MarketingSherpa Blog

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

Earlier this year at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 in Las Vegas, I had the chance to enjoy many conversations with my email marketing industry friends. This post grew out of one of those talks.

I asked Matt Bailey, President, SiteLogic; Christopher Donald, CEO and Lead Strategist, Inbox Group; and Loren McDonald, VP Industry Relations, Silverpop, about comparing “batch and blast” email strategies against some of the more targeted and personalized email approaches. Here are their answers.

David Kirkpatrick: Email marketers are being told to employ aggressive database hygiene on email subscription lists, engage in tactics such as microsegmentation to individualize and customize the content in email campaigns, and begin emphasizing mobile form factors in email design to encourage engagement with campaigns on mobile devices.

At the same time, they are being told to get away from the traditional batch and blast or “spray and pray” efforts.

What are some advantages and disadvantages of these areas of emphasis in email marketing?

Loren McDonald: Email marketing is not “either-or.” A successful program relies on a combination of elements – broadcast, automated triggered emails and segmentation. Each element has a specific role to play in your email program. If you focus on a single one to the exclusion of the others, you’re leaving money on the table.

First, a well-designed broadcast email program makes sense because you will always have email messages that you should send to everyone on your list.

Part of email’s role is to nudge your customers into buying something they didn’t necessarily know they wanted, to reach out to the person who wasn’t planning to buy from you.

Having said that, I do believe that the more behavior you can capture, the more relevant your messages become, and you can automate more messages. Recipients value these messages because they’re more relevant than most broadcast emails.

Automated messaging helps you capture incremental dollars on top of the revenue you’re driving already with your broadcast emails.

Matt Bailey: As much as neither of us would recommend a batch and blast approach, it is still a “better than nothing” proposition.

I find that in many companies, the traditional email batch marketing is the sole or the primary way of corresponding with existing customers. So, in this way, it is better than no communication. There is little to no time spent improving the database or much thought into the messaging of the emails – it’s simply a task to be done.

Now, fortunately or unfortunately, when I audit these types of companies and their marketing, and come to their email programs – it’s a profitable venture. Because so little is put in, besides the creative, the email service provider (ESP) and the blast, but yet it produces the primary source of repeat business.

I say unfortunately, because many times it is profitable because there is little spent and even less attention to segmentation or database management. I say fortunately, because making simple changes and becoming better and more intelligent with microsegmentation, triggers, etc., will only make an already profitable activity soar in results.

The issue then becomes one of paying more for something that is already working and investing in it to grow. Meanwhile, the sexiness of social media is competing for the marketing budget, and the new sexy options tend to get the attention, whereas the already profitable and predictable email marketing gets overlooked.

Christopher Donald: There is definitely a lot of benefit to being able to segment and target based on the data. We like to look at pretty much everything – from browse data to email data. You know, what [your customers] are responding to and not responding to from previous purchases.

So, you can get segmentation or even microsegmentation. The problem is not everybody has the bandwidth or budget to do that.

So they still live in the batch and blast world, and it can be very effective. There are a lot of companies that all they do is batch and blast, and it does really well for them.

You can increase your ROI and your revenue through targeting and through better segmentation and messaging to those segments based on previous activity, but it takes time and money.

Some people do batch and blast just out of necessity, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.

DK: What effect on that final conversion to sale (rather than other email metrics such as open rate and clickthrough) do these two different approaches exert on campaigns?

LM: The one-to-one approach, especially those emails that are triggered to the individual based on a behavior or event, typically have significantly higher conversion rates than one-size-fits-all broadcast emails.

On the other hand, conversion rates on broadcast emails are typically less than 5%, but the emails are sent to all or a majority of your database versus a tiny percentage on any given day of the one-to-one emails. But with automated email programs, the power and math is in that they are triggered 24/7/365 and that as you build your program you might have dozens of these emails going out every day.

So as I mentioned earlier, the key is to combine a growing number of these one-to-one automated emails with segmented and broadcast. Companies that add a significant number of automated email programs often see them contribute 25% to 50% of their total revenue from email.

MB: Oh, there is no contest. Every test, every campaign and every client that develops microsegmented campaigns or persona-based emails sees lifts in every category. It all comes down to relevance. Even if I have subscribed to your company’s emails, unless it is relevant to my needs – at that exact moment – it is spam. The more targeted your emails [are] by relevance, personalization and timeliness, the more significant all metrics increase, especially the ones that count – revenue and profitability.

