Anything Goes Marketing

5 Mistakes B2B Marketers Need to Avoid in 2010

2009-12-22T01:28:00.002-05:00

2009 has been a long year but as I reflect back on my many conversations, I've created a top 5 list of items to avoid in 2010:

1. Not having a defined social media strategy

You would be surprised by the number of companies that say “yeah, social media is important but it’s not important to us at the moment”. In 2010 you will not have a choice but to make social media part of your overall marketing strategy. If you’re company is just breaking ground in this area, at the very least make a commitment to listen to what people are saying about you. For example, check out http://addictomatic.com/ and search for your company name. Most likely, you are being mentioned. Now search for your competitors. This may be enough of an impetuous to get moving on a reactive social media strategy such as “monitor what is being said about you and respond where needed to protect our brand”.

Addictomatic is a free tool that will get you started down this path. You may want to look at some of the paid services out there such as Radian6 or Vocus. Once you have this down, you can then start working on a proactive strategy and determine what it will take in your organization to make this possible. If you’re having trouble with this concept, skip down to #4.

2. Not sending relevant and timely messages

If you continue to only send email blasts on a schedule that you dictate to your email subscribers, you risk massive list attrition, damaging your overall email deliverability and a loss of sales and sales opportunities. The key to sending relevant communication is to automate the process. This may mean creating a lead nurturing program for new inquires on your website or using dynamic content in emails that presents a more relevant message. This concept needs to be at the forefront of your planning in 2010. If you have an automated program in place, look at ways that it can be adjusted to get an even higher response.

3. Not having an accurate picture of your database

Did you have an email campaign this year that received a lower than expected response and blamed the creative or the offer on the poor results? It may well have had to do with these items but did you consider looking at the state of your list and/or database? I highly recommend that you query your database to understand how "active" your contacts are. You need to understand the true state of your database so you can make decisions on what you need to do in 2010 to achieve your goals. Knowing how many contacts in your database have bounced and unsubscribed is no longer enough - you need to understand how much "dead wood" you're carrying around.

In addition, your data may need a "face lift" or a complete makeover as it's either inaccurate or out of date. Consider using data tools that are included in your marketing automation system to clean up your data. You can also look at services like Fresh Address (http://biz.freshaddress.com/) that can clean up your email addresses or providers such as ReachForce or MarketOne that can generate leads based on your specific needs.

4. Not taking advantage of your online community

As a marketer, there are thousands of online resources out there that you can take advantage of to improve your marketing skills. However, listening and reading is just “half the battle” (why am I having memories of GI Joe cartoons from the 80s?). You need to engage other marketers to really learn and get the most out of the resources that are available and there are online communities that are waiting to be taken advantage of. Here are some things you can do today:

Search for a LinkedIn Group that interests you and join it. Participate in discussions or start a new one yourself. Not sure which group to join? See which groups your connections have joined or ask them directly.

Ask and answer questions on LinkedIn. You may see a theme here. There are a lot of experts in your area that are willing to help you so have a look at LinkedIn Answers. To begin, I recommend browsing the Marketing and Sales category and looking for a subcategory that interests you.
Join Twitter and look for a Twitter List that includes tweets about areas of marketing that interest you. To get started, use a tool like http://listorious.com/ that lists some of the top lists on Twitter. An easier idea is to look at the list of a tweeter that you admire and follow their list. Here is my Twitter list that I generated that I follow daily. Again, to really engage the community you need to ask questions and respond.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. At my company, I’m an active participant in our customer only community. If you’re lucky to have such a community available to you, take advantage of it. Find out who the people that contribute the most and try and help them out if they need it. They will hopefully help you in return. You may want to look for them on LinkedIn or Twitter and follow some of my recommendations above. I’m a big advocate of Xobni that is a plugin for Outlook. It helps me easily add people to my Twitter and LinkedIn communities – check it out.

5. Not using best practices or acting on lessons learned from past campaigns

While this may be a given, you need to be continuously updating your skills to get the most out of your marketing campaigns. I highly recommend that you subscribe to resources such as the Marketing Insights blog, MarketingSherpa, MarketingExperiments, SiriusDecisions, ClickZ, and MarketingProfs to name just a few of the great resources that I use on a daily basis. This is on top of the number of great articles that my community of LinkedIn and Twitter provide me.

I also recommend testing your campaigns by using A/B and multivariate testing for emails and landing pages. What you may find is that you're going to be creating your own best practices based on what you found successful.

My last point is to accurately track your campaigns so you can easily see why certain campaigns were more successful that others in order to reproduce this success for future campaigns.

Of course, one of your biggest sources of best practices should be the vendors you work with. Part of my daily job is to work with marketers to help them improve their campaigns and make them successful. You too should have access to a live person that can meet with you regularly and that can provide you with advice on what you’re doing right and where you can improve. Make that a priority for 2010 if you can.

I hope you enjoyed these and please let me know if there are additional mistakes that you recommend avoiding in 2010. Happy Holidays from my family to yours!

Chad H
@chadhorenfeldt

”You’re so 2000 and late” courtesy of zazzle.com
”The Battle” image courtesy of Patrick Hester's Blog
”Good Data, Bad Data” courtesy of CounterForce Blog
”Your community Profile” courtesy of www.socialdesire.com

B2B Marketing Trends From Eloqua Experience 09 Via Twitter

2009-11-15T23:57:00.006-05:00

Earlier this month I left my newborn and poor wife at home for an unforgettable week at Eloqua Experience in San Francisco. This sold out event brought together some of smartest marketers from all over the world. While there were a few keynote speakers, the conference focused on having the Eloqua community share their experiences so we could all learn from each other.

The main difference this year from last year was that we not only shared our knowledge and insights with each other but with the power of Twitter, we could share these with the rest of the globe. This made the event even more exciting as tweeters could listen to speakers, engage other tweeters, tweet their experiences, and see what others were tweeting about all at the same time! To better understand, how Eloqua pulled this off, see: Social Media Buzz at a Live Event. The result was better than Eloqua could ever have expected. The content generated by the event attendees was almost as good as the content from the speakers themselves. Why? Because it’s real. It’s in the moment. What better way to get in the heads of those that attended than by reading their actual thoughts.

While I could write a number of blog posts on my own findings from this event, I decided to let Twitter write the post for me. Of course, I did sift through over 1,000 tweets for trends as well the most memorable tweets. The Eloqua product was much discussed at the event but I’ve excluded those tweets here as this post was focused on learnings for B2B marketers that goes beyond Eloqua. I hope you enjoy it and I encourage you to follow the Tweeters that I mention below. They are some of the best and brightest out there. And if you’re mad that I forgot a important moment or missed a cherished tweet of yours, add a comment at the bottom.

Social Media And B2B Marketing

Social media played such a major factor at this event. This post as an example, was written from the product of social media (Twitter). At Eloqua Experience, there was a focus on helping marketers better understand the different aspects of social media, how to better leverage social media, and why they need to leverage it. One of the memorable moments on Day #1 was at the social media training session when all of students needed to set up a Twitter account (if they didn’t have one) and tweet using the #EE09 hash tag. It actually caused Twitter to block the IP address at the hotel from accessing Twitter for a short period of time due to the amount of new Twitter accounts generated. Those at the event felt proud that they’re collective voice reverberated across the internet – powerful stuff!

David Meerman Scott was a fantastic speaker and adding all the golden nugget tweets from his presentation wouldn’t due it justice. I have added a few though.

Here is a small taste of what was discussed:

tracyekraft: Social Media Revolution http://bit.ly/1Q6I5R at Eloqua Experience learning how to be better w/social media. #ee09

EricHorton: Twitter just blocked the IP for the #ee09 Twitter training session. How will new users learn to reap the benefits from Twitter?

jocebrown: Social's big impact in B2B marketing will be in how you interact with customers and develop advocates and relationships - Laura Ramos #EE09

stevewoods: Thought leadership and credibility, NOT community size are main drivers of why ppl engage in online communities - @lauraramos at #EE09

chadhorenfeldt: Track social media engagement, not ROI @lauraramos #EE09

edthewebguy: #ee09 steve woods - if facebook was a country it would be the 4th most populous

rhonda: #EE09 It's not about controlling the message it's about getting information out there. @dmscott

Bpoz: @dmscott: lose your fear of social media and lose control of your marketing. #EE09

tillatorrens: New Rule by @dmscott - EARN attention by publishing your way in - via YouTube, blogs, etc #EE09

chadhorenfeldt: #EE09 @dmscott borrowed this from @yoda to describe new rules of marketing: u must unlearn what u have learned

The Marketing Organization

While many of my conversations are focused solely on technology, it’s the people and process that are the building blocks of a successful marketing organization. The tweets below focus mostly on the session held by Tony Jaros from SiriusDecisions and some additional tweets from the Omniture session who use much of what SiriusDecisions preaches. The marketing organizations that have the right people and are using the best practice strategies will have the most success. As an example, SiriusDecsions focused on the concept of what they called the Demand Center.

lauraramos: #EE09: Tony Jaros of Sirius Decisions talks about the gap in marketing skills, not the technology or relationship with sales.

lauraramos: #EE09: Now need 2 worry about how 2 facilitate demand through the entire waterfall. Don't sell yourself short by thinking it's anything less

lauraramos: #EE09: Best marketing organizaitons will see the biggest change at the bottom of the waterfall. Waterfall is center of all marketing.

jocebrown: Neither a white paper not a product is a campaign....you need to be solving a problem....cannot continue to be tactically focused #EE09

lauraramos: #EE09: Quality marketing talent must support a wide variety of disciplines. Silos must go. Marketing automation experience will be key.

jocebrown:Frightening number of B2B marketers self taugh with no budget for training according to Sirius....huge performance gap #EE09

lauraramos: #EE09: The Demand Center is a center of excellence for program creation but with advisory, technical, and execution around buyer's journey.

jocebrown: It's the people and process not the technology that is stalling sophisticated nurturing and scoring - Laura Ramos #EE09

lauraramos: #EE09: Omniture organization looks like: Audience Program Mgmt, Offer Development, Channel Execution, and Marketing Operations supports all.

lauraramos: #EE09: 1: Sales engagement means taking in sales language: what do we contribute to the pipeline, how many sales accepted oppty do you need?

paynejoe: Avg CMO tenure 22 mnths. BUT if the CMO has a demand generation or sales enablement background he/she is 2 times liklier to make 5yrs #ee09

Measuring Marketing Effectiveness

This was definitely a hot topic and Eloqua was lucky to not only have speakers like Laura Ramos and Tony Jaros but also CMOs from its customer base. A theme across many of these discussions was the need for marketing to demonstrate its impact to the rest of the business. This doesn’t just mean the pipeline influenced from a lead nurturing program but also can mean the effectiveness of lead scoring to the sales team.

lauraramos: #EE09: all this [marketing] activity amounts to 18 to 30% of the pipe. Must look at influence in the waterfall, even if marketing doesn't source it.

lauraramos: #EE09: @siriusdecisions Marketers must measure the performance of demand creation, not of marketing.

SuaadSait: Benchmarking marketing statistics is NOT what matters, Baseline YOUR mktng data & set goals to grow as a commitment per @lauraramos #EE09

jocebrown: Nurturing value measured in pipeline velocity - Drew Clarke IBM #EE09

rhonda: #ee09 Drew Clark on measuring nurturing: what type & how many activities lead participates in, what their role is in opp & in account.

lauraramos: #EE09: Waterfall + database segementation shows Omni needed to acquire 150K more names to feel the model. Content choice: research survey.

lauraramos: #EE09: Omniture measures conversion across channel and pipeline. Lets them know where to invest marketing programs and why.

rhonda: @pteshima #EE09 ?'s CMOs ask: What initiatives drive ROI, how does sales & mktg funnel look, r my strategies working, how do I benchmark?

rhonda: #EE09 Scott Sheppard shares great ideas on rolling out lead scoring to your sales team: videos, distribute custom reports & driving adoption

Marketing Tactics

If you ask many marketers, one of the main reasons they came to Eloqua Experience was to pick up a few tips that they could take home with them and implement right away. This could mean learning how to clean your data so that it could be easy to segment off of or something simple as creating a control group that you send no marketing communication to and measuring how it fairs to the rest of the database. It’s very powerful when marketers themselves can share their results and let you know what is working and what isn’t.

jill_rowley: @lauraramos - content needs to be about me and my needs, not you and your products, your awards. #EE09 #Eloqua

JenPumpItUp: Session tip: How good is your lead scoring program? Only as good as your sales team buy-in. Make sure they're a part from the start. #EE09

rhonda: #EE09 marketers shld work w/ the sales team to help define a qualified lead for scoring... But DON'T ask them to help you prioritize assets!

rhonda: #EE09 Incorporate time frame into ur scoring model to ensure recency is reflected in the "value" of the lead.

rhonda: #EE09 Sales adoption of lead scoring is a paradigm shift-if rep reluctant, push adoption not just from top but via success of their peers.

lauraramos: #EE09: Omniture says realtime alerts increased contact ratios by to 100X and increased opportuntiies generated by 21X vs. no tools/process.

jfernandez: I love the idea of misspellings within automated e-mails from Sales Rep to add a touch of authenticity. Brilliant stuff, @Omniture. #EE09

Eloqua: Omniture: EVERY email must be personalized and relevant. #EE09

gclarkmt: Mikel Chertudi says Omniture only saw a 3% drop in conversions with their really long contact form versus a short form. #EE09

gregforrest: Omniture says do less programs and make them better - get more out of them. #ee09

tmcmullen: favorite idea of the day - create a control group when testing marketing campaigns/effectiveness #ee09

hallim: #EE09 data cleansing - tactics to support the overall strategy of demand generation and qualified leads into the sales pipline

chadhorenfeldt: http://twitpic.com/o5sq5 - Great Eloqua data quality dashboard in Eloqua by @gregforrest #EE09 #b2b #marketing

jill_rowley: Tony Jaros from SiriusDecisions says something like....Lead nurturing turns garbage into gold. #EE09 #Eloqua

Until Eloqua Experience 2010…

I hope you enjoyed some of these tweets as much as I did and if you were at Eloqua Experience, I hope these tweets bring back some good memories. To end this post, I want to highlight some of the true marketing rock stars that were at the event. These people were the finalists for the Markie awards. Here is Tweet from the Markie awards ceremony celebrating the achievements of the finalists:

stevewoods: Was a fantastic evening! Congrats all! RT @chadhorenfeldt: http://twitpic.com/o7l7g - The Eloqua Markies finalists #EE09

For more information on the winners, see: Winners of the 2009 Markie Awards where you can learn more about the categories, the winners and why they won.

Be sure to add comments on your favorite tweets or moments at EE09. Looking forward to Eloqua Experience 2010!

Chad H.

@chadhorenfeldt

PS: For videos from the event and some of the sessions I mentioned above, check out the Eloqua YouTube Channel. For more pictures, Check out the Eloqua Fanpage on Facebook

PPS: I would like to thank every tweeter at the event – you made this post possible. Believe me, it was hard choosing who to include! I would especially like to thank @lauraramos, @jocebrown and @rhonda who I used extensively.

PPPS: I did mention that this post was not on the Eloqua technology but I did want to give a shout out to the Pedowitz Group and its Sweet Platform that captured all of the tweets from the event in Eloqua and made it possible for me to analyze them. Very nice add-on and a big thank you.

