MarketingSherpa Blog

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

I was recently reading your blog “Lead Generation: Who knows the customer better — Marketing or Sales?“ on b2bleadblog.com. It’s been really fascinating to me to try and figure all this sales and qualifying a lead thing out.

I’ve been employed to do a tough task in a small composite company that doesn’t have the finances to employ specialists. Do you have any advice or books on how to effectively get leads and qualify them and the processes involved in doing so?

Kind regards,

Philip La Trobe, business development analyst

(A young man employed to revamp a business, increase sales and address the communication lines between departments whilst increasing overall company efficiencies.)

I emailed a little more with Philip after this note, and he explained that his background is not in sales, marketing or business development, but rather materials engineering.

That was a wake-up call for me.

The challenge for anyone in B2B content marketing is to not only to create content that would impress the most experienced reader, but also to have some content that appeals to someone new to the industry.

For that reason, here is a beginner’s look at lead generation with links to many additional resources so you can dive deeper where you would like to. I’ll focus on some fundamental questions you should answer as you craft your lead gen program.

Experienced lead gen marketers reading this: What did I overlook? Please add your own advice in the comments section of this blog post.

Question #1. What do your potential customers want?

Getting leads isn’t as easy as it sounds, if it sounds easy at all. No potential customer wants to wake up in the morning and become a lead for your company.

So first, you must understand what your customers want. To figure this out, you have to answer two big questions that result in an infinite amount of more specific questions:

• What are their pain points?
  • What keeps them awake at night?
  • What could get them fired?
  • What do they want to avoid so bad that they would dedicate 15 minutes in their busy day to learn how to avoid it? An hour? Pay $100 to know how to avoid out of their own pocket? $10,000 out of their budget?
  • What is the bad outcome they are trying to avoid?
  • What are the three questions they?re worried their boss or client will ask them?
  • And on and on

• What are their goals?
  • What could get them a promotion?
  • What excites them about their job?
  • What do they want to brag to colleagues about? Their boss?
  • And on and on

There are many ways to learn this — surveys, social media monitoring, interviews with current customers, A/B testing, conversations with Sales, Services and Customer Support…

But the reason this is the longest section of the blog post is because the lead gen journey begins (and sometimes ends) here — what do customers want?

Helpful resources

Why Empathetic Marketing Matters and 7 Steps to Achieve It

Value Proposition: How to use social media to help discover why customers buy from you

Search Marketing: Can your marketing team identify your buyer personas?

Marketing Research Chart: Top tactics in developing buyer personae

B2B Social Media: 4 steps to get your listening dashboard started

Question #2. What value can your company deliver?

Your customers may want unicorns. But unless you run a unicorn factory, that information isn’t going to be very helpful.

What we’re getting to here is this: What promises can you make to potential customers and actually deliver on. What is your company’s value proposition?

Helpful resources

Value Proposition: A free worksheet to help you win arguments in any meeting

Powerful Value Propositions: How to Optimize this Critical Marketing Element — and Lift Your Results

Value Proposition: Why do customers act?

Digital Marketing: How to craft a value proposition in 5 simple steps

Value Proposition Development Online Course

Question #3. What is a lead?

Is it an email address that you buy from a list? Probably not. Is it someone who provides a phone number for a white paper download?

Or is it someone who raises their hand and asks for more information about your company and product? Is it someone who has a big enough budget and the proper authority to buy your product?

Before you can really generate a “lead,” you should create a universal lead definition and make sure all the key players in your company (this usually includes Sales) to agree on what you’re actually trying to get.

Keep in mind, there is an implicit trade-off here. If you want to generate higher-quality leads, you will likely get a lower quantity (and vice versa) or have to invest more resources to get the leads.

On the flip side, if you’re generating a lot of low-quality leads, the cost will probably get you when you send them to Sales, in both man hours and the relationship between Sales and Marketing, because Sales tends to involve more human resources.

Marketing, on the other hand, tends to involve less human touch, whether that’s due to marketing automation or the simple fact that a print ad can reach many more people at a much lower cost than a sales person.

Getting this step right can also help your Sales-Marketing alignment. In other words, making sure everyone involved in serving the customer before a purchase agrees on the strategy and processes to do that.

