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Optimizing Salesforce Autoresponse Emails

Optimizing Salesforce Autoresponse Emails

Automation is the name of the game when it comes to getting the most out of Salesforce. Capturing lead information with the handy web-to-lead functionality is one of the core elements for enabling Sales teams. Not only is the information the lead entered from the web form stored directly onto a lead page in Salesforce, but you can set up the system to auto assign a Sales rep, and have that user notified regarding the new inquiry.

But what if your Sales team isn’t going to be able to follow up right away? You don’t want to lose that momentum. Or maybe you just want to buy your team a bit of time to ensure they can do their research before reaching out? You guessed it, automation is the answer.

The best option here is the web-to-lead autoresponse emails. Once the template and sending filters are setup, an email will be automatically sent out to the new lead, as soon as their info registers in the system. As this feature comes standard on the CRM, we have a few tips below for setting up and optimizing your Salesforce autoresponse emails.

Setup your template (letterhead)

To make life easy on yourself, start by setting up a template, also known in Salesforce as a letterhead. This way, every successive, similar email you want to build will already have the same basic components, such as a header logo, and ensure they all look the same.  Click here for steps on creating a letterhead

(This can also be done in Pardot if you want nicer looking emails. By default, Salesforce offers limited formatting options for your emails)

Create the different variations dependant upon the use case

For this, you need to define the when and the why of each email you are going to be using. Did you capture the lead from a demo video, whitepaper download, or simply someone clicking a “contact us” button?

Best practice for both Sales and Marketing is to send different emails in each of these use cases. But now that you have your letterhead, the basic formatting is already taken care of. From there, create your first email, and you can always use the clone option when making more to quickly build variants that feature small tweaks.

Content is king

Of course, you need to make sure that the content of the email is relevant and specific to the use case. Don’t get off to a bad start by thanking someone for watching a video if they haven’t seen any video. A few other tips for these autoresponse emails.

  • Use merge tags – marketing researchers have proven time and again that adding in a merge tag and personalizing, like the lead’s first name, can have a big impact on improving how an email is received.
  • Give added value – another handy marketing trick is to follow up with added value to further engage. Whether it be a blog post, success story or any other content you have created, just be sure that it can add some real value for your lead.

 

Define your web to lead autoresponse rules

Once you have all of your emails built, it’s time to make sure they send to the right lead. For this, Salesforce allows you to build your sending rules on a large number of fields in either the lead, campaign or current user.

For example, a common use here is the “Lead Source” default field. Simply that you will send a different email to each lead, based on where they came into the system. Whichever fields you choose, do make sure to pick reliable fields that won’t be changing frequently, or can have data error problems. Click here for steps on setting up the autoresponse rules.

 

-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team


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App of the Week – Email-to-anything: Lead/Custom Case Automation

App of the Week – Email-to-anything: Lead/Custom Case Automation

Email integration with any Salesforce object? Including custom objects? It might sound too good to be true, but this app is 100% real.  With this handy app you can setup sales automation (Email to Lead or Opportunity); support automation (Email to Custom Case; Create IT Support Requests Automatically; Raise trouble tickets for a Salesforce Helpdesk) and just generally auto-create any record from emails: tasks, contacts, events or any object. What’s more, you can integrate with any email client.  

Email-to-anything allows you to automatically create, update & import any record. Also send emails from any Object & store full email history & conversations within Salesforce.

Check it out here!

 

App of the Week – D&B Optimizer – Dun & Bradstreet Account and Lead Data for Salesforce

App of the Week – D&B Optimizer – Dun & Bradstreet Account and Lead Data for Salesforce

D&B Optimizer

 

Using your customer data is very important. However, not all companies have the tools that can really give them significant benefits. The D&B Optimizer works to give you better account and lead data. With this data in hand, you can efficiently prioritize accounts based on critical data insights, align territories, segment markets, and identify and link companies in the same family tree to keep sales and marketing strategies on track.

D&B Optimizer automatically improves the account and lead data powering your Salesforce environment to make it cleaner, more complete, and actionable.

