MarketingSherpa Blog

Growing up in central Pennsylvania, the college football team to root for is Penn State. When 107,282 proud fans chant “WE ARE PENN STATE” and the blue and white storm the field, it’s a breathtaking experience.

It is also worth noting that the Penn State uniforms haven’t changed in more than 45 years. You’ve got the “away white,” as shown in this picture, and “home blue.” Attend a home game and you’ll see the team wearing black shoes, white pants, a blue jersey with no name on the back, and white helmets with no logo. That is the way it has always been and there are no indications that it will ever change.

That is why an article last week on national signing day in college football titled “Is Penn State’s resistance to change hurting recruiting?” caught my attention. It discussed how many high school players don’t care for the Plain-Jane uniforms of Penn State and even consider them boring (sorry JoePa). In comparison, kids love the 52 uniform combinations of the Oregon Ducks. Do I also need to mention that Oregon played for the national championship this year?

The Last Blog Post

Ok, so why do I bring up Penn State football uniforms in The Last Blog Post? And what does that have to do with marketing? Well, when our Director of Content, Daniel Burstein, asked me to write my last blog post, my first thought was “What does he know that I don’t?” (EDITOR’S NOTE: You can check out what lessons other marketing bloggers have to on Twitter #LastBlog.)

But after he promised that he wasn’t kicking me out the door and that the purpose of the post was to share what my most important words of wisdom would be if I was writing my final blog post to the marketing community – the wheels in my mind started churning.

What core principle has served me best as a marketer?

What is at the core of great marketing?

As an old and grizzly Sherpa (just had a birthday last week, so I am old), what would I share with you as we walked up that final summit? Note: What would I tell you in addition to “Don’t eat the yellow snow.”

Exciting but intimidating times

What kept coming back to me is the need for marketers to embrace change. We are living in an exciting, but also intimidating, period of marketing evolution, a time of rapid change. From social marketing to automation, the opportunities to improve what we are currently doing are only limited by our imagination. Those that embrace change by expanding their skills, testing new ideas and courageously leading by example will succeed. Those who sit back and hold onto their current success and resist change will be passed by and may never catch-up.

Dr. Flint McLaughlin, my boss at MECLABS, says “The number one hindrance for our next great win is our last great win.” Flint lives this quote each and every day, as he pushes the team to test what we do and challenges us to embrace change. As a marketer we have no choice but to improve what we are doing. Embrace change.

Ask the right questions to embrace change

Maybe sometimes we ask the wrong questions. An example was at last week’s MarketingSherpa Email Summit, I heard people asking “Will social marketing kill email?” That is the wrong question to ask. We should be asking “How can I improve communication between my customer/prospect and my company?” When we start asking the right questions, we instinctively start embracing change.

I’ve made some bold decision over the years. Some have worked out, while others I’ve chalk-up as learning experiences. My move to MarketingSherpa was one of those decisions.

My previous job was with a fantastic magazine company. I totally loved the company but was concerned about the growth opportunities within the company and within the magazine industry as a whole. So when I had a chance to pack my bag and move to MarketingSherpa, it was a change that I was willing to take. What better way to learn about what works in marketing than join the MarketingSherpa team. And until Dan told me that this was my last blog post, I’ve never second guessed my decision.

Just in the last month at MarketingSherpa, we’ve updated the look and feel of our blog and email newsletters. We’ve launched a new newsletter, Inbound Marketing, and we are getting ready to announce a new Summit. So, change is in the works, and that is how I like it.

Like you, we are trying to figure out how to ROI social media, optimize our marketing/sales funnel, grow our list, etc. When will the work be done? Never. In fact, that is why I love marketing so much, because it is always changing and that totally rocks.

Start by engaging your audience

So should Penn State change their uniforms? I’m not sure what’s the answer to that question, but I can tell you they need to start engaging with their alumni and fans on the topic. I know they should embrace change and not resist it. A quick note on that Penn State uniform tradition that may surprise you: the first official colors were… pink and black. So I guess that tells you that change is not a bad thing!

Related resources

The Last Blog Post: How to succeed in an era of Transparent Marketing

The Last Blog Post: It all begins with trust

The Last Blog Post: 5 lessons I’d leave behind

The Last Blog Post: The 4 metrics that matter

The Last Blog Post (And The Most Recent Ego Trap) #LastBlog

The Last Blog Post: Speak Loudly My #MRX Friends #LastBlog

My Last Blog Post

The Last Blog Post: What Marketers can learn from The Last Lecture

The Last Blog Post

The Last Blog Post by Guy Kawasaki

The B.Good snowman

My blog post this week has truly been an exercise in real-time reporting. “Plan A” was to cover some of the Super Bowl marketing activities going on in Dallas this week, but then “Snowmageddon 2011” hit late Monday night, left me iced into my driveway and knocked the media and marketing universe surrounding the Super Bowl into a brand new level of frenzy/panic/excitement — something like “frenzanicment.”

When the uniqueness of Super Bowl week marketing gets kicked up even higher with a freak weather event, the result — however interesting it might be — just isn’t going to apply to many other real-world marketing situations.