Helpful resources

Universal Lead Definition: Why 61% of B2B marketers are wasting resources and how they can stop

Intro to Lead Generation: How to determine if a lead is qualified

B2B Marketing: Why Marketing shouldn’t promise BANT qualified leads for Sales

Lead Gen: A proposed replacement for BANT

Lead Generation: Balancing lead quality and lead quantity

Sales-Marketing Alignment: 8 tactics from a marketer who has worn both hats

Question #4. How will we get leads?

This usually comes from some mix of content marketing, paid advertising, sponsorships and even affiliate programs.

This is, essentially, what most beginners think of as lead generation — the campaigns you run to engage potential buyers with your company.

This, like all these topics really, is a much bigger topic than a simple section of a blog post. But here are a few things to get you started.

Helpful resources

Marketing Research Chart: SEO most effective tactic for lead gen, but also among the most difficult

Content Marketing 101: 8 steps to B2B success

Marketing 101: What is conversion?

Orphan Forms: Marketing 101 change drives 32% increase in form completions

Inbound Marketing 101: 5 steps to help you get started

Social Media Marketing: 4 basic tips for getting started

Content Marketing: 3 tips for how to get started

Web Analytics: 3 basic insights to get you started

Lead Generation: 3 basic tips for webinar newbies

Question #5. Did we get leads?

Once prospects start responding to your campaigns, you have to determine if you really have leads. Question #3 will play a big factor in this determination. This is commonly known as lead qualification.

Helpful resources

On Lead Qualification: Steps to Convert Inquiries into Viable Sales Leads

Lead Qualification: Stop generating leads and start generating revenue

Why the Term “Marketing-Qualified Lead” Creates Serious Confusion — Part I

Question #6. What do we do with the lead?

The answer to this question probably seems fairly simple — send it to Sales.

But what you may find through this process (as you can see, one question informs another) is that what you have received through your campaigns aren’t really leads.

In the work you’ve done answering these questions with Sales, you may find that this is what Marketing would determine is a lead (Marketing-Qualified Lead) but not what Sales would consider a lead (a Sales-Qualified lead).

Lead nurturing is the process to move the prospects you’ve gathered through the funnel (or buying process) to the point they are ready to talk to a sales rep. The best definition I’ve ever heard of lead nurturing is from my colleague at MECLABS, Brian Carroll, author of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale: Lead nurturing is helping prospects whether they buy from you or not.

Helpful resources

Lead Nurturing: Build trust, win more deals by helping prospects — not selling them

What IS and ISN’T Lead Nurturing

Lead Nurturing: How a social business strategy can help you move from selling to helping your prospects

How lead nurturing improves lead generation ROI

Lead Nurturing: 5 tips for creating relevant content

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

Getting the right content to the right people continues to be a challenge in B2B marketing according to Byron O’Dell, Senior Director of Demand Management, IHS, who recently spoke at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2014.

Byron explained how his organization transformed from batch and blast email sends to persona-driven campaigns.

In today’s B2B Lead Roundtable Blog post, I want share the three simple steps for building customer personas Byron shared in his presentation to aid your targeted email marketing efforts.

Every solution starts somewhere

A big factor in solving the batch and blast challenge, as Byron revealed, rests in having the right people in the room to have a productive conversation about how personas can benefit an organization’s targeting efforts.

“It starts with some of the obvious,” Byron explained. “We needed to get the right Marketing folks and the right Product Management folks together and we knew we needed Sales and the voice of the customer as well.”

Step #1. Look to your existing customer data for insight into who buys from you

Once you have key people in the room, the trick to building personas is in looking at your existing customer data to gain insight into who buys from you.

“Initially we got the Marketing and product folks together and we [asked] what types of people are buying our products,” Byron said. “And we supplemented that with data looking at what types of [job] titles are we actually seeing in terms of net new deals.”

Step #2. Define your primary prospect personas

Byron also explained how the team used that insight to create six primary customer personas based on whom the organization would likely want to target.

Here’s the list the team created:

• Military/Government (Planning & Strategy)
• Military/Government (Technical & Program)
• Intelligence Analysis
• Industry (Commercial)
• Industry (Technical & Program)
• Media/Advertising/PR

Step #3. Never build personas in a vacuum

If there is one caveat to mention here, it’s that personas created in a vacuum outside of an alignment between Marketing and Sales is a fast track for missed opportunities.

