Your REGIONAL SALES MANAGER will introduce you to the rest of your team and stay in touch, managing your overall relationship with Act-On.

Your CUSTOMER SUCCESS MANAGER will guide you along the way to set up the basics, integrate your tools, and build on your marketing success.

Act-On’s TECHNICAL SUPPORT pros are equipped to answer your urgent questions, help you navigate through the platform, and troubleshoot any problem that you may encounter along the way.

Ready to get started with your new marketing automation platform?

Our goal is to help you create a solid foundation to ensure your success, and to help you capture ROI as soon as possible. FIRST, meet your team:

Need an extra pair of hands? Our PROFESSIONAL SERVICES team can help with everything from strategy and planning to building your landing pages and executing your campaigns.

If your company doesn’t have the staff or time to manage your sending reputation, consider engaging our professional DELIVERABILITY SERVICES specialists to help you maximize your reputation – and enhance your inbox placement.

Your #1 resource, Act-On University, is filled with how-tos, videos, webinars, user guides and much more to help you succeed with Act-On.

ƛ Bookmark the login page and identify resources ƛ Build a strategy for success ƛ Set up technical recommendations ƛ Set up profile and account information ƛ Add users and set privileges ƛ Integrate with 3rd-party applications ƛ Create standard field names ƛ Create marketing and test lists ƛ Start your lead scoring system ƛ Create your content library

Welcome to Act-On

Let’s begin by making sure your Act-On account is set up properly.

If any of these boxes aren’t checked yet, visit Act-On University to create a foundation. Check out the

Getting Started Playbook. This handy guide will walk you play-by-play through execution of your account setup, and the creation of your marketing structure.

Attract: Use different marketing channels and strategies like social posts, blog posts, SEO, and pay-per-click campaigns to get potential prospects to find and interact with your content.

Capture: Get to know prospects by capturing their information through forms. Start with the basics, and get them to sign up with their email address and name on a Newsletter Sign-Up form or a Contact Us form.

Nurture: Now that you know who your visitors are, you can begin sending outbound email campaigns. This is when you start to use different drip campaigns to nurture them.

Convert: It’s time for your sales team to make the sale. Give sales all the tools they need to close the deal.

Expand: Keep momentum going once you’ve closed the sale. It’s important to onboard your customers properly and help them be successful, so they keep growing.

Along the way, you measure your results so you know what’s working and everyone can see the marketing team’s effect on revenue.

Now let’s walk through every stage and show you how you’ll use Act-On to connect with customers.

In less than a decade, the world of marketing has changed drastically. Increased access to information empowers buyers to proactively uncover content and products, search online, seek social referrals, read reviews, and dig into expert reports before ever even talking to you.

During implementation you will walk through a five-step process that makes every prospect, lead, and customer feel noticed. Act-On gives you the ability to interact with potential buyers and current customers in meaningful ways, respond to them personally, and deliver the value and information they want – when they want it.

Forrester Research calls this “the age of the customer.”

Today’s Marketing is

Customer Focused

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To help you look at the world, and the buyer’s journey, from the customer’s point of view, here is a framework that outlines their journey.

AttractThis is where it all begins.

Your future customer realizes a need, or discovers a problem that must be solved. Once they have that figured out, they start doing online research.

How Act-On helps you: We’ll help you learn how to make the most of inbound marketing. From identifying website visitors to making landing pages and calls to actions, to testing your content, to social publishing – it’s the marriage of process and technology that brings home the results you want.

Your Act-On University bookmark for Attract.

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Make sure your web pages are optimized to attract your prospects with SEO Audit.

Create landing pages that promote your content, offers and events.

Test, test, test. Use A/B testing to find out which email, landing page, or other content will deliver the goods. Or test individual elements such as headlines, buttons, colors, calls to action, and so on.

With Act-On Anywhere, you can access your media library, account histories and other data, no matter what application you’re working in.

Set up your website visitor tracking to capture visitor behaviors.

ATTRACT

Use Twitter Prospector to find, identify, and engage directly with people tweeting about your product or industry.

Set up Social Publish to help you broadcast your social media marketing content.

Your potential customer is now noticing you

as they interact with you and your content on your blog and social channels.

Awareness achieved!

What are your competitors doing on social media? Act-On can show you. Set up the Competitors feature and watch what they do on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more.

Your future customer is online, and social. Fully 100% of business decision-makers use social media for work purposes, says Forrester Research.

read blogs, watch videos, or listen to podcasts

maintain a profile on social networking sites

comment on blogs and post ratings and reviews

You need to be there too.

Your customer finds you online! You use SEO, landing pages, social media and more to be found where your customer is looking. They like your content, so they begin to trust your company as an authority.

For now, your customer is identified as an anonymous visitor in Act-On and their engagement is being tracked in their activity history.

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CaptureThis is where you start to take your relationship with your future buyer to the next level.

Get to know your prospects by capturing their information through forms.

How Act-On helps you: We know forms backwards, forwards, and upside down. Pretty soon you will too. Plus: learn how to gate content, use progressive profiling, make the most of a webinar, track your buyer’s engagement, and much more.

Your Act-On University bookmark for Capture.

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Make the first sign-up easy and attractive. Start with the basics. Offer something simple (like a newsletter) and get her to sign up with her name and email address. Then use a trigger confirmation email so she gets an immediate response.

Your future customer is now a “known visitor” in your database

You can see most of the activity and pages she engaged with before you even knew who she was.

Progressive profiling Use a series of short forms to capture more of her information slowly, over time, as you build trust.