Plan B

But when that freak weather event is affecting a huge swath of the rest of the United States, and local marketers are jumping in with real-time campaigns and CRM activities such as sending messages about new store and office hours in reaction to the event, that’s something any marketer can relate to and maybe gain some insight from to use for future real-time marketing opportunities.

With that in mind, this post is “plan B” — some crowdsourced, real-time reporting on various marketing efforts taken in response to Snowmageddon.

Getting customers to your bricks and mortar location in a blizzard

• Leyla Arsan of Lotus Marketing Services offered this interesting restaurant promotion: One of my clients, a 20,000-square-foot  restaurant in Chicago, offered a blizzard promotion. For each inch of snowfall, they offered guests that percentage off their check. For example, 20 inches = 20% off your total bill. On Wednesday night, they had over 100 guests with only a few hours to promote the special. They used email marketing, Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare to promote the special.
• Style Masters Salon & Spa located in the greater Philadelphia area distributed emails offering 20% service discounts for same-day bookings during snow storms January 26-27. The January 26 promotion filled the appointment book within 25 minutes, while the offer on January 27 took the salon from a 20% booking rate to 52% in 45 minutes. “We couldn’t be more pleased with the results of this last-minute email campaign,” said Christina Vagnozzi, owner of Style Masters Salon & Spa. “Our clients are anxiously awaiting this next storm to see what we come up with.”
• The Boston-based B.Good restaurant chain posted a humorous photo to their Facebook page featuring a giant snowman built at one of the locations while staff awaited customers. The photo was posted on a day when the area received more than a foot of snow. “The photo generated great buzz with ‘Likes’ on our Facebook page, and encouraged walk-ins when we ordinarily would have seen few, if any,” said Jon Olinto, Co-founder B.Good.

Use videos to tell your brand’s story

Stacey Hylen of BusinessOptimizerCoach.com sent this idea: I shot some videos outside in the blizzard with some tips to help small business owners learn how to profit from Snowmageddon and what they need to do in their business to prepare it for another one (things they can do to become more of a global business so local events won’t hurt their business as much.)

I am going to promote the heck out of the videos and also offer a Snowmageddon special through my newsletter and through social media sites.

Real-time email marketing — be proactive

Rick Delashmit of FruitMyCube.com in Belleville, Illinois: We had to delay some of our scheduled FruitMyCube deliveries this week due to the weather. We notified several hundred customers of the order delay/cancellation with this email.

Then today (Wednesday), as we opened up ordering for next week, we announced that we would be including one of our hand-dipped Chocolate Covered Strawberries in each Cube as a thank you for their patience through the “Snowpocalypse”. Then come Valentine’s week, we’ll tie all this together by allowing our customers to add a Gift Box of the berries to their FruitMyCube order. Here’s the email that announced the free chocolate covered strawberry.

Cold calling in freezing weather

Jenny Vance, President LeadJen: As an outsourced Lead generation company, LeadJen is conscious about using client billable time when we will see the highest connections and also highest conversions. Typically, those two things have a 1:1 relationship. If you have more connections/conversations, you have more conversions.

However, we have found that a winter event is much like the holidays because while the ability to connect is greatly reduced, the quality of the connections is much higher. This is because we have an easy way to personalize the message and a universal conversation topic—weather!

The people that are in the office are also not as inundated with requests and interruptions, so the cold call is less of a bother. In order to maximize the conversation topic, we include reference to weather in our voicemails, live dialogues and also email content.

We’ve found that it greatly improves our inbound response to those messages. At the end of the day, we estimate that instead of a 1:1 relationship between connections to conversions, we see a 1:2 relationship. It so critical that during winter emergencies that have the potential to cripple results, LeadJen has been able to stabilize and sometimes improve project performance.

Real-time marketing is nimble marketing

“The great news about today’s marketing tools is that they allow marketers to be really nimble and react to circumstances, like the recent spate of snowstorms, in real time,” said Eric Groves, Senior Vice President, Strategy, Corporate Development and Innovation Constant Contact. “Simply using the ‘excuse’ of the snow as a reason to reach out and share a compelling promotion not only helps maintain sales during what might otherwise be a bit of a slump, but also strengthens relationships with customers by rewarding loyalty.”

All marketers know to tailor campaigns and offers to events like Valentine’s Day or St. Patrick’s Day, but the nimble marketer will also react to events such as weather or breaking news to take advantage of publicity and promotional opportunities. It doesn’t have to be a freak snowstorm rampaging across most of the country, although there’s a lot to work with, as seen above, to get into the world of real-time marketing. You just have to find the opportunity in the news, events, announcements — and yes, even weather — that happen every day.

Related resources

Constant Contact, used by Style Masters Salon & Spa, B.Good and FruitMyCube.com for their online marketing campaigns

Lotus Marketing Services

Real-Time Marketing: David Meerman Scott at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011

Riding a real time Amazon announcement to reach an influential journalist

Email Marketing: Why should I help you?

After squinting at my screen for weeks trying to read the MarketingSherpa 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report PDF, I finally have a hard copy sitting on my desk — and it’s bursting with insight.

Having read the executive summary weeks earlier, I flipped through the chapters today and was struck by this stat:

Does your organization have a method for quantifying ROI from email marketing?

• No: 59%
• Yes: 41%

Email marketing can be amazingly efficient. B2C marketers report an average 256% ROI from the channel — pulling in $2.56 for every $1 invested — as mentioned later in the report.

