Forrester's recently published study on Interactive Marketing (email, social, dialog, banner, etc.) reveals 68% of survey respondents expect to achieve increased email marketing effectiveness over the next three years. Furthermore, survey respondents also indicated they would increase interactive marketing budgets by 60% by shifting funding away from traditional channels: direct mail (40%), Newspapers (35%) and Magazines (28%). The picture that is emerging here is one where marketers have high expectations on interactive marketing and expect to focus less on traditional channels. A lot will be riding on this reallocation of marketing budget -- so what will marketers have to do right to fulfill their hopes and expectations? This particular blog will address best practices that must be followed by email marketers. Future blogs will address social and dialog marketing in detail.
I don't know about you, but I'm not sure I can handle more emails coming into my professional and personal inboxes. I get so many from the same companies that I don't even open them -- not even when they come from companies I opted into. Companies that email too frequently create so much "white-noise" that it affects their open rates as well as the open rates for other companies. In addition to white-noise emails, I also get many others that made me think -- "why did I even get this?...I don't smoke, so why am i offered a smart smoker trial?"..."I have only rented mystery and adventure movies from you, so why are you telling me about The Lion King release?" You experience the same things and feel the same way too. So, what can email marketers do to ensure success and rise above the noise and mediocrity we see everyday? It takes only three things -- relevancy, segmentation and testing. These three tactics are the key building blocks to optimizing your email marketing efforts.
Relevancy - A blog I posted a couple of weeks ago spoke to email relevancy -- that it's about personalizing the email, segmenting your audience and testing your content (copy, images, subject lines, etc).
Segmentation - Your audience will differ by demographics, personality, shopping habits, geography, etc. Simple segmentations where different messages are sent to each segment can deliver huge marketing ROI. A recent Marketing Experiments webinar offered a case study on American Greetings.com (AG). AG's goal for their email campaign was to increase individual Ecard purchases as well as Annual Subscriptions. They created two segments -- Segment A contained customers that purchased humorous Ecards in the past, while Segment B contained customers that purchased traditional Ecards. Each segment got an email that spoke to their interests based on this past purchase behavior. This simple use of segmentation resulted in a 70% improvement in conversion rates when compared to a control group -- that's HUGE! Just imagine what more sophisticated segmentation schemes might produce!
Frequency - Ok, so I have a real issue with this particular topic. I can't begin to tell you how much junk I get in my inbox. I don't even open emails from some marketers and yet I still get an email every day from them -- please do some analysis on open rates and realize, I'm just not into Chocolate Covered Strawberries -- OK?! Oh yes, back to the informational part of my message... The same webinar by Marketing Experiments (I suggest you Google them!) provided another case study on a very large anonymous Ecommerce company. They segmented their customers into seven segments. Each segment got a different number of emails over a 60 day period. At the extremes, one segment got an email every other day, while the other got an email every 15 days. During the webinar, the audience was polled to see what they thought the optimal number of emails would be. They chose 3-4 per month based on their own experiences and readings. Well, the actual results were quite surprising. Their test showed that customers that received emails every two days produced 3X the revenue of the segments that got 2-4 emails per month. In fact, there was a significant positive correlation across all segments based on the number of emails they received (see below graph).
You would think this is illogical. Most email marketers believe we face the tradeoff shown below -- that there will be an increase in revenues at first, but then we'll experience more unsubscribes or non-opens as the frequency increases.
So, what is the disparity between the experience of the webinar audience and the results of this study? Well, we are simply seeing that each company has a unique customer base and a unique relationship with them. You can't just assume your optimal frequency should be what is best "on average" or for a specific company they read about. It means that every company must do segmentation and testing to determine the right frequency for their unique audience.
Caveats? -- there is always one or more:
1) Tell your ESP that you'll be doing experiments and they may see greater volume than normal. After all, you don't want to be blacklisted.
2) Also look at open rates and unsubscribes during your testing. The anonymous email marketer in the 2nd case study saw no correlation between frequency, and open rates or unsubscribes per email sent. But your experience may be different. Remember, an unsubscribe doesn't just effect revenue from a given campaign, but it also erases expected/future customer lifetime value.
Marketers on the street often come up to me and ask, "How many times can I contact my customers and prospects?" Actually, marketers do not come up to me and ask me this question, but they should be asking someone this question. Actually, I decided to write this blog because I am surprised how many organizations do not manage the number of time customer and prospect communications much at all. In some cases customers and prospects are being barraged with marketing communication to the point that the communication is becoming less and less effective.
Opt-Outs First
There are customers and prospects that you should not be contacting at all. These are individuals that have asked to be removed (opted-out) from your marketing communication. If someone asks to no longer receive your marketing messages by all channels, or by a specific marketing channel of email, mail, or call, then they are probably not interested in your messages or in receiving your offers via that specific channel. The customer or prospect by providing you this information has just saved you money, increased your response rate, and has provided you a preference. So, you should use that information.
