MarketingSherpa Blog

Every company is going to define its process, but the basic lead lifecycle consists of three parts: lead generation, lead nurturing and hand-off to Sales. Lead nurturing, particularly in B2B companies, is key because that stage turns the face in the crowd with the raised hand asking for more information into a sales-ready prospective customer.

Adam Blitzer, Co-founder and COO of Pardot, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) marketing automation platform geared toward small- to mid-sized businesses, recently shared an interesting lead nurturing idea he has — nurturing leads lost to competitors.

Often once a prospect makes a purchase decision, and that choice is with a different company, the lead completely leaves the pipeline. Blitzer says there are good reasons to keep that now future prospect in a nurturing program, and discusses how Pardot continues to nurture lost leads.

You have something of a counterintuitive idea — actually nurturing leads lost to a competitor. Is this idea based on research or other metrics?

Adam Blitzer: It really started more as an experiment internally. Since the nurturing is automated, with no real work required on the part of the sales rep, there’s no reason not to try out an idea like this. We saw a fair amount of prospects come our way because they were unhappy with their current vendor, so it made sense to us that someday these leads lost might also be unhappy with their choice and be looking for a new solution.

We started nurturing lost deals back in 2007 and noticed that within a year, we started to win back a reasonable percentage of them.

Explain the reasoning behind nurturing lost leads.

AB: If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense to keep in touch with those lost leads – if your product was on their short list, they saw something the liked in what you are offering. Your sales rep has already invested a good amount of time building a relationship with the decision maker.

Putting them on a nurturing track allows you to keep them informed of new features and updates that you’ve pushed out over the course of their current vendor contract. In a fast-growing, SaaS industry like our own, the scope of a product can change greatly over the course of a year. It’s possible that the feature that cost you a deal might be now be implemented or that you’ve added something new and innovative that puts you leaps and bounds ahead of the vendor that your prospect chose.

It’s really just a way to keep your company top-of-mind in case they are looking to make a change. It isn’t unusual for a company to shop around when their current contract is approaching renewal.

There is also the simple matter of making the most of your marketing dollars, which is the goal of any nurturing program. You spend a lot of money generating leads and even more to generate sales opportunities. If they convert, it is likely a very low touch sale (this time around). You have already spent the funds to try to convert the prospect in the previous year and do not have to re-spend it when winning back the client.

How can a marketer begin reaching out to these lost prospects with a track specific to the vendor who won the deal?

AB: If a good relationship was established with the prospect during the sales cycle, it can actually be as simple as the sales rep setting up the campaign by saying that they wish them luck with their implementation, they’d love to keep in touch and they’ll send them over any information they run across that might be helpful.

Marketers know their competitors well. They can easily set up a different “lost opportunity” track for each competing solution, with content specific to that vendor.

The challenge is keeping automated content “fresh.” The easiest way to do this is to have fairly static email templates that point to dynamic or constantly updating content.

A great example is to have an automated email (personalized from the sales rep) suggesting the prospect take a look at their newest feature and interesting blog post. In both cases the link would just point to a page that is dynamically updated anytime a new feature or post is produced. That ensures that anytime the email is sent out, it points to something fresh and relevant, all without the marketer ever needing to change the nurturing program or email template.

How does timing come into play in this variant on traditional lead nurturing?

AB: The timing or cadence of the nurturing program will actually depend on the competitor to whom you lost the deal. If you know your competitor typically does annual contracts, you can start the program gradually (perhaps one email in each of the first two quarters) and then pick up steam as the prospect is closer to his renewal date.

One of the nurturing best practices we always try to remind people of is to know when to stop. If at any point a lead responds to a nurturing email — that’s a good time for the sales rep to pick up and engage personally with the prospect. And if you’re going to do this, it’s absolutely key that the person be removed from the campaign at that point, to avoid any conflicting messaging. It can be easy to forget this step, but it is so important.

Should the nurturing messaging be based on the winning vendor? If so, how?

AB: It is ideal to use the winning vendor’s name and any other information if possible. This makes the messages much more personal and less likely to be seen as automated. If you do have specific information about the vendor, it can’t hurt to point out the differences in your products, like where you feel yours excels over the competitor.

Should nurturing lost leads have an informal feel, or should these lost prospects be strongly pursued?

AB: While I do think it can be effective to use vendor-specific information that has a strong message, it’s often best to start out with a softer sell, especially at the beginning of a nurturing program. Since the prospect already has an established relationship with the losing sales rep, a personal, informal tone tends to work well.

These emails might include new features about your own product or perhaps even best practices information that could be helpful to them even as they are using a competing product. This best practices information still acts as a reminder that your company is a thought leader in the space and helps keep your brand top-of-mind.

Related Resources

B2B How-To: 5 lead nurturing tactics to get from lead gen to sales-qualified

B2B Marketing: The 7 most important stages in the teleprospecting funnel

(Members library) Lead Nurturing and Management Q&A: How to Handle 5 Key Challenges

Web Clinic Replay: How Lead Nurturing Produced $4.9 Million Pipeline Growth in Eight Months

No Budget and Less Time? Lead Nurturing in Five Simple Steps

photo by: Phil Roeder

Delivering your emails can be like crossing the Bridge of Death in Monty Python’s “The Holy Grail.” You have to answer several riddles to get past the gatekeepers and avoid the Pit of Lost Emails.

The gatekeepers, of course, are the ISPs and webmail providers. To help get your emails across, MarketingSherpa and ReturnPath recently capped a webinar on deliverability with data, case studies, and best practices. Naturally, we received many questions.

There were so many questions, in fact, that co-presenter Tom Sather, Director of Professional Services at ReturnPath, answered some of the audience’s deliverability questions in a recent blog post. Today, I am doing the same with three questions below.

Question #1: Could you share tips about how to forestall people using Spam button to unsubscribe?

