MarketingSherpa Blog

My first job was on a bond trading floor at a Wall Street investment bank. It’s impossible to overstate the impact of innovations in computing and telecommunications on the financial markets in the 1980s.

Within a decade finance was transformed from a clubby, old-boys’ network to a 24-hour global trading system.

With that revolutionary shift a new currency of success emerged: the ability to gather, interpret, and react to new information in fractions of a second – real time.

Today, no financial professional would ever consider making a transaction without understanding where the markets are trading right now and what’s happening in the news at that precise moment.

It has taken a quarter century. But in fields like marketing and public relations, the impact of the real-time revolution in finance is finally beginning to be viable for any organization.

Real-time lead generation

Here is just one aspect – a data driven real-time website with an email component – of what the instant environment offers:

As a buyer visits your Web site and registers for a webinar, an alert is triggered on the salesperson’s real-time dashboard, providing details about the buyer based on the page that person is visiting. The alert notes that the person downloaded a white paper a few days ago.

In fact, the alert is flagged as high priority because that combination of actions (white paper download plus webinar registration) is highly indicative of a propensity to buy.

The alert automatically pulls up information on the buyer’s company. Are they already a client? Have others from this company visited the site before? What do third-party information providers say about the company? News stories from Dow Jones or Bloomberg appear along with a company snapshot from an information supplier like Hoovers.

Even the buyer’s LinkedIn and Twitter profiles appear. And all of this happens in real time.

The system then automatically creates an email that can either be sent automatically, or reviewed by the salesperson first and then sent right away.

In the emerging real-time business environment, where public discourse is no longer dictated by the mass media, size is no longer a decisive advantage.

Speed and agility win.

But you need an infrastructure, much like a Wall Street bond trader, to play in this new world.

Let’s look at a B2B example to see how this works. This is an example I’ve written about before on my own blog, but I want to delve into it deeper than I ever have before for the MarketingSherpa audience, and give some actionable advice you can use to improve your email marketing, and marketing in general.

Imagine a huge company announces it is to acquire one of your competitors. It hit the wires five minutes ago.

What would you do right now?

Not tomorrow. Now.

How about writing a blog post about it in real-time? And then how about sending an email right away to all of the contacts in your database who you know are customers of your competitor?

That’s what Joe Payne, CEO of Eloqua did when Oracle announced the acquisition of Market2Lead, a company that is also in the marketing automation arena.

I’m on the Eloqua advisory board and was having dinner with Joe, other advisory board members, and the Eloqua management team on May 24 in San Francisco when this went down.

Joe checked his BlackBerry and saw that the announcement had just been made.

The Oracle announcement contained only a North Korea style one-paragraph announcement. So Joe realized that there was a tremendous opportunity RIGHT NOW to write a blog post and define what the announcement meant.

In his post, “Oracle Joins The Party,” published a few hours later, Joe said (in part): “I expect Oracle’s entry to make a major difference in the attention paid to this sector. It’s going to open marketers’ eyes, and, as a result, expand the market. This is exactly the type of movement this industry needs. You see, the potential market for lead management systems is less than 10 percent penetrated.”

Eloqua’s CEO now owns the soundbite!

Can you see what Joe did? Oracle announces an acquisition but provides almost no details. The media is hungry for something to say and someone to quote. Bingo, a Google search pops up Joe’s post and now reporters, analysts, and bloggers have an authority to cite in their stories.

As a result of this real-time market commentary, Eloqua became an important part of the resulting stories in InfoWorld, Customer Experience Matrix, PC World, Customer Think, etc.

Now, when people want to learn about this transaction, they find Eloqua in the discussion. If you’re an analyst coving the market category or an existing customer of Market2Lead or are evaluating marketing automation platforms, Eloqua becomes someone you should consider.

Now is when the email kicks in. The marketing team at Eloqua queried their prospect database for any company in the sales cycle that was either an existing or potential customer of Market2Lead. Each of those people then received an email which was sent from the email address of their sales rep, pointing out the real-time blog post that Eloqua’s CEO Joe Payne wrote. These emails were customized by the sales rep:

Subject: Transition program

Hi Jim ,

I wanted to check in because I see you are using Market2Lead. It’s been quite an exciting week for Market2Lead and Oracle with the acquisition announcement. No doubt Oracle’s arrival at the party will bring increased attention to the sector. You see, as an early adopter of Marketing Automation, you’re one of the less than 10% of organizations who are recognizing the value it brings to your business.

