How IRONMARKETS Boosted Engagement and Monetization With Lead Scoring
Project Background
Just getting someone to read your content isn’t enough to earn a sale or subscription. To turn them into long-time brand loyalists, you need to engage each person in your database with the right content at the right time — and find a way to automate it.
To better capitalize on their growing audience, IRONMARKETS (formerly AC Business Media) used Omeda to create a lead scoring solution that identified their most highly engaged audiences and helped them better prioritize their lead nurturing efforts.
In this case study, learn how IRONMARKETS used Omeda’s lead scoring solution to connect with their audiences and drive revenue, all with less busywork than before.
About IRONMARKETS
IRONMARKETS is a B2B media company with a portfolio of renowned brands in heavy construction, sustainability, manufacturing, logistics, supply chain and other markets. Their brand includes digital publications, trade shows, videos, magazines, webinars and newsletters, as well as advertising services.
Challenge
To identify next-best actions for each of their readers, IRONMARKETS needed an easier way to qualify their audience members. They also needed to automate as much of this process as possible so they could respond quickly enough to drive results. Finally, they needed a lead scoring solution that could track someone’s interactions with multiple channels (i.e., their email newsletter and email) at the same time — without forcing the team to manually input audience data from each separate platform.
What makes a good lead scoring model?
Lead scoring models can be powerful, but they’re only as good as the audience data they receive.
If the model only takes in data from some of your marketing touch points, or it takes too long to get data from the source to the model, it’ll underestimate someone’s level of interest. And if someone’s email engagement data is stored in one profile, and their website activity in another, their profile will never capture their full level of interest.
In all of these cases, the model misrepresents the person’s level of interest — and the team can’t target them with the right offers, communications, etc. for their needs.
Process / The Omeda Solution
IRONMARKETS had already been a longtime client of Omeda, an end-to-end audience marketing platform with a native CDP, marketing automation and subscription management functionalities. The IRONMARKETS team used this combination of tools to track how their audience was engaging across channels, ensure that data was as accurate and complete as possible, and then build a lead scoring model around it.
Here’s how they did it:
Track user actions across every touchpoint
The team used Omeda’s audience marketing platform to easily track every action someone took with their brand, regardless of the platform. Omeda’s website analytics solution tracked each user’s website activity, including webpages visits, clicks, bounces, etc. With that, they were able to capture each lead’s email engagement through Omeda’s marketing automation solution and track event engagement through an external platform.
Create a single view of each user with Omeda’s CDP
Omeda’s CDP took in all of this information and stored it in one central database. On Omeda, each user is tracked under a persistent customer ID, rather than by email address or phone number, reducing the likelihood that a job change results in a duplicate customer profile.
The CDP also performed automated field mapping, deduping and identity resolution workflows so that each customer profile was as complete, current and clean as possible. This gave IRONMARKETS a single view of each lead, ensuring that their lead scoring model identified the right high-intent leads.
Profile data entered the lead scoring model
Each lead’s profile data flowed to the team’s lead scoring model as soon as it entered the Omeda database. This allowed IRONMARKETS to identify newly qualified leads as soon as they exceeded the model’s threshold — and respond more quickly.
Monitor and adjust as needed
The team’s model prioritizes high-intent actions taken in the previous 30 to 90 days, like attending a single event and/or repeated engaged (email clicks, high-value content downloads and/or website visits) within the specified timeframe.
But each behavior and point value in the model is flexible, so the team can adjust it on the fly if it’s not delivering the right leads. (Note: Lead scoring is free for Omeda customers!).
Results
With its lead scoring model, IRONMARKETS created three engagement-based marketing segments, allowing them to adjust their offerings and calls-to-action based on each individual’s level of interest. This included:
Interested Audience: People in this group had a low-to-moderate level of engagement over the past 30 to 90 days. Their next move was to encourage repeat visits with website personalizations and other targeted content.
Core Audience: People in this group are loyal readers. “These people are really listening,” says Hughes, “We should tell them, ‘Hey, you should be a top performer of ours and our audience, here’s what else you should be downloading, here’s what you should be reading.’”
Super-users: These were the organization’s most engaged audience members. IRONMARKETS targeted these individuals for focus groups, readership surveys and special event offers, as well as premium advertising opportunities.
They could also design more valuable advertising packages around this group. To do this, IRONMARKETS created profile sheets with this group’s demographic, behavioral and contextual data, then shared it with their premium advertising partners.
“You can literally design a really nice one-sheeter on one of your top engaging people. What are they reading? What’s their business title? What products are they interested in? Really good homework for any big sales calls,” Hughes says. This gave advertisers access to IRONMARKETS’s most enthusiastic audience members — and the insights they need to drive conversions from them.
But your relationship with this group comes first, Hughes says, even if it means cutting back on the amount of emails or promotions you send. “This is hard to do, but look at your top performers and look at how many emails they’re getting and look at how we’re using them and abusing them.”
