MarketingSherpa Blog

Some marketers have noticed that when it comes to using triggered emails, there’s an interesting gap in the perception of automation in terms of “how things should be” and “how things really are.”

Most marketers use automated triggered emails for nurturing early stage buyers, which leaves overlooked opportunities to use automated emails to strengthen existing customer relationships or to win back the hearts and minds of recently lost customers.

In today’s MarketingSherpa Blog post, you’ll find three resources you can use to help your marketing team close the automation gap.

Commit to using automation to build stronger customer relationships

Most marketers in a custom or expensive e-commerce niche are typically not scouting for the impulse buys. Instead, their tactics tend to fall along the lines of supporting a longer sales cycle that requires a little more nurturing.

Indochino, a custom clothing company, decided to test an autoresponder send using hand-picked product suggestions in an attempt to build customer relationships using its email program.

Results: Indochino increased its revenue-per-email 540% in just the first test. To learn more about the campaign and the four-step process the team used to select targets and expand the program into other customer segments, check out the case study “E-commerce Marketing: 540% higher revenue-per-email for automated send.”

Customer behavior matters

For Jermaine Griggs, Founder, Hear and Play Music, communicating with customers through email messaging was a critical part of his marketing efforts. Here’s a short clip of the full presentation from MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013.

During his presentation at Email Summit, Jermaine explained how he transitioned from using his CRM system as a “glorified autoresponder,” to a CRM system based on behavior and personalization for each customer’s unique needs.

Results: Jermaine was able to successfully increase the lifetime value of his customers by 416%. To learn more, you can also watch the entire on-demand replay of Jermaine’s session, “E-commerce: Harnessing the power of email automation and behavior-based marketing to increase conversions,” from Email Summit 2013.  

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One of the perks of growing up in Northeast Florida was being able to watch space shuttle launches from my backyard. I never became an astronaut, but having NASA as one of your neighbors has an impact on you.

For example, I still keep up with NASA’s continued efforts to explore space, which is currently centered on a strategy of looking to planets in the Goldilocks zone orbiting around stars as big as our sun.

As a writer and editor, I often think about where the Goldilocks zone exists on our blogs.

Sure, there are a lot of factors to consider, but what I’ve found is that discovering the ideal zone where the conditions of voice and benefit exist in just the right amounts so an audience can flourish is truly not easy to find.

But, there are a few elements to consider that can point you in the right direction.

Start with the bare bones of blogging

If you break a blog post down, you’ll usually find it consists of two basic elements:

• Identity – The human element of your content’s voice
• Benefit – What the audience gains out of your content

When writing blog posts, hopefully your goal is ideally to try and find the balance between those two elements while keeping the interests of your audience at the forefront. 

Here are a few Venn diagrams to help put this into perspective. Now, let’s take a look at some of the imbalances and why they matter.

The messenger in blogging is a part of the message

A blog that is light on identity lacks the humanistic touch that makes your voice unique.

I often see this as a common problem for newer blogs still developing their voice in the market, but it can quickly become a problem even for established blogs.

To put a little context around this, blogs traditionally started as a platform for democratic content. It was a way for thought leaders to bypass the gatekeeping of traditional media and cut through the noise by taking their message straight to the people.

This idea still holds true today to a large degree even as blogging continues to evolve, but the trick to remember is the messenger remains a vital part of the message.

Consequently, if your blog voice is an erratic messenger with no unique identity, even the most beneficial content on the planet will not save you from eventually being abandoned by an audience.

Before you publish another post, take some time with your team to review the basics around your brand’s persona and how that persona translates into delivering a consistent voice in your blog content.

Just make sure the messenger is not the entire message  

In the case of overdeveloped identity, the majority of attention is focused on the brand or the author and not on the audience or how they benefit from your content.

The upside of an overdeveloped identity is that it’s is easy to spot – I call it “look at me” blogging.

