Download Rules-Based Marketing

Rules-Based Marketing
Today’s latest generation of marketing automation technologies help provide big-company results from small marketing budgets.
Brian Gramer, Vtrenz
F
Defying the Limits
or years, small- to medium-sized organizations have
envied the powerful, integrated marketing campaigns
conducted by their big-company counterparts. But with
today’s new technologies, big budgets, big databases
and big marketing departments are no longer the only keys to
marketing success.
Rather, new marketing automation technologies are making it easy for
even the smallest organization to create powerful, cost-effective, rulesbased marketing campaigns. Rules-based marketing is an automated
strategy involving predefined if-then rules, resulting in communications
that are more timely, relevant and consistent across multiple
communication channels (see Figure 1).
Email
Fax
Direct
Mail
New
Lead
Rules-based marketing campaigns can be as simple as a sequence of
communications that are triggered by a specific event, such as when a
customer fills out an online form. Or they can be highly sophisticated,
involving multiple tracks of information, dynamic content and new rule
sets that change or take effect after each communication. Perhaps most
important, because rules-based marketing is triggered by actions taken
by your prospects or customers, communications tend to be highly
effective. Why? Two reasons. First, the information is highly relevant
because it’s not only based on expressed interest, but also based on
predicted areas of interest identified by actual behaviors. And second,
communications are sent to your audience at the time that’s right for
them, rather than when it’s most convenient for you.
Action
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Integrated Campaign Management
Behavior-Based Segmentation
Multitrack Automation
Figure 1: Rules-based marketing is an automated marketing strategy involving predefined if-then rules.
What is Rules-Based Marketing?
Rules-Based Marketing in Action
Rules-based marketing is a process that allows marketers to deliver
timely, relevant and consistent communications to their prospects or
customers via email, direct mail, telemarketing or other communication
channels. Through rules-based marketing, you, as a marketer, create
“rules” that guide your marketing campaigns. These rules govern which
information is sent out when, which messages go to whom, which
prospects or customers fall into which categories and so on.
Let’s say you send out an email announcing a Web-based seminar. Using
rules-based marketing, you can set rules that automate the different
actions you’ll take based on the different responses (or lack of responses)
to your invitation. For instance, those who didn’t open your email may, a
few weeks later, receive a follow-up with a different subject line. Those
who opened the email but didn’t click through would receive the same
message, albeit with different benefits statements. And those who
t Brian Gramer, CEO and founder of Vtrenz, has an in-depth understanding of marketing professionals’ needs and technology trends. Prior to founding Vtrenz in
1999, Mr. Gramer honed his sales and marketing skills with Michelin Tire Corp., McLeod USA and founded AnyCollege.Net.
3 : Insight
clicked through and completed the landing page form would receive an
attendance confirmation – and perhaps other information as well.
While technology is making it easier to perfect the targeting of your
marketing message, it’s also revolutionizing the management of your
entire marketing campaign. In the past – and, according to 2005 Vtrenz
market research, in nearly two-thirds of companies today – marketers
have used disparate software tools to manage their marketing campaigns. These tools – often called “point solutions” – may include an
email marketing solution, a survey-building tool, a custom-built landing
page and much more. However, the lack of integration between these
tools and the fact that these tools are list-based instead of databasedriven often leads to duplication of efforts, lack of data consistency
and poor follow-up.
However, today’s latest generation of marketing automation solutions allow you to run virtually every aspect of a campaign from
a single, integrated marketing solution. This reduces data complexity,
provides better visibility into customer marketing interactions, ensures
message consistency across mediums and enables a comprehensive,
rules-based marketing strategy.
in response rates, tight marketing budgets and more accountability for
measurable results, today’s marketer needs even more.
Enter behavior-based segmentation. As its name implies, behaviorbased segmentation allows you to segment your audience and tailor
communications to many different audience segments based on actual
behaviors your prospects or customers have exhibited (see Figure 2).
The biggest advantage to behavior-based segmentation is that it
increases relevancy because the information you send is triggered as
Basic
Information
Geographic
Demographic
Firmagraphic
Transactional
Event-Based
Response-Based
Figure 2: Today marketers can use marketing automation technologies to segment
and trigger communications based on prospects or customer actions.
a result of real actions taken by your audience. You can then create as
many different segmentation rules as needed and integrate those rules
into your business process.