People who want to unsubscribe from your emails are more likely to harm to your program than to help it — so let them go. Make it as easy as possible them to stop receiving your emails.

You should always link to a simple (one-click) unsubscribe process. Most companies put this link in the footer, but you can go a step further by putting the link in the header.

Here’s an example:

As Tom Sather described in his recent post, you can also create a coded email header that some ISPs and webmail providers use to generate an unsubscribe link in their interfaces.

Also, take steps to help prevent subscribers from wanting to unsubscribe in the first place. Strive to increase the relevance of your emails’ content and timing. Make sure your signup forms and welcome emails are setting subscribers’ expectations accurately.

If you clearly set expectations and only deliver emails within those guidelines, then subscribers should not mark your emails as spam. They should be receiving exactly what they requested. However, if subscribers do mark a message as spam, be sure to immediately drop them from your list.

Question #2: How do I know if someone marks my emails as spam or junk?

When a subscriber marks your email as “spam” or “junk,” it hurts your sender reputation. Monitoring campaigns for these types of complaints is a good start to preventing them from happening.

Some email marketing platforms offer complaint rates in their reports. You can also sign up for complaint feedback loops with some ISPs and webmail providers.

Feedback loops send you a copy of each complaint made against your emails. Such a complaint could be someone marking your email as spam or forwarding it to a postmaster. Here is more information on signing up for feedback loops from popular providers:
Yahoo!
AOL
MSN / Hotmail
Comcast

Question #3: If you’re using a third-party solution to produce and send your email, is that considered a dedicated IP address?

ISPs and webmail providers typically track senders’ reputations by IP address. Depending on the platform you use to send email, you might have a shared IP address that is also used by other senders. This would mean you’re also sharing your reputation with other senders.

A dedicated IP address is only used by your company. This gives you the ability to manage your sender reputation without having to worry about other companies who might be also using it.

To answer your question, email marketing platforms can offer you a dedicated IP address, but using one does not guarantee you a dedicated IP.

For example, a platform vendor can have some clients who send from shared IPs and other clients who send from dedicated IPs. Getting a dedicated IP will likely require an additional charge.

As we noted in the webinar, 65% of email marketers report that using a dedicated IP address is a “very effective” deliverability tactic, the highest of any reported in our 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report. However, as Tom Sather noted on our blog last year, a shared IP address can be beneficial if you meet these two criteria:

• Mailing volume is less than 20,000 subscribers
• Your database consists mostly of addresses at the top four consumer providers (Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail and AOL)

If you’re not sure which type of IP you send from, reach out to your email marketing platform vendor and ask. You should get a very straight-forward answer. It’s not like you’re asking a riddle.

Useful links related to this article

Webinar Replay — Improve Email Deliverability: Tactics for handling complaints and boosting reputation

ReturnPath’s Blog Post — A follow-up on MarketingSherpa’s webinar, “Improve Email Deliverability”

Email Marketing: Your deliverability questions answered

Email List Hygiene: Remove four kinds of bad addresses to improve deliverability

Email Deliverability: Always test emails that link to third-party sites

Members Library — Webinar Replay: Top Tactics to Improve Relevancy and Deliverability

Members Library — Email Marketing: FedEx increases deliverability and clickthrough rate with preference centers

Photo: pietroizzo

Social media measurement is in its early phases, and marketers need to decide whether to parse the social media cacophony, much like a radio astronomer, gathering as much data as possible to discern the signs of life or selectively focus on a small, but sufficiently meaningful set of metrics.

The word “sufficient” can span a wide spectrum, and determining what is sufficient is perhaps the question that marketers must answer.

In some sense, you really don’t have a choice. How much data you can afford to collect and analyze is limited by your organization’s budgetary and human resources. If you are not already collecting enough data for “big” analytics (”Approach 1” that I described in my last blog post), it makes sense to get the most out of what you have now relatively quickly, and in the process learn what additional data you need.

I spend a significant amount of time in digital photography, and my friends often ask me for advice on what camera to buy as they are getting more “serious.” My answer is always the same—first, get the most out of the camera you have. Once you start appreciating what your camera lacks, then you can start thinking about investing into those specific features.

In the same sense, getting started is critical. Reading blog posts will not give you a concrete sense of social media (SoMe) measurement until you get your own hands on a monitoring tool—even if you start by  manually listening to conversations using RSS feeds, Twitter, Google Alerts, and the like.

Second, you need to clearly identify your objectives. In our own research project on SoMe measurement with Radian6, I am leaning toward focusing on best practices for specific scenarios—e.g., a Facebook company page—to deal with manageable amounts of data and produce results on a realistic timeline.

So for those not quite ready for “big” analytics, let’s take a look at a quick start approach…

Approach 2: A microscope, not a radio telescope

Commit to a set of metrics you’ll be accountable for, and stick with them. This is a far more pragmatic approach that does not require that every kind of data is available to be measured. If it appears that this approach is not scientific, that is not the case. While focusing on a smaller number of metrics does not paint the whole picture the way that the first approach does, trending data over time can be highly valuable and meaningful in reflecting the effectiveness of marketing efforts.

Taking into account the marginal time, effort, and talent required to process more data, it makes economic sense to focus on a smaller number of data points. With fewer numbers to crunch, marketers armed, for example, only with data available directly from their social media management tools, can calibrate their marketing efforts against this data to build actionable KPIs (key performance indicators).

During Social Media Week, NYC-based Social2b’s Alex Romanovich, CMO, and Ytzik Aranov, COO, presented a straightforward measurement strategy rooted in established, if not venerated, marketing heuristics, such as Michael Porter’s Value Chain Analysis. Their core message is to appreciate that different social media KPIs will be important not only to different companies and industry segments, but “these KPIs also have to align well with more traditional metrics for that business – something that the C-Level and the financial community of this company will clearly understand.”

