MarketingSherpa Blog

At MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013, I was asked about the top three things marketers should do to make more effective emails by Jim Ducharme, community director, GetResponse Email Marketing …

Optimizing form fields in emails can be tricky as sales and marketing departments don’t always agree on how to create an effective lead flow process that captures important customer information while minimizing elements of friction.

So, today’s MarketingSherpa Blog post will share two case studies featured at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 and how one marketing team increased its conversion rate 22% by removing its capture form. Our goal is to share with you some real-world email campaigns you can use to aid your lead generation optimization effort.

First, let’s get some backstory on the role segmentation played in these case studies …

According to Dave Mossop, Manager of Interactive Marketing, Expedia CruiseShipCenters, segmenting between prospects and return customers early on in the campaign was key to allowing the team to offer more relevant content in its messaging.

“We did a very simple split of prospects versus customers and that alone gives you enough information to talk to these audiences very differently,” Dave explained.

By segmenting between prospects and return customers, the team was able to deliver a greater relevance for:

• Price points – Lower for new prospects and higher for return customers
• Itineraries – Specific destinations for new prospects and a broader range of destinations for return customers
• Information – Answer first time cruise information for new prospects and explain the benefit of “Why book with us?”
• Special offers – Exclusive bonus offers for prior customers

“As our team grew, we started going one level deeper by going to customer segments,” Dave explained.

Additional segmentation of past customers allowed the team to:

• Focus messaging, sales offers and itineraries
• Discover upsell and cross sell opportunities
• Prevent down-selling to luxury cruise clients

The team took its segmentation efforts even further by grouping past customers based on previous cruise lines. Expedia CruiseShipCenters discovered past customers were likely to book on the same cruise line again.

By understanding past customer behaviors, the team was also able to:

• Promote cruise line loyalty program offers and exclusives
• Write content from perspective of experience

“We see phenomenal results as we get completely relevant and completely personal with the customer we have this data on,” Dave concluded. “Personalization makes a difference, but who we send to matters even more.”

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While looking through the MarketingSherpa 2012 Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report, I noticed a parallel between the top mobile tactics to be implemented within the next six months and the most recent case studies MarketingSherpa has published on mobile marketing.

Recent MarketingSherpa case studies have focused on four of the top five tactics, even touching on the top tactic, mobile website. Some marketers have started the implementation process of mobile marketing, and they have already seen great results. To help you get started on these top tactics, we pulled out the key takeaways from these case studies.

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Blogging can be a very effective element of your marketing mix. For example, an online retailer realized a 172% ROI from its blog.

Of course, as with any marketing tactic, just having a blog is not enough. So, if your blog is underperforming, or you haven’t yet begun to invest in this content channel, perhaps it’s time for a tune-up.

Inspired by the come-ons from the local oil and lube joints for “160-point winter readiness car inspections,” here is an eight-point analysis you can conduct to identify areas for improvement – and we all have them, the MarketingSherpa blog is no exception – on your blog.

Point #1: Posting frequency

On many blogs, the frequency and cadence of the blog posts is sporadic. You might see a blog post on Wednesday, then one on Friday, then no posts for a week, then two on Thursday.

An element of effective content is consistency. Let the journalists of the world be your guide here. For example, I have a weekend subscription to my local newspaper, The Florida Times-Union. Every Saturday and Sunday, a newspaper waits for me on my driveway.

If I were to stumble out of my house one Sunday morning – Tony Soprano-style – to find no newspaper waiting, well, I’d start to question the quality of the newspaper. If it just happened once, I would probably not think too big a deal of it. But, if the newspaper was no longer reliably on my driveway on the weekend, I would start to question the reliability of the information in it.

The same goes for your blog.

That said, you have a tough challenge to face as a content marketer, because you can’t sacrifice the quality of your content for a reliable cadence.

To serve both masters – content quality and reliability – you need to set up an editorial calendar you know you can consistently over-deliver on and build up a queue of content. In other words, if you’re writing your blog posts the same day they are posted, then you have a problem. For example, I’m writing this post on February 15.

That queue will wax and wane in size as you become busy with other duties, but it is your insurance and buffer against missing a scheduled deadline. You can still add some real-time posts to take advantage of general news or changes in your industry. Just make sure you have plenty of high-quality, evergreen posts in your queue to comfortably meet every date you are promising to your readers.

Point #2: Content value

“We know you have a choice of airlines when you fly, and we want to thank you for flying with us.”

While this has become less true of the airline industry after the American Airlines and US Airways merger, it is more true every day in the blogosphere, especially in hyper-competitive industries that have a lot of quality content marketing such as information technology and marketing.