Byron explained that the green primary personas were the ones Marketing believed were vital to their targeting efforts.

After some feedback from Sales, however, the team discovered there was some “granularity” that was also important to consider in building out personas.

The feedback led to the creation of a secondary set of personas that allowed the IHS team to really drill down into their targeting efforts in a way that would likely have been not possible had they not worked with Sales to develop the profiles of their ideal prospects.

Personas are only a means to an end

Personas can help you understand who is buying from you, but they are only a means to help you with the true goal of every email campaign: relevance.

Being relevant means you understand the needs of the customer and how you can serve those needs in a way no one else they encounter on the buyer’s journey can.

To learn more about the challenges Byron faced in transforming IHS’ email program, you can watch the on-demand webinar replay of “Marketing Automation: Key challenges a global information company overcame to transform from batch and blast to persona-driven email marketing.”

You may also like

Email Deliverability: 8 tactics help you overcome rising B2B challenges [Case study]

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

Email Copywriting: 3 tactics for delivering value over perceived cost [More from the blogs]

“One of the biggest challenges we face is educating people about the benefits email campaigns can have for their business when they are done well.”

The above is a recent comment we received about the benefits of email marketing and e-newsletters. Perhaps you face a similar challenge with your clients or business leaders? To help you make the case, here are four benefits of email marketing.

Benefit #1. Social media is traffic, PPC is a billboard, but email is a fork in the road

Social media can be effective, but it doesn’t force a decision. It is much like traffic on a road – a nonstop flow of information. If you look over at the right time, you might see a particular car, and if you don’t, you may never notice it.

PPC advertising can be effective as well, but it is a distraction off to the side. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t get noticed occasionally. However, it does not force an action. You can drive by a billboard without even noticing it.

Email, on the other hand, is a fork in the road. It forces a decision. Even if people simply delete an email without opening it, they took an action. While they were physically taking an action, your subject line had an opportunity to encourage an open.

Perhaps this is why so many social media platforms use email. Think about it – every time an action happens on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook, you receive an email letting you know that it happened so you don’t miss it.

Benefit #2. Build your case over time (automatically)

By setting up a drip email nurturing campaign, you can take prospects from having a limited interest in your company to fully embracing your company’s value proposition – from tire kickers to warm leads.

For example, a gym chain was able to get 98% of people who qualify for a consultation to sign an agreement by using an email education drip campaign.

Benefit #3. Learn about your customers

“Hey”

This was one of the most effective messages for Obama for America that Zoltar himself could never have foretold.

By conducting A/B testing of email messages, the campaign learned what really resonated with its audience and generated more than $500 million in digital donations.

  Read more…

For Jermaine Griggs, Founder, Hear and Play Music, communicating with customers through email was a critical part of his marketing efforts. By embracing behavior-based marketing tactics, Jermaine achieved an increase in customer lifetime value (CLTV) of 416% in 14 months simply by harnessing the power of personalized marketing strategies.

At Email Summit 2013, Jermaine explained how he accomplished these results in his presentation, “How an Online Music Teaching Company Harnessed the Power of Email Automation & Behavior-based Marketing to Increase Conversions.”

In this video excerpt, learn about behavior-based marketing, and how Jermaine applied it to Hear and Play’s CRM system.

“Personalized marketing is about authentically altering the user experience based on data and behavior,” Jermaine explained

In this short clip, watch how Hear and Play captures and uses internal and external data to increase the effectiveness of campaigns. Also, understand how to let what your customers and prospects do dictate what you do in return.

Read more…

“OK, email should be relevant. I get it.

But, how? I’m struggling with where to begin.”

The above quote was a lamentation from an email marketer at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011.

As I had the opportunity to be one of the judges for MarketingSherpa Email Awards 2014, presented by ExactTarget (there’s a picture of us deliberating the entries), I was really impressed with how far marketers have come in a few short years.

While I am the first one to scoff at the idea that software solves problems – sometimes I worry it’s oversold as “software is magic” and will cure what ails your company – I must admit the growth of marketing automation is a contributing factor to the leaps and bounds marketers have made in sending emails that are more relevant to customers than ever before.

