Author: Franz Malten Buemann

There are a ton of benefits to building co-branded partnerships, including cost-effective marketing strategies, bigger audiences, and the opportunity to quickly create relationships with new leads. Which is why building your partnerships and being a great partner is essential. Brand partnerships, often referred to simply as co-branding efforts, leverage your audience and marketing prowess with…
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As much as 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. One of the reasons for that can be a bad lead qualification process, which means that 79 times out of 100 you can be wasting your time and money, trying to pursue leads that from the beginning are not ready to buy. According to MarketingSherpa, 61% of marketers pass leads to sales immediately after collecting their data, without any verification. We present the tools that will help you increase their quality.

 

Identify your contacts – know your potential customer from the get-go

 

With SALESmanago every lead you collected on your website is supplemented with information on its behavior, helping you understand what products or services in your offer brought their attention. Website behavior can be tracked thanks to the cookies technology, which means you have to identify the lead only once, and from now on all their visits to your website will be connected with their 360 customer profile. If the lead was browsing your website earlier, before it was identified, this information will be also included, because SALESmanago keeps historical visits of anonymous visitors to present you with a full view of the leads’ interest.

 

 

Know their needs – use behavioral segmentation

 

Once you know who is browsing the website, you need to know what they want, what were they looking for. That can be managed by creating an appropriate Segmentation Matrice, in which you define the list of URL addresses on your website connected with different products in the offer. As a result, a visitor who browses different subpages, reading articles describing your offer is getting tagged with the name of that product, giving you a quick view on what potentially they might buy.

 

Let’s say, you work for a car dealer company and you want to segment the leads that could be interested in different financing options. If they visit a subpage with the description of the leasing service, a right tag will be assigned to them (e.g. FINANCING_LEASING). That’s how you know, this lead could potentially convert into sale and you can proceed accordingly.

 

 

Measure the level of their interest –  use tag and contact scoring

 

You need to remember that even though behavioral segmentation gives you some information that can help you initiate direct contact, this might be not enough – every lead can check different products in your offer. You will know then how deeply they know your offer but it won’t indicate the most interesting offer. A solution to that is a tag scoring feature, that shows how many times the contact was tagged as interested in a specific product.

 

Going back to the car financing example. You can set the scoring value, which will mean to you that the customer was not just browsing what options are available, but really wanted to learn more about the leasing option.  In such case, if a given person visits three subpages with information about leasing it will not only be tagged FINANCING_LEASING, but by the name of the tag the system will show you how many times it was applied so in the end, you will see FINANCING_LEASING (3) position on the leads’ segments list. You can qualify for sales leads that exceed a certain value in the tag scoring, to make sure you’re talking to leads with specified interest in your offer.

 

 

Another way to distinguish good quality leads is by using contact scoring. It increases anytime the lead is active – opening your emails, or browsing your website. Let’s say, in a day you get a 100 new leads. There could be many selling opportunities, but as we’ve already established, around 79 out of that 100 won’t convert. A solution is to pick the ones that are the most active and therefore have the highest contacts scoring. A lead that has visited your website a large number of times and with a scoring of 100, will be far more probable to convert than a new one with a scoring of 5, so you want to start contacting these new leads by choosing those with the highest contact scoring first.

 

Make sure they understand your product – use lead nurturing

 

Even leads with high contact or tag scoring might not be ready to buy yet, because they could be missing some important information on the product, which makes the majority of them resign after the first conversation with your sales representatives. Try delivering them this information with an automatic educational message cycle. Thanks to lead nurturing, you can get 50% more leads ready to buy. Studies show that lead nurturing emails are 10 times higher response rate compared to regular emails.

 

In SALESmanago’s Lead Nurturing Wizard or in Workflows feature, you can create message campaigns that will start after a chosen lead fulfills some requirements, for example, the contact has been assigned a specific tag or was added to a specific sales funnel, which makes them qualified for a lead nurturing campaign. After you select an event that’ll start the messaging campaign, you can pick the message that will be sent as well as the time of sending (how much time after the campaign was activated).

 

 

Turn good leads into sales – use the Sales Alert and help your salesmen

 

Finally, when you have a good quality lead (segmented, high scoring, nurtured), you have to have a way of informing your sales team on this fact. Sales alert is a simple automation that sends a notification to your sales representative, that they should contact a specific lead.

 

 

You can choose behavior that should trigger sending this notification. In most cases, for leads who qualify for sales the most common trigger is any website visit. They already proved they’re interested. If they are looking for the information again, it’s the best time to reach out to them. 

