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Delivering your emails can be like crossing the Bridge of Death in Monty Python’s “The Holy Grail.” You have to answer several riddles to get past the gatekeepers and avoid the Pit of Lost Emails.

The gatekeepers, of course, are the ISPs and webmail providers. To help get your emails across, MarketingSherpa and ReturnPath recently capped a webinar on deliverability with data, case studies, and best practices. Naturally, we received many questions.

There were so many questions, in fact, that co-presenter Tom Sather, Director of Professional Services at ReturnPath, answered some of the audience’s deliverability questions in a recent blog post. Today, I am doing the same with three questions below.

Question #1: Could you share tips about how to forestall people using Spam button to unsubscribe?

People who want to unsubscribe from your emails are more likely to harm to your program than to help it — so let them go. Make it as easy as possible them to stop receiving your emails.

You should always link to a simple (one-click) unsubscribe process. Most companies put this link in the footer, but you can go a step further by putting the link in the header.

Here’s an example:

As Tom Sather described in his recent post, you can also create a coded email header that some ISPs and webmail providers use to generate an unsubscribe link in their interfaces.

Also, take steps to help prevent subscribers from wanting to unsubscribe in the first place. Strive to increase the relevance of your emails’ content and timing. Make sure your signup forms and welcome emails are setting subscribers’ expectations accurately.

If you clearly set expectations and only deliver emails within those guidelines, then subscribers should not mark your emails as spam. They should be receiving exactly what they requested. However, if subscribers do mark a message as spam, be sure to immediately drop them from your list.

Question #2: How do I know if someone marks my emails as spam or junk?

When a subscriber marks your email as “spam” or “junk,” it hurts your sender reputation. Monitoring campaigns for these types of complaints is a good start to preventing them from happening.

Some email marketing platforms offer complaint rates in their reports. You can also sign up for complaint feedback loops with some ISPs and webmail providers.

Feedback loops send you a copy of each complaint made against your emails. Such a complaint could be someone marking your email as spam or forwarding it to a postmaster. Here is more information on signing up for feedback loops from popular providers:
Yahoo!
AOL
MSN / Hotmail
Comcast

Question #3: If you’re using a third-party solution to produce and send your email, is that considered a dedicated IP address?

ISPs and webmail providers typically track senders’ reputations by IP address. Depending on the platform you use to send email, you might have a shared IP address that is also used by other senders. This would mean you’re also sharing your reputation with other senders.

A dedicated IP address is only used by your company. This gives you the ability to manage your sender reputation without having to worry about other companies who might be also using it.

To answer your question, email marketing platforms can offer you a dedicated IP address, but using one does not guarantee you a dedicated IP.

For example, a platform vendor can have some clients who send from shared IPs and other clients who send from dedicated IPs. Getting a dedicated IP will likely require an additional charge.

As we noted in the webinar, 65% of email marketers report that using a dedicated IP address is a “very effective” deliverability tactic, the highest of any reported in our 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report. However, as Tom Sather noted on our blog last year, a shared IP address can be beneficial if you meet these two criteria:

• Mailing volume is less than 20,000 subscribers
• Your database consists mostly of addresses at the top four consumer providers (Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail and AOL)

If you’re not sure which type of IP you send from, reach out to your email marketing platform vendor and ask. You should get a very straight-forward answer. It’s not like you’re asking a riddle.

Useful links related to this article

Webinar Replay — Improve Email Deliverability: Tactics for handling complaints and boosting reputation

ReturnPath’s Blog Post — A follow-up on MarketingSherpa’s webinar, “Improve Email Deliverability”

Email Marketing: Your deliverability questions answered

Email List Hygiene: Remove four kinds of bad addresses to improve deliverability

Email Deliverability: Always test emails that link to third-party sites

Members Library — Webinar Replay: Top Tactics to Improve Relevancy and Deliverability

Members Library — Email Marketing: FedEx increases deliverability and clickthrough rate with preference centers

Photo: pietroizzo

I’ve been browsing the new MarketingSherpa 2011 Social Marketing Benchmark Report this week and soaking up the rich data. One of the first charts that struck me is a bubble chart on social marketing tactics.

