The Complete Guide to HealthTech Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is intended to simplify your marketing efforts. The automation itself, however, is both complex as a topic and as a strategy for many B2B technology companies. 

So, let’s start with the basics.

What Is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is a combination of software and processes designed to increase efficiency, while decreasing marketing overhead by automating once manual tasks, such as email marketing, social media postings, and lead qualification.

What Are the Benefits of Marketing Automation?

1. 1. Decreased Costs: Marketing automation helps reduce costs by decreasing the number of staff required and streamlining systems. For example, a small team of two to three people can do the same amount of work as a team of 50 when automated campaigns are set up in advance and run on autopilot in the background of other day-to-day efforts. One report shared that marketing automation drives a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead.
   2. Elimination of Busy Work: Every marketer wants to save time—and marketing automation allows you to do so. By leveraging software that frees up staff from “busy work”—like manually reaching out to someone who downloads a piece of content—your marketing team can get back to the creative tasks that inspire and engage them.
   3. Stronger Sales-Marketing Relationships: Every company dreams of aligning two of its most important teams: marketing and sales. Sales and marketing alignment is a sought-after synergy that marketing automation aids and facilitates. Simply put, automation provides marketing with the tools to hand more qualified leads over to the sales team, resulting in more opportunities to close.
   4. Fewer Cold Calls: While it may be hard to ever eliminate cold calls and cold emails from your sales and marketing efforts, marketing automation provides an opportunity to reach out to leads who have previously engaged with your brand and have provided some type of interest via their journey through your marketing automation workflows.
   5. Improved Reporting: Any time you can harness hard data, instead of anecdotal data, your ability to refine, scale, and predict greatly improves. With marketing automation, your marketing team will be able to easily report on the impact of particular emails, landing pages, social posts, paid ads, etc.
   6. Increased Revenue: While marketing automation can decrease costs, which can help with overall revenue, it is also proven to have a direct impact on sales goals. On average, B2B marketers with successful marketing automation programs report a 20% increase in sales opportunities—and another 78% of marketers identify automation as a key contributor to improved revenue.

How Is Marketing Automation Tied to Inbound Marketing?

Marketing automation is directly tied to inbound marketing, as it’s the primary aid for moving buyers from awareness to consideration to decision within the Buyer’s Journey.  

Before automation, marketing and sales teams alike took educated guesses as to where a prospect was in the Buyer’s Journey, using manual processes to guide someone along from one stage to the next. (And sometimes, getting the bad reputation of being sneaky!) The conversion process was longer and less effective than it needed to be. But with marketing automation, prospects move through the Buyer’s Journey more quickly while providing the marketing and sales teams with data about the success of their campaigns.

In short, you should use marketing automation to fuel your inbound marketing efforts.

What exactly does that look like? We’ll get deeper and deeper into the details in each section of this guide.

Key Takeaway

Marketing automation is a process that increases efficiency and revenue, while decreasing spend and overall effort. And whether you work at a lean start-up or at a well-staffed large company, marketing automation gives you more horsepower—it allows you to accomplish more tasks, interact with potential customers more quickly, serve up content, and identify the best candidates for further exploration.

Building a Strong Foundation

Many healthcare solutions hear the benefits of marketing automation and want to jump right in. However, there are quite a few foundational steps you need to take first before investing in a marketing automation platform or strategy makes sense.

1. Measurable Goals

No marketing plan is complete without some measurable goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). Set a few measurable goals for your marketing automation plan so you have an idea of what success looks like.

Goals can be related to:

• Total number of leads, marketing qualified leads (MQLs), or sales qualified leads (SQLs)
• Email open rates and click-through rates
• Lifecycle changes (e.g. moving from an SQL to an opportunity)
• Number of contacts enrolled in workflows
• Demo requests
• General conversion rate

That last goal is likely the easiest to measure and a great place to start using marketing automation software. For example, in HubSpot, each marketing automation workflow comes with the ability to “set a goal.” This goal can be anything from a lifecycle stage change to a form submission.