This is partly because it has given marketers new capabilities and partly because it has also forced them to think in a way that is more customer-focused.

Are you still struggling with delivering relevant emails to your audience?

Well, you should be. It’s hecka hard.

So to get your creative juices flowing, here are three examples from this year’s winners.

Lesson #1. Turn lemons into lemonade (for people who like lemonade)

If you have more than one product or service, you likely have more than one type of customer. To create relevant communications for those customers, you need an understanding of which products are most appealing to them.

A winner in the Connect and Integrate – E-commerce division, Creative Co-Op used data and marketing automation to target closeout products to past purchasers who would find those products relevant.

“The Creative Co-Op campaign uses multiple data sources to create timely and relevant emails. We use individual order history data to send a personalized email when items a customer previously ordered are on sale, in addition to website data to actually showcase those items in the email, linking directly to the product. Putting all their data to work has led to an incredibly effective email campaign,” said Caitlin Kelly, Senior Account Manager, Whereoware, the agency involved in the effort. 

The result? This campaign was one of the company’s highest revenue-producing emails, delivering an 808% ROI in the first month alone.

For those cautious of closeout pricing, here is another insight from Caitlin’s Email Awards submission – “Interestingly enough, pushing users to visit the site led to huge sales outside of just closeout items. Customers went to see the deal, and purchased other items while they were visiting.

“Treating these retailers as individuals paid off big for Creative Co-Op, with huge gains in both closeout items and, unexpectedly, non-closeout items.”

When I asked Caitlin her advice about how marketers can deliver more relevant email, her answer contained the triumvirate of elements that comprise a successful automation campaign – data, personalization and triggers …

“Treat customers as individual purchasers with individual interests. Data is key to creating a personalized experience for your customers. Most marketers have data sources for campaigns that they have not considered or tapped into. For example, a marketer may have historical order data, but has not thought about pairing that source with a product file or website behaviors. Combining multiple sources as a trigger for one campaign creates an additional layer of personalization for the email recipient and will likely help increase conversions.”

Lesson #2. Guide people from where they are to where you want them to be

Content marketing is all the rage and for good reason. Providing value and education to potential customers produces good customers.

But good content, itself, isn’t enough.

You need a strategy to provide relevant content. That’s important because as prospects grow in your content and lead nurturing program, what was once relevant to them no longer is – the distance from brilliance to also-ran in content marketing is shorter than the distance between pop stardom and washed-up lounge singer.

That’s what makes content marketing so hard. The first time we teach you something, you think we’re brilliant. But the second time you hear that piece of information, we’re redundant hacks.

IHS, the Best in Show for Lead Gen, actually killed the newsletter for its Jane’s Defence product. The newsletter is typically a cornerstone of content marketing, but IHS switched to a focused path of content for its target audience – members of militaries, governments and intelligence services, as well as global aerospace and defense industry companies.

I’ll let Byron O’Dell, Senior Director, Demand Management, Corporate Marketing, IHS, explain …

“IHS used email marketing and marketing automation along with good content marketing principles to transform the way we engaged with this hard-to-reach segment. We transitioned from a monthly broad-based batch newsletter into a targeted lead generating engine allowing contacts to opt in based on their interests and customizing messaging and offers based on their actions.”

Here’s a high-level look at the program …

As a result, IHS has seen 10 times more engagement than what the previous program produced.

“Executing these sophisticated marketing automation/content marketing projects are tough,” O’Dell said in his entry. “The first, most critical step was to define our team, and together, step back and review our current process.”

  Read more…

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

Earlier this year at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 in Las Vegas, I had the chance to enjoy many conversations with my email marketing industry friends. This post grew out of one of those talks.

I asked Matt Bailey, President, SiteLogic; Christopher Donald, CEO and Lead Strategist, Inbox Group; and Loren McDonald, VP Industry Relations, Silverpop, about comparing “batch and blast” email strategies against some of the more targeted and personalized email approaches. Here are their answers.

