Even after about a decade, the jury is still out on email open rates. Some marketers disregard them as pointless. Others check them daily to guide subject line and content decisions. Personally, I think there is value in measuring open rates — even if it is limited.
It’s the time of year when I get emails from Sherpa readers who are proud parents, aunts or uncles of new college grads. They want to know, “How can my kid land a job?”
The good news: Even in this economic downturn, many companies are hiring junior marketers. The bad news: Most kids are woefully inept at marketing themselves properly to get these jobs.
Fact: When you’re new to an industry or job function, your resume is NOT going to help you much. Not even if it’s polished by a professional writer. Not even if it’s plastered on every job site on the Internet. Not even if it’s emailed out to the universe. Your resume doesn’t contain enough evidence or proof that you can do the job. It can’t – you’re new!
So, what do you do? It all comes down to networking. I’m not talking about an influential mom or dad making a call. That kind of hand-holding won’t help your child build job-seeking skills for the rest of his or her career. Instead, help your child stand on his or her own feet by suggesting these two tactics:
#1. Informational Interviews
Inspired by the perennial bestseller, ‘What Color is Your Parachute?’, I’ve personally used this tactic four times over my own career and, next week, my newly graduated son is launching his own career the same way.
Pick a particular niche you’d like to explore, such as marketing for a publisher in Washington DC. Then, write letters to people in that field asking for an informational interview. Be clear that you’re not asking for a job, you’d just like to hear what it’s like to be in their position because it’s your goal. Also, let them know you’re not asking for much time – just 15-30 minutes at a time of their convenience anytime in a particular week.
Key – the interview must happen in person so you can make that connection. Go armed with questions, including: “How did you start your own career in this?” and “What do you like and dislike most about this career?” Last: “Is there anyone else you’d recommend I meet with in this industry/area to learn more?”
In the end, you’ll have a much better idea if this is the right career for you; plus, you’ll have honed your in-person interview skills to help you land it. And, if a position does come up later at any of the organizations where you did an informational interview, your chances of landing it are 1000% better than anyone else’s in the stack of resumes.
How do you find the people to interview with? Try your college alumni center (the president of Google told me earlier this year he’s always happy to interview an alum), as well as LinkedIn (this is where your parents’ connections can help you) and, of course, the blogosphere (execs who blog are very likely to say yes to info interviews.)
#2. Targeted Temping
Again, pick a target city/area and industry. Then, contact HR departments of your target companies and ask them, “Which temp agency do you use?” Often, most of the companies will use the same couple of temp agencies. From there, it’s a quick day’s work to go down to each temp agency and sign up. Remember that typing tests, a suitable outfit, and office experience count.
Your goal is to get sent into one or more of your target companies in any position at all. It doesn’t matter if you’re at the front desk or back in the files. It doesn’t matter what department you’re in. Don’t be picky. You’re getting a golden chance to schmooze, networking within the company itself while you “work” there, if only for a few days.
Most executives would rather hire that bright young temp for a junior job than sift through the awful pile of resumes trying to figure out who the best one is. I know since that’s how I got my first job in marketing.
By the way, here’s a link to my past blog on how to break into the Internet marketing field specifically:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.html?ident=30191
There’s been lots of talk for some time about the convergence of online marketing with the print advertising world. Of course, as this blog has discussed in a past entry, there’s the virtual catalog with its ‘thumb-through-the-pages’ technology. And there’s been new ‘online magazines’ debuting in recent years.
Well, Yahoo! has announced a program designed to target online viewers with display ads that originate from the Web versions of retailers’ newspaper circulars. Now, on its face, this is not entirely new. Specifically, grocery chains, drug stores and other retailers have made their circulars available for printable download.
Some marketers try to test every tactic at least once. If it doesn’t work, they stop. Then in a few months, they try it again. The marketing team at Basement Systems, which sells basement and crawl space waterproofing and other products, does this constantly. Read more…
DJ Waldow from Bronto Software recently posted an entry in his blog that made me nod my head and chuckle. He ranted a bit about the term “email blast” and called for the community to slash it from the current vernacular. Read more…
Michael Arrington of TechCruch recently posted an interesting analysis of Microsoft’s new Live Search CashBack campaign.
The program allows advertisers to offer users a rebate on online purchases made after searching on Microsoft’s Live Search. It moves advertising spending from a cost-per-click to a cost-per-action basis. It’s also an attempt by Microsoft to attract some of the shopping search volume away from industry leader Google.
