Raj C, Author at FunnelEnvy

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So far Raj C has created 38 blog entries.

4 Key Metrics for Your B2B Sales Pipeline

There’s a lot for marketers today to consider when it comes to tactics for bringing in new business, but your sales pipeline is what ultimately defines the success of all your funnels, marketing campaigns, and other efforts to add new clients and revenue consistently. But considering the huge array of software tools and data available to modern B2B marketers, it can feel overwhelming to measure all the metrics in a pipeline.

We’ve identified four of the most important metrics for B2B marketers looking to understand their pipeline better. Every company is different, but in our experience, an organization can get a great sense of the overall health of its pipeline by paying attention to the four metrics below.

Velocity

Sales velocity is defined by HubSpot as the measurement of how quickly a deal moves through a pipeline and turns into actual revenue. Velocity is an important metric because it helps you understand and identify obstacles or bottlenecks in your sales process. It doesn’t matter how great your landing pages or nurture sequences are – if there’s an issue with your pipeline velocity, it’ll constrain your sales.

It doesn’t matter how great your landing pages or nurture sequences are – if there’s an issue with your pipeline velocity, it’ll constrain your sales. Click To Tweet

The widely-accepted formula for calculating pipeline velocity is to multiply the number of opportunities by the average deal value, then times your team’s average close rate, and divide that number by the length of your sales cycle. This formula is a great starting place to closely analyze each part of your pipeline to determine any obstacles.

For example, perhaps when evaluating the sales cycle length, you realize that your sales team is taking too long to follow up after the initial appointment with a prospect. Armed with this knowledge, you can adjust your sales process and inform your reps to follow up immediately after an appointment to keep the prospect moving through the sales journey.

Deal Size

The size of your deals doesn’t require any kind of complex formula to calculate, but it can still be difficult to identify issues in this area without some intentional analysis. For example, if your company has the same number of opportunities with the same sales cycle length as last year, but your revenue is down, it’s a sign that you may not be pursuing large enough deals.

Addressing a deal size issue is solely a matter of prospecting. Here are a few tips for finding higher-value prospects:

Use account-based marketing (or ABM). ABM defines a process by which you identify a handful of high-value accounts and create customized sales and marketing collateral explicitly designed for those accounts. According to Gartner, by the end of 2020, over 70% of marketers at midsize and large B2B organizations will be using or testing ABM.
Invest in thought leadership or content that brands give for free to gain trust and credibility by helping its intended audience. In a study published by LinkedIn and Edelman last year, 60% of B2B buyers said thought leadership builds credibility when a brand enters a new category, and 54% said they purchased a new product or service they had not previously considered. Thought leadership can help attract a more discerning type of buyer.
Get social. Participate in events, post on social media, and engage with your prospects in their communities. Remember to be genuine – it’s easy for people to identify someone who’s only interacting with them for the sake of a sale. Let your natural sense of curiosity and desire to help people guide your interactions.

Close Rate

Another straightforward yet critical metric for your sales funnel, a close rate identifies the number of prospects that become paying clients relative to the overall number of leads generated by your marketing efforts. Every company will have a slightly different close rate depending on the nature of their business. A more specialized company with a niche audience might be fine with a close rate between 5% and 7%, while others might be aiming closer to double digits or beyond.

While it’s possible to find general data online about close rates, a better approach is to track your own company’s close rate and assess where it needs to be for sufficient revenue growth. If there are problems with your close rate, it’s generally a sign to evaluate your sales team, the specifics of your client offer, or both. Solicit feedback from prospects whenever possible to better understand which elements are slowing down your close rate.

Sales to Support Ratio

This ratio may not be specifically related to the performance of your sales or marketing, but it’s still vital to understand how your sales pipeline affects the rest of your operations. It’s sometimes expressed as “sales staff to support staff,” but it isn’t necessarily just the number of people working at the organization in each department. For smaller companies with employees or contractors who handle multiple organizational tasks, it isn’t a simple “this to that” ratio.

However you quantify it, this metric is vital to understanding how much of your capacity the company uses for each client. You can also track this number based on deal size, client longevity, and other measures to get a sense of which types of clients require the most attention from your support team. You can use this data in your sales and marketing efforts going forward, helping you focus on the best types of buyers for your offering.

In a well-balanced organization, sales and support can handle a sufficient volume of responsibility that allows the company to stay on track with its goals. In assessing this metric at your own company, you may need to either increase your sales activity or add additional capacity for support, depending on how much your company’s product requires.

Final Word on Key Metrics for Your Pipeline

It’s essential to customize your pipeline metrics like any sales or marketing data. Every company has its own needs, meaning it might not make sense to track the same metrics as an organization in a different industry.

For best results with these pipeline metrics, track them for as long as possible and establish a performance baseline in each area. Note where the numbers are when things at the company are going well and vice versa when you hit a slow period. Doing this allows you to gain insight into where each of your metrics should be, giving you better context when you analyze your pipeline going forward.

If you’re unsure about what steps you need to take or which metrics to track to help improve the performance of your organization’s sales and marketing performance, our team is ready to help. FunnelEnvy has several years of combined experience working with B2B clients to identify gaps in their funnels, tweak critical elements like forms and landing pages, and optimize other aspects of the lead nurturing process to maximize your conversion rate.

Click here to take a short quiz and learn more about our pricing structure.

By Raj C|2022-10-20T04:37:11-07:00October 31st, 2022|Analytics, A/B Testing|0 Comments

Optimizing Your B2B Landing Page Flow

You already know landing pages matter. The key to a successful landing page is giving page visitors what they want while also having them take desired actions that move them through your funnel. And while the design of your landing pages, their forms, and visuals are critical, how you set up these landing pages in the context of the rest of your marketing is just as important.

What happens before and after a user visits your landing page? How do these fit with the other elements in your funnel and your brand? These are important questions regarding improving B2B landing page effectiveness, but they’re often not as closely considered as traditional issues like fonts, colors, and form fields.

Below are some of our best tips and considerations for optimizing your funnel’s landing page flow.

Ensure the Landing Page is Applicable to All Lead Sources

One of the things we know for sure is that people use the internet on different kinds of devices. Not only are they using different kinds of hardware, page visitors all come from unique sources. It doesn’t matter whether someone comes from a social media ad, an email newsletter, or any other potential source: their experience with your landing page should be consistent.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be creating unique landing pages for each campaign you and your team come up with, or that you don’t need to worry about the different sources for leads to the same landing page. It just means that all the different versions you create need to offer consistency no matter how someone accesses the site. This is especially true when it comes to funnels related to consuming information or learning – by some measures, over 70% of web traffic comes from mobile devices. It’s important for those users to have the same thorough access to your landing page as someone on a desktop.

