Own your Automation
Never underestimate the power of record ownership in your marketing automation.
Ownership might be one of those business buzzwords we use too often and never live up to its true meaning. We want employees to take ownership while in truth we just want them to work harder and make fewer mistakes. But that’s a philosophy and what I really want to talk about is the technical term of record ownership in your CRM and marketing automation tools.
In sales, ownership of an account for example is a widely used method of managing communication with customers. Key accounting, one face to the customer, you name it. Personal relationships are crucial for a successful sales strategy. So every CRM makes it easy to assign accounts or contacts to sales reps or teams and helps keep track of who talked to whom. Obviously, marketing automation follows this principle and allows you to do the same - but fully automated.
The power of Ownership
Never forget: marketing automation is simulated one-to-one communication. If you use your automation tool to just send out the same marketing mumbo-jumbo to every prospect, you are missing out on the real strength of it. Personalized content is king. Not only the message itself can be personalized, but the sender can also. To make a long story short, using record ownership in your marketing automation is another means to personalize the messages you send out to your prospects.
68% of Americans base their decision to open an email on the name of the sender.
Discussions rage on what is more important: the subject or the sender’s name. I found some figures at CampaignMonitor, stating that 68% percent of Americans base their decision to open an email on the sender’s name. That’s where record ownership comes in. Instead of designating “the one” to send out all of your emails, you can personalize the sender for each recipient based on who owns the record. So imagine a visitor on your website fills out a form to get your nicely curated whitepaper and the autoresponder with the download link in it does not come from some generic “do-not-reply@mybusiness.com” address but from the sales rep he has talked to on the phone just recently.
This is the power of Ownership!
Marketing Guys, you need to be tough now
Marketing tends to invest a lot of time into creating the perfect subject line, while the sender is just a “technical thing”. Very often, the sender of an email even is the marketing guy who created it. Sometimes a product owner is picked as a more trusted person, but that’s not really simulated one-to-one communication. It is still the one sender fits all approach.
In fact, the marketing guy often is the least respected and trusted person your business has to offer. You are in marketing? Well, you need to be tough now. Marketing is widely regarded as having no clue about the problems of a prospect. Marketing is marketing: the advertisement guys who tell you nice stories but are pretty much oblivious about what really moves a client forward. No one trusts a marketing guy.
Trust
That’s why on billboards no one puts a picture of their marketing team but some famous actress. She might not have a clue about the prospect’s problems either, but she has worked up trust. If it comes to increase your email opening rates, trust is the most important thing.
Most businesses do not employ a bunch of famous celebrities to borrow their trust and send out emails in their name. The next best thing to do is to pick a sender, your recipients trust more than a marketing manager. The best choice here is to pick someone the prospect already knows or to introduce someone who seems to be closely related to the request of the prospect.
Take an example. If your company sells marketing automation and CRM solutions, and a prospect downloads your whitepaper on the 5 top-performing engagement programs of the year, don’t let your CRM specialist send the autoresponder, make it come from your marketing automation specialist, and vice versa.
Speaking technically
Most automation tools let you specify at least one record owner. Some software like HubSpot even lets you define custom ownerships. This enables you to set up ar real ownership-matrix and assign owners based on different segments of your prospects.
All automation tools connected with your CRM are able to handle the basic owner assignments to records. You can use this as an easy starting point and improve your ownership-strategy step by step.
Don’t forget to always have a fallback, because most probably your content will generate new leads who never were in touch with your business before. Set up default owners and leverage assignment-rules to find the best match for the prospect’s request. The more specific you are and the more competent the chosen owner is regarded in the context of the communication, the more trust you can generate.
Bonus-advice: align authors and owners
Marketing automation is based on content and content is always produced by authors. Often your content is the first touchpoint of your customer’s journey. Don’t hide your authors. Use your blog or your landing pages and your whitepapers to introduce the authors to your audience. Make them look like the experts a prospect wishes to talk to. Then make them the first owners of your newly generated leads.
“Hey, that’s the guy who wrote this fantastic blog post about marketing automation and ownership! I want to know, why he mailed me.” That’s the reaction you want to provoke.
tl;dr
Use record ownership to personalize the sender of your automated messages. Use senders who are trusted by the audience. Use every means you have to build up trust and reputation for the sender. The Sender is more important than the subject.
Bought because of Trust
I close this article with a whisky recommendation. I discovered this one because it was introduced to me in a newsletter, sent from a personally known liquor-dealer. I get a lot of newsletters on Whisky, and to be honest: I ignore them all or unsubscribe. My preferred way of discovering new malts is to visit this dealership and taste a couple of products. But because I trust this guy, I read his newsletter and that’s where I found the Lagavulin Aged 16 Years. It is one of the most successful whiskeys from Islay and sooner or later I would have stumbled upon it. But because the story of my discovery matches the topic of this article, I felt it would be worthwhile to introduce it to you here.
Slàinte mhath.