What shocks me is that 59% of email marketers have not gauged their program’s efficiency. This means their company executives are likely unaware of the amazing job they’re doing. Even if executives have seen the clickthrough and conversion rates, they’re likely thinking about that line from Jerry Maguire.

Show me the money

At last week’s Email Marketing Summit, Jeanne Jennings, Independent Consultant and MarketingSherpa Trainer, shot holes in many of the excuses she’s heard for why companies can’t calculate email’s ROI.

Here are three she highlighted:

1. Our Web analytics software doesn’t provide this information
2. We can’t track online sales back to email
3. We don’t have an exact figure for costs

Taking these one at a time, Jennings noted that 1) most analytics solutions can provide the information. Google Analytics does and it’s free. 2) Setting up the tracking is simple. 3) You don’t need exact figures.

“As long as you can compare in an apples-to-apples fashion, that’s enough to get started,” Jennings said.

Judging performance by clickthrough and conversion rates is not enough — you should know the revenue generated, both on a campaign-level and a broader program-level.

Two simple calculations Jennings suggested:

• Return on investment: Net revenue / cost

• Revenue per email sent: Net revenue / # of emails sent

On a campaign-level, these metrics will reveal which campaigns pull in more money — not just more clicks. For your overall program, they quickly convey the importance of your work.

Also: The movers and shakers in your company are going to be much more impressed with figures that include dollar signs.

Show email’s potential

Another way to convince executives of email’s power is to point to success at other companies. Also at the Email Summit last week, Jeff Rohrs, VP, Marketing, ExactTarget, mentioned Groupon as a great example that email marketers could rally around.

Forbes recently dubbed the localized deal-of the-day website the fastest growing company ever, and its success is largely due to great email marketing.

The Wall Street Journal mentioned Groupon’s 50 million email subscribers as a competitive advantage and that some analysts estimate its value at $15 billion.

The executives will care

Once you can clearly attribute revenue and ROI to email, you might be surprised at how much attention you attract from company leaders.

At the Email Summit, Philippe Dore, Senior Director, Digital Marketing, ATP World Tour, presented his team’s email strategy to sell tickets to professional tennis events. A single email drove over $1 million in revenue, and several others brought in over $100,000 each.

The overall email campaign generated about $1.5 million in total. Suddenly, ATP’s executives were interested.

“We have our CMO talking about email marketing and subject lines,” Dore said.

Related resources

Email Marketing Summit 2011: 7 Takeaways to improve results

Email Marketing Awards 2011 Winners Gallery: Top campaigns and best results

Live Optimization with Dr. Flint McGlaughlin at Email Summit 2011

MarketingSherpa 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report

MarketingSherpa Email Essentials Workshop Training with Jeanne Jennings

Photo by: SqueakyMarmot

Social media continues to have a profound effect on marketing, and the use of this channel for marketing purposes is rapidly evolving. This week marks the fielding of our third annual Social Marketing Benchmark Survey to determine exactly how this important new marketing channel has evolved and which strategies will work best going forward.

Last year’s study revealed how social marketing was maturing, resulting in a shift from tactical to strategic thinking. However, we found that most organizations, even those in the strategic phase of social marketing maturity, had not yet figured out how to measure the return on their social marketing investment.

Without the ability to prove ROI, social marketing budgets were, and in most cases still are, being driven by perception. What is the perception? As this chart shows, only 7% of the 2300 social media marketers responding to our last study thought social media was producing ROI and, as a result, were willing to budget liberally. While 49% thought it was a promising tactic that will eventually produce ROI, nearly the same numbers (44%) are much more skeptical and unwilling to invest more.

But social marketing has evolved significantly in the past year and many marketers are not only promising ROI, they are proving it.

So, in our new survey we examine how organizations are overcoming the challenge of social media monetization, and which tactics are most effective for achieving this important objective, in addition to the comprehensive coverage of social marketing topics in general.

To share your insights on social media marketing, please take our third annual Social Marketing Benchmark Survey. This survey is being fielded now and will only remain open through Sunday, February 6, 2011.

Related resources

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

Measuring Social Media’s Contribution to the Bottom Line: 5 tactics (Members’ Library)

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

Social Marketing ROAD Map Handbook

For everyone who made it out to the MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011 this past week at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, you know ;). And everyone who couldn’t attend this year, you missed some great sessions, case studies, speeches and interaction with around 750 of your peers.

What happens in Vegas …

Unless some #SherpaEMAIL folks hit me up *cough @mgieva @martinlieberman cough* this is my evening in #SinCity - phintch

Everyone probably knows the second half of this advertising tagline (hint: what happens, stays), but that’s pretty hard to achieve with real-time blogging (I had posts up on Flint McGlaughlin and David Meerman Scott‘s talks with almost no lead time) from both Sherpa and attendees, crazy-active Twitter hashtag activity (#SherpaEmail) and entire rooms of marketers uploading pictures and video all day long.

We even brought along some of our optimization experts from MECLABS to do one-on-one live optimization of email, landing pages and more (see below) …

Crowdsourced takeaways

A great thing about a successful Email Summit filled with engaged attendees is that reactions to individual sessions and the entire event go online in real-time.

