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Mobile Marketing: 31% of marketers don’t know their mobile email open rate

February 1st, 2013

In the MarketingSherpa Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report, we asked marketers about their mobile email marketing efforts …

Q: What percentage of customers/prospects interact with your organization’s mobile EMAIL messages?

 

Impact of the device itself on mobile email interaction

“I suspect the cost of service for data plans may impact and somewhat curb the degree of interaction on mobile devices,” said Lucia Panini, Marketing and Communications Manager, Betty Wright Swim Center –  Abilities United. “The other factor could be optimization of display, which should become a lesser or no issue with the most recent large-screen phones.”

 

31% of email marketers do not know their mobile email open rate

“I’m most surprised that a full third of marketers don’t even know if their emails are being opened on mobile! With all the attention ‘mobile’ received in 2012, I would expect that number to be lower. Tracking clickthroughs seem to be a bit harder – I’d be eager to hear how other folks are accomplishing this, technology-wise,” said Justine Jordan, Marketing Director, Litmus.

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SMB Marketing in 2013: 85% of SMBs to increase use of email

January 18th, 2013

In part one of this blog post, Rick Jensen, Senior Vice President, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, Constant Contact, provided his thoughts on where SMB marketers should focus their efforts in 2013.

Both of these MarketingSherpa Blog posts were prompted by research from AWeber, which found 68% of small businesses plan on increasing the marketing budget in 2013. That prompted me to reach out to experts in the SMB sector for tips and tactics specific for SMB marketers.

Today’s post offers more details from the AWeber research, along with more insight from industry experts.

The AWeber research was conducted during November and December of 2012, via an interstitial greeting AWeber customers received when logging into the company’s system. Visitors were invited to participate in the research, and 3,159 completed the survey. The methodology included randomized multiple choice options presented to respondents.

Here is an infographic summarizing the results of the survey:

What's in store for small business?
Data and infographic by AWeber

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SMB Marketing in 2013: 68% of small businesses to increase marketing budget

January 17th, 2013

I recently came across research from AWeber that found 68% of small businesses plan on increasing their marketing budget in 2013, and a full 97% plan on at least maintaining their current level of marketing spending.

That’s a very solid majority of small businesses that are putting more money into their marketing efforts.

“We believe that’s linked to a more positive economic outlook,” says Hunter Boyle, Senior Business Development Manager, AWeber. “There was plenty of uncertainty in 2012, but SMBs are resilient, and 58% said they were optimistic about revenue growth for the 2012 holiday season.”

He adds, “Plus, 47% said they felt the economy had changed positively last year. Looking ahead, when marketers are more upbeat, and seeing the value and returns from channels like email, they’re more confident and, in turn, more willing to invest in effective channels.” (Hunter Boyle will be speaking in an industry perspective session – “Breathing Life (and ROI) Back Into Your Email Marketing” – at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 in Las Vegas).

The AWeber research got me thinking. At MarketingSherpa, our usual goal is to provide examples and ideas marketers of any size company might be able to find “transferable principles” that can help ease their marketing pain points, or shed light on potential marketing opportunities.

Since small businesses are reporting an increase in the marketing budget, this MarketingSherpa blog post (and part two, which will be published on the MarketingSherpa blog tomorrow) focuses squarely on small- and mid-sized company marketers and feature tips and tactics geared for the SMB marketer.

To gain some insight into where SMB marketers should focus in 2013, I reached out to industry experts in the SMB sector.

For today’s post, here is Rick Jensen, Senior Vice President, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, Constant Contact, on SMB marketing in 2013.

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Content Marketing: 5 questions to ask subject matter experts to get the ball rolling

January 11th, 2013

Content marketing, at its essence, is really just a connection. It’s linking those who know something (subject matter experts) with those who want to know it.

This can be a struggle for some marketers who are trying to generate content, especially in complex fields like healthcare IT or power engineering.

That’s why the subject matter expert is so valuable. The vaunted SME (pronounced “Smee.”) Much more knowledgeable than Captain Hook’s right-hand man, but sometimes as ornery as the ol’ captain himself.

To win him or her over, it helps to immerse yourself in the industry to a level that you have their respect.

But to create quality content, it helps to ask the right questions to get that subject matter expert going. Once you tap the keg of passion in a SME, the party about topics important to the egg industry or Sarbanes-Oxley just never ends.

So, to help you generate content for your blogs, videos, email newsletters, podcasts, whitepapers, and the like, here are five general questions that have helped me throughout my career, as I’ve interviewed SMEs to create content.

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12 Most-Tweeted MarketingSherpa Blog Posts of 2012: Inbound and email top the list

December 28th, 2012

This time last year, we put together the top 11 posts of the MarketingSherpa Blog for 2011, and social media marketing easily dominated the list. In 2012, email marketing put up a good fight, but social media marketing along with other inbound strategies and tactics still took the gold.

This year’s list focused on three areas: inbound, email and customer-centric marketing. Along with a brief summary of each post, you’ll also find some interesting tweets about select posts. Read on for 2012’s most popular MarketingSherpa Blog posts, as determined by your peers.

 

Inbound Marketing

Blog Awards: The 13 best marketing industry blogs (according to you)

Our top post of 2012 shared the results of the MarketingSherpa Reader’s Choice Awards, where we announced the 13 winning blogs, in a variety of categories, as decided by you, the MarketingSherpa Blog audience.