Now, don’t get me wrong; you want to include a certain amount of personable information in your content. After all, that human element of blogging is what made blogging so dynamic to begin with.

But, the challenge rests in knowing when to deliver enough voice identity in your blog posts to be personable and transition from that to delivering benefit to your audience.

“Look at me” blogging is seductive because it’s easier to do than producing value for an audience, but the consequences for your blog are toxic.

The best way to avoid this is by holding your blogging to an editorial standard where the promise of benefit to your audience is always the focus.

If your team develops the habit of fleshing out value first by asking, “What will the audience get out of this?” before a single word is put on paper, you’ll discover that easily understood value is also easily delivered value.

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You’ll get no arguments from me that starting a new blog can be difficult.

There are plenty of great content marketing resources from MarketingSherpa and elsewhere to help you do that.

But, what happens when your company decides to undergo a change in content?

Navigating the waters of a new format on a well-established blog is a different kind of monster than starting from scratch.

Make sure everyone understands the big picture

If you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of new faces on the MarketingSherpa blog.

Also, if you read the blogs of our sister brands MarketingExperiments and B2B Lead Roundtable, you will also find a lot of new contributors there as well.

When I asked Brandon Stamschror, Senior Director of Content Operations, MECLABS, about some of the elements driving the change in content, Brandon explained the new approach was a unique opportunity to return blogging to its roots.

“For us, it felt like it was time for our blogging voice to come full circle,” Brandon explained. “Blogging originated as the ultimate personal journal. It was a platform for practitioners who were passionate about their message being heard, but over time, that approach has evolved into a more sophisticated medium that has as much in common with a trade journal as it does with a personal journal.“

Another reason Brandon mentioned for the change was based on the idea that members of the MECLABS research team have a wide range of insights and practical advice to offer our audience.

“We realized that we are in a place to leverage the strengths of both approaches. Real world practitioner discoveries and observations supported by a consistent editorial standard,” Brandon said.

Instead of letting all of that content simply vanish, the era of the MECLABS practitioner blogger had arrived.

Consequently, this also meant the MECLABS research team would be taking on a new writing initiative, so the first real challenge was one of communication throughout the organization.

So, the first tip here is simple – communicate, communicate and communicate.

Make sure everyone in the organization understands the reasons for change and what their role in those changes will be, as your team can’t help build something they don’t fully understand.

Anticipate problems and start looking for solutions

This is my faith in Murphy’s Law – if anything can go wrong, it will – so the trick is to anticipate problems and find solutions to avoid headaches later.

For instance, while having a sizeable pool of new content creators was a great asset, there was one catch …

Most of our practitioners’ writing skills were based on formal training in academic writing.

Few had prior blogging experience, while only one to my knowledge had any experience in journalism or exposure to the editorial process.

Based on our assessment, here were some of the problems we anticipated:

• Limited blogging experience – How do we help analysts to start writing blog posts?

• Formal training in academic writing – How can the content team help practitioners develop blog writing skills?

• Few have exposure to editorial process – How do we build a new editorial process that allows for more revision and editing time? How can we educate our internal thought leaders on the editorial process?

After a few rounds of discussion, our team decided a blog post template provided a simple solution to solve the problem of helping analysts get started writing blog posts.

The feedback we received from our in-house writers so far is the blog post template has been helpful in providing some rudimentary direction and structure to get started.

In short, the more problems like these that you can anticipate and find solutions for beforehand, the less painful your transition will hopefully be.

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Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

Using online video advertising as another channel to support your lead generation efforts can help you craft a global audience of potential leads.

Digital video can help keep your brand top-of-mind when it’s time for a purchase decision — if you create content designed for sharing versus selling.

Today’s B2B Lead Roundtable Blog post features three reasons why you should adopt video content into your B2B marketing mix.

Reason #1. The digital video audience is growing

In a recent article on what makes streamers abandon video content, an interesting chart was included projecting digital viewer growth in the U.S. from 2010 to 2016.

