A long list of engaged, interested leads makes any marketer happy. After all, the more people interested in a company’s products or services, the better the bottom line. However, a broad and diverse pool of clientele can lead to an unexpected problem: the conventional marketing funnel doesn’t always apply.

This is the situation Cetera, a leading wealth management services provider, found itself in.

The Challenge: A Diverse & Rapidly Expanding Customer Base

Following rapid growth and multiple company acquisitions, Cetera wanted a way to connect to prospects with varying needs and preferences in a more bespoke way to better classify and route leads. Cetera’s existing methods relied on qualifying leads as part of the initial CSR engagement process, which wasn’t as efficient.  

“Our team was spending more time on the phone classifying leads than we wanted,” explained Merrill Varghese, Senior VP of Corporate Marketing. “We needed a better approach that allowed us to get right to a needs-focused conversation in that first call, so it could be more about how we could support the prospect’s needs.” Fortunately, the team didn’t have to wait long. What started as a project building an internal tool for mapping interest to available services became the spark for a client-facing, scalable, and self-selected approach.

The Solution: Implementing a Dynamic Customer Engagement Tool

Cetera knew what they needed. However, building and implementing the solution would take time—time the team couldn’t afford. To address this challenge, Cetera turned to the 4Thought Marketing team.

The 4Thought team used Cetera’s existing tech stack, including Adobe Marketo, to construct a tool to streamline the routing process. The “Find Your Fit” tool guided prospects through a series of questions, allowing them to identify their own needs and self-match with the most relevant offerings from Cetera.

The solution leveraged advanced algorithms and data-driven insights to categorize prospects based on their responses. This ensured that each prospect received a personalized recommendation, directing them to the top three programs that were the best match for their interests and needs. This approach enhanced the customer experience and streamlined Cetera’s internal processes.

How It Worked: A Personalized Journey for Every Customer

The system was a dynamic “choose your own adventure” experience. Prospects were prompted to answer questions upon visiting Cetera’s platform. Depending on their answers, the tool used predefined algorithms to categorize them into distinct customer segments.

For instance, if a prospect indicated an interest in tax and accounting services, the tool would direct them to content and service options specifically designed for tax professionals and accountants, ensuring they found exactly what they needed without unnecessary searching. This improved user satisfaction and increased the likelihood of conversion, as clients were more likely to engage with content directly relevant to their needs.

The Results: Enhanced Engagement & Higher Conversion Rates

It didn’t take long for Cetera to see an improvement. “The ‘Find Your Fit’ system made it easy for prospects to find exactly what they were looking for and understand how we could support their specific needs, and gave our sales team an immediate advantage. It was a game-changer for us and the prospect experience we were trying to create,” Merrill Varghese explains.

The implementation of the self-categorization tool yielded impressive results for Cetera:

• Improved customer engagement: The tool significantly increased customer engagement and satisfaction by providing a more personalized experience.
• Higher conversion rates: The tailored approach led to higher conversion rates, as prospects were directed to the most relevant services and support personnel from the start. This reduced the time and effort required for decision-making.
• Operational efficiency: The tool allowed Cetera to manage a diverse customer base more efficiently. By automating the initial sorting and categorization of prospects, the tool reduced the workload on sales and marketing teams, allowing them to focus on more strategic tasks.
• Data-driven insights: This approach also provided Cetera with valuable customer preferences and behavior data. This data was instrumental in refining marketing strategies and ensuring that each advisor segment received the most relevant content and offers.

Key Takeaways for Marketers

Cetera’s experience highlights several important lessons for marketers facing similar challenges:

• Adaptability is crucial: As businesses grow and evolve, so too must their marketing strategies. A flexible approach that can accommodate diverse customer needs is essential for success in a dynamic market.
• Personalization drives engagement: Tools that enable customers to self-identify their needs can significantly enhance the customer experience and improve engagement and conversion rates.
• Leverage technology for efficiency: Automating the segmentation process improves accuracy and allows marketing teams to focus on strategy rather than administrative tasks.
• Continuous learning and improvement: Using data to understand customer behavior is key to refining marketing strategies and ensuring long-term success.

If your company has the same challenge as Cetera, the answer might already be in your existing tech stack. We can help you find it and put it into practice. Get in touch with our team today to learn more and take the first step toward a long-term solution.

When Cetera Financial Group needed help completing their Eloqua to Marketo Migration project by the deadline, they turned to the team at 4Thought Marketing.

Cetera Financial Group is a leading financial services firm, overseeing and managing billions in assets, operating with the sole purpose of enabling the delivery of best-in-class financial advice to as many Americans as possible. Cetera proudly serves independent financial professionals, tax professionals, banks, and credit unions by providing wide-ranging financial planning and wealth management services.

Tasked with managing a prominent financial advisor community across multiple channels, the company recognized the need to revisit its MarTech stack and communication strategies. With that mindset, Cetera embarked on a digital transformation journey to remodel its marketing communications experience and capabilities.