How To Build a Lead Nurturing Culture Part I

2009-10-20T07:00:00.001-05:00

Are any of you out there new fathers? How about new parents? I’m still getting the hang of holding my 2 month old son while I check my emails or read a book. I’m getting much better at this juggling act and on some of those nights when he stays up I’ve been able to generate some blog post ideas – I just didn’t have the two hands needed to type until now. :) So here we are.

My biggest inspiration for this post was re-reading Jim Collins’ famous Good to Great. I remember reading it years ago and recalling how it guided some of my career choices as well my management style. It was time to give it another read to see if I could get another boost of inspiration. While I was distracted by reading about how great Fannie Mae and Circuit City were, you need to read past this to get the major points that Jim (if I can call you that Mr Collins) is trying to make.

Technology Does Not Create Momentum – It Accelerates It

Good to Great stresses that technology is not going to instantly transform a good company to a great company. There are many factors that are necessary before technology can really provide companies with the boost that they may have been expecting. In addition, some companies may not be able to fully utilize technology until they’ve put the proper building blocks in place.

There are many similarities between the concepts that Jim Collins discussed in his book and lead nurturing. Lead nurturing can mean many different things to may different people. In my definition for this post, I’m referring to a process that automatically delivers highly targeted emails to prospects or customers in a specific time frame via a marketing automation platform. There is no question that lead nurturing has been a proven tactic for B2B marketers. Aberdeen has reported that the Best-in-Class organizations are have doubled the bid-win-ratio on nurtured leads compared to their peers who have launched lead nurturing programs. Why are we seeing some companies exceed at lead nurturing over other similar companies? Why do we see other organizations that have the technology in place for automated lead nurturing under perform? Beyond the technology itself, what is needed is an organizational culture that will foster and, well, nurture the concept of lead nurturing. For this to happen, marketers are going to need to roll up their sleeves and get to work. I'm going to provide some pointers on how to get there.

Building a Lead Nurturing Culture

Executing a successful lead nurturing campaign is no different that executing traditional types of marketing campaigns. However, there are some key items that you need to focus on and like any marketing effort, proper planning up front and processes will make all the difference. They key here is creating the right frame of mind for your organization that will allow lead nurturing to succeed.

Here are the key items that you need to consider in building a lead nurturing culture:

Targeted, Engaging Content is King. Content is at the core of your lead nurturing efforts. It needs to be engaging and be targeted to your intended audience. You will need to push your organization to ensure you have the resources in place to create the necessary content for your lead nurturing efforts. This may mean sequestering experts from all over your company to help create this content or hiring content professionals.
If you think that a “one size fits all approach” for your lead nurturing content will do, you will not achieve optimal results. If you think that product sales sheets are appropriate for lead nurturing, you will not achieve optimal results. If you’re not sure the type of content that should be included in lead nurturing campaigns, check out SavvyB2BMarketing’s post Need Content? 20 Formats to Consider. Remember that your prospective customer is being bombarded with hundreds of emails each day – how is your email going to appeal to them? Always keep this in mind.

Whether you have content generated for your nurturing campaign or you discover that you already have the content you need from your previous marketing campaigns, you still need to align this content within your lead nurturing campaigns to match your prospects’ buying process. For more information on this topic, see The Buying Process; Auditing your Content Assets.

Focus on leads that are in the funnel. Rather than trying to continuously fill the top of the funnel, marketers need to create campaigns that will engage the contacts that are in your database but not yet ready to buy.

Aberdeen’s research stated that only 16% of the total leads from the companies they studied are deemed as "sales opportunities" that will actually close. Therefore the remaining leads (84%) present a tremendous opportunity for your company. If you keep your company top of mind to these prospects, there is a greater chance that they will buy from you than your competitors. In addition, there is a significant savings in cost per opportunity by focusing on leads that have already expressed interest in your product or service.

Using lead nurturing to target existing leads can not only keep these people “warm”, it can also be used to further qualify them which leads to our next point around sales and marketing alignment.

Building a lead nurturing culture will not happen in one day and either will this blog post (my son just started to cry). Stay tuned for the next post(s) where we’ll cover a common framework for sales and marketing, establishing standard marketing effectiveness metrics and benchmarks, creating focused segments and outlining the right skills marketers need for lead nurturing to thrive.

Remember, technology will only succeed if your organization has fostered the right environment for lead nurturing to succeed.

Chad H.

“King” image courtesy of seoibiza.com

Email Marketing Metrics You Should be Tracking

2009-09-14T00:10:00.007-05:00

If you weren’t aware, Canada (Vancouver specifically) will be hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics. I was inspired to write this post by a group of brave Canadian ski jumpers that are have been denied permission to compete in the upcoming games. You may be saying – wait a minute, ski jumping is an Olympic event so what’s the problem? The “problem” is that these athletes are women and the IOC has not sanctioned women’s ski jumping as an official event making it the only Winter Olympics activity that does not allow women to compete in. We’ll come back to this story – let’s focus back on email marketing.

Sometimes it’s What’s Missing That Counts

I was reading MarketingSherpa’s 2009 Email Marketing Benchmarking Guide looking for useful metrics and tips. I found some extremely interesting data that I will discuss in future posts but what interested me more was what I believe is missing based on what I discuss with my customers on a day to day basis. The goal of this post is not to criticize the great work by the MarketingSherpa folks but rather to provide feedback and start a discussion on the types of benchmarks that should be included in future reports – especially when we’re talking about b2b marketing.

Email Metrics That Need Benchmarks

Here is a list of the email metrics that I would like to see in future MarketingSherpa Email Benchmark reports:

Automated Email Metrics. I’m not referring to autoresponder emails but rather to campaigns that contain two or more automated emails. These emails should be sent using a marketing automation system like Eloqua. The goal is to demonstrate that key email metrics such as opens, click-throughs and conversions are much higher while unsubscribes are much lower using an automated program such as lead nurturing when compared to manual email sends (“one offs”). It would be very useful to B2B marketers to have benchmarks to track if their automated campaigns are trending upwards or downwards year after year.

In addition, at a time when marketers need to do more with less, automated email campaigns allow marketers to reach many more recipients with a fraction of the effort. Therefore another metric may be the number of emails sent using automated campaigns and/or the number of programs executed. Considering that a recent Aberdeen Research report clearly demonstrated that best in class companies are finding lead nurturing successful, adding in these types of metrics should be a no-brainer.

Once we start down this path we can create many different categories as there are a number of different types of automated campaigns such as re-engagement campaigns, renewal programs, trial programs, and welcome campaigns.
How Email Contributes Further Down the Sales/Marketing Funnel. A common theme in 2009 is that marketers need to prove the value of their marketing spend in even greater detail. Therefore email opens as an example is not good enough. What we need to see is metrics such as the number of marketing touches (including email) that lead to an opportunity and/or closed deal. This data needs to go beyond the communications that marketing is sending but should combine the efforts from marketing AND sales.

I know that you're thinking this is not easy to do and I agree with you but today’s marketing automation systems track all of the “digital body language” associated to a customer or prospect and display this data in ROI reports. It’s this type of data that will allow marketers to decide which messages are working and which aren’t and to clearly demonstrate the value that marketing is contributing to the organization.
Database Accuracy Metrics. The cleaner your database, the better your marketing results will be – this is fairly obvious. However, do we really talk about this and benchmark this data enough so that marketers perceive this as a high priority? Marketers need to go beyond just generating new subscribers but also to ensure that they maximize the investment of these new contacts by ensuring that the profile for this contact is accurate and contains the necessary information for further segmentation. It’s been proven that contacts with accurate and complete information allow for better segmentation and personalization for email campaigns which increases response. I would like to see metrics that include the percentage completeness of contacts for key contact fields and the resulting email response metrics for campaigns that involve data that has been cleansed.
Multi-channel Metrics. The success of email marketing campaigns should no longer be looked at in isolation. In fact email marketing should no longer be looked at in isolation. Successful marketers are combining email with other channels such as SMS, direct mail, social media, tele-prospecting and recorded voice to maximize its effect.

It would be very helpful to see which channels combined with email were the most successful in certain situations. For example, should B2B marketers combine email and SMS messages for event reminders or is email sufficient? Did a combined direct mail and email campaign really lift response for a new product launch or was email sufficient? Marketers are looking for benchmark data to help them make decisions on how to maximize their marketing dollars and these types of metrics could really help.

With that said, MarketingSherpa may already be compiling these metrics in other reports but I did not see them in the recent email benchmarking report and wanted to ensure that they’re aware of these key items. I would love to hear from you if you feel these items should be included in future reports and if there may be other metrics that may be missing. And oh yeah, go sign the petition over at http://www.wsj2010.com/ to allow these courageous ski jumpers to fulfill their dream of competing in the Olympics in an event that is an obvious omission.

Chad H
Follow me on Twitter: @chadhorenfeldt

PS: Become a fan of my new son Matthew on his Facebook fan page.

Tweet This!

Tips on Using Twitter to Boost Your Marketing Efforts

2009-08-03T13:35:00.007-05:00

Are you already tired of Twitter? Do you think it’s just a fad? Well think again because the popularity of Twitter is growing at an alarming rate.
I’m always trying to think about how marketers can better leverage the social media technologies that are out there and then share them with you. As you read these, you need to think about your end goals. Many of these may not be worth it to you and your company but they’re good to keep in mind.

I’ve already written a post on tips for using Twitter and email marketing but I wanted to take this to another level. This is not a post on the basics of Twitter. If you want some basic tips on Twitter, check out Twitter 101 or Hubspot’s How To guide. I was inspired by those bright people over at Radian6 who showed me some of the untapped potential of Twitter. This led me to research the ways that marketers are leveraging Twitter to improve their engagement with their target audiences. Most of these tips are dead simple so enjoy and use them well.

Taking Your Marketing to the Next Level With Twitter

Link to Your Twitter Testimonials. If you go to Radian6’s home page, they’ve included a banner that says “See what they are saying about us on Twitter”. What they’ve done is used the Twitter “favorite” feature to mark the posts where people have made positive comments about them and then featured this prominently on their home page as well as on confirmation pages. This is simple, yet brilliant. They’ve leveraged Twitter to show both Twitter and non-Twitter users what real people are saying about them. You could probably create an RSS feed from this URL as well and then display this content in real time on your blog or website.
Socializing Your Landing Pages. On his reside blog, Philip Nelson describes how Eloqua includes a number of Twitter links below the main call to action to continue the conversation via Twitter and other social media outlets and to leverage tools like Twitter to further promote your marketing materials. It also includes links to prominent Eloqua Tweeps that will help build your Twitter brand.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words. If you’re looking to make your company seem more real to prospects and customers, Twitter is perfect for this. However, words can only say so much. If you’re at an event, have a cool employee get together or doing a live webinar, all you need to do to make your Twitter account come alive is a camera phone and a Twitpic account.

Once you sign up at Twitpic, you’ll get an email address that you can email your pics to from your phone. The subject in your email is the message that will appear with a link to the pic. It’s that easy. Doing this in real time helps employees, customers and prospects feel like they are right there with you. Barefoot_exec provides an excellent example:
Change Your Twitter Home Page Pic. This idea literally jumped out at me when I went to Dunkin Donuts Twitter page.

Look at the size of that drink! You know that they’ll change the iced drink to hot chocolate come the fall. That is a good use of Twitter for your marketing efforts. Think about how you can time the changes to your pictures to promote events or product launches.
Combine the Power of Twitter and StumbleUpon. The new URL shortener Su.pr makes it easy to shorten and track long URLs but goes well beyond that. By using this service, you can point people to your blog posts and events and have readers further promote it by indicating to the StumbleUpon community that they like it. In addition, this service makes it easy to promote a page on both Twitter and Facebook at the same time as well as allowing you to schedule when the Tweet should be published if it’s specific to an event or if you want to Tweet and have a life.
Direct the Conversation #1 Using Hashtags. People are going to start talking about you on Twitter and you have little control over this conversation. However, there are a few tricks and tools you can use to direct the Twitter stream. For example, if you have an event, promotion, theme etc… create a hashtag for it (what is a hashtag?). Here is a great example of how Dunkin Donuts created a contest and used a hashtag to focus the conversation and engage its customers. To win a prize, their Twitter followers had to write about a bold moment in their lives. By using the hashtag, #FrznCapp, tweeps could monitor the conversation using the Twitter search tool:

In a recent webinar, Marketing Experiments had a great idea of including a slide at the beginning of the presentation that included the Twitter hashtag for the webinar and provided two ways to monitor and contribute to the presentation: Using Tweetchat.com or Search.twitter.com. To take this further, include the hashtag in the event invites and reminders on your emails, landing pages, tweets and your other marketing channels.
Direct the Conversation #2 Using Unique Twitter Accounts. With my wife in the final stages of her pregnancy we’re seeing a lot of movies (while we still can). At the end of a preview its typical to see a URL for the movie site. I was a bit dumb founded when I saw “Follow us on Twitter”. Movies are jumping into the Twittersphere – check out: http://twitter.com/JulieandJulia

Think about an upcoming event or a new product release – would it make sense to create a unique Twitter account? There are many possibilities here but you need to think about how you would support that Twitter account.
Tracking Twitter as a Source of Web Traffic. Make sure that you can clearly track the source of traffic to your website from Twitter. This goes beyond tracking Twitter at the aggregate level. When someone fills out a form or purchases a product, you should be able to trace this back to the link you tweeted about. This can be done in a few ways. We typically use query strings to track other channels as well as paid search and banner ads.
Forcing User to Promote You on Twitter. This is something that will definitely not work for everyone but I thought it was unique. When I “upgraded” to the new HooteSuite Twitter platform, it forced me to tweet about why I liked HooteSuite before I could complete the upgrade process.
Creating Surveys for Twitter Followers. Use a tool like PollDaddy to engage your Twitter followers. You can use this information for a future campaign and share the results with your followers. This of course assumes that you have developed a strong following. Don’t be afraid to tweet about the survey more than once. Some of your followers may not have seen your tweet the first time.
Cross Promote Across Your Social Media Sites. This tip may be obvious but it’s certainly not done enough. Don’t look at your social media sites in silos. If there is a good conversation going on in your LinkedIn group, direct tweeps to it. If you’ve posted a bunch of pictures on your Facebook fan page or videos on your YouTube page, use Twitter to promote it.

The opposite works as well. Use your blog to promote an offer that is exclusively through Twitter. Twitter can also be used to direct customers to content and/or discussions in a customer only portal. Just ensure you warn your followers as you don’t want to alienate those that can’t access the content. The possibilities here are endless but it’s time to start to brainstorm on how to leverage all of your social media channels to get the most out of them that will achieve your marketing goals.

I hope this post gave you some new ideas. Please let me know if you have any others.

Chad H
@chadhorenfeldt

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Technorati Tags: Twitter,HooteSuite,Facebook,Social Media,Engaging Twitter followers,Best practices Twitter

Top Automated Marketing Personalization Tactics

2009-06-29T23:41:00.006-05:00

There is a lot of talk these days that personalization is back in marketing but what does that really mean and what are some of the tactics you can use?

This is important: Besides all of the technology out there that can make this process easier, it’s important to keep in mind that the goal is to create engaging experiences for your customers and potential customers so that they will respond and ultimately purchase your products and services.

A personalized approach facilitates this process. It allows you to make people feel special by providing timely communication that is more like a dialogue than a one way conversation. The trick is to create this type of personalized experience that will drive sales but to make it easy for marketing to execute and not break the marketing budget bank.