According to those projections, 61% of the U.S. population alone will have adopted digital video viewing within the next three years, bringing the total to a staggering 77% of all Internet users viewing digital video content online by 2016.

A similar article focused on the online activities of U.S. Internet users by age revealed video sharing was a top Internet activity among U.S. Web users in every age bracket, ranking only beneath shopping and social networking in popularity.

As a result, digital video content production and/or digital video advertising will have the potential to reach what truly constitutes a growing global audience.

Reason #2. It’s no more difficult to produce online video content than it is to produce a white paper

For B2B and/or B2G marketers, concerns about adding video content in terms of difficulty, time, effort and expense are understandable, but considering the findings of previous MarketingSherpa research, where B2B and/or B2G marketers were asked…

Please indicate the DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY (time, effort and expense required) in creating each of the content products your organization is using.

Producing white papers ranked nearly equal across every range of difficulty with online video and phone apps, which leads to one important question…

What are some of the tangible benefits for adding video?

Reason #3. Digital video can improve SEO and drive multichannel traffic to your website

When I asked Gaby Paez, Associate Director of Research, Conversion Group, MECLABS, how companies could benefit overall from adopting video, she explained using video content can improve SEO campaigns.

“Not only is video a great way to share your story, it’s also a great way to build links back to your site. And, if users engage with your video, it helps to increase time on site,” Gaby explained.

Here are some of the additional benefits Gaby mentioned for adopting video:

• Branding — craft a consistent message for a 24/7 global audience
• Add human touch to testimonials — increase value and credibility of testimonials by sharing customer stories/case studies in video format
• Repurpose existing content — creating short videos using slides with the content of existing blog posts
• Boost awareness, visibility and reach — share product information, training, tips, or instructions with demos or video tutorials

When I asked Gaby how video could be used by B2B marketers to highlight products in the e-commerce space, she used software as a service (SAAS) and traditional e-commerce as two examples of where video content could supplement or even improve the customer experience.

“See video as a natural progression of customers’ expectations. In the past, they expected to see a product picture to make a purchase decision, then a gallery of pictures and now a product video,” Gaby explained.

I asked Gaby if video could also be also used to drive traffic mobile, and she explained video content was a great way to accomplish this.

“Absolutely,” Gaby explained, “You want to spend time developing mobile content that encourages potential customers to spend time on your website,” Gaby explained.

Related Resources:

Lead Gen Summit 2013: September 30 – October 3, San Francisco

Lead Generation: Content among the most difficult tactics, but also quite effective

Human Touch: 8 Questions to Steer Your Marketing Priorities

Lead Qualification: Stop generating leads and start generating revenue

When asked about different types of content, more than half of marketers considered 12 of 18 types of content to be difficult to create.

At Lead Gen Summit 2013 in San Francisco, we will have sessions discussing how to use content marketing to capture and nurture leads.

To help prepare you for Summit, today on the MarketingSherpa Blog, we’re sharing a video excerpt from B2B Summit 2012 about content production …

In this video excerpt, Eric Webb, Senior Director of Corporate Communication, McGladrey, shared the steps the accounting and consulting firm took to improve its content marketing efforts and, ultimately, execute a 300% increase in content production.

To see the rest of Eric’s presentation and learn more about how you can use content marketing to better serve your customers, watch the free full presentation in the MarketingSherpa Video Archive.

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You’ve determined if there is any true value in your marketing and you’ve taken the steps to craft your value proposition, when the one looming question hits you – what should I do next?

Turning theory into action was the key focus of Tony Doty, Senior Manager of Optimization, MECLABS, and Lauren Maki, Manager of Optimization, MECLABS, during the Industry Deep Dive session, “Value Proposition: How to turn that shiny, new value prop into a high-performing page,” here at MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit 2013.

“We have a lot of great tools for developing value proposition, but often we find a lot of marketers asking us what to do next and that’s what this is all about,” Tony said.