David Kirkpatrick: Email marketers are being told to employ aggressive database hygiene on email subscription lists, engage in tactics such as microsegmentation to individualize and customize the content in email campaigns, and begin emphasizing mobile form factors in email design to encourage engagement with campaigns on mobile devices.

At the same time, they are being told to get away from the traditional batch and blast or “spray and pray” efforts.

What are some advantages and disadvantages of these areas of emphasis in email marketing?

Loren McDonald: Email marketing is not “either-or.” A successful program relies on a combination of elements – broadcast, automated triggered emails and segmentation. Each element has a specific role to play in your email program. If you focus on a single one to the exclusion of the others, you’re leaving money on the table.

First, a well-designed broadcast email program makes sense because you will always have email messages that you should send to everyone on your list.

Part of email’s role is to nudge your customers into buying something they didn’t necessarily know they wanted, to reach out to the person who wasn’t planning to buy from you.

Having said that, I do believe that the more behavior you can capture, the more relevant your messages become, and you can automate more messages. Recipients value these messages because they’re more relevant than most broadcast emails.

Automated messaging helps you capture incremental dollars on top of the revenue you’re driving already with your broadcast emails.

Matt Bailey: As much as neither of us would recommend a batch and blast approach, it is still a “better than nothing” proposition.

I find that in many companies, the traditional email batch marketing is the sole or the primary way of corresponding with existing customers. So, in this way, it is better than no communication. There is little to no time spent improving the database or much thought into the messaging of the emails – it’s simply a task to be done.

Now, fortunately or unfortunately, when I audit these types of companies and their marketing, and come to their email programs – it’s a profitable venture. Because so little is put in, besides the creative, the email service provider (ESP) and the blast, but yet it produces the primary source of repeat business.

I say unfortunately, because many times it is profitable because there is little spent and even less attention to segmentation or database management. I say fortunately, because making simple changes and becoming better and more intelligent with microsegmentation, triggers, etc., will only make an already profitable activity soar in results.

The issue then becomes one of paying more for something that is already working and investing in it to grow. Meanwhile, the sexiness of social media is competing for the marketing budget, and the new sexy options tend to get the attention, whereas the already profitable and predictable email marketing gets overlooked.

Christopher Donald: There is definitely a lot of benefit to being able to segment and target based on the data. We like to look at pretty much everything – from browse data to email data. You know, what [your customers] are responding to and not responding to from previous purchases.

So, you can get segmentation or even microsegmentation. The problem is not everybody has the bandwidth or budget to do that.

So they still live in the batch and blast world, and it can be very effective. There are a lot of companies that all they do is batch and blast, and it does really well for them.

You can increase your ROI and your revenue through targeting and through better segmentation and messaging to those segments based on previous activity, but it takes time and money.

Some people do batch and blast just out of necessity, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.

DK: What effect on that final conversion to sale (rather than other email metrics such as open rate and clickthrough) do these two different approaches exert on campaigns?

LM: The one-to-one approach, especially those emails that are triggered to the individual based on a behavior or event, typically have significantly higher conversion rates than one-size-fits-all broadcast emails.

On the other hand, conversion rates on broadcast emails are typically less than 5%, but the emails are sent to all or a majority of your database versus a tiny percentage on any given day of the one-to-one emails. But with automated email programs, the power and math is in that they are triggered 24/7/365 and that as you build your program you might have dozens of these emails going out every day.

So as I mentioned earlier, the key is to combine a growing number of these one-to-one automated emails with segmented and broadcast. Companies that add a significant number of automated email programs often see them contribute 25% to 50% of their total revenue from email.

MB: Oh, there is no contest. Every test, every campaign and every client that develops microsegmented campaigns or persona-based emails sees lifts in every category. It all comes down to relevance. Even if I have subscribed to your company’s emails, unless it is relevant to my needs – at that exact moment – it is spam. The more targeted your emails [are] by relevance, personalization and timeliness, the more significant all metrics increase, especially the ones that count – revenue and profitability.

CD: I think it all depends on what it is you are selling, right? If you simply sell a widget in 10 different colors, then segmentation probably isn’t important and isn’t even going to get you that much more revenue for the amount of time and cost that will be involved.

Revenue should always be your main indicator.