CAPTURE

Measure what matters!You’re getting conversions now, so create key performance indicators that tell you which messages and which channels are making it happen.

Next, gate some of your really attractive high value content...and ask a few advanced questions. You’ll learn more about what this prospect cares about, and whether she meets your criteria for a good customer. Remember: the more you know about your prospects, the more targeted and personalized the content you can provide to them.

Reports

Create events that fulfill your prospect’s need for education and information. You’ll capture great leads through webinar registration forms. Use Act-On to promote your events, register attendees, send registration acknowledgements, and follow up with both attendees and non-attendees. Use custom touch points so you can score offline events like trade shows, user group meetings, and golf tournaments.

NurtureNow, educate your future customer through the next steps in the buyer’s journey.

Start to use different progressive campaigns to nurture your contacts, and send them targeted content based on what you know about them so far. As they interact, you’ll see more of their interests and behavior and you can send content that’s increasingly relevant.

Your goal: Help the buyer mature to sales-readiness at the fastest pace they are comfortable with.

How Act-On helps you: We can advise you how to get started with a simple nurture program, which you can then build out as you get feedback from metrics.

Your Act-On University bookmark for Nurture.

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We can help you figure out how to use dynamic content so you can target multiple segments with one email, saving time and making your messages more personal.

Guide your buyerusing drip campaigns with content based on his demonstrated interests and inquiries. You can also target people based on where they are in the buying process ... which stage, which step.

What’s a persona? And how do you use them in target marketing? Ask us!

Segment your lists using buyer personas made from common factors like job title, revenue and needs/interests. This will help you personalize the information you send. Your Act-On CSM can help you figure out your strategy for this.

Nurture

Keep reaching out to those buyers with valuable, interesting contentFollow the Rule of 4: Use every 1 piece of content in at least 4 different channels, for a steady stream of valuable information for your buyers. Keep them engaged, even through a long sales cycle.

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Use valuable data from salesUse account and opportunity data fields in the CRM to ensure you’re sending the right information at the right time in the buying cycle to accelerate a sale.

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Testing, testing. You don’t have to guess. Use A/B testing on subject lines, button colors, calls to action and more to optimize and evolve campaigns and landing pages.

Lead scoring isn’t hard. Once we show you how to do it, you’ve got a world of options.

What’s the score?Assign numerical value to BANT (budget, authority, need, time) criteria and actions that indicate sales-readiness. Your future buyer – if he really does have genuine potential to buy – will usually rack up a high enough score to push him to the surface for attention.

ConvertTime to close the deal.

Use the right mix of content and service to turn that lead into a loyal customer.

How Act-On helps you: When a sales rep gets a lead from marketing, they’ll know why they got it – and they can base their conversations on the wants and needs the customer’s digital footprints reveal.

Your Act-On University bookmark for Convert.

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Empower your sales team with marketing-approved email templates that they can send through their own email client.

Or do something nice for sales: Send personalized emails on sales’ behalf to targeted accounts, or with special offers.

Hot Prospects The best leads, sent to your sales team right in their CRM.

Create Website Prospector alertsfor your sales team so they can react quickly when their leads are on your site. (Or sales reps can create their own.)

Convert

Say the right thing to the right personMost sales have multiple decision makers. With Act-On, you can coordinate how you market to each one of them. The information you provide could be different, depending on whether someone’s role is functional or strategic.

Create a funnel report based on each stage of your buyers’ journey, so you can track how quickly and how well your prospects are going through each stage. Remember to measure and analyze!

Your nurture program should be stuffed with bottom-of-funnel materials like references, comparisons, and case studies, so the serious buyer is generating serious lead scores.

ExpandNow you’ve got a new customer!

Marketing doesn’t stop once sales closes the deal. Marketing affects the entire customer lifecycle, and this stage will get you started on your way to creating advocates for your brand.

How Act-On helps you: Want to know what works in onboarding? Ask us! We’ve got lots more to share, from how to instill loyalty to how to inspire advocates.

Your Act-On University bookmark for Expand.

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Celebrate milestones

• Completed account set-up?

• Finished a training unit?

• Launched your first campaign?

Hurray!

Deliver training contentwith your Act-On system. Promote webinars and drip campaigns based on milestones that your customers have achieved. When you upgrade your product, offer more training.

Help people become confident with your productSend a drip program that takes them along, step by step. Got different product lines? Segment people by what they bought, so you can make these steps specific to them.

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Act-On Software delivers cloud-based integrated marketing automation software. Its platform is the foundation of successful marketing and sales departments in organizations of all sizes. Act-On’s highly intuitive user interface, complete online marketing tool set, Act-On Anywhere™ business productivity application, and affordable pricing have enabled the adoption of marketing automation technologies without the need for dedicated IT support.

ABOUT ACT-ON SOFTWARE

©2015 Act-On Software, Inc. Trademarks belong to their respective owners. All rights reserved.

Stay engagedand look for opportunities to upgrade and cross-sell other products. Send a newsletter, do webinars to introduce new products.

Create advocates and get referralsDevelop communities and find ways to reward – and delight –your customers.

We’re here to help.

From setting up your account to determining how to score leads, to identifying which metrics will tell you the most, your Act-On team is here for your education, support and success. And that’s something you can Act-On.

Act-On Consulting and Production Some Act-On customers with big dreams and small marketing teams realize they need someone to supplement their marketing efforts for small projects, or even to help create and execute an entire marketing strategy. Our professional services team is here to help you with anything you need. Just let us know, and we’ll create a custom solution tailored for you.

www.act-on.com | @ActOnSoftware | #ActOnSW