Thanks for all of your questions before and after our teleseminar, ‘B-to-B Marketing: Top 10 Quick Fixes’, last week. More than 100 Sherpa readers wrote in, and I and our senior reporter Sean Donahue are preparing answers to post with our compliments on Sherpa by next week.
In the meantime, I wanted to address one particular query which came up a few times: “Where specifically did Sherpa get that B-to-B marketing data?”
Here’s the answer on a slide-by-slide basis, along with a hotlink to a PDF of the slides, so that you could review the charts again if you’d like. I understand that many of you may be sharing this data with your management team, and so this question is of high concern.
Slide #3. Internal Search Counts
This example is based on MarketingSherpa.com’s own internal reports of traffic using the search box on our site. We happen to power our search with technology from Visual Sciences, but this type of report is fairly basic and should be available no matter which search technology you use.
Slide #4. High-Quality Leads Generated by Events
Sherpa surveyed 1,038 B-to-B technology marketers in April 2007, asking them about the quality and quantity of leads they received from typical events in the past year. We’ve run this survey annually for five years, and the data on this point is highly similar every time. I feel safe in considering it fairly “evergreen.”
Slide #9. Drop Registration Barriers
These two funnels were created based on aggregated numbers rather than on one particular study or on a single marketer’s Case Study. We reviewed hundreds of Sherpa Case Studies, dozens of Sherpa B-to-B Summit presentations, and five years of extensive surveys of B-to-B marketers and their prospects. These numbers represent the trends evident across all this material. Your own campaigns naturally will have different numbers, but we’re fairly sure that the overall result will be the same: barriers significantly decrease audience.
Slide #11. Typical Lead Database Breakdown
I consider this pie chart to be one of the most critical ones in the presentation. It’s one I strongly suggest every B-to-B marketing department build using their own internal data. Your numbers will inevitably be different because everyone’s business is unique. However, based on Sherpa Case Studies and Sherpa B-to-B Summit Presentations, I’m absolutely sure that your pie will break into the same types of slices.
You’ll have some sales-ready leads – probably in the 5%-12% range if you’re anything like the hundreds of marketers I’ve spoken with. You’ll have a slightly larger group of mid-term leads – prospects who could be sales-ready with a few weeks or months of nurturing. Your largest group will probably be the long-term leads – prospects who have months or even years to go before they are sales-ready but who will either reach that point some day or become a key influencer to the sales-ready crowd. And last, you’ll have some duds – the number often depends on how many students and competitors are in your field.
The specific dollar values we put in this chart were based on assumptions of 10% of nurtured leads converting to being sales-ready, and 35% of sales-ready leads converting at an average $95,000 sale. Obviously, your numbers will vary widely. The important thing is that you know what your pie looks like, and you can assign your own numbers to it. Then, use that pie to convince management to let you spend more time and perhaps budget on nurturing activities!
Slide #13. Telemarketing Timing
These telemarketing results is data presented by MIT Professor Dr. James Oldroyd and Inside Sales’ Dave Ellington at Marketing Sherpa’s B-to-B Summit in October 2007. They detailed study data across lead-qualification telemarketing for hundreds of clients as well as Case Study data for Franklin Covey. Your own telemarketing data will vary; however, the trend will almost certainly hold true. The longer you wait to call an inbound lead, the less positive the result will be. And “too long” might be a matter of just a few hours.
The key to all these slides: You need to start measuring these factors for yourself. In fact, these measurements may be just as or more useful for your marketing programs than the sorts of measurements – email open rates and cost per lead, for instance – that dominate your current marketing reports.
I hope this was helpful and I look forward to answering the rest of your questions by next week! In the meantime, here’s a hotlink to the presentation PDF as well as a transcript from the actual event:
PowerPoint: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/tele/B2BHB08.pdf
Transcript: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.html?ident=30707
I’ve discovered that the customer loyalty strategy of sending out birthday emails is largely relegated to the restaurant biz. Read more…
With the U.S. economy still on shaky ground, it’s no surprise that people are looking for signs, prognostication, or insights into how the marketing community might adapt to the slowdown. One of the latest reports finds that digital marketing channels might be the biggest beneficiaries of downturn-induced strategy changes.
An often overlooked and undervalued metric is website bounce rate. A page’s bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave immediately after arriving. There are two ways to measure it:
o Percentage of visitors who leave before a set time
o Percentage of visitors who leave without clicking into the site, regardless of time spent
For landing pages, it measures the connection of the message driving the traffic to the message on the page. A poor connection causes a high bounce rate.
