MarketingSherpa Blog

One thing I really enjoyed at Email Summit 2012 was being able to walk around and talk to the email marketers of the world about the tactics they’re using. For example, I learned about marketers’ experiences with sales and marketing automation for small businesses over breakfast and European privacy regulations over lunch.

If you weren’t able to attend (and even if you were), I hope this blog post can serve as a proxy for that experience. During some of the general and breakout sessions at Email Summit 2012, we conducted a live poll using Acxiom technology where attendees could text to vote. (Full Disclosure: Acxiom was an Email Summit 2012 sponsor.)

In this blog post, I’ll share some of these results, along with some resources to help you act on these tactics.

Please keep in mind that I don’t intend this data to be regarded as statistically valid, rather view it the way you would anecdotal information you would attain from networking.

There are many validity threats, including the fact that the sample we surveyed (Email Summit attendees) is likely a skewed sample and much more active and experienced than the average email marketer since they invested the time and money in attending Email Summit. So the average email marketer is even less likely to be using these tactics.

That said, let’s jump right in …

How are you deploying mobile in your marketing strategies for 2012?

In research conducted for the MarketingSherpa 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, mobile was identified as the most challenging channel to integrate with email.

So it’s not surprising that only a handful of email marketers considered themselves advanced at deploying mobile in their marketing strategies.

• Advanced (3 respondents, 7.31% of all respondents): We currently deploy advanced tactics to reach our mobile audience (e.g., geo targeting, mobile apps, SMS outreach, email optimized for mobile)
• Basic (16, 39%): We have optimized our website (or) our emails for mobile
• Considering (19, 46.3%): We are considering mobile marketing, but have not yet decided upon a strategy
• Unconvinced (3, 7.31%): We do not believe that mobile marketing is the right fit for our audience

Some resources to help you with mobile marketing:

• B2B Marketing: A discussion about integrating mobile, email and social
• B2B Marketing: 7 mobile and social media tactics
• Email Summit: Mobile marketing panel on the complex sale

Have you used SMS and/or QR codes for email list sign-up?

We asked this during a session I moderated with Ryan Amirault, Digital Marketing Manager, Whole Foods Market.

[whole foods]

Ryan’s team saw some impressive results — generating more than 2,000 email subscribers from SMS and QR codes. Ryan’s advice:

• Place QR and SMS in strategic locations. For Whole Foods, that meant table tents, meat/deli/seafood scales, bathroom stalls, registers, cafés, grocery aisles, eating areas and guest services
• Test QR codes before deploying creative materials

However, 67% of Email Summit attendees have not tried this tactic at all.

Here are a few resources to help get you started:

• Mobile Drives Email List Growth: How to use SMS and relevant content to add opt-ins
• Direct Mail and SMS Combo Lifts Rewards Program Membership 5%: 5 Steps
• Consumer Marketing: 3 mobile tips for consumer marketers

How are you designing your emails to fit into your mobile marketing strategies for 2012?

There was limited response to this question, which is not surprising considering that we learned in the first survey that a minority of marketers are really engaged in mobile tactics.

• Relevant (7 respondents, 15.5% of all respondents) – We deploy emails targeted for relevance in the mobile environment (e.g., geo-targeting)
• Responsive (6, 13.3%) – We have designed our emails to be responsive for a handful of mobile operating systems (e.g., iOS 5)
• Visible (14, 31.3%) – We have added a “view on mobile device” link at the top of our emails
• Considering (18, 40%) – We are considering integrating email with mobile marketing, but have not yet decided upon a strategy

Here are a few resources to help you with your mobile email design:

• Mobile Marketing: Get your audience’s attention – wait till they’re bored
• Location-Based Email Marketing: 6 tactics to leverage social check-in to grow email lists and improve engagement
• Email Relevance: 8 tactics for leveraging timing, segmentation and content

Do you optimize email landing pages for specific devices?

