Campaign Results

Thanks to Joel and James for a thought-provoking event on Wednesday - Pull Marketing, Social CRM and Influencer Marketing - Twitter Tag #b2b21c

Stephen Mills from O2 advised that you only have 4 seconds to capture interest so RELEVANCY is key if you want to drive campaign results.

Given the volume of communications that we are all trying to manage, you can see why Marketing Management Technology is so popular right now.

Will Schnabel explored the shift of power from vendor to buyer in the sales process - the hunted become the hunters and use multiple channels to inform themselves (Tom Chapman advised that 1 in 5 tweets mentions a brand, product or service). With 70% of leads not being "ready now", event trigger marketing and lead automation are no longer optional tools for the B2B marketer.

Katie and Pamela from Volume informed us that 69% B2B decision makers use social networks and 90% participate in video - thanks for sharing the Oracle case study on Enterprise Performance Management TV.

David Beard re-enforced the message that Sage don't just do finance software! They are doing a great job "keeping the conversation going" around their CRM solutions and interacting with any interest they observe.

"Too much noise" was the message from James Hanson. Every prospect you are speaking to is likely to have at least 5 influencers. Empathy is key - understand what drives the influencers and adapt your marketing plans accordingly. Thanks to Drew Nicholson for sharing the influencer experience at Cisco Webex.

Great energy from Prof Merlin Stone. Are we approaching a tipping point similar to the explosion of telephone marketing 20 years ago? Web 2 has given the customer parity with the supplier this time. Hyper-competition makes planning very difficult - best to be guided by how you would like your customers to talk about you.

A stimulating debate, led by Scot Mckee from Birddog and Steve Kemish from Cyance, forced us to consider whether traditional forms of B2B marketing were dead and that we all need to migrate to digital. Despite protestations from Joel, the panel - and audience - migrated to the middle ground and the much maligned word "Integration".

Guess I'll have to be careful about how much I reference the ability to integrate all your marketing efforts in Aprimo Marketing Studio!

The key to achieving your desired conversion rate is relevancy -- pure and simple.  It's more than using your microsite software to support specific campaigns.  It's about testing and delivering personalized emails with relevant content that drives customers to a personalized and relevant experience on your microsite. 

A few words stand out in the above paragraph that merit additional attention.

Personalize - This means many things to many people.  It can be as simple as embedding the customer's name in the email message.  A recent study by Aberdeen found that personalizing an email with a name increased conversion rates by 200-300% over non-personalized emails.

Relevant - The message/offer needs to resonate with the customer.  Relevancy can be driven by events,  prior purchases, and/or through segmentations.

• Events - A customer that downloads a whitepaper or article about a product or service could be ripe for a follow-up email or call.  A dramatic increase in bank account balance could signal a call-to-action from a bank about investment options.  A very personalized email could be triggered to drive customers to personalized microsites with a relevant message that speaks to the customer's need or interest.  Lead nurturing applications can play a key role in supporting your marketing efforts related to customer events.
   
• Prior purchases - Simple cross/up-sell campaigns can be driven by product purchases.  For instance, a customer that purchases a water filter could receive an email that drives them to a microsite that attempts to enroll them in scheduled deliveries (recurring sales!) of replacement filters.  Data mining can also use information about prior purchases (RFM type data) to predict the likelihood of a customer's interest in other products or services.  Then we simply communicate to customers about the products they are most likely to purchase (based on a statistical probability to respond).  We won't always be right, but more times than not, this type of personalized communication will increase conversions and improve our campaign results.
   
• Segmentations - There are many ways to create segmentations.  One is based on industry, product and customer knowledge that is accumulated over time.  For instance, "I've worked in this industry for 10 years and know that females, aged 21-25 are the best targets for my product."  Another interesting segmentation approach that improves campaign results is customer clustering.  Clustering is a data mining technique that creates customer segments where everyone in one segment is similar to each other based on customer attributes (e.g., gender, age, prior purchases, geographic location, income class, etc.).  While everyone in a given segment are similar to one another, each segment in general is quite different from any other.  Once we profile each segment, it is easy to develop a personalized message that goes beyond first name.  The actual copy/text of the email can be personalized to be perceived as even more relevant.  If just using first name for personalization leads to a 2-3 X conversion improvement versus mass email, just imagine what affect personalized copy will have.  Let's look at an example.
  
  A large print newspaper in the northeast was experiencing declining subscribers like many of it's counterparts nationally.  The newspaper appended Census data (number of residents, race, ethnicity, age, income, home value, average commute time and many other variables) at the zip+4 level to all of it's subscribers. It then used clustering to create five different clusters of customers based on the Census data.  Their idea was to profile each group and develop editorial zones based on these segments.  Each editorial zone would receive it's own unique newspaper content based on assumed interests as derived from the cluster profiles.  One cluster was comprised of the highest proportion of customers with high home values, 4-year degrees and the lowest proportion of people with blue-collar jobs.  This cluster also  enjoyed the highest penetration in terms of current subscribers.  You can see how the content this group would be interested in would differ from the cluster with lower education and income.  By personalizing the newspaper content, the newspaper reduced the rate of subscriber loss from all segments/zones. 
  
  This information was also used to promote customizable online versions of the newspaper as well.  Subscribers now opt-in/out to various content.  As such, they are directly professing their interests in a topic or issue.  This information is even more powerful from a marketing perspective than what we "deduce" via analytics, and can drive a circular process where we get to know the customer better and better over time.  This increases customer loyalty and ROMI.
  
  Many organizations have even taken this idea farther from a Social Marketing perspective.  Customers can form their own clusters by opting in/out of particular forums or discussions.  Creating customer segments based on the forums or discussion groups to which they belong is valuable low hanging fruit.  Some leading edge companies are also applying Text Mining to customer posts to take proactive steps for customer loyalty/retention, cross-sell and acquisition efforts.  More to come on Social Marketing and Text Mining in future posts.