Sure, you could publish only self-promotional posts. But why would anyone read them? Or share them?

When writing every post, you must ask yourself the central value proposition question – If I am a [particular prospect, e.g., IT manager], why should I [read this blog post] rather than [get information from any other source, anything from an industry magazine to a competitor’s blog]?

The end results of every blog post must be to serve your audience. So, focus on value as your top objective – it is more important than length, promotions or frequency.

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The day one keynote presentation at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 featured Jay Baer, President, Convince & Convert and co-author of The Now Revolution. Jay’s presentation was titled, “More Alike than Different: Why Email is Madonna, and Facebook is Lady Gaga.”

A handful of data points

Jay explained email remains an extremely relevant channel. He cited ExactTarget research from 2011 that found 58% of U.S. adults check email first thing in the morning, and research from 2012 that found 77% of people surveyed reported preferring email for promotional messages.

He also said Facebook is far and away the social media platform of choice with only 27% of U.S. social media users 12 years-old and up embracing second-tier networks such as Google+ and LinkedIn, according to research from The Social Habit.

Additionally, he added 44% of corporate social media marketers look at Facebook as a way to gain new customers based on Wildfire research from 2012. One challenge is 84% of company Facebook fans are current or former customers per DDB research.

“Email and Facebook are strategically, operationally and tactically aligned. Or they should be,” Jay said.

Email and social media are more alike than different

Jay stated social media, and Facebook in particular, is just email with “fresh paint.”

Along with this statement, he presented a slide of an image he titled, “Magaga,” juxtaposing Madonna and Lady Gaga side by side to illustrate his point.

To further make the point, Jay described three areas of integration:

• Operations and measurement
• Channel and audience
• Message and content

In the case of measurement, email and Facebook share basic metrics even though the nomenclature is different.

Email metrics: Subscribes, unsubsribes, opens, clicks, forwards

Versus

Facebook metrics: Likes, hides/unlikes, reach, engaged users, shares

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Live blogging from MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 in Las Vegas, I had the opportunity to catch Loren McDonald, VP of Industry Relations, Silverpop, speak on using buyer behavior in email campaigns. His presentation was titled, “Let Buyer Behavior Be Your Guide! Delivering Communications that Convert.”

Loren opened his talk by explaining three approaches to email marketing:

• The mass market approach treats all customers as a single audience, what he described as a “hope-based” marketing approach.
• The segmented audience approach treats customers as many audiences, a marketer informed and defined approach.
• The personal marketing approach that treats customers individually and is a behavior-based marketing approach.

From this framework, he explained customer behavior drives the actions in email campaigns with the personal marketing approach.

To illustrate this approach, Loren offered a number of case study examples, including a look at a wedding invitation email series from Paper Style. In this example, Paper Style changed its approach to email marketing. Previously, it used a “batch and blast” approach with no targeting, which resulted in reduced response rates.

In implementing the behavior-based approach, Paper Style’s team analyzed website behavior from visitors, purchase patterns of its customers, mapped the wedding process to understand when typical behaviors happened and finally used this information to create a wedding timeline.

This analysis also uncovered two separate audiences – brides and friends of the bride who are helping with the wedding planning.

To segment those two audiences, Paper Style used website and/or email click behavior to drop prospects into either the “your wedding” or “friend’s wedding” email nurturing tracks.

Each track received a separate email series with content specific to each group. Brides’ email included information on invitations, bridal party gifts and thank-you notes. The bride’s friends’ track email included details on planning bachelorette parties as well as gifts for the bride and groom.

The result of analyzing its customers and developing email nurturing tracks based on behavior from its prospects led to impressive results for Paper Style: 244% boost in open rate, 161% increase in clickthrough and most importantly, revenue per mailing increased 330%.

Loren’s 10 tips for success

Along with real-world examples of behavior-based email marketing, Loren also gave the audience his 10 tips for personal marketing success:

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On the first day of MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 in Las Vegas, I’ll be interviewing the Best-in-Show winner of MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing Awards 2013, sponsored by Responsys. In this session, our winner, The National Football League, will discuss its fantastic NFL.com newsletter campaign.

However, there were several outstanding, winning campaigns from this year’s awards deserving of recognition as well.

Note: If you want to see the entire collection of winning entries, download the free Email Awards 2013 Special Report. There’s no squeeze page – just download, learn and share.

As the lead editor on this year’s Email Awards, I found it interesting that, of the myriad submissions we received, email integration played a part in many, if not all, of our winning campaigns.