CD: I think it all depends on what it is you are selling, right? If you simply sell a widget in 10 different colors, then segmentation probably isn’t important and isn’t even going to get you that much more revenue for the amount of time and cost that will be involved.

Revenue should always be your main indicator.

It is your main indicator of whether what you are doing is working, or not. I have seen clients spend huge amounts of money and time segmenting and on hygiene and managing inactives and doing everything they can do, but the bottom line – the return on investment of doing those things – doesn’t always pan out.

For others, it does. It is really looking at what you are selling. If you are selling lots of different products, it makes all the sense in the world to segment.

DK: Is relying on batch and blast because it still works possibly selling short a longer-term strategy of an engaged, if maybe smaller, subscriber base? And possibly risking eventual issues with deliverability, recipient fatigue (and the resulting opt-outs, or worse, spam/junk status) and/or brand credibility?

LM: If your email program is almost entirely batch and blast, then you are simply leaving a lot of money on the table. That is the fundamental reason to go beyond this approach – deliverability concerns and related issues are secondary. Remember, your goal as a marketer is to make as much money as possible for your employer while at the same time balancing margins, customer expectations, choice, list churn and other factors.

The simple truth is that sending more email makes you more money. But “more” doesn’t mean just sending more of the same old thing to everyone – but more relevant emails at the individual, segment and broadcast level. As my friend Dela Quist of Alchemy Worx says, “Don’t be stupid.”

You have to be responsible with your broadcast program. You must test frequency and monitor engagement across your database. Concentrate on activating your new subscribers right away. Use technology and data to identity customers who are becoming unengaged and then move them into different tracks. You also need to understand the longer-term impact on churn and revenue when simply sending more broadcast emails.

Additionally, one of the goals and purposes of your broadcast program is to drive subscriber behaviors that then trigger those one-to-one emails that lead to higher conversions and engagement. Without the regular cadence of broadcast emails you will have fewer behaviors from which to trigger the highly personalized emails.

MB: Absolutely! I believe that the batch and blast approach is only profitable because we are in a unique place in digital marketing. It’s the “grace period” before we hit a critical mass of personalized, targeted marketing. If your company isn’t doing it, then you will get overwhelmed by your competitors and others who are engaging your customers at a more personal level.

CD: I think it does hurt in the long run, for sure. I think you can turn off your audience over time [with batch and blast email].

But, sometimes it is a knowledge issue. There are a lot of plug-and-play services with recommendations based on browsing, or cart abandonment, or targeting based on data.

Sometimes people are email marketers by default, not by choice.

DK: What emphasis should email marketers place on mobile platforms right now when designing new email campaigns and overall email marketing strategies?

MB: I would look at your metrics to see how your customer base is interacting with your emails. While the data suggests that email is the number one activity on mobile you need to see how that is stacked up for your company. Just because reports state that you still have to see what is happening in your own business.

Now, after verifying how people are using your emails and where they are opening – if you see even the slightest trend or predilection to mobile, then you need to be exploring, designing or planning. Don’t ignore it.

CD: I think [email marketers] should take it very seriously.

You need to find out what percentage of your [audience] are opening and reading on mobile. We have a B2B client with a mobile open rate of only 4%.

You would think [being] business to business, the mobile open rate would be huge, right?

But, with this particular client, they have been sending this newsletter on a monthly basis for seven years and the newsletter is content heavy. It generates 1.6 million PDF downloads of new insurance policy information for agents.

Because it is a large format newsletter and a lot of content, there is no way to make it mobile-friendly.

DK: What are your overall thoughts or ideas you’d like to share on this topic?

LM: While I am a major proponent of one-to-one, behavior-based automated email, success is still all about balance and knowing what works with your customers.

You need to find the right balance among broadcast, one-to-one and segmentation based on your business, resources, budget and customer and purchase lifecycle. If you overemphasize one approach at the expense of the others, you’re leaving money – perhaps a lot of it – on the table.

MB: Metrics are powerful, and they are absolutely necessary to prove our assumptions. Even though your traditional email campaigns are profitable, it doesn’t mean that they will remain so next year. Even the simplest segmentation strategy will make a remarkable difference in your response rates, conversions and even more – the customer perception of your company.  All of which will be important as the personalization of digital marketing explodes over the near term.