First, I want to say, I love these bubble charts. They provide a three-dimensional view of the data on a given topic. Our researchers do a great job of packing them full of information without making them confusing.

This chart graphs the effectiveness, difficulty and popularity of each social media marketing tactic. You’ll notice a clear positive correlation between a tactics’ level of difficulty and its level of effectiveness.

Hard work pays off

For those of you who have not brushed up on your statistics lately (as I just brushed up a moment ago) I will note that a positive correlation between two factors means that as one factor increases, the second factor increases. For example, there is a positive correlation between my consumption of ice cream and the temperature outside.

Looking at this chart, it’s clear that the most effective social marketing tactics are also the most difficult, and vice-versa. Blogger relations — the most effective tactic reported — is also the only tactic to break into the 70%-range in terms of marketers reporting it as “very” or “somewhat” difficult.

You’ll also see that the three most-effective tactics — blogging, SEO for social sites, and blogger relations — are known to require significant amounts of time and effort before results are shown.

Every tactic is somewhat effective

Take a look at the scale on this chart’s Y-axis (level of effectiveness). Those listed percentages correspond to the number of marketers who reported a tactic as “very” effective. What they do not include are the marketers who reported a tactic as “somewhat effective.”

Looking at the chart, you might guess that adding social sharing buttons to emails is a waste of time — but don’t be too quick to write this tactic off completely. Only 10% of social marketers reported it as “very effective,” but 55% rated it as “somewhat effective” (found deeper in the report). With a total of 65% of social marketers reporting at least some effectiveness, these buttons might be worth the small investment they require.

Also, since adding social sharing buttons bottoms-out the Y-axis here, every other tactic listed has more than 65% of social marketers reporting at least some effectiveness. Here are some examples:

• Social sharing buttons on websites: 69% say at least “somewhat” effective
• Advertising on social sites: 73%
• Microblogging: 75%

Related resources:

MarketingSherpa 2011 Social Marketing Benchmark Report

Free Webinar: Best Practices for Improving Search and Social Marketing Integration

Marketing Research Chart: Using social media as a list-growth tactic

Inbound Marketing newsletter – Free Case Studies and How To Articles from MarketingSherpa’s reporters

Think about how many emails you sent yesterday. Now think about how many your company sent yesterday — to customers and coworkers. Probably thousands of unique emails, right? That is a mountain of content, but little of it gets used for marketing.

I spoke last week with Chris Baggott, CEO and Co-Founder of Compendium (also co-founder of ExactTarget). During our discussion, Baggott pointed out two content-rich resources that marketers often overlook: their email marketing campaigns, and their social media profiles.

Marketing emails, for example, often tell a story or feature content that is not published elsewhere. The content is not indexed by search engines — but it could be if published online.

Also, the comments and conversations on your Facebook profile typically never escape the walled garden. But you can grab that content and incorporate it into your marketing.

“We’re working on breaking down content silos to be able to pull content from anywhere and distribute content anywhere,” Baggott says.

Here are some examples Baggott provided of how some companies are breaking down content silos and combining email marketing, social marketing, natural search and content marketing:

Publishing emails for long-tail search

One of Baggott’s first points was that a company’s emails are a huge untapped resource for content. Of course, there are your marketing emails, as mentioned above. But even your sales and customer service emails can be published.

Sales and service teams write thousands of emails to answer customers’ questions. Questions such as:

• What is the best product for my situation?
• When would I have to update my product?
• Will this product work while I’m traveling?

The answers to these questions are extremely specific to each customer’s situation. If published, they’re potentially valuable for long-tail (low volume, highly qualified) search traffic. What is the best parka for sub-zero temperatures? That sounds like a Google search to me…

Of course, not every email you send will be valuable. They should be screened before publishing, but you could identify several emails to publish each day.

Collecting and leveraging user-generated content

Baggott also mentioned an email strategy to gather and use content in your program. Here’s the process he laid out:

1. Send a triggered email asking customers for reviews, testimonials, or other types of user-generated content. These emails can be sent after customers use a product, such as after they’ve stayed in a hotel room.
2. Publish that content online to help attract natural search traffic and encourage visitors to sign up for your emails.
3. Send another triggered email asking customers to share their content with friends on social networks.
4. Use the content in marketing emails or nurturing campaigns.

