MarketingSherpa Blog

After writing hundreds of MarketingSherpa Newsletter case studies and, in the process, interviewing, speaking with and getting to know many, many marketers, one attribute really stands out for influencing successful marketing — Sales and Marketing alignment.

It doesn’t guarantee success and lack of alignment doesn’t automatically mean failure. However, when Marketing and Sales are working together as a team instead of as adversaries within a company, the entire sales pipeline is much more effective.

One reason for this success is that companies with a Sales and Marketing alignment are much more likely to see the entire customer experience holistically, where each person is seen in terms of where they are in the process.

For example, that person will be seen as a freshly generated lead, a prospect who has been handed off to Sales, a paying customer requiring service or an ongoing nurturing to ensure they remain a customer.  This is much more preferable than being just a cog in a process that begins with Marketing, goes to Sales — where, at that point, the person drops off of Marketing’s radar altogether — and then, hopefully, is passed to customer service and is no longer a Sales concern.

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Deliverability should be a concern for any email marketer. If you can’t get into the inbox, your email send might as well not have even happened.

Deliverability can be a challenge. A bad reputation score can significantly impact your ability to reach the inbox. An ESP (email service provider) with other clients behaving poorly on a shared IP also hurts you. Getting off of a spam or junk mail blacklist can be a Kafka-esque experience of not really being sure who or what will get you off that list.

To help you with deliverability issues, I reached out to three industry experts to find out what they considered to be the biggest deliverability challenges facing marketers today.

Understand why you have a deliverability problem

Tom Sather, Senior Director of Research, Return Path, said, “The biggest challenge that marketers have today is gaining awareness and understanding why they’re having a problem. Email providers like Gmail and Yahoo!, as well as spam filters, make real-time, data-driven decisions based on their users’ behaviors and actions.”

He said understanding the data behind your email program is going to do more towards solving a deliverability issue than following any list of tips or best practices.

Tom explained, “Most email marketers lack this fundamental data that the email providers have access to and are essentially in the dark ages when it comes to finding a solution. As a result, we hear experts touting general best practices — which is more like alchemy and doesn’t provide the desired results or can make the situation worse. Marketers who have access[to]  and analyze the data will see the highest inbox placement rates and happier and more engaged subscribers as a result.”

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A recent MarketingSherpa B2B Newsletter case study, “Personalization Marketing: In-trial messages increased online registrations by 15% for a B2B SaaS,” covered Brainshark, a cloud-based B2B service for training, sales conversions and marketing. The case study examined how Brainshark pushed personalized messaging on users of a freemium product that offered a scaled down version of one of its main enterprise products.

These messages took the form of informational and educational tips about using the freemium products and promotions for other free Brainshark products, while offering to upgrade to the paid version.

The freemium product, myBrainshark, creates video presentations out of static data, such as presentation slide shows, spreadsheet data, PDFs and other written content. Although Brainshark targets business users director-level and above in sales training, enablement and operations, the freemium product attracted more than just attention from business users. Arthur Gehring, Vice President of Demand Generation, Brainshark, said educators were another main user base.

He explained, “It’s amazing how much kids today are using technology like this in the classroom. It’s really cool. A lot of high schools, elementary schools, use myBrainshark as a learning aid.”

Arthur continued, “Those people — we’re not as interested in trying to sell them an enterprise product.”

At the same time, for Brainshark’s actual target audience, Arthur said the team wanted to know more about those users and used analytics to see what they were looking for. He described it as, “[trying to] help them and hopefully provide more value to them.”

Making registration quick and painless

To register for myBrainshark, new users only have to provide a screen name and email and create a password. Arthur said the small number of form fields was to drive as many registrations as possible.

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When you’re running a small online business, what’s the fastest, easiest way to grow your business and save money? Automation, according to Lenny Kharitonov, President of Unlimited Furniture Group, a furniture retailer.

Kharitonov says his company was among the first in the furniture industry to automate the online order fulfillment process.

“The furniture industry in general is not very technology savvy,” he admitted.

The Unlimited Furniture website markets products from a variety of manufacturers that ship them directly to the customer. Before automation, the Unlimited Furniture team and its vendors handled every aspect of the transaction manually using a combination of spreadsheets and Google docs. Now customers can order online, and the details are instantly sent to the vendor. Once the vendor ships out the product, Unlimited Furniture automatically receives all of the information about the shipment and updates the customer without any manual involvement.

