Lead nurturing is by far one of the most advanced and effective marketing automation out there. Used by most major organizations today, it has changed the way companies communicate and deliver information to users and clients.
In the vast range of different companies offering marketing automation and lead nurturing, Act-on is by far one of the most advanced and effective systems out there. This is of course due to personel such as Atri Chatterjee their CMO, who is a very bright and succesful mind in the field of marketing and innovation.
Intiuged and impressed with his lecture in the 2013 Totango’s customer success summit on customer lifecycle marketing. I requested to conduct a short interview.
The results are as followed:
Interview With Atri Chatterjee CMO of Act-On Software
Please tell us a bit about your background.
I’ve spent over 20 years running marketing, product management and business development for both publically traded and pre-IPO companies. Prior to joining Act-On, I was Vice President and GM of the User Authentication business at Symantec. I was also the first VP of Marketing at Responsys, where I helped create the first business plan, raise several rounds of funding and establish that company as a pioneer SaaS application for email marketing. I’ve held senior marketing roles at other category-leading companies including CipherTrust, McAfee, Netscape, and Clarify.
Much of your focus is towards Customer Lifecycle Marketing. Can you give us a look into why customer lifecycle marketing has replaced the traditional approach to marketing tact
I wouldn’t use the words “replaced traditional approach to marketing;” it’s just a more holistic way to view marketing, with a customer-centric approach. Most organizations do some form of customer lifecycle marketing today, but it is usually piecemeal and disjointed. Marketers need to interact with customers throughout the entire relationship not just during the acquisition phase. You have to think about retention of the customer and how to keep them happy and benefiting from your product/service, as well as expansion—upselling and cross-selling to your pre-existing customer-base. Marketing automation is being underused at this time. The capabilities of the technology can be leveraged ongoing, to manage all of the marketing programs through the entire customer lifecycle.
How should we measure success of customer lifecycle marketing?
Customer lifecycle marketing can be measured by overall customer satisfaction, churn rate, average customer life-expectancy and customer value over the entire customer lifetime. These measurements can give you an overview of how effective your customer lifecycle marketing programs are performing.
How can Big Data help optimize revenue throughout the customer lifecycle.
Big data provides insights that lead to more informed interaction with customers. With the Act-On platform, marketers can capture actionable insights at every stage of the relationship. From the suspect who visits your website and converts to a known customer, to the lead who downloads a specific white paper, to the long-term customer who responds to a satisfaction survey, marketing automation is tracking, recording, and sharing valuable, actionable data points. Integrating Act-On with other systems such as customer service and billing gives you continuous, evolving insight into the profile of your customers. Today’s marketers are able to track, manage and report more efficiently and adapt programs in response to the big data gleaned through Act-On. The data provided equips marketing, sales and customer success departments with the intelligence they need to better service the requests of customers throughout the lifecycle.
A side question that I wish to ask you from your vast experience in security companies. Security in SaaS is a mission critical issue – how should vendors best approach this issue without slowing down the speed and user experience of their online operations?
At Act-On we take security, compliance and data integrity very seriously. Act-On has earned Trusted Cloud and EU Safe Harbor Practices certification by TRUSTe and Trustwave PCI Compliance Certification. Act-On also self certifies with the US-Department of Commerce. We take careful steps to protect our infrastructure from attack as well as to safeguard our customers’ data. Security and privacy are of paramount importance at Act-On.