Alex stresses that “the entire ‘value chain’ of the enterprise can be affected by these metrics and KPIs – hence, if the organization has a sales culture and is highly client-centric, the entire organization may have to adapt the KPIs used by the sales organization, and translated back to the financial indicators and cause factors.

This approach should immediately make sense to marketers, even without any knowledge of statistical analysis.

Social2B focuses not only on the marketing, but also on the customer service component of SoMe ROI, and here is Ytzik’s short list of steps for getting there:

1. Define the social media campaign for customer service resolution
2. Solve for the KPI and projections
3. Apply Enterprise Scorecard parameters, categories
4. Solve for risk, enterprise cost, growth, etc.
5. Map to social media campaign cost
6. Solve for reduction in enterprise costs through social media
7. Justify and allocate budget to social media

An important element here is the Enterprise Scorecard—another established (though loosely defined) management tool that is often overlooked even by large-scale marketing organizations. Given the novelty of SoMe, getting it into the company budget requires not only proving the ROI numerically, but also speaking the right language. Ytzik’s “C-level Suite Roadmap” might appear simple, but it requires that corporate marketers study up on their notes from business school:

• Engage in Compass Management (managing and influencing your organization vertically and horizontally in all directions)
• Define who owns the Web and social media within the company
• Identify the enterprise’s value chain components
• Understand the enterprise’s financial scorecard

Again, no statistics here—it is understood that analysis will be required, but these tools will put you in a good position when the time comes to present your figures.

How to get started

Finally, I wanted to get as pragmatic as possible to help marketers get started and not get stuck in a data deluge. Here are Social2B’s top 10 questions to ask yourself before you scale your SoMe programs:

1. Is my organization and my executive management team ready for social media marketing and branding?
2. Does everyone treat social media as a strategic effort or as an offshoot of marketing or PR/communications?
3. Where in the organization will social media reside?
4. Will I be able to allocate sufficient budget to social media efforts in our company?
5. How will social media discipline be aligned with HR, Technology, Customer Service, Sales, etc.?
6. What tools and technologies will I need to implement social media campaigns?
7. Will ‘social’ also include ‘mobile’?
8. How will we integrated SoMe marketing campaigns with existing, more ‘traditional’ marketing efforts?
9. How much organizational training will we need to implement in integrating ‘social’ within our enterprise?
10. Are we going to use ‘social’ for advertising and PR/Communications? What about ‘disaster recovery’ and ‘reputation management’?

Related Resources

Social Media Measurement: Big data is within reach

2011 Social Marketing Benchmark Report – Save $100 with presale offer (ends tomorrow, April 30)

Always Integrate Social Marketing?

Inbound Marketing newsletter – Free Case Studies and How To Articles from MarketingSherpa’s reporters

Should marketers wait for a grand unified theory of social media ROI measurement, or confidently move forward with what they have available to them now?

This question has been at the forefront of my thinking, as we proceed with MarketingSherpa’s joint research project with Radian6 to discover a set of transferable principles, if not a uniform formula to measure social media (SoMe, pronounced “so me!”) marketing effectiveness.

As I have written previously, some of the popular measurement guidelines provide a degree of comfort that comes from having numbers (as opposed to just words and PowerPoint® slides), but fail to connect the marketing activity to bottom-line outcomes.

To help think through this, I spoke with several practitioners to get some feedback “from the trenches” during SoMe Week here in NYC. With their help, I broadly defined two approaches.

Approach 1: Brave the big data

Take large volumes of diverse data, from both digital and traditional media, and look for correlations using “real” big-data analysis. This analysis is performed on a case-by-case basis, and the overarching principles are the well-established general statistical methods, not necessarily specifically designed for marketers.

Pros

• The methodologies are well established
• There are already tools to help (Radian 6, Alterian, Vocus, etc)

Cons

• Most marketers are not also statisticians or have the requisite tools (e.g., SAS is an excellent software, but it comes with a premium price)
• Comprehensive data must be available across all relevant channels, otherwise the validity of any conclusions from the data rapidly evaporates (Radian6 announcement of integrating third-party data streams like Klout, OpenAmplify and OpenCalais in addition to existing integration with customer relationship management (CRM), Web analytics, and other enterprise systems certainly helps)
• In the end, it’s still conversation and not conversion without attribution of transactional data

If the volume of data becomes overwhelming, analytical consulting companies can help. NYC-based Converseon does precisely that, and I asked Mark Kovscek, their SVP of enterprise analytics, about the biggest challenges to getting large projects like this completed efficiently. Mark provided several concrete considerations to help marketers think through this, based on Converseon’s objectives-based approach that creates meaningful marketing action, measures performance, and optimizes results:

• Marketers must start with a clear articulation of measurable and action-oriented business objectives (at multiple levels, e.g., brand, initiative, campaign), which can be quantified using 3-5 KPIs (e.g., Awareness, Intent, Loyalty)
• Large volumes of data need to be expressed in the form of simple attributes (e.g., metrics, scores, indices), which reflect important dimensions such as delivery and response and can be analyzed through many dimensions such as consumer segments, ad content and time
• The key to delivering actionable insights out of large volumes of data is to connect and reconcile the data with the metrics, with the KPIs, and with the business

How much data is enough? The answer depends on the level of confidence required.  Mark offered several concrete rules of thumb for “best-case scenario” when dealing with large volumes of data:

• Assessing the relationship of data over time (e.g., time series analysis) requires two years of data (three preferred) to accurately understand seasonality and trend

–   You can certainly use much less to understand basic correlations and relationships.  Converseon has created value with 3-6 months of data in assessing basic relationships and making actionable (and valuable) decisions

• Reporting the relationship at a point in time requires 100-300 records within the designated time period (e.g., for monthly listening reporting, Converseon looks for 300 records per month to report on mentions and sentiment)