This automated process:

• Prevents mistakes. “When you do things manually, it’s subject to human error,” Kharitonov said. “For instance, somebody could put in the wrong quantity or wrong color; it could be done on our side or the vendor’s side.”
• Eliminates duplication of effort. Before automation, Unlimited Furniture would enter a purchase order manually then send it to the vendor, who would enter the same information manually.
• Saves money. Automating order fulfillment has slashed Unlimited Furniture’s administrative costs 40%.
• Speeds delivery. Orders are processed real-time now, instead of waiting for someone at Unlimited Furniture and the vendor to manually process it.“The quicker the service you give the customer, the more likely you’ll get repeat business,” Kharitonov said.

“We want to grow the business. We don’t want to spend all our time processing orders,” he explained. “In this day and age, it’s assumed that’s automatic, but it’s not. I know a lot of our competitors are still doing it manually.”

Watch the full interview and find out more about the power of automation here:

Unless you are executing batch-and-blast email campaigns (and I sincerely hope that you aren’t), your email strategy probably involves some level of personalization or at least getting relevant email content to the right person. In order to achieve either of those goals, the starting point is your email subscriber list and having that list segmented so you can pick and choose who in your database receives each email send.

Lists can be segmented many different ways, and obviously the more record fields you have on each person in your list, the easier it is to segment based on criteria such as geographical location, job title, industry and possibly even transaction history.

To provide a few ideas of how your peers are segmenting their lists for email campaigns, here are three examples taken from MarketingSherpa Newsletter case studies. Hopefully you will discover insights that are inspirational or maybe even something you can immediately apply to your own email efforts.

Tip #1. Utilize behavioral data for segmentation

This tip comes from an article titled, “Segmentation: How a small office supply ecommerce site boosted revenue 25% by sending more emails,” covering JAM Paper & Envelope, a New York City-based brick-and-mortar that added ecommerce in 2007. Andrew Jacobs, Director of Ecommerce, JAM Paper, said, “Essentially, we come up with one email a week, or every two weeks, or even a month if we didn’t have time, and we would send it out. We would just cross our fingers and hope for the best,” referring to the company’s initial batch-and-blast approach to email.

JAM Paper’s campaigns included a “lapsed purchase” send to anyone who hadn’t bought anything for 17 months, but the team decided segment beyond just a certain timeframe and began taking individual behavior into account for the campaign.

This meant looking at each customer’s buying behavior. Some bought monthly, or even weekly, while others bought only once a year. The team calculated the average time between orders for each customer and began sending the “lapsed purchase” email once each person passed their individual threshold. This tactic yielded a 45% conversion rate — the highest among all of JAM Paper’s email campaigns.

Tip #2. Mine social media for customer segmentation data

In the case study, “Email Marketing Segmentation: Clothing brand uses social behavioral data to drive a 141% increase in revenue,” Johnny Cupcakes, a mid-sized apparel retailer, linked its customer database to social media engagement of its individual customers, analyzing 19 million public social expressions.

These posts led to insights on data points such as:

• Gender
• Customer interests
• Brand preferences
• Media habits

Gender was seen as the key data point to uncover from the effort and was actually taken directly from social media profiles if that information was available. One of the insights into customer interests was that a lot of Johnny Cupcakes’ customers were sports fans.

The team decided to test these insights by promoting a baseball-themed shirt to the sports fan segment of its list.

Men on the list were sent an email featuring a male model and a shirt cut for men:

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Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

Lead nurturing involves a number of activities and channels such as ?under the hood? tracking and scoring of prospects behavior and engagement with your campaigns as well as follow-up telephone at times whenever that tactic fits into an overall lead nurturing program.

However, the key channel for lead nurturing is email — particularly using email to send a series of relevant content pieces or offers to prospects as they move through the buying funnel.

In previous B2B Lead Roundtable Blog posts, I’ve offered a group of MarketingSherpa case studies based around a particular content area. Today, I’m going to highlight one case study — Email Marketing: 133% ROI for B2B’s first-ever lead nurturing program — on a lead nurturing program launched by Crowe Horwath, a public accounting and consulting firm.

Background on the campaign

Christine Elliot, Director of Content Strategy and Digital Marketing, Crowe Horwath, understood the value of lead nurturing to both fill leaks in the sales funnel and improve ROI.