Today’s MarketingSherpa blog post will feature four questions every marketer should ask themselves about what the next step should be for implementing value proposition development into marketing efforts.

Question #1: Who is my target audience?

Tony and Lauren explained before you think about where you will express your value prop statements, you need to first determine who your audience for that value proposition is and what their needs are.

“We should always craft a value proposition with a customer’s needs in mind,” Tony said.

Question #2: Do I know where my customers are coming from?

Tony also explained once you’ve identified the target audience for your value proposition, you need to understand the channels where your traffic comes from, and adapt your message as needed per channel.

Lauren brought up a good point that customers from different channels have different needs and motivations, so your value proposition placement should be strategic within each channel.

To do this, she explained you first need to identify not just who your target prospect group is, but also where that prospect group is coming from.

“There’s a lot more places than just your homepage for your value proposition,” Lauren explained. “Look at your data to determine if what you’re doing is effective once you’ve started putting your value propositions into place [in those different channels].”

Some of the channels Lauren highlighted in her example are:

• Targeted email campaigns
• PPC campaigns
• Display ads
• Referral sites
• Landing pages
• Product pages
• Informational pages
• Cart checkout
• Social media

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Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

This week, I’ve joined marketers from around the world in Athens Americana — Boston, Mass. for MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit 2013. After a short (and rather scenic) water taxi ride from the airport, I’ve settled into one of the Value Proposition Development Course sessions being led by Austin McCraw, Senior Editorial Analyst, MECLABS, as he teaches marketers how to craft and express value propositions.

“I want to take the theory that we have put in place so far, and bring it down to a ground floor level of application,” Austin said.

So, today’s B2B Lead Roundtable Blog will highlight that ground floor application from Austin’s session by showing you how you can craft a value proposition in five simple steps. Our goal is to give marketers a frameworkthey can use to identify and express a value proposition using the MECLABS value proposition worksheet.

However, before we get started, take moment to download this worksheet to aid your value proposition efforts and let’s get clear on what a value proposition is exactly…

What is a value proposition?

According to Austin, there’s a fundamental question every customer wants answered that directly impacts your ability to capture and convert — “If I’m your ideal prospect, why should I buy from you rather than any of your competitors?”

“Your value proposition is the ultimate reason why your prospects should do business with you,” Austin explained.

To put this further into perspective, take a moment to ask yourself, “Can I clearly and succinctly state the core value proposition of the product or service that I am marketing?” and write down you answer.

If what you wrote down resembles any of these …

• “We empower your software decisions.”
• “I don’t sell products and services; I sell results — my guarantee.”
• “We help companies find their passion and purpose.”
• “We are the leading [insert your service here] provider.”
• “We give XX% off for new clients.”
• “This site has the solution your company is looking for.”

Then it’s very likely your marketing campaigns are underperforming from poorly-crafted value propositions that are also likely leaving some serious leads and revenue on the table.

Step #1: Identify the value proposition question

Austin explained the first step in crafting a value proposition is to identify the type of value proposition you need to answer.

“Once you have identified the value proposition question you want to answer, you have already won half of the battle,” Austin said.

And so, you first have to choose which question you want to answer; be it the primary question of “If I’m your ideal prospect, why should I buy from you rather than any of your competitors?” or a derivative value proposition that has a much more granular focus on your products or process.

Step #2: Identify potential claims of value

The next step is to list some potential claims of value that answer the primary value proposition question we identified in step one.

To illustrate this, I created a hypothetical email service provider and listed some potential claims of value.

Step #3: Rate the appeal and exclusivity for each claim

After you’ve listed some possible claims, rank them from one through five according to their appeal and exclusivity, of which:

• Appeal — “How much is this offer desired by the market?“
• Exclusivity — “Is this offer available anywhere else in the market?“

In keeping with our example, let’s take a deeper look at appeal and exclusivity of our highest-ranking example claim.