I've listed the top tactics that I typically discuss in my day to day client meetings. Together, these make up a personalization playbook that you may want to keep in mind when you plan and execute your future campaign:

Email / direct mail merge fields: This is the bottom of the pyramid in terms of personalization. Adding someone’s “first name” to an email is the least that you can do these days. While it may seem obvious, don’t overlook it as it’s more important in conjunction with the other tactics I've listed below.
Personalized URLS (PURLS): I like to think of PURLS like those place cards at weddings that have your name on it and tell you where you’re sitting. It’s like an exclusive invitation that is also very practical. It’s saying “Yes, you belong here – now go sit down at table 10”. What do you do? You go find your table! PURLs act in the same way as they have your name as part of the URL and they take you to what you feel is an exclusive website designed just for you. We've found that people have responded better to offers that contain a personalized URL (such as www.fun.com/yourname). With the right technology, this is also very easy to do.
Form pre-population: When you've strike up a conversation with someone you've just met at a party, do you keep asking them what their name is every two minutes? NO! They would feel that you weren't listening to them and move on. It’s not that much different in the world of marketing. We want to feel that when I’m engaging with you that I’m at a place where “everyone knows your name” (now you know why I included the video on Norm). If you've already collected information from someone, avoid asking for it again at all costs. You should make the customer feel that you are carrying on a conversation from where it left off last time – not starting all over again.
Email / direct mail sender personalization: Notice how this is getting more difficult as we move down the list? When you send a post card to your family from your trip to Spain (I really want to go back to Spain but can’t with a baby on the way) do you sign it “Yours Truly, the marketing team”? NO! If there is someone in your organization that has a direct relationship with the intended recipient, send it from them.

For B2B companies, have communications sent from sales reps or Account Managers if a relationship has been established. A recent Aberdeen Research report has proven that this technique can dramatically boost response rates. In B2C, this is more difficult but there may be opportunities to explore. For example, some sports teams can experiment having communications personalized from their players.

Yes this method requires additional effort and yes it does mean that your data needs to be in order for it to work but it’s a proven method that brings your company closer to your prospects and customers. When sales reps call into prospects and they're not seen as strangers, there is a higher chance that they can make traction. This is especially the case if your prospect has already received an email from your company with a thought-leadership piece that was based on their interests and had a picture of the rep to put a face to the name. This process is 100% easier when you have tight integration between your customer relationship management tool and your marketing automation tool.

I use this technique as part of an automated customer education nurturing program that I created and am seeing greater than 50% open rates when emails have the sender name of the account representative.

Personalized email/direct mail content. There are two parts to this and I could spend a whole blog post just on this topic. I’ve already discussed the first part which is personalizing the sender and signature of email or direct mail communications. The next part which is even more difficult is personalizing the message.

Why is this part so difficult? For example, it would be great to have a platform that would know your home insurance subscription is due in 60 days and have an email automatically sent to you that told you to look for a mailing with your renewal documents. This email would include the name of person that will call you and what the new subscription cost will be.

This can be difficult for a number of reasons:
1. It can be costly to have a system that can execute these types of complex campaigns
2. You need a way to collect the data and systems that make it easy to action on. For example, I recommend creating email campaigns based on the past web behaviour of individuals or their digital body language. This requires a system that can collect this data and then have an easy way to query this data so it can be actioned on.
3. You need to have clean data. To personalize the message, you need to have the data to personalize it that is normalized and complete.
4. It requires data sources that are integrated so they can be easily queried to create lists and personalized messages. There’s no point spending days building a list – it’s just not cost effective.
5. Content must be created for each segment – this requires resources etc…
To make this a personalization a bit easier, technology advancements allow you to add dynamic content sections to mostly generic communications. By adding in some slightly personalized sections you can really show that you can really make a difference in your response numbers. This may mean displaying a special offer for repeat purchasers or dynamically displaying an article in your regular newsletter that is geared specially to your customers. Is it worth it to make these personalized adjustments? What I recommend is to try it out and test the results. In countless examples it has led to increased response rates and reduced the time needed to execute campaigns by eliminating redundant steps when targeting multiple segments.

Dynamic landing page/microsite content.This is similar to the last point but typically is more flexible. Emails and direct mail are fairly static while website content can dynamically change on the go. For example, you can create campaigns that ask a series of questions that builds a profile and creates a personalized knowledge library or demo for an individual based on their selections in a web session. This also goes hand in hand with PURLs as the PURL is the gateway to a personalized microsite.

This content should change based on the behaviours that the contact has exhibited over time. Only display the content that the web visitor will find relevant or you won’t find them there very long. We use a technique called "Progressive Profiling" where we collect addition information over time and build a more complete picture for the sale team.

You can blend other elements such as merge fields, form pre-population, and dynamically displaying the sales rep’s contact information to make the web experience as personalized as possible.

Event triggered communication. We've talked about delivering the right message, now we’ll talk about how to deliver it at the right time. There are many different ways to do this but the best time to deliver the right message is at a time that matches your customer’s buying process. When my air conditioner blows up and it’s 100 degrees in the shade, that’s the time I want a call from someone that can fix my air conditioner.

Here are so more obvious examples of triggered communication:
1. Sending confirmation emails when a product is purchased or a white paper was requested
2. Sending unique communications to new email subscribers Sending a promotion email to an opted-in subscriber who has visited certain product pages X amount of times in Y amount of days
3. Email and Direct email sent to trial recipients over the lifetime of a trial
4. Customer communications based on the terms of an agreement. The insurance example above is a good one
5. An email promotion sent to customers on their birthday
Some of the key requirements that I've described above are also required to make this a reality – namely a system that can automatically detect these triggers and fire off the
right communication at the right time. If you have the right tools and data synced up correctly, your only limits are your creativity and your free time.

Automated, personalized voice messages. When I think about automated voice messages, I think back to an episode of the Simpsons where Homer spammed all of Spingfield trying to solicit money from them. That is a bad example.

An example that I've seen really work well is combining personalized voice messages with email. For example, if you have an important webinar coming up, why not send a voice message from the webinar presenter inviting them to the webinar and telling them to look out for an email invite. For those that have registered, have a personalized voice message reminder. They key is to have this process automated so you don’t have to create different lists and coordinate the execution. All you need to do is to design the process and let the technology handle the rest.
Sales tools. A tactic that I recommend is to create email templates for the sales team that allows them to modify the content and supplement their own personalized messages for each situation based on what they know about a customer or prospect.

For example, I use email templates in Outlook that I've created using my marketing automation tool. I can easily change up the text for these emails in Outlook to personalize them based on the specific circumstance before I send them. The template makes this process easier for me but it’s the personalization that is needed to make the content relevant.

You may have counted 9 points and said “what gives?”. The 10th point is using social media to deliver an automated, personalized experience but this concept is still in its infancy. There are a few examples here and there but for the most part, social media is real time communication by real people and the personalization is controlled more by the consumer. It will be interesting to see what new technologies develop in the near future.

Let me know if you have any other examples or opinions that you want to share.

Chad H
@chadhorenfeldt

PS: Here is a good article worth reading: The Four Dimensions of Personalization

Technorati Tags: personalization,marketing automation,Simpsons,microsites,direct mail,email,smart marketing,Cheers

Latest B2B Marketing Trends From SiriusDecisions Summit 09

2009-05-17T12:28:00.011-05:00

If you’re looking for an eloquently written post on how B2B marketing has changed and recommendations on what you should do, you’ve come to the wrong page. What I have done is reviewed the tweets from the latest SiriusDecisions Summit 2009 and captured points that I thought were interesting and categorized them.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to go (not without trying!) but as you’ll see from the comments below, some great stats and thoughts have been captured by attendees via Twitter (yet another reason to use Twitter).

At some point I would like to come back to each category and focus on them specifically but for now, here is some organized Twitter talk for y’all – enjoy it:

Sales and Marketing Alignment
jblock: Only 32% of sales and marketing orgs work together to define programs for existing customers. @megheuer #sds09

megheuer: Sales is protective of customers and late-stage deals; marketing needs give options, not mandates, to help at this stage #sds09 @tjaros

jblock: 72% of B2B orgs can segment the customers and prospects in their marketing database. @megheuer #sds09

jblock: Management changes served as a catalyst for greater sales and marketing integration at Aspect @thetravelingcmo #sds09

megheuer: #sds09 If leads that marketing thinks are qualified get ignored by sales, find out why/what's changed to fix it @tjaros

megheuer: Question: Marketers, do you understand the compensation structure of the team you feed leads to? No=FAIL #sds09 @tjaros

megheuer: #sds09 "whole sales team is motivated to make this work" so positive changes in marketing really make a difference --Perry Dembner

megheuer: #sds09 If leads that marketing thinks are qualified get ignored by sales, find out why/what's changed to fix it @tjaros

megheuer: #sds09 Ennis: "Get everyone clear on marketing's contribution to revenue" and use a common language to track, explain it

megheuer: #sds09 @joegalvin says sales 2.0 is really about the dominance of buying cycles and increasing productivity through sales readiness

megheuer: #sds09 Only19% of attendees have sales and marketing collaborate on sales playbooks; 58% don't create them at all

megheuer: #sds09 Goal of sales playbooks is increased productivity: More opportunity, shorter sales cycles, higher win rates

megheuer: #sds09 It's not a new selling paradigm, it's a new buying paradigm, powered by technology @joegalvin says

cahidalgo: #sds09- 59% of attendees do not believe their sales and marketing are aligned.

amyblack: #sds09 how do you increase adoption? Process drives productivity - start with process then implement technology.

Lead Nurturing

jblock: @tjaros: If you get one deal out of a reconstituted leads program, it's worth the effort. #sds09

jblock: 5%-10% of leads that are sitting in your CRM system as "dead" can become real opportunities if put into a nurturing program. #sds09

cahidalgo: #sds09- Tony Jaros - lead nurturing business rules must be established by BOTH marketing and sales in order to be effective.

megheuer: #sds09 "When leads are actively disqualified, that' a good thing- you can address that lead in an automated way to nurture it" –@tjaros

megheuer: #sds09 When a quantity function (1-and-done marketing) feeds a quality-focused function (sales), leads fall out at top of funnel @tjaros

megheuer: #sds09 21% of attendees have a lead nurturing program in place now; twice that number are "working on it"

Marketing Effectiveness Measurement

megheuer: Biggest change in marketing results: About a 10% drop in closed deals over the last year @tjaros #sds09

megheuer: #sds09 @jneeson reports 55% of marketing inquiries generated via the Web today; email 19%; events 15%, direct mail 11% (averages)

megheuer: Great metrics to track from CyberSource: # of days to close a deal and # of marketing touches to close #sds09

megheuer: "We know that sometimes approximate is good enough to get us where we're going" for marketing reports -Brenda Kring #sds09

megheuer: Need to be able to measure overall ROI and also activities, to align them with your overall strategy #sds09 @lazgonzalez

MarketingFuel: 52% of attendees dont track conversion rates [in their sales pipeline] and 77% dont track sales cycle lengthi n the sales pipeline #sds09

jblock: Only 24% of orgs have a closed loop process between sales and marketing regarding detailed info on opportunities. #sds09

kdewitte27: #sds09 Org's that have embraced a closed loop approach=+21% profit and +24% rev growth vs -6% and 0% for those that haven't (3 yr timeframe)

amyblack: Deborah Nelson at HP says that her "best in class" roi target is $70 earned for every dollar spent. #sds09

Sales/Marketing Funnel

stharris: #sds09 Most case studies are after purchase. Why not have one on Why they switched? Case studies across the demand waterfall. (Tony Jaros)

cahidalgo: #sds09: TJaros- "The demand waterfall is as much about human behavior as it is numbers." Human change management is part of process change

megheuer: Omniture improved # of opportunities by 5X, marketing's pipeline contribution by 7X based on linking brand to demand #sds09

megheuer: "Not about how we measure progression of a sales opportunity, but how we impact the progression of an opportunity" -@joegalvin at #sds09

jeffernst: #sds09 @jneeson This year sales is not just telling marketing we need more leads, we need marketing's help advancing our pipeline opps.

jblock: Focus is not so much at the top of the funnel; it has shifted to pipeline acceleration and sales enablememt. #sds09

Channel Marketing

jblock: Partners need guidance from their suppliers to run effective multi-touch campaigns. @lazgonzalez #sds09

cahidalgo: #sds09-common definition of a lead expands beyond direct sales and marketing and must also extend to the channel.

kdewitte27: #sds09 trend in channel demand gen strategy: let the partner create his leads and have the vendor support them with the right tools.

megheuer: #sds09 Channel programs shifting $ to supplier-to-customer programs, delivering message themselves, not waiting for partner @lazgonzalez

MarketingFuel: 83% of #sds09 attendees have absolutely no visibility into Channel marketing campaigns and effectiveness. Do partners really want you to?

Marketing Automation

megheuer: #sds09 Marketing automation is a requirement for best-practice performance says @jneeson

megheuer: #sds09 Prediction from @jneeson is by 2015, up to 50% of b-to-b marketers will deploy marketing automation

Marketing Structure

cedwardbrice: #sds09 more than half of audience making organizational changes to their marketing functions

kingsol: #sds09 Common theme between Deb (HP) and Buell (IBM) on creating single marketing themes for global deployment. Develop Once, Run Anywhere [DORA]

megheuer: #sds09 "Cajoling and good citizenship did not work" to drive use of run-once-use-everywhere programs; Centralized org structure did

megheuer: #sds09 By 2015, dominant marketing model will be an architecture of plays and tactics in an integrated, multi-dimensional approach

megheuer: #sds09 Attendees report marketing ops (38%), field mktg (36%) are areas of marketing programs that will change the most by 2015

megheuer: #sds09 The marketing demand center has advisory, execution and technical resources--more value-add than execution only @jneeson

megheuer: #sds09 Most attendees report their marketing org structure is a hybrid model (43%); 2nd most common is centralized (32%)

megheuer: #sds09 Leading organizations invest in marketing skills and address gaps in technology, process and programs that hurt progress

Social Media

cedwardbrice: #sds09 B2B organizations with a coordinated reputation strategy gain an average of 40 percent more inquires

brainshark: #sds09 Create content in smaller chunks that can be reused @jblock Convergence of Social and Traditional Media

megheuer: Need to have a baseline--do an annual audit of communications and social media activities to see what works/doesn't @jblock #sds09

megheuer: "We can't stick our heads in the sand anymore and not monitor what's going on in social media" -@jblock #sds09

megheuer: @jblock: Use a combination of social media and traditional awareness tools to improve leverage and reach of assets #sds09

amyblack: #sds09 Social media is cheap (technology) but expensive from a human resources stand point - it takes time and effort to do it well [ Amen!]

megheuer: #sds09 Only a small number of btob organizations have a coherent strategy for social media says @jblock

amyblack: #sds09 Communities are the fastest growing social media segment within b2b orgs - blog adoption is still higher ( 33% vs. 29%)

amyblack: #sds09 prediction that social media will become more a function of product marketing as that group needs to have a dialogue with customers

Here are some quick thoughts that I’ve jotted down (more later - just went through 25+ pages of Twitter search results and need to reflect more on this):

Inbound marketing is and will be extremely crucial go forward but marketers need to develop strategies to target leads that are deeper in the sales/marketing funnel – especially in this economy
Importance of lead nurturing (no need to say more right now)
No mention of lead scoring - any comment on this from summit attendees?
Suppliers are looking for ways to help out their partners
Social media in B2B marketing is still at its early stages but expect this to grow enormously for the next summit
The key across all of these topics is sales/marketing alignment. It may also be the most difficult part.