When she began working with the “performance group,” a business unit within the firm, Christine was pleased to learn that she didn?t need to pitch the value of launching an inaugural lead nurturing program.

The program was based around a 12 to 18-month sales cycle and targeted C-suite executives and large financial institutions with at least $1 billion in assets.

What the team did during the campaign

The first stage was determining content for the program, in this case, based on four topic areas: Dodd-Frank, anti-money laundering, process improvement and core systems. From there the team mapped content to the early, mid and late stages of the buying cycle.

In launching the lead nurturing program, the campaign began with a list of 4,000 executives who would receive a monthly email offer for a piece of content.

To even be entered into the lead nurturing program, email recipients had to download content from an invitation email.

After engaging and entering the program, list members no longer received invitation emails and instead began receiving one email every three weeks with an offer for free content.

The team had 12 pieces of content for each of the three buying stage tracks for a total of 48 pieces of content. The nurtured leads became sales-ready after either downloading three pieces of content or just one piece of late-stage content.

How the team refined the campaign

Once the program launched, both Marketing and Sales met to review the newly nurtured leads and discuss how the program was performing. These meetings led to improvements to the program:

• Instead of filling out a lengthy form, prospects only had to answer a single question to download content. These questions even had the options of “none” and “other” so prospects didn’t even have to provide any meaningful information, but according to Christine, most did. One question asked recipients if they preferred to receive email on a different topic — a question that might change the nurturing track they were currently on.
• Lead scoring was improved after analysis of every person in the program, and the team found out that factors impacting lead quality included: asset size, title and behavior such as changing tracks, forwarding material or downloading at least three pieces of content.

How the campaign performed

What were the results of this campaign?

• 33% of invited executives entered the program
• A 75% to 80% open rate for nurturing emails

This was the first automated nurturing program at Crowe Horwath, and it became a model the team uses to deploy similar programs across the company.

“Now we’re expanding all over the firm,” Christine concluded.

If you found this short excerpt of the case study, clickthrough to read the entire case study with more detail on each step of the program.

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Lead Nurturing: Pilot campaign increases conversion 32.6% with automated emails [MarketingSherpa case study]

Lead Nurturing: How intent data lifted a B2B email campaign’s CTR 248% and forwarding rate more than 400% [MarketingSherpa case study]

Multichannel Marketing: Combining email and content marketing leads to 35% conversion rate for Elsevier [MarketingSherpa case study]

Email marketing is often a constant grind of tiny wins and (hopefully) tiny losses.

That’s why it’s such an honor to be able to recognize a marketing team for their relentless work on a campaign, where despite limitations, they were able to make a real difference in the email conversation between company and customer.

This is my second year as a judge for the MarketingSherpa Email Awards (sponsored this year by Blue Hornet) and it’s always a lot of work (30 hours of pre-screening, followed by 20 hours of deliberation) but a privilege to be able to debate and discuss strengths and weaknesses in email marketing with four other judges, who all come from different email marketing perspectives.

The joy that we get out of it is why this year we wanted to share that process with you, the MarketingSherpa Blog reader, by creating the MarketingSherpa Award – Readers’ Choice category.

Out of 500 speaking submissions and email case studies, the judging panel selected two Best-in-Show winners for B2B and B2C, as well as five finalists for the Readers’ Choice. All five are listed and detailed below with links to full case studies if you wish to learn more.

You can now vote for your Readers’ Choice Award winner. After voting, give your Klout score a workout by showing your favorite some love and sharing on social media.

All of the campaigns met our judging criteria of being transformative, customer-centric, innovative and offering transferable principles that marketing peers can apply to their efforts. Each case study displayed strong results. From there, it’s up to you to decide which one deserves top honors.

Have different criteria? Thoughts to share on any of the campaigns? Let us know in the comments.

Happy voting!

  Read more…

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

Our sister publication, MarketingSherpa, publishes three weekly newsletter case studies, and in the B2B beat in particular, those weekly articles routinely feature a story covering marketers tackling lead generation for the complex sale.

For this B2B Lead Roundtable Blog post, I want to offer four of those case studies published over the last couple of years addressing that very topic.

If you only have a few minutes, this post provides highlights from each case study. But, if you have more time, or if one really strikes you, click on the link for the entire article and supporting creative samples.