Don’t Neglect Your Post-conversion Thank You Page

It can seem like a relatively subtle detail, but the page that site visitors see after converting can make a big difference in both how they perceive your brand and what they do after taking the desired landing page action.

There are several different strategies to consider when it comes to a thank you page. We see plenty of marketers making the mistake of sticking with the default text. Failing to address these valuable areas where many visitors look for additional information about your business and its other components is a wasted opportunity.

The page that site visitors see after converting can make a big difference in both how they perceive your brand and what they do after taking the desired landing page action. Click To Tweet

A few common strategies used for thank you pages:

Play a short video thanking the user and talking about other areas of the company – ideally ones related to the landing page’s funnel.
Link to another relevant area on your site. This link could be something like a mission or vision statement, a case study section, or anything else that might entice your visitors.
Add a link to a blog post or other popular new content that you’ve recently published. You could also share news in this section, but keep it relevant, so you don’t appear to brag.

Remember to iterate on and test each design option you consider for your thank you page to see which one works best. Finally, don’t overload your page with so much content that people get bogged down or overwhelmed.

If your landing page’s funnel is information-heavy and you feel it’s important to include a lot more details on your thank you page, save it for the part of your landing page flow we bring up in the next section.

Create (or Improve) Your Follow-up Sequence

When we talk about a follow-up sequence, it doesn’t mean a confirmation email you send to a user who converts. It’s a longer set of multiple emails that is meant to do more than just reiterate that they’ll get what they were told they’d receive on the original landing page.

A follow-up sequence should provide extra context that helps nurture a prospect closer to becoming a client by giving them the kind of information that also assists them in achieving their goals.

For example: let’s say you’re a healthcare software company with a landing page funnel to book demonstration appointments. After someone books an appointment on your landing page, you could send them a technical description of the specific tool (or element of the tool) that they’ll be seeing at the upcoming demonstration.

This is also a good place to incorporate social proof in your funnel. Include quotes, reviews, or case studies with data and numbers that show evidence of business improvement and tangible results achieved by your past clients.

Finally, after enough time has passed – and the user has completed any demonstration, appointment or other time-based objective – you can include an email in the sequence that asks for feedback. Speaking of which…

Solicit Feedback (and Use It!)

You don’t have to ask every user who converts their thoughts on the entire process, but it is important to actively ask for feedback from visitors to your landing page funnel. It could mean including a button that links to a quick web survey, or you might simply decide to follow up with a personal email or call. But one of the best ways to improve the flow around any landing page is to see what real people think about it. If you start hearing something repeated often in your feedback, it may be a sign to implement it into working versions of the landing page or funnel.

Again, it’s essential to keep your requests concise – your prospects likely have a lot of other things going on. Focus on one or two key areas of the page that you might be uncertain about or have been underperforming relative to other parts of the funnel. Remember to be gracious and thankful for any feedback a prospect is voluntarily willing to provide.

Final Thoughts on Optimizing Landing Page Flow

Landing pages are a common and vital part of any funnel. But if the parts of your funnel around your landing page aren’t working well, it will likely hold back your performance and constrain the number of leads you bring in from the funnel.

While you should always strive to improve your landing pages and the things included, it’s equally important to ensure page visitors have a good experience before, during, and after they are on the landing page. That means spending some time considering elements outside of the page itself – the emails you send to users who convert, the information you present on the confirmation page, and the way you incorporate their feedback in both individual sales relationships and improvements made to the broader business.

Looking to get expert insights into your landing pages and the elements around them? The team at FunnelEnvy can help you, whether you’re looking to plug a leaking funnel, pick up the performance of a landing page, or simply ensure that your marketing continues to perform at a sufficient level. Click here to take a short quiz that will help us learn more about how we can get you closer to your business goals.

By Raj C|2022-10-06T05:04:35-07:00October 17th, 2022|Landing Pages|0 Comments

Top B2B Marketing Landing Page Trends

A landing page is the critical element of a funnel upon which its broader results hinge. You could have slick visuals and top-notch marketing automation software – if an error or obstacle on your landing page prevents visitors from converting, it will constrain your results and limit the effectiveness of your digital marketing.

Even if your landing page has been working well and capturing a healthy number of people, it can always be optimized so that you can convert even more visitors. The bigger question is, how do you take steps to optimize your landing page?

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer. Everyone’s offering and their funnel will be slightly different. However, even in the dynamic world of B2B, where there is a strong focus on customization, our team has seen certain trends emerge across several industries.

Just remember, trends in landing page design operate the same way as trends in any other industry – fashion, art, music, etc. That means you don’t need to take this blog post as a comprehensive guide to all the elements you must include on a landing page. Think of it the way you might think about trends in clothing: you wouldn’t rush out and replace your entire wardrobe with only the items trending at this year’s top fashion shows.

Instead, you would look at what kind of clothes are trending, think about your signature style, and decide how you might incorporate a few popular pieces into what you already wear. The same goes for your landing page – instead of completely overhauling a page to keep up with the latest trends, decide which of them make sense and edit your pages accordingly.

Live Messaging and Chatbots

If you’ve been on any recently-updated landing page in the last year or two, you probably noticed a recurring pattern: a chat window pops up, often on the bottom-right side of your screen, prompting you to ask a question about a product or service, or perhaps giving you details of the company’s latest sale or launch.

The rise of support via messenger and chatbot platforms on company websites has been meteoric. According to Fortune, the global chatbot industry expects to grow at a rapid clip of 22.5% between 2020 and 2027. That significant growth rate didn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of customers in many industries preferring to get their questions answered immediately via chat instead of sitting on hold or waiting around for an email inquiry to get answered. Over 40% of customers prefer getting answers from chat immediately, compared to 32% who prefer the phone and 23% who prefer email.

You don’t need to build a sophisticated AI-based chat platform from scratch. Plenty of simple chat platforms allow you to use either a real person or a basic bot to message people who have questions about your offering. Check out tools like HubSpot, Drift, Intercom, and Twilio as a starting point in your search for live messenger and chatbot solutions.

Inclusive Design

According to Adobe, inclusive design is a style that “considers the full range of human diversity with respect to ability, language, culture, gender, age, and other forms of human difference.” In other words, it’s a design that allows the broadest range of people to view and use your landing page content, even if they use adaptive technology or have some type of disability.

A great place to start regarding inclusive design is the web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG), created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Government bodies, universities, and other organizations leading the way in accessible digital content use these guidelines.