The content generated, again, will be very specific to each customer’s situation. If you have good information in your database, you can match the content to subscribers’ attributes and use it to send them targeted, highly relevant messages.

“One of the biggest problems we’ve always had with dynamic content [in email marketing] is the content,” Baggott says. “The problem isn’t that I don’t have enough data, or the tools to make it easy to send relevant emails. The problem is that I don’t have enough relevant content to send to the right person.”

Related resources

Social Media Marketing: Turning social media engagement into action at Threadless

Inbound Marketing: A pioneering YouTube video strategy

Marketing Research Chart: Top tactics for delivering relevant email content

Marketing Research Chart: Using social media as a list-growth tactic

Search Marketing: Capture future seasonal traffic lifts by preparing today with these 4 SEO factors

Inbound Marketing newsletter – Free Case Studies and How To Articles from MarketingSherpa’s reporters

Your email database is the foundation of your email marketing. Haphazardly adding names can invite irrelevant subscribers and invalid email addresses — which weaken your foundation.

Inspired by our upcoming Optimization Summit, I went back to my notes from our recent Email Summit to reinforce what I learned about email deliverability. I found some great information on bad email addresses and list hygiene from an expert panel.

Jack Hogan, CTO and Co-Founder, Lifescript, a women’s health website, presented his team’s work with FreshAddress, an email list hygiene provider. Austin Bliss, President, FreshAddress, was also on hand and noted:

“People make typos all the time… You want to keep that address out of your list because it’s not going to help you. And no amount of deliverability tweaking later is going to help you if the initial email address is bad.”

Hogan and Bliss highlighted four types of bad email addresses removed from Lifescript’s database. Take a look to see if your list has any of these:

Role Accounts

These email addresses are maintained by a website or company for specific purpose. Examples include:

• info@example.com
• admin@example.com
• press@example.com
• abuse@example.com

These addresses are often maintained by a group, not an individual. So if you send an email to one of these addresses, it will not likely be relevant to all the owners and can make your message susceptible to being deleted or marked as spam.

Furthermore, these addresses are often publicly available on websites, which means they’re easily picked up by spammers. Email services are aware of this trend and monitor emails sent to role accounts. Emailing a high number of role accounts in your campaigns will likely harm your reputation among email services.

Syntax Errors and Typos

These invalid addresses are genuine mistakes. People frequently mistype their email address. Even if they are asked to write the address twice, it is very easy for someone to type it incorrectly the first time and copy-and-paste the mistake into the second form field.

How bad could this problem be?

“I saw 500 different ways yahoo.com was entered into our address book,” Hogan says.

The problem with these addresses is that they are often from people who are legitimately trying to subscribe to your newsletter — and they never receive it. This can create a bad impression with your brand. Furthermore, email services do not like receiving a high-volume of emails sent to invalid accounts and can mark-down your reputation in response.

Fake Addresses

These addresses are entered by people who do not want to give a valid email address. For whatever reason, they wanted to complete the signup process without providing a personal email. Instead, they made something up, such as:

• nope@gmail.com
• null@void.com
• asdf@yahoo.com
• nowaybuddy@getlost.com

One reason you might receive a high number of fake addresses is by requiring people to provide an address to complete an unrelated task, such as to enter a contest. The person is not interested in a newsletter or promotions — they just want to enter the contest, so they invent a fake address.

Lifescript mainly collects email addresses from people subscribing to its newsletters — but it still saw these bogus addresses in its database. Even though this does not make sense, it happens.

As mentioned above, sending emails to a high number of invalid addresses can tarnish your reputation.

Spam Traps

Email services and other companies create these addresses and publish them online as bait for spammers. Then they wait for someone to find the addresses and start sending unsolicited emails. This helps the companies identify spam.

Emailing one or more spam traps can hurt your reputation. The trouble, though, is these emails can find their way into legitimate company’s lists via:

• Poor sources — such as a purchased lists from a disreputable company
• Poisoning — a malicious competitor or an upset customer can identify a spam trap and sign it up for your emails.