–   This is reasonably easy when dealing with Facebook data and reporting on Likes or Impressions

–   However, when dealing with data in the open social graph to assess a brand, topic or consumer group, you can literally process and score millions of records (e.g., tweets, blogs, or comments) to identify the analytic sample to match your target customer profile

• Assessing the relationship at a point in time (e.g., predictive models) requires 500-1000 records within the designated time period

Understanding the theoretical aspects of measurement and analysis, of course, is not enough. A culture of measurement-based decision making must exist in the organization, which means designing operations to support this culture. How long does it take to produce a meaningful insight? Several more ideas from Converseon:

• 80% of the work is usually found in data preparation (compiling, aggregating, cleaning, and managing)
• Reports that assess relationships at a single point in time can be developed in 2-3 weeks
• Most predictive models can be developed in 4-6 weeks
• Assessing in-market results and improving solution performance is a function of campaign timing

Finally, I wanted to know what marketers can do to make this more feasible and affordable. Mark recommends:

• Clearly articulate business objectives and KPIs and only measure what matters
• Prioritize data
• Rationalize tools (eliminate redundancy, look for the 80% solution)
• Get buy-in from stakeholders early and often

In my next blog post on this topic, I’ll discuss an approach to SoMe measurement that trades some of the precision and depth for realistic attainability—something that most marketers that can’t afford the expense or the time (both to learn and to do) required to take on “big data.”

Related Resources

Social Media Marketing: Tactics ranked by effectiveness, difficultly and usage

Always Integrate Social Marketing?

Inbound Marketing newsletter – Free Case Studies and How To Articles from MarketingSherpa’s reporters

Social Marketing ROAD Map Handbook

I’ve been browsing the new MarketingSherpa 2011 Social Marketing Benchmark Report this week and soaking up the rich data. One of the first charts that struck me is a bubble chart on social marketing tactics.

First, I want to say, I love these bubble charts. They provide a three-dimensional view of the data on a given topic. Our researchers do a great job of packing them full of information without making them confusing.

This chart graphs the effectiveness, difficulty and popularity of each social media marketing tactic. You’ll notice a clear positive correlation between a tactics’ level of difficulty and its level of effectiveness.

Hard work pays off

For those of you who have not brushed up on your statistics lately (as I just brushed up a moment ago) I will note that a positive correlation between two factors means that as one factor increases, the second factor increases. For example, there is a positive correlation between my consumption of ice cream and the temperature outside.

Looking at this chart, it’s clear that the most effective social marketing tactics are also the most difficult, and vice-versa. Blogger relations — the most effective tactic reported — is also the only tactic to break into the 70%-range in terms of marketers reporting it as “very” or “somewhat” difficult.

You’ll also see that the three most-effective tactics — blogging, SEO for social sites, and blogger relations — are known to require significant amounts of time and effort before results are shown.

Every tactic is somewhat effective

Take a look at the scale on this chart’s Y-axis (level of effectiveness). Those listed percentages correspond to the number of marketers who reported a tactic as “very” effective. What they do not include are the marketers who reported a tactic as “somewhat effective.”

Looking at the chart, you might guess that adding social sharing buttons to emails is a waste of time — but don’t be too quick to write this tactic off completely. Only 10% of social marketers reported it as “very effective,” but 55% rated it as “somewhat effective” (found deeper in the report). With a total of 65% of social marketers reporting at least some effectiveness, these buttons might be worth the small investment they require.

Also, since adding social sharing buttons bottoms-out the Y-axis here, every other tactic listed has more than 65% of social marketers reporting at least some effectiveness. Here are some examples:

• Social sharing buttons on websites: 69% say at least “somewhat” effective
• Advertising on social sites: 73%
• Microblogging: 75%

Related resources:

MarketingSherpa 2011 Social Marketing Benchmark Report

Free Webinar: Best Practices for Improving Search and Social Marketing Integration

Marketing Research Chart: Using social media as a list-growth tactic

Inbound Marketing newsletter – Free Case Studies and How To Articles from MarketingSherpa’s reporters

Earth Day is coming up tomorrow, so with that in mind, we are providing information on green marketing from an industry expert. Shel Horowitz is a green marketing consultant, and along with Jay Conrad Levinson, co-author of “Guerilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet” (published by Wiley in January 2010.)

Today’s B2C newsletter case study features the guerilla marketing tactics Horowitz used to promote the book, and he also took the time to share some of the basics of green marketing for this blog post.

What is “green marketing?” What are some of its key principles?

Shel Horowitz: It has two parts: First, using green technologies to do the marketing (e.g., e-mail—ideally, with servers powered by clean and renewable power sources — vs. postal direct mail that consumes lots of trees and fossil fuels, teleseminars and webinars vs. in-person events). Second, marketing a green product/service/company/organization/idea and reaching the green consumer with a green-friendly message.

Principles:

• Looking systemically and holistically at problems/solutions, goals/achievement paths, which leads to a lot of creativity both in product development and in marketing.

Examples: Go Flushless drastically lowers water consumption by neutralizing the odor and staining properties of urine, thus cutting down the number of flushes.

Sustainable Garden Supply sells “vertical gardens” about the size of a water fountain that urban apartment dwellers can use to grow food in their apartments.

Hydros Bottle allows you to drink clean filtered water anywhere you travel without the incredible waste of disposable water bottles (a filter is built into a reusable water bottle).

• Creating marketing that appeals to both a customer/prospect’s self-interest and global interest.

Examples: Marcal doesn’t just say, “buy our recycled toilet paper”. It says, “help save 1 million trees (by buying the toilet paper).”

Ben & Jerry’s talks as much about fair trade, environmental sustainability, and providing jobs to the severely disadvantaged as it does about the quality of its ice cream.

• Thinking about how to turn competitors into allies and partners, rather than enemies—joining forces to provide creative approaches that would be harder to do on your own.