The workflow tool automatically calculates the conversion rate based on the number of total contacts enrolled, and the number of those who met the select goal. For example, this workflow above for a B2B SaaS company is geared toward MQLs. A prospect is automatically enrolled when they are marked as an MQL. If the MQL fills out a demo form or becomes an opportunity based on lead-scoring, they “meet the goal” and the conversion rate is automatically calculated.

Goals are important because they provide marketing and sales teams with a destination or an end point. Before you get started, identify why you’re investing in marketing automation and what you want the results to be.

2. Personas

Personas are at the center of inbound marketing—as getting the right piece of content in front of the right person at the right time (via marketing automation) is essential. However, the big problem with personas is that marketing teams get too hung up on the specifics about the “ideal client” based on a few small sample sets, rather than considering important questions like: What types of problems do they encounter? Where do they search for answers? What are their skillsets? What motivates them to make a decision? What are their obstacles? 

If your company already has personas, now is a good time to evaluate them for their effectiveness. Do you really understand your prospective buyers, their problems, needs, and wants? Do you understand the difference between buyer personas and user personas? If not, modify them so that you can make smarter choices when it comes to automating your processes.

If you don’t currently have any personas, you will definitely want to create at least 2-3 before getting started with your inbound strategy. However, if you’re pressed for time, don’t get hung up on the nitty-gritty details and specifics.

To get started with crafting your personas, start by asking “who is our target audience?” From there, you can likely come up with a variety of segments within that target audience. For example, consider healthcare technology automation. A medical device company might say its target audience is hospital leadership. Within that audience, there are segments in clinical, finance, technology, operations, and executive leadership. From here, it’s important to dive into each segment’s problems and how your product offers solutions to those problems. List the questions they ask, and be ready to answer those questions in emails and other content.

3. Content Offers

Content offers can aid in kicking off a marketing automation campaign (say for example, when someone attends a webinar), and also fuel your automation campaigns by acting as the trigger points that increase lead score, send emails, and notify sales reps.

This Content Marketing Matrix developed by Smart Insights helps you visualize and map the most effective types of content based on the stage of the funnel/Buyer’s Journey. Mapping your content makes it easy to set up automation campaigns because you’ll know when to introduce different types of content to nudge individuals down the funnel. 

4. Marketing Automation Software

The marketing automation software you select will be the ties that bind all of your marketing automation components together. In order to automate processes, you’ll need a strong platform that makes it easy to implement the components of marketing automation effectively. In the next section of this guide, we’ll discuss selecting marketing automation software more thoroughly.

Software Components & Implementation

Once you’ve selected your inbound marketing software, you’ll need to continue to build upon your strong foundation with key marketing automation components within your software.

1. Landing Pages

Landing pages need to be set up to house your content offers and lead qualifying forms, and are an essential component of any inbound/automation strategy. In fact, research from HubSpot shows that companies see a 55% increase in leads when they up their number of landing pages from 10 to 15. Landing pages have the highest conversion rate among signup pages at 24%. Landing pages are the lynchpin of your lead generation efforts, so make the most of your B2B landing page with these best practices. We’ve outlined instructions in these articles.

2. Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is the process of automatically vetting targets as they travel through your automated purchase process. Lead scoring is arguably the most important component of your marketing automation strategy, as it is one of the major utilities that will keep the automated program moving forward. For example, when a lead score hits 50, you can set it so that the lifecycle stage changes to MQL, the sales rep is notified, and your emails change sequence and tone.

What makes a lead score change? There’s quite a long list that includes:

• A link being clicked
• A form being completed
• A web page being visited
• A webinar registration or attendance
• A certain number of emails being opened
• A particular amount of time being spent on your site

And the list goes on! Do your best to base your lead scoring off of data and don’t be afraid to cautiously adjust as the launch continues.