Not surprisingly though, we’ve had a lot of calls over the last few days from many nervous clients as Oracle only acquired Market2Lead’s Intellectual Property (IP), not their customer contracts. As the leader in marketing automation, Eloqua is interested in helping you transition to a platform that will allow you to continue to do great marketing. We are offering Market2Lead clients a transition program consisting of a free SmartStart onboarding program and a six-month, money back guarantee on all subscription fees.

The Eloqua team is committed to helping you make a smooth transition.

Let me know when you have 10 mins to chat. You’re not alone!

Best,

Sales Rep Name Here

Eloqua

Amazingly, this Eloqua email was often the first that the customers of Market2Lead were hearing that their vendor had been acquired. Again, Eloqua owned the sound bite because they were first.

Many of those sales prospects then contacted their sales rep to learn more and soon deals started to close. The first signed customer as a result of this effort was Red Hat, a Market2Lead customer who chose to switch to Eloqua resulting in a $250,000 deal.

I’m constantly amazed at what real-time communications can do. Had Eloqua waited several hours to act, the moment would have been lost.

An immensely powerful competitive advantage flows to organizations with people who understand the power of real-time information.

Here are some things you can do right now to get started:

The most important thing is to develop a real-time mindset – an attitude that recognizes the importance of speed. It is an approach to business (and to life) that emphasizes moving quickly when the time is right. Developing a real-time mind-set is not an either/or proposition. I’m not saying that you should abandon your current business-planning process. Nor do I advocate allowing your team to run off barking at every car that drives by. Focus and collaboration are essential. The smart answer is to adopt a both/and approach, covering the spectrum from thorough to nimble. Recognize when you need to throw the playbook aside, and develop the capacity to react quickly.

The first priority to implement your mindset is to listen to bloggers, analysts, journalists, and others who talk frequently about you and your business. To find these voices, start by checking the search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and so on) for all the relevant keywords and phrases you can think of: your company, customers, competitors, prospects, product categories, buzzwords—whatever you can think of. Use specialized blog search engines like Google Blog Search, IceRocket, and Technorati to find bloggers interested in subjects related to your business.

Develop guidelines that permit people to communicate at speed. Develop an effective code of real-time communications and proactively embed it throughout your organization. Train it, demonstrate it, discuss it, and review it until this becomes second nature to everyone. Have your people internalize it as deeply as the instincts that tell them when it’s safe to turn left at a traffic light (or right if they’re Brits). This is fully possible. IBM’s code is called Social Computing Guidelines. The IBM guidelines include all manner of helpful instructions. Be who you are; be thoughtful about how you present yourself in online social networks; respect copyright and fair use laws; protect confidential and proprietary information; add value; don’t pick fights; and don’t forget your day job. But the single most important guideline in the IBM document is this: Speak in the first-person singular. In fact, I think that speaking in the first-person singular is essential to understanding what we’re really talking about here.

To support real-time business, you need technology infrastructure every bit as sophisticated as a financial trading floor. When well-integrated into an appropriate technology backbone, real-time data work together to feed the dashboard that your marketers, PR professionals, salespeople, and executives use every day.

Fortunately for organizations like Eloqua that operate in real-time, not many people are using these technique yet.

When everyone else is pitching the media using traditional methods and sending plodding emails pitching product when it suits them, why not frame the discussion with your own well-placed commentary and alert prospects by email.

Editor’s Note: David Meerman Scott will be the featured keynote speaker, sponsored by ExactTarget, at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011 + Awards & Expo in Las Vegas, January 24-26, and all attendees will receive a copy of his latest book, Real-Time Marketing & PR.

Related Resources

Email Marketing Manager: Look past campaigns to boost your career

B2B Marketing: Marketing automation helps with lead nurturing and management

Email Summit ’11: Tackling the Top Email Challenges with All-New Research, Case Studies and Training

Earlier this month I led my ninth full-day Email Marketing Essentials Workshop Training for MarketingSherpa. One of the most popular parts of the day is the on-the-spot critiques of email creative. They are gentle critiques – attendees send samples and as a group we talk about how they follow standards and best practices and what the marketer might test to improve performance. I’ve had people tell me that the critiques of their pieces alone were worth the cost of admission, but I digress.