Examples: The Empire State Building retrofit involved at least six different companies, each with particular strengths.

My launch of “Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet” tapped into many other marketing consultants and leading figures in the green business movement, all of whom could be seen as competitors (from my co-author on down).

• Respecting the customer’s intelligence; involving the customer or prospect as a partner in educating the world.

Tell me four things about green marketing that would surprise most people.

SH: 1. Often, the green approach is actually cheaper (which is why extremely profit-driven companies like Wal-Mart have become major players in sustainability).

2. If you do a good job selling the value of your green approach to both self-interest and global interest, green consumers tend to be less price-sensitive and more willing to pay extra for a green product or service (within reason).

3. Transparency is the key to avoiding accusations of greenwashing. Don’t claim to be super-green if you’re really only part-way there. Explain how far you’ve gone down the path, and what further steps you’ll take in the future.

As people take time to educate themselves, you will see huge backlash against, for example, the nuclear power industry in the coming years—which falsely claims to be clean, carbon-neutral, and safe. It will be a lot of years before BP can again claim to be a green company, when the Gulf oil spill showed the whole world that it had been lying.

In the book, I discuss a bottled water campaign that got Nestlé hauled into court, and I show how a few minor wording changes would have made the ad claims transparent—and bullet-proof.

4. The market will respond positively when you make substantiated claims; not to do so is to forfeit a huge marketing advantage.

Is this a topic all marketers should be interested in? Why?

SH: Absolutely! Green-sympathetic “Cultural Creatives” make up about 25 percent of the marketplace and rapidly growing, so this is a big market that people should pay attention to. In the coming years, companies that can’t legitimately claim to be green will be left behind as consumers seek greener alternatives.

Related resources

Website for “Guerilla Marketing Goes Green”

(Members library) Going Green: How to Transition Catalog Users to Email & Lift Conversions 19%

(Members library) Don’t Make These Common Green Marketing Mistakes

Conversion diagnosis: Nature.org’s carbon footprint calculator

Backing Up Green Messages – Part I

Back Up Your Green Messages by Flexing Your Muscle

Sign up for the MarketingSherpa B2C newsletter

photo credit: Pedro1267 on Flickr

Think about how many emails you sent yesterday. Now think about how many your company sent yesterday — to customers and coworkers. Probably thousands of unique emails, right? That is a mountain of content, but little of it gets used for marketing.

I spoke last week with Chris Baggott, CEO and Co-Founder of Compendium (also co-founder of ExactTarget). During our discussion, Baggott pointed out two content-rich resources that marketers often overlook: their email marketing campaigns, and their social media profiles.

Marketing emails, for example, often tell a story or feature content that is not published elsewhere. The content is not indexed by search engines — but it could be if published online.

Also, the comments and conversations on your Facebook profile typically never escape the walled garden. But you can grab that content and incorporate it into your marketing.

“We’re working on breaking down content silos to be able to pull content from anywhere and distribute content anywhere,” Baggott says.

Here are some examples Baggott provided of how some companies are breaking down content silos and combining email marketing, social marketing, natural search and content marketing:

Publishing emails for long-tail search

One of Baggott’s first points was that a company’s emails are a huge untapped resource for content. Of course, there are your marketing emails, as mentioned above. But even your sales and customer service emails can be published.

Sales and service teams write thousands of emails to answer customers’ questions. Questions such as:

• What is the best product for my situation?
• When would I have to update my product?
• Will this product work while I’m traveling?

The answers to these questions are extremely specific to each customer’s situation. If published, they’re potentially valuable for long-tail (low volume, highly qualified) search traffic. What is the best parka for sub-zero temperatures? That sounds like a Google search to me…

Of course, not every email you send will be valuable. They should be screened before publishing, but you could identify several emails to publish each day.

Collecting and leveraging user-generated content

Baggott also mentioned an email strategy to gather and use content in your program. Here’s the process he laid out:

1. Send a triggered email asking customers for reviews, testimonials, or other types of user-generated content. These emails can be sent after customers use a product, such as after they’ve stayed in a hotel room.
2. Publish that content online to help attract natural search traffic and encourage visitors to sign up for your emails.
3. Send another triggered email asking customers to share their content with friends on social networks.
4. Use the content in marketing emails or nurturing campaigns.

The content generated, again, will be very specific to each customer’s situation. If you have good information in your database, you can match the content to subscribers’ attributes and use it to send them targeted, highly relevant messages.

“One of the biggest problems we’ve always had with dynamic content [in email marketing] is the content,” Baggott says. “The problem isn’t that I don’t have enough data, or the tools to make it easy to send relevant emails. The problem is that I don’t have enough relevant content to send to the right person.”

Related resources

Social Media Marketing: Turning social media engagement into action at Threadless

Inbound Marketing: A pioneering YouTube video strategy

Marketing Research Chart: Top tactics for delivering relevant email content

Marketing Research Chart: Using social media as a list-growth tactic

Search Marketing: Capture future seasonal traffic lifts by preparing today with these 4 SEO factors

Inbound Marketing newsletter – Free Case Studies and How To Articles from MarketingSherpa’s reporters

Your email database is the foundation of your email marketing. Haphazardly adding names can invite irrelevant subscribers and invalid email addresses — which weaken your foundation.

Inspired by our upcoming Optimization Summit, I went back to my notes from our recent Email Summit to reinforce what I learned about email deliverability. I found some great information on bad email addresses and list hygiene from an expert panel.

Jack Hogan, CTO and Co-Founder, Lifescript, a women’s health website, presented his team’s work with FreshAddress, an email list hygiene provider. Austin Bliss, President, FreshAddress, was also on hand and noted:

“People make typos all the time… You want to keep that address out of your list because it’s not going to help you. And no amount of deliverability tweaking later is going to help you if the initial email address is bad.”