“If you’re looking for information to help you improve performance and advance your career, check these blogs out,” said Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS, in the post.

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Marketing Video: How to deliver relevant marketing based on different personality types

December 4th, 2012

With our content creation for February’s Email Summit 2013 in Las Vegas now in full swing, we wanted to take one last, loving look at our previous Summit – B2B Summit 2012.

Keynote Sally Hogshead was insightful and inspiring. After she stepped off the stage and the crowd headed out to the cocktail hour, Luke Thorpe threw his camera on his shoulder, I grabbed my mic, and we asked her a few questions to help the MarketingSherpa blog audience understand how to market to different personality types …

 

 

For those impatient and busy types, here are a few timestamps if you’d like to jump ahead in the video …

0:50 – Segment content using personality triggers

2:39 – Identify which triggers to use with different prospects

3:50 – You don’t need to talk to a lot of people, you need to talk to the right people

4:45 – A look at Sally’s $2-per-piece business card

 

Related Resources:

Event Recap: MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2012

Customer-centric Marketing: 7 triggers to engage customers and build loyalty

HowToFascinate.com – Sally’s website

Email Summit 2013 – February 19-22, 2013, Las Vegas

Marketing Career: 5 tips for building a personal brand

October 16th, 2012

The ladder of success no longer has certain rungs that must be met. Now, companies are placing a greater emphasis on company culture, and are looking for people who will fit into that.

In the days when large corporations were the trendsetters of the business world, you could get ahead by following a certain set of rules. As the recession knocked down some of these traditional companies from their former glory, a new way of doing business was highlighted.

Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple and a thousand others like them ditched the suits and turned casual Friday into a week-long institution. Ping pong tables (like the one here at MECLABS) replaced conference tables and office spaces began providing an environment that would encourage employees to “think different.”

Companies are looking beyond info from your resume, and wanting to get to know you. Zappos, for instance, has said that in their personality-focused hiring process, they ask themselves if the person being interviewed is someone they would want to get a beer with.

As personality and corporate culture become a bigger proponent of the hiring process, it may be time to make yourself known and stop hiding behind a generic black and white, 12-point Times New Roman font resume.

An increasing amount of companies want to see that you have unique, unconventional skills to bring to their team, instead of checking off a list of qualifications on your resume.

Establishing your personal brand online can be the most effective way to get – and keep – a company’s attention.

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Storytelling and Brand Resurrection in the Age of Social Media

October 12th, 2012

Editor’s Note: One of the prizes of winning the MarketingSherpa Reader’s Choice Awards is the chance for a guest post here on the MarketingSherpa blog. Today’s post is by Cheryl Burgess of the Blue Focus Marketing blog, chosen as best social media marketing blog … by you.

With the recent announcement of the “new” MySpace — and with Justin Timberlake providing the public face of the redesign — the question on everyone’s minds is: Will it work?  Can a social media platform that had been all but left for dead really resurrect its brand? Much has changed since the site’s heyday around 2006-2007, and many obituaries have been written for the flagging social media platform since the advent of cooler, more versatile and user-friendly platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+.

Other more specialized social media platforms have also been introduced into the mix such as Twitter, Pinterest and Foursquare, each offering users a deliberately limited—but engaging—social experience.  Quite simply, there will be a lot more competition for MySpace this next time around, including the thriving platforms responsible for “poaching” the platform’s original users in the first place.

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Navigating the Four-Phase Social Media Process

October 9th, 2012

Everyone has been playing social media ROI hide-and-seek for some time now. How does social media drive sales? Does the extent to which a firm engages or fails to engage in social marketing impact the bottom line at all? Or, as some have suggested, is the return on social efforts akin to the Loch Ness monster — we’re pretty sure it exists, but nobody seems to be able to track it down.

 

 What if we’re looking at it from the wrong perspective?

What if social media is more of a process, a series of steps taken at every point in the sales process, which, in totality, makes it more likely to convert leads to clients but, in practice, is difficult or impossible to measure? Or, what if social media has to be done for a certain amount of time and at a certain level of devotion before those benefits manifest?

For instance, a recent study by Dr. Sounman Hong of Harvard University suggests that newspapers’ adoption of Twitter is positively associated with their number of online readers (readers = revenue, right?), and that the strength of the association increases the larger the social network is.

Common sense seems to suggest that social subscribers are added over time, and that a bigger subscriber list, in most cases, indicates a more mature social presence. In other words, we grow into our ROI by continuing to paint the fence and mature our social media efforts.

Another recent study, this one by James “Mick” Andzulis, Nikolaos G. Panagopoulos and Adam Rapp, goes so far as to break this social media evolution down into practical subdivisions. Now we begin to see a pattern emerge. Their take is that our social media efforts evolve though a series of four phases:

 

Click to enlarge

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Marketing Career: How to get budget approval to build your skills

October 5th, 2012

What challenges undermine your marketing department’s potential? When we asked that question to 1,646 marketers while researching for the MarketingSherpa 2012 Executive Guide to Marketing Personnel, here’s how they responded …

 

Click to enlarge

 

So today’s MarketingSherpa blog post is aimed at helping you overcome challenges #1 and #3: to help you get budget approval to build your skills. With Email Summit 2013 coming up in February, we’ll use a MarketingSherpa Summit as the example for this blog post to show you the factors you should consider when conducting a little internal marketing of your own.

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