Thanks to all of the twitters who passionately twitted at the conference and gave people like me some semblance of being there. Of course, muchos gracias to @siriusdecisions for bringing together great presentations and great people.

Chad H.
@chadhorenfeldt

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Technorati Tags: B2B Marketing,sales marketing alignment,lead management,lead nurturing,Twitter,BtoB,social media,demand waterfall,marketing automation,marketing ROI

Top 10 Triggered B2B Email Marketing Campaigns

2009-04-05T22:35:00.003-05:00

One of the themes for marketers in 2009 is “doing more with less”. While some marketing teams are facing cut backs and spending freezes or reductions, they still need to hit their goals which may include generating X number of leads, Y amount of influenced pipeline and/or Z amount of influenced sales. A key part of “doing more with less” is automating your email marketing campaigns. While many may label this as “lead nurturing”, it goes well beyond lead nurturing. It’s at times like this when you need a bounce in your step and powerful tools that will make it easy to keep you engaged with customers and prospects but allow you to leave work at a reasonable hour.

After reading Ed Henrich’s excellent article on ClickZ Top 10 Triggered E-mail Programs to Build Relevance, I wanted to take a more B2B slant on it but as you’ll see, many of the triggered email programs apply to both B2B and B2C. By triggered email campaigns, I mean an email or a series of emails being sent based on an action of a contact in your database, by their inaction or by their state (for example, a new customer). Here are my top 10 triggered email marketing campaigns:

Transactional Messages. Transactional messages or autoresponder emails are some of the easiest and most beneficial campaigns to setup. By transactional email, I’m referring to the automatic email that you receive when you sign up for a newsletter or download an e-book. The open and click-through rates are typically much higher for these types of emails as the web visitor has engaged with your organization and almost expects to receive something in return.

In addition, Michele Linn over at Savvy B2B Marketing recommends that “instead of providing an immediate download of the offer (e.g. white paper, webinar, etc.), send an email with a link to it”. Therefore, the transactional email becomes more than just a record of a transaction but the offer itself. This is recommended for a number of reasons as it provides a greater assurance that the email provided will be legitimate, makes it easy for the recipient to forward the document on and acts as a bookmark to easily find the document at a later date. Here is a perfect example: A web visitor finds your pay per click ad on a Google search results page and clicks on it. On the ensuing landing page, they are able to download a relevant white paper after filling out a short form. Instead of providing the white paper on the confirmation page after the form is filled out, send a link to the white paper in an email. This ensures that you get the most of out your paid search campaigns.

For more information on autoresponder emails, see my post “Email Autoresponders 2.0 in B2B Marketing”.
Welcome email campaign. While an autoresponder may be part of a welcome email campaign, this type of campaign typically includes 2-3 emails sent over a period of 2-3 weeks and should have different messaging.

With some marketing automation platforms, you can automatically check to see if the contact is a new one to your database after they have filled out a form. If it is a new contact, send that person an email that acknowledges that they are a new registrant and provide information on what they will receive and when they will receive it. You should also include a link for them to update their email subscriptions and their profile.

Follow up emails that are part of the welcome email campaign may include sending the latest newsletter, or key videos and/or documents based on the information provided. Some organizations use welcome email campaigns to gain additional information on the registrant for better segmentation – something we call “progressive disclosure”. The key to this campaign is to demonstrate to the new registrant that it was worth it to provide their information and build a long lasting relationship.
Event/webinar campaigns. This is fairly obvious one. When someone signs up for an event, send on the event information to the registrant via email. One item often overlooked is automating the entire event registration and follow up process. A fully automated event contains the following emails:
-First invite
-Second invite to those that didn’t respond to the first invite
-Reminder email for those that registered a day before the event
-Reminder email for those that registered on the day of the event
-Follow up email thanking those people that registered and attended
-Follow up “sorry we missed you email” to those that registered but didn’t attend.
-OPTION: If an event has size restrictions, have an automated email sent when capacity has been met and send another automated email to those on the waiting list if additional room was made available.

When setup correctly, this type of automated process can save the marketer countless hours as the lists are automatically generated and emails are sent as per the schedule set up ahead of time. For more tips on improving your webinar campaigns see Paul Teshima’s excellent post Four Practices to Increase Webinar Effectiveness.
Inactive or Dormant Lead campaign. By inactive, I mean a contact in your database that has not responded to an email or visited your website within the last six months. I’m not referring to a lead that sales forgot to follow up on but this program may include those contacts as well.

Similarly to your welcome program where you had unique messaging based on their “new contact” status, you’ll want to customize your messaging for those contacts that have not demonstrated any recent activity. The key here is for your marketing automation platform to automatically feed these inactive contacts into a campaign that will fire off these targeted emails. If you have to manually mine your database for these “inactives” or pay someone to do it, you are not “doing more with less”.

These types of emails can include the following:
-Special offer that re-engages the contact
-Survey that asks the contact what type of information they would like to receive
-Notice that if they don’t respond, they will be removed from regular communications.

I’ve seen campaigns that flag contacts as “inactives” and removes them from receiving "regular" emails but if these inactive contacts demonstrate any activity, the inactive flag is removed and they set to receive regular email communications.
Customer service survey. Automatically send out a follow up email after a customer service case was closed asking for feedback. This is again a simple idea but often overlooked. This type of campaign can prevent issues from boiling up.
Renewal reminders. If your product or service is subscription based, automatically enter key customer contacts into an email campaign that sends auto email notifications that their contract is about to expire at the 90, 60 and 30 day mark prior to the renewal date.
Trial tips. If your product includes a limited free trial, enter contacts into a trial campaign that will send targeted emails throughout the trial with value add materials that encourages the lead to take the next step in the purchase process.
New customer program. For new customers that have purchased your product or service, enter them into an email campaign that introduces them to your product as well as your company. Your product may have been purchased by a select few but will be used throughout the organization. Having a “new user/customer” campaign can help people that aren’t familiar with your product get better acquainted.
Education programs. By education programs, I’m referring to the traditional lead nurturing campaigns. This is typically a series of emails sent over a period of time that helps keep your company top of mind for potential customers. While I’m not going to focus on the substance of these emails, I will indicate how these campaigns are triggered. These types of campaigns can be triggered by:
-Sales reps entering leads into a nurturing program via a trigger in your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database. Many CRMs are fully integrated with a marketing automation platform which easily allows for these types of campaigns.
-Lead Rating not being high enough. If a lead is deemed “not yet ready to be sent on to sales”, they can be automatically added to a lead nurturing campaign with the goal that they lead will eventually raise their hand to indicate they are ready to be engaged.
-Activity/User interests. As an example, if a certain link was clicked on an email (or not clicked on), a contact can be added to an email campaign that will send on more targeted information. Another example is when a web visitor was looking at a page or series of pages on your website, automatically send them a follow up email that provides additional information with a call to action to speak to an expert that can answer any questions that they may have had. Ed Henrich referred to this as a “browse program”.

It’s these types of automated email campaigns that when set up properly can produce tremendous results. The key to this is ensuring that you are measuring the outcomes of these nurturing campaigns. See my post “Lead Nurturing - How to track ROI?” for more details.
Reference Program from Net Promoters. This was an idea I brought up to my own company but it took Ed Henrich to remind me about it. If your organization runs a Net Promoter survey, send an automatic follow up email to those that are “promoters” asking them if they would act as references

These are my top 10 triggered email campaigns but this is by far not a full list. Having the right tools allows you to create highly customized automated campaigns. I hope that you found this useful and please let me know of other automated email campaigns that you may have deployed and how they fared.

Chad H.

Technorati Tags: lead nurturing,e-mail marketing,lead scoring,autoresponders. automated email campaigns,ClickZ,event marketing,webinars

Sharing Space: Marketing and Sales

2009-03-24T23:27:00.010-05:00

Although we’re in a down economy I’ve still been able to travel twice out of the last three weeks meeting with clients, working until all hours of the night and seeing first hand what is on the minds of marketers these days. I personally wouldn’t have it any other way.

During my travels, I saw the following parking space that made me stop and consider the message that it was saying (had to take a picture of it – thanks Andrew!). Take 30 seconds and really think about the message this is conveying:

Here are some items to consider:

The only parking spaces reserved were for outside sales and customers
There were enough parking spaces available for everyone (reserved spaces were not essential)
What do other employees (including inside sales) think when they see this?

You may have the following reactions:

I don’t think this is a big deal. Sales are coming from all across the country and need a special place to park when they visit headquarters
Outside sales are getting the recognition they deserve for making the company what it is. They should repaint the white lines and repave the cracked pavement.
Why should sales get their own parking spaces? I work my but off yet have to find my own parking spot or take public transportation.

Any of these opinions are valid but here is something to consider – we’re in a down economy right now and sales are not as easy to come by as they once were. You may be selling the sharpest and finest knife set ever created with a brand that everyone knows, loves and trusts but at when money is tight, people will consider all of their options. At your own company there still may be plenty of interest for your products or services but companies may not have the budget to purchase from you which means longer sales cycles and missed forecasts. How are the best in class companies still reaching their 2009 targets?

Come Together. Right Now. Over Me

SiriusDecisions, a leading source for business-to-business sales and marketing best-practice research and data, recently indicated that while the sales team may be suffering, best in class companies are repositioning their marketing strategies and tactics to help them out.

These marketers are not focusing on programs that are strictly lead generation campaigns but rather geared to existing clients and deals in the pipeline. Alden Cushman at SiriusDecisions notes that:

“Instead of focusing on generating new leads, these programs represent a more effective way for marketing to impact the extended sales cycle by helping to move deals that have stalled in the pipeline. Without question, the economy is driving this trend, as the program numbers we're seeing are now more in balance with specific sales requirements."

This entails a greater emphasis on sales and marketing being in tune with each other and supporting each other during these rough times. Heather Foeh over at the Marketing Insights blog has delved further into some tactics that marketers can employ which I would recommend having a look at. I would also recommend sales and marketing have joint goals, clear definitions of each stage of the lead management funnel (which are approved at the highest levels), and metrics that support those definitions. All of these items should be reinforced at regular meetings where sales and marketing are working off the same dashboards and/or spreadsheets.

Here are some additional tactics to consider:

Ensure that marketing is communicating any activities that it’s partaking in to the rest of the company along with the results. This can be in the form of a newsletter, webcast, blog or podcast.
Marketing needs to involve sales as much as possible in their marketing efforts. This includes coordinating on marketing campaigns, looking for opportunities where leads may have fallen through the cracks, and better understanding what potential buyers are looking for at different stages of the buying process and their challenges
Provide useful tools to sales. Just the other day a marketer showed me a custom link they added to salesforce.com that integrated LinkedIn to the contact and lead records. It literally takes 5 minutes to add this custom code and the rich data that sales now have access to is unbelievable. I have other clients that are passing over activity data to sales (such as web visits) so sales can better prioritize who to follow up with. Other tools can summarize web activity at a higher level. The key here is to make this is as easy as possible for sales to work with and execute on.

The message I want to leave with you is that companies need to break down the walls of exclusivity that may have created for sales so that marketing and other areas of the company can better serve them. It’s time for sales to give up those reserved spaces to improve the alignment across the organization. It's the best in class companies that get this concept that will thrive in this down economy and capitalize on the opportunities that exist.

Chad H.
@chadhorenfeldt

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Resources on Aligning Marketing and Sales for B2B Companies
Digital Body Language: Golf, Putting, Sales Reps, and Growing Revenue

Technorati Tags: marketing and sales alignment,linkedin,down economy,recession,SiriusDecisions

Social Media Success Stories

2009-03-08T13:16:00.005-05:00

I get a few blank stares at times when I talk about social media technologies with friends and colleagues but I’m starting to win people over day by day. How am I doing this? With real stories! Today, I want to share these stories with you to help you better understand the power of social media and to hopefully inspire you to continue on your social media efforts or to jump in for the first time.

LinkedIn: Starting an Alumni Group

When Linkedin started a groups feature (like Facebook groups) I thought about how I could network with former colleagues. Some of the smartest people that I knew were from a technology post-grad college that I attended called the “Information Technology Institute (ITI) in Toronto. I decided to create an ITI alumni group to pool together these brilliant people and the results have been terrific thus far.

In a few short months, the group has 32 members without having done any advertising. There is also an active discussion going on about how ITI grads are succeeding and how ITI has contributed to this. I now have 32 new people (and growing) that I can network with who share my similar background and interests. Did you go to ITI? Join the ITI Alumni group (now I can say that I have done some advertising).

LinkedIn tip: Look for ways that you can create niche groups that pull together people with similar interests.

Twitter: Maximize Your Travel

In the past, I had blogged about why I use Twitter so it’s exciting for me to provide a success story for Twitter. In today’s economy, many companies are limiting travel in order to save a few bucks. In my new position, I not only manage my own clients but manage clients across an entire segment. I of course lead an amazing team, but this new position requires me to be active with as many customers in my segment as possible to support my team. Twitter helps me keep in touch with various clients and colleagues as well as better understand what people in my network "have on the brain". Besides the virtual interaction of Twitter, it has far greater benefits.

In my recent travels to Atlanta, I posted the following after I just arrived in the city and was doing some prep work from a Starbucks:

Visiting clients in Atlanta. Beautiful day! Beautiful city! Now to get down to work.

I then received a direct message (DM in Twitter lingo) via Twitter from a client in my segment in the Atlanta area asking me what my role at my company was and if I service clients in the area. I sent the client an email later that night after I verified who they were explaining to them who I was and suggested meeting for breakfast as I had time before another scheduled meeting. We ended up meeting and I was able to help this client out as much as I could in the short meeting time that we had. Here is the response from the client on Twitter after I tweeted about a successful tweet up:

Ohhh...knew I didn't have the lingo down @chadhorenfeldt ! Great success indeed - Eloqua crew welcome in Atlanta anytime!!

Twitter tip: Keep your network updated as to where you are. Twitter is a fantastic networking tool and it can help you maximize your travel time.

Twitter tip #2: Make sure you add your Twitter URL to your LinkedIn profile. I just connected to someone as I was writing this post.

Tripit: Maximize Your Travel #2

Tripit is a great application that allows you to post your travel plans so other people in your network can see them. A recent improvement has made this feature even more valuable – integrating with LinkedIn. Now, when I update my travel plans to Tripit, it will display my travel plans to all of my LinkedIn followers. This is helpful as I can keep track of people I work with and clients and partners have a greater insight into my travel schedule. For example, our sales team can see my travel plans and perhaps pull me into a prospect meeting if I'm in that area.

For my recent trip to Atlanta, one of our partners saw that I was visiting Atlanta and asked if I would be visiting them. I followed up and let them know why I was travelling and that I didn’t think we needed to meet this trip. I think it’s great that our partners are following our travels and offering up to meet. This definitely shows that power of Tripit.

Tripit tip: Use it and ensure that you have tied it into your LinkedIn profile. If you’re a manager or higher up, get others in your company to use it as well.

PS: The Tripit people have also made it very easy to post your trips – just email your travel itinerary to plans@tripit.com and it will update your network automatically. That is very cool.

Blogger: Blogging is the Differentiator

Some people may have written off blogging and I admit that I have a love/hate relationship with it but in 2009 I’m definitely seeing it as even more important social media tool. While anyone can sign up for the networking tools I listed above, blogging acts as a differentiator as it forces you to come up with good content that people will want to read (if that is your goal). While Twitter does this as well, Twitter is limited by its 140 characters (this is a debate for a future post). I see blogging as a way of connecting many of the dots in social media - let me focus on a recent story to show you what I mean.

