MarketingSherpa Blog

How do you move 18 to 20 segments of customers through the learning process of a complex sale? Mitch Zlotnik, President, and Seth Pauley, Vice President, both of Audimute Acoustic Panels, used marketing automation to educate customers with content on a large buying decision.

To learn the process they used to find the right marketing automation solution and agency to help create this low-touch ecommerce operation, I interviewed Mitch and Seth.

“We’ve been rapidly growing for the last eight years. We’ve found a good partner selection helps you grow your business. A poor selection extracts resources from your business, creates problems that hinder growth,” Seth said.

Mitch and Seth discussed their “Five Q” Technology or Agency Selection Process:

• Qualified (at 3:39 and 7:40 in the video interview)
• Quantified (at 5:52)
• Quick (at 5:05)
• Quill (at 8:30)
• Quality (at 8:39)

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Email marketing is often a constant grind of tiny wins and (hopefully) tiny losses.

That’s why it’s such an honor to be able to recognize a marketing team for their relentless work on a campaign, where despite limitations, they were able to make a real difference in the email conversation between company and customer.

This is my second year as a judge for the MarketingSherpa Email Awards (sponsored this year by Blue Hornet) and it’s always a lot of work (30 hours of pre-screening, followed by 20 hours of deliberation) but a privilege to be able to debate and discuss strengths and weaknesses in email marketing with four other judges, who all come from different email marketing perspectives.

The joy that we get out of it is why this year we wanted to share that process with you, the MarketingSherpa Blog reader, by creating the MarketingSherpa Award – Readers’ Choice category.

Out of 500 speaking submissions and email case studies, the judging panel selected two Best-in-Show winners for B2B and B2C, as well as five finalists for the Readers’ Choice. All five are listed and detailed below with links to full case studies if you wish to learn more.

You can now vote for your Readers’ Choice Award winner. After voting, give your Klout score a workout by showing your favorite some love and sharing on social media.

All of the campaigns met our judging criteria of being transformative, customer-centric, innovative and offering transferable principles that marketing peers can apply to their efforts. Each case study displayed strong results. From there, it’s up to you to decide which one deserves top honors.

Have different criteria? Thoughts to share on any of the campaigns? Let us know in the comments.

Happy voting!

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“One of the biggest challenges we face is educating people about the benefits email campaigns can have for their business when they are done well.”

The above is a recent comment we received about the benefits of email marketing and e-newsletters. Perhaps you face a similar challenge with your clients or business leaders? To help you make the case, here are four benefits of email marketing.

Benefit #1. Social media is traffic, PPC is a billboard, but email is a fork in the road

Social media can be effective, but it doesn’t force a decision. It is much like traffic on a road – a nonstop flow of information. If you look over at the right time, you might see a particular car, and if you don’t, you may never notice it.

PPC advertising can be effective as well, but it is a distraction off to the side. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t get noticed occasionally. However, it does not force an action. You can drive by a billboard without even noticing it.

Email, on the other hand, is a fork in the road. It forces a decision. Even if people simply delete an email without opening it, they took an action. While they were physically taking an action, your subject line had an opportunity to encourage an open.

Perhaps this is why so many social media platforms use email. Think about it – every time an action happens on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook, you receive an email letting you know that it happened so you don’t miss it.

Benefit #2. Build your case over time (automatically)

By setting up a drip email nurturing campaign, you can take prospects from having a limited interest in your company to fully embracing your company’s value proposition – from tire kickers to warm leads.

For example, a gym chain was able to get 98% of people who qualify for a consultation to sign an agreement by using an email education drip campaign.

Benefit #3. Learn about your customers

“Hey”

This was one of the most effective messages for Obama for America that Zoltar himself could never have foretold.

By conducting A/B testing of email messages, the campaign learned what really resonated with its audience and generated more than $500 million in digital donations.

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Some marketers have noticed that when it comes to using triggered emails, there’s an interesting gap in the perception of automation in terms of “how things should be” and “how things really are.”

