MarketingSherpa Blog

My “official” blog post will begin in a minute, but first here’s a quick tale from the road:

Some marketers from Microsoft attended the Email Essentials Workshop in Seattle, Washington last month. The creative they brought to share didn’t leverage the preview pane as effectively as it could have when images were blocked.

We were discussing ways to address this as a group, when I just couldn’t resist. I suggested that, since Outlook was a Microsoft product, they just talk to the developers at their company and change the default from “images blocked” to “images on.”

The room broke out in laughter and a little applause; the other attendees were definitely on board with this idea. One of the people from Microsoft jokingly said he’d speak to Steve Ballmer about it right away. Who says that talking about email marketing can’t be fun!

Some of the most interesting discussions in the MarketingSherpa Email Essentials Workshop Training sessions I’ve been leading center around creative execution, preview panes and image blocking.

Workshop attendees bring samples of their email marketing efforts that we review as a group, identifying areas where the creative mirrors standards and best practices, and also looking for things the marketer might test to improve performance. It’s surprising to me how few marketers take image blocking into account when developing their email creative.

In the latest MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Benchmark Report, a survey of email recipients found that only 33% have images turned on by default. That means that 67% – or two-thirds of recipients – don’t.

The preview pane is your prime real estate to pull people into your email. In conjunction with the sender address and subject line, it’s the key to getting people to read your email. When I’m looking at image blocking, I focus on the preview pane view. This is the place that having images on, or off, makes the most impact.

More than 80% of business people and more than 50% of consumers utilize the preview pane view on their email clients. More than 75% are using a horizontal (rather than vertical) preview pane (data, again, comes from Marketing Sherpa’s 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Report).

So you should all know what the preview pane view of your email looks like, both with and without images.

Exhibit A: A recent issue of one of USATODAY’s email newsletters (see below).

With the images turned on, I can see that it’s the Travel Briefing and even get part of an image and a headline to pull me into the email.

But that’s not the case when images are blocked (see below).

With images turned off I can see the “housekeeping” messages at the very top, as well as the copy associated with the Facebook and Twitter links, but nothing else.

At the very least, the “Travel Briefing” headline should be in rich text, as the social media copy is. Many companies prefer to make newsletter titles and even headlines images because it allows them control over the font for branding purposes. That’s fine on a website, but for email anything that can be rich text should be. That way the words will show even if images are blocked.

Also fine on websites are large “hero photos” which appear under the header — but they’re not so good in email. The caption for the photo at the top left, which is also the story headline, is “Top 10 Free Travel Apps.” It’s directly below the image. If USATODAY moved this above the image it would make the preview pane, with or without images blocked, much more engaging.

One more thing: With images blocked the content of the email is shifted down. So even though the headline on the right appears when images are on, it gets bumped below the preview pane when images are blocked. Without images there’s not a lot here to engage readers and pull them in to read the email.

Developing email creative to take full advantage of your preview pane prime real estate when images are blocked isn’t difficult or expensive. It just takes a little thought. If you don’t know what your email looks like in the preview pane with images blocked, now’s your chance to check.

So check how your messages appear in the preview pane when images are off. And if you don’t like what you see, fix it — and see your engagement and click-through rates rise. At least until my Microsoft marketing contact convinces Steve Ballmer to have the developers make “images on” the default setting for Outlook…

Editor’s Note: Jeanne Jennings is teaching MarketingSherpa’s Email Essentials Workshop Training in 10 locations around the country this year; the next one takes place in Atlanta on June 25th. 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.

Just wanted to post a quick reminder that the deadline is fast approaching for entries to MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Viral and Social Marketing Hall of Fame.

You have until Friday, June 18, at 5:00 p.m. EST to enter your best-performing social media or viral marketing campaign for this year’s honors.

Enter your campaign details here

Here are a few pointers to help you with your entry:

– There is no entry fee for this program. You can submit as many campaigns as you like, as long as they used social media or audience participation to achieve strong results.

– Campaigns from 2009 or 2010 are accepted, as long as they were not entered for the 2009 Viral Hall of Fame last summer.