Eloqua to Marketo Migration: A Strategic Move for Cetera

The Eloqua to Marketo Migration represents a pivotal shift in Cetera’s marketing strategy, aligning their tools and systems with contemporary market demands.

The company needed a fully standardized and integrated marketing automation process and a partner that understood its business. Fortunately for Cetera, their marketing automation partner, 4Thought Marketing, had knowledge of their business and both Eloqua and Marketo.

A migration project of this scale typically requires at least three months to plan and execute. Cetera had only half that time. But Cetera’s leadership team trusted 4Thought to make it happen. “A smooth transition was critical,” explains Ed Rayyis, Cetera’s MarTech and Architectural Manager. “The only way we accomplished that was with 4Thought Marketing providing invaluable training and support to our team.”

4Thought Marketing stepped in and took on a leadership role for the entire migration process. The 4Thought team created a transition schedule, managed internal announcements to Cetera employees, hosted regular training sessions, answered staff questions, responded to technical issues, planned for future integrations after the initial migration phase, and managed communications between our internal team and Cetera’s team. Our Senior Marketing Operations Consultant took on the role of project manager. Ultimately, Cetera completed the migration process by its deadline.

For now, Cetera employees continue learning Marketo with training materials created by 4Thought Marketing. Already-certified employees and newcomers can now take full advantage of their marketing automation platform to improve their output. Cetera expects enhanced adoption, utilization, and growth in the following phases due to the switch.

4Thought Marketing is proud to have had the opportunity to assume a leadership role in Cetera’s marketing automation platform migration. Whether a company migrates to Eloqua or a different platform, we have the know-how and experience to complete the project successfully. Contact us today to learn more if you’re considering your migration project.

W. P. Carey is one of the largest diversified net lease REITs, specializing in the acquisition of operationally critical, single-tenant properties in North America and Europe. It primarily engages in sale-leasebacks, where a company sells its real estate to an investor (like W. P. Carey) for cash and simultaneously enters into a long-term lease.

As the company grew, its integrated communications team began looking for ways to further optimize and automate marketing efforts to increase reach and efficiency. One step the team took to achieve this was to integrate its MarTech stack.

Problem 1: Data Quality

W. P. Carey has used Oracle Eloqua as its primary marketing automation platform for over ten years. As a result, the company had a decade of old data cluttering up its system. The first challenge was performing the required housekeeping to clean up contact data.

Problem 2: Eloqua Expertise

The Integrated Communications team also noticed that when reaching out to the platform for support, they were met with different representatives, each of whom required a detailed background explanation of W. P. Carey’s system before they could help. Consequently, this process made support tickets take longer, posing a challenge as the team did not have a designated expert on call who understood Eloqua and W. P. Carey’s system to quickly address challenges.

Problem 3: System Integration

The primary reason W. P. Carey partnered with 4Thought Marketing was to assist with a system integration project. W. P. Carey uses Salesforce as its CRM and Eloqua for marketing automation, but hadn’t integrated the two tools yet. This resulted in disconnected contact databases, created a gap in reporting, and limited the team’s abilities to email contacts and tenants. Without their own backend Eloqua knowledge, the team sought an experienced agency to support the integration.

The Solution: Partnership with the 4Thought Marketing Team

Following a thorough evaluation, W. P. Carey decided to establish a partnership with the 4Thought Marketing team.

The 4Thought team quickly integrated with W. P. Carey’s team to help address their challenges. First, they focused on data quality, clearing out the old contacts from W. P. Carey’s Eloqua instance. Next, 4Thought fully integrated Salesforce with Eloqua, allowing W. P. Carey to engage with contacts through Eloqua marketing campaigns and record responses in Salesforce.

Kelly Mulvaney, Digital Marketing Manager at W. P. Carey, says this simple change was revolutionary to her team: “We could now track the entire contact journey from start to finish, create reports with just a few clicks, and enhance our overall marketing automation strategy.” The saved time allowed the team to focus on other important projects, like the W. P. Carey blog newsletter (distributed via Eloqua).

The 4Thought team also provided a primary contact that supports W. P. Carey, so the marketing team always knows who they should contact for questions or to discuss strategy and plan future improvements. Most importantly, the marketing team enjoyed near-immediate responses to questions or requests.

What’s Next for W. P. Carey?

As the company moves forward, the Integrated Communications team plans to use the newly reworked MarTech stack to make landing page and email creation more efficient, as well as take full advantage of Eloqua’s ability to connect contact data to campaign activity. “We look forward to developing evergreen lead generation campaigns and an improved lead score model,” said Kelly. “Most of all, I’m excited to have an optimized framework in Eloqua that I can share with the rest of the company as a huge timesaver.”

Write Your Own Success Story with 4Thought Marketing

Do the challenges faced by W. P. Carey sound familiar? If your marketing team needs better systems integrations or an on-call Eloqua expert, we’ve got you covered. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help.

Modern business demands a lot from professionals. Systems like Eloqua work wonders to lighten the load, but sometimes they need a little help—especially where dirty data is involved. We work to provide the additional boost Eloqua needs to keep our customers in business. Here’s how 4Thought’s suite of Eloqua apps improved lead generation for Sophos.