Creative is nice, but quantitative data is where the rubber meets the road for me. So I often ask attendees about the performance of the creative we’re viewing. What’s your abandon rate on that email sign-up page? How was the click-through rate on this email? Why do you send this every month – does the ROI justify it?

And it surprises me how many marketers don’t know these numbers off the top of their heads.

Now, I admit it; I’ve always had a head for figures. When I check-in to a hotel my room number always imprints on my mind right away. Early in my career I was a fixture at upper level meetings, because my bosses knew that I’d be able to answer, off the top of my head, just about any quantitative query that arose.

But still…

In my perfect world, here are the ten numbers that every email marketer would have committed to memory (join us in Miami or Los Angeles and impress me!):

1. Percentage of New Website Visitors that Sign-up for Email

New, rather than returning, Website visitors are a key audience for email acquisition. Anyone who visits your Website and likes what they see is someone you want on your email list. That way you have the ability to begin a relationship with them via email – and sell them, over time, on your company and your offerings.

There’s no “magic number” for this type of conversion. But there’s also no reason that you shouldn’t always be trying to improve it. I’ve seen new visitor conversion rates from 0% to 25%. They key is to know what your conversion rate is and to always be looking for ways to improve it.

2. Abandon Rate on Your Online Sign-up Process

How many people that start your sign-up process bail out before they are finished? This is important because if you can figure out why they left and address the issue, you have an instant boost in your list growth.

There’s no golden rule for what your abandon rate should be, except the lower the better. I’ve seen abandon rates as high as 90%, meaning that 9 out of 10 people that thought they wanted an email relationship changed their mind during sign-up. If you’ve got 50% or more of the folks abandoning your sign-up process, you have plenty of room for improvement. And even if it’s only 25%, making changes to get it to 20% would provide a nice lift in list growth.

3. List Size

Everyone should know how many email addresses they have on their email list. This is a basic and most people do have this information close at hand, I’ll admit. But be sure you get monthly updates.

As with some of the other figures, there’s no perfect size for a list. I’d rather work with a client that has a small but responsive list than a large list that’s unresponsive. It’s usually more difficult to do any statistically significant testing with a list of less than 40,000 email addresses. The key here is to know the universe of your target audience and work to get as many of them as possible to sign-up for your email program.

4. Monthly List Growth Rate

How much is your list growing, or declining, each month? It’s an important question to be able to answer since it goes directly to the long-term viability of your email marketing program.

MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Report reported that lists that were growing did so at an average rate of 19.2% every six months. Those with declining lists reported a 10.3% decline over the same six-month period.

If you do the math, that’s an average monthly list growth of 3.2% for those with lists that are increasing. If your list is growing more quickly than this, great – but you still want to be thinking about how you can boost acquisition performance.

5. Bounce Rate

Bounces shouldn’t be a large part of your email send – but you should know this figure cold. If it’s higher than the industry average, then you may have serious issues with your list, list management and/or with being blacklisted (since some, but not all blacklists return a bounce message).

The Epsilon Q2 2010 Email Trends and Benchmarks Study reported an average bounce rate of 5.2%. If yours is higher, it’s worth some analysis to figure out why.

6. Open Rate

What percentage of your email audience is opening your missives? Opening is the first step to action, so this figure directly impacts your overall campaign performance. Open rates are somewhat controversial, but if you look at them as a relative, rather than an absolute, metric, they are still very useful.

Open rates are running from 16.4% to 31.5%, depending on industry, according to the Epsilon Q2 2010 Email Trends and Benchmarks Study. The average across all industries is 22.1%. If your open rates are below this it gives you something to shoot for. If you’re exceeding these metrics, there’s still always room to do better.

7. Click-through Rate

Click-through rate, calculated by dividing unique clicks by the quantity assumed delivered (send quantity minus bounces), is an important figure. Don’t get it confused with your click-to-open rate (sometimes referred to as the “engagement rate”) – which is useful but very different.

The Epsilon Q2 2010 Email Trends and Benchmarks Study is reporting an average open rate of 5.3%; the range across industries is 3.2% to 10.1%. As with opens, you should always know where you are in relation to industry benchmarks – and always be striving to improve your performance.

8. Conversion Rate

There are many different types of conversion rates, but the one I’m speaking of here is related to the bottom line goal of your email. If you’re looking to generate leads, then it’s the number of leads you generated divided by the quantity of email messages assumed delivered (quantity sent minus bounces). If you’re going for direct sales, then substitute direct sales for leads generated. If your email has some other goal, like driving traffic to a brick and mortar location, then substitute that.