3. An Accurate Database

An accurate database holds the same level of importance as lead scoring. Ensuring the contacts in your database that you’ll be enrolling have up-to-date data is essential, as getting the right piece of content in front of the right person at the right time relies on this. 

As you review your database, you’ll want to first ask these questions: 

• • What information is essential for us to know about our products and services?
  • What information would we want to segment by?
  • What information would we want to personalize by?

In most cases, you won’t need every field in your CRM filled out, but it is important to focus on getting the data you need to communicate and segment appropriately. 

For most B2B tech companies, this means having the following fields accurate at a minimum:

• First and Last Name
• Company Name
• Email
• Persona
• Lifecycle Stage

However, we also recommend having accurate data for the following fields because of privacy concerns brought about by CCPA and GDPR:

• State
• Country
• Account Owner (sales rep who owns the account)

There may also be additional data you want to track that is specific to your company, such as the package level a client has, a prospect’s budget, or their biggest obstacle. These will help you segment even further, which ultimately results in more successful campaigns.

4. Automated Email Workflows

Without automated email workflows, you’d be lacking a primary component of marketing automation. Workflows can be used for building awareness of your brand, educating your targets with your perspective, and moving targets to buy.

In short, workflows are the conveyer belt moving contacts through the Buyer’s Journey.

We’ll dive deeper into automated email workflows later in this guide.

5. Personalization and Dynamic Content

Based on the accuracy of your data, you’ll want to use personalization and dynamic content throughout your marketing automation campaigns so they don’t appear automated. For example, this means including a contact’s first name and/or company name in an email.

Key Takeaway

A successful marketing automation plan requires numerous different pieces that all depend on one another and work together. As you get started with marketing automation, you’ll want to“check” all these boxes to set the foundation for success.

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Selecting your marketing automation software is a big commitment. With so many essential components, you definitely don’t want to get everything set up in one platform, only to be unhappy and then switch. The most popular marketing automation software options are HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot—each with its own pros and cons. With the boom of the marketing automation industry, there have also been quite a few smaller competitors popping up with less robust, but more affordable options.

Timing

While we don’t recommend purchasing software without any hint of a plan, you will need to purchase software before you actually get started with marketing automation, so it is clear which tools you have available to you. 

Once you have a goal, your personas, content offers, and a full-time employee to execute your automation strategy, it’s a good time to invest in your automation software.

Software Considerations

As the marketing industry grows, so will your automation options—so you’ll want to make sure you take the time to vet all of your potential providers. As you consider your marketing automation provider, be sure to inquire about the following:

• Functionality: Which of the marketing automation components are most important to your business and your strategy? Does the software do what you need it to do? Make a list of the most important traits your ideal platform has, and be sure to address those with each of your potential providers.
• Ease-of-use: Be sure to ask each of your potential vendors for a demo and sandbox access. You’ll be spending a lot of time in here, especially out of the gate, so ensuring you feel comfortable using the software is key.
• Future-proof design: “Future-proof” software isn’t something that all buyers consider—but it is vital to your investment. Because switching automation platforms should be avoided, you’ll want to be sure that you select a vendor that has a proven history of innovation and scheduled software updates. When you make a big investment, you’ll want your provider to grow as you do.
• Integrations with other products: Most marketing automation platforms will offer a variety of integrations—some, stronger than others. Make a list of the systems your company currently uses (or might plan to use in the future), and inquire about integration possibility and sophistication.
• Support: Inquire about the level of support, response times, etc. We all know that time is of the essence in the world of marketing, so getting prompt responses will be important to your sanity.
• Educational content and thought leadership: While the internet does make plenty of content widely available, working with a provider that produces its own educational content is important because the company will be a true partner throughout the length of your relationship.
• Testimonials and case studies from similar clients: It’s not only important to hear from other clients using the platform, but you’ll want to know how clients similar to you use it. Ask for these specifics, if you can.
• Price: Don’t get hung up on the price tag. Rather, determine how it stacks up against the other options when you add in all features and compare “apples to apples.”