It is your main indicator of whether what you are doing is working, or not. I have seen clients spend huge amounts of money and time segmenting and on hygiene and managing inactives and doing everything they can do, but the bottom line – the return on investment of doing those things – doesn’t always pan out.

For others, it does. It is really looking at what you are selling. If you are selling lots of different products, it makes all the sense in the world to segment.

DK: Is relying on batch and blast because it still works possibly selling short a longer-term strategy of an engaged, if maybe smaller, subscriber base? And possibly risking eventual issues with deliverability, recipient fatigue (and the resulting opt-outs, or worse, spam/junk status) and/or brand credibility?

LM: If your email program is almost entirely batch and blast, then you are simply leaving a lot of money on the table. That is the fundamental reason to go beyond this approach – deliverability concerns and related issues are secondary. Remember, your goal as a marketer is to make as much money as possible for your employer while at the same time balancing margins, customer expectations, choice, list churn and other factors.

The simple truth is that sending more email makes you more money. But “more” doesn’t mean just sending more of the same old thing to everyone – but more relevant emails at the individual, segment and broadcast level. As my friend Dela Quist of Alchemy Worx says, “Don’t be stupid.”

You have to be responsible with your broadcast program. You must test frequency and monitor engagement across your database. Concentrate on activating your new subscribers right away. Use technology and data to identity customers who are becoming unengaged and then move them into different tracks. You also need to understand the longer-term impact on churn and revenue when simply sending more broadcast emails.

Additionally, one of the goals and purposes of your broadcast program is to drive subscriber behaviors that then trigger those one-to-one emails that lead to higher conversions and engagement. Without the regular cadence of broadcast emails you will have fewer behaviors from which to trigger the highly personalized emails.

MB: Absolutely! I believe that the batch and blast approach is only profitable because we are in a unique place in digital marketing. It’s the “grace period” before we hit a critical mass of personalized, targeted marketing. If your company isn’t doing it, then you will get overwhelmed by your competitors and others who are engaging your customers at a more personal level.

CD: I think it does hurt in the long run, for sure. I think you can turn off your audience over time [with batch and blast email].

But, sometimes it is a knowledge issue. There are a lot of plug-and-play services with recommendations based on browsing, or cart abandonment, or targeting based on data.

Sometimes people are email marketers by default, not by choice.

DK: What emphasis should email marketers place on mobile platforms right now when designing new email campaigns and overall email marketing strategies?

MB: I would look at your metrics to see how your customer base is interacting with your emails. While the data suggests that email is the number one activity on mobile you need to see how that is stacked up for your company. Just because reports state that you still have to see what is happening in your own business.

Now, after verifying how people are using your emails and where they are opening – if you see even the slightest trend or predilection to mobile, then you need to be exploring, designing or planning. Don’t ignore it.

CD: I think [email marketers] should take it very seriously.

You need to find out what percentage of your [audience] are opening and reading on mobile. We have a B2B client with a mobile open rate of only 4%.

You would think [being] business to business, the mobile open rate would be huge, right?

But, with this particular client, they have been sending this newsletter on a monthly basis for seven years and the newsletter is content heavy. It generates 1.6 million PDF downloads of new insurance policy information for agents.

Because it is a large format newsletter and a lot of content, there is no way to make it mobile-friendly.

DK: What are your overall thoughts or ideas you’d like to share on this topic?

LM: While I am a major proponent of one-to-one, behavior-based automated email, success is still all about balance and knowing what works with your customers.

You need to find the right balance among broadcast, one-to-one and segmentation based on your business, resources, budget and customer and purchase lifecycle. If you overemphasize one approach at the expense of the others, you’re leaving money – perhaps a lot of it – on the table.

MB: Metrics are powerful, and they are absolutely necessary to prove our assumptions. Even though your traditional email campaigns are profitable, it doesn’t mean that they will remain so next year. Even the simplest segmentation strategy will make a remarkable difference in your response rates, conversions and even more – the customer perception of your company.  All of which will be important as the personalization of digital marketing explodes over the near term.

MarketingSherpa Email Awards 2014

Did this blog post get you thinking about your own email marketing strategies and tactics? If so, let us know about your best campaigns from the past year and enter those efforts in MarketingSherpa Email Awards 2014. You have until September 8, 2013 to enter.