A few simple elements that you can incorporate right away to improve accessibility:

Add captions to all video content, whether live or pre-recorded
Allow users to pause and play audio and video content
Allow users to resize text by at least 200% without assistive technology
Don’t include any images or visual elements that flash more than three times

Progress Indicators and Icons

Another common element on today’s landing pages is some type of indicator to let users know how they are progressing on a form. Percentage bars or icons representing the number of form pages completed and remaining are a great addition to almost any landing page. By some metrics, you can increase your website’s conversion rate by 30% just by adding a progress bar to your landing page.

Ideally, you want to keep your landing page to no more than four separate pages or sub-forms. If you need to collect more information than this, think about adjusting your funnel or trying to gather extra data after the conversion event has taken place. For example, if your landing page is to book appointments, there may be some kinds of information that you can collect on your first sales call instead of on the page form. Keeping your form as short as possible and letting people know how many more sub-forms they have to complete is a great way to improve landing page conversion.

Minimalist Design

Check out this landing page from Squarespace:

Notice the simplicity: it has the company’s logo, the main form, and an option that allows visitors who aren’t ready to buy to return to the home page. This type of minimalist design is everywhere on modern landing pages, from those related to the most complex B2B software to those offering the most basic B2C commodity.

If you’re going for the minimalist approach, strike a good balance between design and functionality. Don’t sacrifice important information that prospects need to know simply to include as much space as possible. However, it can be helpful to re-evaluate your landing pages with a close eye to determine if there are elements that you may be able to remove.

A final tip for the minimalist or “blank space” approach: use colors that make the main elements of your page stand out. A white background typically means using brighter colors on elements like links, buttons, and headers. Be sure to pick a color scheme that works well together and doesn’t clash or cause any readability issues for visitors.

Final Thoughts On Landing Page Trends

Remember: you don’t need to adopt any of these trends on your existing landing pages, particularly if your funnel already works well at converting visitors. However, when looking to improve your landing page’s conversion rate, it can be helpful to look at current trends in landing page design as a starting point to determine what positive changes you could make.

Our expert team at FunnelEnvy can help by evaluating your landing page and identifying a few key areas you can improve. With only minor tweaks to your page, it’s possible to increase your conversion rate by a significant percentage that expands your marketing funnel and provides real gains to your organization’s bottom line.
Click here to complete a short quiz and find out more about how FunnelEnvy may be able to assist with optimizing your funnel’s landing page to incorporate some of the latest trends and designs for better results.

By Raj C|2022-09-21T04:41:22-07:00October 3rd, 2022|Landing Pages|0 Comments

Finding the Right Analytics Operator for Your Marketing

Software is essential for successful B2B marketing campaigns, but it’s only half the battle. You can have the most sophisticated software deployed on top-of-the-line hardware – but if you don’t have the right people running it, you won’t maximize your (likely significant) investment into these resources. It’s like racing with a souped-up car driven by someone who’s never been behind the wheel.

You need your marketing tools and the people using them to be well-aligned so that your organization can take full advantage of today’s technology. Whether you’re running complicated data analytics platforms driven by AI and machine learning or a simple email marketing automation platform doesn’t matter. The people responsible for them need to be well-suited for the role and equipped with everything they need to be successful.

In this article, we’ll go over a few different ways you can find the right operator for your analytics, including information about the pros and cons of each method. Finally, we’ll offer some general tips on how to set up whoever you choose to operate your marketing analytics to do the best job possible.

Internal Assignment

The quickest way to find an operator for your marketing analytics platforms is to choose someone on your existing team to take the role. Even if your organization already has a well-defined marketing department that manages its own tools, this step can come with some challenges. What if it’s a new system with which no one has training? If they have the expertise, does your internal marketing team have the bandwidth to take on the responsibility of another platform?

This path gets even trickier for early-stage companies that don’t have someone designated to oversee these types of tools. These super-lean organizations typically have to assign the role to someone who already has a lot on their plate, which brings up the potential for errors or incomplete data.

If you plan to go this route, ensure the internal team member has the necessary availability and knowledge. Otherwise, this option should be a short-term choice that you transition out of immediately – for example, having a marketing manager run an analytics platform until you can transition the responsibilities into a more-fitting candidate.

Hiring a New Team Member

This is ideal if all circumstances allow it. Adding someone to your team specifically to manage one or more analytics platforms is an excellent way to have a dedicated resource on this task, ensuring that it never slips to the bottom of the list of an employee with more generalized skills.

Of course, the challenge with this method is it requires the largest investment of time and money. Giving a task to an existing team member can be done instantly, and you can quickly start most external marketing resources if there’s an urgent need. Hiring a new person, though will take weeks, if not months, from start to finish. Even when you’ve completed the hiring process, there’s still a ramp-up time while the employee gets comfortable and fully acclimates to the new responsibilities.

On the other hand, if you don’t need someone immediately and have the capital available to support a dedicated team member, this might be the best choice. This is especially true if you’re looking for someone to manage a marketing system you use frequently. Choosing this option also gives you the most control over how you operate your marketing analytics.

Even when you’ve completed the hiring process, there’s still a ramp-up time while the employee gets comfortable and fully acclimates to the new responsibilities. Click To Tweet

Using an External Resource

This choice typically involves initiating a working relationship with an agency or contractor (or both, depending on the complexity of your needs). In the best cases, an external resource should be a middle ground between assigning marketing management roles to poorly-qualified or overworked existing team members and hiring someone new.

This option still has a process that requires screening, and you may interview contractors or agencies the same way you might interview a full-time team member. The big difference here is cost – except for the most high-end, premier operators in the field, you can usually bring on an external resource for a fraction of the cost of hiring a new team member.

It’s also a quicker process to get them started, and there’s no long-term commitment required when hiring a dedicated team. Additionally, it’s much easier to scale workloads up and down when you use an external resource. This is great for seasonal businesses that may need a lot of work for a few months of the year but don’t have the demand for marketing analytics management to sustain a full-time team member year-round.

The drawback of using an external resource is that you’ll still need to devote time to managing and directing them, especially at the beginning stages. You’ll also have less control over how they work – in fact, legal standards dictate that you cannot provide specific requirements for when, where, and how work gets done when you hire a contractor. Some agencies or contractors spread particularly thin may not communicate the way you’d prefer.

Setting Up Any Type of Marketing Analytics Operator for Success

None of these three options is the right or wrong answer. Many companies have used all three approaches for marketing operators – some larger companies may even need to apply all three simultaneously.

