By Stuart Wheldon

For many marketers, the recent downturn will have been a lesson in discipline and accountability. Now that budgets have begun to be restored, marketers can execute long-considered campaigns; however, the focus on revenue must emerge as the single highest priority as businesses stabilise. Assessing the best techniques to achieve not only marketing success, but also business success is if companies are to meet their new growth targets.

Ensuring data is current and relevant

Companies need to ensure that data is kept up-to-date, so that only relevant messages and promotions are communicated to customers. A reliable way to achieve this is to create an online preference management centre that allows users to control their own contact information. The purpose of this practice is to empower recipients to maintain the who, when and how they wish to be contacted so that they are receiving relevant offers. The benefit to companies, of course, is that they minimise list fatigue, where marketing databases begin to contain duplicate records and become outdated. Matching customer interests with marketing content maximises response rates and reduces opt-out rates.

Sales and marketing: passing qualified leads to the right sales resource

Unfortunately, too many organisations still operate a siloed strategy where marketing and sales departments fail to operate with an integrated approach. This disconnect was underlined by an Eloqua survey conducted this year that found 61 per cent of organisations did not have fully aligned sales and marketing teams (research conducted at TFM&A London, February 2010). If the two groups are to maximise return on marketing investment, a documented strategy needs to be in place that allows all relevant prospect and customer data to be communicated between teams. This will allow processes to be established for lead scoring, nurturing and routing, all to optimise correspondence with prospects and maximise sales personnel efficiency.

Scoring leads

Once marketing teams identify potential leads they should employ a system of lead scoring. Lead scoring is another way of assigning an interest level to prospects by determining who they are, how they interact with the company and what goods and services they will be responsive to. Certain scores correspond to how likely the prospect is to make a purchase and therefore indicate the different communications required.

With a basic lead scoring system in place, marketers should begin to build a matrix of their prospects which can sit alongside the database. A lead is assigned a letter score that corresponds to fixed information (such as job title or location) and a numeric score corresponds to their interaction with the company (such as online activity on the company website, email click-throughs, or tradeshow visits).

Maximising marketing performance

Following these guidelines will help to make the marketing process as effective as possible. Without a strategy in place that takes these techniques into account, organisations will struggle to make fully informed decisions on how to best use the wealth of insight at their disposal. Using the right solutions to qualify and manage the demand generated by campaigns will help the marketing function to be more closely aligned with the sales department and, ultimately, have a positive impact on the business’ bottom line.

About Eloqua

With over 35,000 users and 700+ customers, Eloqua is one of the main leaders in demand generation applications and expertise. Eloqua's integrated marketing platform gives you the power to execute, automate and measure B2B marketing programs on a global scale. Bridging the sales and marketing divide, it integrates direct marketing, interactive marketing, lead generation and sales force automation to turn customer acquisition into a measurable process, improve marketing effectiveness and accelerating the enterprise sales cycle.