Mailchimp for B2B Marketing

Mailchimp is a great tool. It’s easy to use, has solid functionality and a reliable deliverability. Create an account and you will be able to build and launch an e-newsletter campaign within 30 minutes. It’s that easy.

And it’s cost effective. You can send 10,000 emails a month to a list of up to 2.000 subscribers with Mailchimps Free plan.

No wonder that so many B2B marketers have Mailchimp. But is it a good fit for your next B2B marketing ambition? Can you map marketing messages to buyer journey stages? Can you use lead scoring to qualify leads? Or hand over hot leads to your sales team?

In this blog, we look at the B2B marketing automation functionality Mailchimp offers. Then we address what’s missing and how to fix it using Manceppo.

Mailchimp as B2B Marketing Automation Tool

Mailchimp has evolved from newsletter solution to Marketing Automation system over recent years. For marketers it now offers a good starting point for many automation scenarios. Especially its new Customer Journey Builder is a great improvement over the previous Automations editor.

But Mailchimps strategic focus in launching new functionality has primarily been on e-commerce. It has optimized integration with leading B2C e-commerce platforms. And their cross-channel marketing approach is focused on Facebook social posts, Facebook ads and postcards (Hey stop, wait a minute mr. Postman!). Some B2B Marketing Automation options however are still missing. This is where integration of Mailchimp with Manceppo can help you out.

To optimize Mailchimp for B2B Marketing Automation an integration with Manceppo offers addition functionality, including:

• 360 view on profiles
• Lead scoring
• Building customer journeys
• Hand-over from marketing to sales

Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

360 View On Profiles

To automate B2B marketing tasks, a complete view on profiles is essential. Mailchimp offers some basic CRM functionality and a detailed view on email interactions. But for B2B marketing it’s incomplete, as the timeline misses interactions from other channels. Think of website visits, white paper downloads or webinar registrations. These are essential pieces of information to create if-then-else workflows or lead scores. By integrating Mailchimp with Manceppo you can complete the timeline of your B2B marketing contacts and typically track:

• Website visits on a page level
• Downloads of white papers, reports or e-books
• Registrations for events or webinars
• Opens and clicks of emails from MailChimp

Also, Mailchimp does not separate profile information and company information. This is important as one company can have multiple contacts. For instance in lead generation and Account Based Marketing its important to know whether multiple contacts within one organization are interested in the same topic. This is why Manceppo added company data as separate entity to the data model. Based on email domains and fuzzy-matching, Manceppo can associated multiple contacts working for the same organization.  And enrich this information with company data from LinkedIn and other sources.

Now, with all your profile information in one place, you can start triggering smart workflows across your marketing tools, without investing in a high-end solution. You can track critical moments like a visit of your pricing page, a link click on an offer or interest in specific topics to trigger Customer Journey campaigns in MailChimp.

Lead Scoring

Key to successful B2B marketing is reaching out to leads with commercial messages at the right moment. In marketing automation systems, this is facilitated by applying lead scoring mechanisms. Lead scoring is a way to measure the likeliness of a commercial opportunity for a potential customer. Depending on this lead score, the next best step can be determined — for instance, transferring a lead to the sales department or triggering a certain nurture flow. But MailChimp only shows a simple contact rating indicating the engagement of a subscriber. This isn’t a true indicator of specific interests. Here’s an example:

In many B2B marketing automation systems, lead score techniques use both explicit and implicit information. This is where lead scoring becomes interesting. Explicit scores are based on specific profile characteristics that are generally available. Think of intelligence regarding buying authority, position or presence of social media accounts. Implicit scores are based on lead behavior such as website visits, email opens and white paper downloads. Here’s one example:

Together, implicit and explicit scores can give a good indication of the interests and characteristics of an individual person. This interest score provides a good opportunity to determine your next best step in communication with your contact. And this is core to marketing communication — sending the right message to the right person at the right moment.

By integrating Mailchimp with Manceppo, lead scoring and using lead scores to trigger emails becomes possible using Mailchimp.

Customer Journeys

The Mailchimp Customer Journey Builder helps you create automated marketing workflows for your profiles. You can use Customer Journeys to add tags, send targeted emails, and accomplish other important tasks for you. The Customer Journey Builder is quite friendly and flexible to use, and there is a practical video tutorial available.