Most marketers use automated triggered emails for nurturing early stage buyers, which leaves overlooked opportunities to use automated emails to strengthen existing customer relationships or to win back the hearts and minds of recently lost customers.

In today’s MarketingSherpa Blog post, you’ll find three resources you can use to help your marketing team close the automation gap.

Commit to using automation to build stronger customer relationships

Most marketers in a custom or expensive e-commerce niche are typically not scouting for the impulse buys. Instead, their tactics tend to fall along the lines of supporting a longer sales cycle that requires a little more nurturing.

Indochino, a custom clothing company, decided to test an autoresponder send using hand-picked product suggestions in an attempt to build customer relationships using its email program.

Results: Indochino increased its revenue-per-email 540% in just the first test. To learn more about the campaign and the four-step process the team used to select targets and expand the program into other customer segments, check out the case study “E-commerce Marketing: 540% higher revenue-per-email for automated send.”

Customer behavior matters

For Jermaine Griggs, Founder, Hear and Play Music, communicating with customers through email messaging was a critical part of his marketing efforts. Here’s a short clip of the full presentation from MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013.

During his presentation at Email Summit, Jermaine explained how he transitioned from using his CRM system as a “glorified autoresponder,” to a CRM system based on behavior and personalization for each customer’s unique needs.

Results: Jermaine was able to successfully increase the lifetime value of his customers by 416%. To learn more, you can also watch the entire on-demand replay of Jermaine’s session, “E-commerce: Harnessing the power of email automation and behavior-based marketing to increase conversions,” from Email Summit 2013.  

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In today’s MarketingSherpa Chart of the Week, we looked at the long list of organizational email marketing goals marketers told us they are focusing on for the next 12 months, and I implore marketers to narrow their focus to just the three or four goals that will really move the needle in their email marketing program this year.

This is not an exercise I’m unfamiliar with. As we launched the Call for Speakers for MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2014 at the Aria in Las Vegas, we also had to decide the email marketing pillars to focus on – and in the spirit of simplifying, this year you can enter MarketingSherpa Email Awards 2014 and submit a speaker proposal using the same form.

At Email Summit 2013, we built the agenda around five email marketing goals and two elements. Frankly, it was just too much. If you focus on everything, you focus on nothing.

So this year, we’ve narrowed down the Email Summit Call for Speakers and Email Awards Call for Entries to four topics. These topics are below, along with links to MarketingSherpa reporting to help you improve your email marketing, and perhaps get your juices flowing for your own proposal/entry.

Build and Cleanse: Efforts to build up email lists, or strengthen the program overall through cleansing make up this pillar. List data and management, database hygiene, list testing and optimization are examples of the types of campaigns to fall within it.

List Growth: 11% increase from sweepstakes for Waterford Crystal

Email Marketing: CNET win-back campaign sees 8% subscriber re-engagement

Create and Design: This pillar will recognize message testing and optimization, as well as delving into marketing efforts involving design creative, copywriting, messaging.

Email Marketing: User-generated content helps drive 16% clickthrough rate

Email Marketing Optimization: How you can create a testing environment to improve your email results

Deliver and Automate: This pillar will focus on marketers’ efforts with marketing automation and deliverability. The function and theories behind testing and optimization will also be discussed within this pillar.

Marketing Automation: 416% higher customer lifetime value from auto-email strategy

Personal vs. Robotic: How to turn automated email into personal experiences that drive new and repeat sales

Email Deliverability: How a marketing vendor with 99 percent delivery rates treats single opt-in lists vs. double opt-in lists

Connect and Integrate: The optimization of email integration tactics with social media, websites, mobile, offline and testing will make up this pillar.

Social Email Integration: Sony Electronics nets 3,000 clickthroughs from email to “pin” on Pinterest

Email Summit: Integrating mobile, social and email marketing channels

But, enough from us. We want to see what you’ve been working on, and more importantly, how your marketing peers can learn from your work. If you have any questions, we’re here to help. You can check out the FAQ … or just ask us.