Conversion rates are all over the board. Much depends on what your goal is and how much effort and/or commitment is required from the respondent to achieve it. I’ve seen conversion rates as high as 40% (and this conversion required a purchase!) – and as low as 0%. As with many of the other metrics, there’s no hard and fast measure of success here – but you always want to do better.

9. Return on Investment

Return on investment is calculated as how much revenue you generate for each dollar you spend on your email program. Some email marketers I’ve met shy away from even trying to calculate ROI because either (a) they have no way to track revenue associated with email or (b) they don’t feel they have a clear way to delineate the costs of their email program. While it’s great to have an absolutely accurate ROI, even an estimate can be useful. As long as you use the same formula to calculate ROI send-over-send and month-over-month, you can get a relative read on whether it’s improving or not.

The Direct Marketing Association projected that email will return $42.08 for each dollar spent on it in 2010. That figure is somewhat controversial, many feel it’s too high, but remember that it’s not a measure of success or failure. If your email marketing is profitable, returning more than $1 for each dollar you spend, it’s a success. And if you are making more than $42 for each dollar you spend, then your goal should be $50.

10. Dollar Value of an Email Address

What is an email address worth to your company? This is another figure which few marketers know, but it’s critical to the success of your acquisition efforts. The easiest way to calculate it is to divide the overall revenue generated from your in-house email efforts by the average number of people on your house list. When you know how much revenue you can expect from an email address, then you know how much you can spend on acquisition.

There’s no right or wrong answer here, and no industry benchmarks which would be valuable to gauge against. But that shouldn’t stop you from generating a quantitative figure. And as with the other metrics, you should strive to be sure that the value of each email address goes up, not down, with time.

Editor’s Note: Jeanne Jennings is teaching MarketingSherpa’s Email Essentials Workshop Training in 12 locations across North America this year; the next one takes place in Miami on November 9th. She’ll be blogging about the course material and her experiences during the tour. We’re excited to have her on board and contributing to the blog.

Related resources

MarketingSherpa Email Awards 2011

MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011

MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Essentials Workshop Training

News of email marketing’s demise has been around for years.

Cases in point:

• I’ve been on many panels where the topic is “Email is Dead; Long Live <Fill in the Blank>” where “the blank” is Blogs, RSS, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube – you name it. Typically it’s a point-counterpoint format, where I’m alone on one side of the stage and there are at least three “experts” on the other side dissing on email.
• News sources, from About.com to iMedia Connection to the Wall Street Journal have run articles about  all the latest online marketing tactics – and how they will displace email in a matter of months or years.
• I recently did an audit of a large organization’s email program, from acquisition through creative development and into conversions and overall performance. At a presentation to the field reps, it only took a few slides for an attendee to raise his hand and ask why we were bothering, since no one used email anymore (even though their members are career professionals in their early 20s through retirement age).
• Ever since I started my email marketing consultancy, over nine years ago, people have asked me what I was going to do when email died. Confidence in my career choice was not high.

All that said, email is NOT dead yet. Nor is it dying.

Each year, the Direct Marketing Association ranks marketing channels by the ROI generated. Email has led their rankings for a number of years; in 2010 they project that email marketing will return an average of $42 for each dollar spent, down from more than $43 in 2009. Email is the leader by more than a nose; the #2 channel was Internet search advertising, which returned just under $22 per dollar spent in 2009.

Forrester also weighed in on email earlier this year, projecting that U.S. spending on email marketing will increase by a compound annual rate of 11% until at least 2014, when it will reach $2 billion.

A recent MarketingSherpa survey found that email was one of only two tactics where more organizations increased budgets than decreased them in 2009. Nearly 50% of companies reported that their email budget increased, compared to 14% who said it decreased (the balance said that their email marketing budget stayed constant). The only other tactic where more budgets increased than decreased? Social networks and blogs, where 48% of companies increased budgets and 20% decreased them.

The latest report that supports the life left in email marketing comes from Yahoo! Hotjobs, which recently  published an article on six new careers they felt were “coming of age.” Number five? You guessed it – Email Marketing Manager. Yahoo! reports it delivers an average salary of $69,000 and encourages those interested in moving into email marketing management to pursue an MBA.

My experience in the trenches supports the health of email marketing. My email marketing consultancy has been busier than ever in the past few years. I continue to grow my client base and just brought on a new employee to help me meet the demand.

