Articles

@flickr Roland

“A business rules what?”  We enterprise data geeks have long relied on business rules and business rules engines to define the who, what, where, when and why of data integration. As the marketing cloud has grown, there’s an ever growing need (and opportunity) for marketers to leverage business rules engines for fun and profit.

BREs: Business rules engines are software services trained with your company policies that help you automate the answers to questions like:

Is your email subscriber eligible for a discount? Is that new lead sales ready? Which campaign do we send to which prospect? What step is next in presales nurture process? What data do we need to report to CXOs and when?

A Business Rules Engine Primer:
Given a set of facts (Jenny Customer is 25, has purchased 3 widgets from us, and lives in NY) a business rules engine will answer a given question. Is Jenny eligible for our senior discount? Nope.

Sample Business Rules
“Gold-level customers are eligible for free shipping when order quantity > 10″ and “minimum age for insurance discount = 27”…

What’s Possible?
A few smart marketers we know are integrating business rules engines into their cloud marketing stack and seeing (big) tangible benefits. Here’s a one supremely cool case:

Real-Time Lead Arbitrage
Most B2B marketers buy leads in one form or other. Why pay the same for great and not-so-great leads? With an automated rules engine you have a lead arbitrage opportunity. How? You know your best customers. Take a peek into your customer database and determine the key criteria for leads that convert to sales (geography, size of company, position/title, etc). Define your business rules to match these criteria. Connect your web forms to your rules engine.  Start paying your lead partners more per good lead and less per crappy lead. You’ll see higher ROI (and magically?) your partners will work harder to provide more high-converting leads in the pipeline.

(Update: we’ve been experimenting with Google’s Prediction API to help define the criteria for high-converting leads from existing customer databases with…  intriguing results – contact for a sneak peek).

Get Started with Existing Engines?
Though most business rules may be hard-coded within your app infrastructure (and there’s often really solid reasons for this)  your IT and dev teams may already have a formal rules engine you can extend and leverage.    Might be worth shooting an email to see what’s already in your infrastructure.

If not, there are amazing open source options ready for cloud integration today.

Search engines like content.  Marketing directors like traffic.  CFO’s like free traffic.  CEO’s *really* like gaining market share, while simultaneously decreasing the PPC budget.  Recently, we were tasked with building a workflow system to create and manage enterprise content.  Simple goal: increase traffic while decreasing PPC spend.

Background:
In every industry we’ve worked there are always ways to increase web traffic with a systematic content creation strategy.  And there are folks who really figured out the content creation process.  But rallying resources to create great content on a consistent basis is massive hurdle.  Part of the solution is technical and (of course) most of the issue is human — e.g. how do we prioritize content creation on the long list of company projects?

High ROI Content Creation:
Solution?  We recommend you take a two-pronged approach to content.  First:  Focus your team’s efforts on high-ROI content.  Identify keywords that offer the the best visitor for your company, then rank content opportunities based on a keyword valuation. We do this by leveraging a bit of internal special sauce, where we give every keyword opportunity a corresponding valuation — an amalgam of demand (searches), sales cycle intent (buying vs. info gathering intent), and the PPC cost to buy a given keyword.

Second:  Systemize your content creation.  Set a content goal.  Create your content calendar. Identify content creators (you, your team members, internal subject experts, outsourced writers, ghost-writers) and integrate these folks into your content plan.

Just a couple years ago, this two-pronged attack would mean a big IT undertaking.  Today, leveraging a bit of open-source technology, solving the content-creation problem is within reach.  Here’s how we’re approaching this problem:

Project Scope: Content Creation Engine ‘must-haves’
Our proposed solution had a few ‘must-haves’ to be a good fit for the organization and meet ROI goals:

• Content ‘valuation’ based on ppc/keyword cost (done)
• Content idea repository and article to-do queue
• Workflow engine to leverage internal and external authors
  • Internal folks, subject matter experts.
  • Contract writers, paid by the article.
  • Industry partners, guest-post authors.
• Business process for creating and queueing completed content
  • To include business rules, routing, and approval
• Content staging
• ROI Reporting based on traffic and keyword valuation.

Solution Identification:
We were surprised we couldn’t find an off-the-shelf solution within our (admittedly modest) budget parameters.  There were a few almost options, but test-driving a couple open source BPM solutions convinced us we could build a high-ROI solution, fast.

