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Are you looking for marketing automation case studies that you can learn from? In the meanwhile, here’s why we’re talking about marketing automation in the first place, as well as how to do it effectively:
According to the results of a recent poll on the status of marketing automation, 80 percent of those who participated had already implemented marketing automation at their place of employment. Furthermore, even though these respondents used marketing automation for various reasons, the three most common reasons they cited were lead generation, lead nurturing, and account-based marketing.
According to the same poll results, 19 percent of respondents said that the most challenging barriers to effectively adopting marketing automation are a lack of high-quality content and the difficulty in utilizing these platforms.
Marketing automation, on the other hand, is widespread because the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. Marketing automation provides little or no difficulty if you choose a solution that is simple to use, created specifically for your company, and falls within your budget.
According to Forrester Research, business expenditure on marketing automation solutions would climb to $25.1 billion per year by 2023, up from $11.4 billion in 2017. So you should be investing your money in intelligent marketing automation technologies.
Please look at the following B2B marketing automation cases to help you decide if marketing automation is the right choice for your business. Then, investigate for yourself how automation has aided individuals in elevating their marketing initiatives to new levels.
CentricsIT
The strategy;
In this case study, CentricsIT, a data center solutions provider, demonstrates how marketing automation helped them achieve a significant increase in lead generation while also having a substantial effect on their bottom line.
Mandy Hauck, Manager of Marketing Communications at CentricsIT, joined the firm as its first marketing employee and stepped into what might be described as a rather primitive marketing plan, which mainly consisted of email blasts. However, Mandy has now grown into her current position.
Her previous experience was in email marketing, but she reached out to a marketing automation company based on a co-worker’s relationship with the CEO of that vendor early on in her career.
Following a conversation with a vendor’s sales representative, Mandy decided to introduce automation at CentricsIT. She then did internal marketing to get support from both Sales and corporate leadership.
Attending a seminar on the automation system in place and learning how to incorporate Sales in planning how automation will be utilized at CentricsIT were all part of this process.
A precise system of tracking leads and nurturing them did not exist before the use of automation at the organization. Instead, leads were put into Mandy’s inbox, where she would be responsible for manually forwarding them to Sales.
Results;
- Following the deployment, prospects were automatically routed from landing pages to sales agents, saving time and effort.
- CentricsIT had a 59 percent boost in lead generation in the first year after implementing marketing automation, and the company earned $1.5 million in sales due to the new technology.
Crain’s Business Insurance
The strategy;
As a trade journal, Crain’s Business Insurance had to deal with the same challenges that many publications are dealing with right now: diminishing advertising income. But, at the same time, its industry clients started purchasing up-front research and content from Crain’s Business Insurance.
Because the organization employs reporters with a combined total of more than 300 years of writing and editing expertise, it was well-positioned to take advantage of the opportunity that presented itself.
To do this, Crain’s deployed marketing automation, redesigned its databases, and merged them.
With three databases – print subscribers, online registrants, and the newly developed marketing automation database – the firm connected its content development process with the marketing automation system to maximize efficiency.
As part of integrating content production into the automated system, it was necessary to create content categories. Therefore, it split the database into distinct groups so that content creation could be aligned with specific reader segments.
From there, Crain’s adopted lead scoring and even used statistics gleaned from marketing automation to affect the company’s continuing marketing strategy, among other things.
Results;
- Demand generating services will generate about $550,000 in brand-new advertising-income this year.
- Increases in registered online newsletter subscribers by 43 percent, and pay increases.
- Print newsletter subscribers by 2 percent were recorded.
- The anonymous website visitors had a conversion rate of 2.6 percent, which was impressive.
Managed Maintenance
The strategy;
MMI, a supplier of technological asset management services, was presented with a different dilemma in this case study than SmartBear, the subject of the case study that follows it.
Unlike SmartBear, which implemented marketing automation and a CRM solution to ensure that those pieces were integrated, MMI had marketing automation and a CRM solution in place. Still, the two were siloed and were not synched – Marketing’s and Sales’ activities and data were completely separate.
The answer was to conduct an assessment of the present technological setup, and it was concluded that MMI needed to replace both the automation and CRM tools at the same time, and that, similar to SmartBear, the new software components required to be implemented simultaneously to guarantee that they were connected.
Marketing at MMI has been able to begin lead scoring and lead nurturing as a result of this. Perhaps even more notably in corporate culture, Sales and Marketing became more aligned due to the new technology implementation, which provided visibility from lead generation to conversion to the sale for everyone involved in the entire pipeline.
Results;
- MMI’s lead generation increased by 75% in the first year after a thorough overhaul of its marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM) systems.
SmartBear
The strategy;
Another incredible marketing automation example comes from SmartBear, which used automation to generate a large number of leads in a short period.
SmartBear Software, a B2B cloud mobile software firm, was experiencing explosive growth in writing. As a result, processes were more difficult to handle manually, necessitating the use of automation.
The team begins by deploying and testing a few email messages once the automation system has been set up.
SmartBear was fast to develop lead nurturing to manage many leads, having learned from its mistakes and achievements along the way. As a consequence, the number of leads increased by 200 percent.
The whole point of putting marketing automation in place was to guarantee that there would be a scalable infrastructure in place to accommodate the anticipated expansion.