Also, we put together a quick video to show you what it’s like to be an Email Summit speaker…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Loren’s 10 tips for success

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

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Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with Julie Schwartz, Senior Vice President of Research and Thought Leadership at ITSMA (Information Technology Services Marketing Association), and Laura Patterson, President of VisionEdge Marketing. Both were involved in recent marketing research, 2012 ITSMA/VEM Marketing Performance Management Survey: The Path to Better Marketing Results.

The survey was conducted during the summer of 2012 via email and social media invitation through Twitter and LinkedIn, and included 405 completed surveys.

Here is a chart outlining details of the respondents:

Click to enlarge

All respondents were analyzed by company type, company size and by a self-grading system (grade results included, and note that “D” was the lowest possible grade):

• A – Marketing demonstrates contribution to the business: 25%

• B – Marketing makes a difference, but contribution is not measured (these marketers were considered “middle of the pack”): 33%

• C and D – Marketing may have an impact, but not known if impact is material (these marketers were considered “laggards”): 33% for “C” and 9% for “D”

Click to enlarge

Here are the key takeaways from the research:

• Marketing’s satisfaction with its ability to measure, analyze and improve performance is shockingly low

• Marketers are caught in a downward spiral as they report past performance to continually prove the value of marketing

• A few exceptional marketers have cracked the code; they excel across the board in data, metrics, processes, tools, analytical skills and reporting

• These grade “A” marketers can clearly demonstrate their value and contribution to the business

• The number of “A” marketers has remained relatively constant over time, but we see a decline in the number of “B” marketers

Because the heart of this research was marketing performance management, the self-described grades listed above were created by the key question: What grade would the C-suite give your marketing organization for its ability to demonstrate its value and impact on the business?

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Pilots have it easy. All they do is flip on the autopilot, order some Sleepytime® tea from the galley, and get a little shuteye, snoozing across the Atlantic, until they land at Schiphol (word of caution: this is based on my utter lack of knowledge of what pilots actually do … but thanks for getting us there safely).

In all seriousness, marketers have an autopilot, too … of sorts – the automated, event-triggered email. When I read Megan McCardle’s line in Newsweek, “Looking for a fail-safe plan to get rich without working?” I thought, “That could almost be a description of triggered emails.”

Think about it: Triggered emails offer the Holy Grail of email marketing that is so difficult to achieve – relevant, timely information.

I sign up to your email address, you welcome me … right at the moment I am most interested in receiving emails from you. And, perhaps, I hop right on a promotion in that welcome email, since you’re reaching me at the peak of my interest in your company (hey, I just signed up for your list).

Or I abandon a shopping cart because the product is 20% too expensive and then, poof, like magic, I get a 20% discount code in my inbox.

Or it’s my birthday, and you give me a free bottle of prosecco or wine to celebrate (hey, I’m going out tonight anyway), as Pizza Express did for Kate …

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Triggered emails are rarely discussed as a standalone tactic. Buzzwords like “marketing automation” and “shopping cart recovery” are everywhere, but the automated messages behind them seem to be taken for granted.

After 2011, I am no longer taking triggered emails for granted. I interviewed scores of marketers that used them to achieve fantastic results by:

• Nurturing their newest leads
• Notifying customers that products needed service
• Encouraging visitors to return to a website
• Incentivizing customers to refer friends
• And much more

Through these and many similar campaigns, I have noticed that triggered messages have tremendously higher engagement rates than most other emails. Why is that?

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In the B2B marketer’s toolbox, marketing automation software is more like industrial equipment than a simple screwdriver. It’s a capital investment, and it does some serious heavy lifting.

There are many automation vendors out there with a wide range of price points and features to fit the needs of marketers of all size of prospect list and complexity of sale. One thing that remains the same across all these options is there are some key elements to fitting marketing automation into any sales cycle that every marketer should keep in mind.

Jason Striker, Digital Marketing Manager, ICM Document Solutions, presented “Marketing Automation for Misers – Strategies for implementing an effective automation program on a tight budget” to the audience at the recent MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2011 in San Francisco, and he offered a solid blueprint for doing just that for marketers with any budget size .

Here are seven tactics Jason gave our Summit attendees that I’d like to share with you:

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