Fix the Funnel: Closed Loop Marketing

Do you know how your visitors are finding you online? When your visitors convert on your site, can you tie that conversion back to the specific marketing campaign that led to it? Are you utilizing closed loop marketing?

Closed loop marketing is a sales-and-marketing system that leverages your customer relationship management system, marketing software and analytics-tracking technology to paint a clear picture of how your visitors are finding you, what they’re doing when they browse your site and the origin of their conversion when they ultimately make a sale or fill out a form.

Symptoms of a Broken Funnel

Ideally, your lead generation or sales conversions are steady and are at a “healthy” level (based on your particular business needs). Sales and marketing are complementing each other’s efforts and your website is meaningful and useful for your target audience.

But ideal is rarely the case.

Are you experiencing any of the following:

• Low lead volume?
• Unusually high amount of unqualified leads?
• Large bounce rate on your website?

There are other symptoms of a broken funnel, but let’s take a deeper look at a high bounce rate. According to an Inc.com study, the average bounce rate should be around 50%. Anything higher—and especially anything above 80%–indicates a clear problem.

If you’re noticing symptoms of a broken funnel, here’s the good news: it can be fixed, and we can help.

Closed-Loop Marketing Tool Box

The basics for a closed-loop marketing system are the following:

• Marketing Automation Software. Marketing automation software helps organize and track crucial data—saving you time and effort to create a homebrew solution. At Oneupweb, we’ve partnered and used HubSpot, but there other options available and we’re happy to discuss those and research them further to see if they fit your needs.
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software. SalesForce is a very popular and well-known CRM, but like marketing automation software, other options are available. Whatever you ultimately decide to use, just be sure it’s compatible with your marketing automation software.
• Site layout, navigation and content—built around your target audience. Your website is the central hub in your closed-loop  marketing efforts, so to make it work for your business, it must be built around your customer. If you don’t know whether your site is optimized and useful for your audience, a site analysis and user audit will help.
• High value calls-to-action, effective landing pages and form fills.

Of course there’s one more very important thing you’ll need: the team to execute and put all these pieces together. Closed-loop marketing is sophisticated and it can be an investment well-spent for your business, if you have the right people to execute. An internal team may be capable, but be sure to examine your options from all angles. If you need advice on choosing a digital marketing model and whether to choose an internal team or an agency, read this.

And if you’re curious about some of the more nuanced details of closed-loop marketing, we recently authored a white paper on that topic. In it, we go into further detail about:

• The closed-loop marketing cycle
• Benefits of closed-loop marketing
• In-depth analysis at a closed-loop marketing tool box
• What to do next with your closed-loop marketing tool box
• More

It’s free to download, and we think you’ll find it useful.