Test - Testing is a best practice that cannot be ignored by Online Marketers.  It's often referred to as A/B or Champion/Challenger testing.  The notion is to create two or more versions of your message.  Perhaps version A uses a dark blue call to action that is italicized, and version B uses rich green that is bolded instead of italicized.  The simplified notion here is to split your targets into two groups or segments.  Segment A gets version A, and segment B gets version B.  We'd then look at open rates and click-thru's to see if one version outperformed another.  We can then use the format of the winning version in future email campaigns.  We can also utilize A/B testing on microsite pages as well.  Testing can cover various combinations of: font size, font color, subject line text, images, etc.  Testing is truly where the art of marketing meets the science of marketing square on to dramatically improve your campaign performance.  I will develop a post dedicated solely to the subject of Testing in the near future.  Keep an eye out!

There is soooo much that can be written on the many marketing topics I've covered at various levels in this post.  Please write to share some of your valuable insights today and help others become marketing heros!

Let’s face it -- we’ve all gone to website pages that take forever to load.  Sometimes, the load times are so long, I just close the window or hit return and hope a competitor’s webpage loads faster.  So, what’s the culprit here?  Typically it’s a large Flash file or just a page with one or more images that have not been optimized for the web.  Non-optimized images and long page load times adversly affect conversion rates and marketing campaign results.  Whether you’re building a simple webpage, a marketing oriented microsite or an email, images must be optimized for the web. 

Optimizing images for email and microsite pages is the act of finding the sweet spot between a great looking image that takes too long to download and a grainy image that downloads in a second at dial-up speeds of 56kps.  The idea is to modify the image to retain a nice rendering while decreasing the overall file size.  Optimization becomes more and more critical as we add more and more images to any microsite page.

There are a number of software packages out there that allow you to resize images – Photoshop, Fireworks and Paint Shop are a few of the most popular.  By resizing, I mean changing the absolute size in pixels, as well as the file size itself.  Changing file size refers to changing the amount of data compression used for an image.  The most common image files used for the web are JPEG, GIF and PNG.  The difference in JPEG, GIF and PNG is the way they compress data.  GIF and PNG compression work almost exactly the same, but PNG often produces slightly smaller files.  JPEG compression is designed to optimize images with fine gradiations of color, while GIF and PNG are better at compressing images with large areas of color, such as illustrations.  The more you compress JPEG files, the more artifacts you see.  This is because you are actually removing “data” from the file.  Here are a few JPEG examples I created using Fireworks.



Look at the captions below each of the images.  The original uncompressed image on the left is 96K and would take 15 seconds to download if you were using a dial-up connection.  The image on the right manitains almost the same overall quality but has been compressed to less than 25% of the original file size, resulting in only a three second download.  Now imagine that there are four images on this page that are these sizes.  A webpage using non-optimized images would take 60 seconds to fully render, while a webpage using optimized images will only take 12 seconds.  This is the difference between losing and gaining customers that visit your web and microsites.  As you can see, "size" really does matter!

While GIF and PNG compressions do not actually lose “data” like JPEG compression, they do lose color fidelity.  GIF and PNG files are limited to 256 colors or less.  When compressing these files, we typically move to 32, 24 or 8 colors.  Here are a couple of examples of compression using PNG files.



The above images are virtually identical in appearance.  However, by looking at the captions, you can see that the 16 color, 8-bit image on the right is only about a third of the size of the original.  

Many companies today are adopting marketing management technology that allows marketers to easily create their own marketing campaigns, emails and microsites.  This is great, but companies need to also put safeguards in place to protect their brand.  This is where marketing asset management comes into play. That is, the notion of creating assets like logos and other images that have been optimized and approved for use in marketing campaigns.  Please feel free to visit our blogs on Brand Asset Management to learn more.

You just got an email from your favorite media rep.
They have cut their pricing in half (one time only) for banner ads on their site. 
You have to decide today, and you have to send the ad tomorrow to take advantage of the offer. Guess what?  Your agency requires  three days advance notice to get the paperwork done, play with ideas, present concepts, get copy approved, create final art and get final approval.

So, what do you do?

It's a great offer, and a great way to generate some demand and leads and drive inbound marketing.
But, web advertising can be so immediate that you don't even have time to create it!
Look into automation that allows you to create banner ads from your desktop.  Yes, they exist and they're pretty amazing.  Pick the size.  Pick the style.  Pick the animation effects.  Drop in the copy, and you're done!  You can even send the ad to the publication, and track click-throughs right from your desk. Talk about immediate campaign results!  Oh, and you can track your expenditures as well, did I mention that??

Banner ads, on demand and on budget.
That's what I call good website marketing!!

A microsite is a mini-Web site that interactive marketers use to enhance the company's primary Web site. Often, a microsite has its own domain or subdomain.

Microsites are a great tool that allows other marketing professionals to obtain targeted leads for specific marketing campaigns.

Despite its small stature, a good rule of thumb to follow when developing a microsite is to develop and execute the microsite based on a comprehensive plan and execution strategy.

Post campaign analysis is a critical component of of any online property. Your execution strategy must contain a way to measure campaign results. Tools like Google Analytics or more robust offerings from Omniture need to be a part of the comprehensive plan.

Other planning tools that can go a long way in aligning your Web team with the marketing area requesting a microsite, is a site map. Visio is often used as a microsite tool to build a site map, but many other free Visio alternatives are available.

As with any marketing project, don't rush the microsite, as the targeted content and approach a microsite offers, can be a great way to boost ROI in marketing.