In fact, as we’ll likely learn from our upcoming Summit sessions, one of the reasons email has been such a venerable channel throughout the years is because of the creative, strategic ways marketers have evolved the tactic to include elements of social media, PPC and website integration.

So, before we head west to the glitter of Las Vegas, let’s pull a few nuggets from these campaigns, seeing what you can learn from other Email Awards 2013 winners’ use of effective integration to find pure gold.

Lesson #1: Facebook contests don’t all have to look alike

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

Customer relationship management (CRM) is defined a number of different ways. However, the most expansive definition takes a total end-to-end look at every interaction a person has with a company from simply becoming aware of the company at the very top of the sales funnel, all the way through customer service contact after the final conversion to a closed deal.

With a complex sale, many personal touch points in customer relationship management are present — such as directly answering a question posted on social media or an online forum. At the same time, the real engine driving CRM and keeping prospects moving through the sales funnel is technology.

The first technology that comes to mind is CRM software, such as Salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics. However, CRM technology potentially includes multiple pieces including email software and marketing automation (MA) solutions.

Paul Greenberg, Managing Principle, The 56 Group, LLC, and author of CRM at the Speed of Light, said although there are some technology suites that attempt to provide these solutions through the entire sales cycle, it is much more common for companies to integrate CRM technology from more than one vendor.

A common example is utilizing marketing automation software on the Marketing side of the funnel from one vendor and integrating that piece with CRM software from another vendor for the Sales side of the funnel, with a common database providing records on each prospect or customer for both pieces of software.

Paul said this creates something of a challenge because a number of different areas in the company are involved in implementing, and utilizing, CRM technology.

Marketing, Sales (and IT) alignment

Marketing and Sales alignment should be a goal for any company to improve the efficiency of the entire complex sale process Bringing multiple pieces of technology into the sales funnel adds another element within the company — the information technology department.

“Who owns [CRM technology] is a matter of the internal culture of a company,” Paul explained. “Could it be joint ownership between two departments? It could be, as we’re seeing increasingly.”

He added, “But, we’re seeing the CMOs are starting to own a lot of IT budgets, so it could be the CMO that owns that [technology].”

At the same time, the IT department traditionally has controlled technology pieces, so the CIO could possibly own the CRM technology, allocate usage, and make functional decisions based on the business outcomes Marketing and Sales are looking for in using CRM tech.

The role of marketing automation

Linda Athans, Marketing Manager, Tribridge, stated the size of the company might dictate how many pieces of CRM technology are deployed. “Ideally, your CRM can ‘do it all,'” she said, “but depending on your organization’s size and how it uses its CRM application, additional MA integration may be necessary to handle specific tasks.”

She mentioned a few areas where MA software can help Marketing:

• Automatically sending large quantities of emails
• Performing split testing on campaigns, such as email subject lines or copy
• Providing performance tracking and analytics on campaigns

Heidi Melin, CMO, Eloqua, obviously has a certain amount of vested interest as a MA software vendor, and she pointed out the value of MA for marketers.

“By integrating marketing automation with CRM [software], companies are able to get a better picture of their buyers and a better picture of how their marketing investments impact their revenue,” Heidi said. “That’s an area where companies are understanding that they can get a competitive advantage in tying a marketing automation solution into their existing CRM implementation to get more out of their investments.”

Brian Vellmure, Principal and Founder, Initium LLC/Innovantage International, added another advantage of bringing more than just CRM software into the customer relationship management technology picture: The nature of B2B sales has changed in recent years. Before, the sales team had a great deal of control over the information flow and education of prospects.

Now, according to Forrester analyst Lori Wizdo, two-thirds to 90% of the buying cycle is completed before a B2B buyer ever speaks with a sales rep.

Marketing automation helps the marketing team track prospects’ behavior, such as website visits and social media interaction, and then respond to that behavior with what the prospect is looking for, at the time they are looking for it and on the channel where they are looking.

“Then, [Marketing] offers an invitation to the next place on the prospect’s journey. I think that’s where marketing automation comes into play,” Brian explained.

How does your company handle CRM technology? What department “owns” each technology piece? We’d love to hear your thoughts and insights in the comments section.

Related Resources:

CRM How-to: Tactics on Marketing/IT alignment, database strategy and integrating social media data

Marketing Research Chart: Social CRM is increasingly important for managing social customer relationships

Defining CRM: Thoughts from three experts

How Technology on the Trade Show Floor Can Help Your Sales Team Work Smarter and Sell More

Lead Nurturing: 9 questions answered on lead qualification, nurturing, and Marketing-Sales alignment

One aspect that makes digital marketing both exciting and challenging is always having something to contend with – such as new social media platforms, new technology and new ways to reach your target audience. Facebook Graph Search is one of the most recent of those digital marketing challenges.

