Marketing Automation for a SaaS Business
Having worked in a number of SaaS companies, I often get approached for help implementing “marketing automation” processes and platforms. Marketing automation can streamline and automate many marketing tasks and greatly increase the efficiency of your marketing, growth, sales, and account management teams. A well run marketing automation program can help you create, retain and extend customer relationships at scale.
The first order of business is figuring out the key actions you want to accomplish and which KPIs you want to affect with marketing automation. This will determine what tools will help you get there. There are many parts of the marketing and sales cycle. Automation around each one of them requires a different strategy, tactics, and ultimately tools.
As you start, consider the scope of what you hope to achieve with the marketing automation platform. Make sure to ask for input from customer support, account management, sales, business developer and SDR teams, because marketing automation is an extremely cross-functional task and all of these teams will be impacted by your decision and programs.
Clearly identify what you are hoping to automate:
- Outbound — prospects you’re contacting in an outbound manner. Your goals may be to generate interest and pass a lead on to an SDR, a sales executive or have the prospect interact with a piece of content.
- Lead nurture — Prospects that filled out an inquiry form or somehow else engaged with the business, but are not ready to become a customer.
- Signups/Onboarding — Potential customers that signed up to use your product but are not paying customers.
- Customer life cycle campaigns — Welcome emails, user guides, upsell, cross-sells and retention.
- Newsletters and other mass emails like promotion offers
As you may have noticed, the different parts of the lifecycle can be broken up into two categories: those triggered by a result of an interaction with a person and those triggered by a user’s interaction (or lack thereof) with your product. Many companies end up relying on a mix of platforms to service all of their needs, while others try to shoehorn one platform to serve multiple use cases. We’ll dive more into this when we discuss individual automation platforms.
The biggest mistake beginners make when they are thinking about marketing automation is trying to do too much. They get enamored with the increasingly complex features and functionality the platforms offer and decide that they need to use all of the features right away.
People will say things like “The platform allows us to have our website adapt in real time to customers based on the presumed industry of their company. Then we can ask them questions about their software needs and based on their responses put them in one of seven different nurture campaigns. If they open the email and don’t click then we can trigger a task for an SDR to call them. If they click…” and it goes on and on.
In theory, these schemes always sound clever, but in practice this much complexity always comes at the expense of executing any of the elements in a focused, high-quality way. It also leads to mistakes. Pick one part of the sales cycle, whether it’s outbound email, lead nurture or life cycle messaging and focus on getting results in one area before biting off the next chunk.
Regardless of where you decide to start, here are some important considerations for a successful marketing automation program deployment:
- Integration with your CRM — You need the marketing automation platform to sync with your CRM, which should be your global customer system of record. Emails sent, content downloaded, calls to prospect, should be all synced to your CRM.
- Customer segmentation — Your success depends on delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. This is why CRM integration is crucial to success. The CRM will tell you if the person still fits the criteria for the program. It could also mean ability to define and update lists based on properties such as last response time, email opened, last login to your product, features used, money spent, etc.
- Content — There is nothing worse than automatic drip emails that are always asking something of the recipient, without delivering any value. You need value-add content to leverage in the automation programs. This can be research data, white papers, videos, blog posts or anything else that is not a “buy my product” message. This is especially important if you’re looking at outbound and lead nurture campaigns.
- Organization — Although called “marketing automation”, this is very much a cross-functional project. The key question is how to distribute and who’s going to handle the responses that the program generates. For this, you need to work closely with your sales, business development and account management teams to figure out when and to whom to pass on the newly engaged customers.
- Analytics — Make sure that the platform you select let’s you understand the health of your lists, pipeline and automation programs. It should let you set guard rails so your prospects aren’t bombarded by daily emails or otherwise overwhelmed.
One more consideration to keep in mind is the billing model. Some automation platforms charge based on the number of prospects or users, which quickly gets expensive for a company with a large pipeline and potential market. Carefully consider the payment structure of any platform to see how it aligns with your lead and customer volume.
Once you have a very clear understanding of what part of the customer engagement cycle you want to automate, you’re ready to consider the technology that helps you get there. I will go through the different parts of the sales, onboarding and retention cycle in future posts to outline platforms and best practices around deploying them.
Follow up posts:
Thank you to Alan Blank for this feedback and suggestions for this post.