Let’s get a little more granular, and instead of talking about mobile as a big picture, look at how marketers handle devices …

• Yes, iOS – 5 respondents, 6.17% of all respondents
• Yes, Android – 1, 1.23%
• Yes, multiple devices – 23, 28.3%
• No – 48, 64.1%

If you’re thinking about getting device specific, here’s some help:

• Mobile Email Marketing: iPhone-targeted landing pages boost conversion rate 40% for Ritz-Carlton Destination Club
• Mobile Marketing How-To: 9 tactics for improving ranking in Apple’s App Store and the Google Android Market

With regard to email testing, which of the following best represents your organization’s efforts?

While mobile clearly is a hot topic for marketers, let’s look at a more tried and true tactic – email testing.

• Basic testing (14 respondents, 21.4% of respondents) – Subject lines, personalization, copy
• Average testing (11, 37.2%) – Templates, timing, automation
• Advanced testing (4, 17.3%) – Validated tests, multi-varied options
• Expert testing (2, 23.9%) – All aspects have been tested and optimized

Some inspiration and ideas to get you started testing or give you new ideas for future tests:

• Copywriting Contest: Write the best-performing subject line and win
• Email Research: The 5 best email variables to test
• Email Marketing: Triggered emails that target the conversion funnel boost revenue
• Research Update: The state of email marketing testing and optimization
• Headline Writing: How a junior marketer beat the CEO’s headline by 92%
• Email Messaging: How overcoming 3 common errors increased clickthrough 104%

What do you think will have the biggest impact on email marketing in 2013?

At the MarketingSherpa Email Summit, we focus on what really works. However, sometimes you have to look past what is already proven, gaze into the crystal ball, and try to make strategic decisions today to position your company for the opportunities (and threats) of tomorrow.

So what will tomorrow bring? Let’s take one extra spin on the email marketing carousel of progress and take a look at what your peers think will have the biggest impact on email marketing in the near future.

• In-line Video (15 respondents, 10.7% of respondents)
• Social Data/Content Integration (48, 34.2%)
• Privacy Legislation (29, 20.7%)
• Dynamic Content (48, 34.2%)

As you try to peer over the hill for your own marketing efforts, here are a few resources that may help:

• Great Scott! 5 Email & Social Marketing Tips from the Future
• Email Newsletters: Social media integration yields 135% more traffic for New York Public Library
• Online Behavioral Advertising: How to benefit from targeted ads in a world concerned with privacy
• Email Marketing: HP uses dynamic email content to drive 300% open rate and 600% clickthrough increase

New technology is always bewildering. We get a newfangled tool. We play with it. We relate it to other stuff. We try to understand it.

The problem is that new technology is new. You can relate it to older stuff at first, but you have to move on. Thinking about it in old ways can hold you back.

Take email marketing, for example. Companies used it as a digital form of direct mail for years. We now know email is not direct mail, but some companies continue reliving the past. Here are a few examples:

Read more…

Yesterday’s blog post featured the thoughts of Larry Drebes, founder and CEO of Janrain, a social user Web management platform, on the social media channel and marketing over the next six to 12 months.

Today we have insight and advice from Loren McDonald, Vice President of Industry Relations, Silverpop, an email and marketing automation vendor.

Loren will be joining us next week at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas for the MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012, and will participate in the innovation panel Wednesday afternoon, February 8^th.

Social media marketing is an important channel for both B2B and B2C marketers, and Loren offers up a valuable perspective on the topic and some actionable takeaways to maximize that channel over the rest of this year.

This chart illustrates Silverpop research on where all marketers are utilizing social media:

Click to enlarge

Here are Loren’s thoughts on social media marketing:

  Read more…

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a popular blog post on using social media profiles for login on third-party websites rather than the more traditional form field registration. The post featured research from Janrain, a social Web user management platform, and some additional commentary from Larry Drebes, founder and CEO of Janrain.

That topic was very specific and applies to one marketing issue — gathering data from website visitors.

Janrain’s research found that Facebook is the clear favorite for social login at 42%, followed by Google at 29% and Yahoo! at 11%.

Click to enlarge

In preparation for the innovation panel Wednesday afternoon, February 8^th, at next week’s MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012, I also had the chance to speak with Larry about the social channel in more general terms, and to get his take on where it is heading and what marketers should be thinking about over the next six to 12 months.

