Your Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation

Behavior-Based Marketing Automation: Behavior-based marketing automation (otherwise known as behavioral marketing) refers to a system that triggers emails and other communication based on user activity on and off your site. It enables marketers to nurture leads and send them information only when it is most relevant to their point in the buying cycle.

Closed-loop marketing: The practice of closed-loop marketing is being able to execute, track and show how marketing efforts have impacted bottom-line business growth. An example would be tracking a website visitor as they become a lead to the very last touch point when they close as a customer.

Cross-platform marketing automation: refers to the ability of your emails to display well across different platforms like tablets and mobile devices. If you fail to optimize for mobile, you miss out on a huge opportunity to communicate with potential customers.

Drip marketing: A communication strategy that sends, or "drips," a pre-written set of messages to customers or prospects over time.

Lead nurturing: The act of educating a lead and moving them through the stages of your company’s customer lifecycle, improving the quality of that lead over time. Lead nurturing is about building trust and reciprocal relationships with your prospects to the point they become paying customers.

Lifecycle Stages: A lifecycle stage is a way to categorize your entire database of contacts based on where they’re at in the sales funnel. The lifecycle stages are often subscriber, lead, MQL, SQL, opportunity and customer. A lifecycle stage should determine how you interact and communicate with each contact.

Workflow/Automated Program: A series of automated trigger-based actions configured on the marketing automation system. These actions, ranging from sending emails to updating contact lists, are programmed to trigger based on user behavior.

API (Application Programming Interface): A specific set of “rules” (code) that software programs can follow to communicate with one another.

Automation Rules: Automation rules allow you to perform certain marketing and sales actions within your automation system, like sorting leads into different lists, based on criteria that you specify.

Behavioral Data: This is behavioral data that a marketing automation platform tracks such as emails opened, pages visited and webinars attended.

Contacts: Contacts are everyone in your marketing automation database. Each of these contacts will have a different lifecycle stage.

Demographic Data: This is the demographic data for your contacts collected by a marketing automation platform such as company, job title and location.

Known Visitor: A known visitor is someone who has visited your site with an email address associated to their IP address because they’ve filled out a form or opened/clicked an email you sent them and your platform started tracking them.

Marketing Technology Stack: A grouping of technologies that marketers leverage to conduct and improve their marketing activities. The essential components of this stack are a content management system (CMS), advertising technology, email, insights and analysis, and experience optimization.

IP Address (Internet Protocol Address): A number assigned to each device participating in a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. Most marketing automation systems recognize the IP addresses of website visitors to potentially identify anonymous visitors.

Personalization: Personalization or dynamic content refers to the ability to customize what each visitor to your site sees by using their demographic or behavioral data to swap out things like cover images, downloadable guides and more.

Smart List/Segment/Dynamic List: A smart list is a dynamic list that automatically adds contacts to it based on criteria you set out.

Trigger/Entry point: A trigger is where an automation starts, based on certain actions, like adding contacts to a particular list, sending out an email and even based on actions taken by a contact or a group of them.

Unknown Visitor: An anonymous visitor is someone who has visited your site but your marketing automation database does not have an email address to associate with their IP address.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM): A set of software programs that let companies keep track of everything they do with their existing and potential customers.

Lead scoring: Ranking prospects on a scale (based on attributes, behaviors, etc.) that represents their perceived value as a lead. The scores are used to prioritize the company’s engagement with the most valuable leads.

Opportunity: Opportunities are contacts who have become a real sales opportunity in your customer relationship management (CRM) database.

Pipeline Management: A cross-project management tool that systematically tracks open sales opportunities as they move through your sales process.

Always Be Closing (ABC): A phrase used to remind sales to always look for new customers, pitch products or services to those individuals, and then complete the sale. ‘Always Be Closing’, as a strategy, is about the salesperson being persistent but also knowing when to cut losses.

BANT: Budget, Authority, Need, and Time. A method for qualifying both likely and desirable sales prospects, who should have the proper resources for your product/ service.

Lead scoring: Ranking prospects on a scale (based on attributes, behaviors, etc.) that represents their perceived value as a lead. The scores are used to prioritize the company’s engagement with the most valuable leads.

Pipeline Management: A cross-project management tool that systematically tracks open sales opportunities as they move through your sales process.

Lead fit: How well a particular buyer matches your brand’s ideal prospect, or usual buyer.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM): A set of software programs that let companies keep track of everything they do with their existing and potential customers.

Smarketing: A fun phrase used to refer to the practice of aligning Sales and Marketing efforts.

A/B Testing: The process of comparing two variations of a single variable to determine which performs best in order to help improve marketing efforts. This is often done in email marketing (with variations in the subject line or copy), calls-to-action (variations in colors or verbiage), and landing pages (variations in content).

Analytics: The discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data. In marketing, it’s looking at the data of one’s initiatives (website visitor reports, social, email, etc.), analyzing the trends, and developing actionable insights to make better informed decisions.

Call-to-Action: A text link, button, image, or some type of web link that encourages a website visitor to visit a landing page and become a lead.

Content Management System (CMS): A web application designed to make it easy for non-technical users to create, edit, and manage a website.

Conversion Path: A conversion path is a series of website-based events that facilitate lead capture.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): The process of improving your site conversion using design techniques, key optimization principles, and testing. It involves creating an experience for your website visitors that will convert them into customers.

CTR: Click-through rate; a percentage of how many users click on a link included in a webpage or email, whichprovides a way of measuring the success of the campaigns.

Friction: Any element of your website that is confusing, distracting, or causes stress for visitors, causing them to leave your page.