MarketingSherpa Blog

Last week’s MarketingSherpa B2B Newsletter case study — “Lead Generation: Content and email combine for high-quality list building” — covered an effort by cloud replication and disaster recovery startup company, CloudEndure. The overall basis of the campaign was a process created by CloudEndure’s Vice President of Marketing, Ramel Levin, before he joined the startup. This process Ramel called BYOL, or “build your own list.”

The case study features some of the steps involved in Ramel’s lead gen idea, but since he developed it for a company he worked for before joining CloudEndure, the exact steps he took in putting the process together were not part of the case study.

For today’s MarketingSherpa blog post, I wanted to provide more detail on how Ramel created his BYOL concept.

Ramel said he was in a business setting speaking with a startup company that did website translations when the BYOL idea came to him.

“I was asking them, ‘How do you generate leads for websites that need translations?’ He (one of the employees at the startup) started telling me about all the different ways he was doing it, and he talked about the traditional ways of doing email blasts, going to conferences and doing advertising for pay-per-lead and PPC,” Ramel said.

One method for building high-quality lists

After a bit of thought, Ramel decided that building a list of higher-quality leads would be more effective for this company, and here is the process he developed to do just that.

Step #1: Identify the first stage of target companies

Ramel stated, “So I told him, ‘How about doing the following? How about scanning the top one million websites, based on Alexa or Quantcast, or any other ranking service … and find out how many of those websites have only one language.”

He said, for example, scan the top sites in Germany, and make sure they only have pages in the local language. If the company is in the United States, its website only features pages in English.

Read more…

In the MarketingSherpa 2013 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, we asked email marketers which list-building tactics they use …

Q: Which of the following tactics is your organization using to drive email list growth? Please select all that apply. 

As always, we asked the MarketingSherpa audience for their actionable advice based on this data …

75% increase in opt-in rate using squeeze page

When the election campaigning was in full swing last summer, I noticed that Obama was using an interesting squeeze page on whitehouse.gov. I swiped the wireframe and built a similar one of my own for my marketing tools website at AffPortal and noticed an immediate difference in my opt-in rate of about 75%. There’s a lot of value in watching what the big budget guys are doing to list build and swiping the concepts.

– Corey Bornmann, AffPortal.com

Excellent advice, Corey. For those looking to learn more from the “big budget guys,” Toby Fallsgraff, Email Director, Obama for America, and Amelia Showalter, Director of Digital Analytics, Obama for America, will be presenting a keynote case study – Email Optimization: How A/B testing generated $500 million in donations – at Optimization Summit 2013 in Boston.

77% of marketers use website registration pages to drive email list growth

Very good breakdown of marketing options and success rate.

Web page registration is one of the most trusted, hence the high success percentage.

Offline, it’s comparable to responding to a P.O. Box versus an actual address.

– Paul Harding, Jr., Creator/Publisher, iCyberSurfer

6% use other tactics to drive email list growth

How about pop-ups and slide-ins? Are these included? I’d be interested in seeing how these work for people in “quality” markets such as B2B.

I’d also like to know about email harvesting as a tactic because I think many people use it but don’t admit it. They are scared of being called spammers but in reality, if they are presenting valuable solutions, they are not [spammers]. So how about a line for email harvesting?

Personally, I think the “share with a friend tactic” is underutilized because it can be encouraged to a level that takes email capture to exponential heights. You can forward to five friends at once!

– Boyd Butler, consultant

Read more…

This week’s consumer marketing newsletter article wrapped up 2011, and featured four B2C trends to watch in 2012: the mobile marketing channel, local search, online privacy and the new features in pay-per-click advertising.

These choices were based on the 80 (give or take a few) interviews with consumer marketers that my reporting colleague, Adam T. Sutton, and I conducted over the past year. One B2C trend that received serious consideration, but didn’t make it into the article, is content marketing.

Sure, content has its place in any overall marketing strategy, but I’ll bet when many marketers hear “content marketing” as a channel, they think B2B – whitepapers, lead nurturing campaigns, third-party validations within specialized industries, etc.

In fact, content is becoming an important part of consumer marketing efforts.

I’m going to present several case studies and how-to articles from this past year that illustrate just how important it truly is. (Note: MarketingSherpa articles often feature numbered tactics. In this blog post, I’ll call out several specific tactics within linked articles.)

  Read more…

A common challenge we’ve heard at our Email Marketing Workshops is that marketers want to know how to effectively grow their email lists. This was true at the Seattle and Boston workshops, and I expect it will continue through Washington, New York, San Diego and Austin.

One tactic we describe is how to leverage existing channels between your brand and your audience to grow your list. Marketers can study how their audiences receive information from their brands and test adding an opt-in request to those channels.

For example, the New York Public Library used its transactional emails to grow its list. The library already sent automated emails to remind patrons that books were due. The marketers tested a simple addition to these emails:

“Get the latest NYPL news and events. Sign up for our newsletter at: [shortlink].”

This two-sentence request increased the library’s opt-ins by 120%.

More than transactional emails

I really like the above example. It shows how a simple idea in an existing channel can grow a database at nearly no cost.

Your company is not likely to be a library, but this idea extends beyond late notices for books. I saw another example while flying to our Email Workshop last week.

I took this picture on a Delta flight from Memphis to Seattle. I was poking through the touch-screen personal television at my seat and noticed, lo and behold, that Delta wanted my email address. As you can see in the second sentence, the page does a good job of emphasizing the value I’ll receive by handing over my information.

Here’s the next screen:

I am not very sharp on the history of in-flight televisions, but I assume these screens were not installed solely to collect travelers’ email addresses. Instead, I assume that the opt-in request was added later at the suggestion of a clever email marketer. This is another example of a company leveraging its existing channels of communication to build its list.

Look for relevant audiences

In our Email Marketing Workshop, we spend the first half of the list-growth section emphasizing the importance of list quality and how it can be improved. We really hammer on the point that the size of a database is not as important as its quality.

For example, a large database that is loaded with disinterested subscribers is not going to help your marketing nearly as much as a smaller database with subscribers who are interested in your content and offers. You want high-quality subscribers who enjoy receiving your emails and clicking your links.

One way to help build a quality database is to invite only relevant people into your email program. The two examples mentioned above do just that.

• The New York Public Library’s transactional emails reached people who had books checked out. These people had visited the library, so they might have been interested in receiving news about the organization.

• Delta reached people in-flight on a Delta plane. These people were travelers, and they traveled with Delta, so they might have been interested in receiving offers and updates from the airline.

So when you’re looking to your existing channels to help grow your list, be sure to test the channels that reach the most relevant audiences for your email program. You don’t want to invite just anyone into your database. You want to build a high-quality list.

Related resources:

Email Marketing LEAPS Advanced Practices Workshop

Members Library — Growing Email Lists with Social Media: KFC’s Facebook tool adds subscribers

New Chart: Most effective email list growth tactics

Maximizing Email List Growth: How the New York Public Library drove a 52.8% lift in newsletter subscriptions

Email Marketing: Three lessons learned at the MarketingSherpa Email Marketing LEAPS Advanced Practices Workshop

B2B Marketing: Building a quality list