MarketingSherpa Email Awards 2014

Did this blog post get you thinking about your own email marketing strategies and tactics? If so, let us know about your best campaigns from the past year and enter those efforts in MarketingSherpa Email Awards 2014. You have until September 8, 2013 to enter.

Related Resources:

Email Marketing: 208% higher conversion rate for targeted emails over batch and blast

Automated Email Case Study: 175% more revenue and 83% higher conversion rate

Email Marketing: 900% more revenue-per-email from Restaurant.com’s automated strategy

Email Marketing: Two ways to add relevance, and why you must be correct

Last week, I was a guest of Responsys at Responsys Interact 2013, and I had the chance to interview Rich Fleck, the company’s Vice President of Strategy.

We covered a range of topics that will appear in an upcoming MarketingSherpa how-to article, but I thought it would be interesting to address some questions from our audience that we didn’t have time to cover in MarketingSherpa webinars and MarketingExperiments Web clinics.

Here are your questions with Rich’s answers:

From Cate: “Can you go too far with personalization where it gets kinda creepy for the recipient? Big Brother-ish …”

Rich Fleck: Yes – there is great temptation to get hyperpersonal with all the data we now have at our marketing disposal. However, it’s important to align personalization with consumer expectations and privacy guidelines.

As marketers, we need to look at our marketing efforts through a consumer lens – putting ourselves in their position to make sure our initiatives make sense in the context of the consumer experience. How will the consumer respond? Are they expecting this message? Effectively balancing the targeting/personalization with consumer expectations will drive the best marketing result.

From Ed: “How does personalization affect conversion rates?”

RF: Smart targeting and personalization drives better consumer engagement and conversion. We often see targeted messaging out-performing status quo messaging by a factor of two to three times – on both engagement and conversion metrics.

The challenge is finding the right personalization opportunities by leveraging analytics to understand consumer behavior and then aligning marketing initiatives to propel a positive behavior (purchase) or mitigate a negative behavior (unsubscribe, customer churn).

Read more…

National Geographic was sending an enormous amount of emails to its list – as much as almost 18 messages a week on average, depending on the season and the target segment within its database.

There were multiple marketing and creative teams sending those messages, so along with volume, branding and just simple look-and-feel was an issue as well.

To compound those problems, when a creative piece worked, it was re-used. A lot. A subscriber receiving a high frequency of emails might see the same, albeit (at least originally) high-performing, image for weeks or months on end.

Unsubcribes became an issue, particularly among the best converting recipients who were receiving the highest volume of email.

Kill your marketing calendar

I’m reporting live from Responsys Interact 2013 in San Francisco (Full Disclosure: I am a guest of Responsys at this event). Eric Brodnax, EVP, Digital Products, National Geographic Society, shared steps about how that well-known brand sought to overcome this challenge by taking a very customer-centric approach to completely change its email strategy in a session titled “Kill your marketing calendar. Moving from campaign-led to customer-led marketing.”

“What we saw was the retention rate was directly correlating to the number of messages they were receiving,” Eric said.

National Geographic used three learnings to turn this problem around across its email campaign ecosystem:

1. Ignoring your customer’s wishes impacts the entire business.

2. Your organization needs unified ownership of the customer relationship.

• Without central oversight, it’s easy to mail too much.
• It’s often your best customers who are treated the worst.
• Problems compound as time passes.

3. Tailor your message to your (internal) audience.

• Use analogies. Numbers don’t speak to everyone. In this case, Eric used the analogy of overfishing the ocean.
• Be patient. You may need to repeat your message again and again.
• Appeal to core values. Most companies claim to respect the customer and value collaboration.

“In the end, [appealing to core values] will resonate with people,”  Eric said. “But, if you don’t change the way you do business, you’re not going to make any differences.”

The implementation of business rules and frequency caps

I also had the chance to get insight into this email transformation from Marc Haseltine, Email Marketing Manager, National Geographic:

By actively monitoring our comments inbox and communicating with our email subscriber base, those on the front line of the program were aware that many customers felt like they were being over-communicated with via email.

These individual comments and feedback that were being received helped surface issues and potential problem areas in our email program for our data analysis group to really dig into. Their work helped identify long term trends that were impacting the email program.

We were actively targeting all our email campaigns, whether it was based on customers’ and fans’ stated preferences, purchase activity or geolocation, however, the email channel was helping to support so much of the Society’s content, activities and products.  Without business rules and frequency caps, it’d be possible for those most engaged with our brand to sometimes receive up to four emails a day from us.