Case Study #1 — Local B2B Marketing: 150% boost in lead generation

This case study covers how a commercial cleaning and janitorial services franchise created an Internet-based direct response marketing machine. Before this program was created, the company had a rudimentary Web presence — essentially no Internet marketing and no digital marketing strategy in place.

To create the program, the team began with the website and from there, added paid search and SEO to the digital marketing initiative. Another major piece was ongoing testing and optimization on all the new online marketing channels.

This effort led to lead generation through website form registration, and even phone calls from prospects who initially found the company through the digital marketing.

What were the results?

• 3.37% average conversion to sale across all Internet traffic sources
• 150% increase in lead generation from 2010 to 2011
• 1,500% ROI on SEO in 2011
• 200% ROI on PPC in 2011

Case Study #2 — Lead Generation: Revamped marketing automation and CRM technology drives 75% more leads

Technology is a major factor in effective lead scoring and nurturing once that lead has been generated.

A provider of management services for technology assets serving the mid- to large-enterprise market found that its technology setup had a problem ? the automation solution and CRM system were operating in tech silos and, most importantly, not sharing data.

To meet this challenge, the team audited the current situation, and ended up replacing both existing marketing automation and CRM solutions, and found new technologies that were more integrated.

With the integrated technology in place, a lead scoring process was created, the contact list was built out, leads that Sales couldn’t close were nurtured, and the enterprise even found a higher level of Sales and Marketing alignment. Also, after the first year, lead generation improved 75%.

Case Study #3 — Lead Generation: Targeted event marketing effort leads to 300% ROI, generates 140 qualified leads

Technology and automation are vital and valuable pieces of marketing today, but the personal touch still has its place.

A provider of OEM equipment for printing companies created a campaign that combined event marketing with direct mail, email and teleprospecting both before and after a trade show to create brand awareness and new opportunities.

In this campaign, the company segmented its prospects for targeted marketing, came up with different incentives — such as trips to the company headquarters, or admission to a major league baseball game — for each stage of the campaign, utilized PURLs to track response to the campaign, and used telemarketing to highly qualify prospects.

This particular campaign resulted in a 300% ROI.

Case Study #4 — B2B Lead Generation: 300% ROI from email and teleprospecting combo to house list

This final case study is about how a drug information provider for health IT companies leveraged the knowledge that its conversion rate was much higher with already engaged prospects, so the goal was to increase ROI by focusing on what the team called “known” contacts.

The effort began with segmenting the list to uncover those known contacts. From there, the segmented group received an email with the goal of priming the recipients for follow-up calls instead of seeking a direct response to the email send. The first call was made within several hours of the email send.

Four days after contacting via telephone, a second email was sent. This email?s messaging featured a personal touch and referenced the earlier email and phone call. The second email was also followed up with a call.

The campaign resulted in a 13.4% average conversion rate, with a conversion being a scheduled meeting, and 15.9% of prospects scheduling meetings becoming customers. All of this amounted to a 300% ROI on the campaign.

You might also like

Sign up for MarketingSherpa Newsletters to receive these case studies straight to your inbox every week

Lead Generation: How to empower your program like Siemens Healthcare [Video]

B2B Lead Generation: 6 social media tactics from 7 experts [How-to article]

Marketing Research Chart: Most widely used lead gen tactics [MarketingSherpa Research Chart of the Week]

Questions Every Marketer Should Ask of Lead Gen Forms [More from the blogs]

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

Marketing automation can help you manage lead nurturing efforts in a complex marketplace.

So where do you even begin in terms of an automation strategy?

In today’s B2B Lead Roundtable Blog post, we’ll look at three lead nurture tracks you should automate to aid your email marketing efforts from a MarketingSherpa Lead Gen Summit 2013 presentation featuring Keith Lincoln, Vice President of Marketing, SmartBear.

Path #1. Separate users from prospects

When you boil down behavior automation, using prospect actions as triggers for email sends ultimately creates a list within a list as you separate product users from potential prospects.

As Keith explained, the product download is where the track begins, followed by responding to those product usages with emails offering helpful content.

“The next thing we want to be able to tell our team is: Did they activate the software, or are they using it?” Keith asked.

Path #2. Turn users into customers

Automating a sales nurturing track is significantly different from a content nurturing track as it turns up the dial on complexity.

