Demandbase improves customer relationships by automating high-impact campaign experiences

Challenge

Driving higher course completion rates

One of the ways that Demandbase empowers marketers to be more effective in their roles is through a series of online ABM certification courses. “We offer a robust ABM certification program designed for marketing and revenue professionals who  are interested in mastering account-based strategies,” explains Dering. “Our certification program is a win-win for us. The courses train marketers in ABM best practices that they can apply at any company, which is a great way to increase awareness around our category and offerings. From a customer marketing standpoint, our goal is to get more Demandbase customers certified, as we’ve observed that certified customers tend to show higher retention and a 2.6x higher CLV.” 

The Demandbase team had observed that while customers tend to take full advantage of the company’s comprehensive ABM training, some would stop short of completing the course at different stages. The team knew the importance of encouraging certification completion, but struggled to identify the exact location where individual customers dropped off in their training within the company's learning management system (LMS). “To actually engage attendees, we had to export long lists of course registrations and completions from our LMS, manually format the data, then upload it to our marketing automation platform (MAP). We were wasting too many cycles on manual work that we could’ve spent supporting an even better customer experience.” 

Demandbase needed a solution that could automatically identify customers who hadn’t completed their certification for additional nurture. “These certification courses are incredibly critical to our business. We needed to find a way to identify the LMS experience of our students in a more efficient way.” 

Solution

Demandbase automatically syncs training data from its certification program

“The team started to evaluate different integration solutions,” says Dering. “We wanted to hit that sweet spot of enterprise-grade functionality and ease-of-use. While we are pretty tech-savvy, we don’t have engineers on our team to build integrations. So we needed a low-code solution that didn't require development knowledge and was flexible enough to evolve with our business needs.”

“Initially, our search led us to an integration solution that branded itself as a quick and easy automation tool. Unfortunately, that tool didn’t have the flexibility or the functionality to meet our use case.” 

After discovering the Tray Platform, the Demandbase team realized that they had found their solution. “The Tray Platform offers out-of-box connectors for all of the services we wanted to integrate: Docebo, Pardot, and Salesforce. Additionally, it has strict compliance and data governance policies, which aligns with our high standards for customer data security. And the Tray Platform is robust and flexible enough to handle our use case while being user-friendly enough to not require an engineering background.” 

Use case

Integrating Docebo + Pardot + Salesforce

Demandbase harnessed the power of a General Automation Platform (GAP) to automate real-time uploads for lists of course students from its LMS, Docebo, with its MAP, Pardot. Once inside Pardot, each student receives a personalized email nurture sequence that periodically sends reminders and course follow-up material to students to help maintain momentum on what they’ve learned. 

“We used the Tray Platform to bridge the gap between high-value customers and the means to engage them,” Dering explains. “Eventually, beginners become experts, and the experts seek out tools like ours that help them execute strategic ABM campaigns.”

“And these initiatives aren’t the only ways we’re using automation to augment our educational courses. The success of our first integration led us to look at ways to increase course completion rates. Now, we can identify and follow-up with enrollees that haven’t completed their certification. An investment in our educational programs is ultimately an investment in our bottom line, so we want to nudge as many people as possible to become certified.” 

Results

Demandbase improves relationships and nurtures more customers 

“Using automation, we transformed a very manual yet business-critical process into an efficient, automated process that helps us close gaps in our funnel and increase our overall CLV,” remarks Dering. “Not only do customers that have completed one of our certification courses have 2.6x the lifetime value of non-certified customers, they are also 12% more likely to renew.”

“Additionally, we’re seeing a 38% lift in customer training completion rates, thanks to our automated reminder program. This uplift wouldn’t have been possible without our integrations.“

“Not to mention, we’ve generated a 107% ROI in saved hours of manual work from our education team, which they can invest back into making even better content that shapes marketers into ABM experts.” 

Next Steps

Expanding the scope of automation at Demandbase

Moving forward, Demandbase is excited to explore the relationship between automation and strategic marketing campaigns. “These days, marketers need to achieve much more with less. If you can deeply integrate your tech stack, you’re unlocking powerful automation that not only drives revenue growth but saves you time, too.” 

If you’d like to dive into this use case further, check out this walkthrough on the Tray.io blog. Or, if you want to see how other successful firms are using automation to drive leads and improve process efficiency, join our next weekly group demo.