So the next time someone suggests to you that email is dying, smile and just hum the tune to Monty Python’s “He’s Not Dead Yet.” Then go back to the office and continue to hone your skills to succeed in this exciting industry which is very much alive.

Editor’s Note: Jeanne Jennings is teaching MarketingSherpa’s Email Essentials Workshop Training in 12 locations across North America this year; the next one takes place in Toronto on October 19th. She’ll be blogging about the course material and her experiences during the tour. We’re excited to have her on board and contributing to the blog.

Related Resources

Master the Essentials of Email Marketing in One Day with MarketingSherpa Email Trainer Jeanne Jennings

Email marketing Case Studies, How To Articles and Interviews

Email Marketing Awards Gallery 2010: Winning Campaign Details and Creative Samples

What’s the difference between a webinar and a website? The last four letters.

At first, this seems like a bad joke out of the “1,001 Wacky Jokes for Children of Marketers” (which I believe is out in paperback now). But take a step back from your website and webinar, look at the big picture, and you’ll quickly find that they both have the same goal – a conversion.

At MarketingExperiments and MarketingSherpa, not only do we research and publish information about the most effective marketing practices – the “what really works” – we also conduct webinars ourselves.

With that in mind, here are five questions we ask ourselves when staring in the mirror on the morning of a webinar…

Are you providing value?

According to MarketingExperiments research, the most important positive element to conversion is motivation. A negative element that hurts conversion is friction. Not to be overly simplistic, but given this paradigm, the ideal situation to use a webinar is when you have customers motivated enough to overcome the friction of having to take an hour or so out of their day and spend it with you.

Of course, this is why so many B2B companies conduct webinars. They have complex knowledge and products that customers are, at some level, motivated to find out more about. But let’s drill a little deeper into that thought, and perhaps address that second question as well. For any conversion to happen there must be a value exchange, and webinar attendance, while not a final sale, is a mini-conversion. So the best kind of customer to reach is the one you can truly provide value for.

Your knee-jerk reaction might be, “I provide value to every possible customer.” However, it will better serve your efforts if you take an honest self-assessment of your possible content, and decide who (if anyone) would give something for this content. Because attendees are paying with their time.

Are you communicating that value?

Every activity that happens before the webinar is your chance to make this sale. Remember, this is essentially a sale and the price is your audience’s time.

Your title, the description of your webinar, promotion blog posts, tweets, social media conversation – these all must be focused on a challenge or objective the customer has, not on your product’s features and functions.

All of your pre-webinar activity must create a solution to that challenge on three levels.

• It must be relevant. If your audience is mid-level warehouse managers, telling them how to recreate an entire manufacturing process over which they have no control is not relevant to their challenge of meeting their production goals within the current process.
• It must be urgent. Your customers will not spend an hour with you to solve a problem that is 15 months away. They have to meet this quarter’s goals and numbers and that is where their greatest motivation lies. In the long run there is no long run if they don’t fix short-term problems. Or, as noted economist John Maynard Keynes has said, “In the long run we are all dead.”
• It must be important. Your audience likely has many challenges in their job. But if you are only addressing something minor, why should they spend an hour with you? Put another way, would you try to sell better tires for an airplane that has no wings?

Take an unbiased look at your efforts and make sure you truly are addressing your customer’s most pressing issues, and not just, like many companies, putting new wrapping on the same sales pitch.

Are you constantly engaging your audience?

For the host, the key is value, value, value. Why start the webinar with an ad for yourself, as so many do? What is the value for the customer? Every minute they remain on the webinar is a micro-sale to get them to stay on for the next minute.

As Flint McGlaughlin, the Director of MECLABS Group, teaches, “Dazzle me gradually.” Continuously provide value to your audience, to overcome the inherent friction of staying on any webinar.

From a technology standpoint, have a conversation with them using polls and answering submitted questions throughout. Have staff on hand to conduct Q&A through your platform since you won’t likely have the time to address every question on the call. Encourage them to have a conversation with each other by using a Twitter hashtag.

Again, your focus is not the sale, its helping and providing value to your audience.

Are you listening to your audience?

Once you have dazzled your audience, give them a way to learn more about how your company can help them. Over time, you can start to measure the value of these leads with your sales team and then discern how many leads you get per webinar and how much these leads are worth. Are they more likely to close than a bought list or other cold lead? Do they end up being higher-value deals since they are from more motivated, more engaged customers? Answers to these questions will help you determine ROI.