– Results are paramount. We’re looking for campaigns that achieved a significant business result, such as leads or revenue generated. Having millions of views isn’t too impressive in and of itself, unless you can prove that you reached the right people and encouraged them to take some action that achieved the business goal behind the campaign.

– Innovation gets attention. We’re looking for campaign tactics and creative approaches that the marketing community hasn’t seen before.

So gather up your results and creative samples and wow us with your tales of using of social media or viral marketing to record big marketing wins. The honorees will be featured in a special report later this summer that lays out all the details of the campaign approach, measurement tactics employed, results achieved and lessons learned.

Here’s the link again:

Viral and Social Marketing Hall of Fame Entry Form
(Deadline: June 18, 2010)

Thanks, and good luck!

People who follow your social media updates are likely fans of your brand. Their motivations may vary, but if they’re reading and responding to your content, then they know who you are and they like hearing from you.

“It’s not really surprising that, like search traffic, social media traffic tends to be very qualified,” says Maura Ginty, Senior Manager, Search and Social, Autodesk. “It can be small in volume, but it’s really qualified.”

Ginty’s team uncovered this insight by monitoring social media traffic to Autodesk’s website and analyzing the actions visitors took after arrival. Obtaining data around social media is not difficult, Ginty says. The hard part is using it.

“I think people end up feeling like the data is going to answer their question, but it’s the interpretation of all that data and the filtering of all that volume that really helps provide insight into what to do next,” she says. (Keep an eye on our Great Minds newsletter for an up-coming article on how to improve social media measurement).

Ginty’s team started synthesizing data to uncover the social impact of online marketing campaigns, in part, by using a tool created with Covario. For example, the team can calculate the velocity of a marketing message — the number of people a message reaches in a certain amount of time in social media — and combine it with a sentiment analysis. This information helps the team gauge how quickly messages spread, how people respond, and which efforts have strong social appeal.

“We’ve seen from different areas that a lot of the push of information will end up happening in the first 24 hours,” Ginty says.

Social media is a new channel with unique brand/customer interactions that can be tested and measured. I am excited to see how other industry leaders will start measuring and tweaking their social efforts to improve everything from brand image to conversion rates.

Are you doing any testing in social? Let us know in the comments…

Since the beginning of this year, I’ve noticed a recurring theme in my conversations with B2B marketers: This is the year to get serious about lead management and lead nurturing.

It’s not that lead management is a new concept – in fact, many marketers I talk to already have some kind of nurturing and scoring process in place. But many of those same marketers admit they haven’t fully realized all the benefits of their system and need to optimize it.

And now, a range factors are coming together to push those teams to get more out of their lead management systems – while pushing teams that haven’t adopted lead nurturing or scoring to create a system of their own.

Here are a few of the factors I’ve seen:

– Lead nurturing can address some of the biggest challenges B2B marketers reported facing in our 2009-2010 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report:
• Generating high-quality leads
• Marketing to lengthening sales cycle
• Marketing to a growing number of people in the buying process

– Staff and budget cuts brought on by the recession are forcing teams to streamline and automate more of their marketing processes. Things like automated drip-email nurturing campaigns look more like a “must-have” when your staff and budget for campaign execution shrinks.

– On a more positive note, optimism about an economic recovery has some teams thinking about future growth. They realize that the manual systems they use now won’t scale when their volume of leads and sales activity picks up again.

Any of those factors would be a good reason for you to revisit how you manage your own lead flow and qualification process. I have to note that, unfortunately, there’s no quick and easy route to lead nurturing nirvana.

The process requires a lot of work – collaboration between sales and marketing, planning and development of automated campaigns, monitoring and analysis of data, and routine testing and modification of your process, among other tasks.

On Thursday, June 10, I’ll be conducting a free webinar with Jennifer Horton, Best Practice Consultant, Eloqua, that provides research data and case study results to address some of the key challenges in optimizing lead management. (Here’s the registration form with more information.)

But if you’re ready to put in the effort, you can transform the way your marketing team operates, improve your relationship with sales, and make an even bigger contribution to your company’s revenue.

I am in awe of the amount of online buzz generated by ABC’s recently completed television series, Lost. On its Facebook fan page alone, wall posts about the finale each captured 1,200 to 19,000 comments to date.