Here’s just a small sample from all the great material this Summit generated:

The #sherpaemail Daily

Email Summit notes shared by Alison Chandler, Marketing Manager American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Here’s some of the material Alison is sharing:

• Slides: http://www.sherpastore.com/related-page-3921.html
• MarketingSherpa’s  2011 Award Winners Special Report – PDF
  http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=31815
• Wrapups across the web
  MarketingSherpa Email Summit takeaways
  http://emailblog.eu/2011/01/26/marketingsherpa-email-summit-takeaways/

  Photos
  http://hashalbum.com/sherpaemail

  Smart Network Data Services
  https://postmaster.live.com/snds/

• Exclusive content gives people a reason to fork over their email addresses. Make at least some of the content in your emails available ONLY to email subscribers (such as special discounts), or FIRST to email subscribers (such as the chance to buy tickets before the general population).

And be sure to check out Alison’s “random gems” at the link.

Key MarketingSherpa Email Summit takeaways from Emailblog.eu — this is a great collection of Twitter commentary

Live Blog: How Pandora Uses Email Marketing to Keep You Listening from EE Tech News

More from EE Tech News — Live Blog: Email Marketing Summit, Real-Time Marketing and PR & Inbound Marketing

Summit panelist, Ardath Albee — Make 3rd Party Content an Opportunity Not a Necessity

4 Email Marketing Challenges and How to Tackle Them from Magdalena Georgieva at HubSpot

And do hit the official MarketingSherpa Twitter account to find retweets of even more crowdsourced content and photos from the Summit.

#SherpaEmail

Of course a blog of crowdsourced material would not be complete without taking in all the activity at the Summit’s Twitter hashtag — #SherpaEmail. Some numbers for the seven-day period from 1/21 to 1/27:

• 2,295 tweets
• 389 contributors
• 327.9 tweets per day

Here’s a sample from the top ten tweeters (and yes, I somehow made it onto this list):

• d’OH! We need to educate on the difference btwn spam & unsub. RT @Listrak: 30% of people use spam button to unsubscribe. Ouch.#SherpaEmail – @martinlieberman
• Caesars generated 100K mobile opt-ins easily. Have had 100K app downloads in last year. 15K people have used mobile check-in. #sherpaemail – @kristinhersant
• Simple but effective. Put a newsletter subscribe on every interaction: Signatures, receipts, door clings, splash pages, … #SherpaEmail – @Kvanbeeck
• Think twice about list rentals and purchases, they don’t perform well. Build out your house list, performs MUCH better. #SherpaEmail – @marthalisa
• Post-modern consumers don’t believe marketers. Don’t sell, say. #sherpaemail #emailmarketing – @coskier
• Implement comprehensive email hygiene and correction to maximize the number of addresses on your list. #SherpaEmail – @Listrak
• B2B email addresses tend to be longer thus more prone to typos. #SherpaEmail – @MelanieAt
• What comes first? Message or medium? Start with the message & decide on best medium #SherpaEmail – @knuss
• MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011 One-on-One Case Study http://t.co/H3rRa1R #SherpaEmail – @davidkonline
• ‘Email is a conversation, not a magazine ad.’ #SherpaEmail – @shannonholato

Optimizing swag

The “more” up there in the live optimation section leads to something probably near, and dear, to most conference and expo veterans’ hearts — swag. At lunch on Wednesday, me and my editor — and Director of Editorial Content MarketingSherpa — Daniel Burstein, sat with Karen Rubin and Magdalena Georgieva of HubSpot and Jessica Best of emfluence and did a little swag optimization.

Sure MECLABS Research Managers and the MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal are the go-to people when you need a better-performing landing page, but who should you turn to in order to make cool swag even cooler? Marketing experts, that’s who.

I’m taking full credit for this one:

Optimizing Swag Real Time (#osrt) at #SherpaEmail @davidkonline: Add a USB drive for an #emailgeek #swissarmyknife - bestofjess

How to optimize this swag from emfluence Interactive Marketing? Easy. Lose the letter opener and add a USB flash drive on the other side of the keyboard brush, and leave the screen cleaner strip alone. Done and done, and voila, you have a Geek Swiss Army Knife. Ah, swag optimization at its best.

These efforts led to this Twitter exchange:

• Optimizing Swag Real Time (#osrt) at#SherpaEmail @davidkonline: Add a USB drive for an #emailgeek#swissarmyknifehttp://twitpic.com/3tnzc8 – @bestofjess
• Had fun optimizing #SherpaEmail schwag @ lunch w/ @KarenRubin@mgieva @DavidKOnline Stop by Emfluence booth for Swiss Army Knife for Geeks – @DanielBurstein
• @bestofjess @DanielBurstein @mgieva@davidkonline My vote is for#optimizedswag – @karenrubin
• @DanielBurstein @mgieva@davidkonline @KarenRubin what other #osrt? Oh! An on/off volume switch for the slingshot monkey. #optimizedswag – @bestofjess

So you can see we have something of a swag-optimizing super group. If you were at MarketingSherpa Email Summit and have your own swag optimization suggestions, feel free to tweet them using #optimizedswag.