Back on December 21, 2008, I wrote the post “10 Tips for Using Twitter And Email Marketing for B2B”. Perhaps because it was the holidays it didn’t receive that many page views at the time I published it. About a month or so later, it was picked up by another blogger, Kathy Pay, and then quickly by the Twitter community. Here is an example of what this looked like on Twitter search:

The result was a surge of traffic to my blog, additional Twitter followers, and blog RSS subscribers. The post was then picked up by other social media hubs such as StumbleUpon and Digg which pushed additional traffic along with search engine traffic.

Blogger tip: While I use Blogger, you can use any blogging platform that works for you. The real point is that good content drives traffic and your blog can be the driver for all of your other social media efforts.

Blogger tip #2: Make sure your blog is featured in your Twitter profile, on LinkedIn, Facebook and any other social media app that you use.

Best Story for Last

Almost three years ago I married my wife. That in itself is an accomplishment but it’s how I met my wife which is the interesting part. I found my future wife on Jdate.com which was a social media site before the term social media was widespread. We are happily married and are expecting our first child in August.

Takeaways: Before I sign off, I did want to point out that my stories demonstrate a few things to keep in mind:

The power of social media tools. My stories are at a very small scale and something I do in my spare time. Imagine how you can use social media tools for your business
Social media tools are interrelated. Think about how you can blend in various social media tools to increase your own voice in this digital world as well as your company’s.

I hope you enjoyed these stories and I encourage you to relate your own stories in the comments area. Did this post help you better understand the power of social media?

Chad H.
@chadhorenfeldt

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Technorati Tags: social media,Twitter,Linkedin,Tripit,success stories,Atlanta. StubleUpon,Digg,Facebook,Blogger,web 2.0 tools,online marketing

Email Autoresponders 2.0 in B2B Marketing

2009-02-21T13:30:00.012-05:00

Reflecting back on a long week I had the pleasure of meeting a number of new clients and seeing what they have accomplished as part of their online marketing initiatives. I am extremely lucky to see some of the most cutting edge marketing tactics being used and wanted to highlight some of them here.

I was inspired this morning after my 11 cups of coffee by a former customer and now colleague, Heather Foeh and her blog post "Friday Quick Tip: Re-Visit Your Autoresponders". By autoresponder email, I mean the confirmation email that a registrant immediately receives when they fill out a form on a website. Heather has some good tips to ensure that your information and call to action(s) is up to date. At times, marketers set these up and then forget about them. In this post, I want to highlight some of the interesting trends I'm seeing in marketing automation - specifically the autoresponder email and how you can take advantage of this often neglected marketing gem.

The Evolution of the Autoresponder Email

Let's start with the evolution of the autoresponder. Although this post is mostly from a B2B perspective, the items described here can also be applied in the B2C world. In the past, email recipients were used to receiving a text based email that had a simple message that thanked the subscriber for submitting their information. This in itself was a big step forward as many marketers either didn't have the capability to implement this due to their technology provider or the insight to add this tactic. Now, there are many different types of autoresponder emails from product/service confirmations to event detail information. In this post, I want to concentrate on the use case in which a user either signs up for a newsletter or to access resources from your website. Here is a quick timeline to trace how far marketers have come by displaying how past autoresponders appeared:

1. The Traditional Email Autoresponder

Thanks for registering.

2. Email Autoresponder 1.0

[Insert company logo here]

Thanks for registering.

Click here to unsubscribe.
CompanyX address

3. Email Autoresponder 1.5

[Insert company logo here]

Dear FirstName,
Thanks for registering to receive [insert name of resource] from CompanyX. Please be sure to return to www.companyx.com.

Regards,
CompanyX

Manage your profile or click here to unsubscribe.
CompanyX address

Autoresponder Email The Next Generation

Looking at the examples above, there really isn't anything wrong with the autoresponder 1.5. It provides relevant information, it's simple and to the point. I would also include a few other items as part of autoresponder 1.5: relevant static links to key areas of your website as well as asking recipients to whitelist your email address. This is all great but, if you're looking at ways to get more out of your autoresponders then keep reading.

I've found that autorepsonders can have open rates that can achieve greater that 80% open rates and clickthrough rates in the 20-30% range which blow industry averages out of the ball park. Registrants who fill out forms almost expect to get these emails as they have already taken the time to provide you with some type of information. The least you can do is provide them something useful in return. Other goals to keep in mind is to encourage the new subscriber to open and read future emails but encourage as well as interacting with you in other channels that they may not have known about.

Personalization: Adding "Dear FirstName" in your email is good but you're wasting an opportunity to build a relationship between the new registrant and a real person at your company. You know the saying "people buy from people" - well it's true. A recent Aberdeen report has demonstrated that email personalization drives higher email open and conversion rates. Knowing that registrants will most likely open the autoresponder reduces the risk of having a real person in the "from line". What this does is begin or continue the relationship between the prospect and sales rep. As an added tip, make sure you add the name of your company in the first few characters of the subject line so the email recipients realizes that the the name of the person in the "from line" is from your company.

Once the person opens the email, have a signature that includes a real person's name and contact information. The autoresponder should encourage the email recipient to contact the sales rep if they have any questions. The best in class marketers have their CRM synced up to their marketing automation platform which means that known contacts from their CRM should already have an associated sales rep. Your marketing automation platform should also allow you to dynamically include the sales reps information as part of the autoresponder. As an added tip, include a picture of the sales rep. If the registrant is new to your system, have a generic signature that perhaps is from your CMO or a known figure within your organization. Your marketing automation platform can also help you build signature rules based on other contact information such as geography which allows for a personalized approach even if a web visitor has yet to be assigned to a sales rep.

This type of personalization leads to a much stronger and smoother hand-0ff process between the marketing and sales teams which I described in my last post "Lead Management and Football". Using this technique demonstrates that marketing is at the top of their game.
Dynamic Content: This is one of the key areas that makes me smile when I'm reviewing how our customers are getting the most out of our product. Dynamic content in an email allows you to:
- Simplify the autoresponder email creation. Instead of having 20 different versions of the same email, have one email that you can easily maintain. Using dynamic content you can change key areas such as what was exactly downloaded as well as customizing a call to action either based on what they downloaded and/or the interests that were specified in the registration process.
  
  In one example, I have a client that promoted different case studies based on the industry that was specified in the sign up process. In another example, a client specified exactly what was downloaded by capturing this in the registration process and then dynamically displaying this on the email. These techniques are simple, effective and led to increased response.

Pull in content from RSS feeds: I've outlined this concept in an earlier post Latest Trends in Email Marketing: RSS and Calendar Reminders. You can promote corporate blog posts, upcoming events, press releases and the newest white papers/case studies in an RSS feed(s) that you can add to your email either underneath the main "Thanks for registering text" or as a side column. This means that not only are you saying "Read our latest blog posts" but you're actually including the title of your latest posts as well as a link to read the entire article. In this way you have new content that is dynamically added to your autoresponder without the marketer having to make any manual updates. This is a great way to get more out of your content and drive new registrants back to your website.
Personalize who the email is coming from. I described this above but want to point out that this is a form of dynamic content

Promote Other Channels: More and more marketers are using social media to keep prospects engaged while they are in the sales and marketing funnel. In addition, more and more of prospects are using social media to learn about your products and services as well as comparing you to your competitors. As I outlined in 10 Tips for Using Twitter And Email Marketing for B2B you can add your company's Twitter address, Linkedin groups and links to RSS feeds such as your corporate blog to your autoresponder emails.

You should consider other channels as well. For example, Breaking Point Systems offers a free poster which has proven to be a very successful campaign. I also find this approach brilliant as the autoresponder email drives recipients back to the website to fill out additional information to receive the poster. Another idea is to include a link to a video that may be a customer testimonial that is relevant to the recipients challenge or job role.
Sales Should not Follow up the Email With a Call: So you're reading this post and hopefully enjoying it and then you read this and you're like "What? Chad - you should have stopped after the second cup of coffee". Just because a web visitor signed up for a white paper or a newsletter on your website and you have pasted a nice picture of the rep on your autoresponder doesn't give anyone the right to call them up. If you have a properly defined lead management process, leads should only be passed on to sales for follow up if the prospect has attained a high enough lead score. In this way, you're focusing your sales team on the prospects that are more inclined to buy and sparing a potential buyer from being called too early in the purchase process.
Don't Stop After The Autoresponder: You may be saying: "Wait a minute - so, sales shouldn't follow up but I shouldn't stop after the autoresponder?". That's correct. As I mentioned above, you want to ensure that new subscribers are "sales worthy" according to the agreed upon definitions that you should have between sales and marketing. A great way to keep a new subscriber informed about your company is to move them into a nurturing program typically called a "welcome program" for new subscribers. This may involve a few different channels including having someone follow up with them by phone to further qualify the "inquiry" but the first few touches should be via email to demonstrate the value of having provided you with their email in the first place and to build a profile which translates into a lead score for marketers that have implemented a lead scoring system.

What is important is to provide content that is relevant. Relevancy depends on the recipient's interests that they provided, what they have downloaded and/or which pages, offers or emails they responded to. Frequency is also very important. Try to prevent recipients from receiving email content that they have already received. You also want to ensure that recipients are not receiving too many emails in too short a period of time. However, I believe that relevancy trumps frequency and if the content is relevant, recipients will want to receive it and if they don't feel like looking at it right away, they'll still want to get information from you in the future.

Measure the Results

Measuring the results is very key in this process. If you've read the above you may either be excited or overwhelmed. I would recommend benchmarking your current key email and conversion metrics and then slowly adding some of the techniques above and seeing the results. For example, by adding in personalization, are your sales reps receiving inbound calls as a result of this email? Of course, you will need a process in place to measure this (perhaps a dedicated line) but I would recommend starting simple and building on your successes. While these recommendations will require an investment of time up front, it will pay off in the long run.

Have you tried any of these techniques? How has it worked for you?

Chad H.
@chadhorenfeldt

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Technorati tags: autoresponder email, e-mails, email frequency, relevancy, social media and confirmation emails, personalization, Twitter B2B marketing

Lead Management and Football

2009-02-19T00:59:00.005-05:00

In one of my meetings these past few weeks I was thinking of an analogy where I could break down the lead management process into much simpler terms so everyone could understand their roles - this is where football comes in. Why football? Well, if I compared it to hockey no one outside of Canada would care. I'm going to introduce the players and coaches below and then summarize how the different parts fit together to create a Super Bowl caliber lead management process. Are you ready for some football?

The Players and Coaches Take the Field

Quarterback: The marketing team is the QB. If you're a marketer, you're saying "I don't get paid like a quarterback". No one does - let's assume that salaries don't apply here. If you're in sales you may also disagree as QBs typically get more of the glory but hear me out and you can have your own say if you don't agree. The lead management process should start with the marketing team just as a football play begins with the quarterback getting the snap. It's marketing's job to fill the funnel with leads as it is the QBs job to move the ball down the field and pass the ball off to other players on the team.
Running back: The players running with the ball on the ground are the inside sales/demand generation team (different companies give this group different names). Inside sales gets to do a lot of the grunt work to qualify leads and set meetings but they typically don't close the deals. In football terms, these guys can make the difference in the game but typically only pick up short yardage.
Receivers: The receivers are the sales team. Who else are the biggest prima donnas on earth and are proud of it? Here are a few football players that come to mind: TO, Chad Johnson and Plaxico Burress. While receivers talk the talk, they also walk the walk. They are expected to make the impossible catches, score the winning touchdowns and throw the odd block to help their team move down the field and score. The good receivers are sought after by every team.
Place kicker: The place kicker represents members from the sales and marketing operations team that typically don't get the recognition that the other players get but are key in scoring points. This may include CRM and marketing automation administrators, analyst that pull together the key sales and marketing metrics and key personnel who prepare sales collateral While there are some place kickers that stand out, it's typically the ones that screw up that everyone remembers (Steve Christie "wide right" ring a bell?). These people need to be on their game to ensure all systems are running as they should.
Defence: While I could break down every defensive position, I like my rest and honestly, I couldn't tell you every position and you wouldn't care (except you there who plays the right outside linebacker position on the weakside). In the lead management process, the defence represents anything that is preventing the offence from scoring touchdowns. Think of the defense as anyone or anything that is hampering the lead management process. The defense could be a marketing automation system that is not fully synced with a CRM, it could be your competition providing higher quality products or it could be a breakdown in the hand off process between sales and marketing - there are many more possibilities.
Coaches: The coaches are the executives in the organization: CMO, CEO, VP of Sales etc... They are the ones that watching the hours and hours of film to review past performances and they are the ones that are guiding their players to prevent interceptions by the defence and to ensure that the other teams in the league (your competition) get their buts handed to them.
Fans: The fans of course are your paying customers. Typically, if you have a really good offence and coaches, you're going to have a good team that scores a lot of touch downs. More touchdowns usually means more wins which leads to more fans and the cycle hopefully continues until you need to build a new stadium with more private boxes.

Putting the Pieces Together: Touchdown!

As we know you have star quarterbacks like Joe Montana and Brett Favre who have great vision and deliver quality passes and you have quarterbacks like Rob Johnson and Ryan Leaf who could throw the ball with decent accuracy but never lead their teams to major victories. In the lead management process, you need marketers that not only deliver leads to the inside sales and sales team but deliver leads that are of the highest quality as defined by both marketing and sales. If a QB throws a pass that is a perfect spiral 10 yards down the field, they may define that as a quality pass. However, if the receiver who the pass is thrown to is on the other side of the field then this pass will be incomplete and may lead to an interception by the defence and a loss of downs. The marketing and sales team need to be on the same page and be reading out of the same playbook so that everyone knows if a newly assigned lead is considered of high quality and should be prioritized. This is where strong coaching is needed in football to ensure everyone's head is in the game. When it comes to marketing and sales, the executives from both departments need to be involved to ensure that both sides are in full cooperation (Here is a great video from SFDC Dreamforce 08 on this topic).

Some marketers will use an inside sales or demand generation team to further qualify leads and ensure that when these leads are passed on to the field sales that they are real opportunities. To compare this to football. the quarterback physically hands the ball off to a running back and can be assured that there isn't going to be an interception and will usually get positive yardage.

How can marketers improve their skills to improve the lead management process? Just like in football where you need to constantly practice and upgrade your skills to be a top notch QB, marketers need to take advantage of the best technology out there to make the lead management process as smooth as possible. This will involve the sales and marketing operations teams that may assist in configuring and maintaining the CRM and marketing automation platforms as well as using techniques such as automated lead scoring and routing to make the process run more efficiently. Again, the executives will be key here to decide which "players" should be used and the strategy that should be employed.

Post Game Review

You may hear this conversation on a local radio show following a football game (any Lions fans?): "Hi, I'm a long time listener, first time caller. I called in to say that the our team played like @%&^ today. That's all I have to say. Thank you."

When a game is over and players and coaches have finished doing their post game interviews, coaches watch the game film and do a full review on every play of the last game to learn about what worked, what didn't and can be improved upon to play even better in the next game. The sales and marketing process must have this same type of process where dashboard reports have been set up to monitor key metrics that have been defined by sales and marketing to measure success. Not only should these dashboards be setup, they should be consistently monitored and reviewed to make changes in the process where necessary.