Beyond ROI and independent of leads, make sure you keep a finger on the pulse of your webinars themselves by making sure your audience has a way to provide you feedback and let you know how much value and help you provide through them. By keeping an eye on this soft metric, you can use your webinars to help educate a community instead of alienating potential customers.

Are you building a community?

Before, during and after a webinar, social media and other content marketing is an excellent fit to building a community around your solution (and, as the name suggests, your solution is not your product but rather the value you provide to customers).

Before a webinar, solicit feedback through LinkedIn to understand what topics your customers want more information about. Then, perhaps release a juicy whitepaper that you can dissect live on the webinar. During the webinar, use a Twitter hashtag to facilitate conversation with (and between) attendees. After the webinar, write follow-up blog posts (with audio and video replays) to share information with those who couldn’t attend, and interest them in attending your next webinar and further feeding the virtuous value cycle.

Remember, a webinar – just like social media – is a channel. It has no inherent value. Your job is to provide that value.

Related Resources

“Double the Value of Your Online Testing: Don’t just get a result, get the maximum customer insights” Web clinic

“Top Five B2B Marketing Practices For 2011” webinar

How to Promote Your Webinar Via Google News

The Art of Inventing Must-Attend Webinar Topics: Real-life Inspiration

Marketing with white papers and/or webinars

Pay-per-click advertising in search engines is a veritable money machine for some companies. They put money in, turn some wrenches, and money comes out the other end.

However, PPC is not a miracle worker. Turning those wrenches can take a lot of work. And there are several marketing goals PPC achieves less effectively than SEO.

Comparing data from MarketingSherpa’s 2011 Search Marketing Benchmark Reports: SEO and PPC Editions, more marketers reported SEO as “very effective” at achieving the following objectives:

o Increasing brand or product awareness: SEO: 42%; PPC: 34%

o Improving brand or product reputation: SEO: 29%; PPC: 19%

o Improving public relations: SEO: 27%; PPC: 6%

Clearly, more marketers believe SEO is more effective than PPC at changing people’s opinions about their products and brands. However, when it comes to conversion-related objectives such as increasing lead generation and online sales revenue, more marketers report PPC as “very effective” than SEO.

The data lead me to believe that people searching to learn more about a company or industry are more interested in natural search results than paid results. Ads take on a larger role as searchers make purchase decisions or consider other conversions (such as reaching out for more information).

If your team is hoping to lift brand awareness and reputation, you’re better off working to improve your natural search performance than increasing your PPC budget. PPC is not necessarily ineffective, but it’s likely to have a smaller return than time invested elsewhere.

I’ve just completed another MarketingSherpa Email Essentials Workshop Training session, and have another quick tale from the road:

In the recent Workshop in Atlanta, one attendee submitted the URL of his email sign-up page for a critique, but said that he wasn’t submitting a welcome message because he didn’t believe there was one. Lo and behold, when I signed up for his email list I received a welcome message. I then understood why he didn’t realize it existed — it was utterly forgettable.

There are so many things that a welcome message can and should be; so many ways it can get the email relationship off on the right foot. We critiqued this welcome message during the workshop; I look forward to seeing the marketer implement the ideas we discussed to make it more effective.

Do you know if a welcome message is sent to new subscribers to your email list? If it is, do you know what it says? Whether it’s text or HTML? Who to contact if you need to update or change it?

I’m often surprised at how many marketers overlook this critical aspect of a new email relationship. Here are a few tips on welcome messages (just a small taste of what we cover in the email list growth section of the Workshop).

Welcome messages are one of the most common types of transactional email messages. A survey published in MarketingSherpa’s Best Practices in Email Marketing Handbook found that:

– 54% of respondents stated that they open and read transactional messages “very often or always.”

– Only 21% of respondents reported opening and reading other opt-in email with the same frequency.

Bottom line: Your welcome message (and other transactional messages) are probably opened and read by two-and-a-half times as many people as your email marketing messages. They are worthy of your attention.

Yet many organizations don’t think much about their welcome messages. Case in point: Exhibit A below.

This welcome isn’t bad, but it’s not reaching its full potential. It does thank the reader for subscribing. Then it reiterates the information provided at sign-up — but why? There’s really no reason.

Contrast this with Exhibit B: A welcome email from NFL Shop.

