PTC Leverages Motiva to Increase Clickthroughs by 46%

Challenge & Opportunity

PTC’s marketing automation team recognized the opportunity to achieve higher email engagement using artificial intelligence. They wanted to shift their team from a “Send It and Forget It” culture that hindered innovation and optimization to a “Send, Review, and Improve” culture of continual learning. Though the team was advanced in their automation skills, achieving continuous campaign optimization requires a high level of manual effort — and the team was already at capacity supporting 80+ marketers globally. Adding resources was not an option, so they needed to get creative.

In 2019, Anna Poulakis, Senior Director of Marketing Automation, and Mike Marshall, Marketing Automation Manager, reviewed PTC’s maturity to identify areas for improvement and opportunities to use AI to address their scaling challenges. They compiled a list of concrete actions with the goal of taking PTC’s email marketing to the next level.

Action Items:

• Technology: Gain access to new AI technologies capable of automatically learning and performing previously manual tasks at scale
  
• Culture: Expand the culture of questioning, experimentation, and continual improvement by automating optimization and analysis
  
• Measurement & Strategy: Become truly data-driven by formalizing goals and KPIs that directly inform strategy and content development
  
• Workflow: Close the loop between analysis, strategy, and content development, making it easier for easier 
  
• Data: Gather new data to gain deeper insights that can be leveraged in campaign planning

Solution

PTC leveraged Motiva’s automated optimizations and analytics to improve engagement and lead velocity. Anna and Mike were able to initiate a rapid transformation because Motiva integrates into existing workflows, making it easier to optimize content and send time.

Within the first week they optimized their fatigue management strategy by using Motiva’s out-of-the-box insights and automations. In the first month, PTC had both existing and new campaigns updated to leverage automated, AI-driven, send time, and message optimizations.

The next step in achieving a data-driven marketing strategy was updating review workflows to close the loop between analytics and content creation, as well as initiate new data standardization and cleansing practices. Finally, they worked with the larger global marketing team to build the foundation for best-practice insights through their newly formalized campaign and optimization reviews.

Clear Impact

In just one year, PTC shifted from being in the “emerging” and “mature” categories to being world-class in marketing AI. And the payoff is clear: These stats represent the impact on PTC’s augmented reality business unit, their fastest-growing, most cutting-edge software offering.