For big sites like Euromoney Institutional Investor, site traffic is not a problem; getting qualified leads from all their traffic is. In this Case Study, Ben Eva, Global Head of Conversion Management, spoke to us about how Euromoney is testing marketing automation technology and tactics on five of the company’s 100 brands. Discover how you can use this technology to score leads and hand off more qualified prospects to your sales team. 

Target Market

Euromoney has about 100 products, and is testing its marketing automation technology around 5 products in the high-level, B2B financial and commodities niche, as well as hedge fund intelligence, which primarily targets primarily target hedgefund managers, researchers, plus investors, service providers.

Content

Euromoney’s content and services are diverse, ranging from newsletters and eBooks, to databases and research reports. The company also has paid products in events, training, books, magazines, workbooks, journals, magazines and maps.

For the sake of brevity and clarity, we will defer an in-depth discussion of content and services in this Case Study, instead focusing on the company’s adoption of marketing automation, as well as its use of other marketing tactics.

Marketing Automation: Implementation and Results

If you’ve seen our On-Demand Video on Marketing Automation, you know that marketing automation comes down to one simple concept:
If this, then that.

If a person lands on your site, she gets a trial offer. If she takes the trial, she gets a series of emails. If she fails to convert after the trial, she’s added to an email list for specific promotions down the line. So on and so forth.

As Eva tells it, Euromoney had an 8% conversion rate on trials about eight years ago, and most prospects came in through search and email. But today’s buyers are more sophisticated and do a lot of research before buying, so conversion rates are around 0.4%. (In fact, our recent blog post reported a 0.2% conversion rate for metered sites.)

In addition, salespeople have become less efficient in dealing with leads, treating all leads as equal prospects.

Therefore, Euromoney looked to make its sales funnel more efficient through marketing automation that would not only customize responses to certain behavior, but provide lead scoring capabilities as well.

What is Lead Scoring?

Lead Scoring is a score given to prospects based on behavior and demographics. Euromoney uses a 100-point scale and assigns 10 points each for characteristics and behaviors such as:

• Being part of their target market demographic
• Job function or title
• Type of company
• Operating budget
• Geographic location
• Viewing one piece of content
• Viewing another type of content
• Past customer status, etc.

Much of the demographic data is captured at trial sign-up, but online behavior informs this lead score.

By scoring each lead, Euromoney has cut down the volume of leads sent to sales by 55%, and they’re looking to get that down to 15% in the next 12-18 months.

This seems counter-intuitive — why would your sales staff want fewer leads? But the combination of marketing automation and lead scoring allows a subscription site to automate certain functions (like sending an email offer based on viewing a certain type of content) while using human capital to close deals on highly qualified leads.

Eva likens this sales funnel process to buying a car. The sales funnel has three stages: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision. The trial period is the test-drive; it doesn’t guarantee a sale anymore. But during the trial you need to educate the consumer on what you offer, how it can help them, as well as get a better idea of his needs.

“By the time a prospect gets to a salesperson, our theory is that 50% won’t buy,” says Eva. “And that changes the dynamic of the sales call.”

Marketing to Low-Score Leads

The lead scoring system allows Euromoney to focus sales staff efforts on well-qualified leads, but that doesn’t mean that low-scoring leads are ignored and left to languish.

Marketing automation allows Euromoney to market appropriately to these leads. The software (see Vendors & Technology section below for details) allows Euromoney to start building anonymous profile through cookie tracking.

The marketing funnel’s first objective is to get the prospect to register with an email address. Euromoney also tries to get additional demographic data at this point.

After registering, the prospect starts receiving content marketing promotions. Either on the site or through email offers, they are presented with relevant offers, such as eBooks or infographics. If the prospect clicks through, the marketing automation system records the user and notes whether their demographic data fits. For example, a student can download an eBook, but wouldn’t receive additional offers. A more appropriate prospect might be directed to a landing page to share information from the site with their network. They could later be asked to sync in their LinkedIn profile and invited to join a LinkedIn group managed by Euromoney.

Finally, the prospect would receive an email from sales staff, but this email is automated, not originally generated by a live person. However, the automation allows for more customization than before, so emails are customized according to the prospects’ industry or interest.

All in all, Eva says the marketing automation funnel can include between 5 and 20 steps, based of behavior patters.

Euromoney initiated this process about 18 months ago, and it took a year to get approval to invest in the software that would allow them such complex automation. Eva said he just trained marketers in the New York office, and plans to spend the next six months building out the various customer journeys. The company has plans to roll out the software to the 120 marketers working for Euromoney across the globe.

One last note: Eva particularly dislikes the term marketing automation. “It sounds like a factory. But it’s more about intelligent marketing. Marketers are now becoming data architects — making decisions based on data and planning a customer journey.”

It’s not communicating less, but rather communicating better by making sure those communications are hitting the right prospect at the right time.