And, who could leave out — or forget — the Slingshot SEO monkey:

“I’m walking through the airport and every so often my suitcase screams like a monkey. #sherpaEmail” – @karenrubin

Related resources

Live optimization with Dr. Flint McGlaughlin at Email Summit 2011

Real-Time Marketing: David Meerman Scott at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011

MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011 One-on-One Case Study

Email Summit Case Study: National Education Association’s Member Benefits Corporation

Email marketing strategy independent consultant and MarketingSherpa email marketing trainer, Jeanne Jennings, wrapped up MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011 at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas with a great presentation that offered some quick hit advice illustrated by several case studies.

Make it so

Jeanne opened the session by outlining the four challenges of email marketing:

1. Strategy
2. Relevance
3. Deliverability
4. Return on investment

And she immediately went into the differences between strategy and tactics. In fact, Jeanne admitted when she starts working on an email campaign and starts blocking out the strategy, doing the big picture works gets her so excited she starts getting into tactics too quickly and has to draw back.

Her main definition of strategy is, “A plan of action to achieve a specific goal,” and her description of tactics was to quote Jean Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise — “Make it so.” Strategy is the plan, or blueprint, of your email marketing campaign, and tactics are the steps or stages you take to turn that strategy into reality.

The case study

The first study she presented was an email campaign for the National Education Association’s Member Benefits Corporation conducted this past holiday season. The NEAMB provides programs and services to the 3.2 million members of the National Education Association. This particular case study is focused on two of the seven steps of efficient email strategy — performing a SWOT analysis and developing a content strategy.

The control for this case study was a catalog list email that often ran several pages, making holiday offers hard to find. The test against the control took a page from the Groupon handbook with a clear offer, and content that based on Jeanne’s description I call “Groupon-lite.”

SWOT analysis

• Strengths — members have highly favorable impression of association, great holiday offers for members, recipients historically responded to discounts, new CMO encourages new idea
• Weaknesses — email had been catalog of offers, limited internal resources and budget for content, limited budget for content freelancers, concern that members are being overrun with mail decreasing response rates, no explicit opt-in; opt-out email permission
• Opportunities — Groupon and other deal emails are popular, people are actively looking to save money in this economy, busy professionals (teachers) are looking for ways to reduce holiday stress, shopping online is becoming more and more popular
• Threats — all the other holiday offer emails, differentiate from those; general inbox clutter makes members look for mail messages, some deals offered by retailers aren’t exclusive to organization

Here are the parameters Jeanne set up for the test email: weekly send; 100% opt-in; content strategy — engaging quotes,  gift ideas; single discount offer; low -resource content marketing;  quotes and tips from staff; differentiation from National Education Association’s Member Benefits Corporation control and other retail messages.

The quantifiable results

“Holiday cheer” test v. control

• Open rate up 214%
• Clickthrough rate up 105%
• Decrease of 34% in click-to-open because the click rate was so much higher than control

“Holiday cheer” v. internal benchmarks

• Open rate up 185%
• Clickthrough rate up 337%
• Click-to-open up 49%

Jeanne mentioned that conversion data is not available yet for this study.

Roll your sleeves up and get a full day of email training with Jeanne through MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing Essentials Workshop Training. The next dates include Chicago on Tuesday, April 21, and San Francisco on Thursday, March 10.

Related resources

Ten Numbers Every Email Marketer Should Commit to Memory

Email Marketing: “I am not dead yet”

Welcome Messages: Are You Making a Good First Impression on New Opt-ins?

How a 6 Email Series Increased Unique Key Clickthrough Reach by Nearly 400% Over a Single Email

(photo credit: MYMRMARK)

David Meerman Scott is a marketing strategist and author of Real-Time Marketing & PR: How to Instantly Engage Your Market, Connect with Customers, and Create Products that Grow Your Business Now. He describes himself as a recovering VP of Marketing, and as the keynote speaker he pumped up the crowd at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011 at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.

Real-Time Marketing and PR

David shared a number of examples of actual real-time marketing and engagement, and one had a little relevance to the Summit because the event driving the effort happened in Las Vegas. At the end of last August, Paris Hilton was arrested in Las Vegas for possession of cocaine.

Paris Hilton and Wynn Resorts in Las Vegas

Wynn Resorts immediately sent out a press release stating that she was banned from their properties. The immediate result was that most stories covering the arrest also mentioned that Wynn Resorts banned Hilton as well. Over 5,000 stories were written right after the arrest and a Google search today using this string, “paris hilton arrest las vegas wynn banned” pulls up over 500,000 hits. Wynn resorts took advantage of a real-time event to drive promotion in the form of traditional media coverage.

David said speed and agility are a decisive competitive advantage. Reacting to, and focusing on, what is happening in the news can apply to both email and marketing campaigns. He added that too many companies are run by “MBAs and spreadsheets,” and are looking at data from last week, last month or even last year, and forecasting out as far as five years. He said he didn’t have anything against long-term planning, but David asks, “What about now?” Focus on today.

The Gap logo change

To provide another example of just how fast things happen in real-time, David talked about The Gap changing its logo. The change set off a firestorm of traditional and social media coverage, and most of that coverage was negative. The entire process from logo change, loud and energetic negative reaction, and The Gap announcing it was keeping its old logo happened over four days.