Fumble! A Leaky Funnel

You just made a great catch and you're running towards the end zone. The problem is that you have three defenders ready to take your head off. If you run out of bounds, you give your QB another chance to score a touchdown - what do you do? Do you risk possible brain damage or do you give it back to the quarterback for another shot? In the lead management process, you need to define a process where leads get handed back to marketing in situations where prospects just aren't ready to buy. If we go back to our story, you can compare a possible touchdown to a closed deal. There is no way that the deal will be closed at this time. The sales team needs a way to label a lead to be sent back to the marketing team for further nurturing until the prospect is ready to engage again with the sales team. Don't allow for fumbles where leads fall through the cracks.

Notice how I didn't mention a punter? That's because leads should never be punted anywhere. A punt is unpredictable and can bounce all over the place. The lead management process needs to be much more specific. I didn't even get into the nitty gritty of the lead management process in terms of creating opportunities etc... Perhaps I'll cover that another time. The important item to keep in mind is that you need a process that is clearly defined and agreed upon by everyone. If the team is not in sync, there will be a breakdown which will lead to a possible quarterback sack and in this economy, making the right decisions is even more important. Let's keep everyone on the field, playing the game as it should be played and winning as much as possible.

What do you think? Did I miss any players? Did I misrepresent anyone?

Chad H.

PS: Let's talk about cheerleaders - we can't forget the cheerleaders. Cheerleaders could be part of your marketing team that is building demand for your products or services or your top customers who are your biggest promoters. I'll let you decide.
PPS: Some other posts on this topic:

Why I Use Twitter

2009-02-02T01:32:00.006-05:00

While I'm not turning this blog into a Twitterfest, I've had a few people ask me recently why I use Twitter and how do I use it effectively without it taking over my life. Instead of answering people one by one I thought I would write a quick post on it (it better be a quick post!). I hope that you find this useful. And hey, this blog is called "Anything Goes Marketing" so I'm just keeping it real on here and keeping you in the loop on the latest marketing trends. I do have some other posts that I'm working on that get more into tips and tricks so stay tuned.

I'll start off with why I use Twitter and write a follow up post on my strategies for managing it.

Why do I Twit?

It seemed cool and cutting edge. One of the best practice consultants at my company, Jennifer Horton, introduced me to Twitter as the next big thing in social media. I thought at first she was crazy but after jumping into it and being able to converse with social media experts, bloggers, customers, competitors, colleagues and friends in a friendly and cooperative format that would otherwise be impossible, I was hooked. I guess being already exposed to the social media world made twittering a logical step. Twitter is quite similar to blogging but you are limited to how much you can write (140 characters) and there is much more of a chit chat going on.
I'm in the loop. Ever feel like people are talking about you behind your back? Well you can do what Michael Scott on The Office did and get everyone to tell you how they feel about you or you can listen in on Twitter. Twitter allows me to better understand the landscape that I work in. I hear what challenges customers and fellow colleagues are experiencing as well as the latest trends in marketing. I feel like I can get into the head of some of the most forward thinking thought leaders as well as students that are struggling to understand difficult concepts. I hear about news before it becomes news and when it does become news I hear it from the direct sources. Now that's what I call being in the loop.
I can respond. With my central role in driving customer success, I'm always looking for ways to make customers better. With Twitter, I can learn how to create better experiences for customers by arming myself with knowledge. I see Twitter as a huge knowledge share where people continuously pass around information. I specifically look for those people that can help me and I will promote those Twitters that provide me with valuable insights. The fact that I can easily thank someone for helping me is amazing.

Not only do I listen to my fellow tweeters, I also look for people that may need assistance in my field and try to contribute to the Twitter information library. Again, it's my nature to help people and I try and do this as much as possible. This may mean answering a question, providing tips and tricks I find or responding to a customer concern. I like that I can correspond via Twitter and I can typically do it when I want it and how I want it (via Twitter or direct message). The fact that Twitter encourages you to respond and that communication is restricted to 140 characters and is informal makes it so appealing.

In addition, one of the most important responses I give to people in Twitter is a "follow" which means I've chosen to receive to listen to their Tweets. If you get an "unfollow" from me (which is extremely rare), it means you've said something that's really offended me.

People respond to me. I think one of the most satisfying reasons for driving my Twitter usage is to generate new followers that listen to my tweets as well as to have people reply to my tweets, directly message me via Twitter or retweet (forward) my tweets. Everyday I meet new and exciting people as well as learn view points that I would not be exposed to otherwise. Heck, I even announced that my wife is pregnant on Twitter and had people I barely know congratulate me. The interaction that is achieved on Twitter is the engine the drives it.

I hope that you have found this useful. I encourage you to try out Twitter by registering an account. When you do, follow me at @chadhorenfeldt and I'll be sure to follow you and help you get up and running!

Chad H.

PS - stay tuned next time for a post on how I manage my use of Twitter.

Email Marketing Gone Wrong - It's not the 1990s Anymore

2009-01-21T23:39:00.012-05:00

I've just got off the treadmill and getting ready to turn in and received an email from a Canada's largest retail drug store - Shoppers Drug Mart or "Shoppers" for short. The email broke most of the essential email best practice rules and I want to ensure that you are aware of these and that Shoppers takes these into consideration for future campaigns. This email may have cut it 1999 but will be deleted or never make the inbox in 2009.

1. Subject Line Contains the Word "Free"

The email subject was the the following: "Free $10 Shoppers Drug Mart Coupon!".
Typically email recipients will block anything with the word "free". This is an email no no. Magically the email arrived in my inbox - I may have whitelisted the "from address".

2. The Email Looks Like This:

Do I need to say more? Ok, I will.

If the "from line" and "subject line" did not say "Shoppers", I would have deleted the email right away. However, I did open it and I see this black box. What is this?? Emails today should not be all images for this reason. Email clients like Hotmail or Outlook (B2B and B2C recipients) will automatically block images. It's a necessity that the email contains text that is visible when the email is opened. An unsuspecting recipient may have thought this was a scam and quickly clicked on the "this is spam" link.

Including images in an email is actually a good idea depending on the email and the target audience. Besides blending in text, adding in ALT tags to the images could have outlined what the images were about. For example, the ALT text could have been "Shoppers is offering a $10 off coupon for this weekend". This unfortunately was not done and I have a grey box staring back at me. It gets worse - much worse.

3. Do I Look Like a Woman? Seriously.

Here is the email once I enabled the images:

If you notice, the products being advertised are women's beauty products. Thanks Shoppers, just what I wanted and it only takes 42 days for a "nuyu"- great (heavy sarcasm here)! In 2009, you need to ensure that emails are highly personalized. That means that every part of the email should have relevant information that I'm interested in. I'm part of the Shoppers Optimum Points program - I'm sure I provided my gender when I'm signed up. The products that I should see could be something like shaving gel. Let me be specific MEN'S shaving gel. In fact they should know my previous purchases and use that data to promote relevant products.

Ok, that may be pushing things but they could have used my age for improved segmentation.
If for some reason you may not have all of the relevant data for improved segmentation, look for ways to collect that information over time. I would have gladly updated my profile to get the coupon or to have downloaded some relevant information (if we're looking for a B2B example).
We are bombarded by too many emails and messages today. The emails need to be sent at the right time and with the right message.

Now, you may have noticed that Shoppers did include my Shoppers Optimum points balance - which is a personalized piece of information. A few notes here on how a good thing went wrong:

It's too bad that I never saw this until I scrolled down. This information should have been near the top.
I have 30 million points - so what? What can I do with those points? If you're going to include my points balance, make it actionable - if it doesn't add anything, don't include it. This information wastes space and takes away from the main purpose of the email.

It still gets worse!

4. How do I get the Coupon?

So I get over the fact that I first see a grey black box and that they think I need a makeover with women's facial cream. Yes, I'm insulted but I would like the coupon because I've run out of Shampoo and I have a Shoppers across the street from me (they're everywhere in Canada). I click on the image of the coupon. I click on it again. NOTHING HAPPENS. I click on the image of the women's' beauty products - that link works! The last tip I can give Shoppers is that you need to test your email campaigns and ensure that all images are clickable. While you can't tell from the grey image above, it's actually two images and they just forgot to add the correct link.

I hope that you and Shoppers have learned something from this campaign. Companies will waste precious marketing dollars if simple email best practices are not followed.

Chad H.

PS - If you live up here in the North, you can go here for the coupon
PPS - Here are some additional email tips:

Technorati Tags: shoppers drug mart, email best practices, e-mail marketing, deliverability

Twitter and Customer Service - Potential PR Nightmare

2009-01-18T16:55:00.006-05:00

Your company may have just started down the path of using Twitter as another communication channel. (If you're not there yet, that's cool but keep reading because there are some items to be aware of. Now back to our story). You may use it to highlight upcoming events, press releases and product/service updates. Using it for this purpose is fairly straightforward. It's mostly a marketing function and is controlled typically by the marketing team.

The question that you may be grappling with is this: How should Twitter be used for customer service? The answer: It's not your decision because Twitter is a two-way conversation and your customers will use it to post comments whether you like it or not. Therefore, the decision has been made for you and your company's customer service department needs to determine how Twitter will be used to create the best customer experience possible. If you are not monitoring Twitter and/or you provide poor follow up via Twitter, the results can be catastrophic for your company's brand.

Twitter and Customer Service Recommendations

This topic is a new one and this post is more of a brainstorming session then "best practices". I have seen and read about a few experiences and will share these here. PLEASE add your own experiences by commenting on this blog. Here are my recommendations:

Decide when to respond. David Meerman Scott write an excellent post on how the US Air Force decides to respond to any social media comments. If you notice, it's recommended that all customer blog posts be followed up on. It even provides guidelines on the type of response.

I don't believe that it's as cut and dry as that - there may be times when just listening is the best response. Frank Eliason of @comcastcares (a Twitter account designed for Comcast customers) mentions in a video interview that it's important to listen to customers and at some point engage in the conversation. If you have a corporate Twitter account and someone sends you a message, you better respond and quickly. However, at times when a twit is sent in general about your company by a customer, you may just want to monitor the conversation at first rather than just responding. Twitter is a community and you may find that other customers may respond for you which is typically more powerful then having someone from your company respond. It all depends on the nature of the request.

I would tend to be more on the side of responding to any customer mention of your company - this is for you to think more about. Frank mentions the importance of Comcast's Twitter presence in "being there and helping". This should be central in your decision making process on Twitter - how can I best help my customer. Here is a post by Melanie Seasons on a successful customer resolution via Twitter: Frank Eliason: Helping Comcast suck a little bit less. Notice that the response time of Comcast was a big factor in customer satisfaction. If you see a customer mentioning your company on Twitter, even responding with "Is there anything I can do?" is recommended.
Respond to the twitterer directly. I have an example where a customer saw me on Twitter and posted a message on Twitter with my Twitter name (@chadhorenfeldt) on a product issue. I didn't reply via Twitter (which everyone can see) but sent a direct message (can't remember if it was via Twitter or email) letting the person know that that their customer representative would follow up with them soon. The customer responded very positively via Twitter (so everyone could see) that their customer rep got in touch with them. I took the conversation "offline" as my Twitter account is not a corporate account and I would rather deal with the issue privately. This is another decision that you'll need to make - what's the best channel to respond to customer.

This example was a positive story. However, you need to watch how you respond to customer tweets. Some twitters are not aware that when they twit about your company that people are listening. If you respond via email to a negative twit, cc a few other people from the customer's company and cite their complaint, you may run into some issues. Don't assume that because the person twitted about you, they want others in their company to know that they twit (especially that they twitted during working hours). The recommended approach is to message or email the person directly or respond via Twitter to get the issue resolved. I don't recommend citing the original twit in an email. Emails can get forwarded on quickly and your customer may get into trouble by their superiors if their twit is against their own company's web policies.

You may want to break down the type of customer requests and decide if certain requests can be handled immediately via Twitter while others should be taken offline. Here is a great example by Bank of America Twitterer David Knapp (@BofA_help) who handled a customer complaint over charging fees for an allegedly "free" chequing account. He responded with the following:
@miacupcake I'd have to look into the circumstances to really understand the situation. Can you send me a DM with your contact information?
For those non-twitters, DM means direct message. David decided to take this conversation offline and get it resolved (response time was about 45 minutes after the initial complaint for those who were wondering).
Set the right expectations. Valeria Maltoni wrote a blog post on her experiences with Skype. She had an issue using Skype on an important family call on Christmas and tried to get it resolved. Skype customer service responded to her quickly on Twitter. The issue is that while the communication was sent via Twitter immediately, the issue wasn't resolved for three days. Valeria expected the issue to be resolved instantaneously (like Twitter). Same day response may have been impossible for Skype but since Skype did not set an expectation for resolution with Valeria she ended up being extremely angry and wrote a negative blog post. If you are going to use Twitter for customer service, ensure that you set the correct expectation when responding. You may want to use Twitter to point the customer to your regular support channel and let them know that someone will follow up with them in the near future. This is something else to think about.
Get a Twitter customer service plan in place. As I mentioned previously, your customers will talk about you and if you are a large or small company, you need some sort of plan in place to prevent a "Twitter free for all" at your company. What I mean here is that not only are your customers twitting about you but many of your employees are on Twitter and are twitting away about your company. For the most part, this is only beneficial - it's like you have an army of company supporters doing the PR work for you. However, this army can quickly start taking flak by making some social media mistakes based on my discussion above. You may already have a social media policy in place. It's time to add to it to consider how you should deal with Twitter mentions. Here are some items to think about when creating your plan when a customer mentions your company:
1. When is a response needed?
2. What should be the turn around time for a response?
3. Who should respond?
4. What channel should be used for the response should be provided? (email, phone, Twitter etc..)
5. Who should receive the response?
6. What is the message of the response? What should customers be instructed to do?
7. Are expectations clear to the customer on a resolution?
8. What is the escalation path at a company for dealing with Twitter complaints?
9. Other items to consider: Is a designated twitter customer service account needed? I personally don't believe this to be the case and it depends on the size of the company and the nature of the business. I think that responding "by committee"should suffice. What is important is that it's clear as to who should respond and when a response is necessary.
When it comes to these types of plans, go easy on your employees and focus on and what it will take to best support customers and not on restricting employees' freedom on Twitter. Companies like @zappos have the following policy: "just be real, and use your best judgement". I don't recommend enforcing such items as ensuring that the company twitters have a company logo etc... - Twitter is all about personality and that shouldn't be restricted.

I hope that you have found this discussion helpful and I highly encourage you to share your thoughts and experiences by commenting on this blog post.

Chad H.
www.twitter.com/chadhorenfeldt

PS: If you found this useful, please tweet about it.
PPS: Here is a good post on the subject: How to Get Customer Service via Twitter

Technorati Tags: Comcast, Zappos, Bank of America, Customer Service, Twitter, Skype

10 Tips for Using Twitter And Email Marketing for B2B

2008-12-21T20:11:00.009-05:00

I was told that every blog needs a "top 10 post" and I thought today would be a good day to write one on a topic that is growing in popularity. That topic is Twitter and how best to use this tool for your B2B marketing efforts. I thought I would take a stab at providing tips on blending a tried and true tool like email with Twitter. Let me know what you think and if you have additional tips (let's see if Darren Rowse from Twitip is listening)

10 Tips for Using Twitter And Email Marketing for B2B

1. Add a link to your company's Twitter account to all mass email communications. Consider adding a link in the email footer to items such as your event invitations or email newsletters. This tip is especially important for any resource or newsletter autoresponder subscription emails. I've found that the autoresponder email from BreakingPoint does this quite well (and has an excellent newsletter!).