Jonathan Greene, Social Media/Business Intelligence Analyst, MECLABS, said, “Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has defined ‘graph’ as the network of one’s friends, relatives, favorite brands and products.  A ‘graph search’ therefore is a search that leverages one’s ‘graph’ or ‘network’ to provide more interesting, relevant results.”

He added, “The biggest implication for marketers is that Graph Search, if successful in stealing significant market share from Google, will flip SEO on its head. Links will be replaced by ‘likes’ in the SEO hierarchy, and building social capital will be the new optimization strategy for organic search improvement.”

Currently, Facebook Graph Search is only available in limited beta with a significant waiting list for platform-wide adoption.

Although Facebook Graph Search has not rolled out across the entire Facebook ecosystem, it’s certainly worth thinking about for a head start in creating a strategy to meet this new search engine marketing avenue.

To learn more on how marketers should approach Facebook Graph Search, and learn some tips and tactics to share with MarketingSherpa Blog readers, I had the chance to interview two SEM experts: Dan Sturdivant, Account Manager, Speakeasy, and Chairman, DFW Search Engine Marketing Association; and Rob Garner, Principal, Rob Garner Consulting, and author of Search and Social: The Definitive Guide to Real-Time Content Marketing.

MarketingSherpa: Marketers have been told Facebook “likes” are much less important than Facebook clicks – to a landing page for example – or converting those “likes” to a database entry for the email list and other purposes. Does Facebook Graph Search change that equation a bit and make “likes” in and of themselves more valuable?

Dan Sturdivant: Yes, the equation changes with Graph Search; the importance of “likes” will be greatly increased. [For] some businesses, local retail in particular and restaurants especially, this is critical. Consumers will use Graph Search to research companies and services.  Businesses “liked” by their friends will reinforce an immediate connection with that business.

Taking that further, engaging consumers, asking them to “like” the page is important and then engaging them through a newsletter or other marketing tactic and pushing them back to the Facebook page is critical.

That last part is a big change, as well. It used to be you would want to drive folks back to your website, and while it goes against the “digital sharecropper” concept, driving people back to the company’s Facebook page is a good idea.

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The MarketingSherpa Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report shows a staggering 55% of marketers reported lacking an effective mobile marketing strategy, as well as not having adequate staffing, resources and expertise.

With MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 quickly approaching, speaker Diana Primeau, Director of Member Services, CNET – who will be presenting a session on win-back campaigns and list cleansing at the event – has insight to offer on this topic to fill in the knowledge gaps when it comes to developing an effective mobile newsletter strategy.

Diana said she knows many marketers become overwhelmed when upper management demands “mobile” without understanding the time and work that goes into it.

“It is not a little magic wand … because if it was really easy, every single email we look at today would work well on mobile,” she said.

Tip #1. Know what your audience expects

Mobile newsletters take quite a bit of planning, Diana said, and the most important question to ask is: “Who are you going to design for?”

Knowing your audience will allow you to not only understand what their expectations of you are, but what types of devices the majority of them use, and how often they interact with your emails on their  device.

The MarketingSherpa Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report also shows 31% of marketers don’t know their mobile email open rate – start by determining what that rate is, and become better acquainted with the needs of your audience.

“Who is your audience and what do we need?”  Diana asked. “If somebody has a business that requires them to have certain attributes in their emails, what are those attributes and will they work on a mobile platform?”

Tip #2. Consumers expect a multi-device experience

Like most aspects of marketing, mobile newsletters are not something you can wash your hands of once it’s accomplished – it is a constantly evolving process where your customers will always want more.

With mobile, Diana said, “Our customers are just like everybody else’s customer,” meaning every aspect of an average customer’s day from dawn to dusk is filled with multiple devices, and they expect their emails to reflect that.

“They might be commuting to work and they are on their phone, and they might be sitting at their office and they might be on their desktops. They might be going to meetings and they might have their tablet with them, and they might be sitting at home and they have their tablets or … their phone with them,” she said.

Knowing how your customer spends their day will help you develop your mobile email program, and decide how expansive you need to be.

Diana knows with CNET customers, “the idea of being able to move from device to device is an expectation, not something that is like, ‘Oh wow, that is really cool.’  It is expected and we know our customers look at their email across multiple devices.”

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