NFL Shop’s welcome message is in HTML, not text. But that alone doesn’t make it better. Just as the previous message did, it thanks the recipient for subscribing. But then it goes a few steps further.

– The benefits of having an email relationship with NFL Shop are front and center, in bullet points so they are easy to skim. This gets the recipient excited about receiving future email messages from NFL Shop.

– They also provide a link to get a free team catalog. They are making it easy for people to learn more about the merchandise they offer to entice them to shop and buy.

– Speaking of which, I love the “Begin Shopping” button on the right side of the email. It drives people back to the site to browse and buy, which is NFL Shop’s bottom line goal.

As good as this welcome message is, they are still missing an opportunity. See all the blank space below the “Begin Shopping” button? Why aren’t they using it to provide a coupon for a discount on my next purchase? They could add urgency by having the offer expire a week after the date that the welcome message was sent. That would give recipients an extra incentive to go back to the NFL Shop site and buy.

In a nutshell, an effective welcome message should:

o Thank the subscriber for signing up

o Reiterate the benefits of the email relationship

o Include a call-to-action

o Offer an incentive to encourage the desired action

Dating analogies are rampant in the email world, so here’s another. When someone signs up for your email list, they’re expressing interest in having an online relationship with your organization. Sending an effective welcome message right away is critical for leveraging this “honeymoon” period and getting the relationship off on the right foot.

Anyone familiar with press releases sees it all the time: a bunch of words that don’t say anything. I’ve personally read releases with three or four sentences of real information. The rest was just superlatives and hype.

Marketing strategist David Meerman Scott has targeted this type of writing since at least 2007, starting with his Gobbledygook Manifesto. In 2009, he pooled resources and queried journalists to pull together 325 common phrases. He then worked with Dow Jones to analyze their occurrences in over 700,000 North American press releases sent in 2008.

The top three most-used “gobbledygook” phrases they found:
1. “Innovate” (and all its derivatives)
2. “Pleased to”
3. “Unique”

“You see that stupid word [innovate] everywhere,” Scott says. “Every company is claiming how innovative they are, how innovative their products are…It’s so over used to have literally become meaningless.”

At best, potential customers ignore such words, Scott says, and at worst they’re insulted by them. Furthermore, the words do nothing to differentiate a brand, and they’re unlikely to be used by someone in a search engine. They’re truly empty phrases.

I recently interviewed Scott to ask him how social media can help cure a company’s addiction to these phrases (keep an eye on our Great Minds newsletter for the article). Scott shared a wealth of information — and not all of it made it into the final piece.

Here are some steps he suggests for checking whether your company uses too much “gobbledygook”:

First, check content on your website, press releases and other marketing content. Look for clichés listed here and in the Dow Jones analysis linked above. Examples include:
o “Mission critical”
o “Ground breaking”
o “Market leading”

Also, check if your content describes how your products solve your customers’ problems, and if it’s written in your customers’ language. Too many companies, Scott says, speak in a language that is only understood internally.

“People are dreaming up this language in a vacuum.”

For a good test, Scott suggests taking a block of questionable text, finding all references to your brands and products and replacing them with your competitors’ brands and product names.

“If the language still sounds accurate, then you’re in deep trouble,” he says. You’re not differentiating yourself at all.

When working in social media, many marketers stick to a few areas, such as Facebook, Twitter and blogging. Justin Greis, Owner, Panna Dolce, chose a broader approach.

The Chicago-based French maracron, cookie and brownie bakery relaunched in December 2009 after perfecting their macron recipe for five years. Now, they have a blog and also work in Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, Flickr, YouTube and other networks.

“We don’t discriminate,” says Greis. “We found there are different types of people who connect through different types of networks, and the more we’re connected and linked up through a central hub, which ends up being our blog and our ecommerce site, the better.”

Amazingly, Panna Dolce’s three-member team is able to keep content fresh in all these networks while maintaining their business. They do so, in part, by connecting as many accounts as possible, so a blog post becomes a tweet, a video becomes a Facebook update, and so on.

“We haven’t seen a lot of interaction on our blogs. But when you link your blog to Facebook, when you like it to Twitter, when you link it to YouTube and Vimeo, you connect with people the way they want to be connected to — and that is absolutely essential.”

The team also generates content by partnering with and writing about relevant sites, as well as covering their own:
o Charity work
o New flavor launches
o Events attended
o Press mentions

The team’s website, powered by Volusion, enables shoppers to share links to their product pages, further increasing their content on the  networks.