Some spam traps are obvious, such as abuse@example.com, but most are kept secret. Otherwise, they would not be effective. This can make them difficult to identify. However, they’re not likely to be active, responsive subscribers, so you should be targeting them for removal based on inactivity anyway.

You can find out more about email deliverability at our upcoming webinar:
Improve Email Deliverability: Tactics for Handling Complaints and Boosting Reputation
(Thursday, April 21, 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. EDT)

Related resources

MarketingSherpa Optimization Summit 2011

Email Deliverability: Always test emails that link to third-party sites

Email Deliverability: Getting into Gmail’s ‘Priority Inbox’

Email Marketing: Improve deliverability by deleting subscribers?

Email Marketing: Your deliverability questions answered

Members Library — Webinar Replay: Top Tactics to Improve Relevancy and Deliverability

Members Library — Third-Party Links and Email Deliverability: 4 Tips to protect your reputation

Soap Photo by: Horia Varlan on Flickr

Email deliverability is best managed proactively. You cannot respond to bounces and spam complaints if you’re not aware of them. Performance should be monitored. Problems should be fixed.

Deliverability is a primary concern for a company like Zozi. The deals website offers discounts on local activities such as kayaking and wine tasting. Well over half of its transactions are generated through email, says Ryan Morris, Director of Content, Zozi.

Last year, before Zozi sent emails focusing only on deals, it had a newsletter that offered travel information and updates with a funny tone. Zozi’s marketers learned more about deliverability through this newsletter with tests like the one described below.

Monitor deliverability with a seed list

Morris maintained a list of email accounts to which he’d send draft versions of the newsletter (also called a seed list). He had several accounts at the email services (such as Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail) that represented the bulk of Zozi’s email database.

Morris could login to each account and see if the newsletter arrived, rendered well and landed in the inbox or junk box. His diligence helped Zozi uncover deliverability problems before campaigns launched (Zozi has since started using Mail Monitor to test and monitor email delivery).

– Third-party photo trouble

Last year, one test email did not arrive in the inbox for about 50% to 60% of Zozi’s test list. Morris researched possible problems with the email and asked Zozi’s engineers for ideas.

“We learned that in our email for that particular day, we linked to a photo. We ended up hosting that photo at an image hosting website because, at the time, we did not have abilities on our own site to host images and create unique URLs,” he says.

“It was the first time we had done that, and it absolutely reined terror on deliverability… We ended up removing that portion of the content and sending another test… After that, we hit 100% deliverability.”

Two key deliverability takeaways

Zozi’s experience highlights two key points in email deliverability:

1. Test deliverability before an email is sent to subscribers. There are many factors that determine whether your email arrives in the inbox. You are likely to miss one at some point and should err on the side of caution. Your team can build a test list such as the one described above in a matter of hours, which is a good start.
2. Deliverability depends on more than reputation. Email services look at the reputation of every website to which you link. Furthermore, if you send emails from a shared IP address, then you also share your reputation with every sender on that IP.

In the (slightly edited) words of the great George Washington: “Associate with men of good quality if you esteem your own [email] reputation; for it is better to be alone than in bad company.”

You can find out more about email deliverability at our upcoming webinar:
Improve Email Deliverability: Tactics for Handling Complaints and Boosting Reputation
(Thursday, April  21, 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. EDT)

Related resources:

Email Deliverability: Getting into Gmail’s ‘Priority Inbox’

Email Marketing: Improve deliverability by deleting subscribers?

Email Marketing: Your deliverability questions answered

Members Library — Webinar Replay: Top Tactics to Improve Relevancy and Deliverability

Members Library — Email Marketing: FedEx increases deliverability and clickthrough rate with preference centers

Members Library — Third-Party Links and Email Deliverability: 4 Tips to protect your reputation

Seeds photo by: flickrich

Washington photo by: Joye~

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again. The most significant challenge to effective email marketing is targeting recipients with relevant content, according to the MarketingSherpa 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report.

