Churn is an important metric for companies offering cloud-based services and in startup companies your churn percentage is always reasonably low, in the beginning – you may actually manage to retain around 99% of your existing business. However, if your focus is growth then, as well as cross-selling, customer acquisition will be a major focus for you while sustaining existing relationships.
If you’re on a growth track, within a few years, you will reach a point where the challenge in churn management becomes the growing loss of revenue, as both your churn and revenue start to increase. For example, a churn of 1% of £45K turnover looks and feels a lot different from a 5% of £63K. Your revenue may have increased by 40% but your loss via churn has rocketed from £450 to £3150 and growing. A 600% increase in lost revenue is a major concern.
![By Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC (http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_rec.php?id=6089) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](http://www.brightfire.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/cloud-churn-300x300.jpg)
Essentially, inbound marketing is about setting and achieving your online lead generation goals and tracking this through to revenue.
A valuable component of inbound marketing is you can assess all investment and see exactly what it produces. It allows for 100% transparent reporting which means you can scale what is working for you and similarly change what could work better.
The European business world is crossing a threshold in terms of using marketing tools to reach their audience and Tuesday March 5th 2013 Hubspot crosses that threshold with them.
Brightfire are in Dublin, also, as HubSpot’s keynote speaker, to provide valuable insight into how three of its technology customers Flexiant, Amor Group and Surfray have been successful in growing revenues using a combination of HubSpot’s marketing automation tools and Brightfire’s inbound marketing method which uses marketing automation to analyze and track data produced by inbound marketing tactics.
How do you track your sales or business development progress and your lead’s engagement with your company and it’s resources while at the same time maintaining and nurturing your business relationship with the decisions-maker at that company?
It’s simple. You can do this using two Hubspot tools
So, as an example, let’s say you have a list of fifty decision-makers in fifty companies that you believe your product or service will be of particular benefit to.
Here is some valuable information for your Sales Department on how to gain business intelligence using marketing automation software Hubspot’s Prospect tool.
What the Prospects tool doesn’t provide you with is contact names and email addresses, but it does provide you with company IP addresses and pageview information that can seriously pay-off if you are willing to do some detective work and assimilate the intelligence to establish your leads. (more…)
In preparation for an upcoming webinar on lead nurturing I came across Margot Bloomstein’s ‘Content Strategy: Your Key to Connection without Creepiness’
There is an increasing acceptance of the principles of content marketing as an effective way to:
Imagine walking into a computer store and having a greeter ask, “Which model would you like to buy?” Since the vast majority of store visitors are not ready to purchase at that moment, the greeter will ask more generic questions like, “Is there anything I can help you with?” or my personal favourite “What brings you in today?” This qualifying question allows the greeter to determine where you are in the sales process and what the appropriate next step is.
In today’s multi channel world to reach increasingly connected prospects, a company needs to provide a user journey across channels and platforms that are part of their target audience’s world.
Indeed, marketers are increasingly aware of the need to connect with so-called “consumers of information” through the savvy use of data and targeted engagement strategies. But are they doing it effectively?
The Digiday/Acxiom State of the Industry study found that while most marketers want to understand their customers and engage with them with bespoke experiences “in this era of the empowered consumer”, the majority haven’t yet found the optimal way of tapping into user data effectively.
This time last year marketing pundits were looking into the “crystal ball”, trying to discover trends that were likely to take the marketing world by storm in the year to come. Personalisation and context were then hailed as businesses’ most promising opportunity to reach and engage multiscreen users. But has this prediction materialised?
It is no surprise that, as digital marketing takes a marked turn toward harnessing ‘big data’ and providing a personalised user journey across media channels, there is a lot of buzz around marketing automation.
A single integrated platform where marketers can simultaneously glean user insights, test, perform and analyse, and sales teams can easily identify what stage of the buying cycle a prospect as at – the idea is certainly appealing so no wonder marketing automation is now enjoying increased adoption in the B2B world. (more…)