About Sophos

Sophos provides comprehensive cybersecurity solutions for almost 400,000 businesses in more than 150 countries. Based out of the UK, the company has four other locations around the world. Their customer list includes such diverse clients as the Diocese of Brooklyn, the Washakie County School District, Del Monte, People’s Independent Bank, and many more. Sophos also offers a family version of their cybersecurity software for individual subscribers. But whether Sophos is marketing their products and services to fortune 500 companies or a local family, they rely on lead generation as much as any other company. And unfortunately, customers aren’t making their job easy.

Problem #1: Dirty Data

Sophos uses multiple free trials offers to generate new customer leads from anyone willing to fill out a short customer-facing form. There was certainly no shortage of interested parties submitting these forms. According to a 2017 survey, most B2B companies report that 66% or 2 out of 3 free trial users end up converting once their trial expires. Quality leads through free trials were and continue to be a valuable asset, to companies as a whole and to Sophos in particular.

However, much of the information submitted in these forms were unusable. People might provide an invalid email address or even list their name as “Mickey Mouse”. Far too much of the data coming from these forms fell into this category of “dirty data”. And if it wasn’t caught in time, the unusable information made its way to the sales team, who then had to spend additional time sorting genuine contacts from tire kickers.

Receiving fake data is surprisingly common, especially in the privacy and security fields. “People are exceptionally apprehensive about giving their personal details because they are in the security space,” said Corey Lysohirka, Senior Marketing Operations Manager at Sophos. “In our industry, people are less likely to provide us with their personal information.” While expected, the influx of unusable information was certainly a problem.

The Sophos team did their best to isolate dirty data once it entered their system. Their Eloqua setup included nearly 400 rules to locate bad information but lacked a straightforward and automated method to delete it.

Problem #2: Poor Lead Flow

Like many companies, Sophos works hard to promote its products and services at public events like trade shows and webinars. These marketing events can result in many new contacts and potential leads. However, contacts from events require near-immediate follow-ups to prevent the conversation from going stale. Sophos’ lead processing system segmented the contact data in Eloqua and marked them to be processed as leads, but that’s where it stopped. Eloqua’s Program Canvas only allows contacts to enter workflows at midnight each night. This caused lengthy delays in getting sales-ready leads into the sales team’s hands and caused the leads to go cold. Sophos needed a solution.

The Solution: Data Filtering & Lead Acceleration Apps from 4Thought Marketing

Corey first noticed 4Thought Marketing while examining the Eloqua cloud app catalog. Impressed with the range of apps and capabilities he saw, he requested that Sophos get in touch with them. From there it was a simple process to find the right apps to solve the problem.

4Thought has developed a suite of apps that extend Eloqua’s functionality and further streamline the marketing process. The first app considered was the Contact Garbage Indicator. This app screens every contact entering Eloqua and singles out potential bad data. This bad data is then held for manual review to prevent false positives. Once the data has been reviewed, the Contact Garbage Indicator empties its data storage and continues to filter incoming contacts.

The Contact Garbage Indicator works in tandem with another app from 4Thought Marketing, the Contact Deleter App. This app does exactly what its name implies—it purges bad contacts routed into it. The Sophos team is especially fond of this one. The team simply has to drop the object into the canvas and then, as Corey puts it, “You just route every garbage contact record that you want to be deleted out of Eloqua to that object and the app simply deletes the garbage record.”

But while both of these apps root out bad data that has already made its way into the system, legitimate customer contacts still need attention as potential leads. Sophos uses the Contact Cloud Feeder app to accelerate lead flow in Campaign Canvas. Instead of having to wait for overnight processes to transfer lead data between programs, the team set up the app to check for newly added contacts every 5 minutes. The app then begins processing, getting leads into the hands of sales reps faster. The process is fully automatic and fits right into their current Eloqua setup. No need to refresh segments, and no need to wait overnight for programs to refresh!

Results: Improved Quality & Processing Speed

With their new setup, Sophos’ data intake has never been better. The Contact Cloud Feeder App kicks off the cycle of processing incoming contacts as leads. The Contact Garbage Indicator then examines each lead for possible dirty data and filters it out. Finally, the Contact Deleter removes the bad data from the system entirely. With all the administrative work done automatically, Sophos is free to focus on generating and nurturing new leads without worrying about bad contacts.

The Sophos team is also exploring live email validation. When someone fills out a customer-facing form, the website will quickly verify that the domain for the provided email address actually exists, otherwise, it will not allow the form to submit. In the long term, Sophos plans to use this validation system to further filter bad data.

Write Your Own Success Story

Sophos has managed to drastically improve its data quality and lead flow with 4Thought Marketing’s suite of Eloqua apps. Dirty data is not a problem unique to them, however. Virtually any company could find itself dealing with bad contacts. Why not give our apps a try and streamline your marketing team’s workday? Contact us today for more information.