The most effective tactic for increasing relevance is to send triggered emails, according to the report. In fact, 70% of consumer-marketers using email reported the tactic as “very effective” and 47% of B2B email marketers agreed.

“Remarketing” emails are a type of triggered message that can be very effective. One example is an email sent after a customer abandons a shopping cart. The message lists the items left behind and encourages the customer to return and complete the purchase.

Charles Nicholls, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, SeeWhy, and his company specialize in abandoned-cart emails. Below, we’ve included his comments and tactics for improving your own.

Strong performance from relevant emails

An effective remarketing email is closely tied a customers’ recent activity, which makes it very relevant. On a basic level, an abandoned-cart email should:
•    Clearly be from your company
•    List the products left behind
•    Supply useful information (such as a link back to the abandoned cart and your contact info)

In February, SeeWhy crunched data from emails sent in response to 65,000 abandoned shopping carts across its roughly 1,000 clients (overwhelmingly B2C companies). The average metrics are much stronger than industry benchmarks, which Nicholls attributes to the high relevance of the emails.

“You can write remarketing emails that will annoy and drive-up unsubscribe rates up,” he says. “The key is to do it in such a way that you’re really delivering a great service to the customer and they really appreciate it.”

How to Design Remarketing Emails

Here’s Nicholls’ advice for starting and improving your abandoned-shopping-cart emails:

1. Send the first email immediately

Ample industry research, including research from MarketingExperiments, emphasizes that the email should be sent immediately after the customer abandons the cart. Even waiting a single hour can pound your performance.

2. Provide a service, not a sales pitch

The email should be service-oriented, Nicholls says. “This is not a glossy promotion designed by an advertising agency.”

Tell customers that they left their cart and you want to help. Provide relevant information, list your contact information and add a link directly back to the abandoned cart.

“We tend to focus more on a text-based presentation, really delivering a customer service message where the content is incredibly personal and relevant,” Nicholls says. “Images that get used tend to be fairly limited.”

3. Start with a three-email sequence

The most important email is delivered immediately after a customer abandons a cart, Nicholls says. Beyond that, he suggests his clients start with a three email series with the following timing:
•    Email #1: Sent immediately
•    Email #2: Sent 23 hours after first email
•    Email #3: Sent 6 days and 23 hours after second email

“That gives them a starting point and they can test from there.”

4. Avoid discounts

The top two reasons customers abandon carts, Nicholls says, are price and timing. You can overcome the price issue by offering a discount, but this should be avoided. You’re likely to win back customers, but you’re also likely to condition them to abandon more carts in the future.

“Many campaigns work incredibly well without offering any promotions at all. That’s because customers clearly already have some intent.”

If you want to test a discount, Nicholls suggests doing so in the third and final email of a sequence.

5. Test timing and messaging

Of course, these tactics are only a starting point. Nicholls suggests marketers run tests to find the best approaches to fit their markets. One test he suggests applies to companies that offer free shipping after a certain price level.

“If the site has free shipping after $100, then for cart values greater than $100 we would send a different email that reiterates that their cart already qualifies for free shipping. Those types of things become really important when you get into the whole promotions area.”

Related resources

All New MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Advance Practices Handbook

MarketingSherpa 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report

Shopping Cart Recovery Tested

Chart: Top tactics for delivering relevant email content

Members Library — Webinar Replay: Top email tactics to improve relevancy and deliverability

Photo attribution: kevindean

Being a reporter has its ups and downs. Thankfully, some articles are a pleasure to write. I was thrilled to publish our latest inbound marketing article featuring the YouTube video strategy of Orabrush, a brand of breath-freshening tongue cleaners.

Orabrush’s strategy has pulled-in over 35 million video views and powers the majority of the company’s marketing. Below, I’ve pointed out three key areas that I like about this strategy.

CMO as Chief Marketing Publisher

A central tenet of inbound marketing is that marketers need to think of themselves as publishers. Rather than buying ads in a media outlet, your brand builds the media outlet. You own the newsletters, blogs, apps, webinars — or whichever platform you select.

Jeffrey Harmon is CMO at Orabrush. His team is committed to consistently delivering the videos its audience enjoys and expects. This makes for a demanding publishing schedule, but that’s the life of a Chief Marketing Publisher. Deadlines must be met and quality must be maintained.

