As an international leader in digital printing technology, Electronics for Imaging (EFI) serves clients across a wide range of industries, from creative agencies to higher education. It required a new marketing technology application to support personalized customer engagement across multiple business units. Since EFI often works hand-in-hand to help clients switch from analog to digital printing, building client relationships is a key part of its sales model.

When Naomi Liu, the director of marketing operations at EFI, was tasked with helping the company transition from its legacy marketing automation system as it approached end of life, she took a “right brain, left brain” approach to problem solving. This helped her identify the best ways to create and deliver dynamic, effective customer experiences at scale and drive change management throughout the organization.

After evaluating several options, including HubSpot, Pardot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Eloqua, and Adobe Marketo Engage, Liu and her team were most impressed by the flexibility of Marketo Engage.

“We had to find the right application to help sell our own technology,” says Liu. “Marketo Engage comes with rich analytics that help our sales and marketing teams develop and quickly execute personalized marketing campaigns.”

Small team has strong impact

Migrating to a new platform is almost always technically challenging, but Liu and her four-person team took control: they completed the migration quickly, while securing buy-in from business partners across the company.

As she helped get the organization excited about Marketo Engage, Liu and her team worked with implementation partner DemandGen to get the application up and running, and, crucially, to manage it on their own. Even as they fulfilled their typical day-to-day duties, they were able to complete the implementation on-schedule and within budget.

Now, Marketo Engage enables Liu’s team to support digital marketing operations for dozens of internal business partners across multiple business units.

“Marketo Engage empowers us to execute a campaign end-to-end and allows people to play to their strengths, whether that’s email or web development, data operations, or analytics,” says Liu. “We can create beautiful landing pages, build event-related microsites, and adjust email templates without outsourcing. Marketo Engage maximizes the potential of our small team.”

Once fully deployed on Marketo Engage, they quickly found that processes that would’ve taken days could be done in hours.

Using the Marketo Engage integration with translation management software XTM, Liu’s team condensed a language translation process that would have taken 28 hours of HTML coding, reviewing and proofing, and content review per campaign into just 1.5 hours.

Liu’s team partners with the localization group to translate campaigns in up to 18 languages. In just one year, Liu’s team launched 700 campaigns. And — despite such heavy use — there have been zero internal Marketo Engage-related IT tickets.

Powerful analytics translate into personalized experiences

Some of the beneficiaries of the Marketo Engage campaigns were business partners that Liu’s team previously couldn’t support.

Liu invited one business unit to a special training session on Marketo Engage. When the group learned about how the solution could produce targeted messages at scale, integrate with other popular marketing applications like Vidyard, and clone successful campaigns, they wanted to collaborate. Soon after, another business unit wanted to work with Liu’s team.

The list of business units looking to collaborate with Liu’s team keeps growing, in part, because Marketo Engage is a powerful resource for sales teams working to generate leads. Liu has championed Marketo Sales Insights (MSI) across the company, holding multiple training sessions while working with individual sales team members.

By providing data and analytics about potential leads from the EFI website and other channels, MSI helps the sales team prioritize those leads to engage them in personalized conversations. The depth of data enables sales teams to close more deals faster while increasing ROI; it also helps align sales and marketing strategies.

“The leaders of most companies don’t decide to start a print shop from the ground up, so our business model is more about nurturing client relationships, educating, and upselling leads on products and services,” says Liu. “Through the Marketo Engage integration with Salesforce CRM, we have resources like MSI that allow our sales teams to pursue clients more productively while sharpening the clarity of our marketing messaging.”

Leads generated from Marketo Engage go into the CRM in mere seconds. From there sales reps can gain valuable engagement information – such as when an email is opened – so MSI has become a growing resource among sales teams.

After using MSI for over a year, Julie Tomasino, a new business specialist with EFI, relies on the tool to track engagement with emails she is sending out to prospects to more quickly find decision makers and influencers. “I don’t send an email without going through Marketo Engage. It’s been a valuable resource and has helped me cut the time it takes me to find the right contact in half.”

Liu attributes the boost in productivity, as well as time and cost-effectiveness, to the Marketing Nation support community. If an issue arises, Liu and her team can turn to the Marketing Nation for a solution before escalating it to IT.

Bolstered by the sales teams’ enthusiasm and the efficiency of Marketo Engage, Liu is planning to train more team members on the Marketo Engage Account-Based Management (ABM) module. The ABM module will help sales teams generate new leads while deepening existing client relationships by providing a comprehensive range of information, such as account segmentation, pipeline measurement, and account-based revenue analytics, all from within Marketo Engage.

This widespread excitement is a testament to the efforts Liu and her team put in toward driving Marketo Engage adoption across the company.

A new way of approaching business as usual

The willingness to embrace new technologies helped prepare EFI for the ways COVID-19 upended business as usual.

Much of the company’s revenue comes from physical products, and in-person trade shows and events used to consume a substantial part of marketing budgets. The pandemic proved to be the ultimate challenge in using technology and creativity to keep marketing operations running. Having Marketo Engage already in place helped EFI to promote and move events online. The web developer on Liu’s team can use Marketo Engage to create multiple dynamically designed landing pages on the microsites that accommodate new virtual events.

The Marketo Engage integration with Vidyard, helps create webinars and virtual demos that EFI can use to help clients find new markets. For example, during the pandemic, EFI found a sudden demand for printing technology in divisional graphics, such as social distancing decals and printing on plexiglass dividers.

As Marketo Engage helps EFI move individual events online, it also allows the company to keep ongoing communication with its clients. Marketo Engage is a key resource for the EFI Professional Services team, which works with Liu’s team to send out regular client engagement surveys. Through the automated capabilities of Marketo Engage, the Professional Services team can set gated milestones that trigger surveys on each project.

Even as Marketo Engage helps EFI continue to nurture client relationships, it is also a resource for internal stakeholders. Liu’s team has collaborated with HR and internal communications to send mass communications across the company.

“With Marketo Engage, our team has the capabilities of a far larger operation, positioning us as a creative resource for all our business units and partners,” says Liu. “Across the organization, people want to get hands-on with Marketo Engage because once they have the analytics, they’re free to create more tailored, successful experiences.”

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