Read more…

MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit 2013 is rapidly approaching, and today’s video excerpt offers an exciting preview for one of the sessions, “Boston Globe: Discovering and optimizing a value proposition,” featuring Peter Doucette, Executive Director of Circulation Sales & Marketing, The Boston Globe.

At last year’s Summit, Peter’s presentation was titled, “The Boston Globe: Managing a transition from free to paid product,” covering an ongoing and relatively early-stage testing and optimization program. This year’s presentation will discuss part two of that process.

In this excerpt, Peter and Pamela Markey, Senior Director of Marketing, MECLABS, talk about how tablets became an important digital form factor for The Boston Globe’s new online subscriber strategy, some of the customer insight that began informing the strategy and the new direction insight created at The Boston Globe.

Also, if you would like to hear the entire process Peter and his team at The Boston Globe undertook to transform the way it approached both its online and offline audience, watch the full presentation from last year’s Optimization Summit from the MarketingSherpa Video Archive.

Read more…

For today’s MarketingSherpa blog post, we have an infographic from Kentico, “Customer Experience in the Digital Age.”

The research behind the infographic was an eight-question survey of 200 Internet users via SurveyMonkey in February 2013, and the survey was open to both consumer and B2B brand interactions.

Here are few data points on the surveyed Internet users:

The gender breakdown was 54% male and 46% female, and the age breakdown included …

• 18-24 – 10%
• 25-34 – 20%
• 35-44 – 24%
• 45-54 – 19%
• 55-64 – 15%
• 65-74 – 10%
• Over 74 – 2%

To help put this infographic – and the research that went into the content – into context, I had the chance to interview Thom Robbins, Chief Evangelist, Kentico Software.

MarketingSherpa: What were some of the key findings?

Thom Robbins: Company websites were second (25%) behind word of mouth (28%) in weighing most heavily on impacting brand affinity. In-store experiences factored [at] 18%.

Perhaps most surprising was the discovery that only 7% of respondents felt their brand experience was affected by social networks such as Facebook or Twitter, but I think this may be misleading. People may be influenced by social media a lot more than they think they are, through both direct and indirect interactions.

MS: Did any results come as a surprise?

TR: Other than the small role social media seemed to have, which I think merely shows us it’s a channel still on the rise, I was most surprised to see that 69% of those surveyed said they were willing to give up personal data in exchange for more customized service.

MS: Were there any results that might inform future research, or uncovered data points that deserve/require a deeper dive into customer insights?

TR: Well, I thought it was very telling that 97% were ready to forgive poor service as long as the company offers up a quick response or correction.

It’s important for businesses to know that while mistakes will be made, in the age of social media, every single customer experience counts. You can’t afford [to have] anyone to walk away unhappy, and there’s really no excuse given how forgiving customers are as long as you respond quickly to complaints.

Read more…

Last November, we published a how-to article in the MarketingSherpa B2B Newsletter titled, “CRM How-to: Tactics on Marketing/IT alignment, database strategy and integrating social media data.” As you might guess from the title, the article covered a range of customer relationship marketing concepts. To get the insights presented in the piece, I spoke with six industry experts.

With all of this great information at hand, I faced a common “problem” that crops up when researching multi-source MarketingSherpa articles – after writing a thorough how-to article, I still had a huge amount of great material that just didn’t make it into the piece. The solution? Offer those insights in a couple of additional blog posts.

Here on the MarketingSherpa Blog, we published, “Defining CRM: Thoughts from three experts,” a deeper look into how different industry experts actually define the term “customer relationship management” (and a fascinating group of opinions that might change the way you think of CRM), and another on the B2B Lead Blog, “Sales and Marketing: The technology behind CRM.”

Today, I’d like to offer more insights into CRM, and also add another industry expert to the entire mix, Lou Guercia, President and CEO, Scribe Software, a data integration and migration software company.

4 doors into the company

One key distinction covered in the post on defining customer relationship management was between CRM as simply a technology piece of software that might be as narrowly defined as the software utilized by Sales, or CRM technology embracing marketing automation and email technology as well, compared against CRM as a holistic customer lifetime experience that takes into account marketing activity, sales actions and customer service.

Even though he is coming from a very data-centric perspective, Lou said he sees CRM from the customer lifetime perspective.