Whichever source you decide on for your marketing analytics operator, you can do a few things to help them do the best possible job they can:

Be descriptive. This applies to everything from the initial job description you use to hire to the ongoing instructions you provide on new projects. Use quantitative, specific language when discussing skills, responsibilities, project timelines, and everything else you discuss with your analytics operator.
Communicate. In the era of remote work, it’s imperative to ensure the lines of communication between you and your team members stay open. You should be proactive about getting in touch and asking if they have any questions or obstacles – particularly when they’re new in the role and still getting settled.
Allow them to have input. Very few people want to be in a position with completely rigid instructions and no room for personalization. Autonomy is particularly important for employees of your company, who will want to incorporate their own unique skills and interests into their day-to-day role

The Last Word on Finding a Skilled Marketing Analytics Operator

It doesn’t matter how many resources you invest in the right tools for marketing analytics. If you don’t have the right person or people at the helm of the operation, you will eventually be disappointed in your ROI. On the other hand, bringing on the right talent – even if it’s a freelancer or someone you already have on the team – can help you maximize your return on investment in marketing analytics, even if your tools are limited.

Interested in working with our team of B2B marketing funnel specialists? Just fill out this short quiz to see if you’d be a good fit for FunnelEnvy. We can help you optimize how you approach marketing analytics so that it’s much easier for anyone – individual or agency – to achieve the desired results.

By Raj C|2022-09-05T04:58:29-07:00September 19th, 2022|Analytics, A/B Testing|0 Comments

How to Map Content Creation to Your B2B Funnel

Anyone working in marketing today is probably aware of the importance of creating content. Thanks to the growth of content marketing over the last decade or so companies in every field are rushing to produce content they believe will drive revenue and improve their brand awareness among their target audience.

Unfortunately, many content marketers don’t get it right. They direct an internal resource or outside contractor to churn out a set number of content pieces about pre-arranged topics on a monthly or quarterly basis. Robert Rose, chief strategy officer at the Content Marketing Institute’s Content Advisory consultancy, has spoken about this issue before, calling it the “vending machine” approach to content creation.

As Rose points out, not only does this approach not scale, it positions content as nothing more than a to-do list for the marketing department. A better approach is to first understand the goals and objectives behind each piece of content pertaining to different stages of your sales funnel. From there, you can create content in a way that aligns smoothly with your funnel and provides tangible value for your audience.

How do you go about doing that? It’ll be slightly different for everyone depending on your specific target audience and the funnel for which you’re creating content. Below, we dive into a few tips that any marketer can apply to B2B content creation.

Revisit Personas and Funnel Steps

Before you start churning out content assets, it’s essential to take a step back and go over the fundamentals of your funnel. Begin the process by going over your buyer persona, which according to HubSpot best practices, should include information like:

Demographics including age, income, location, etc.
Communication preferences that indicate how they like to receive information and engage with potential vendors
Goals for both their personal and professional lives
Biggest challenges particularly as it relates to the product or service being marketed

As you (ideally, along with your primary content creators) review this information, remember to spend time considering whether or not anything is outdated or inaccurate. This is a great time to update your personas and make your marketing efforts more effective.

Beyond that, you should also look at each step in your funnel to see how people inside it go from a stranger unaware of your brand’s existence to the conversion action you desire. This process will also unlock a vital source of ideas for content and make it much easier to align each piece with your funnel.

Here’s an example: let’s say visiting a landing page is an important step in the funnel for which you want to create effective content. By drawing on the existing content, language, and media on the landing page, you’ll have a starting point for content you want to map to that funnel segment.

Experiment With Different Channels

One of the double-edged swords of modern digital marketing is the array of different kinds of media we can use to reach an audience. The most common formats are e-mail, social media, blog posts, and videos. Clever marketers can develop an endless variety of themes and formats within just these four channels.

If you haven’t already, you need to work on aligning your different marketing channels with each stage of your funnel. These insights will be key for understanding what type of content to produce for different segments of your audience.

Here’s another concrete example: you typically use video advertisements on social media networks to attract people to your brand and make them aware of your offering. This is a standard way marketers use video content for the top of their funnels.

If you haven’t already, you need to work on aligning your different marketing channels with each stage of your funnel Click To Tweet

But what if, instead of only using video for social media ads, you also incorporated video at the later stages of your funnel? Maybe you publish a video interview with a satisfied client in which they discuss some of the most significant benefits of your offering and why it worked. In this case, you’d use video for your funnel’s middle segment.

It’s impossible to definitively say which combination will work best for your funnel and audience. Remember to measure and track the data so you can compare how each channel works for each segment of your funnel.

Add a Personal Touch

It’s wonderful to understand your sales funnel as a progression of different steps and know what kind of content will work best for prospects at each one. But to maximize your content’s effectiveness, you must find a way to express an understanding of what your target audience is going through.

Take a look at this excerpt from a landing page for Drift, a conversational marketing tool focused on interactions via chatbot and messenger platforms:

From the very first word of the copy, they ask the reader to envision how their work situation could be made better by using Drift. Sure, the message may not be as effective for people who don’t manage a sales team daily. But because the team responsible for marketing Drift has a deep understanding of their target audience, they can add this personal touch that speaks directly to the goals or challenges of their ideal prospect.

It’s vital to incorporate these kinds of highly-specific messages in your content, no matter what stage of the funnel you intend. If you don’t feel confident enough in your audience’s understanding to add these personal touches, revisit the first step in this post to deepen your knowledge.

Solicit Real Feedback

Our final piece of advice for mapping content to different funnel stages is straightforward but not always easy: ask a real person! One of the most common mistakes we see in the prospects and clients we work with is the “bubble effect.” A team of marketers gathers (virtually or in-person) to figure out the needs and challenges of an audience without any input from real people in that audience.

This approach is okay in the earliest stages of your marketing or when resources like time and money are drastically limited. However, you shouldn’t run a content marketing campaign for an extended period without getting input from the target audience. Whether you receive that input from a formal survey, a casual in-person meeting, or a quick video call, it’s critical to integrate it into your content creation efforts as soon as possible.

Final Thoughts on Mapping Content Creation to Your Funnel

Content creation as a strategy for digital marketers probably isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. However, the format of that content and how you create it will change. The best-performing content marketers will be the ones who can closely match their content with the specific challenges of their audience – in a time-sensitive fashion, presented via a format that fits their lifestyle.

Are you looking to get some expert insights into how you can do a better job of matching content to different parts of your sales funnel? Click here to fill out a quick questionnaire and see if you might be a fit to work with our team at FunnelEnvy.

By Raj C|2022-08-24T07:12:51-07:00September 5th, 2022|General B2B Funnel Advice|0 Comments

The Top 4 A/B Tests That Will Drive Revenue

Experimentation is at the heart of digital marketing success in almost any area, from paid advertising to content production. Marketers are constantly pushing the envelope to innovate in a way that brings measurable results to their organizations.

Modern marketing technology allows us to run experiments on many areas, from buying behaviors and customer preferences to information delivery techniques and specific advertising messages. A/B testing, or split testing, has been used for decades to improve customer satisfaction in B2C businesses. In the last few decades, technology has allowed B2B marketers to run powerful, sophisticated experiments leveraging analytics and machine learning. By some measures, more than half of all B2B marketers today use A/B testing as their primary conversion rate optimization (CRO) method.

On a basic level, many organizations could improve their websites and drive more customers to their products and services by using A/B testing to identify what works and doesn’t. However, with so many tests available to run, knowing which ones will give you the best return on investment (ROI) can be difficult.

We’ve compiled a list of the top four A/B tests for B2B marketers that can directly impact ROI through increased conversion rates.

Form Names and Text

You’ll likely use forms in conversion elements at every point in a funnel. The names of your forms and the text within them can impact conversions more than you may think. A/B testing can help you determine which form of words and text are most effective in getting people to convert. Try testing different fonts and header placements to see if any are more effective than others. You could also switch up the order of fields to see if visitors prefer to fill out one before the other.

This small change can make a big difference in your conversion rate. Remember not to change any form fields for existing clients or customers so drastically that people who already have an account with you are redirected back to fill out their information again. Also, remember that less is more: asking too many questions might scare away potential customers. On the other hand, adding new elements to a form may show visitors that you really understand their particular issues, pushing them closer to converting.

Element Colors

Different hues can evoke different emotions in your website visitors, which impacts how users interact with your website or app. Try different combinations of colors and see which ones result in the most conversions. According to researchers, blue is often associated with calming safety and trustworthiness, while red is associated with urgency and excitement. Green is typically associated with nature and growth.

You want your funnel pages to be visually appealing to potential customers, but you don’t want to go overboard. You can turn them away with too many bright colors or combinations that clash. A/B testing can help you find the perfect balance of colors for your website. A few specific areas to test different color combinations include background, text, button, and form field colors.

Also, remember not to go overboard on changes in a single experiment. Try to test just one color against another (e.g., red vs. green) by changing just one element at a time to measure each change’s effect on your conversion rates.

CTA Language

Asking your visitors to take action correctly can differentiate between a successful conversion and a bounced visitor. But what words should you use in your call-to-action? That’s where A/B testing comes in. Marketers can try out different phrases and see which ones get the best results.

Generally, you shouldn’t overuse generic terms like “Click here!” or “Go.” Visitors are more likely to convert when they know exactly what you’re asking them to do. Ensure your CTAs include clear directions about what will be on the other side to avoid confusion and frustration over unmet expectations.

Emphasizing the benefits of your product or service in your CTA can be another powerful way to increase conversions. People are always more likely to take action if they know what’s in it for them. For example, if you’re promoting a case study that shows how your accounting software streamlines a firm’s operations, instead of using “Download the case study,” try something like “See how [Client A] saved 30% on staffing costs.”

Images

Though it’s something of a cliche by now, when it comes to conversion rate optimization, a good picture really can be worth a thousand words. A/B testing can help to find the perfect image for your funnel. One way to A/B test images is to divide them into categories, then test pictures in each category against one another.

For example, you might choose categories like:

People
Faces
Landscapes
Abstract

After that decision, you can test images of the same category, then compare how images in different categories perform. This is just one option – the specific level of detail you want to A/B test with your images will depend on how many visuals you have and the nature of its placement in the funnel. In other words: you may not need to A/B test every image you send out in your weekly newsletter, but you might want to be more thorough when it comes to testing the one image you include on a critical landing page in your funnel.

One way to A/B test images is to divide them into categories, then test pictures in each category against one another. Click To Tweet

A Final Note on A/B Testing

Though A/B testing is undoubtedly popular and can be effective, it comes with its own drawbacks and dangers. As we’ve covered previously, you shouldn’t consider A/B testing as a panacea that will fix all the issues with your campaign. We’ve worked with many clients who gathered little to no valuable data from A/B tests, despite waiting many weeks or months to collect data. A/B testing can also be difficult for newer ventures that haven’t yet had enough time to build up a sufficient traffic baseline to be statistically significant.

That’s why we suggest using A/B testing strategically as a supplement to your CRO efforts. We believe that for modern B2B marketers to achieve the greatest success from A/B tests, it’s essential to move past “experimentation 1.0.” Marketers should consider their customer’s holistic journey and optimize each stage in concert with one another, using personalized insights and data about their preferences and habits whenever possible.

Are you looking for some assistance with integrating A/B testing into your funnel? Maybe you’ve already been running A/B tests for a while and haven’t seen the definitive data you were hoping for to direct your campaigns going forward. FunnelEnvy specializes in helping all types of B2B clients make A/B testing and other CRO experiments much more effective through the use of personalized solutions custom-built for a specific audience of sophisticated decision-makers.

Want to learn more about our services? Click here to fill out a short quiz that will help determine if we’d be a good fit to work together.

By Raj C|2022-08-10T18:04:29-07:00August 22nd, 2022|Analytics, A/B Testing|0 Comments

Personalization Strategies to Accelerate Conversion Rate

Once companies have established a functional system for marketing, personalization is typically the next big leverage point to increase their return on investment. Successful personalization can have a significant positive impact on conversion rate and client satisfaction. But how should you implement this idea – what’s the best way to tailor your marketing to the different segments of your audience?

Below are a few essential personalization strategies that can improve your funnel’s efficiency and make your audience feel like you genuinely understand their needs and concerns.

Update Your Personas

Before personalizing something for a specific audience, you must understand them. Most companies don’t make it a regular habit to review and update their buyer personas. A deep understanding of personas is vital if you want to succeed with personalization. Take some time to refresh your knowledge of each buyer persona you’ll be targeting. It may reinforce what you already know, but in many cases, you’ll uncover new trends or ideas related to a specific segment that might help with personalization. For example, is there a significant new industry regulation that one of your personas must now consider as they make decisions?

Even seemingly minor factors can provide insights that translate to more successful marketing. According to HubSpot, addressing concerns on a landing page can increase conversions by as much as 80%. Best of all, the information you learn will be applicable across different funnels and campaigns in the future.

Get Input From Users

It’s always easy to speculate in a vacuum about what users want or how they prefer to receive information. But the best way to understand your target audience is to hear it directly from them. That means talking to current and previous clients about a few significant concerns, including:

What are their biggest challenges at work?
Have any of those challenges changed since they started as a client?
What would make your job easier for the next month/quarter/year?
How helpful have you found other solutions in our industry?