“We can integrate into any social media platform”

• Appeal: 4.5 — The ability to conduct multichannel marketing with your emails is going to have a reasonably high amount of appeal to our hypothetical ideal prospect.
• Exclusivity: 5.0 — While there may be other players in our market; our business intelligence has determined that we are the only ESP currently capable of integration into every social media platform.

Step #4: Identify evidentials for your highest-ranked claims

Evidentials are the backbone of your potential claim because they make your claim quantifiable, or as Austin explained, “Once you understand your appeal and exclusivity, you want to begin building supporting credibility with your evidentials.”

To help intensify the credibility of potential claims, Austin shared three key principles for selecting evidentials:

1. Specification — Substitute general descriptions with specific facts.
2. Quantification — Quantify your claims.
3. Verification — Let someone else do your bragging.

Step #5: Combine the highest-ranked claims with supporting evidentials

This is where you bring it all together — by taking your highest-ranked claims and their supporting evidentials and turning them into what Austin described as “the ultimate conclusion as to why prospects should buy from you.”

Related Resources:

Value Proposition: Congress has a value exchange problem … do your marketing offers?

Value Prop: Is there true value in your marketing proposition?

Customer Value: The 4 essential levels of value propositions

Marketing in highly competitive environments can be difficult as pressure mounts to stand out amongst fierce competitors in a space that feels like its constantly shrinking.

So, in today’s MarketingSherpa blog post, you will hear three ideas to inspire you from a MarketingExperiments Web clinic – “Discovering Your Value Proposition: 6 ways to stand out in a crowded marketplace.” Our goal is to share a few simple techniques to differentiate your offers in highly competitive environments and avoid “me too” marketing.

But first, let’s clarify what a value proposition is.

According to the MECLABS Value Proposition Development Online Course, a value proposition is defined as the answer to the question – “If I am your ideal prospect, why should I buy from you rather than your competitors?”

So, how would you answer this question about your offer?

Take a few minutes to brainstorm on how you would answer this question.

Now if what you wrote down read like any of these …

• “We empower you with software solutions.”
• “I don’t sell products and services; I sell results — my guarantee.”
• “We help people find their passion and purpose.”
• “We are the leading [insert your service here] provider.”
• “Get found online.”
• “This site has what the person is looking to find.”

Then, it’s likely your campaigns are underperforming. Here are some techniques you can use to plug some of the leaks in your sales funnel.

Technique #1: Craft offers that focus on your “only factor”

Your value proposition must include one aspect that differentiates you from your competitors. This one singularity is your “only factor.” If your value proposition doesn’t do this, you’re already at a disadvantage.

The goal here is to craft offers with a powerful only factor that will ideally have the right amount of appeal and exclusivity. Offers that are short on either of these elements can result in the following:

• Offers with appeal but not much exclusivity lose appeal in a crowded marketplace with lots of competitors, and choices, for your ideal customer.

• Offers that are exclusive but lack appeal quickly lose their leverage because not enough of those ideal customers will likely be motivated to act on your offer.

Technique #2: Support value propositions with clear evidentials

Evidentials are supporting claims in your offer that can be quantified and verified. To illustrate this point, let’s revisit the hypothetical car dealership owned by our Director of Editorial Content, Daniel Burstein.

Suppose Daniel decides to make a commercial for his dealership and in the ad he says:

“Please visit us at Burstein Auto; we have Florida’s best selection of cars for you to choose from!”

That statement is not very quantifiable because almost anyone can make the claim that they have the “best” of something.

Now if he were to instead say something like this …

“Please visit us at Burstein Auto; our dealership spans across five acres of land with over 1,500 new cars for you to choose from.”

The claims made in the second statement are quantified and have greater credibility because they can be verified. An overall goal for evidentials is to use them as bulleted points of information that support your claims strategically.

Here are a few key questions to ask yourself or your team about your evidentials:

• Is our claim quantifiable?
• Can our claim be verified?

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One of my favorite proverbs is “Change yourself and you change your fortunes.”