In this case, prospect behaviors trigger email sends based on a conversion process to turn free, one-time users to paid, ongoing customers.

“This is a little bit more complex than finding out if they are just activating the software,” Keith said.

Keith also explained how the sales nurturing track has been helpful in delivering additional customer intelligence to Sales on where customers are within the conversion process.

Path #3. Remind users the clock is ticking

Campaign-based triggers are probably the easiest of the three tracks to set up, and they also acknowledge the elephant in the room with free trials — time will eventually run out.

Using your free trial timeline can help you deliver helpful content to prospects when they might need it the most.

You can’t automate trust

As I mentioned at the start of this post, automation can help you manage lead nurturing, but you can’t automate trust.

Trust is earned by being helpful, relevant and honest with your prospects.

To learn more about how marketing automation impacts lead generation, you can watch the exclusive MarketingSherpa on-demand replay of “The Marketing Automation and Autonomy Paradox.”

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Email Summit 2015 [Have insights to share like Keith did? Apply to be an Email Summit 2015 speaker.]

Lead Generation: 2 simple tactics to determine cost per lead [More from the blogs]

Lead Gen: 17% lift in lead capture by including more details in email [Case study]

Email Marketing: 133% ROI for B2B’s first-ever lead nurturing program [Case study]

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

If you want a snapshot of the user experience on your websites from the perspective of your prospects, just ask them.

This is exactly what James Coulter, Marketing Optimization Specialist, Sophos, did to better understand how prospects were engaging the organization’s website.

James shared some of Sophos’ user feedback that he really took to heart during his presentation at Optimization Summit 2013.

“I really wanted our website to be something that would help them in their purchasing decisions,” James explained.

I would wager there are many B2B marketers reading this who receive similar kinds of feedback from prospects a lot more often than they would like to.

This feedback, while harsh, is some of the most valuable insight you’ll ever receive. It’s also an honest wake-up call for making the changes needed to better serve your prospects.

In today’s B2B Lead Roundtable Blog post, I want to share the three steps James used to implement a testing and optimization strategy for Sophos’ Web experience to hopefully help your team tackle the four toughest words in optimization:

“Where do we begin?”

Step #1. Identify your goals

James explained that although there were plenty of areas where he could have focused on increasing, such as white paper leads, free trial leads and new quote leads, narrowing the list down to the greatest opportunity would be key in developing optimization goals.

“There were hundreds of things we could have focused on,” James said, “and the first thing I tried to understand is: Where should we focus?”

Some of the information he gathered to help him understand where to focus was:

• Feedback from Sales
• A review of all lead sources (average cost per lead and lead/opportunity percentage)

This also gave James the insight he needed to set a clear goal of discovering “where can we have the greatest impact on revenue.”

Step #2. Put together a cross-functional team

Next, James put together a cross-functional team from Sales, Marketing and Product Management to help drive visibility, awareness and buy-in on the new initiative.

Putting together a diverse team is also a fantastic way to look for new ideas outside of your own and create a true sense of ownership in the success of the new approach.

Step #3. Craft your initial hypothesis

Finally, James and his team mapped their entire quote funnel to really drill down and understand where in the process most prospects were dropping out.

This led them to also identify where the greatest testing opportunities existed.

Crafting your hypothesis on customer behavior is also where you truly start to bridge the gap between intuition and data-driven insight and then turn that insight into goal-oriented action.

How would 6,000% more leads than you have now impact your organization?

Ultimately, the Sophos team developed a well-tested and optimized lead generation program that increased leads 6,012% and counting, according to James.

The team’s success also points to a bigger notion — the process of testing and optimization is a marathon.

It’s a long-term strategy that takes time, testing, analysis and even more testing to help you fully understand what works.

It’s a strategy where success is not the destination, but instead, the only option left.

To learn more about the challenges James faced in transforming Sophos’ lead generation program, you can watch the on-demand replay of “How a Long-term Optimization Strategy Led to a 6,031% Increase in Leads.”

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Web Optimization Summit 2014 — May 21-23, New York City

Lead Generation: Revamped marketing automation and CRM technology drives 75% more leads [Case study]

Marketing 101: How to get started in lead generation [More from the blogs]

Email Marketing: Do you test your legacy marketing? [More from the blogs]

Email Marketing: 2 campaigns that used innovative creative to generate leads [More from the blogs]