And now, to help hammer the point home, here are three more case studies on the same topic.

And if you’re interested in discussing marketing automation trends and best practice then apply for a place at our APAC roundtable events.

They will focus on marketing automation, email, and behavioural marketing. The dates are:

Now, on with the case studies.

Cincom

Cincom Systems is an enterprise software solutions company that was unable to identify its newsletter subscribers within its sales process.

So the company had no way of knowing whether its new leads and customers were already subscribing to its regular updates.

To remedy this, Cincom used marketing automation software to implement a behaviour-based content campaign that involved five phases:

  1. When a newsletter subscriber clicked through to an article their on-site behaviour was tracked.
  2. Articles were tagged by subject matter, which enabled Cincom to identify which topics its subscribers are interested in. So, articles tagged as ‘sales enablement’ and ‘performance’ signalled that users might be potential customers for Cincom’s sales and product configuration solution software.
  3. Cincom carried out a content audit of its newsletters, website, blogs, ebooks and podcasts to look at what was most relevant and appealing to its readers.
  4. Cincom used progressive profiling to gain a clearer picture of its audience. This means that the more a user engaged with the company’s content and offers, the more information they would be asked for.
  5. Sales teams were given these qualified leads.

The results of the campaign are as follows:

  • 256% improvement in the campaign open rate.
  • 1,941% increase in the click-to-open rate.
  • 1,513 potential opportunities identified.
  • An average of 18 new sales leads every week.

Crain’s Business Insurance

Trade publication Crain’s Business Insurance used marketing automation to reverse its fortunes in the face of falling advertising revenue.

It focused on making the most of the opportunity afforded by the renewed interest in research and sponsored content.

Crain combined its two legacy databases (print subscribers, online users) with a new marketing automation database, and also integrated the content creation process.

The latter process involved the creation of content categories and segmentation of the database into those different groups to align content with reader segments.

Crain was then able to implement lead scoring and also used analytics from its marketing automation software to optimise its marketing strategy.

The results were:

  • $550,000 in new advertising revenue for demand generation services.
  • Increase of 43% in online newsletter subscribers.
  • 2% increase in paid print subscribers.
  • Conversion rate of 2.6% from anonymous website visitors.

Further to this, one of the clients that bought Crain’s new demand generation services achieved the following results from a $50,000 campaign:

  • 1,180 top-of-the-funnel leads.
  • 102 marketing qualified leads
  • 25 sales-accepted leads
  • A new customer signed a deal worth $2m.

Capterra

Business software vendor Capterra managed to increase sales by 400% thanks to its new marketing automation system.

The increase was achieved by reducing the amount of time that the marketing team had to spend qualifying leads, which meant they could contact a greater number of people.

Prior to investing in the new technology, Capterra’s marketers spent a lot of time segmenting lists and manually sending A/B tests to optimise email messages.

Without automation they were unable to properly respond to inbound follow-up emails, so just forwarded them all over to the sales reps.

As the leads were not qualified the reps were wasting time cold calling people and sending out questionnaires to find out more about their potential customers.

On average it was taking the reps 12-24 hours to get in contact with each new inbound lead.

To improve the situation, Capterra invested in marketing automation software that dealt with all incoming leads to its landing pages.

If reps were unable to get in touch with the potential customers within 24 hours then the automation software took over, freeing up the reps to deal with the fresher leads.

Capterra set a target that all new leads should be contacted within an hour.

The all-important results:

  • 94% reduction in average response time, dropping from 18 hours to around 45 minutes.
  • Quadrupled the qualification rate from 11% to 40%.
  • Maintained close rate to create a fourfold increase in sales.