Quick note here: I already assumed that your company created a Twitter account. You can find many other blog posts out there on that subject. Here is a great one that should scare you into getting one: Don’t get BrandJacked: Confirming Your Corporate Twitter Account

2. Link to a form landing page from your company Twitter account. For example if you have a Twitter post such as "New white paper on how to increase ROI". Upon clicking on the link to the white paper, direct "Tweeple" (twitter people) to a landing page where you request their email address to get access to the white paper if you don't already have it. In this way you're converting your twitter followers into opted-in email subscribers.

3. Use Twitter content in your email newsletters. For example, create a feature called "Twitter Q/A". In this section, address questions/comments that came up on Twitter and what the response was. This goes back to being an Eco-Marketer and reusing content that you have. I would also recommend recognizing and thanking Tweeple that have contributed to your community. That's the stuff that builds social media loyalty and grows and nurtures your community. If you don't have enough content it means that your company is not leveraging this channel enough and it's time to get on that because it many cases, the conversation has already started.

4. Post links from your email newsletter articles on Twitter. Instead of including one twit that says: "Check out the latest newsletter" and links back to your main newsletter page, consider seeding individual articles on Twitter over a period of time (say a week). You can use a tool like Brightkit to pre-schedule your twits in advance. Companies should make each twit count and make the content as interesting as possible.

5. Ensure that all email newsletter article authors have their Twitter account listed on the email. This allows recipients to continue the conversation after they read the article. You may want to have a Twitter account for anyone mentioned in your marketing emails. This will require the individual to listen and contribute on Twitter which is a good thing (even if they object) :). A definite email best practice is personalization and I believe that Twitter is just an extension of this.

6. Provide instructions in your emails about how subscribers can follow conversations about your company on Twitter. For example, if you are promoting an event in your email, let subscribers know that they they can twit about the event using the hashtag character #. For example #myevent. You would replace "myevent" with the name of the event. You can instruct event registrants to use Twemes to follow the Twitter conversation about the event. Have a look at Karl Roche's excellent post on Twitter for events for more information.

7. Ask email subscribers for their Twitter ID when they sign up. Experiment with an optional field on a few key web registration forms and see how this affects your conversion rate. I recommend mentioning that you will follow the person if they provide their Twitter ID. This may an incentive enough as Tweeple are looking to get as many followers as possible.

8. On your email preference page, indicate to those who may want to unsubscribe that they can still follow you on Twitter. While you may have lost the person from your email list, you keep them in your community. This is the strength of Twitter and how it can be leveraged to enhance your existing marketing efforts.

9. Add a link in your emails and/or on your website that allows email subscribers and web visitors to easily tweet about an article, event or promotion. I learned this from Mr. Tweet. All you need to do is link to Twitter with the following URL: http://twitter.com/home?status= and add in a message under 140 characters after the "=" sign. Here is an example: http://twitter.com/home?status=Great post on Anything Goes Marketing: "10 Tips for Using Twitter And Email Marketing for B2B" http://twurl.nl/sd7i43. This makes the process of spreading the word about your email article extremely easy. Does it take more time? Yes. Will it drive more traffic and help you get further bang for your email buck? Most likely. All you have to do is test it out.

10. Conduct Twitter interviews and use this as content for your email marketing. This type of "Twitterview" could be with a customer, partner, company exec (or any other employee), or industry thought leader. What makes Twitter great is that these types of interviews are easy to do and you can use email to promote these as "live events" as well. Here is an interview that Ann Handley from MarketingProfs did which is a great example of how easy this is.

I hope you have found this useful and please contribute additional tips by adding your own comments below.

Chad H
www.twitter.com/chadhorenfeldt

PS: If you found this useful, please tweet about it.

Technorati tags: Twitter, Darren Rowse, MarketingProfs, Email Marketing, Twitterview, E-mail marketing, web 2.0., Twitter and email marketing

How to Prevent List Attrition yet Drive Event Attendance

2008-12-16T00:43:00.004-05:00

This week's blog post was inspired by an idea by Yaro Starak over at Entrepreneurs-journey.com who suggested to look for blog ideas by scanning Facebook groups. I decided to do a quick scan on Linkedin instead and found a great topic on email marketing. Here is the question that was asked:

How does your company email customers about events and web seminars without sending too many emails to the same customer that may share several products within a product line?

How often do you email your customers and do you have a format that eliminates multiple emails to the same contacts within a short time frame?

This is a timely question as I was just reviewing a similar situation last week. While you can answer the question by saying "use a system that restricts how many emails you send within a given time frame", that may not be an acceptable approach for marketers that are measured on the number of event attendees. The best approach that was brought up in the Answers section in Linkedin is to send emails based on a person's specified interests. While the product that a customer has purchased can help you segment them, is that what they are truly interested in and can you go further in your segmentation (say based on their title or geography)?

Let's assume that the marketer may not know all of this information just yet. The bottom line is that the marketing team needs to promote events but the more emails that are sent may lead to list attrition. My recommendation is to use the right messaging based on what you know about the contact.

Using Dynamic Email Content the Right Way

This is a perfect situation for using dynamic content in email. Instead of creating one email for each event, consider creating one email and using dynamic content to display multiple events based on a person's product purchases. For example, if a person has only purchased one product, they will receive an email that promotes the event associated to that product. If a person is associated to two products (I would not promote more then two events in one email), you may want to promote the event that will be occurring next at the top of the email while including the event that is occurring later on underneath it. Another approach is to display both events side by side or to promote one event in the main column and a webinar in the smaller column.

Promoting Events in Your Newsletters

Another issue that you may deal with is the mix of newsletters, promo offers and event invite emails that you need to send. These items really should work together. For example, you can include a column on your newsletter that promotes upcoming events. You could even make this dynamic to only show events that are relevant to the individual based on their product purchases.

One approach I'm seeing more and more is to create an RSS feed of your company events and display this as a featured section in an email newsletter. It doesn't have to be an RSS feed but it does make it easier as you can update this in one spot- see Steve Wood's post called Content for Free on how to do this.

A Few Other Ideas to Cut Down on Event Emails

Here are a few small tips that you can implement:

Have a link on your event invite that says "I can't make the event but maybe next time". Surprisingly, there will be times when a person in your database has a conflict because their umm.... working? Instead of sending them a follow up email that invites them again to an event that they can't attend (send enough of these and you can expect an unsubscribe), give the person an out. If they do click on that "I can't male it this time" send them a follow up email after the event with recorded version and see if they download it.
Once someone has signed up for an event, do you really need to send 10 emails reminding them of the event (exaggerating here)? Perhaps all that is needed is an autoresponder confirmation email and an email on the day of the event or a day before the event. The way to cut down reminder emails is to get the event registrant to book off the time in their Outlook or Lotus Notes calender using an ICS file link.

Unfortunately, the question on Linked in was closed so I couldn't post my answer but that's why I have my blog. I hope you have found this useful and maybe inspired you on how to generate posts on your blog as well. Let me know if you agree or have other ideas.

Chad H.

PS: I did create a recent group on Facebook during the whole Canadian federal government debacle last week called: "I Prefer Celine as Canada's PM over Stephan Dion any day!". Even if you're Canadian it's not really that funny.

Technorati Tags: event marketing, dynamic email content, database segmentation, Celine Dion, Stephan Dion, Facebook, Linkedin

The Recession is Here - Time to Become an Eco-Marketer

2008-11-16T18:34:00.010-05:00

When I say that you should become an eco-marketer, I don't mean that you should add some corny green recycle image to your website (who would do that?) or support a "Save the Whales" campaign. Although I'm a big supporter of environmental issues and started my career running an environmental organization, I would like to focus on eco-marketing in terms of demand creation.

I focused my research this week on how I can help my customers build out a demand waterfall as defined by the smart people over at SiriusDecisions. During my research, I stumbled upon a great article by the Canadian Marketing Blog called "2009 B-to-B Demand Creation Trends" eh (Canadian joke). It's here where I came across the term eco-marketer and I wanted to build on the excellent analysis that they have already provided. However, after I drank 10 cups of coffee, I've created my own version of the eco-marketer. Here are my three Rs that I recommend to become the best eco-marketer you can be in a down economy:

The Three Rs of Marketing and a Bonus R

Reuse: In a down economy you need to reuse all of your marketing resources that you have out there and maximize your marketing investments. Here are my recommendations:
- Reuse your webinars. If you have run a live webinar, post the archived version on your website behind a form. It's been proven that archived webinars can generate more leads then the actual live event.
- Reuse your email newsletters by ensuring they are posted on your website. This is a simple one but it's surprising how many e-newsletters remain only in email format. I would recommend to post in on your website and even create an RSS feed. With an RSS feed, you can promote in your email footers and it can be re-used by other bloggers and companies. You should even consider creating a blog and reposting your newsletter articles on it.
- Reuse your live presentations. If anyone from your company or your customers are speaking on behalf of your company ensure that you film them and add them to the resource area of your website. You can even just post the slides or the speech text. Don't miss these great opportunities to build marketing content.
- Use social media techniques such as Twitter and YouTube to maximize the effect of your webinars, videos and white papers. For example, you can mention on your twitter profile that you've just released a new blog post or newsletter. Think of social media as a big marketing ecosystem (see, I am focusing on the environment) and make sure you take advantage of all the tools out there. In this way, you can reuse your marketing materials as much as possible.
- Reuse all of your marketing materials in your lead nurturing efforts. Having the right content for automated lead nurturing programs can be the most difficult part of a lead nurturing campaign. However, many companies have all of the materials they need already created. Even though some may be dated, if the materials are good they should be reused. You don't need to just focus on pushing out new content, you probably have some gold nuggets that may be hidden on your site.
  
  For your nuturing campaigns, create a document that outlines all of the marketing content that you have and map this to the buying process of your target audiences that you have identified (assuming you have created defined marketing segments).
  
  You would be amazed at how you can reuse the content you already have (blog posts, newsletter articles, industry white papers, demos) and create a specific and defined automated program that is designed to target a specific segment and has a specific marketing goal.
- Create marketing campaigns that can be reused. For example, if you have a large marketing team, create processes so that you standardize your email and landing page templates. Tweak them as necessary based on your successes (or failures). Another example is to create automated program templates such as an event management or lead nurturing template. These templates can be copied and reused.
- Reuse (and abuse) your whole company. If you have Jimmy from the development team who did a lunch and learn on how he coded a solution that will benefit your clients, get him to write it down and post it on a blog. If Sarah from your Support team came up with a great solution to solve a customer problem, video tape her and post it on your site or include it in your next newsletter. MAXIMIZE YOUR ENTIRE COMPANY IN YOUR MARKETING EFFORTS. Did I just write in caps?
Reduce: Not only should B2B companies reduce the amount of lead leakage where leads are being lost is the sales/marketing funnel by tightening up processes, the following also needs the be considered:
- Reduce the amount of communication that you're sending to leads. Are you saying to yourself "Are you on drugs Chad? Why would I want to send less communications when I need to keep up the number of leads to my sales team?". In a down economy you need to work on further segmenting your campaigns and matching your communications to the right person at the right time. Any emails, direct mail etc... send should be based on a person's interest and the stage of the demand waterfall that they are in. This type of eco-marketing will achieve the best results and ensure that you conserve (another eco-friendly term!) you're ever shrinking opt-in database in the tough times ahead.
- Reduce the amount of time it takes for qualified leads to be followed up with. An automated lead nurturing process will help deal with leads that are qualified but not yet ready to buy and thus reducing leads falling through the cracks but a process needs to be put in place to put the best leads on the desks of your sales team so they'll follow up right away. The best solution for this is a lead scoring process that scores leads based on their explicit information (industry, job role etc...) and their implicit activity (offers they've downloaded, emails they've responded to). With this type of process in place, you can ensure that your sales team is "cutting through the crap" and following up with the best leads before your competitors.
- Reduce the complexity to getting access to information on your website. Optimize your landing pages by removing any unnecessary fields. Ask for more information only if it makes sense to the potential lead. Consider building up a profile of the lead over time. This requires more effort as you need to think through the stages on getting this information but it is worth it.
Recycle: By recycling leads that are in your sales and marketing funnel you will get the most out of your marketing investments. Just because a potential lead attends a webinar and doesn't respond to a sales call doesn't mean they're not interested in buying from your company. An eco-marketer may want to further investigate SiriusDecisions methodologies around calling webinar attendees "inquiries" rather then leads and not passing these on to sales until they've been further qualified through an automated marketing program. In fact, SiriusDecisions has demonstrated that webinars are typically viewed at the beginning stages of the buying process. This is just one example of how marketers need to go beyond lead generation to concentrate on the lead funnel and developing strategies to move leads through this funnel.

Recycle your "inactive leads". Recycling doesn't just include those leads that are not "sales ready" or not yet ready to buy. You need to have automated processes that will detect those leads that you've been sending emails to (or other forms of communication like direct mail) and haven't responded. This means that they haven't visited your website, filled out a form or responded to your marketing communications. You can recycle these leads by placing them in a separate automated program with messages that are specific to this segment. This may include an email with a survey asking these "inactives" what they would like to receive from your company or a request to opt back in with a targeted offer. You may decide that it's time to take some of these leads to the curb but at least you have tried your hardest to maximize those leads that came through your front door.
A bonus R is "Remove". Remove any of the following:
- Remove barriers between the sales and marketing team. Everyone needs to work together. Think peace and joy on earth (just like a real environmentalist).
- Remove campaigns or tactics that are not working. To do this, you need a mechanism in place to measure every aspect of your marketing efforts. This goes back to my original premise of researching the demand waterfall. Having a defined process in place where you can measure the success of your marketing efforts at each stage of the sales marketing funnel is crucial. For example, if the conversion rate of a Google AdWords campaign is failing as the effort to turn these "inquiries" into MQLs (marketing qualified leads) is too expensive and takes too long, remove it. Focus on sources that are bringing in more qualified leads.
- Remove crappy data and automate the process if possible. You will probably have fewer leads coming in the top of your pipeline so you can concentrate on creating processes that will remove contacts that should never hit your database. This may include contacts with bad email addresses, your competitors etc... You can also look at your database for data that is inconsistent and clean it up. Where possible, you can fix this data using automated data tools. For example, it may be possible to standardize contacts that have various job titles or contacts that have different versions of a country (USA, U.S.A., United States etc...). Bad data prevents you from further segmenting your database. Clean out the crap and ensure it stays as clean as possible.
- Remove or punish people that have not bought in. Relating this back to the environment, in Toronto we've implemented a new program for home owners that taxes you based on the garbage that you put at the curb. If you follow the three R's and reduce your trash, you save money. If you don't want to get with the program, you'll pay for it with your wallet. It's fairly straightforward.
  
  As an eco-marketer, you need to get the senior people bought in on your new eco-marketing mantra. If you have sales people that don't want to participate, have them penalized. If you have marketing folks that can't see the forest through the trees, remove them. It's obviously easier said then done but that's why you need executive buy-in.

I'm sure you can add here to my points above and I implore you to do that by leaving some comments. Good luck to you during some tough times ahead and be the best eco-marketer you can be.

Chad H.

PS - Here are some additional resources I used in my research (let me know if you have other useful resources)

PPS - Here are some tips to reduce the amount of water you use in your home.

Technorati tags: eco-marketer, sirusdecisions, lead nuturing, scoring, water conservation, reduce, Reuse, Recyle, demand gerenation, marketing automation, Toronto garbage laws, waterfall, sales and funnel, twitter

Is your Company Being Blogged About?

2008-11-09T19:47:00.005-05:00

Last week I mentioned how you can track your company's brand on twitter. Incidentally I did predict Obama winning the election and also the Dolphins beating the Seahawks today so I'm on a roll!