Click here to read the entire case study on the many issues and solutions that SmartBear encountered when implementing automation in their business.
To foster the vast amount of lead generation generated by SmartBear’s three product groups at the time, they established nurturing routes for each product group.
Results;
- Lead volume increased by 200 percent, and automated trial downloads generated 80 percent of worldwide leads.
- The trial download leads accounted for 85 percent of SmartBear’s total revenue generation.
Rhinov
The strategy;
With the use of email newsletters and follow-up texts and emails, Rhinov, an online interior design business, hoped to get more excellent traction and income from their two primary sources of consumer engagement: email newsletters and follow-up texts and emails.
They hoped to accomplish the following goals using marketing automation: Increase their client retention rate via email newsletters.
Increase the number of prospects who become long-term paying clients by using automatic follow-up messages and customized processes.
To achieve these objectives, the firm sought an automated email marketing software product to enable them to send out automatic follow-up texts and emails and informative newsletters.
It just took a few simple steps to construct their customized and highly personalized email campaign using a marketing automation software solution and have everything up and running in no time.
The primary objective was to save time while also avoiding missing out on potentially lucrative leads.
They were able to do this by:
- Sending out automatic email follow-ups to the prior customer regularly.
- Importing contacts into a new list to send a particular letter.
They saw excellent results after spending a significant time re-engaging with existing customers and pitching to new leads.
For starters, they will be able to save a significant amount of time. And, perhaps most crucially, they saw a substantial increase in the conversion rate of inactive users.
Results;
- Rhinov’s automated email marketing strategy has generated 26 new sources of traffic in recent weeks.
- The firm observed a 32 percent increase in the rate of conversion.
Hubspot
The strategy;
HubSpot is a B2B marketing behemoth with a large customer base. It’s impossible to work in B2B marketing and not be acquainted with these terms.
HubSpot started as a customer relationship management and marketing automation software, but it has swiftly evolved into an all-in-one marketing solution. Not only is their product excellent, but they have also established themselves as a thought leader in the field of inbound marketing.
In many ways, HubSpot was responsible for the creation of the category of inbound marketing. In 2005, its co-founder created the phrase for the first time, opening the route for Hubspot to establish itself as the ultimate thought leader. Their brand awareness skyrocketed as a result of this.
Social Media Marketing: HubSpot launched Inbound.org, an online community where marketers can connect, learn, and find employment. Within a few years, it had grown to include more than 170,000 members worldwide.
Content Marketing: HubSpot is the company that invented the term “content marketing.” Not only do they dominate search engine results pages (SERPs) with material that ranks, but they also have a great library of downloads.
Micro-Influencers: HubSpot has approximately 300,000 Instagram followers, a significant portion of which can be attributed to their collaborations with micro-influencers. They enlisted HubSpot partners to create unique content to promote their product, which resulted in a significant increase in their following.
Results;
- They went from having 6.6 million in yearly sales to having 271 million in revenue in only seven years.
Shopify
The strategy;
Shopify has been the undisputed leader in the eCommerce sector for quite some time. Their website has approximately 400,000 clients and more than 100 million consumers who have purchased from their websites.
The context at the top of the funnel on search engines: Shopify has over two million ranking keywords (including “eCommerce” and “online shop”), and so dominates the top of the funnel on search engines. Not only do they provide excellent material, but they also develop fantastic free tools.
A Sticky Free Trial Offer: The free trial is their bread and butter, and it has proven to be quite successful. Once you’ve arrived on the site, they make a strong pitch for the free trial. Customers find it almost tough to opt-out of Shopify after using the program for two weeks since it is such an excellent piece of software.
A Killer Onboarding Sequence: Once you’ve signed up for a free trial, people convert like crazy thanks to appealing microcopy, timely CTAs, and compelling subject lines. A Killer Onboarding Sequence
Results;
In 2018, they almost doubled their product sales from $7.7 billion to $15.4 billion, a nearly 100% increase.
Slack
The strategy;
Slack is a program that requires no introduction. According to Gartner, because of some fantastic SaaS marketing methods and approaches, they have become one of the fastest-growing SaaS platforms of all time. Here’s how they went about it:
Ranking on Review Sites: Rather than attempting to rank for competitive phrases such as “collaboration software,” Slack achieved good rankings on review sites such as G2 and Capterra, which already dominate these keywords.
Integrations: A large portion of Slack’s traffic comes from sites that have integrated with the service.
Powerful Landing Pages: Slack places a strong focus on their landing pages, which are designed to convert visitors via clear language and social evidence.
Results;
- They have more than 3 million paying customers. At the moment, their conversion rate from trial to paid service is 30 percent.
- They are the SaaS firm with the quickest growth. Of all time, to be precise.
- They have gone from being worth $0 to being worth $5 BILLION in just four years.
- They are adding new contracts worth $1 million to their portfolio. Every. Single. Day.
- They have a clientele that includes 77 percent of the Fortune 100 companies.
- They have more than 8 million users that are engaged daily.
Final Thoughts
So that’s the end of it!
We discussed five B2B company success stories and how they employed marketing automation to propel their businesses forward.
Like this, there is an endless number of other success stories – and with marketing automation, you can become the next one.
