Marketing automation for small and mid-size businesses in 2013

Strip away the vendor language and a marketing automation platform does five things.

1. Tracks known visitors. A cookie placed when someone fills in a form connects every later visit, page view and email click to a named contact record.
2. Captures leads. Hosted forms and landing pages, with progressive profiling that asks new questions on each visit rather than twelve fields at once.
3. Scores and segments. Points for job title, company size, pages viewed, emails opened, pricing page visits; negative points for students, competitors and inactivity. Lists update themselves.
4. Nurtures. Multi-step email sequences triggered by behavior: downloaded the guide, did not open the follow-up, visited pricing three times this week.
5. Hands off to sales. When a score crosses a threshold, the contact appears in the CRM with its history, and the rep gets an alert.

Reporting ties the pieces together: which campaign produced which leads, and which leads became customers. That closed-loop report is the thing enterprise marketers paid six figures for; it is now the standard feature.

The category is consolidating fast. Oracle bought Eloqua in December, ExactTarget bought Pardot last October, Marketo went public this month, and Salesforce has been circling the space. For a smaller business the practical choices are these.

Most contracts are annual, and most vendors charge by database size, so clean out dead contacts before you sign. Onboarding fees of $500 to $2,000 are standard; negotiate them, especially at quarter end.

If your list is under a few thousand contacts and you have no sales team, MailChimp or Constant Contact with autoresponders, at $30 to $150 a month, will do most of what you need this year. Automation earns its price when there is a sales handoff to automate.

Say yes to at least four of these before you buy.

• You generate at least 100 new leads a month from the website or events.
• You have, or will commit to producing, a steady flow of content: at least two substantive pieces a month that a prospect would trade an email address for.
• Sales and marketing can agree in writing on what a qualified lead is.
• You use a CRM, and salespeople actually keep it up to date.
• Someone on staff owns the system for at least a quarter of their time.
• Your sales cycle is longer than a week, so nurturing has room to work.

If you scored under four, the money is better spent producing content and fixing the CRM first. The most common failed implementation is a $10,000 annual contract sending one newsletter a month.

Start from the CRM. Salesforce shops have the widest choice. Dynamics and SugarCRM narrow it. If you have no CRM, HubSpot and Infusionsoft include a basic one.

Count the features you will use in year one. Forms, landing pages, email, scoring, one or two nurture tracks, CRM sync, reporting. Social publishing, A/B testing and revenue attribution are real but secondary; do not pay for a tier you will not reach for eighteen months.

Check email deliverability. Ask for the vendor's shared IP reputation record and whether a dedicated IP is available and at what volume.

Test the editor. Have the person who will build emails spend an hour in the trial. Editors differ enormously and the ugly one will be used less.

Read the contract. Database-size tiers, overage charges, the cost of adding users, and what happens to your data when you leave. Export rights matter.

Price the people, not just the license. Budget for setup, template design, content and a quarter of someone's time. Software is often a third of the true first-year cost.

1. Weeks 1 to 2: foundations. Tracking code on every page, CRM connection, suppression lists, unsubscribe and CAN-SPAM compliance, email templates that match your brand.
2. Weeks 3 to 4: capture. Rebuild the three forms that matter most on hosted or embedded versions with progressive profiling. Build one landing page per offer.
3. Weeks 5 to 8: one nurture track. Not five. Pick the biggest lead source, write a four to six email sequence over four weeks, each with one piece of useful content and one modest call to action.
4. Weeks 6 to 8: scoring. A simple model: demographic fit up to 50 points, behavior up to 50, threshold at 70 for handoff. Expect to recalibrate monthly.
5. Weeks 9 to 12: handoff and reporting. Alerts to reps, a service-level agreement on follow-up time, and the first closed-loop report from source to opportunity.

Then add tracks one at a time: a re-engagement series for cold contacts, a customer onboarding sequence, an event follow-up.

Buying before the content exists. Nurturing with nothing to send is a drip of newsletters.

Importing every address you have ever collected. Old lists damage deliverability and inflate the bill. Re-permission anything older than two years.

Scoring too cleverly. A 40-rule model nobody understands is worse than a 10-rule one that sales trusts.

No agreement with sales. If reps do not call the handed-off leads within a day, the whole system is theater.

Letting the vendor's onboarding define success. Their checklist ends when the system works. Yours ends when a nurtured lead becomes a customer.

Discover: we map your lead sources, sales process, CRM data quality and content inventory, and establish whether automation is the right next step or whether something cheaper is. Plan: we select the platform against your CRM, budget and team, define the lead stages and score model with sales, and lay out the first three tracks and their content in one document. Build: our workflow automation team implements the platform, our systems integration team connects the CRM, website and any ecommerce or billing data, our creative team produces the templates and content, and our web team builds the forms and landing pages. Improve: monthly reviews of conversion by stage, deliverability and lead quality, with scoring and sequences adjusted on evidence. Because brand, growth, web and technology are one team, the email, the landing page and the CRM record stay consistent.

The Digital Transformation engagement is the representative pattern. A mid-size professional services firm with a spreadsheet for leads, an unused CRM and a quarterly newsletter adopted a marketing automation platform as part of a broader rebuild of its sales and marketing systems: CRM cleaned and reconnected, website forms moved onto the platform, a single nurture track for the main service line, a simple score model agreed with partners, and a monthly closed-loop report that for the first time showed which marketing produced revenue. Further tracks were added only after the first one proved itself.