Check it out here!

 

Lead Management Tips with Pardot

Lead Management Tips with Pardot

Proper lead management often requires more planning and detail work than most people realize. Doing it the right way is much more than a “set it and forget it” type of mentality. However, when done properly, a few simple best practices can really boost your company and help you keep a pipeline full of qualified, and worthwhile leads.

 

So below, we have a short list of some of these best practices. Some are specific to using Pardot, and some are just generally good ideas when it comes to lead management in general.

1. Make sure Sales and Marketing are aligned.

For any lead management plan to work, marketing and sales need to be on the same page. When a lead enters the system, many times they are not yet “sales-ready”.

The job of marketing is to nurture these prospects through education, value, and promotion, so they get to the point where there are legitimately interested and knowledgeable enough to be ready to talk to an account executive, but also to find out more about them to determine if they are a good fit. If all goes well, you can weed out the prospects who aren’t a good fit, and begin sending sales a steady stream of qualified prospects.

This means mapping out a clear sales process in addition to the marketing process, and defining where and how leads are handed off to Sales.

2. Track anonymous visitors and use their history once they opt-in

This is one of the staple items of using Pardot. When you setup Pardot, you add a little bit of tracking code to all of your essential web pages, forms, and links. When a prospect converts by filling out a form or gives you their email, all of that data will be automatically added to their profile.

This gives you a detailed history of how they went about looking at your company, the path they took to get to conversion, data on how successful your campaigns are and hopefully specific info on the prospect themselves. All of this happens passively, but in the end allows you to improve your campaigns, and understand how best to connect with your target audience.

3. Score leads properly

Essential to know when to turn over your leads to Sales, is scoring your leads. Each and every action a prospect takes, from visitng your web pages to clicking on your links carries with it some level of interest. But don’t confuse casual interest with intent to buy. Take some time and consider exactly what actions are good indicators (such as looking at a pricing page), and score them appropriately.

In the end, it is the action-oriented items, like signing up for a demonstration, that usually indicates the really interested parties, and should be marked as your hotter leads. Understand the difference is essential so that you don’t assign un-interested prospects to Sales.

Pardot makes this extremely easy, through the lead scoring customization page. Users can alter each and every standard scoring item, as well as create all sorts of custom score objects to fit each company’s unique cycle.

4. Keep the whole sales cycle in mind

Properly nurturing a lead means working with them throughout the sales cycle. The job of marketing is to nurture these prospects through education, value, and promotion, so they get to the point where there are legitimately interested and knowledgeable enough to be ready to talk to an account executive, but also to find out more about them to determine if they are a good fit. If all goes well, you can weed out the prospects who aren’t a good fit, and begin sending sales a steady stream of qualified prospects.

You can and should use every channel at your disposal, from email to social media to partner media channels. Content offers should include thought leadership pieces, guides, tips, industry research, and other pieces of content that help them solve their daily pains and addresses the particular problem you’re targeting with your product. Just remember, that this nurturing should continue throughout the entire duration of the sales cycle, and (to a lesser degree) beyond the sale as well.

Again, Pardot makes all of this easy. With connectors to most social media channels, as well as integrated email and link tracking, you can easily stay in touch with all of your prospects and deliver content anytime, anywhere

5. Create a target buyer profile

It’s pretty straightforward, how can you find and manage leads properly, if you don’t have a target in mind? Are you selling to B2B or B2C? Small companies or enterprise? Are you looking at a particular location or vertical? Are you selling to a CEO, marketing director, or another decision maker?

Setting up one or multiple profiles that both marketing and sales can use is just another trick to make sure your lead management efforts are giving you the best results.

Pardot offers a sophisticated profile creation tool. Users can create multiple profiles using characteristic traits such as location, industry, job title, company size and more. Then, each of these characteristics can be given a grade value, resulting in each prospect being assigned an overall grade for how closely they fit your ideal buyer.

So there you have it. Some simple but powerful tactics to better manage your leads.