This week I found a new site that you can use to compare how you're company is doing on the blogosphere versus your competition. The tools is called www.trendpedia.com. I liked this site because it graphically represented the trends on a timeline and allows you to drill into them to see the actual blog posts. The home page also contains data on the most popular comparisons.

Here are a few comparisons I had fun with:

Try comparing your company versus your competitors and drill into the peaks to get a better understanding of why their was a high amount of chatter on a certain day. What are the trends? How is your company being represented when compared to your competitors.

This week and last week's posts should give you the kick in the but you need to ensure that your company has a voice in the social media world and if you've already delved into this that you listen very closely and refine your approach.

Chad H.

PS - a new source to look out for when tracking your brand is Linkedin.

Obama beats McCain... on Twitter

2008-11-02T18:38:00.009-05:00

Are you having a tough time convincing your boss your company needs to get on Twitter? I checked out a site called Tweetvolume that tracks the number of times a term(s) is mentioned on Twitter and presents it in a bar chart. You can compare multiple items which allows you to compare the mentions of your company vs. another company.

Here's a few I tried:

Try it out and you can even send a link to your boss showing how your company compares to your competitor. That should be all you need to get your company's "Twitter on".

Good luck!

Chad H.

PS: You can follow me on Twitter
PPS: Smart companies use Twitter search to see what people are saying about them. While you may not actively on Twitter, the social community is twittering about you.

Landing Page Optimization: Mini Case Study

2008-10-13T18:42:00.006-05:00

It's Canadian Thanksgiving up here today and I'm all about giving back. I'm always looking to help out marketers with their landing pages ever since I went to the Marketing Experiments Landing Page Workshop earlier this year (yes, it was in Florida and no, I didn't just go to the beach!). From time to time, I check out MarketingProf's Know How Exchange where people post their marketing questions and I try and help out.

The following was posted on MarketingProfs:

Landing Page Critique For Agency's Ppc Campaign
Posted By: melissa on 10/10/2008 5:23 PM (CST)	125 Points
Hello, We are running a PPC campaign for a full-service marketing agency, and trying to decide on the best landing page for the promotion. The conversion goal is for prospective clients to call or complete the short contact form. The pay-per-click categories/keywords are for: marketing agency, advertising, copywriting, design, branding, etc. Lead results so far have been pretty good, but conversions are terrible (we have not used any of these landing page designs yet). It's possible that we are not attracting the right audience, however it may be another reason. We have developed 3 different variations for the landing page - please review these links (refer to each as 1, 2, or 3) and let me know what you think? Thank you, 1 -- http://www.discoverycomm.com/landingSample/DCG1.html 2 -- http://www.discoverycomm.com/landingSample/DCG2.html 3 -- http://www.discoverycomm.com/landingSample/DCG3.html

Here is my response (I admit I'm not modest and don't pull any punches). The picture above is the first example that is provided:

Let me preface this as I've been certified by Marketing Experiments in landing page creation. Out of the three, I liked the design of the first landing page but truthfully, I don't see your conversion rates increasing. Here's why:

a. What is compelling the web visitor to respond? What's in it for me? All I hear about is your company. I don't feel you've touched on any pain points of my company. This page seems way too broad. Create a title that is compelling and really hits on the keyword that someone typed in that led to them landing on this page.
b. The offer is the same old same old. Above someone mentions a case study. You'll have readers that do not want someone calling them right away. I would recommend starting the "conversation" with a simple download that hits on a pain point of the marketer as the call to action and not the "free discussion". Send them a follow up email with another call to action and see if they are interested. This will definitely increase your conversions.
c. This is petty but the letter looks like a 5 year old designed it. I'm not talking about the copy but rather the design. The letters are all sloped. This can be improved. (Actually, as I read this again, the copy is really hokey)
d. This is also petty but there is no submit button on the form!! You need something compelling such as "I want my free consultation" or "Have George call me".
e. Add a privacy agreement. This reduces the anxiety of the web visitor.
f. It's a best practice to remove the site navigation so keep the page as is. I disagree with a few of the folks above. Don't confuse the web visitor with additional information.

Good luck!!

I hope you found this helpful and feel free to send your landing pages my way and I'll try and review them (also feel free to go to the MarketingProfs forum and criticize my feedback or post a comment right here!).

Chad H.

PS: This case study on B2B online backs up my recommendations above.

Technorati Tags: Landing page optimization, improving conversion rates, PPC campaigns,copy writing that hits a pain point, call to actions work, Happy Thanksgiving Eh

Improved Email Click-Through Tracking Using Query Strings

2008-09-28T16:58:00.008-05:00

If you have a call to action that is directed at the same landing page more then one time in your email, what is the best way to track which link received the most unique clicks?

Let's back up and review why this topic is important for marketers. As a best practice, it's VERY important to:

Have more then one link in your email to the desired landing page. For example, one link may be an image while one is a text link
Know which links in your email are performing better. You can use this information for future campaigns.

Jay Kulkarni over at B2B wrote an article on this subject called:"How can you ensure that you’re effectively tracking unique click rates on the same URLs within your e-mail creative?" Jay suggests using web redirects on subsequent versions of the link. For example, say you have a link to an event such as this HP event. Here is the original URL:
https://h30406.www3.hp.com/campaigns/2008/events/poweritdown/index.php
You could then create a redirect such as:
http://www.hp.com/poweritdown/index.php that will redirect the web visitor to the original URL but will allow you to track that an email recipient clicked on the second URL and not the first URL.

Track Multiple Email Click-Throughs To The Same Landing Page Using Query Strings

There is another way of tracking mutiple click-throughs from different links in an email that go to the same page. This process I'm going to suggest may be easier for you as well - no need for setting up a redirect. I typically recommend using query strings to get this type of tracking. All you need to do is add a query string and a query string value to the URL and you can track multiple instances of a URL that go to the same page. For example, let's take the original URL example I used above. To make this a unique URL, I can add a query string called "link" with a value of "2" (I used 2 as this is the second instance of the URL). Here is what it looks like: https://h30406.www3.hp.com/campaigns/2008/events/poweritdown/index.php?link=2.

Looks easy eh (My Canadian accent coming through)? Well it is. This doesn't require any technical know how and any good tracking system should differentiate URLs based on query string values. Try this out and let me know how it goes.

Chad H.

PS: I talk more about query strings and how they can be used for improved tracking in my post called One way to tackle closed loop marketing.
PPS: Follow me on Twitter

Technorati Tags: tracking multiple call to actions, email click-throughs, Improved results, query strings

Lead Nurturing - How to track ROI?

2008-09-20T11:27:00.007-05:00

The concept of lead nurturing is something that is complex for some but very straightforward for others. To keep it simple, I look at it as a way of keeping your company top of mind to your potential customers or existing customers who are qualified but not yet ready to buy. I'm not going to reinvent the wheel here so check out Brian Carroll's blog post for a more in depth explanation.

Quick Overview on Trends in Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing can present itself in many ways. It can consist of a sales or call center rep calling a prospect over a period of time or a series of emails sent by marketing. The shift that I've seen is to automate the process using technology. This makes it easier for marketing as messages can be delivered in a timely and consistent manner without a marketing person manually sending out the email each time. Sales benefits as well as marketing is performing "air cover" and with today's tools, the messages can look like the sales rep is sending it themselves with all of this being automated. The other shift I've seen is to use multiple channels as part of a well laid out plan. This may consist of a postcard sent out with an email being sent two days later so it coincides with the direct mail piece and then having a call center rep call 2 days later to maximize the impact of the campaign.

Great - How do I track ROI for Lead Nurturing?

If you are using a CRM with a campaign component, set up a campaign that is specific to your lead nurturing efforts (you may need several campaigns based on the number of programs you are running). On any of the emails that you send as part of the campaign, direct the respondents to a form landing page that when filled out, passes the lead to your CRM and tags that respondent as being part of the lead nurturing campaign that you set up. As deals turn into opportunities and then hopefully into closed deals, you can look back on how your lead nurturing program contributed to the pipeline and then eventually to your company's bottom line. I've also seen companies use a dedicated 1-800 number as part of their lead nurturing campaigns which allows them to easily indicate that the call was generated from a lead nurturing channel.

The explanation above is a summarized view on tracking ROI and some marketers out there may probably rolling their eyes and saying "if only it were that simple". There are many factors that go into this including getting sales and marketing working together as well as buy-in from the marketing team and the rest of the company to invest the time and resources in a systemized lead nurturing process. All I can say is that from what I've seen, it's well worth it and with a well throughout process the return on investment should not take too long to be realized.

Lead Nurturing - Getting Started

Starting a lead nurturing initiative is not the focus of this article but what I would recommend for now is to start simple and look for an area that you can run a pilot program. For example, pick a specific segment such as a key vertical and choose leads generated from a specific channel such as Google Adwords. A simple program may consist of 2-3 emails sent within a specific time period with key messages that should educate prospects and make it easy for them to reach out to your company. Obviously, the more automated you can make this, the easier it gets for the marketing team.

That's it for now - hopefully this was helpful.

Chad H.

Technorati tags: online lead generation, sales air cover, nurturing, automated marketing ROI

Newsletter Content that Engages Your Marketing Database

2008-09-09T00:58:00.005-05:00

Take a minute out of your day and have a look at this ad (it's worth it):

Yes, this is an ad but what is appealing is the message. This is not about beer. This is not enticing you to go out and drink beer. It's providing a message that hits you on an emotional level and when they have you right where they want you (at the "Thank You"), they flash their logo up there. This beer company is going beyond their product to focus on their target audience. I can imagine the thought process of the agency in their board room: "What content can we produce that will engage Anheuser Bush's customers?" They succeeded with this ad.

Who are you Writing Your Newsletters for?

For many companies, newsletters are key to either keeping customers, creating repeat customers or nurturing prospects who are interested in your products but not yet ready to buy. Many company newsletters you receive in your inbox today talk about how their company is changing and what new products are being released. So what? Why do I care about that? How is that going to help me finish my work for the day? Why would I want to open your newsletter? Before you click the send button on your next email blast, you need to consider these questions.

Creating Relevant Newsletter Content 2.0

Creating relevant content does not just mean writing about an aspect of your product or service that appeals to the target audience. Of course you need these but it's the companies that go beyond this that are able to create, nurture and sustain a loyal audience that will keep your company top of mind. Consider writing about content that will entertain or enrich the daily lives of your email registrants. This goes beyond your product and beyond your company. Here are some examples:

Solar Ink (by Solar Winds). Check out this newsletter issue where they feature the "Game show for geeks". This B2B company is clearly in tune with its target audience
MEC Email Newsletter (by Mountain Equipment Co-op). Here is an example of their newsletter that contains how to videos on how to fix your bike.
The Smart Life (by TD Bank Financial Group). Here is a case study that outlines how this newsletter that is targeted at its customers is designed to keep TD top of mind so they renew. It doesn't just feature their products and promotions but includes "lifestyle topics about home and family, car care, vacation properties and vehicles, smart saving and spending ideas".

Based on these examples, here is the bottom line to consider: How can you provide content to your prospects and customers that goes beyond your products and services but focuses on what is interesting to them and will keep them interested so either they keep buying from you or will eventually buy from you?

Chad H.

PS: On a side note, it would be interesting to further investigate how these companies segment their databases and if they serve different content based on these segments. For example, does content differentiate based on past products purchased, geography, job title?
PPS: I receive these newsletters above and read them.
PPPS: This concept can go beyond newsletters and be used for your automated lead nurturing efforts or in an attempt to re-engage email subscribers that are unresponsive.

Technorati tags: email newsletters, e-newsletters, newsletter content, segmentation, relevancy, online marketting, targeted message, beer ad, Support Our Troops, examples, Umm... Beer

The Right Way to Generate More Leads on Your Site

2008-06-22T22:52:00.008-05:00

It's been a very busy month with lots of travel thrown in. Throughout my journeys much of the conversation comes back to generating a higher quantity of leads from the web that are of better quality. I had the pleasure of attending the Marketing Experiments Website Optimization workshop that was held in Florida earlier this month (still waiting for my landing page professional certification badge :) ). From that conference, combined with a very good study on email tactics in retail I've been inspired to write a post on this topic.

What's in it for me?

They key point hammered home at the Marketing Experiments Workshop is that all points of interaction on your website should answer the following question from the web visitor's perspective: "What's in it for me?". Therefore, if you have one of those newsletter sign up boxes on every page of your site (like the one I have in the top right hand corner) that says "Enter your email to get our newsletter", you may need to rethink this area as you're not providing a compelling reason for the visitor to sign up for your newsletter. A better approach may be "Get expert updates on X" (by X I mean a specific topic that is assumed to be relevant to the site's content or why would they be there in the first place). Even the submit button should be written in a way that answers the question "What's in it for me". For example: "Send me Product Alerts".

To use a simple sign up form or to not use a simple sign up form - that is the question.

To go back to my last point on that newsletter sign up - should this be a simple email only form or should you have a link that directs web visitors to a newsletter sign up page? This depends on your target audience as well as the type of segmentation and personalization you would like to perform in your marketing campaigns. B2C companies may only need email to begin the conversation but B2B companies typically collect company name and first and last name.

Here are the points to remember:

Most of the pages on your site can be accessed from a search engine. Don't assume that web visitors come waltzing through the front door (your home page). A website is like a big semi-permeable blob (think back to your to your biology days) that can be entered from all areas. Therefore ensure that you have a call to action on every page to engage new visitors and turn them into leads that you can market to.
Ensure you answer the question "What's in it for me" and don't assume that because they are on a website about say hot dogs that the visitor will know that the newsletter will provide the latest deals on hot dogs. Don't assume anything. You need to spell it out.

Another bad tactic that I see is to use landing pages for multiple purposes. For example, directing newsletter registrations to the Contact Us page. This is not a good idea as the call to action doesn't correspond to the desired result and possible subscribers would be scared off as they don't want Mr/Mrs Salesperson calling on them asking them how many hot dogs they want.
The more fields on your web form, the less conversions. For some marketers, this is OK as they only want serious submissions. For example, if you're inquiring about how you can fly into space through one of those private space programs, you first need some serious coin to be considered. It would be a good idea to ask subscribers for their annual income before having someone in sales call them back.

However, if you are just trying to start a conversation to attract a larger audience to a subject area that you have expert content in, the less fields on your form that you do have, the higher the conversion rate. Always ask yourself if you really need those additional form fields (say for segmenting or personalization) and can you get that information in a future campaign or do you need this information right away.

Another consideration is to ask subscribers what type of information they would like to receive. This is definitely recommended. It should also be clear how often you will be sending subscribers communications.
Test, test, test... I know you hear that all the time. Imagine being stuck in a conference room for 8 hours straight each day in Florida right beside a PGA golf course and being forced to hear that when you could be outside. Of course the Marketing Experiment people are right. You need to test out the method that will work the best for your situation.

I hope that this post has been helpful and I should be adding some additional findings from my landing page workshop experience. In the meantime, feel free to check out my twitter profile for updates on marketing tools and info that I pick up. I just found an interesting tool that can tell you the type of email client that your subscribers are using to view your email in. This can be key in better understanding how best to design your emails.

Chad H.

PS: I just changed my blog updates sign up form text - we'll see if it improves conversions. I think I need to provide content more often. :)
PPS - image courtesy of www.wearyourbeer.com

Technorati tags: beer, landing page optimization, Marketing Experiments, Call to Action, What's In it for Me, test, PGA, Tiger Woods, Space - the final frontier