Notice that these questions are more general inquiries about their work and business functions and don’t have anything to do with the specific nature of your offering. While getting feedback from your users about particular points of your service or product is always important, asking them for feedback about your product or service while requesting updated details about their professional needs can be overwhelming.

User surveys are valuable for personalization, but you must keep them concise and tightly focused. Click To Tweet

Beyond that, offering some reward or compensation to users who provide feedback that enhances your personalization efforts can also be helpful. It shows you value their time and the insights they provide, even if it’s just a percentage discount or a small gift card. At the very least, you should explain how you’ll use their feedback to make your offering better and more helpful to users like them.

Source Data From Different Business Functions

Many marketing teams face a similar challenge: siloed data. Instead of understanding the lifecycle of a customer from prospect through to purchase and retention, they can only interpret the needs and concerns of prospects through the lens of marketing actions – whether or not they convert, how long they stay on a website, their job titles, etc. The problem with this approach is that it ignores crucial elements of the customer journey that are vital to the understanding necessary for personalization. Customer interactions outside of marketing can provide a richer picture of what they are looking for from your offering.

For example, let’s say you provide a software solution that helps mortgage companies streamline their internal operations. It’s valuable to know what kind of landing page, emails, and advertisements will get the attention of prospects and convert them into subscribers or customers of your business. Suppose you can access reports on their interactions with customer service or data on which areas of your tool they spend the most time. In that case, you can use this information to personalize marketing messages in your funnel further.

Focus on Key Conversion Points

When personalizing your marketing funnel, some areas are more critical than others. For example, personalization matters on a confirmation page that appears after a user converts, but it’s essential to landing page content that helps convince visitors to take the conversion action.

As you build a strategy for improving your funnel’s personalization, you want to emphasize high-leverage points that give you the most return on the time and money invested. In some of these areas, a few small tweaks in your content and visual design can be responsible for exponential growth in conversions.

What are some of the critical areas to think about when it comes to conversions? It varies depending on your offering and funnel, but the most common ones we work with on client engagements include:

Landing page forms, including things like headlines, body copy, and field text. An easy solution here is running A/B tests that pit one version of a page against another, but there are plenty of other options for improvement if you have the right data.
Social media ads that target your audience on networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and other platforms. These are important because they are often the first interaction prospective customers have with your business. A successful ad will improve brand awareness and drive conversions towards your goal.
Drip emails that nurture clients and prospects towards signing up for your service or purchasing a product or other offering. In most B2B sales cycles, prospects will want to spend some time getting to know you before even agreeing to schedule a meeting – let alone committing to a significant, high-priced purchase. If appropriately composed with the correct elements (subject line, preview text, and body content), drip emails can be one of your most effective sales tools.

Final Thoughts on Personalization

Even in niche B2B markets that don’t represent some of the fastest-growing sectors in the world, professionals responsible for business buying decisions face a lot of noise and uncertainty. Faced with many different options and marketing messages on various platforms, buyers have no choice but to focus entirely on the solutions that seem best for their specific needs.
While it can be harder for marketers to break through to prospects and pique their interests, the scenario also creates an opportunity. A well-calibrated message that speaks to prospects’ needs and pain points can cut through a lot of that noise and resonate immediately with the right audience. That means increased conversion rates, more significant revenues, and ultimately, a more satisfied customer base that stays with you for longer.

Looking for some help from conversion rate optimization specialists on personalization and how to apply it to your funnel? Fill out this quick quiz to see if our services might be a good fit for your requirements.

By Raj C|2022-08-08T05:35:44-07:00August 8th, 2022|Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

The 3 Most Common Landing Page Design Mistakes

We all come across landing pages in day-to-day web browsing. From consumer purchases to complex business decisions that affect large organizations, landing pages are often the foundation for commerce on the internet. A landing page might have many different parts or components from a technical perspective, but a good page has a singular goal: getting a page visitor to take an action, whether that’s to sign up for a newsletter, set an appointment, or purchase a product.

When it comes to complex components like landing pages, successful execution can seem overwhelming. With so many different options and factors to think about, how can you give yourself and your team a process that results in the consistent creation of productive landing pages?

At FunnelEnvy, we sometimes find it easier to advise clients and prospects on what not to do when building out their landing pages. When you know what you should be staying away from, it’s easier to direct the project into success.

Below are three landing page design mistakes we see most frequently, why they matter, and how you can correct them, so they don’t cause leaks in your funnel that cut into your company’s growth.

Overloading the Page with Copy

When working on creating a landing page, it can be tempting to include every single benefit of your company’s offering, information about past users, quantitative statistics about how your product or service has helped, and so on. Resist the initial urge to be exhaustive on a landing page. In today’s era of browsing on mobile devices and shorter attention spans, it’s almost always better to convey information with the fewest words.

Some marketers – particularly those in complex B2B fields that involve a lot of technical jargon – may push back on this idea, believing that they have to include as much detail as possible to speak to an educated buyer. Depending on which stage of your funnel the landing page is placed, this approach could still work – so long as the content you include is well-formatted and scannable. Make sure to use headers no matter how long or short your page is, and if you include a significant amount of text, it might be wise to include a basic navigation menu that allows visitors to jump from section to section.

Finally, remember that text shouldn’t be the exclusive medium you use to communicate on your landing page. Putting aside the difficulty of reading long-form text on the small screen of a phone or tablet, many people just prefer getting information from videos no matter what device they use. In a survey by HubSpot, over 50% of consumers of all ages reported wanting more video content from businesses they support.

Giving Users Too Many Choices

Along the same lines as including too much content, giving users too many choices is another fatal landing page error. Again, the tendency here for inexperienced marketers is to try to squeeze as many conversion events as possible out of each prospect or page visitor. And while there’s nothing wrong with striving for efficiency, giving people multiple paths to take often means they decide to walk none of them.

Yet too often, marketers can’t resist adding that small email signup box on the sidebar, or linking page visitors to a similar offer they might like since they were interested in the original one. It may seem harmless to you since you’re focused intently on crafting the best possible landing page. But to your prospect, your landing page is just one (probably small) element in a day likely full of complicated tasks and responsibilities. Several visitors will leave if it’s too difficult to figure out the right path on your landing page. By some statistics, landing pages with multiple offers get 266% fewer leads than pages with a single offer.

while there’s nothing wrong with striving for efficiency, giving people multiple paths to take often means they decide to walk none of them. Click To Tweet

Keep things simple for your page visitors by limiting your landing page to one offer. If you feel strongly about including a plug for your newsletter or another offer relevant to your current funnel, save it for the confirmation or “thank you” page after the visitor has already converted on your main offer.