 

-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team

 


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Tips for Better Lead Scoring in Salesforce and Pardot

Tips for Better Lead Scoring in Salesforce and Pardot

 

Getting a large funnel of leads is a big part of the job for any marketer. However, once you have a good volume of leads, you need to do something with them. Specifically, you need to have good qualifying parameters set up so your sales team doesn’t spend a ton of time with leads who are either uninterested or just not ready. To find out who is really interested in your product, you need to set up your lead scoring properly.

When it comes to Pardot, your lead scoring is based upon specific actions taken by your prospects, such as email opens, link clicks, downloads, etc. The idea here is to establish how much the prospect is interested in you. The more engaged the prospect is with your website and your content, the more confident you can be that they are interested in you and your product/service.

Alternatively, how interested you are in the prospect is a separate scoring system in Pardot known as prospect grading. In this article we won’t be discussing grading, other than to say that it is through the grading system that you can determine your ideal lead based on industry, geography, title, etc. This grade gets attached to the prospect so that when a prospect seems interested in you, via lead scoring, you should have sufficient data to determine how much you want to engage with that prospect.

So without further ado, here are our quick tips to help you get the best results from your Pardot lead scoring.

Assign different scores for different pages and different actions.

As one of the foundations of any good lead scoring plan, you need to be sure that you have some variety in your scores. You most likely have a few pages on your site that are “more important” such as a pricing page or product detail page. These pages should have higher point values than say, “about us” or your blog page.

Similarly, not all actions are equal. While it is great that someone has clicked on a number of your emails, and maybe even downloaded a paper, it certainly isn’t as much of a positive flag as someone who has submitted a form on a contact page.

Negative scores and degradation

Negative scoring can be just as important as varying your scores for “more and less important” actions and pages. Over time, prospect scores can easily become inflated, as clicks and pageviews slowly add up. Negative scores can help keep this in check, such as assigning negative scores for views of your “Jobs” page, as you don’t want to be focusing your time on job seekers, or automatically be deducting points for a prospect who has been inactive for a certain period of time.

Keep an eye out for Spam

Unfortunately, there are a lot of spammers out there, and for whatever reason, they may be filling out forms, and being entered as prospects into your system. A couple things to look for that may indicate a spam prospect: a form that is filled out without the expected capitalizations in the name or company fields, or inputted field data that is basically gibberish words.

One other thing to keep in mind is that leads using an email address from either Gmail or Yahoo may indicate less reliable prospects. Whenever possible, try to focus on prospects with business email addresses. In any of these cases, keep an eye out for prospects whose data doesn’t seem to be in line with what you normally see. If something seems off, they might not be a good prospect.

Setup a lead scoring threshold

Once a prospect gets to a certain point threshold, you can set up notifications for your Sales team. This ensures that Sales only get notified after a prospect has gone through a certain level of qualification. A simple automation rule should do this trick nicely. Pardot recommends initially setting this threshold at 100 points, if you are going by their built-in scoring rules. Take some time to think and plan for what your ideal scoring threshold is, based on your frequency of marketing content, and how you are scoring each action. And don’t be afraid to tweak your threshold over time if you aren’t getting the results you need right off the bat.


Think twice when you assign points for email opens

Learning this one the hard way can really throw off your scores. Don’t get us wrong, email opens are essential for marketing, but they aren’t the best indicator of interest or engagement. After all, some people open all of their emails just to have a clean inbox! An email opened does not necessarily equal email read. 

If you are sending out a lot of emails, you should really consider not assigning a score for individual email opens, as it can give you an inflated score, that really doesn’t reflect how interested the prospect is. Better metrics to consider for emails will be click-through and content downloads.

Discuss your scoring model with the Sales Team

From the get-go,  marketing and sales should get aligned on this process. Sales can help you determine which metrics have been the best indicators of a quality prospect in the past and they can help you decide at what scoring threshold they want to get notified about individual prospects.

With all of these tips on board, you should be well on your way to having a better-qualified group of leads.

 

-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz team