Marketing Automation

136 Pages·2015·6.09 MB·English

by  Paul Angles

The Angles ReportTM: Marketing Automation
ke1 8
Marketing
PAUL
Automation
ANGLES
September 2015

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The Angles Report™
Marketing Automation
Table of Contents
Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 5!
Industry Scorecard and Analysis ............................................................................................... 8!
Summary ........................................................................................................................... 8!
A Big Budget Without a Great Process Is Worthless. .................................................... 10!
Not All Winners (or Losers) are Created Equal. ............................................................... 11!
How to Be a Winner. ....................................................................................................... 15!
Company Scorecards & Analysis ............................................................................................ 24!
CallidusCloud (cid:2)

............................................................................................... 25!
Constant Contact (cid:2)(cid:2)(cid:2)(cid:2)
......................................................................................... 30!
Eloqua (cid:2)(cid:2)(cid:2)(cid:2)
.......................................................................................................... 36!
Emma (cid:2)(cid:2)

........................................................................................................... 41!
eTrigue (cid:2)

......................................................................................................... 46!
HubSpot (cid:2)

....................................................................................................... 50!
iContact (cid:2)(cid:2)(cid:2)(cid:2)
........................................................................................................ 55!
Infusionsoft (cid:2)(cid:2)(cid:2)(cid:2)
................................................................................................... 60!
Leanplum (cid:2)(cid:2)(cid:2)

...................................................................................................... 66!
MailChimp (cid:2)(cid:2)

.................................................................................................... 71!
Marketo (cid:2)(cid:2)(cid:2)(cid:2)(cid:2) ........................................................................................................ 76!
Pardot (cid:1)(cid:1)(cid:1)(cid:2)(cid:2) ........................................................................................................... 82!
RedPoint Global (cid:2)

........................................................................................... 88!
Sailthru (cid:2)(cid:2)

......................................................................................................... 92!
Salesfusion (cid:2)(cid:2)(cid:2)

................................................................................................... 97!
SALESmanago (cid:2)(cid:2)

........................................................................................... 102!
SharpSpring (cid:2)(cid:2)

............................................................................................... 107!
Silverpop (cid:2)(cid:2)(cid:2)

.................................................................................................... 112!
StreamSend (cid:2)

............................................................................................... 118!
VerticalResponse (cid:2)(cid:2)(cid:2)

....................................................................................... 123!
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The Angles Report™
Marketing Automation
Zoho (cid:1)(cid:1)(cid:1)(cid:1)(cid:2) ........................................................................................................... 128!
Methodology ............................................................................................................................ 133!
What We Do. ................................................................................................................. 134!
About . . . .................................................................................................................................. 135!
Paul Angles ................................................................................................................... 135!
Angles, Inc. .................................................................................................................... 135!

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The Angles Report™
Marketing Automation
Introduction
As an online marketing agency that guar-
“The results are shocking.
antees performance, “How do we trust
what you’re recommending?” is one of the Companies we expected to do
most common questions clients and pro-
well didn’t and flopped for rea-
spective clients ask us.
sons that we hadn’t consid-
This is exactly the right question and you
should be asking it of whoever manages ered.”
your online marketing, even (or especially)
if it’s you yourself.
Our answer is this book.
Over the years, we’ve had documented successes for many clients in many industries. In paid
search, we grew one client’s sales by 20x. In email marketing, we’ve doubled and tripled sales,
even growing one client by 45x in just one year. All good, but we obviously can’t discuss the
specifics of client programs without violating non-disclosure agreements. However, we can
share the lessons and insights that have allowed us to achieve such dramatic results.
No one has ever attempted a book like this before. We’ve taken the thinking and the strategies
that have worked consistently for our clients and systematically applied them to an entire in-
dustry. In doing so, it becomes readily apparent which companies have their act together and
which ones don’t. Who’s following best practices and who’s just a follower. Who’s a winner
and who’s a loser.
Presenting The Angles Report™.
The Angles Report is a simple idea with pro-
found implications. We’ve zeroed in on a highly “A simple idea with
competitive industry. Documented how each
profound implications.”
company markets itself. Applied the rigorous
analysis that we conduct on our own work for
our own clients1. Determined objectively which
companies market best at every step of the process. And shared the findings.
So that by seeing what works and what doesn’t, you can apply our findings to your own pro-
gram and quickly improve your own performance.

1
Technically, we only applied a subset of our standard analysis in The Angles Report because we only used publicly-available
data. For our own clients, we use their confidential analytics and other data and our reports and recommendations go into far
greater depth.
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The Angles Report™
Marketing Automation
To ensure that our first issue is of maximum benefit to our readers, we’ve started with the mar-
keting-automation industry, those companies whose very value proposition is to make it easier
and less expensive for other companies to turn online traffic into leads and then into custom-
ers2. They make the tools that we and our clients use daily, so it stands to reason that they
should be better at using those tools than anyone in the world.
We followed the paths from 21 marketing-automation companies’ ads on Google AdWords to
their landing and confirmation pages to their email and phone follow-up with leads. We docu-
mented every interaction with screen shots and voice transcripts. We then scored and ranked
each company to determine who does what best – and worst.
The results are shocking. Companies we expected to do well didn’t and flopped for reasons
that we hadn’t considered. While one company was a clear winner overall, even it fell short on
a number of dimensions. All of the companies profiled could, by refining just a few parts of
their marketing process, dramatically increase their scores and their business results.
And, by extension, so could any marketer reading this report.
Why The Angles Report™ Matters.
Web marketing is a winner-take-all proposition. Being in first place overall is a tremendous
strategic advantage because you’ll acquire more customers than your competitors and a tre-
mendous financial advantage because they will be more profitable customers.
Getting our clients into first place is the reason our agency exists, but getting there requires
more than just outspending the competition. It requires a fully-optimized, four-phase process,
each of which can be broken down into numerous smaller pieces:

2
We deliberately did not include display advertising, social media, retargeted advertising, organic search engine
optimization, affiliate programs, Yahoo! or Bing search, Facebook, email prospecting, real-time bidding, content
marketing, and native advertising. The marketing campaigns of many of the companies profiled in this report are so
extensive that documenting them adequately would require entire book or even multiple books per company. In-
stead, we’ve focused on the narrowest program that we felt is representative of the whole. Companies that get this
process right can confidently project the results onto other areas of their marketing.
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The Angles Report™
Marketing Automation
As the following example illustrates, increasing the website conversion and lead conversion
rates by just 10 percent, a marketer can receive much more sales from Google (and other
sources) while generating far more profit on each sale:

This ultimately is why The Angles Report matters: by applying best practices across the board,
even small marketers can cut costs, increase sales, and maximize profits.

− Paul Angles
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The Angles Report™
Marketing Automation
Industry Scorecard and Analysis
Summary
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the world of marketing automation, wary of vendors’ extrava-
gant promises, and confused by the buzzwords and jargon, take heart: You’re not alone.
In the first-of-its-kind study of the online marketing programs of 21 top marketing-automation
vendors, we came to an inescapable conclusion: Most are just as confused as everyone else.
Here’s some of what we found after 12 weeks of research:

• A big budget isn’t enough to make a search program successful.

• Most marketing-automation companies don’t practice what they preach.

• Almost every company does some really dumb things that cost them a surprising
amount of sales and revenue.

• Companies that sell software for inbound marketing are pathologically allergic to out-
bound marketing, to picking up the phone and calling prospects.
Marketing Automation: A Relevant, Growing Industry.
We focused on marketing automation for the first issue of The Angles Report™ for a very sim-
ple reason: We and our clients use marketing-automation software every day for online market-
ing, email distribution, lead capture, data collection and analysis, so the methods and messag-
es they use are designed specifically to work on people like us. Marketing-automation compa-
nies tend to be thought leaders in this space and they have exposure to a wide range of cam-
paigns, techniques, and tricks every day. Simple osmosis should make them great marketers.
Industry: Marketing Automation
Average Unique Visitors/Month 2,181,695
Total Unique Visitors/Month 37,088,807
Average Monthly Budget $119,228
Total Monthly Budget $2,503,790
Marketing automation also has become big business, with a range of companies large and
small. This corresponds nicely to a lot of marketers. You may not have a six-figure budget to
work with but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn from companies that do. Or, you may have an
eight-figure budget in which case you’re right to be paranoid that smaller companies are out-
performing you right and left.
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The Angles Report™
Marketing Automation
Each month, our survey set of 21 companies attracts approximately 37 million unique visitors
and spends $2.5 million on Google AdWords. (See above.) Most, but not all, of these compa-
nies purchase the very expensive category keyword “marketing automation” for as much as a
$16.40 cost per click. Each day, there are about 400 searches conducted for “marketing auto-
mation.”
On average, the monthly paid-search budget for the companies researched was $119,000;
with one spending as little as $4,750 while another shelled out $711,000. The average number
of unique visitors each month was 2.1 million; there were 25,000 at the low end and 25 million
at the high end.

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The Angles Report™
Marketing Automation
A Big Budget Without a Great Process
Is Worthless.
No matter the company size or scope of
“We scored each company
its online marketing program, we as-
sessed how well each executed a well-
for 200 metrics that were de-
established process: Advertise, capture
signed to be as objective as
data, engage and convert. (See p.6.) To
evaluate that process, we examined possible.
companies’ paid-search ads, landing and
confirmation pages, and their follow-up
with leads.
We scored each company for 200 metrics that were designed to be as objective as possible.
(See Methodology for details.) The total scores for all 21 companies researched produced The
Angles Report™ company rankings, a profile of the average marketing-automation vendor (See
average score below.) and companies executing best practices (See winners below.):

Average
Winners
Score
Paid Search
Program Scope 3.86 Constant Contact, Infusionsoft, Zoho
Category Keyword 8.14 Eloqua, Marketo
Category Focus 3.29 Emma, Leanplum, Marketo
Paid Search Total 15.29 Marketo
Landing Page
Technology 2.64 HubSpot, Marketo, VerticalResponse
Page Attributes 6.57 iContact
Form Design 1.19 8-way tie
Landing Page Total 10.40 Marketo
Confirmation Page
Copy 1.19 Zoho
Design 2.26 Marketo
Confirmation Page Total 3.45 Zoho
Follow-Up
Email 8.23 Marketo
Phone 0.67 Constant Contact
Follow-Up Total 8.90 Marketo
Overall 38 (out of 100) Marketo
Overall, the companies we researched performed best with their search programs, the first of
the four-phase online marketing process. The weakest part of their downstream processes, on
average, was the confirmation page. Marketo ranked first in three out of four categories, scor-
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