You might remember playing the guessing game 20 Questions as a kid. The object of the game was to learn what someone was thinking about through questions designed to narrow down the field to the unique solution. The stakes are vastly higher for companies seeking marketing solutions, so ask yourself if your current software is doing the job.
About Your Data
What are your hard and soft bounce rates? These figures are fundamental to data governance. High bounce rates affect email deliverability not only to those specific addresses, but also to the rest of your mailing list. Internet service providers keep an eye on these statistics and reward companies that have low hard and soft bounce rates with a higher trust rating.
How complete is your knowledge about the names on your mailing list? The more you know about your prospects, the better you’re able to meet their needs and connect with them in ways they prefer. If you only have a mailing address, for example, and your lead likes email communication, you’re missing an important contact opportunity.
How can you increase fill-out rates for forms? Whether it’s a on a landing page or a newsletter subscription, the information leads share with you is valuable. Ensuring high completion rates on forms is vital to building your data library on leads. With marketing automation software, you’re able to serve visitors customized forms that reduce the friction a gateway form might otherwise cause.
How do you keep information on leads up to date? Marketing automation systems excel at maintaining complete records on leads’ accounts even through job changes and moves. Because of higher bounce rates, old data is sometimes worse than no data at all, so having a system that keeps up is essential for deliverability and customization.
Why is behavioral and contextual data important? Demographic information can tell you a great deal about your leads, but it can’t give you any insight into where they are in their decision-making process. For that, you need marketing automation software that tracks behavioral data and looks for signals of buying readiness.
About Your Marketing Strategy
Which part of your marketing strategy gives you the highest ROI? Every business needs to know what its money-makers are. Marketing automation gives you a precise answer to this question.
Where can you afford to cut? Almost as important as knowing where your earnings come from is knowing where they aren’t.
How do you know which part of your campaign deserves credit for success? Automation lets you drill deeper into attribution and determine key motivators for conversions.
What big-picture inferences can you draw about your A/B testing results? Individual email marketing tests tell you about a particular campaign, but looking at results in the context of a larger program speaks volumes. Software that shows you test results over time gives you insight into market trends.
How do your campaigns perform over time? Some campaigns don’t produce immediate results but give leads information they use later to make a buying decision. You need to know about these sleepers and learn more about why they offer long-term success.
About Your Audience
What do your best customers have in common? Chances are, your best buyers share some characteristics that you might not spot without marketing software that tracks their demographic, firmographic, and behavioral data extensively.
What do your website visitors care about most? Analytics should show you not just which pages get the most traffic, but also traffic sources, time on page and subsequent actions.
How can you retain leads’ interest? Learn what people like, then serve them more of it. A marketing automation system notes each lead’s actions and assembles a picture of his or her interests.
Knowing that information is the key that unlocks continued interest.
How do customers perceive your company? Surveys from customers and analyses of your competitors can tell you a great deal about your brand and how decision-makers respond to it.
Where do potential customers drop out of the buying process? When you know where otherwise promising leads take a detour out of your sales funnel, you can take action to keep them on the path to a sale.
About Your Content
Which downloadable content attracts the most attention from your audience? Tracking downloads tells you a lot about your audience’s interests.
How is content correlated with action? Some content motivates more activity in readers than others. Pinpoint the content that’s most closely associated with conversions, and you’re then able to pick it apart and find out what prospective customers find compelling about it.
Does your content speak to all segments of your audience? Leads are far more willing to listen when you’re speaking their language – and that starts with segmentation.
Is your content meaningful and helpful to individual leads? Marketing automation software sets up nurture campaign flows that channel useful information to leads precisely when they need it.
How can you coordinate content across multiple channels? Email, blog posts, white papers, webinars, articles in trade journals – it’s a lot to track manually. Automation eliminates channel micromanagement.
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