Final Architecture:
To get the project in client hands turned out to be a quick and inexpensive. In Part II, we’ll walk through the entire application structure, including integration, our customer-facing app, but here’s an overview:

• Keyword Ident: Using our existing keyword & valuation engine via API.
• Workflow: Activiti BPM engine.
• Outsourced Writing: API integration with Amazon Turk and Writer’s Market
• Article queue: RedisDB
• ROI Reporting: Google Analytics API plugin.

Bottom Line:
A systematic and scalable content creation engine that drives traffic is within reach.  Look for Part II for a real-world look at what’s possible and how to implement within your organization.

Short URLs are the lifeblood of social apps.  The new breed of short-url apps enable you to tag and track your visitors post-click and store mucho metrics — e.g. the ad campaign visitors clicked, facebook page they liked, or tweet they clicked  etc.  And services like Bit.ly, Tinyurl, and Ow.ly make shortening URLs supremely easy. But what if you want a bit more control over the branding of your URLs?    How ’bout your own API-enabled, short-url engine with custom branded links like   you.yourdomain/link ?

If you’re a Google Apps for Business subscriber, get thee to Google Labs and activate your own enterprise shortener. Free.

Requirements:

• Google Apps for Business (e.g. Google for domains)
• Administrator access
• Access to your domain DNS settings
• URLs to shorten

1. Activate Google Short Links

Choose Add it Now then accept license agreement.

2. Create Your URL Settings

In order for Google Short Links to work correctly you’ll need to create a sub-domain (or CNAME). Traffic to this subdomain will route through Google’s servers rather than your own. The Great-Big-Goog then forwards your visitor on to the endpoint you define later on.

3. Set Your Short Link Policy & API Access Credentials

If you want to be able to create links programatically, set an API access key here (there’s a sample python script you can download here as well).  There happens to be a little cloud integration company in Austin, who can help you out…

4. Visit Your DNS Provider & Create a CNAME

Visit your hosting provider or domain registrar (e.g. GoDaddy) to create a CNAME record that points to Google’s servers @ ghs.google.com.

5. Create Your First Short Link

Visit the sub-domain you created above — e.g. links.yourdomain.com. If everything’s up to snuff, you’ll see the Google Short Links manager for your account. Each user within your Apps for Business account can now make and manage their own urls.

6. View Metrics for each Short Link

To view and manage your links, choose “Find Out Now” link at on the Short Link manager page. View your click count and edit your url as needed.

7. Create Your URL Bookmarklet

1. Click and drag the bookmarklet button up to your bookmarks bar. 2. Customize your button text. As you browse any site, simply click the bookmarklet to create a linnk via Google Short Links to the web page!

Pros & Cons

Pros:

• Google Short Links enable your team to create, manage and share links from within Google Apps for Business.
• Creating custom short-urls is quick and easy when you use the Bookmarklet.
• With a bit of API goodness you can create on-demand urls for all your key campaigns, collateral and creative. Integrate away!

Cons:

• Services like Bitly are a quick click direct from your social app clients and offer greater link options and more robust statistics.

If you’ve been wanting to offer your own url-shortener in-house, Google Short Links is the shortest, cheapest path.

Get thee shortening.

Many gray hairs ago I was IT Director for a small, fast-growth company.  With no outside funding, we had to pinch every IT penny.  And like every other IT department we had to make conscious decisions about the makeup of our infrastructure or ‘app stack.’  For each decision, we made ROI calcs for the cost of desktop hardware, operating systems, within the local network ops center and our web-facing servers.

Today, the same is true in marketing.

Choosing your marketing app stack is harder than ever — there’s a ton of vendors with ever-increasing offerings.   At a minimum, marketing departments need to identify and have an ROI calc for:

• CRM
• Email nurturing, segmentation and transactions
• Content management, delivery, and landing pages
• Analytics and dashboards
• Web forms
• Competitor research
• Company/brand alerts

The Good news?
Much of your marketing app stack can be had completely free, while a few are free to start and most are comparatively inexpensive.  Wiring your marketing stack together with your operations, finance and IT infrastructure can be a costly headache, but rejoice!  You are living in an era of marketing technology abundance.    Thank your lucky stars you don’t have to wait for IT to build any of this stuff!  (IT ladies, you know I love you)

What are your best choices for your marketing app stack?  In future posts we’ll talk through your options.

As promised, the slide deck from Rob’s Recent talk, The Secret Formula for Demand Generation — or 7 Steps to Demand Generation Nirvana…

Contact us today if you’d like a private webcast of this presentation.

