Silverpop Adds New Automation Features With Engage 8.3 Upgrade

Working to help marketers engage prospects on “their own terms,” Silverpop recently announced new features as part of its Engage 8.3 product upgrade.

Since accumulating data about customers and prospects is an important goal for all marketers, Silverpop has added Progressive Web Forms and Multiple Lead Scoring models to its product suite. Because asking for too much information too soon, or failing to use the knowledge gathered to inform messaging can lead to impatient and uninterested contacts, Silverpop has taken steps to help marketers avoid these pitfalls.

The Progressive Web Forms builder is designed to enable marketers to pose new questions each time a contact visits their web site or landing page, to garner deeper insight into their interests. To incorporate this feature into their campaigns, Silverpop customers can prioritize the list of questions they would like to ask their contacts, and indicate how many should be addressed during each exchange.

“Most people, fortunately, don’t shake hands and immediately share their entire life story within the first 30 seconds of meeting someone new, and online relationships shouldn’t be any different,” said Bryan Brown, Director of Product Strategy at Silverpop. “The strongest relationships develop over time and involve give and take. When you ask contacts to share information with you, you need to be prepared to use that knowledge to develop more relevant and engaging dialogues with them.”

Focused on helping marketers develop score models that rank contacts based on their level of engagement and likelihood to purchase, Silverpop’s new Multiple Lead Scoring functionality is designed to help marketers create multiple scoring models that segment based on different product lines, geographies, behaviors or loyalty levels from within the same database.

Silverpop also added new Web Tracking capabilities, designed to help marketers monitor prospect web site activity after they leave an email. The tools are aimed at helping marketers harvest valuable information regarding a prospect’s interests and location in the buying cycle.

Customizing Engagement

To nurture prospects’ needs and engagement level, Silverpop’s new Snooze feature offers marketers to allow recipients to temporarily pause receipt of communications from their company for a specified period of time.

“With the average rate of annual list churn hovering around 20-30% or more for most companies, marketers must make every effort to retain as many subscribers as possible, and one way to do this is to present them with options when they click unsubscribe,” said Loren McDonald, VP of Industry Relations at Silverpop.

Using Engage’s drag-and-drop user interface, Silverpop users can click once to add the Snooze button to their forms and give recipients a way to declare their desire to put the program on hold rather than unsubscribing. If recipients elect this option, rather than opting out, they can choose to stop receiving the company’s email communications for a predetermined period of time or can even specify the exact date they want to start receiving messages again. These recipients remain opted in and will resume their place in any active campaigns at the end of the Snooze period.

“Successful marketers listen to what contacts tell them, and sometimes they want to tell you that your information is still valuable, but now just isn’t the right time,” McDonald said. “Someone who recently returned from a cruise may simply want to pause, rather than unsubscribe, a cruise operator's emails for six months when they will start planning next year's vacation. By allowing them to Snooze, you not only save the relationship, but you remind them that you care about their preferences — which goes a long way in building customer loyalty.”