 

All of that gives you a bigger chance of succeeding while reaching out to new leads, as you made sure to pick the high value ones.

marketing automation

marketing automation

Browser vendors are planning changes that will affect the way Pardot users produce online content and emails. The Pardot product team is working with the browser vendors and web standards communities to stay current with planned changes and to communicate to our customers what you need to know to continue to deliver effective content. In this post, we’ll explain what mixed content is and how near-term changes being rolled out by browser vendors will affect you.
But first, some background that will help us understand why things are changing.
The history of online encryption
Before about 1970, commercial computers were mostly isolated systems, each installed by a business for some specific task, such as running an accounting system. As business processes became increasingly reliant on information technology, the potential of networked computers became apparent. This raised a serious question: How would networked systems protect themselves against malicious actors who would snoop on and tamper with critical data moving between systems?
Outside of secretive governmental agencies, encryption was mostly a dark art in 1970. But due to the rise of the internet, this has changed in the decades since. In the 1970s, we saw the standardization and deployment of the Data Encryption Standard (DES). In the 1980s, we saw the rise of encryption systems with fancy capabilities such as performing secure digital signatures. During the 1990s, Netscape developed the early versions of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), now rebranded Transport Layer Security (TLS).
TLS is the protocol that secures the internet. It’s based on the encryption research that happened in earlier decades, and the protocol continues to mature today – the most recent version is TLS 1.3. During the 2010s, technologies such as Let’s Encrypt made TLS more accessible, and the visible rise of major cybersecurity incidents has motivated technology leaders like Salesforce to push for the universal adoption of encryption via TLS. The 2020s will be the decade where we witness ubiquitous web security and privacy via encryption.
This is a trend that we need to pay attention to.
What is mixed content?
Browsers interact with sites using a technology called Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The “http” in http://example.com/ indicates the link is using HTTP to transfer your content to your visitor. But HTTP alone doesn’t provide any encryption. This means that content transferred to the browser can be snooped on or tampered with while in transit.
HTTPS is HTTP combined with TLS. The “https” in https://example.com/ means the link is using HTTP along with TLS to provide a secure browsing experience. Technology leaders and standards bodies are moving away from vanilla HTTP to secure HTTPS.
Now we come to the heart of this post: mixed content.
Mixed content is when a site mixes HTTPS and HTTP. A common example of mixed content is a secure site (served over HTTPS) that includes images served over vanilla HTTP. The problem is that the site owner or site visitor created a website that was clearly intended to be secure, but some parts of the website — images in this example — still remain vulnerable to snooping and tampering.
Why it matters to marketers
You may be thinking: None of my trade secrets are exposed on my site or in my marketing materials. While this is probably true (I’d hope so!), there are good reasons to move all of your content to HTTPS and make sure you don’t have mixed content. The biggest reason?
Browser vendors are changing the browser experience to encourage site owners to avoid mixed content, with an ultimate aim to create a secure browsing experience across the internet.
Chromium, the technology at the heart of the Google Chrome, has announced mixed-content deprecation, an initiative to disallow sites to serve mixed content. This process is already in motion. There are a couple of key callouts for Pardot users:

The latest version of Chrome – Chrome 86 – automatically attempts to upgrade mixed-content images to HTTPS. While this should be innocuous, there may be unintended side effects of this Chrome change that affect the browsing experience.
Chrome will eventually stop showing mixed-content images altogether. This is planned to happen in Chrome 88, scheduled for deployment in January 2021.

There are other motivations for moving to encryption everywhere. Not only do search engines prioritize secure sites, this practice also promotes trust with your audience and helps to future-proof your sites against related browser and web changes.
How marketers can prepare for the changes ahead
According to my research, over 90% of Pardot users have websites served via HTTPS. This is good! My calls to action for you are:

Make sure that the marketing content you link to in your sites and emails is also served via HTTPS. Not sure how to do this? Learn how to turn on HTTPS for your marketing content.

Check out the Pardot product team’s Salesforce Knowledge Base Article about mixed content. We’ll update it as new information emerges.
Check your site for any resources, even those not served by Pardot, that need to be secured.

At Salesforce Pardot, we believe that a secure, trusted experience in everyone’s best interest. For this reason, we’re actively exploring other ways to promote security for our users and for their customers. Stay tuned for more communication as events unfold!
This blog post is part of our security, privacy, and technology series.

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