Behavior-based segmentation generally falls into three categories:
■ Transactional – These are customers or prospects who have
conducted a transaction with you, such as making a purchase.
■ Event-driven – These audience members have taken a specific
action, such as downloading a white paper, clicking on a link or
opening an email you’ve sent them.
■ Response-based – These respondents have taken action by
completing a form with a defined response or providing response
information that has met some type of qualification criteria.
Cracking the Segmentation Code
In the past, a major stumbling block to rules-based marketing was audience segmentation. Historically, segmentation was limited to relatively
basic demographic, geographic or firmagraphic information. Sure, that
information was enough to create good marketing campaigns back in
the 1990s. However, faced with intense competition, a downward trend
Weblink
Read about the profit potential of marketing to the affluent
masses in “New Rules for Marketing To the Mass Affluent”
in this book.
Behavior-Based Segmentation
Meets Rules-Based Marketing
Let’s say a prospect responds to a white paper offer you’ve made, and
indicates that his firm is looking to purchase new software within the
next nine to 12 months. By responding favorably to your offer, he’s
shown a willingness to consider purchasing your product. Better yet,
he’s provided an actual time frame for doing so.
This information, coupled with today’s newest marketing automation technologies, allows your rules-based marketing to kick into
high gear with the right message and timing. With it, you know
precisely when to send additional marketing information about your
product, when to pass his information along to your sales department
and when to have a member of your sales staff call on the prospect.
Defying the Limits
As every good marketer knows, having the right information is critical
to conducting successful, profitable marketing. The more you know
about your prospect or customer and the behaviors of your prospect and
customer, the easier it is to tailor your messages to their needs and,
ultimately, make sales.
The good news for today’s marketers is that new marketing automation technologies are making it easier than ever to segment customers and prospects based on their actions and, in turn, create new
and more powerful rules-based marketing campaigns.
These marketing campaigns can be as simple as a sequence
of communications that are triggered by a specific event –
such as when a customer fills out an online form – or they can
be highly sophisticated, involving multiple tracks of information,
dynamic content and new rule sets that take effect after each
communication.
Complete Marketing History
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Behavior-Based Segmentation
Improves Marketing Results
Rules-Based Marketing
DAY 0
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Defying the Limits
Figure 3: Marketing automation technology allows you to set up a wealth of automated customer communications.
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As we’ve seen, an automated marketing solution that provides the
right information can help your organization tailor its marketing efforts
to those individuals or groups with high propensity to buy – ensuring
future sales and continued profitability.
time. This potent combination overcomes many of the factors that lead
to marketing breakdowns and gaps in the sales cycle – factors that
include a lack of coordination between sales and marketing, poor timing
and even basic human forgetfulness (see Figure 3).
Automated Campaign Execution
Helps Transform Leads Into Sales
Rules-Based Marketing Meets Marketing Automation
In 2003, the Meta Group estimated that a staggering 70 to 90 percent of
marketing-generated leads are not acted upon because sales finds them
unqualified (an often-provided excuse for not making sales projections).
What’s more, those that actually are acted upon often aren’t followed up
with in a timely manner.
As we all know, leads that aren’t followed up on don’t turn into
sales. And the greater the time lapse in contacting a prospect, the less
effective that follow-up tends to be. As a marketer or company decision
maker, these facts are undoubtedly horrifying to you – and likely raise
a critical question: What can our organization do to ensure that our
sales leads are followed up on quickly and converted into sales?
The answer, thanks to new marketing automation technologies,
is to employ rules-based marketing along with automated campaign
execution. In addition to automating follow-up communications,
marketing automation technologies also manage the workflows for
dynamically routing qualified leads to the right salesperson at the right
When you combine rules-based marketing with marketing automation, you can begin to bridge the gap between initial customer
interest and readiness to make a decision. Using today’s latest
marketing automation technologies, your company can quickly design
workflows that automatically execute the steps necessary to run an
effective rules-based marketing campaign. These automated workflows allow you to do more sophisticated marketing with fewer
resources. Plus, automation eliminates slow, costly and error-prone
human intervention and helps ensure that you can conduct even the
most complex multistep, multichannel campaigns quickly, consistently and on schedule.
To be sure, automating your marketing efforts is nothing new. Fill
out a form on almost any website, and you’ll likely receive an automated
email response. But with today’s rules-based marketing automation
solutions, an automated-response email is just the beginning of a series
of communications you can send to your customers or prospects at
specified time intervals or on specified dates. ■