Another tenet of inbound marketing is that your content is not advertising — it’s rich information that interests your audience. Your brand and products can be included, but they are secondary. The content must give the audience what it wants while helping to achieve your marketing goals.

Orabrush does this by creating several types of video, as described in the article. The majority of videos are intended to engage and entertain — which is what Orabrush’s audience wants. Other videos are intended to encourage conversions while also entertaining.

This isn’t just for the LOLs

Orabrush’s videos are funny and they’ve built an audience. But at the end of the day, the company needs to sell tongue brushes. Harmon’s team is not trying to build an audience to sell advertising.

That is why Orabrush’s marketers have included calls-to-action throughout its videos and YouTube page. Viewers are encouraged to:
o Watch another video
o Share the video on Facebook or Twitter
o Connect with Orabrush on other social networks
o Visit Orabrush’s website
o Request a free brush
o Locate a nearby Orabrush store
o And more

You can see a great example of their calls-to-action at the end of this short video:

This approach applies directly to inbound marketing. The content is the main attraction. It is the reason Orabrush’s YouTube page exists. But while viewers enjoy videos, they’re encouraged to interact with the brand, visit the site, and try out an Orabrush.

Experimentation and research drive the ship

Orabrush has an elaborate YouTube page. The channel is part video-viewer, part landing page, part social channel. The design is the result of several years of research and testing by Harmon and his team.

Orabrush is not afraid to test new ideas, which is how it developed this strategy. Its YouTube page was not a modified best practice. The marketers built it piece by piece through rigorous testing.

Even Orabrush’s first forays into video were experiments. As mentioned in the article, Harmon first tested adding another publisher’s video to one of Orabrush’s landing pages. That video boosted conversion rates by 200%, and it served as the first step in the long journey to build Orabrush’s video strategy as it stands today.

Without its culture of experimentation and testing, Orabrush would not likely have such a powerful presence on YouTube. You can find out a lot more about testing and optimization at the upcoming MarketingSherpa Optimization Summit in June.

Enough already!

I could go on and on about why I love Orabrush’s video strategy (including that it came from a scrappy startup and that its marketers also engage in social marketing) — but I won’t.

The last point I will make is that Harmon’s team built this channel with a small team and a limited budget. There is truly no reason why any company could not do something similar.

Related resources

Inbound Marketing: Small business builds YouTube channel from the ground up, expands to 40 countries

MarketingSherpa: Subscribe to our Inbound Marketing newsletter

MarketingSherpa Optimization Summit 2011

Inbound Marketing: Brand-powered content hub grabs top Google rank in two months

Inbound Marketing: How to pull-in customers without pushing ads

Content Marketing: How to get your subject matter experts on your corporate blog

Content Marketing: Should you lure a journalist over to the ‘dark side?’

Email Marketing: Maybe it really is an inbound tactic…

When I was on the phone with Stacey Epstein, VP of Marketing, ServiceMax, I remembered some advice I heard when researching our first article for MarketingSherpa’s Inbound Marketing newsletter.

I spoke with a lot of great experts for that piece. On content marketing, I spoke with Joe Pulizzi, Founder of the Content Marketing Institute. He mentioned that marketers should avoid publishing too many types of content and focus on about three that fit their strategies.

“But you have to do one really well,” he said. “You have to do an awesome blog or the best e-book program that’s ever been run; focus on what you can do really well, better than anyone else in your industry.”

That is exactly what Epstein and her team are striving for with SmartVan. ServiceMax launched the site in January as a content portal for the field-service industry (which is served by ServiceMax), to help companies that send technicians out of the office for service, installation, and repairs.

“We noticed there was a complete lack of resources for these people,” Epstein says. “The site is meant to be a place for field-service professionals to educate themselves.”

Site traffic has grown faster than anticipated. After a just a few months, SmartVan holds the top Google rank for the phrase “field service news” and about 15% of its traffic comes from natural search.

“It’s great for us to be ranked so high so quickly,” Epstein says. “I think it’s a testament to how little content there is out there. It helps validate that we’re helping to serve this huge need.”