Tomorrow’s blog post will feature the thoughts of panelist Loren McDonald, Vice President Industry Relations, Silverpop.

Here is the result of my conversation with Larry:

  Read more…

Technology and language have a strange relationship. Technology pushes the limits of what we can do. Language lags behind, trying to explain what we’ve done.

For example, take “cross-channel management.” Or is it called database integration? Or multi-channel management? Or a unified customer database?

All these phrases strive to describe a similar technology — one in which a company centralizes all its customer data and makes it actionable. The vendors appear to differentiate themselves in their language and their features.

But marketing teams are reaching the limits of their databases and they need more than snappy jargon. They need clarity.

Nearly 90% of email marketers say integrating email data with other data is at least a “somewhat significant” challenge, according to the MarketingSherpa 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, written by W. Jeffrey Rice, Senior Research Analyst, MarketingSherpa. And just last week, we published a case study about a credit union that replaced its database to push its email marketing forward.

To help clarify this topic, I spoke with Kristin Hambelton, VP of Marketing at Neolane. Neolane provides “conversational marketing technology” (which is another phrase you can add to the list).

Read more…

While gathering presentation material for the upcoming MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012 (February 7-10 at Caesars Palace Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas), I had the chance to reach out to Jen Doyle, Senior Research Manager, MarketingSherpa, to get some additional background on lead re-engagement and nurturing.

Jen was the lead author of the 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, and was very helpful in finding a couple of relevant charts for me, providing some additional comments on what this research means for B2B marketers.

73% of all B2B leads are not sales-ready

The first lesson Jen offers is almost three quarters of all B2B leads are not sales-ready. This means Marketing needs to engage with those leads in some fashion to move them down the buying funnel. This also means it’s possible for leads to “go cold” somewhere between entering the funnel and becoming sales-ready. Those are the leads Marketing needs to reengage with.

Here is the first chart of MarketingSherpa research Jen provided:

Chart: Average percentage of total lead volume that is sales-ready

Click to enlarge

And here is Jen’s commentary:

The above chart is the demonstration of why all leads cannot go directly to Sales.

At the time of original lead conversion, an average of 27% of those leads will be qualified to the point where they are ready and willing to engage with Sales.

The remaining 73% are not there yet. When these leads are prematurely sent over to Sales, they are not receiving the experience they desire and will look elsewhere for it.

Besides, do you really want your Sales team spinning their wheels making dial after dial where nearly three-quarters of those leads are not ready?

So, a large majority of B2B leads are not ready for Sales. This is where lead nurturing campaigns come into play.

The usual touch point for lead nurturing is email. These campaigns are greatly enhanced by utilizing marketing automation software to track and score those leads, and send triggered email based on demographic, firmographic, and probably most importantly as the lead moves closer to be becoming sales-ready, behavioral information. Behavioral information would include website visits, whitepaper downloads, webinar participation, and similar activities that indicate the lead is getting ready to buy the product or service.

With that in mind, this second chart is not good news for many B2B marketers:

Read more…

Sales were up 80% in 2011! Congratulations!

Except, well, now you have to repeat that feat in 2012 (or at least hold the line). So, how exactly did you lift sales?

Not only that, but your team is 80% bigger this year, and many of them weren’t even working with you when you initiated many of the changes that got you the big success in the first place (nice hypothetical problem to have, right?). Still, it begs the question …

How do your replicate your success?

Or how do you avoid making the same mistakes? Well, first you have to discover why you succeeded and failed. And then you need to spread that new business intelligence throughout your team and your organization.

I recommend forensic reporting. That’s a term I like to use to explain what our reporters do here at MarketingSherpa, and how we write the case studies that appear in our free marketing newsletters. (While our case studies are meant for external consumption, this is something I used to do internally as well for companies like IBM and BEA Systems to spread effective tactics inside the company, so I can see how the same principles apply.)

First, you have to understand these case studies don’t just exist somewhere. Marketers and teams go about their jobs and do various things. From these actions, they bring about successes or failures. But the reasons why and how they did it, which is the case study, is never prepackaged.

As the name “forensics reporting” connotes, you have to investigate and dig pretty deep, because often the entire picture of what led to the success or failure isn’t even immediately obvious to the people that helped make it happen.