There are obviously other players besides “the big three.” Just take a look at this comparison of all leading marketing automation platforms from G2 Crowd.

Key Takeaway

With so many viable providers in the marketplace, we encourage you to register for demos with each marketing automation software company you’re considering and weigh the pros and cons of each one as it relates to your marketing team and process.

Marketing automation, while time-saving, can also be a beast to set up. It requires you to establish KPIs, map content and lead scoring, and create dozens of unique and creative emails right out of the gate. Because automation happens over a series of weeks or months, it also means you don’t always get the immediate gratification of measuring the success of an email campaign. Whether you’re completely new to marketing automation, or you’re looking to improve your efforts, here are the most popular use cases for marketing automation.

Getting Started

Before you dive into the marketing automation methods below, you’ll want to have the following marketing automation components set up:

• Lead Scoring: Lead scoring in many cases will be the trigger that continues automation. You’ll want to be sure this is set up before implementing any automated email campaigns.
• Content Database: While content is a key component of marketing automation, ensuring you have it organized in a single location by persona and funnel stage will make it easy to pick and choose content for each email—saving you time and making your emails more effective.
• KPIs: In the next section of this guide we’ll discuss how to establish your KPIs and goals, as they are essential to nail down before you begin your automation strategies.

By having these components set up, you’ll be able to hit the ground running with creating campaigns that make an impact.

Social Media Marketing

The simplest use case for marketing automation is social media automation. Unlike email automation or lead scoring, which requires quite a bit of setup, social media automation does not. To automate your social media marketing, all you need to do is schedule your social media posts in advance, on a weekly or monthly basis. While there are plenty of social media automation platforms out there already, like HootSuite, Buffer, and SproutSocial, some marketing automation platforms like HubSpot include a built-in social automation tool.

With social media automation, you can:

• Schedule social media posts in advance for major platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram
• Monitor what your competitors are doing
• Link social media posts to campaigns to monitor overall success
• Track referral website traffic from social media

Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is the most common use case for marketing automation. This is the process of developing relationships with buyers at all stages of the sales funnel/Buyer’s Journey. While lead nurturing is critical to increasing conversion rates and revenue, asking your sales team to consistently communicate with all of their leads at all stages of the funnel is a near impossible request. This is where marketing automation comes in.

Marketing automation empowers your marketing team (and/or sales team) to maintain consistent communications and successfully nurture leads, while saving time.

Lead Nurturing with Marketing Automation

Lead nurturing campaigns are essential for keeping prospective buyers engaged with your brand across their journey through the funnel. Essentially, lead nurturing is achieved by automating a series of emails that builds brand awareness, trust, and loyalty. While, of course, your sales team may have previously done this manually, automation provides you a platform and process that don’t take away a sales rep’s precious time with bottom-of-the-funnel buyers.

In general, the goals of lead nurturing with marketing automation are:

• Build brand awareness and establish trust by providing helpful content to buyers during different stages of the funnel
• Address pain points to build confidence in your brand and solutions
• Gently nurture buyers from awareness to consideration to decision
• Ultimately, earn a conversion that moves a prospect from the “lead nurturing” stage of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel to meet with a sales rep

Easy Campaigns for Getting Started

Welcome Campaign

A “welcome” campaign or email is one of the simplest forms of marketing automation, but also one of the most effective. This is the first impression you get to make with a new customer, blog subscriber, newsletter subscriber, or prospective customer via email. Welcome emails provide you an opportunity to share content and special offers, and most importantly, to establish a relationship with your new contact. 

Welcome campaign emails should be sent when a new contact subscribes to your blog or newsletter.

