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)
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.
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 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.
HubSpot, Brightfire’s strategic partner for supplying inbound marketing services in the UK and beyond, recently announced an upgrade to their set of tools that makes it easy for “mere marketing mortals” like you and me to deliver the type of personalisation that Amazon is known for, while generating better qualified leads into your marketing funnel.
“HubSpot 3 is a fully integrated marketing platform built by HubSpot in 2012. The platform is based on an extensive contact database and enables each channel of marketing to be more agile and personalized to the end recipient,” say HubSpot themselves.
Since the announcement the digital marketing world has been abuzz with chat and opinions about the advances in marketing automation that HubSpot have brought to the market. (more…)
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…)
A recent study by Aberdeen Research Report Group found that despite the growing need for marketing and sales alignment, few UK companies are focused on building a sales pipeline. Even though the overwhelming majority (85%) recognises the value of measuring marketing performance, 63% of those companies are using conversion rate metrics.
What is more alarming, however, is that only 58% of the respondents rate marketing’s contribution to the sales pipeline as being valuable, with a mere 43% actually measuring it. What do these figures indicate? (more…)
Who doesn’t like a bit of space imagery? Especially when related to something as unfathomable as the social media sphere, metaphors such as “solar system” and “asteroid fields” feel just right, and Marketo knew that quite well while they were designing this clever B2B infographic. (more…)
There is some evidence suggesting that marketing automation is the next target market for enterprise software vendors. Here are a few recent signs that something is afoot:
• Dell’s announcement in June that it has added Pardot marketing automation to its list of Dell Cloud Business Software applications.
• Intuit’s acquisition in May of local marketing vendor Demandforce.
• FICO’s announcement in May of its purchase of Entiera, one of the few remaining enterprise class marketing automation products for the B2C market.
• Salesforce’s and Google’s investment of $32m last year into HubSpot.
• IBM’s acquisition of Coremetrics in 2010, as well as Unica and Netezza.
• Oracle’s acquisition of Market2Lead in 2010.
In a race to get more clicks and conversions, as marketers we often forget a very fundamental truth – that just like old-school touch-and-feel mail (remember the morning paper, anyone?) a person’s email inbox is a highly intimate space and, it goes without saying, it should be treated as such.
And just as mail finds its way to the recipient via a postman kicking about town in a van, it is an email marketer’s job to deliver a brand’s communications from the comfort of their desk, and do so in a sensitive, non-intrusive manner.
But what usually happens is just the opposite – one’s personal virtual mailbox gets bombarded with unsolicited and/or irrelevant messages. You certainly don’t want to be the one whose emails go straight into the Junk Mail folder, especially after all the effort. You want to be the one whose emails are welcome and eagerly anticipated, right? Then stop doing these things… (more…)