Poor Load Time (or Other Technical Issues)

One of the major advantages of keeping your landing page minimal regarding content and conversion offers is that it also keeps the page light from a technical perspective. You could have the best offer in your industry with compelling landing page copy and slick, captivating visuals that make visitors want to know more about your product or service. It won’t matter if the technical side of your landing page falls.

According to Google, an increase in page load time from one second to three seconds can increase the page’s bounce rate by almost one-third. In their rush to build a creative, aesthetically-pleasing landing page that will also convert, many marketers forget to consider the technical side of building a successful landing page.

A few common reasons your landing page might be slow loading include:

Too many plugins. Many great marketing automation tools can enhance your web experience for visitors and provide you with a better understanding of their behavior through data. Unfortunately, having too many plugins can also cause your landing page to drag when people try to load it.
Images not optimized. Even if you size your images properly, they could be in the wrong format or not compressed the right way. There’s no need to work on manual image optimization. Plenty of helpful plugins and online tools can automatically take your images and compress them to load quickly on the web.
Caching problems. Page caching allows small files to be stored on a user’s computer the first time they access a site to increase load speed, but it also helps a page load more quickly on subsequent visits. This fast loading is important if you expect it might take a few visits for an average conversion, which is often the case with complex B2B offerings.

Broken or wasteful code and outdated plugins can also cause issues with how a site loads.

The Last Word on Landing Page Design

As marketers, we are all about efficiency. The goal of any campaign or initiative is to generate the most significant number of leads and sales with the smallest possible investment of time and money. But there are some aspects of marketing where streamlined simplicity should be the name of the game.

That’s the case when it comes to landing pages. By avoiding the common issues mentioned in this post – too much text, too many different offers, and slow page load time – you can bring your audience some simplicity. Doing so will guide them down a path to purchasing something that will ultimately help make their life easier, making them more productive or allowing their organization to remove critical roadblocks affecting progress towards important initiatives.

Looking for some expert help with your landing pages? Click here to fill out a short quiz to determine whether or not our team is a good fit for your needs.

By Raj C|2022-07-14T05:05:38-07:00July 25th, 2022|Landing Pages|0 Comments

The Most Important Paid Advertising Metrics for Your CRO

For a data-driven marketer that enjoys the challenge of finding patterns and applying them to business initiatives, paid ads are a great avenue to pursue growth. Besides how effectively they generate attention from a wide swath of online audiences – from healthcare professionals to manufacturing executives to business service providers – paid ad campaigns also provide a lot of information. Even when someone doesn’t fully engage with an ad campaign, it gives marketers feedback they can use to improve going forward.

And while this wealth of data generated by an ad campaign can be extremely valuable, it may pose a big challenge for some marketers. How do you know which data elements to give most of your attention? Which numbers really matter, and which might be somewhat deceptive as it relates to your campaign’s current success?

To help sort out your numbers, let’s go over some of the most essential paid ads metrics viewed through the lens of conversion rate optimization, the pursuit of converting more traffic into leads that have taken a specific action within your funnel.

Clickthrough Rate

You can calculate your ad campaign’s clickthrough rate as a percentage by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions, or how many times the ad shows up in a feed. Your clickthrough rate might not seem to be the most critical metric, but when paired with other numbers, it can help give you a good sense of where the problems may be in your campaign.

For example, you might compare your ad’s clickthrough rate (CTR) with the conversion rate of your campaign’s landing page. If your CTR is relatively high compared to your ad traffic, but you aren’t getting many conversions, it could be a sign that there’s an issue with the composition of your landing page. Use CTR as an indicator that reveals details about other conversion metrics.

Bounce Rate

A “bounce” is when a user loads only a single page and takes no action before leaving. Understanding your bounce rate is important because it helps tell a story about your ad campaign’s audience calibration. If you have a high bounce rate, it could be a sign that your ad isn’t showing up to the right audience. Your ad’s composition might draw people in, but they leave after it becomes clear the offer isn’t for them.

Another common culprit for high bounce rates is a technical error. This error sometimes comes in the form of a website that isn’t responsive and doesn’t load properly on a user’s device. If you notice a high bounce rate among mobile sessions, it’s probably a sign of some issue with your landing page or another part of your campaign on mobile.

Revenue Per Visitor

Revenue per visitor helps you quantify the portion of your ad campaign’s audience that converts into a paying client. It’s a simple calculation: the total number of visits to a campaign landing page divided by revenue earned from the ad campaign. Revenue per visitor helps you understand your campaign’s efficiency. For example, if your ads aren’t shown to an audience as large as you expected, but you’re still meeting internal projections related to sales and leads, limited traffic probably isn’t an issue.

On the other hand, when revenue per visitor is exceedingly low, it’s a sign that the audience for your ad campaign may not be as well-calibrated as you’d like or that there’s a block elsewhere in the funnel.

Meetings Set

In many of the most common B2B ad campaigns we see clients running, setting a meeting with someone responsible for sales is the typical next step. And while this element of the funnel may not seem directly related to an ad campaign, getting feedback about meetings with leads generated from ad campaigns is an excellent source of business intelligence.

For example, say you’re running a campaign centered on an ebook designed to inform prospects about proprietary business software your company developed. But after a few weeks of meeting with your sales team, they indicate that the lead magnet is giving leads an unrealistic perspective on what your software can accomplish. Now you have a specific diagnosis of how to improve your campaign. This scenario is another great example of why metrics should be shared with all of the company, even if they aren’t directly related to generating or processing them.

Getting feedback about meetings with leads generated from ad campaigns is an excellent source of business intelligence Click To Tweet

Time on Page

If visitors to your campaign landing page are spending a lot of time on the site and your conversion rate is where you want it to be, it’s a sign that your offer is compelling and makes people want to take the next step in your funnel. But if visitors have long sessions on your site without converting, it could indicate a problem with your offer, lead form, or whatever the next step in your campaign.

Like bounce rate, the time on page metric could indicate visitors are having trouble engaging with the offer in the desired manner. It may be a technical issue, something as simple as a button or link they can’t click with a mobile phone’s touch screen. Be sure to track this metric throughout the time your ad is up and running so that you can establish a benchmark for this metric to help understand when things are out of the ordinary.

Putting All Your Metrics Together

As you might have realized by now, there’s typically very little to gain from observing individual metrics in a vacuum. To truly make your ad campaign’s data actionable, you need to view it as a cohesive web of related measurements. Impressions are related to conversions, which are related to meetings set, and total revenue. This kind of connected thinking is the only reliable way to optimize your company’s ad campaigns with data.