Related Resources:

Email Marketing: 208% higher conversion rate for targeted emails over batch and blast

Automated Email Case Study: 175% more revenue and 83% higher conversion rate

Email Marketing: 900% more revenue-per-email from Restaurant.com’s automated strategy

Email Marketing: Two ways to add relevance, and why you must be correct

In today’s MarketingSherpa Chart of the Week, we looked at the long list of organizational email marketing goals marketers told us they are focusing on for the next 12 months, and I implore marketers to narrow their focus to just the three or four goals that will really move the needle in their email marketing program this year.

This is not an exercise I’m unfamiliar with. As we launched the Call for Speakers for MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2014 at the Aria in Las Vegas, we also had to decide the email marketing pillars to focus on – and in the spirit of simplifying, this year you can enter MarketingSherpa Email Awards 2014 and submit a speaker proposal using the same form.

At Email Summit 2013, we built the agenda around five email marketing goals and two elements. Frankly, it was just too much. If you focus on everything, you focus on nothing.

So this year, we’ve narrowed down the Email Summit Call for Speakers and Email Awards Call for Entries to four topics. These topics are below, along with links to MarketingSherpa reporting to help you improve your email marketing, and perhaps get your juices flowing for your own proposal/entry.

Build and Cleanse: Efforts to build up email lists, or strengthen the program overall through cleansing make up this pillar. List data and management, database hygiene, list testing and optimization are examples of the types of campaigns to fall within it.

List Growth: 11% increase from sweepstakes for Waterford Crystal

Email Marketing: CNET win-back campaign sees 8% subscriber re-engagement

Create and Design: This pillar will recognize message testing and optimization, as well as delving into marketing efforts involving design creative, copywriting, messaging.

Email Marketing: User-generated content helps drive 16% clickthrough rate

Email Marketing Optimization: How you can create a testing environment to improve your email results

Deliver and Automate: This pillar will focus on marketers’ efforts with marketing automation and deliverability. The function and theories behind testing and optimization will also be discussed within this pillar.

Marketing Automation: 416% higher customer lifetime value from auto-email strategy

Personal vs. Robotic: How to turn automated email into personal experiences that drive new and repeat sales

Email Deliverability: How a marketing vendor with 99 percent delivery rates treats single opt-in lists vs. double opt-in lists

Connect and Integrate: The optimization of email integration tactics with social media, websites, mobile, offline and testing will make up this pillar.

Social Email Integration: Sony Electronics nets 3,000 clickthroughs from email to “pin” on Pinterest

Email Summit: Integrating mobile, social and email marketing channels

But, enough from us. We want to see what you’ve been working on, and more importantly, how your marketing peers can learn from your work. If you have any questions, we’re here to help. You can check out the FAQ … or just ask us.

Also, we put together a quick video to show you what it’s like to be an Email Summit speaker…

Read more…

In a recent MarketingSherpa webinar, I interviewed Eric Webb, Senior Marketing Director, Corporate Marketing & Brand, McGladrey, about his impressive work with the accounting firm’s content marketing.

You can now watch the video replay of that webinar – “Content Marketing: A discussion about McGladrey’s 300% increase in content production.”

But most of the questions I asked him weren’t my own, they were from you. In fact, we got tons of your questions about content marketing, and Eric has been kind enough to answer some of them here today on the MarketingSherpa blog.

Even better, Eric also provided you a tool his team used to help with its 300% increase in content production. Click below to download the template …

Submission form – with example

And now, your questions…

B2B online lead gen as a topic. – Mor, online marketing manager

Eric Webb: We use content to generate leads 70% of the time. Via Demand Generation, and social media, we promote specific content that resides behind a form. We may ask qualifying questions as well to help discern where they are in the buy cycle.

To do this, you need to repackage the topic to leave a breadcrumb of content that helps you accelerate the sales process. You may have a white paper which shows they are in discovery of the issue, then a podcast with a client and a case study. If they download these, they are likely more interested and are considering or feel they can benefit in some way from the solution.

Finally, a self assessment or an offer for a free 30-minute talk with the expert tells you they are truly interested and deserve a call.

