will send to an address that soft bounces up to four times in a three-month period. After the fourth soft bounce error for an address, it will be placed on the block list. For Vicinity, having old addresses no longer in service had a negative impact on overall deliverability to that domain of active addresses. Identifying if this is the cause versus a full mailbox versus some server error is vital to combat and improve deliverability moving forward. To stay ahead of this, Kaitlyn pulls the bounce list after each communication and manually checks if the contacts should in fact be on the block list. If not, they can highlight the ones that need to be taken off and use an Excel loader to update that in their CRM. Last Words For Kaitlyn, it has really come down to awareness. I m no expert, but if you re not aware of graymail or who is on your block list, then it s a huge red flag for everything else. You may think you re sending to a list of 2,000 plus, but really only 500 of those are getting through, Kaitlyn concludes, is still the most highly used communication tool in business, and graymail can really put your business at risk. The person has manually marked your previous as SPAM.

8 Share your commentary on social media #MakeItDyn Check out more monthly reports like this one at marketing-in-the-microsoftdynamics-community/