Weave the brand into the content

Epstein has big plans for SmartVan and hopes to continually grow its traffic for several years. One key principle is to avoid selling ServiceMax too directly, she says. Otherwise visitors could write-off the site as a marketing channel rather than a trusted resource for industry news.

“We’re really trying to create a resource for field-service people that doesn’t exist today… We feel that we’ll have a lot more success in getting people interested in the site and wanting to be on the site if we don’t try to sell them.”

The team does plan to incorporate ServiceMax into the site, but will do so carefully, and mostly around content. For example, a ServiceMax webinar on how the iPhone is changing the industry will be mentioned on SmartVan.

Also, a company blog written by ServiceMax executives will soon be hosted on the portal. Epstein also plans to offer an email newsletter to help build a database.

“We’ll never have a homepage that says ‘SmartVan is brought to you by ServiceMax. Go see us now and buy from us,’ etcetera. That’s not our intent.”

Content creation: easier than thought

A website that’s designed as the go-to resource for a specific topic cannot afford to have stale content. When planning SmartVan’s strategy, Epstein wondered how her team would keep up with the demands of a daily publishing schedule.

But that challenge has been easier than anticipated. The team has partnered with LaunchSquad to help manage the site and has pooled content from a variety of sources.

“We found some great contributing writers who were super interested to join us. We certainly contribute content from ServiceMax. We have a couple of guys from LaunchSquad contributing, and we aggregate content from other sources,” Epstein says.

“Between all those different people, I’m actually blown away by the amount of content. We’re serving up multiple pieces of fresh content every day.”

Changes and hurdles on the horizon

Epstein has promoted SmartVan with a press release, an email to ServiceMax’s house list, and mentions in Facebook and Twitter. She’s hoping the site will continue to grow through word-of-mouth and natural search.

A key challenge to growth, she says, will be connecting the field-service audience and encouraging visitors to interact. SmartVan will soon offer social features in hopes of fostering engagement, but this will be a pioneering effort for the industry.

“Right now, this is not necessarily a super tight-knit community,” Epstein says. “Part of that is because there isn’t a lot that brings them together. There aren’t a lot of trade shows, and there aren’t a lot of online forums.”

But that challenge is also a huge opportunity. SmartVan could become a powerful marketing channel for ServiceMax if it continues to grow at its current pace.

“If we can succeed in building this community and creating a place where all these people can go, interact and get educated, it will by far outpace any other traditional marketing strategy that we ever could have done and at a much, much lower cost and with fewer resources.”

Related resources

MarkteingSherpa’s free newsletters

Inbound Marketing: How to pull-in customers without pushing ads

Content Marketing: How to get your subject matter experts on your corporate blog

Content Marketing: Should you lure a journalist over to the ‘dark side?’

Email Marketing: Maybe it really is an inbound tactic…

Members Library – Content Marketing: Microsoft crowdsources content ideas with a viral contest for new Windows Phone 7 platform

Inbound marketing is growing in B2B companies. Investments in webinars, SEO, social marketing and page optimization are all on the rise, as noted in this chart from MarketingSherpa’s new 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report.

As inbound grows, more marketers are finding the right mix of tactics and channels for their companies. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, but certain tactics are commonly reported as effective.

Below, we pulled stats from four charts in the benchmark report to highlight the most-effective tactics for B2B inbound marketing. Check out how the best tactics are interrelated.

Search engine optimization

• Most effective tactic: On-page content optimization

An effective SEO program is vital to an inbound strategy. Most B2B marketers research keywords and create great content about topics surrounding them. One of the most popular content platforms is the blog. Although blogging is not easy, many B2B companies have stuck with it (because it works).

Social media marketing

• Most effective tactic: Blogging

Blogging is the most effective B2B social marketing tactic. This ties directly to the popularity of blogs as a platform for publishing search-optimized content, as well as their ability to engage audiences.

Website optimization and design

• Most effective tactic: Using unique landing pages for campaigns
• Second-most effective tactic: Optimizing design and content for conversions

Inbound marketing can pull more visitors to your website — but visitors have to take action when they arrive. They have to download a report, subscribe to your newsletter, request to be contacted, etc. Otherwise the traffic is wasted.