David asked the audience, “Is there anything you could have done with this?” for Summit attendees to think about opportunities with their own businesses and how they might use an event like The Gap logo change, and he pointed out that the event would have played out differently even two years ago. Twitter, Facebook and other online tools have changed the timeline of how the public reacted to the new logo.

(photo credit: @ContactLab)

Real-time guidelines

David said the way to start the process of real-time marketing is set guidelines in the company that allows for employees to take advantage of, and react to, real-time events. He pointed out that news happens all the time. The CEO might be away at a conference, or it might be the middle of the night, or during dinner after business hours.

To truly implement real-time marketing, the triggering event needs to be addressed immediately, and not have to wait for business hours and approval within the company.

Comments from the Twitter feed:

• Nobody cares about your products, except you. Create interesting content! #dmscott#Sherpaemail — @BjarteFalck (Bjarte Falck Olsen)
• Offer valuable content – not incentives. (@dmscott) #sherpaemail — @kristinhersant (Kristin Hersant)
• Don’t “do” social media. Make it a part of who you are. (via @dmscott)#SherpaEmail — @martinlieberman (Martin Lieberman)
• Create interesting content for your audience to share. People love to share valuable or funny information. (@dmscott) #sherpaemail — @kristinhersant (Kristin Hersant)
• Hard to separate work/personal on social media. Just be an authentic human being. (via @dmscott) #sherpaemail — @martinlieberman (Martin Lieberman)
• “virtually everyone is online.” @dmscott. Love it! #sherpaemail — @jenniebennie (Jennie Beyer)

(photo credit: @mattmcn)

Related resources

David’s blog, Web Ink Now

Improve Your Copywriting with Help from Social Media: 7 Tactics from David Meerman Scott

Lead generation: Real-time, data-driven B2B marketing and sales

Email Marketing Manager: Look past campaigns to boost your career

There is a certain tribe of marketers out there that are Pied Pipers for a new way of thinking. Email is dead. Get social.

Well, there are many metrics I can give to refute that stance, but here’s my favorite – paid attendance to next week’s MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011 is up 40% from last year.

Horn tooting done, my point is that the best strategy for most marketers is to engage in both email AND social media marketing, despite what the rhetoric-filled and biased bloggers out there may say. This may not be shocking news to you. Your bigger question is likely – but how?

Well, that’s why we have the Email Summit to begin with, to learn from all the high-performing marketers out there. So, I turned to Lindsay Massey, Marketing Director, Freshpair to share some techniques and tactics that might help your efforts.

Lindsay is a panelist for the how-to panel at Email Summit entitled, “Growing Email Lists and Engaging Customers with Social Media.” Freshpair.com is a leading intimate apparel retailer. You can find them on Facebook and follow them on Twitter. But first, read on…

So, the first thing that jumps out at me from your successful campaign is that Facebook is the “next big thing” in email, while email is supposedly “dead.” Yet, essentially, to me your campaign was really just a traditional email send where Facebook was the conversion goal. “Dead” delivers I guess? How did you approach this send similar to other promotional sends, and in what ways was it different?

Lindsay Massey: We look at email and social as great complements to each other, and we definitely don’t see email as “dead.” After all, how does Facebook notify you that you have new comments or messages? Email!

By engaging our email subscribers in another relevant channel, we are able to interact with them on a more personal level, share unique content to generate buzz and ultimately engage more people in our brand. We approached this send like other promotional sends that are part of a larger campaign in that we developed an offer, segmented our list to target customers with the highest propensity to participate and, where this message would be relevant, created supporting content on Facebook and tracked the results.

This email campaign was different from other promotional sends in that the main goal was to encourage people to follow us on Facebook rather than go straight to freshpair.com. We measured the success differently than other campaigns – number of fans in addition to standard email KPIs.

Why email? Why not, say, Twitter?

LM: We definitely promote our Facebook presence on Twitter as well. The email was just one piece of our overall campaign. We chose to promote Facebook over Twitter for this particular campaign, mainly because Facebook allows you to customize the experience more than Twitter.

We were able to show more content tying back to the email. As soon as a customer fanned us, we were able to display new content that gave them the offer and let them click to freshpair.com to shop. A different approach could definitely be utilized on Twitter and would be a great follow-up campaign.

What is the importance of a Facebook fan-acquisition campaign? What is the value of a Facebook fan?

LM: For us, the goal of a Facebook presence is to strengthen our brand and reach new customers. By encouraging our existing customers and brand loyalists to join, we are able to build our relationship with them, as well as encourage them to share us with their friends.

Buying intimate apparel online can be challenging, so we try to educate fans with photos and take on a friendly tone by sharing funny statistics, like what percentage of people own a lucky pair of underwear. By keeping followers engaged and giving them unique content, we leave a favorable impression, so they remember us when it’s time for a fresh pair!

When it comes to measuring social media, the focus must go beyond traditional e-commerce analytics. We use Omniture to gauge the impact of our Facebook presence, specifically the conversion rates of visitors coming from Facebook. However, we consider Facebook to be more of a branding tool, so the exact value of a Facebook fan goes beyond the data in Omniture.

We also look at fan count and interactions. The customer insight you gather through social media will help you develop strategies across all marketing channels to get new customers in the door and keep them in the door. For example, we test different types of content within posts to see what people are most interested in interacting with. We then use this to inform marketing campaigns to further shape our other social initiatives.