Creating content for niche industries and clients – Maddie, marketing analyst

EW: I recommend looking to industry publication editorial calendars for ideas, clients and outside speakers.

Specific metrics and related incentives for the content creation team, please. – Marshall, CEO

EW: For content, the metrics we most watch are clicks and downloads, or form conversions if behind a form. We don’t necessarily offer an incentive except recognition for the SMEs (subject matter experts) on how the content they create is performing. But, you clearly could offer an incentive based on form-conversion leading to an opportunity.

How much content is necessary? – Christian, director of marketing

EW: Depends on your objectives – if you are just trying to build awareness, then you may measure retweets, likes or +. You could also look at a benchmark of current visits to a section and just say 10% above that. But ultimately, you have to determine what your objective is.

How do you re-purpose other’s content? – Christian, director of marketing

EW: We do curate content to help fill out a section and drive more time on site or to attract more people. But only the first paragraph and then we link out to their site. Otherwise, we look to vendors or partners to provide some of their content in totality.

Besides social, blogs and email – any other outlets? – Christian, director of marketing

EW: Networking sites like LinkedIn updates and groups. Partner sites, publications and association sites; some of our most clicks come on the heels of someone commenting in a news article and providing a link to our content. Slideshare. Reddit. Digg.

I love the idea of creating energy around content for SMEs and am looking forward to learning more about this. – Dee, founder

EW: Basically it comes down to being able to provide a breakdown of specific metrics by each content piece (clicks, downloads, form fills and opportunities). Develop a monthly report to show the value that the content is creating and highlight the author. Also, if you have a PR group, get them to promote the author as an expert, showcasing their content to reporters.

How quickly do you plan from idea generation for content to getting it up and available? – Nick, manager

EW: It depends on the topic. A blog post is usually a few days, depending on approvals required, but a white paper can be weeks and months, especially if it’s a regulated industry. We try to get teams to use content calendars and think at least three to six months out by assigning topics to SMEs.

How to develop a thought leadership culture in the workplace? – Kim, senior email marketing manager

EW: I noticed a change when you could report the metrics. And, with our marketing automation system, we now are close to showing a measure of influence of total revenue and direct attribution of particular campaigns and content offered to opportunities.

Explaining how your audience buys – their buy cycle – and then being able to show how they read through content to ultimately filling a form and wanting to engage helps as well. Consistency is key.

Read more…

“What gets measured is what gets done.” So says the old business maxim, at least.

We wanted to know what marketers get done, so to speak, so in the 2013 Marketing Analytics Benchmark Report, we asked…

Q: Which of the following are you involved with tracking, analyzing or reporting on for your organization?

We asked the MarketingSherpa community about these results, and here’s what they had to say …

Managing through measurement

These results highlight the indifference, or perhaps lack of experience, when it comes to tracking marketing, especially social media marketing.

As these channels can be tracked offline (via call tracking) and online, via dynamic numbers and email tracking, it still seems as though there are trackers and non-trackers in terms of marketing specialists.

Even with a nudge effect of marketing across several channels, the ROI of these nudges is important and should be tracked.

The old adage of “managing through measurement” is still important and not having accurate measurement to call upon leaves marketing specialists arguing based on their opinions rather than facts. (And, that’s a sure way to the exit door).

– Boyd Butler, Consultant

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In the MarketingSherpa 2013 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, we asked email marketers how they use automation capabilities …

Q: What type of automated, event-triggered, lifecycle email messages does your organization deploy? Please check all that apply.

As always, we asked the MarketingSherpa audience for their actionable advice based on this data. We received two interesting tips from Richard Hill and one from Chris Hexton …

Nurture current customers

Most marketers use automated triggered emails to strengthen relationships with early-stage buyers (i.e., for ‘lead nurturing’).

However, one of the most under appreciated opportunities is to use triggered emails to strengthen relationships with current (and recently lost) customers:

• Advocate social referral
• Contract renewal reminder
• Product education/training
• Customer service issue management
• Low product usage alert
• Upsell/cross sell
• Win/loss
• Net promoter score segment migration
• Win-back campaigns

All of these “customer nurturing” programs represent great ways for modern marketers to re-balance their approach, and use trigger emails (and marketing automation tools) to more consistently support the whole buying journey.

Read more…