Watch the full session here:
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See full transcript
Ronda Hughes: Lead scoring, why do we do this? Why now? Ah yes, I have to switch it. There we go.Well, why not? It’s free. Omeda’s not charging you for this. It’s fairly easy, especially if you have a super bill or whoever your client success manager is, they can help you. And honestly, it’s long overdue. It’s like having this great present in your closet and you’re waiting for the perfect day to open it and use it. Every day is a perfect day, come on. Open it up, use it, because honestly, it gives you great quick insights on how hard your audience team … my audience team is here, they work hard every day. Trying to get our leads in the database, try to get them engaged. And other than building queries and running reports, you can really, at a glance, see and score your data. I’m hoping my voice lasts, so bear with me.
So, how do we get started? Pick one brand, AC Business Media has 11 brands. Just pick one and start there. Decide on a list of behaviors, website behavior, email behavior, high value asset downloads, cred spark, survey respondents, events registrations, webinar registrations. Pick all the behaviors you really feel are important to you and your audience. Decide on a scoring system and don’t get wrapped around the axle. It’s not scientific and you can change it if you don’t like the results.
Then again, work with your client success manager and really partner up with them. I don’t know any other clients here of Omeda’s scoring their data or have tried? One, yay. You all have access to this, you really should do it, work with your client success manager, and you’ll see why here in a minute. Because what you can do is you can run really simple reports to see if it’s working for you and if not, you can change it. Nothing’s carved in stone.
Here’s a sneak peek of the chart. I mean, yeah, this isn’t very visual either, but this is how we roll. This is what it looked like. And actually, Angela, my superhero audience development manager in the back there, I was probably driving her crazy. I’m like, I come up with a set of numbers, it’s not working out when we run the reports, we need to change the range or the timeframe. And you can do that pretty simply. So this is what we ended up with in the next … actually the next slide will show you that it’s not perfect and that we are going to tweak it a little more.
So we want to monitor audience better, we want better segmentation, and we want to monetize, of course. That’s the three major things that we all want to do with our data. So when we ran the reports and I got this pie chart, it’s like, what did I immediately see from this? Well, my heart sunk. I’m like, what? Out of about 500,000 records, although 200,000 were anonymous. Look at that big purple area, no points, what? They’re engaging with something, how come I don’t have any points? Right away I knew we’re going to have to add another layer. Right now, all the behaviors I used were within a 30-day range and it was a little too tight. So we’ll keep it there, there are super users. But we’ll also add a layer 30 to 90 days. So at least half of the purple area will also have some points related to it.
And then the anonymous traffic is probably the other 200,000, which gives us a really easy snapshot and KPI, to identify the anonymous, move them from unknowns to knowns. Which we talk a lot about that all the time with the modal and personalization and stuff like that. What I saw in here is we have like 2,400 super users, it’s the little tiny piece of the pie. But that’s 2,400 in this market that are incredibly engaged. We’ll talk about that in a minute. Over 30% of our audience is engaged within the last 12 months. I think that’s pretty good. And then we have the other 15% of the engagers that I would call really kind of our core audience and they really love us. So what do we do with this information?
First off, better segmentation. And this is just one example. We just started this one brand, we’re in a roll it out to the other 10. But the interested audience up there, the first about 1,700 records, they raised their hands, they’re listening, they’re opening at least one email or they went to our website. We should really, like I said, strike when the iron’s hot. Give them more of what they’re already reading, match that up to what they’re interested in and give them more of that.
The core audience, these people are really listening. We should tell them, hey, you should be a top performer of ours and our audience, here’s what else you should be downloading, here’s what you should be reading. They are loyal, they love you guys. And then, they’re our super users like I talked about, and we’ll see how we can monetize those. But all of this is really one quick report with the scoring. Really easy to get to.
So monetizing our investments. Honestly, there’s probably a million different ways you can do this. Right out of the gate, I look at those top performers, and I’m looking at a CPM should be higher. Treat them like royalty. How many times are we giving these leads out and we’re treating them the same as everybody else.
Also, for sales calls, it’s really cool to look at some of your … like the last presenter was talking about, look at what they’re doing, look at their personas. You can literally design a really nice one-sheeter on one of your top engaging people. What are they reading? What’s their business title? What products are they interested in? Really good homework for any big sales calls. And honestly, this is hard to do, but look at your top performers and look at how many emails they’re getting and look at how we’re using them and abusing them. And I think we’re not quite there yet, we’re not doing that. But I think that is something we should be looking at, as well. Save them for your premium packages, people who are spending a lot of money with you. And they’re also good for buyer hosted events. So one-on-one events, face-to-face, more intimate events. These are people who would probably not bark at all, sitting down with your clients and talking to them face to face.