“Why wouldn’t everybody use Click360 to run their marketing?” – Digital Marketing Specialist
Customer Profile:
The customer is a medium-size, publicly traded company in the manufacturing industry. They have a long, complex B2B sales-cycle that consists of selling products and services both directly and through channel partners. The customer’s main website has tens of thousands of distinct pages and millions of visitors each month and they receive thousands of new inquiries each month (more than they can call). The customer also has hundreds of thousands of “nurture” leads that had previously contacted the customer, but were not ready to purchase at that time.
Prior to engaging with Click360, the customer worked with a digital marketing agency for search engine optimization and targeted ads, and they had some tracking which they collected primarily for Google Analytics.
The customer uses a popular Customer Relationship Management platform (CRM) and a separate marketing automation platform. They do not have a dedicated analytics or data science team, and most of their prior analytics efforts had been fairly limited. Because they operate internationally, privacy and GDPR compliance were major considerations for all their analytics efforts.
Business Goals:
The customer’s main goals for Click360 were:
- Prove out marketing Return on Investment to justify expenditures;
- Allocate marketing resources and prioritize the marketing activities that result in the best sales outcomes (i.e., make the handoff to sales more effective);
- Prioritize new leads so that Business Development Representatives can maximize their efforts; and
- Find the most interesting “nurture” leads–the “needle in the haystack” problem.
What Click360 Did:
Click360 went to work right away collecting clickstream data and combining it with a custom CRM integration (i.e., not through the API). The customer added a single line of code on their website and provided access credentials to access their sales data; Click360 handled all of the other integration work.
Early on, we worked with the customer to setup daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly reports to prove ROI and identify trends.
Click360 also worked with the company to make sure they understand the terms and ideas used in Click360, and to make sure that definitions and concepts aligned with how they thought about their sales process. Click360 also tied into existing reports by pushing data into Google Analytics.
Finally, the customer used Click360’s application of Deep Learning to understand what actions indicate buying intent, and what the optimal way to treat each customer is. Click360 worked with marketing to align their efforts to drive higher quality leads and actions, and with business development representatives to properly prioritize them.
Business Results:
With Click360, the marketing team was able to track what is working and prove out their Return on Investment for marketing efforts. The marketing team used the periodic reports in their weekly meetings and for top-level reporting for their Board of Directors (the “50,000 foot view”). When challenged on the numbers (because they looked better than in the past when less tracking and analytical capability was done), they had the ability to drill all the way down to the attributions of individual pages and opportunities and prove that the numbers were correct. The ability to demonstrate their value and backup their metrics with proof helped the marketing team perform more effectively and gain respect from sales and executives, helping them fund additional marketing efforts.
Equally important, Click360 applied its Deep Learning to identify patterns of behavior that work and automatically segment visitors (both anonymous or known) according to their behavior and other attributes.
We discovered something even better than pareto efficiency: that about 20% of the visitors drove about 93% of revenue, and 31% of traffic drove over 99% of revenue.
This revelation was something they could simply not see in Google Analytics or other inference-based approaches. In effect, the customer was able to see that some visitors were worth many tens of thousands of dollars, while about 69% of visitors were worth a negligible amount.
On the marketing side, the company was able adapt its marketing efforts to retarget unknown visitors with advertisements, and to target highly-valued known leads with targeted emails.
For sales and demand gen, the company was able to have its representatives prioritize the new leads most likely to convert to opportunities and revenue, and even to expand to reach out to the “nurture leads” that suddenly became more likely to convert.
Conclusion
The customer in this case had a very complex B2B sales cycle, with data spilling all over the place. Click360 was able to integrate the customer’s various systems, combine the data, and process it to gain valuable insights for ROI calculations and to achieve greater than pareto efficiency by targeting the most valuable potential customers.
Overall, Click360 returned significantly increased sales and marketing efficiency and helped each of those teams improve their outcomes.