But fundamentally, it’s focused on executing drip campaigns. Email drip campaigns consist of a series of emails sent to members of a specific list or segment. They can be sent to all members, new members or members for whom a certain field is identified.

Triggers

Triggers for Customer Journey campaigns in MailChimp include:

• Campaign Activity: These triggers help you target subscribers who are on your email marketing list, are identified as “opened,” “clicked” or “not opened” or found you through a specific link.
• List Criteria: These triggers help you target subscribers who signed up for your Mailchimp list, a group or after adding a certain tag. Triggers can also be based on changes in subscriber fields.
• Queue Activity: These triggers help you target subscribers who are already in the queue of your automation series such as opened previous email or clicked on a specific link in previous email.
• E-Commerce: These triggers help you target customers from your connected e-commerce platform such as Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce or Magento.
• Integrations: These advanced triggers help you target subscribers who meet criteria you establish based on custom API integrations.
• Date-Based: These triggers help you target subscribers based on a specific date field in your list like a birthday or an anniversary. This trigger type is exclusively available for date-based automations.

Drip campaigns are powerful in many situations. But B2B Marketing Automation and drip campaigns are not the same thing. A drip campaign is a set of marketing emails that will be sent out automatically on a schedule. B2B Marketing Automation, however, is a much broader concept. Its objective is to automate a series of repetitive tasks across channels and tools.

To enable more B2B Marketing Automation functionality, adding Manceppo to your WordPress website and Mailchimp account extends the set of triggers you can use:

• Profile: Set conditions to trigger an event on profile fields like email address, job title, lead score or profile status (market, suspect, lead, MQL, SQL, customer).
• Company: Set conditions to trigger an event on company fields like company name, industry, location or company size.
• Forms: Trigger events based on completion of forms for downloads, registrations and messages or form visits.
• WordPress: Trigger an activity based on any web visits or specific web page visits, like visits to your pricing page or solution page.
• Mailchimp: Trigger an activity based on Campaign activity or subscriber criteria, like tags or list memberships.

Actions

Based on criteria, actions can be triggered, either directly or with a specified delay. Mailchimp actions that can be added to a Customer Journey Builder include:

• Sending an email
• Adding or removing a tag
• Adding to or removing from a group

Manceppo extends the ability for B2B marketeers to trigger actions and automate marketing processes. To trigger Customer Journeys in Mailchimp the Manceppo Rules Engine can add new subscribers to a list and add or remove a tag. But the Manceppo can also execute actions outside Mailchimp, including:

• Profile status: Change the status of a profile, for instance from Lead to Marketing Qualified Lead, typically based on a lead score threshold as trigger.
• Send alerts: Send an alert when criteria are met. For instance sending an alert to account management when an email link is clicked or when a message was left on the website.

By adding Manceppo to your Mailchimp account, a more complete B2B Marketing Automation platform is created. The Mailchimp drip campaign presented in the picture above can now be extended with for instance the following Manceppo triggers and actions:

• Add a profile and tag based on an e-book download
• Build a lead score to determine when leads are marketing qualified
• Set alerts on interesting events, like specific link clicks

Hand-over of leads from B2B marketing to sales

Key to successful B2B marketing is handing over marketing leads to the sales team at the right time. Leads must qualify for a follow-up by sales, for instance based on their interest and/or demographics. In Mailchimp there are not many ways to automate this hand-over. But Manceppo offers some straightforward ways to make sure valuable leads are handed over from B2B marketing to sales at exactly the right moment:

• Lead scoring: as discussed, Manceppo offers an easy to use lead scoring scheme in which you can configure multiple lead scores. Lead scoring is a simple way to separate the golden leads from the sandy noise.
• Lead status: Based on any trigger, for instance lead scoring, you can adjust the leads status of a profile. Status options include: market, suspects, leads, MQL, SQL and customer.
• Interesting Events: Define your own ‘interesting events’ like specific link clicks, page visits or leaving messages on website to trigger an alert or lead status change.
• Alerts: Set an alert for an interesting event or lead score threshold.
• Lists: Maintain a dynamic list with profiles based on criteria.

Feature overview

The feature overview below presents the way Manceppo extends Mailchimp to turn it into the perfect solution for B2B marketing.

Getting started

Once you have implemented Manceppo, you can start using many other marketing automation features on top of Mailchimp. Using the Manceppo WordPress plug-in, you can turn WordPress pages into effective landing pages for your white papers and e-books. Get started with your free account today!