Why aren’t social media sharing buttons enough?

LM: The social media sharing buttons are also important, and we include those in our campaigns as well. However, we see the main content receive the majority of clicks, while the share buttons receive a very small fraction of the clicks in each email campaign. We felt it was important to dedicate an entire campaign to acquire fans, but we also continue to push social through emails and onsite messaging as well.

It’s important to note that one dedicated email is not enough. Acquiring Facebook fans or Twitter followers should be an ongoing effort across channels in order to see the best results. Social isn’t just about sharing content, it’s also about extending interaction to new spheres and providing additional value to your fans. Share buttons are limited in that they don’t allow you to proactively communicate with interested parties and build your brand.

What is the downside of a dedicated send to try to attract Facebook fans?

LM: We didn’t see a downside to this specific campaign. The unsubscribe rate was not higher than a regular promotional send, and the segment of customers we mailed was highly engaged. The subject line actually led to an open rate that was 40% higher than average.

For all the marketing VPs and directors out there, what are the biggest lessons they should take away from your success?

LM: Email can be a very effective driver for Social. Before you begin a Facebook acquisition campaign, be sure you have a clear goal and strategy in place, as well as a supporting content strategy for your Facebook page.

Also, you could start small with a test to your most engaged customers to gauge response before you roll it out to a larger list. Then continue to marry your email and social strategies, so customers can get the information they want in the form they like best.

One of the things that we struggle with is catering to multiple demographics – some people want to see pictures of men in underwear and some people want advice on which bras go with what. Before you push your social presence to your entire list, make sure that you have a defined content strategy (either focus on one demo or have something for everyone so no one feels left out).

As for Facebook specifically:

• Be sure to develop a clear strategy for Facebook overall, so new and existing fans continue to be engaged. If you are just on Facebook to be on Facebook or because your competitors are there, take a step back and rethink your long-term strategy.
• Be sure to devote resources once your strategy is in place, so your Facebook page stays current. Take time to engage with your fans and continue to provide them with unique and interesting content.
• Promote your acquisition campaign across multiple marketing channels – not just email, and be sure to track your results.

Related Resources

Email Marketing: Finding the time to improve results

MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011

MarketingSherpa Email Essentials Workshop Training

Email Marketing: A customer-focused mindset at ATP World Tour

The answer from one marketing automation vendor might surprise you.

During an interview with Kristin Zhivago, President Zhivago Management Partners, for a Sherpa B2B article, Guided by Buyers: Four tactics to create a customer-centric sales and marketing strategy (members’ library), she mentioned that marketing has undergone a sea-change in focus from 80% creative and 20% logistics in the past, to today where those numbers are exactly flipped. I recently had the chance to speak with Phil Fernandez, President and CEO Marketo, and a 26-year Silicon Valley vet with a present and past riddled with marketing software companies. I guessed this “80/20 rule” was a topic right up his alley.

We covered a wide range of marketing subjects, and in passing I mentioned the 80/20 rule presented by Zhivago and Phil immediately offered his opinion on the topic. We didn’t want to sidetrack our talk at the time so I told Phil we’d get back together and revisit his thoughts. This quick interview is the result.

A surprise that opens a debate

Phil’s answer was more than a little shocking coming from a marketing automation guy, and not an agency, since he sells data and logistics … or so I thought. Read on to find out what the CEO of Marketo thinks about the art of marketing versus the science of marketing.

His response opens a debate on the state of marketing today — is it more data- or creative-driven? We’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic in the comments section.

During our conversation a few weeks ago, I mentioned that Kristin Zhivago told me marketing once was 80% creative and 20% logistics and data-driven, and now that number has flipped to where logistics and data make up 80% of a marketer’s world and creative is only 20%. You strongly disagreed. Tell me why.

Phil Fernandez: At Marketo, we obviously evangelize marketing automation and analytics as critical components to drive significantly better marketing performance and ultimately greater revenue growth. I regularly advise corporate management to embrace a more metrics- and data-driven sales and marketing culture – what I like to call “hard marketing.”

So it may come as a surprise, especially from the CEO of a leading technology company that builds products for marketers, that I fundamentally disagree with the premise that marketing has flipped to a world where creative is only 20% of the craft of marketing.

There is no question that the sophisticated marketing automation and analytical solutions available today, such as Marketo’s, are imperative for successful marketing. However, it is incorrect to suggest that the adoption of technology solutions has made creative less important. In fact, I’d argue that the creative side of marketing is more important than ever! Why? Two reasons, one tactical and one strategic.

Tell me more about why the creative side of marketing is more important than ever.

PF: First, we need to look at how marketing automation (“MA”) tools are changing the job of the marketer. In particular, MA solutions help the marketer to implement a key new business process called Lead Nurturing. In Lead Nurturing, it is the job of the marketing professional to engage across channels and develop a relationship over time with each and every prospective buyer for their product or service. They work to educate the buyer, to assist them in their independent research, and to stay top-of-mind for that magical moment when the buyer is ready to make a decision.