This is why using unique landing pages for each campaign and optimizing them are the most effective tactics for B2B websites. The tactics reach into all facets inbound marketing and ensure your traffic is put to use.

You can find out a lot more about effective landing page optimization and design tactics at the upcoming MarketingSherpa 2011 Optimization Summit in June.

Pay-per-click advertising

• Most effective tactic: Creating highly-targeted ad groups
• Second most-effective tactic: A/B testing landing page content

Landing page testing is nearly tied for first as the most effective PPC tactic for B2B companies. This, again, illustrates that websites have to be designed to convert traffic that is generated by inbound marketing. Otherwise the traffic is wasted.

Related resources

MarketingSherpa 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report

MarketingSherpa 2011 Optimization Summit

Inbound Marketing: How to pull-in customers without pushing ads

Landing Page Optimization: Value-focused revamp leads to 188% lead gen boost, increase in personal interaction

MarketingSherpa: Subscribe to our Inbound Marketing newsletter

Content marketing goes well beyond publishing text-based material. Your company can provide videos, slide decks, Twitter feeds and even Web-based tools — like ClickMail’s ESPinator.

ClickMail pairs companies with email service providers (ESPs) and helps them establish effective programs. For years, its marketers have published a blog and an annual PDF guide about selecting ESPs.

“We’ve always felt that we had a clear view of the strengths and weaknesses of the various ESPs,” says Marco Marini, CEO, ClickMail. “From that, we evolved into an annual guide on selecting the best one. It’s completely vendor-neutral. It doesn’t talk about any vendors at all, just what the factors are.”

The ESPinator is the next step in that strategy, Marini says. Launched last month, the tool asks users a series of questions and suggests up to three ESPs that are well-suited to their needs.

“Every vendor at a trade show says their solution is the best. There truly isn’t a best solution. It all depends on what your specific needs are,” Marini says.

“There are more than 30 ESPs in the tool, and we don’t have a relationship with the vast majority of them. So this is truly more for the email marketing audience.”

Upfront investment vs. long-term upkeep

Content marketing requires investment. Someone has to create the content and it has to be really, really good. You can either invest your time or pay someone else. Either way, there is no free lunch.

This is also true of ClickMail’s ESPinator, which took over two years to create and is still in beta. One of the biggest challenges was building its scoring system. Each ESP had to be scored in various categories so it could be matched against a user’s needs.

One such category is each ESP’s depth of integration with salesforce.com, a popular CRM solutions provider.

“All [salesforce.com] integrations are not created equal among ESPs,” says Cameron Kane, CTO, ClickMail, who headed the project. “Some may synch simply contact data, some synch lead and contact data, some work with custom objects, some will not work with custom objects” and so on.

– Keeping content alive

Some types of content — such as books — require a onetime investment. Once a book is published, it’s published. Blogs, on the other hand, require on-going investment or they will wither and die. ClickMail’s tool is somewhere in the middle and will require updates.

“When an ESP on that list comes up with a new version or enhancements, we need to go back and modify the scores on those areas that they have potentially improved,” Marini says.

Marketing plans to attract attention

The ESPinator is so new that ClickMail has just begun its promotion. The team launched it at the MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Summit last month — the industry’s largest event — and plans to do more soon.

Ideas they are kicking around include:

• Offering co-branding partnerships to companies
• Offering the tool to prospects as part of the lead-nurturing process
• Pitching the tool to industry press and blogs (like this one) to score inbound links

Ultimately, the team hopes that the ESPinator provides a useful service and helps attract attention to ClickMail and its services. Furthermore, the tool’s calculated suggestions will help position ClickMail as a company that is well-suited to help marketers choose email providers.

“When you say content marketing, I immediately think of thought leadership,” Marini says. “Our company philosophy is to show that value upfront without asking for anything.”

Related resources

MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Summit 2011: 7 takeaways to improve results

MarketingSherpa German Email Marketing Summit 2011

Content Marketing: How to get your subject matter experts on your corporate blog