But high-level success with this approach requires a bidirectional approach to data sharing within the company. Even as it relates to a specific ad campaign, getting information from other parts of your business – like sales and customer service, for example – can help optimize your efforts to get the most out of your ad spend. Not only does this philosophy help you increase the effectiveness of a single campaign, but it also creates an iterative profile of your ideal persona.

At FunnelEnvy, we specialize in helping clients maximize their ad campaigns by helping to unify data across the business. From social media campaign metrics to web analytics and sales, our platform allows you to generate a unified, detailed profile of your ideal customer that you can leverage for all types of marketing efforts in the future. We can also help optimize internal elements of your campaign, including landing pages and lead forms, to ensure that your funnel doesn’t have significant holes in it, causing leads to drop out.

Interested in learning more about our team and how we’ve helped some of the biggest names in the B2B tech space optimize their marketing funnels? Click here to fill out a short questionnaire to help us better understand your needs and determine if we’re a good fit to work together.

By Raj C|2022-06-30T04:53:52-07:00July 11th, 2022|Paid Media|0 Comments

The Importance of a Customer Data Platform (CDP) in Your Marketing

Customer data platforms (CDP) are like the connective tissue of your marketing. Like ligaments in our arms and legs, they bind all the different elements together and allow them to move in sync to accomplish the goals of the broader system.

A CDP isn’t a static piece of software that reads data and spits out metrics or provides abstract insights that may or may not be actionable. A good quality CDP is a bi-directional platform that acts as the “glue” of your marketing platform and also helps inform your intelligence and reporting.

This article will go over some of the benefits of CDPs and offer some tips on using them.

What Exactly Is a CDP?

According to Gartner, a customer data platform is “a software application that supports marketing and customer experience use cases by unifying a company’s customer data.” An effective CDP should not only help you process and understand the data gathered from your marketing campaigns; it should also provide information that enables you to direct your efforts going forward.

That’s a good definition, but it can be easier to fully understand a CDP when considering the benefits it can bring your marketing team. Let’s dive into a few everyday use cases for CDPs and explain why they will help you better understand your customers and prospects.

Segmentation of Personas

Distinguishing between the problems and objectives of different clients is one of the most common challenges in B2B marketing. By using a CDP to improve your ability to collect and analyze data from different places, you gain a more thorough understanding of what motivates different clients. A more well-rounded data set means you’re not just relying on interactions with your marketing funnels to get information about people interested in your offering. You can then use this information to segment assets more deeply like email messages, landing pages, pay-per-click ads, etc.

Unification of the Client Profile

Just as a CDP can help you differentiate between your personas, it can also provide a deeper dive into the needs of one audience. This ability allows your marketing team to go beyond vanity metrics and whether or not an offer was converted or clicked on.

Just as a CDP can help you differentiate between your personas, it can also provide a deeper dive into the needs of one audience. Click To Tweet

A common example in the world of B2B software is support interactions. We often see companies taking a siloed approach, where marketing uses one set of data, support uses another, and it’s challenging to put them together to draw overarching conclusions. Even if the raw data is available in some form – for example, a CRM accessible by the entire company – it can be challenging for all sides of the team to understand how to interpret the data and use it to take informed actions.

With a CDP, information flows openly from one part of the experience to the other in a way that is accessible and understandable for everyone who should be involved in its interpretation.

Enhance Data by Connecting It to Other Departments

The right type of CDP platform allows you to track and gather data from every angle of your business and connect everything into a single thread that makes sense in the broader context of the company. You’ll be able to glean deeper insights from some of the data you are already gathering, which can improve many different parts of the business.

Here’s an easy example: think about the data you are currently tracking from your landing pages. Unfortunately, much of this web analytics information likely falls into the “vanity metrics” category like page views, visits, bounce rates, etc. These data can be helpful, but only if you can put them together into a broader narrative that dictates decisions about your funnel.

Now incorporate a CDP into the picture. Not only can you put these metrics into the platform, but you can also enrich these basic web analytics KPIs by incorporating data from your marketing team – conversions, click-through rates, etc.

This path allows you to go beyond surface-level metrics for your landing pages and understand the specific revenue attributable to each interaction. You can take the normal numbers you look at from a landing page and more clearly understand their direct impact on your sales pipeline.

How Do You Choose a CDP?

We’ve spent a lot of time reviewing a CDP’s benefits. The next logical step to consider is the process of choosing a CDP. While the entire selection process is too complex to detail here fully, we can offer three general tips:

Clearly define your needs. Think about what specifically you are hoping to accomplish, at least on a broad level – you don’t need to go into great detail yet. Do you want to use a CDP to enhance your post-purchase support and improve churn numbers? Maybe you want to plug up some bad leaks in your funnel. Identifying multiple scenarios is okay, but ideally, you should have two or three that drive the process.
Incorporate company-wide stakeholders. Representatives from each team responsible for using the CDP in one way or another should have at least some degree of input during the selection process. Even if you want to move relatively quickly, it’s still beneficial to at least keep relevant team members abreast on updates with the selection process. Doing this avoids any unexpected delays or obstacles during the implementation stage.
Optimize for growth. Change is one of the only consistent elements in the B2B technology sector. As new protocols and tools are developed, the needs and goals of your target audience will undoubtedly shift. This shift leads to pivots, growth, and contraction – often in a very compressed timeframe. The best CDP for your company will be able to handle these changes without causing significant hiccups in your data collection.

Conclusion

It’s easy to see why some might initially be skeptical of a customer data platform as unnecessary complexity, another item to check off on the analytics to-do list. When you use a CDP to its full potential, it has the opposite effect: simplification. A CDP helps you enrich the data you’re already collecting and better connect the work of different team members. Ultimately it should paint a more detailed picture of the entire scope of your customer journey, from the first interaction with marketing collateral to repeat purchases over the long term.

Although these are tangible benefits, the process of going from considering a CDP to reaping its positive elements of it can be a difficult road. A CDP is a complex tool that touches almost every side of your business. For someone unfamiliar or new to selecting the right marketing technology, it’s especially critical to have expert input.

Our team at FunnelEnvy has several years of experience in simplifying our clients’ most complicated business software decisions. If you’re looking to use a CDP to go beyond the rote metrics that may or may not have value for your team, get in touch with us today. We can help you identify the key factors that should drive your CDP decision and advise you on some of the solutions that have worked well for companies in a similar scenario.

To get started, fill out this short quiz to learn about our pricing and how we may be able to help you grow.

By Raj C|2022-06-16T18:03:44-07:00June 27th, 2022|B2B|0 Comments

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