He explained the four touch points, or “doors,” for customers interacting with your company:

• Marketing
• Sales
• Support (customer service)
• Finance

“What can we do to do support customers better?” Lou asked. “Think through what would be the data requirements and the workflows that would allow our business to service those customers through those four doors to the company in a way that would make those customers happy and more likely to continue to use our product or service.”

In the list of “doors,” I found it very interesting Lou added finance. Customer service is often mentioned in the holistic view of CRM, but from a customer touch point perspective, and maybe even more importantly from customer data perspective, how that person interacts with the finance department is a very important piece of the customer lifecycle.

The largest section of the original how-to article we published was on the database, and whether companies should keep separate databases for Marketing and Sales.

The opinion was mixed, with one expert, Brian Vellmure, Founder, Initium LLC/Innovantage International, splitting the difference suggesting one, or two, databases should be determined on a case-by-case basis, even though he did suggest there needed to be some way to merge all data for the ability to perform end-to-end data analysis.

Lou said a CRM implementation strategy should include integrating the Marketing and Sales databases if those are not already in sync, but the next stage would be to integrate the accounting and financial data into that overarching database as well.

With this total insight into the individual customer, if a database record changes for any reason at any point in the customer lifecycle – as a database prospect, after the handoff to Sales as a qualified lead, or at the account level post-conversion to a customer – the database everyone is using contains the correct information.

This means Marketing and Sales continuing efforts in up-selling, cross-selling and ongoing brand awareness understand, and can react to, changes in that customer’s status – maybe their phone number, job title or possibly even company changed over time.

The cloud and big data

As a marketer you might be thinking, “Oh man, first I have to get aligned with Sales and get all of us playing in the same data sandbox, and now I have to think about adding Finance to the mix?”

Lou suggested any CRM implementation strategy should be handled incrementally, and there’s no need to “boil the ocean” and try to do everything at once. At the same time, there needs to be an overall plan for the implementation.

He said, “If you think it through from a process level:

• What are we trying to do?
• What can we improve on?
• What feedback have we heard from these customers?
• How can improve the way we work with those customers and prospects?
• What are the data elements that we are going to need to do that and then have an actionable, prioritized plan?”

The implementation should be based on an overarching plan, and he said to avoid being so tactical that urgent problems get fixed without a framework in place for the entire process.

From a data perspective, one relatively new technological solution is out there.

“One factor that is impacting the market for adopting this kind of strategy is the rampant growth of cloud services,” Lou said.

He added the cloud provides the ability to link data from sources ranging from sales and marketing automation technology, call center systems and even accounting and finance.

Lou said one school of thought regarding another hot term right now – big data – is the idea of “give me every bleeping piece of data under the sun, and I will have smart algorithms that will figure out where to get some patterns.”

“I think that’s great for IBM,” he explained. “What I am about is relevant data sets. What are the types of data that you would want that can be reasonably well parsed through and used by organizations.”

He added big data is about finding patterns in unstructured data that will be helpful to the business, and marketers probably know what data they want for better access into customer insights. The challenge is managing big data in a coordinated way.

“Maybe I am not about ‘big data’ in the classic sense, but more [about] relevant use of bigger data, not vast data,” Lou explained.

Brian Vellmure, the advocate of allowing corporate culture to determine the database strategy, provided another perspective on actually handling big data for marketers:

Big data will allow us to obviously understand our customers better.

If we can understand who they are, who they are interacting with, where they go, what they are interested in beyond our products and service offering, and what their normal day in a life is, then obviously, we have a potential to bring them the right message at the right time.

It is not intrusive. It is not annoying, and it also allows us to find patterns that we didn’t even know to look for before.

Read more…

Despite Super Bowl ads promoting the misconception that social media marketing is full of clueless hipsters, the social media marketing channel provides a wealth of data marketers can use for analytics to optimize and improve campaigns.

Jay Baer, President, Convince & Convert, in his keynote presentation at the recently held MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 in Las Vegas, even made the case that email marketing and social media marketing are similar in three main areas:

• Operations and measurement
• Channel and audience
• Message and content

Jay went on to describe social media as email “with a fresh coat of paint.”

So, if you accept Jay’s analysis – and he makes a very sound point on the topic – email, the elder statesman of digital marketing, and social, the new kid on the block, are more similar than different.