Because sending a welcome email is as simple as automating a single email, this is a great way to get started on your marketing automation journey. Your welcome email should include:

• A warm welcome and a “thanks!”
• Some expectations: How often will they hear from you now that you have their email?
• An easy way to update subscriber email preferences

Content Download Campaign

When someone downloads a piece of content on your website, they’re essentially raising their hand and saying “hi, I’m interested in this topic, but not necessarily your brand.” However, you, of course, want them to be interested in both. 

Once a website visitor converts on your website, this is the prime opportunity to keep them engaged with your brand and build trust. It’s important that they are engaged at this stage in their journey so you can turn leads into MQLs. You’ll also want to automate this process because it can be extremely cumbersome (and less effective) to execute manually.

Keep in mind that you might have many different campaigns based on the type of content and subject at hand. For example, someone who downloads an eBook clearly intended for the awareness phase (such as a how-to guide) likely needs more nurturing than someone who downloads a buyer’s guide. Likewise, if your B2B technology company offers a variety of products, you may need different workflows for different products to ensure the content is most relevant.

However, regardless of the funnel stage, the process remains rather similar. When someone downloads a piece of content, you should send a  series of 3-5 automated emails over 9-15 days. We recommend spacing emails about three days apart to capitalize on the momentum of the download, without being “salesy” or overbearing.

What does that campaign look like? Here’s an example of how you might automate your emails for someone who downloaded a top-of-the-funnel piece of content:

• Email 1: Send another high-level content offer, but make sure it is different than the one they already received. For example, if they downloaded an infographic on better testing for EHR changes, three days later, send them a white paper that speaks to an aspect of EHR testing emphasizing the benefits.
• Email 2: Send a middle-of-the-funnel content offer, such as a longer eBook or case study. Again, you’ll want to be sure the topic at hand is similar to the content the prospective buyer originally downloaded.
• Email 3: Send a bottom-of-the-funnel content offer, asking them to request a demo, schedule a consultation, or meet with a rep.

You may want to send additional content offers before you get to the bottom-of-the-funnel content in order to gauge the interest of your buyers, but this will also hinge on the amount of content you have available. Only a small percentage of those you email to will convert during campaigns like this. We will explore how to market to those who grow cold in the next section.

Six Essential Automated Marketing Campaigns for HealthTech Organizations

Once you get your feet wet with some simple marketing automation campaigns, it’s time to dive in a little deeper. Most B2B technology companies benefit from automating the following lead nurturing campaigns:

• Hot Leads Workflows: These workflows are meant to engage someone who is already deeper in the funnel and may already be an MQL. They are constantly visiting your website, downloading content, attending webinars, and even engaging with you on social media. In this case, a particular lead score should automatically trigger a series of emails to be sent. Plan to send a series of 3-5 emails, each three days apart, with bottom-of-the-funnel content offers. You’ll want to end your workflow by asking the lead to meet with a rep—only if they’re still engaging with you, of course.
• Cold Leads Workflows: Unfortunately, you’ll likely run into cold leads more often than hot leads—and this happens for a variety of reasons that are sometimes completely out of your control, even if you’ve done a great job with marketing automation. The purpose of a cold lead workflow is to re-engage a lead that “went cold” during a previous workflow. Maybe they downloaded a piece of content and then never opened your next three emails. Maybe they weren’t ready to buy three months ago, but they could be now! The best way to kick off a cold lead workflow is with a question-based email like “is there anything new with your business?” or “we just launched this new resource, and it reminded me of your business.” Because you don’t want to annoy your cold leads, keep this workflow to two emails or less, sent at least three months after their last engagement. This workflow could automatically be triggered using a field such as “months since last engagement” or manually triggered by a sales rep in your CRM.
• Dark Opportunity Recovery Workflow: Similar to a cold lead workflow, with a dark opportunity recovery workflow, your purpose is to re-engage someone that was once engaged. However, this is for recovering an opportunity, someone who was further down your pipeline. While a sales rep may typically want to nurture this opportunity on their own, creating a series of 2-3 emails they can use to see if the opportunity is still interested can save them time.
• Customer Engagement Workflows: We all know that it is cheaper to retain a current client than to obtain a new one—so you can’t forget about your existing customer base! You’ll want to set up a series of at least three emails for this group. 
  • The first should be a “welcome” email, similar to your original welcome campaign. Thank them for becoming a client, and let them know where they can find key resources and information that’s relevant to them. 
  • In a second email, 2-3 weeks later, ask them how things are going. Based on how they answer that email, you could automate a series of actions. For example, if they select an option that says they’re unhappy, maybe have an internal notification sent to your client success team. Or, if they indicate they’re very pleased, ask them to write you a review on a site like G2 Crowd.
  • Finally, 2-3 months after they’ve become a client, you’ll want to promote products and/or services that are technically “upgrades” or add-ons to their original purchase. This can, again, be a single email or a series of emails.
• Closed/Lost Workflows: It’s important to engage your clients, but it is also important to engage those who didn’t become clients 6-12 months after you lost the deal. Sometimes, people are unhappy with their choices, and you can reach them at the right time. Set up a series of 1-2 emails that automatically send 6-12 months after a deal is lost. You know your buying/sales cycle better than anyone else, so choose the timing that is right for you. For example, if you know that on average, a solution takes six months to deploy, you’d want to check in 9-12 months later, to ensure the lost prospect has had time to use the new product. It is usually helpful to note a reason why the deal was lost, such as budget, features, etc. When someone marks a lead as “closed/lost” in your CRM, this workflow can be automatically triggered. You can even go so far as to create different workflows based on why a deal was lost, such as budget. Closed/lost workflows can also be used for clients that have left your company. You would simply want to swap out content and messaging.
• Workflows by Persona: All of the workflows in this list have one thing in common: while still effective in a broad sense, they become even more effective when made personalized. Creating different workflows for your top three personas will help you write more compelling content that is targeted toward each of your personas’ key wants and needs.

Utility Workflows and Automation

Marketing automation isn’t just about engaging your prospective buyers and current clients—it is about automating processes that were previously manual. We like to call these “utility workflows.” 

For example, maybe your marketing team used to manually email a particular sales rep every time someone downloaded your buyer’s guide. With a marketing automation platform, you can set up a step within your workflow to notify the appropriate rep. 

You may also want to set up utility workflows for automatically changing the lifecycle stage based on lead score. For example, you could create a workflow that makes it so when a contact’s lead score hits say, 85, their new lifecycle stage would automatically become MQL. Then, they’d automatically be enrolled in the appropriate workflow.

Depending on your automation platform and CRM integration, you may have a variety of options available to you, including:

• Sending an internal email
• Changing a contact/company property
• Clearing a contact/company property
• Enrolling a contact in a new workflow
• Removing contacts from or adding contacts to lists

While these options may be included in the workflows you’re already setting up, sometimes separate workflows are required. 

Automation for Sales and Marketing Alignment

Potentially the most important use case for marketing automation is sales and marketing alignment. Marketing automation (which lies in the hands of marketing) has the power to unite the two, often disparate, departments. It helps avoid list burnout, while saving your marketing and sales teams time. Essentially, marketing automation aids sales and marketing alignment and powers a more impactful funnel because marketing handles leads until they are sales-ready and become SQLs.

In an ideal world, here’s what sales and marketing alignment looks like in your sales funnel when nurturing a new contact:

1. A new contact downloads a piece of content that would qualify them to be in the “awareness” or “early consideration” stage of their journey. Immediately, a “thank you” email is sent with the downloaded piece of content.
2. Two to four days later, marketing takes the reins with a series of automated emails aimed to turn this individual who “downloaded a piece of content” into an SQL to pass to the sales team. This is done using marketing automation. In most cases, the marketing team should have slightly different workflows set up based on the type of content downloaded and  the prospect’s stage in the journey.
3. Through the use of lead scoring, every interaction your new contact has with the series of automated emails is given a positive or negative score. For example, opening an email and downloading a relevant white paper would increase the score, while not engaging with the emails would result in a negative score.
4. Once they reach the score that notes them as an SQL, the appropriate rep is automatically notified to begin the personal sales process. At this point, marketing halts communications to avoid contact burnout.
5. The new contacts who received the series of marketing automation emails, but did not reach a lead score that would deem them an SQL would likely stay in the hands of the marketing team. However, this is where open dialogue becomes critical. Let’s say for example, in a given month, 100 new contacts download an eBook and 20 of them become SQLs. Your sales team now has 20 qualified leads to meet with—but what about the other 80? What if they’re almost SQLs? Your marketing team can provide your sales team with a list of contacts that seem to be on the tipping point, too. For those not really at a tipping point, your marketing team can automatically enroll them in another set of automated emails or lay off communications for a bit to avoid burnout.

Within the funnel, it is important to note that there is an obvious hand-off from marketing to sales based on lead score, where marketing stops communication and sales begins communication. Make sure your marketing and sales teams are aware of where this hand-off lies in your funnel and are appropriately trained to facilitate this.

Key Takeaway

Marketing automation simplifies numerous marketing processes for B2B tech companies. Start small, and don’t try to automate everything at once. As a company, decide which workflows are most important for reaching your end goal. This will provide you a good base and starting point, as the number of processes and emails you can automate can quickly become overwhelming.

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A key component of understanding the success of your marketing automation campaigns will be appropriately reviewing metrics and KPIs. All marketing automation platforms offer different reporting functionality, and you’ll want to use this functionality to track the success of your campaigns frequently.

Setting Attainable KPIs 

When you set a goal, you are clearly defining an objective. A KPI is the numeric value assigned to determine if you are on track for a goal. If you want clear and understandable goals, an accompanying KPI is essential.

A KPI is the ruler by which you measure your progress; you can set multiple KPIs per goal. Setting KPIs for your goals is a matter of asking good questions. Start your process with your closed deals. Ask questions like, “How many other deals were lost versus won?” and “Why did our new clients say yes?” We go into greater detail in our guide.

How to Set Your KPIs for Marketing Automation

1. Identify your primary goal. What is the most critical thing you must accomplish in the next fiscal year? How can marketing automation help you achieve this primary goal?
2. Highlight the critical step to reach the goal. Of all the factors that contribute to that goal, how does marketing automation help?
3. Research the right key indicators and statistics. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by all of the data available to you. Do you know your numbers? Are they the right ones? For marketing automation, it is likely open, click-through, and conversion rates.
4. Map indicators and statistics to your funnel. Your marketing and sales funnel should lead from one stage to the next.
5. Determine your focus areas for future growth. At this point, you know your past. Now, what will your future look like? What areas are performing well and need more fuel? What areas are hurting and need repair?
6. Outline your marketing plays for each focus area. How can marketing automation make a difference? How will you deploy your automation strategies? Who will be held accountable for the work?
7. For each play, create the metric—KPI. It becomes the best warning light for that issue.
8. Set up a scorecard to track all of your KPIs. This is your daily and weekly dashboard telling you how things are going, where to apply more effort, and when to celebrate.
9. Faithfully track every KPI every week. Your business isn’t a crock-pot you set and forget; it’s a finely-tuned, high-tech spacecraft that needs constant vigilance.

Common Marketing Automation KPIs

Open Rates

Because most of your automated campaigns will be email-focused, keeping an eye on open rates will be a key indicator as to what’s working and what’s not. Of course, because automated emails aren’t usually sent to a list of hundreds or thousands at once, you’ll want to measure performance over a few months to get a true indication of which subject lines perform well, and which ones don’t.

A low open rate may mean that your subject line wasn’t compelling enough, the sender’s name was unfamiliar, or somehow, your email ended up in spam. After a couple of months, compare your actual open rate to your target open rate, and make changes as necessary.