All this work is paying off. The team estimates 35% of ecommerce sales come from referral traffic from social networks. That number jumped to about 50% during Valentine’s Day. Also, the team’s work is earning them valuable business contacts.

“We’ve had several offers from big retail department stores that are tasting our products right now to see if they want to pick them up. We’ve had a lot of interest from bigger boutique grocery stores…All of those contacts were made through [online social networks].”

This week marks the opening of MarketingSherpa’s Seventh Annual Search Marketing Benchmark Survey. If you’re involved in search marketing, please take the next 5 to 15 minutes to share data and insights via the following link:

http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/269878/k0tnd

As a thank you for your time, we are offering a complimentary Executive Summary Report that includes key charts and insightful commentary. You will also be invited to attend a free webinar to review highlights from the study.

In the last year, the search landscape has seen a number of dramatic changes. Between social media’s continual growth, search innovations like mobile search, real time search, and search personalization emerging and gaining importance, accompanied by increased competition, search marketers face greater challenges than ever before.

How are marketers perceiving and reacting to these new changes in search? This year’s Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report will be stacked with information on balancing search and social media to achieve optimal success, as well as sections dedicated to search innovations.

In the meantime, let’s take a deeper look into the social media content that will be covered in this year’s report:

Applications and benefits of social media integration with search campaigns

-> Search Performance

The search landscape is growing more competitive, and this is partly due to social media. Social media has added another venue in which marketers must up their SEO ante, so to speak.

What tools and tactics are most effective these days in SEO? How many marketers are integrating social media into their search efforts? What are my industry’s current performance benchmarks? These are just some of the questions this year’s report will answer for you.

-> Search and Social Objectives

There are a number of target business objectives that can be achieved with social media, and improving search rankings is a popular one indeed.

Other popular objectives include:
o Increasing website traffic
o Increasing lead volume
o Driving sales revenue
o Improving brand reputation and awareness.

These objectives, of course, can also be achieved with SEO. The key is to balance your SEO efforts with social media in order to achieve success towards these common objectives.

Sections in this year’s report will include the effectiveness of search and social against key target objectives, and insights on search marketer’s greatest success stories and challenges.

-> The Impact of Social Integration

When used properly, social media can have a great impact on SEO. One of the most effective and most difficult SEO tactics is generating inbound links.

With social media, you can generate highly relevant inbound links to your site by attracting links from blogs, forums, social networking sites, and other social media channels.

Another great benefit search engine marketers are reaping from social media is increasing the number of listings that get displayed for their brand in the SERPs, pushing their competition to lower rankings and increasing the click through rates on their own listings.

We want to find out what specific goals are being most widely targeted for integrating social media into search campaigns, and what impact social media has had on results. As responses to this year’s survey start to come in, we’re becoming more anxious to see final results.

Stay tuned! The 2010 Search Marketing Benchmark Report is scheduled for release soon!

Please feel free to tweet or post the following invitation:

Search marketers share your insights. Take the 2010 Search Marketing Benchmark Survey http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/269878/k0tnd @MarketingSherpa

As a reporter, I will contact a company through any means necessary. I prefer using a phone number or an email address for a specific person — but sometimes I’m stuck filling out a ‘contact us’ form.

I’ve filled out more contact forms than I’d like to admit. I really dislike them. About a quarter of them do not work, and I’m never sure if my messages reach my intended audience: the marketing department.

Some common problems I’ve seen:
o Errors after clicking ‘submit’
o Tiny message length limits (such as 200 characters)
o Bounced emails in response
o Claims of ‘improper formatting’

Even worse is after receiving an error, you can lose your entire message. I learned long ago to write messages in a separate program and to copy-and-paste them into forms, in case I need to resubmit.

I’m just a reporter trying to get a marketer on the phone — can you imagine if I was a dissatisfied customer? My frustration level would skyrocket. If I was a potential business lead, I’d likely leave and never return.

‘Contact us’ forms are similar to social media in that they provide a way to receive customer feedback — which is very valuable. Broken ‘contact us’ forms send a clear message: “we don’t care about your feedback. Don’t contact us.”

But I’m sure that’s not true. You must care about your customers’ feedback. Their satisfaction keeps you in business.

So if you have a minute, check your website’s contact forms. Make sure they’re flexible, easy to use, and most importantly, that they work. A small effort can go a long way in preventing customers from walking away for good.