When you take “measurement” from the first bullet point in mind, email metrics are likely fairly ingrained for most marketers – open rates, clickthrough rates, unsubscribe rates, list building, etc.

To take a closer look at social media marketing metrics, I turned to the recently published MarketingSherpa 2013 Marketing Analytics Benchmark Report and found this chart:

And, here is commentary from Brad Bortone, Senior Research Editor, MECLABS, and editor of the report:

HOW ARE MARKETERS TRACKING SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING METRICS?

Despite the fact that only 48% of surveyed marketers tracked social media marketing metrics, those who did were tracking a wide breadth of social tactics, with social reach (e.g., total followers, “likes,” etc.) being the most reported at 61%. This is likely the highest performer because these metrics are obtainable directly from the social media outlet in question.

This immediacy was beneficial to Mary Morel, Director, The M Factor Pty Ltd, who said social media enabled her the ability to, “concentrate most on regularly providing valuable information to build brand and watch Facebook stats, Twitter followers, Google Analytics, e-newsletter opens, subscribes and unsubscribes, and blog stats.”

Likewise, traffic referral data (49%) is information available from the social media outlet, and from link-tracking tools.

Read more…

The day one keynote presentation at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 featured Jay Baer, President, Convince & Convert and co-author of The Now Revolution. Jay’s presentation was titled, “More Alike than Different: Why Email is Madonna, and Facebook is Lady Gaga.”

A handful of data points

Jay explained email remains an extremely relevant channel. He cited ExactTarget research from 2011 that found 58% of U.S. adults check email first thing in the morning, and research from 2012 that found 77% of people surveyed reported preferring email for promotional messages.

He also said Facebook is far and away the social media platform of choice with only 27% of U.S. social media users 12 years-old and up embracing second-tier networks such as Google+ and LinkedIn, according to research from The Social Habit.

Additionally, he added 44% of corporate social media marketers look at Facebook as a way to gain new customers based on Wildfire research from 2012. One challenge is 84% of company Facebook fans are current or former customers per DDB research.

“Email and Facebook are strategically, operationally and tactically aligned. Or they should be,” Jay said.

Email and social media are more alike than different

Jay stated social media, and Facebook in particular, is just email with “fresh paint.”

Along with this statement, he presented a slide of an image he titled, “Magaga,” juxtaposing Madonna and Lady Gaga side by side to illustrate his point.

To further make the point, Jay described three areas of integration:

• Operations and measurement
• Channel and audience
• Message and content

In the case of measurement, email and Facebook share basic metrics even though the nomenclature is different.

Email metrics: Subscribes, unsubsribes, opens, clicks, forwards

Versus

Facebook metrics: Likes, hides/unlikes, reach, engaged users, shares

Read more…

Live blogging from MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 in Las Vegas, I had the opportunity to catch Loren McDonald, VP of Industry Relations, Silverpop, speak on using buyer behavior in email campaigns. His presentation was titled, “Let Buyer Behavior Be Your Guide! Delivering Communications that Convert.”

Loren opened his talk by explaining three approaches to email marketing:

• The mass market approach treats all customers as a single audience, what he described as a “hope-based” marketing approach.
• The segmented audience approach treats customers as many audiences, a marketer informed and defined approach.
• The personal marketing approach that treats customers individually and is a behavior-based marketing approach.

From this framework, he explained customer behavior drives the actions in email campaigns with the personal marketing approach.

To illustrate this approach, Loren offered a number of case study examples, including a look at a wedding invitation email series from Paper Style. In this example, Paper Style changed its approach to email marketing. Previously, it used a “batch and blast” approach with no targeting, which resulted in reduced response rates.

In implementing the behavior-based approach, Paper Style’s team analyzed website behavior from visitors, purchase patterns of its customers, mapped the wedding process to understand when typical behaviors happened and finally used this information to create a wedding timeline.

This analysis also uncovered two separate audiences – brides and friends of the bride who are helping with the wedding planning.

To segment those two audiences, Paper Style used website and/or email click behavior to drop prospects into either the “your wedding” or “friend’s wedding” email nurturing tracks.

Each track received a separate email series with content specific to each group. Brides’ email included information on invitations, bridal party gifts and thank-you notes. The bride’s friends’ track email included details on planning bachelorette parties as well as gifts for the bride and groom.

The result of analyzing its customers and developing email nurturing tracks based on behavior from its prospects led to impressive results for Paper Style: 244% boost in open rate, 161% increase in clickthrough and most importantly, revenue per mailing increased 330%.

