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Automation: The fast lane to data-driven marketing

Quick take

Partnering with Ascend Marketing, BlueJeans insourced the automation expertise needed to remake its data set and power advanced B2B campaigns.

Challenge

Millions of BlueJeans’ customer records needed to be cleansed to restore data integrity and reveal high-value customer insights, but the company’s automation systems weren’t optimally integrated to do the job.

Solution

Ascend created a clear, 3-step plan for BlueJeans to connect their automation pieces effectively and deliver an accurate view over all their customer data, accelerating marketing action and paving the way for growth.

Results

With their automation platforms streamlined, connected, and optimized, BlueJeans quickly gained the momentum they needed to run advanced marketing campaigns, build customer engagement and boost sales.

Getting to good data ASAP

If you’re serious about marketing from a place of huge competitive advantage, it’s no longer a question of if you need automation to support your efforts, it’s how soon can you get there? Automation is the key to transforming vast amounts of data into the game-changing intelligence marketers use to execute modern, data-driven B2B campaigns.

So how soon? Now would be a great time to start.

BlueJeans, an advanced video collaboration platform for hybrid work environments, recognized the need to up their automation game, but like a lot of companies they didn’t have a sizable team of experts with the requisite abilities on staff. By partnering with Ascend Marketing, they insourced the skill set needed to reach their automation objectives quickly.

“We had the platforms in place, but they weren’t talking to each other correctly to give us the intel needed to run campaigns. We had the bones to run, but Ascend gave us the automation muscle to run faster.”

Chadd Thompson

Chief Marketing Officer, BlueJeans by Verizon

We have the bones to run. We need the muscle to run faster.

BlueJeans leadership already had several marketing automation, CRM, and ABM platforms in place, but the systems weren’t set up to work in sync. The depth of the automation and data challenges was limiting marketing and sales from performing at their highest level:

BlueJeans had the marketing vision but not the comprehensive automation horsepower to realize it
Disconnects in platform integration led to marketing and sales teams receiving multiple reports with conflicting information
Large numbers of customers in the BlueJeans database could not be accurately identified for targeting
Lack of confidence in the data and limited data-driven customer insights left teams operating in the dark
Automation was not optimized for advanced B2B campaign strategy, limiting intel into customer actions and their journey stages

Reaching a single source of data truth that BlueJeans could rely on would be daunting and too time-consuming for a lean internal team. Ascend’s insourced automation experts dove in with a plan to clean up millions of unreliable, outdated customer records, streamline the automation systems, and help marketing move forward rapidly.

Articulating the pieces of powerful data-based marketing

First order of business was assessing the state of BlueJeans’ data. In getting under the hood, Ascend’s team uncovered up to 39% non-marketable records in the database total—duplicates, opt outs, faulty geo data, incomplete form fills, etc. Several automation platforms had to be integrated with each other to cleanse the accumulated customer records, restore database integrity, and reveal a true user base for segmentation and targeting.

Next, Ascend built out a complete, automated lifecycle model to track and provide extensive customer data in real time—from newest leads all the way through paid customers—giving BlueJeans a clear view of how to best engage users and prospects in different marketing funnel stages and product streams. Aligning this marketing data closely with sales was a pivotal improvement in the company’s operational process.

A critical step in the plan was disabling outdated, ineffective automation, then ensuring best-practice operational management automations were deployed. Ongoing opt-in and GDPR compliance automations were put in place to maintain a healthy marketing environment going forward. This work was foundational to ensuring continuous data integrity and supporting BlueJeans’ drive to run robust campaigns.

From headwinds to marketing momentum

With processes in place that connected and optimized its automation systems correctly, BlueJeans began to see results immediately in their ability to advance as a marketing organization. “Instead of headwinds we started feeling a lot of momentum to move ahead full tilt, with the confidence our marketing decisions were supported by good data,” added Thompson. The benefits of streamlined and improved automation methods were unmistakable:

Automation generated a single source of data truth, enabling BlueJeans to understand user personas and behavior, target customers, and run effective campaigns
Standardization of processes gave marketers the bandwidth to focus the lion’s share of efforts on strategic thinking
Clean data revealed a true user base and uncovered over 150,000 existing customer records ready for top-of-funnel engagement
Dynamic reporting updates allowed real-time decision-making, supporting immediate response and campaign optimization
Speed and efficiency of automated processes saved BlueJeans time, money, and resources

BlueJeans experienced a

41%

increase

in marketable customers after data cleansing

“With our systems aligned and good data everyone could rely on, our team was able to leave much frustration behind. Our company’s focus shifted to where we could go and the possibilities ahead. It was transformative in so many ways.”

Swati Bhatt

Head of GTM Systems & Tools, BlueJeans by Verizon

Right message, right place, right time

Reaching the universal standard for marketing success all comes down to automation. Without it, securing a single source of data truth your teams can rely on for actionable insights might seem impossible. From collecting and organizing to enriching and analyzing data, the speed of automation makes the lift easier, freeing up valuable time and resources for any organization.

BlueJeans’ partnership with Ascend not only provided much-needed automation expertise to boost marketing horsepower, it helped the company reach its objective of scaling quickly into more advanced, more powerful campaigns.