If you are seeing longer sales cycles, less traffic, extreme price shopping, fewer sales and big pressure on profits, you’ve got a kink in your marketing flow.  Some thoughts on getting your flow back…

What’s Your Constraint?
Some years ago, I happened upon Eli Goldratt and his Theory of Constraints (new to you? Check out The Goal — great read).  I’ve adopted his techniques for marketing systems and had much success leveraging his process to improve struggling funnels.

Business or Marketing Constraint
When I conduct business briefs, I’m trying to uncover the key constraint in your business that’s keeping you from making and keeping more customers, hurting your sales, squeezing your profits.  I’m simply trying to uncover the core issues that need the most work.  E.g. – are there internal (business) or external (market) factors at core? Here’s one to ask yourself:

Right now, could you increase your throughput (product shipments, service obligations) by 20% without impacting quality or delivery times?

Answered Yes? You’ve got a marketing constraint/problem at work.  No? There’s internal factors to uncover and attack.

We’re in the business of uncovering and attacking marketing constraints.

3 Steps to Cure Market Constraints
Most folks I talk with today have a marketing constraint.  There’s really just 3 key steps to solve this.

1. Craft, test and optimize a salient message.
2. Target and approach your market with your salient message.
3. Optimize, integrate and automate your sales funnel.

Simple?  Yes, but as you might guess, darn complex too — many factors at work.  Over the next few posts we’ll uncover some of the top hacks and shortcuts for fixing each.

Our clients have had quite a bit of success with Live Chat — in one key case, integrating chat has doubled their lead-flow.  This is the first in a series taken from our Live Chat for Lead Gen e-course (contact for more details).

Lots of Traffic, Few Leads?

You are blessed with traffic.  Folks have taken a moment in their day to visit your web site.  But, unfortunately, a very small percentage of these potential prospects take the next action.   Is there a magic bullet that will convert all these visitors to buyers?  Nope.  But, if you can incrementally improve the percentage of visitors who take an action, your wallet will be very happy.  Live Chat for Lead Gen is one marketing technology arrow to add – today – to your quiver.

What is “Live Chat for Lead Gen?”

Live Chat for Lead Generation relies on the same technology you might have used for technical support, to re-book your airline tickets or reconnect with a High School friend on Facebook. Smart companies have adapted the same Instant Messaging (IM)  and Live Chat technology that’s been around for a decade, for their lead gen activities.

Why Live Chat for Lead Gen?

If you are in the complex sales business, leads are your lifeblood. Increasingly, prospects expect instant information, yet are reluctant to pick up the phone and wade through your phone tree, and even more reluctant to register for and wait for collateral materials by email.

Live Chat – Benefits for You:

• More leads: live chat is an easy, ‘safe’ action for your users to take.
• Efficient: multiple conversations per agent.
• Systemized: Canned responses enable a systemized conversation/script flow.
• Knowledge: Analytics tell you where your website is failing and where your customers need help.

Benefits for the Prospect

• Fast: immediate response
• Easy: safe action – without needing to wade through a telephone tree or register
• Immediate: no need to wait for collateral by email

Who Uses Live Chat?

Which Chat Technology?  The Top 5 Live Chat Apps:

1. Liveperson: the industry leader. Per seat licensing on a SAAS basis. Advanced integration can be a pain.   They have a large installed base and advanced client software.

Also rans:

Following have been tested. There are benefits and drawbacks to each. A few fit for small/solo organizations (Olark) , others for large enterprise integrations (Ngenera).

2. Boldchat

3. Zopim

4. Ngenera

5. Olark

Want to double your leads? Think:  Can I Help You?

Millions in sales for our clients from this simple idea:  When you walk into a retail store, it’s nice to be welcomed with a simple “Hi!.”   But, when you are agonizing over a buying decision within the store (will this widget really do what I need it to do), it’s massively helpful to have a friendly, knowledgeable, clerk offer help.

Like the helpful, knowledgeable sales clerk, we’ve doubled leads overnight by simply (and it really is simple) adding live chat “can I help you” invitations to key action web pages.

The process?

• Determine your key selling pages.
• Add a timed chat invitation: ‘friendly, experts here to help”.
• Develop your ‘Bait’ pieces to get the prospect opt-in info (email, telephone).
• Develop your  soft closing script to move conversation to next level.