Here’s a very simplified, six-step process to get your started …

  Read more…

Now that 2012 is upon us, we wanted to share what marketing thought leaders and practitioners have identified as some of the biggest B2B opportunities for the upcoming year.

If you’re familiar with MarketingSherpa research, I must warn you that, in this case, the data gathering was completely unscientific. MECLABS A/V Specialist Luke Thorpe and I simply wandered around the networking event at MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2011 in San Francisco, and thrust a microphone and camera into the face of every willing participant.

Many speakers and attendees were kind enough to put their drink down, pick up a mic, and share insights with you. Here are a few of our favorites …

So what’s on the horizon for B2B marketing in 2012?

• (00:38) Jay Baer, President, Convince & Convert, and author of “The Now Revolution,” discusses multimedia for B2B
• (1:34) Tracy DeMay, Marketing Manager, CenterBeam, talks about leveraging social media
• (1:53) Ge Moua, Senior Demand Generation Manager, Unify, shares her thoughts on the importance of tools
• (2:23) Beth Toeniskoetter, Product Marketing, ReadyTalk, thinks deciphering which new technologies to invest in is key
• (2:39) Tony Doty, Senior Manager, Research & Strategy, MECLABS, reminds marketers of the importance of segmentation
• (3:21) Pamela Markey, Director of Marketing and Brand Strategy, MECLABS, sees a huge opportunity for content in this new year
• (3:42) Karen Hayward, EVP and CMO, CenterBeam, urges marketers to slow down so you can go faster
• (4:30) Kristin Zhivago, President, Zhivago Management Partners, and author of the book “Roadmap to Revenue,” wants you to pick up the phone and interview customers
• (5:00) Michelle Mogelson Levy, Associate VP, Marketing Programs, ECI Telecom, discusses revenue marketing

Related Resources:

B2B Marketing: Top “Aha moments” of 2011 from your peers

B2B Marketing: 7 tactics for implementing marketing automation from a fellow brand-side marketer

Social Media Marketing: Why B2B marketers need to care, by the numbers

MarketingSherpa’s B2B Summit 2012

B2B Summit 2011 DVD Combo

It’s that time of year again … time to look back and reflect on what we’ve learned. For the MarketingSherpa blog, we wanted to focus that reflection on what you, our readers, valued most in 2011. So we created our top posts list from the number tweets you shared for each post.

And to say social media marketing dominated this year’s most-tweeted Sherpa blog posts would be an understatement. But it’s not surprising marketers have social marketing on the brain as we found more than two-thirds of organizations increased their social marketing expenditures in 2011, according to the MarketingSherpa 2011 Social Marketing Benchmark Report.

Without further ado, here are your top 11 Sherpa blog posts for 2011 along with a brief (140 character of less) description of the post from your peers …

Read more…

Marketing and Sales alignment is always a hot topic. When the two business functions are working together marketing efforts are more effective and Sales’ job becomes easier.

At the MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2011 in San Francisco this week, Michelle Mogelsen Levy, Associate Vice President Marketing Programs, ECI Telecom, presented a case study on a successful quick-hit, top-of-the-funnel effort that had the side benefit of getting already close Marketing and Sales teams into even closer alignment.

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Sales’ challenge for Marketing

Sales at ECI Telecom came to the marketing team and asked for support to penetrate a brand new geographic market in a very limited time frame – under 30 days – and fill the top of the funnel with high-quality leads.

The resulting effort was a proprietary workshop in Sweden, a new market Sales was targeting. Marketing’s challenge was finding a way to get relevant prospects to the event with an eye on being cost-conscious. And the goal was to register 20 participants for the eight-hour workshop.

The strategy was an inbound effort combining Sales leveraging its connections through email and social media with Facebook posts and other outreach, and Marketing taking advantage of the existing database along with reaching out to anonymous web visitors from Sweden. Turning unknown website visitors into known visitors was a key goal in the effort.

ECI Telecom went out and found a vendor that was able to provide a tool that allowed for segmenting Web traffic and delivering relevant messages to those visitors, and allowed for real-time intelligence on site visitors and behavior. Read more…