Making changes that increase the bottom line starts with marketers making a commitment to change how they engage customers effectively with their tools at hand.

Tools like customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation systems that track user activities allow marketers to leverage behavior insights gained from captured analytics to engage both return customers and potential prospects.

But, according to Jermaine Griggs, Founder, Hear and Play Music and AutomationClinic.com, some marketers fail to put these tools to good use.

“Instead of better understanding ‘who’ or ‘what’ and letting the captured data talk to us, many of us are using CRM to send static time-based follow-ups,” Jermaine said.

Jermaine was a presenter at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013, and one of the key takeaways from his session at Summit was a hypothetical litmus test for marketers to self-assess their CRM and marketing automation usage.

Today’s MarketingSherpa blog post will present Jermaine’s litmus test as five questions every marketer should ask themselves about how they use CRMs and marketing automation to drive email campaigns. Our goal is to share peer insights you can use to aid your email marketing efforts.

But first, let’s take a look at a case study that provides a little backstory on how Jermaine discovered he was not using his CRM and marketing automation platform to their full potential.

Jermaine explained Hear and Play underwent a transformation when it started using its CRM and marketing automation platform to focus on personalizing its automated email marketing campaigns. The change resulted in a 416% increase in lifetime customer value and product purchases per customer from an average of 1.5 to 12.46.

“Our transformation came when we stopped using our CRM merely as a glorified autoresponder and started to really harness the power of behavioral and personalized marketing,” Jermaine explained.

Question #1: Do I have email campaign steps users can’t influence?

Jermaine suggested marketers assess their email campaigns using a ratio he calls an S2D score, or static vs. dynamic ratio.

In Jermaine’s S2D ratio:

• Dynamic sends are influenced directly by customer action
• Static sends are steps in a process that are not influenced by any customer action

Jermaine accredited increased use of dynamic sends over static sends as a driver of success in Hear and Play’s email marketing strategy reformation and suggests marketers take the time look at their data and acknowledge past customer behavior.

“It will go a long way, and there is an exponential impact on how customers respond,” Jermaine said.

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Optimizing form fields in emails can be tricky as sales and marketing departments don’t always agree on how to create an effective lead flow process that captures important customer information while minimizing elements of friction.

So, today’s MarketingSherpa Blog post will share two case studies featured at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 and how one marketing team increased its conversion rate 22% by removing its capture form. Our goal is to share with you some real-world email campaigns you can use to aid your lead generation optimization effort.

First, let’s get some backstory on the role segmentation played in these case studies …

According to Dave Mossop, Manager of Interactive Marketing, Expedia CruiseShipCenters, segmenting between prospects and return customers early on in the campaign was key to allowing the team to offer more relevant content in its messaging.

“We did a very simple split of prospects versus customers and that alone gives you enough information to talk to these audiences very differently,” Dave explained.

By segmenting between prospects and return customers, the team was able to deliver a greater relevance for:

• Price points – Lower for new prospects and higher for return customers
• Itineraries – Specific destinations for new prospects and a broader range of destinations for return customers
• Information – Answer first time cruise information for new prospects and explain the benefit of “Why book with us?”
• Special offers – Exclusive bonus offers for prior customers

“As our team grew, we started going one level deeper by going to customer segments,” Dave explained.

Additional segmentation of past customers allowed the team to:

• Focus messaging, sales offers and itineraries
• Discover upsell and cross sell opportunities
• Prevent down-selling to luxury cruise clients

The team took its segmentation efforts even further by grouping past customers based on previous cruise lines. Expedia CruiseShipCenters discovered past customers were likely to book on the same cruise line again.

By understanding past customer behaviors, the team was also able to:

• Promote cruise line loyalty program offers and exclusives
• Write content from perspective of experience

“We see phenomenal results as we get completely relevant and completely personal with the customer we have this data on,” Dave concluded. “Personalization makes a difference, but who we send to matters even more.”

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