Loren’s 10 tips for success

Along with real-world examples of behavior-based email marketing, Loren also gave the audience his 10 tips for personal marketing success:

Read more…

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

Customer relationship management (CRM) is defined a number of different ways. However, the most expansive definition takes a total end-to-end look at every interaction a person has with a company from simply becoming aware of the company at the very top of the sales funnel, all the way through customer service contact after the final conversion to a closed deal.

With a complex sale, many personal touch points in customer relationship management are present — such as directly answering a question posted on social media or an online forum. At the same time, the real engine driving CRM and keeping prospects moving through the sales funnel is technology.

The first technology that comes to mind is CRM software, such as Salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics. However, CRM technology potentially includes multiple pieces including email software and marketing automation (MA) solutions.

Paul Greenberg, Managing Principle, The 56 Group, LLC, and author of CRM at the Speed of Light, said although there are some technology suites that attempt to provide these solutions through the entire sales cycle, it is much more common for companies to integrate CRM technology from more than one vendor.

A common example is utilizing marketing automation software on the Marketing side of the funnel from one vendor and integrating that piece with CRM software from another vendor for the Sales side of the funnel, with a common database providing records on each prospect or customer for both pieces of software.

Paul said this creates something of a challenge because a number of different areas in the company are involved in implementing, and utilizing, CRM technology.

Marketing, Sales (and IT) alignment

Marketing and Sales alignment should be a goal for any company to improve the efficiency of the entire complex sale process Bringing multiple pieces of technology into the sales funnel adds another element within the company — the information technology department.

“Who owns [CRM technology] is a matter of the internal culture of a company,” Paul explained. “Could it be joint ownership between two departments? It could be, as we’re seeing increasingly.”

He added, “But, we’re seeing the CMOs are starting to own a lot of IT budgets, so it could be the CMO that owns that [technology].”

At the same time, the IT department traditionally has controlled technology pieces, so the CIO could possibly own the CRM technology, allocate usage, and make functional decisions based on the business outcomes Marketing and Sales are looking for in using CRM tech.

The role of marketing automation

Linda Athans, Marketing Manager, Tribridge, stated the size of the company might dictate how many pieces of CRM technology are deployed. “Ideally, your CRM can ‘do it all,'” she said, “but depending on your organization’s size and how it uses its CRM application, additional MA integration may be necessary to handle specific tasks.”

She mentioned a few areas where MA software can help Marketing:

• Automatically sending large quantities of emails
• Performing split testing on campaigns, such as email subject lines or copy
• Providing performance tracking and analytics on campaigns

Heidi Melin, CMO, Eloqua, obviously has a certain amount of vested interest as a MA software vendor, and she pointed out the value of MA for marketers.

“By integrating marketing automation with CRM [software], companies are able to get a better picture of their buyers and a better picture of how their marketing investments impact their revenue,” Heidi said. “That’s an area where companies are understanding that they can get a competitive advantage in tying a marketing automation solution into their existing CRM implementation to get more out of their investments.”

Brian Vellmure, Principal and Founder, Initium LLC/Innovantage International, added another advantage of bringing more than just CRM software into the customer relationship management technology picture: The nature of B2B sales has changed in recent years. Before, the sales team had a great deal of control over the information flow and education of prospects.

Now, according to Forrester analyst Lori Wizdo, two-thirds to 90% of the buying cycle is completed before a B2B buyer ever speaks with a sales rep.

Marketing automation helps the marketing team track prospects’ behavior, such as website visits and social media interaction, and then respond to that behavior with what the prospect is looking for, at the time they are looking for it and on the channel where they are looking.

“Then, [Marketing] offers an invitation to the next place on the prospect’s journey. I think that’s where marketing automation comes into play,” Brian explained.

How does your company handle CRM technology? What department “owns” each technology piece? We’d love to hear your thoughts and insights in the comments section.

Related Resources:

CRM How-to: Tactics on Marketing/IT alignment, database strategy and integrating social media data

Marketing Research Chart: Social CRM is increasingly important for managing social customer relationships

Defining CRM: Thoughts from three experts

How Technology on the Trade Show Floor Can Help Your Sales Team Work Smarter and Sell More

Lead Nurturing: 9 questions answered on lead qualification, nurturing, and Marketing-Sales alignment