Other Marketing Tactics

Euromoney has a long history in engaging in multi-channel marketing both online and offline. Here is a quick summary of their activities:

• SEO: A significant amount of traffic comes from SEO for Euromoney, and the company just made a big investment in its CMS in order to maximize SEO.
• PPC: This is the fastest growing area for marketing investment for Euromoney, and the company plans to focus their PPC efforts on their three main topical areas — finance, commodities and hedge funds.
• PR: While Euromoney does not use a PR agency, the company does distribute a lot of online press releases market wide.
• Social Media: Social media is not Euromoney’s biggest marketing investment, with a particular focus on LinkedIn. However, Facebook and Twitter are also becoming popular methods of targeting and re-targeting audiences. “We’re doubling every year in the volume of traffic coming through social media,” Eva says.
• Trade shows: Euromoney has historically been very passive at trade shows, putting out leaflets at booths. The company is now reviewing its whole approach to trade shows, and sees social media and content marketing as a savvy way to grab a captive audience and engage with consumers.
• Blogs: Some of Euromoney’s brands have separate blogs, especially for event brands. The company is also looking to use its blogs to build relationships with key bloggers in their markets.
• Postal direct mail: Postal direct mail was cut back by more than 90% in 2007-8, but is still used to promote events.
• Affiliates: Eva reports that Euromoney has experimented with affiliate marketing, but had little success.
• Formal Word-of-Mouth: Through social media and recommendation campaigns, Euromoney looks to leverage its audience for word-of-mouth endorsements.

Conversion Tactics

As described below in the Marketing Automation section, email capture is Euromoney’s most important conversion tactic as it then allows it to build a profile of each prospect and user linked to an email address.

Eva says there’s an internal debate whether to make more content free without an email address. The company knows the content is valuable, but feels it may have put too much behind the paywall originally. So the company is working on developing a strategy to give content away to non-paying customers without “giving away the crown jewels.”

Euromoney also offers a paid trial to many of its product. The fee can vary, and trial-takers get access to a lot of content, but not all of it.

Site Licenses and Marketing Automation

Given the nature of its content, Euromoney has a large site license business. And marketing automation has helped them capitalize on this revenue stream.

By flagging IP addresses, Euromoney can identify multiple users from the same company. It can then market to the whole company based on IP address. “This is one of our big areas of automation, as it helps drive engagement,” says Eva.

Average site license prices can range from $1,000 to $3,000 per year, but as Mary Barnes told us last year during Subscription Summit, some accounts can be six-figures a year.

Cross-Sells and Upsells

Euromoney has an eCommerce team that is just getting started on optimizing the company’s cross-sell and upsell operations by building those sales into the customer journey.

Historically, if someone was interesting in, say, air finance, the company would have tried selling everything in that niche to that person over time; now they’re trying to pinpoint where that person is in his/her career in order to make more appropriate pitches.

About Ben Eva

Ben Eva has worked in marketing for 18 years, getting his start in subscription marketing with magazines before subscriptions for business publications piqued his interest. He has worked for Nielsen and joined Euromoney in 2005.

His biggest surprise has been the slow uptake of online. “What everyone expected to happen in 1997 is happening now.”

His advice to other marketers is to look for ways to do new things. Instead of saying something can’t be done, look for ways to innovate.

Vendors & Technology

Euromoney handles its web design and development in house, and built its own CMS system. It uses the following third-part vendors:

Marketing Automation — Adobe Campaign (previously Neolane)
http://www.adobe.com/solutions/campaign-management.html

Payment processing — Data Cash
http://www.datacash.com/mcdatacash/index.html

Email management — Was Adestra now Adobe Campaign

A/B testing – Optimizely
 https://www.optimizely.com/

Insider Analysis

Obviously, Euromoney Institutional Investor has resources that many other subscription sites don’t have in terms of both financing and personnel. But the fact that it took the site so long to plan and implement its marketing automation program as well as approve the software is a lesson for us all — while the concept of marketing automation is simple (If this, then that), the sophistication it allows should not be developed haphazardly.

Furthermore, we think this Case Study gives a good overview of how marketing automation can specifically be used by subscription sites to sell more subscriptions. Furthermore, the Case Study shows how marketing automation can be a solid investment for B2B and high-priced subscription sites in order to better qualify leads for human sales staff engagement. There is still a need for human capital on the automation end — someone must develop and oversee the various customer journeys, especially as they get more specific and tailored for niche, job function and timing. But nevertheless, a sophisticated marketing automation and lead scoring program can helps sites with heavy traffic improve its conversion rate and use its resources wisely.

Our recommendation is that Euromoney look to expand its marketing automation beyond acquisition and focus on using it for retention purposes as well. Well-timed emails or landing pages for certain content or information can really help any company retain subscribers. In addition, re-targeting of cancelled or expired subscribers through social media, email and behavioral advertising can also go a long way. Finally, marketing automation can also help increase engagement (which helps increase retention) by serving up reminder emails or display ads when appropriate (see our On-Demand Video on Behavioral Targeting for Subscription Sites for more on this tactic).