Hogan and Bliss highlighted four types of bad email addresses removed from Lifescript’s database. Take a look to see if your list has any of these:

Role Accounts

These email addresses are maintained by a website or company for specific purpose. Examples include:

• info@example.com
• admin@example.com
• press@example.com
• abuse@example.com

These addresses are often maintained by a group, not an individual. So if you send an email to one of these addresses, it will not likely be relevant to all the owners and can make your message susceptible to being deleted or marked as spam.

Furthermore, these addresses are often publicly available on websites, which means they’re easily picked up by spammers. Email services are aware of this trend and monitor emails sent to role accounts. Emailing a high number of role accounts in your campaigns will likely harm your reputation among email services.

Syntax Errors and Typos

These invalid addresses are genuine mistakes. People frequently mistype their email address. Even if they are asked to write the address twice, it is very easy for someone to type it incorrectly the first time and copy-and-paste the mistake into the second form field.

How bad could this problem be?

“I saw 500 different ways yahoo.com was entered into our address book,” Hogan says.

The problem with these addresses is that they are often from people who are legitimately trying to subscribe to your newsletter — and they never receive it. This can create a bad impression with your brand. Furthermore, email services do not like receiving a high-volume of emails sent to invalid accounts and can mark-down your reputation in response.

Fake Addresses

These addresses are entered by people who do not want to give a valid email address. For whatever reason, they wanted to complete the signup process without providing a personal email. Instead, they made something up, such as:

• nope@gmail.com
• null@void.com
• asdf@yahoo.com
• nowaybuddy@getlost.com

One reason you might receive a high number of fake addresses is by requiring people to provide an address to complete an unrelated task, such as to enter a contest. The person is not interested in a newsletter or promotions — they just want to enter the contest, so they invent a fake address.

Lifescript mainly collects email addresses from people subscribing to its newsletters — but it still saw these bogus addresses in its database. Even though this does not make sense, it happens.

As mentioned above, sending emails to a high number of invalid addresses can tarnish your reputation.

Spam Traps

Email services and other companies create these addresses and publish them online as bait for spammers. Then they wait for someone to find the addresses and start sending unsolicited emails. This helps the companies identify spam.

Emailing one or more spam traps can hurt your reputation. The trouble, though, is these emails can find their way into legitimate company’s lists via:

• Poor sources — such as a purchased lists from a disreputable company
• Poisoning — a malicious competitor or an upset customer can identify a spam trap and sign it up for your emails.

Some spam traps are obvious, such as abuse@example.com, but most are kept secret. Otherwise, they would not be effective. This can make them difficult to identify. However, they’re not likely to be active, responsive subscribers, so you should be targeting them for removal based on inactivity anyway.

You can find out more about email deliverability at our upcoming webinar:
Improve Email Deliverability: Tactics for Handling Complaints and Boosting Reputation
(Thursday, April 21, 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. EDT)

Related resources

MarketingSherpa Optimization Summit 2011

Email Deliverability: Always test emails that link to third-party sites

Email Deliverability: Getting into Gmail’s ‘Priority Inbox’

Email Marketing: Improve deliverability by deleting subscribers?

Email Marketing: Your deliverability questions answered

Members Library — Webinar Replay: Top Tactics to Improve Relevancy and Deliverability

Members Library — Third-Party Links and Email Deliverability: 4 Tips to protect your reputation

Soap Photo by: Horia Varlan on Flickr

Do you know the problem with the customer experience? It doesn’t have a media sales rep.

So no one is taking you out to a nice lunch, plying you with semi-fine wine while slowly separating you from your budget and increasing your media spend on it.

However, that doesn’t mean that the customer experience doesn’t generate media for you. We live in a digital age where you must assume that every customer is also a publisher. So, if you invest in your customers, you can gain significant positive media exposure. Fail to invest? You can get significant exposure as well…it just won’t be as brand-friendly as those TV spots you just bought.

So, while businesses are expected to spend $214.3 billion on advertising in 2011(according to SNL Kagan), what return will they get for their investment? In recent research by Satmetrix, only four percent of Americans said they trust advertising the most as an information source when choosing products or services. The top choice? Independent sources (83 percent), especially those with whom they have personal relationships.

While recent research from Experian (warning: there is a squeeze page) disagrees on the exact number, it reaffirms the importance of winning over your customers. It states, “Despite consumer reliance on digital devices and Internet-provided information, the most influential element driving purchase decisions today is still word-of-mouth.”

Experian found that 54 percent of consumers chose word-of-mouth as highly influential to their purchase decisions. Of course, this shouldn’t be news to you. You probably learned about word-of-mouth in Marketing 101.

But, a lot has changed since then. As stated above, every customer you have is now likely a publisher as well. So now there is even word-of-mouth advertising from people your consumers have never even met. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, “nearly six-in-ten adults (58%) have done research online about the products and services they buy, and about a quarter (24%) have posted comments or reviews online about the things they buy.”

So, how do you optimize the customer experience to get the most from word-of-mouth advertising today?

There is no one right answer, of course. I asked around a little in this vast, resourceful marketing community of ours. Read on for a few tips, and I’d love to hear your thoughts as well…

Your customers can see right through your marketing so you might as well let them

“When a company is humble enough to admit a weakness, they immediately distinguish themselves from the competition. It opens the door for a trust relationship.

The consumer is all too aware of the fact that we are not perfect. To pretend otherwise only serves to raise their suspicion. Tell them what you can’t do, and they’ll believe you when you tell then what you can do.”

– Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director (CEO), MECLABS

Transparent marketing is essential. According to the Satmetrix study, 20 percentof those who defected a company did so because of unfair fees or charges.

“Companies still need to advertise to create market awareness, but market trends such as the increased use of social media networks and consumer reviews online are all increasing transparency about the actual experiences that companies deliver, and what customers think of them,” John Abraham, general manager of Net Promoter programs at Satmetrix, said. “You just can’t hide any longer behind bad quality. Advertising and marketing messages need to line up with customers’ real experiences. So, first and foremost, you have to get the experience right.”