Click-Through Rates

Click-through rates are often more telling than open rates, simply because sometimes people open emails by accident. A “click” is an intentional engagement that can tell businesses a lot about the success of the written content and offers in their emails. 

Typically, a low click-through rate, when associated with a high open rate, means that the written content or content offer did not resonate for one reason or another.

As with open rates, you’ll want to let your automated campaigns run for a couple of months before analyzing data to ensure you have enough to draw meaningful conclusions around click-through rates.

Conversion Rates

A conversion rate is the percentage of leads in your funnel who convert on a particular content offer, demo form, etc. Conversion rates are essential to track because they tell you the percent of individuals who reached the goal of a particular email or automation campaign. For example, say in your “welcome” campaign email, you provide a link to your most popular eBook download. You could measure the number of individuals who receive that email and then download the eBook. The downloads would be your conversion rate.

Another important conversion rate you will want to track is your conversions from lead to MQL and MQL to SQL. Tracking how many leads make it through your funnel will be a large indicator as to whether or not your automation campaigns are successful.

Key Takeaway

As with all components of sales and marketing, setting goals and tracking your success is key. Because marketing automation is always running in the background, it is essential to constantly check in and monitor the success of your campaigns. Start by setting your main goal, your KPIs, and a cadence at which you will “check in” on your campaigns. Then, based on the success (or lack of success), make the necessary changes.

While marketing automation has a history that dates back more than a decade, many HealthTech companies are still rookies—in part, because new solutions pop up every quarter and, in part, because the strategy can be complicated, especially during the initial implementation. Marketing automation can easily become a full-time job, and shouldn’t be just added to the to-do list of your marketing and/or sales team members. For this reason, working with an agency is often an ideal solution.

Why Work with an Agency?

Expertise

While every company’s automated campaigns will be different, many of the same strategies for success do remain the same—which is why working with an agency can often be extremely beneficial, especially during the initial setup. An agency can help you set goals, prioritize your workflows, and build effective workflows in your automation tool based on its team’s knowledge and experience. 

Bigger ROI

Because it often takes weeks or months to determine if a marketing automation campaign is effective, you’ll want to get the most ROI and make the biggest impact right out of the gate. With an agency’s expertise, the workflows you want to build will likely be more effective to start.

Affordability

We usually don’t like to bring cost into the equation, but marketing automation is definitely a situation where it counts. You’ve already invested dollars into an automation platform and CRM, and likely some talented employees. An agency can offer your B2B tech company more support and expertise at a lower cost than hiring an in-house marketing automation specialist.

The Golden Spiral Advantage  

You are determined to make a difference in the healthcare industry, and your solution can dramatically improve your part of the ecosystem.

Chances are you lived through and experienced first hand systemic inefficiencies or ineffective solutions, and knew you could do better. So you did. You and your team have worked hard to create a solution that delivers, and you have confirmed a strong product-market fit.

You have great customers, but you are not realizing the kind of growth you know is possible. Any of these scenarios sound familiar?

• When you get to the table, you close deals, but you are not getting to the table as often as you would like. You frequently see potential customers buy inferior solutions before you get to them. Frustrating.
• Your sales team sells, but you know their message could be sharper and their velocity would be helped by a strong marketing program that drives awareness and generates demand.
• Your potential customers often don’t understand the strength of your solution until you have a face-to-face meeting.
• You know how your product will create value for your customers, but you don’t always have unity in how you talk about your product even within your own company.

You know “marketing” is more than a good website and some press releases.

You know it is a commitment to consistently engaging your potential buyers with meaningful conversations, and that takes real energy, time, and money.

You know marketing done right will work, and you have the budget to make that happen, or you are willing to find it.

You know you will benefit from some objective expertise to energize your processes or supplement the efforts of your existing team, and you are ready to go.

So are we.

Let us help you improve patient outcomes by empowering you to communicate your solution in ways that capture attention, motivate change, and speed improvements throughout the healthcare ecosystem.