And what is the single most important factor in implementing an effective Lead Nurturing program? It’s content. If a marketer is going to stay in touch with prospective buyers over time, helping to educate them and build trust and awareness, the marketer must deliver a stream of compelling, persuasive and brand-reinforcing content. Effective Lead Nurturing initiatives need a continuous stream of new content to stay fresh and relevant, and the most common reason why MA initiatives fail is a company’s inability to create enough content to build a trusted relationship with prospective buyers.

What defines an effective marketing automation system?

PF: The goal of effective MA solutions needs to be to make it fast and easy to do the logistics and data-driven parts of the job and then fade into the background, so that the marketer has the time to focus on the critical process of creative development.

More strategically, the relationship between buyers and sellers has fundamentally changed with the emergence of the Internet, Google, and more recently, the whole world of social media. The buyer has taken control of the process and only “listens” when and where he/she wants. And we all know that the Internet and social media world is a pretty noisy and chaotic place. This shift has greatly elevated the need to break through with creative, compelling content and big ideas – it’s the only way to get buyers to listen.

As a result, the art of marketing (communicating your brand, creating awareness about your unique value proposition and creating marketplace excitement through big ideas) is even more important today than it was a decade ago. If your message and/or content are not resonating with potential buyers, they will purchase from competitors who have done a better job of connecting with them in a relevant, timely and compelling way. That’s why our own marketing team at Marketo spends a lot of time focusing on our brand strategy and developing “magnetic” content via our blogs, webinars, “Definitive Marketing Guidebooks,” videos, events, and yes – advertising.

So both automation tools and the creative side of marketing are important …

PF: Keep in mind, automation and advanced analytics provide marketers speed, precision, and powerful insights into revenue performance. They can even go as far as predicting the amount of revenue a marketing campaign will generate. However, it’s the creative that inspires someone even to consider what you are selling in the first place, and eventually (if you did your job effectively) to buy. Automation and advanced analytics such as we offer at Marketo, give a marketer more productive time to spend on developing compelling creative that will generate the greatest impact. By balancing the “science” of marketing with the essential “art” of the craft, successful marketers are able to accelerate predictable, expanding revenue across the revenue cycle.

Then, what do you think is driving the argument?

PF: As much as anything, it’s probably a factor of today’s technology-driven business environment, where there is an expectation that the right technology can solve pretty much anything. More broadly, since the Industrial Revolution, we have been conditioned to the idea that science and technology replaces the arts and crafts culture that came before it. And in lots of areas, like precision manufacturing, this has been true.

But the world of creating revenue is different. The art of marketing and the art of sales remain very much alive. The good news is that there is a tremendous amount of synergy to be had when companies get this right and the art and creative elements of marketing and sales are combined with hard science and technology that Marketo and others have created. It can seem like the Holy Grail to companies looking to generate more revenue more predictably.

Related Resources

Find Phil’s blog at Revenue Performance

B2B Marketing: What to look for in 2011

Lead generation: Real-time, data-driven B2B marketing and sales

Inbound Marketing: Invest in content to generate leads

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

photo by Jennifer R.

Increasing your emails’ relevance is one of the most effective ways to improve results — but it is also one of the most challenging, and for a variety of reasons.

Sometimes the largest roadblock isn’t expertise, money or will power — but time. A marketer might know exactly what to do and how to do it, but first has to design the next landing page, create the next PPC ad, finish off some copy, attend a meeting, etc.

Sound familiar?

The good news is that this challenge does not come without opportunity. Simplifying part of your process can be the best thing you’ve done for your email marketing in months.

Production was a nightmare

For example, Brad Hettervik, Product Manager, Marketing Systems, Oversee.net, handles the email marketing at LowFares.com, a travel comparison site owned by Oversee. LowFares.com’s weekly email newsletter, Travel Insider, features travel deals selected from hundreds that are forwarded to Hettervik’s team by its partners.

Before the team streamlined the newsletter’s production, partners sent lists of deals in different formats and through different channels. Team members would have to:
o Manually gather the deals
o Go through the lists
o Check each deal by copy-and-pasting their URLs
o Copy the text of deals they would use
o Apply tracking codes to the URLs
o Create the email newsletter

“We select the top 20 to 30 deals out of potentially thousands of deals. So the production part of that was a huge nightmare,” Hettervik says. “It would take sometimes 15 hours,”

“Some of these deals expire in eight hours or 24 hours, so the speed is very important… [But] the production aspect was so labor intensive that if you wanted to add any more layers of targeting, the complexities got out of control” and some deals would expire before reaching subscribers, Hettervik says.

From 12 hours to 30 minutes

The team has since built an email tool in-house to simplify the process. It is a desktop application that pulls the week’s deals from each partner into a single interface. A marketer can click a check-box to select deals to include in the newsletter. Then, with a single click, it codes the URLs and generates the newsletter’s HTML.

The eight- to 12-hour process could easily be completed by an experienced marketer in 30 minutes, Hettervik says.

“Now that we’re not spending a full day or a day-and-a-half creating [each email], that has allowed us to get more analytical with our reporting…We are able to do a lot more targeting, a lot more testing and now it has actually helped us quite a bit in terms of delivering relevant emails to our user base.”

Related resources

MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011

MarketingSherpa Email Essentials Workshop Training

Email Marketing: A customer-focused mindset at ATP World Tour

Email Deliverability: Getting into Gmail’s Priority Inbox