We’ll talk about getting that experience right in just a minute. But first, how do you ensure that your advertising and marketing messages are transparent and truly reflect what your customer is experiencing? You don’t want to be the Comical Ali of your company, claiming victory while the facts on the ground so clearly conflict with your messages. And while he may have literally had a gun to his head, forcing him to make ridiculous claims…you don’t. You have a choice.

As I’ve said before in these (Web) pages, I think Transparent Marketing: How to earn the trust of a skeptical consumer is an excellent guide, but, in full transparency, it is written by the man who signs my paychecks – Dr. Flint McGlaughlin.

So, I also wanted to get a perspective from someone outside of MECLABS and provide a very granular example that you could apply to your marketing efforts today. I asked Ryan Deutsch, VP of Strategic Services, StrongMail, about transparency in email marketing. He said that “welcome programs offer the best opportunity for transparency” and offered these specific tips:

• Provide examples of the types of messages the subscriber will be receiving
• Provide an overview of the frequency of communication and give the consumer the opportunity to set preferences around cadence
• Provide an explanation of how data is captured within the email program and how that is used to create more targeted and relevant messages
• Explain the privacy policy of the brand
• Explain the opt-out and unsubscribe options

Don’t dictate, discover

“It is the customer who determines what a business is. For it is the customer, and he alone, who through being willing to pay for a good or for a service, converts economic resources into wealth, things into goods. What the business thinks it produces is not of first importance – especially not to the future of the business and to its success. What the customer thinks he is buying, what he considers “value,” is decisive – it determines what a business is, what it produces and whether it will prosper.”

– Peter Drucker, The Practice of Management

In Peter Drucker’s day, it was far more difficult to determine what the customer considered valuable. Today, you have almost instant access to that information in many different ways:

• Test your value proposition – You can test and measure your value proposition in real-time under real-world conditions with your actual customers using PPC ads
• Actually ask your customers – Use automated exit surveys, ensure your sales and customer service teams track customer interactions in a CRM system, engage in one-on-one conversations in user forums, or use technology in some other creative way to pick your customers’ brains.
• Listen to what they say – Social media monitoring has become a very powerful tool to learning from your customers. Of course, don’t stop at listening to customers and discovering what they want, use social media to respond as well. For example…

I asked Joe Chernov, VP of Content Marketing, Eloqua how he uses social media to discover what customers want and nurture word-of-mouth advertising. As co-chair of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s Ethics Panel, he knows a thing or two about the topic. Here’s what he had to say…

“All customers are not created equal. Those who engage with you on social channels are far more likely to be your brand advocates. In fact, at Eloqua, a client who engages with us on any social network is 450 percent more likely to be a brand promoter than our baseline client. This self-selecting group is a collection of ambassadors-in-waiting.  The key to unlocking their word-of-mouth is as simple as connecting with them on a personal level on their social channel of choice. That’s really all it takes.”

Truly serve your customers

“We learn whatever skills we need to service the customer. We build whatever technology we need to service the customer.”

– Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amazon

Think about Amazon for a moment. They mostly sell books and other stuff (lots of stuff) through an e-commerce store. Yet, out of seemingly nowhere, they launched their own hardware device – the Kindle. We take it for granted now, but for an e-commerce store to launch a hardware device in a segment that barely existed before it entered the market is quite revolutionary.

Why take that leap of faith? To truly serve the customer.

How can you truly serve your customers? After all, you’re likely not Jeff Bezos. You likely only have control over a small patch of territory in your overall company.

And yet, that patch is likely the tip of the spear in terms of customer interaction. You are in the unique position to discover and then shine a light on issues that really matter to your customers, to ensure that there is true value in your marketing propositions.

I asked Dave Ewart, Senior Director of Marketing, Satmetrix how marketers can achieve this. Satmetrix, the company behind the study referenced above, makes a management tool that can be used to gauge the loyalty of a firm’s customer relationships. Ewart said that successful customer-centric marketers:

1. Continuously collect and analyze data about customer interactions and customer satisfaction, and they use automated customer listening and feedback systems;
2. Track and measure word-of-mouth online, and identify and support customer advocates;
3. Share data from customer interactions across organizational departments; this helps them strengthen relationships with customers and sometimes even uncovers untapped markets; and
4. Lead a company-wide commitment to addressing and resolving customer issues and problems.

Don’t consider anything that impacts the customer “not my problem.” It’s you who made the promise upfront with your impressive marketing campaigns. So, it better be you who ensures that your company delivers on that promise with an exceptional customer experience.

If not, your customers hold the trump card. Advertising even more successful than yours. Word-of-mouth.

Related Resources

Hoax Marketing: Your brand comes first, humor second, even on April Fool’s Day

Social Media Marketing: Turning social media engagement into action at Threadless

The Last Blog Post: How to succeed in an era of transparent marketing

Inbound Marketing newsletter – Free Case Studies and How To Articles from MarketingSherpa’s reporters

Social Marketing ROAD Map Handbook

Every advertising agency, SEO specialist, and PR firm likes to be seen as a partner, not a vendor. And that may well define your relationship. But, go down to accounting and explain that relationship, and they’ll laugh in your face.

And for good reason. While, hopefully, you do have that close knit partner relationship, at the end of the day, this is a financial arrangement and you must maximize the value of that arrangement.

On the face of it, performanced-based pricing seems like a no-brainer. You get a guaranteed result, or you don’t pay.

Is this a great country, or what?

Like many things, the devil is in the details. First of all, you have to keep in mind that the vendor knows the metrics far better than most prospective clients do. That means, in many cases, the vendor is selling the illusion of risk.  Second, and more importantly, you have to be sure the result you are paying for is the result you really want.