Double Your Leads?  Try a  One-Month, “Double Your Leads” Test:

• Sign up for a 1 month test of Liveperson or Zopim (free)
• Designate a single sales rep as the test agent
• On your key conversion pages, add an automated live chat invitation
• So: when your your designated agent is online, every visitor to a key conversion page sees 1 invitation to chat
  - visit rackspace.com and wait 10 seconds to see a sample of this in action
• Note: be sure to set a minimum time on page before the invitation appears (20 seconds has worked very well)
• Analyze your conversations: what’s the key question in your visitors minds?
• Track your conversions: are leads improving?
• Track your leads sources, including live chat.
• Incrementally, you will see a dramatic increase in leads.

What are the pitfalls to avoid?

Here’s a few pitfalls we’ve encountered in Live Chat for Lead Gen integrations.

Test. Test. Test.
Last year, we tested a new Live Chat Invite creative with one client. The creative bombed.  Terribly. Over a 2 week period, we saw 50% drop in leads. When we replaced the test creative with the control, leads bounced right back. What was the problem?  We replaced a friendly, custom, operator icon with a coupon code. “Chat now to get 15% off immediately” — it was a good looking ad that was completely ignored.  Testing is your friend.

Integration
Integrating chat into your analytics and lead tracking systems will be a pain.  First, make chat interactions a goal within your analytics framework.   This can be challenging (contact us for a free/quick cheat sheet).  More painful is tracking your lead source and automating lead source capture.  We’ve had success with this, but there is a distinct lack of API’s in live-chat land — and much depends on your chat vendor.

Typing
Many sales folks are awful typists. It’s hard selling via Live Chat if your AE is thinking more about typing than engaging the prospect.  If you plan to roll out chat across the sales force, you may find a few folks who need typing training.  Free typing games do wonders for typing speed and accuracy.

Bait
Chat windows are easy to close. You’ll need to entice your chat prospect to take your preferred next action. At a minimum encourage the opt in. Half or more of your sales script and canned responses should be devoted to this task.

Bottom Line?

Can you double your leads this month with live chat?   No way to know without a test.  Fortunately, it is quick and easy to get started.  Follow our 1-month test guidelines and see for yourself.  How much difference would 50% more leads make in your organization?

Here’s a time-tested recipe that is very high ROI, but I see so very few companies employing.

Thank your prospects.

The Recipe

1. Scan your  opt-in and new CRM leads daily.  We use a custom app that scans all our client lists, but you can use a variety of off the shelf systems.
2. Combine all your prospects  and add these folks to a separate, one-time email list (or email API queue).
3. At 8pm every night, send a simple, 6-line, thank you email from your CEO.

Sample email copy we’ve used very successfully:

thank you email

Note:
You’ll want to send the thank you email from a real address and have a system in place to monitor it.   The insights you gain from emails to this address are priceless.

Welcome to the cloud-based, SAAS marketing world.  In this brave new world, Marketing has thousands of demand gen opportunities at any given moment – each and every tactic leverages some sort of technology.  Social, email, SMS, ad buys, platform integration plays, advanced re-targeting, segmentation — too many opportunities, too little time.

Enter IT.  Their budgets are stretched.  Fewer bodies to support an exploding amount of internal, external and product-based technology.  Their only logical answer to new project suggestions is “Nope, can’t do it”.

How Can We Do It Without Involving IT?
And this has a dramatic impact on the organization’s ability to compete in the new, transparent, marketing world.  Seven of my last 10 client conferences have had some version of “Um, we really need to do this — how can we get it done without involving IT?”.

Marketing Technologists to the Rescue?
Our teensy firm functions well as mediators between marketing and IT (having been Head Geeks AND Heads of Demand Gen).  And we’ve identified a number of best practices that can help make both Marketing and IT happy.  But, mostly the mediation can be boiled down to:

Marketing: IT is the department of “No”

IT: Marketing is the department of “we’ll fix it later, feature creep”

And both are right to some degree. Yes, marketing is from Venus, IT from Mars.

Rise of the Marketing Technologist
That’s why Scott Brinker is spot on.  In fast-growing, technology organizations, the all-encompassing “Marketing Technology” will increasingly impact growth – where making and keeping customers involves equal parts technology and marketing. The Org Chart of the future (now?) will have another important addition: Chief Marketing Technologist.  Scott is 100% spot on:

Rise of the Marketing Technologist

View more presentations from sjbrinker.