In fact, Lost generated the most social media engagement of any television show from February through April, the New York Times reports.

How did ABC’s team use Facebook to build such a gargantuan amount of chatter? Here are some tactics I can see from Lost’s fan page:

1. Build anticipation

As far back as three weeks before the show’s May 23 finale, the team posted reminders and teasers about the event. We’ve seen a similar tactic used in Twitter to tease a sales event.

During the final week, ABC posted at least one mention per day. It posted four times on the final day, capturing tens-of-thousands of comments.

2. Provide relevant content

Throughout the countdown, the team sent fans links to Lost-related content, such as:
o A Facebook event page
o A musical tribute
o Video clips

Providing relevant, high-quality content is important to keeping fans engaged. Otherwise they may decide to interact elsewhere.

3. Promote other channels

ABC set up a chat service on its website for fans to discuss the finale in real time as it aired, and posted about it on Lost’s Facebook page. The team also posted a link to a free archive on its website of previously aired episodes and asked fans to “revisit all their favorite moments.”

I am not naive enough to believe these tactics alone were enough to generate the level of buzz the team realized. Lost is a widely popular and well-promoted national television show — it’s going to generate some buzz. However, I do believe these tactics helped ABC bring more attention from its Facebook fans to Lost’s finale.

Facebook this week launched a free Guide to Facebook Ads to give advertisers more information on how to build successful campaigns on the social network.

The guide covers the basics, such as the types of ads Facebook offers, as well as detailed information on how to budget campaigns, target an audience and improve performance.

For example, the guide’s “Best Practices” section provides the following tips:

– Choose one goal for your campaign to better focus your efforts and set a budget

– Create ads with captivating titles, relevant images and a strong calls-to-action

– Use demographic and psychographic reports available in the Ads Manager to determine which audiences your ads best resonate with

– Closely relate landing pages to ads

– Test multiple ads to uncover the best approach for your audience

For marketers already advertising in Facebook, the guide is worth going through to round-out your knowledge and to fill in any gaps. For marketers who are just getting started, or who are considering a campaign on the network — it’s a vital resource.

Tracking, integrating marketing channels and smaller budgets are among CMO’s top challenges, according to a recent survey of more than 100 consumer-targeting CMOs. Aprimo and the Argyle Executive Forum conducted the survey on April 29, 2010.

Here are some highlights from the report:

1. More tracking is needed

39% of the CMOs said correlating marketing activities to revenues is the “most broken” area of marketing. 27% reported that the growing requirement for ROI and accountability is driving the most change in their marketing strategies.

Two likely contributors to this situation:
o The recent economy’s pressure on marketers to justify their budgets
o The unprecedented tracking potential offered by digital marketing

2. Multichannel marketing is challenging

Also related to tracking, 37% of the CMOs said their biggest challenge is integrating and tracking multiple channels. 27% said lack of marketing channel integration was the “most broken” area in marketing.

Integrating marketing channels and tracking customer interaction on an individual level can provide tremendous insight — but it’s difficult to achieve. Many marketing systems were not designed to play nicely together.

3. Budget woes continue

28% of the CMOS said “doing more with less” is their biggest challenge today, showing that the rising economy has not yet lifted marketing teams’ budgets and staff numbers to their previous levels.

What do you think of these stats? Are you experiencing something similar? Are you on a totally different page? Let us know…

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].”

I wanted to let you know about a new resource available from our sister company, MarketingExperiments. They’ve just released The MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal.

This new publication collects the some of the best writing and research published during the last quarter by the three companies in the MECLABS Group: MarketingExperiments, MarketingSherpa, and InTouch. It’s free and available online for anyone to read.

This issue includes 22 articles to help you optimize your marketing, including:

• Analysis of the latest site, search and email optimization research by the MarketingExperiments team
• Lead nurturing and lead management advice from Brian Carroll, CEO, InTouch
• Social Media research and advice from Sergio Balegno, Research Director, MarketingSherpa

Here’s the link to get your free copy now:
http://www.marketingexperiments.com/marketing-optimization/Q12010.html

Enjoy! And if something you learn there helps you improve your own marketing campaigns, I’d love to hear about it.