Let me show you what I mean. I’ll use a teleprospecting vendor as an example, and highlight the lesson you can get out of each example for the type of vendors you work with every day.

What intermediate metrics truly contribute to your success?

In B2B lead generation, a common result is defined as an appointment for sales people. The cost per appointment generally runs from about $400 to $800, depending typically on volume, your brand and the target.  If you can provide the vendor with the people your sales team absolutely, positively wants appointments with, you’re in business.

In my case, I would gladly take appointments with CMOs of B2B companies with $500 million or more in revenue. At least, that would probably be my immediate response. Of course, there might be a few CMOs in that target that oversee pure e-commerce plays, or highly commoditized, low-end products that do not require lead generation, my area of expertise (or, so I would like to think). Therefore, I might pay for some appointments that I don’t really want. So, the real cost for a qualified appointment might be a bit higher than I originally agreed to.

Then there is the hidden cost: sales productivity. The purpose of such services is to increase sales productivity. For these kinds of top executive-level appointments, the representative might very well expect to meet face-to-face with the CMO. So, you have to add to the equation the cost of the commuting time and meeting time. Loaded field sales costs for complex solutions often start at about $100 an hour and can be $500 an hour or more, for elite, high-end key account sales people.

Very quickly, a $500 appointment can become an $800 or even $1,500 appointment, especially if any serious commuting takes place. If the conversion-to-deal is high or the revenue-per-deal is high, then who cares? In many cases, however, buyers find out that 20 to 30 percent of the appointments are not a fit. Now the cost of the qualified appointment goes way up, and the soft cost of sales expense goes to the moon, not to mention the hit on sales productivity.

Unless you are absolutely certain that your sales team wants appointments with a particular set of individuals, then you really need to focus more on qualified leads, not just appointments.

LESSON LEARNED: Make sure you pick the correct intermediate metrics when paying for performance.

Are you helping  your vendors be successful?

OK, now you have learned your lesson, the hard way. You won’t do that again, right? So you negotiate a cost per lead fee structure. Before you do, you wisely work with sales to define BANT (Budget, Authority, Need and Timeline) lead criteria and structure the deal accordingly. Again, the devil is in the details. What if sales discovered, after further review, that what they really wanted was to get in to larger accounts before the prospect had finalized a budget? In those cases, maybe the deal takes longer but the win rate is higher and the deal size is higher. Happens all the time. Now you have to try to change the deal. At least for some accounts.

With leads, there is also often subjective information, open to interpretation. Is the prospect really acting with authority? Do they really have a budget? Even seasoned sales people can be mistaken about such things. In short, lead qualification is almost always nuanced, complex and evolving, as the teleprospecting operation figures out how to qualify leads precisely and the sales organization figures out what it really wants and needs. This reality often creates conflict with the vendor initially, because the fee structure negotiated is not really the right fee structure and so one side or the other loses.

Finally, if the vendor is taking all the risk, many people understandably put vendor support on the back burner. It’s human nature. In reality, teleprospecting operations fail, including those that are in-house, without proper support from marketing and sales. For example, from marketing, this operation needs lists, assets and tools, and an appropriate supply of reasonably qualified responders. From sales, the team needs training and mentoring on qualification and precise, rapid feedback on leads..

After all, the fee is fixed and the operation should run on auto-pilot. You also might not bother investing in effective demand generation that feeds the vendor or even list development, instead allowing the vendor to get by on cold-calling decaying lists.

Your program then becomes the dumping ground for new hires. The vendor might also park underperformers there before giving them their walking papers. In other words, both you and the vendor try to extract some value out of the effort. But, some of what matters isn’t getting measured, like the cost in the market place to your brand because of the quality of the calling.

LESSON LEARNED: A business relationship is a two-way street. Your vendor can’t help you be successful, if you don’t help it be successful. As Jerry Maguire said, “Help me help you!”

Is there transparency in your relationship?

So, what’s the right approach? It really depends on what you need and how clear you are about your needs. If you have a reasonably well-oiled, well-documented process and approach to teleprospecting, then asking the vendor to share in the risk and the upside can serve your mutual long-term interests.

If things are not going so well and you need to figure out the right approach, then pay-for-performance is going to create unnecessary conflict. You might be better served in that case to put your focus on determining the right model or strategy for teleprospecting and the parameters of a pilot. Insist on a level of transparency during the pilot and then use the pilot to optimize the approach. Then, after the production level has begun to plateau, start working on a shared risk model.

The right shared risk fee structures ensure that both the vendor and the client win if the program is working and lose if the program is failing. To arrive at such an arrangement, there must be clarity on both sides about mutual obligations and the consquences for non-compliance. Mutual trust and respect are also necessary, including a win-win approach to the fee structure.

To those who might argue that every dollar of profit a vendor makes is a dollar of margin that is lost to its clients, I would point to the free enterprise system. Everywhere in free markets, the quest for profits drives higher levels of efficiency (and losing money drives companies out of markets and out of business). If the vendor makes above average profits for driving above average efficiency, then its clients are the beneficiaries. And the profits that the vendor makes must always be tempered by what its competitors offer or what its clients believe they can achieve in-house.

LESSON LEARNED: A rising tide lifts all boats…as long as everyone is clear on how “tide” and “boat” are defined in the process. So, before you dive in, dip your toe in and start with a pilot that has flexibility to evolve over time. Once the proper success metrics have been discovered, and a working relationship is established, you can create a more successful payment model that truly shares risk and reward.

But don’t stop there. Look at this as an evolving fee model. Continue to optimize as you learn more about what creates a mutually successful relationship.

Related Resources

B2B Marketing: The 7 most important stages in the teleprospecting funnel

B2B Lead Generation: Why teleprospecting is a bridge between sales and marketing

B2B Marketing: The FUEL methodology outlined

Free MarketingSherpa B2B Newsletter