There are other regulations covering telemarketing opt-outs (TSR or the Telemarketing Sales Rule) that require marketers to apply the National Do Not Call list and maintain and use a do not call list for your organization. For direct mail, there are no do not mail regulations, yet. However, because of the high cost of direct mail every direct mail marketer should have their own do not mail list and use it. The DMA also offers its own national do not mail suppression list to members. For this and other compliance information, check out the Direct Marketing Association's compliance portal here. Please note, I am only discussing U.S. regulations in this blog. Each country and/or economic region will have its own regulations. As I said before, check with your own legal council about these compliance issues.
Number of contacts - There is no silver bullet
Once you can drop the prospects and customers that do not want to be contacted at all, you can concentrate on how often you communicate to the others. Okay, if you are looking for the silver bullet answer to this question here, you won't find it. It doesn't exist. But you can start finding it for yourself. It is a complex issue. There is a delicate balance between the power of repeating a message and overwhelming and diluting your messages with too many messages. You definitely don't want to compete with your own messaging or worse start increasing the number of people who are opting-out or unsubscribing from your marketing messages all together.
The first step to implementing a contact management strategy is to define some basic contact management rules. The rules should specify how many times your marketing organization will contact a person in a set period of time. The best rules are marketing channel centric, that is a rule defines how often you will contact the person via email, call, and mail per week or month. Do not create a rule with large time frames like 10 times a year, because this would still allow a marketer to contact the person 10 times in one day. This seems obvious, but a client once asked me to implement an only contact 10 times a year direct mail rule.
At this point, you can use some customer research or anecdotal evidence or gut feel to define your initial rules. I usually suggest something like no more than 1 email per week, a direct mailing once every two weeks, and a telemarketing effort (could include multiple attempts) only once a month. Once you have your initial contact management rules implemented and established, you can start testing variants. You can pull a segment of customers and market to that segment more frequently and compare overall results versus your baseline. Whenever changing your contact management rules, monitor your opt-outs from the test group as well as response rates. You want to increase response rates without significantly increasing opt-outs.
Exceptions -every rule has one
There are exceptions to every rule even contact management rules. Usually, informational messages from marketing are required for regulatory purposes or other reasons. These messages are not counted as a contact and they are not suppressed because of contact management rules either. The customer or prospect must receive this information because it is important or required. It is not promotional in nature. Really, these informational messages should be rare from marketing.
Subscriptions are another special case. Opt-in subscriptions are not counted against the total number of contacts because the prospect or customer has chosen to receive those messages. Subscriptions are also semi-promotional and informational in nature. The customer or prospect wants to receive these messages and if they did not, the individual can unsubscribe from them. If you enforced and counted these contacts against your contact management rules, then the subscribers would not receive their subscriptions and marketing could not reach the subscribers - your most engaged individuals - to make them offers. So, subscriptions are a special case.
Responses to customers and prospects asking for more information are another exception. If the customer or prospect asks to have a white paper emailed to them, these emails should not count against the individuals' totals or be suppressed because the customer or prospect received too many emails. I would also argue that confirmation messages, usually emails, and thank yous are not counted as well.
What you want to regulate and control with contact management rules are the promotional and unsolicited marketing messages to your customers and prospects.
Another Exception - Communication plans
There is another unique exception that requires some special handling and some variation to your contact management rules. In some cases, you will want to run a customer through a series of messages to completion without interruption. This could be a series of welcome emails, a renewal series, or multiple invites to an upcoming seminar via mail and email. During this time, you want the customer or prospect's undivided attention. You do not want other random messages to appear. The contact management rules would only apply at the beginning of the multi-touch communication plan, but no contact management suppression rules would be applied after the first contact in the series. Also, the records would be locked for a longer period of time then your normal contact management rules - weeks or months even.
This lock period can be managed by setting a lock date for each individual in the campaign. Standard exclusion rules applied to each campaign could then suppress these locked individuals. This will prevent the individual from being promoted by other campaigns until after the specified lock date. This lock date could also be used to reserve control groups that are held back from all marketing promotions for baseline comparisons of marketing lift. What is marketing lift you ask? Marketing lift is the amount of additional revenue or responses that marketing promotions to individuals generate compared to the control group that did not receive any marketing promotions.
Technology
Multichannel Campaign Management and eMarketing systems, like Aprimo, provide capabilities to manage opt-outs and to manage contact management rules. In fact, these applications make it easy to manage your opt-outs, contact management rules, and contact strategy. The components of the system are simple. A contact history table or communication log to track which customer or prospect received which marketing message or offer via which channel and when. Also, the ability to apply predefined filters or queries for each contact management rule to suppress records that have already been contacted more than the allotted time. A lock table can also be created and written to in order to use in queries to enforce promotion blackout periods for specific individuals. Multichannel Campaign Management solution has these components out of the box, all you need to provide are the contact management rules.
Think about it
So, I have not provided you with any silver bullets regarding implementing a contact management strategy. However, there are some guidelines and practices to consider. The only limitation to putting a contact management strategy in place is the internal discipline and processes of marketing. Technology, like Aprimo, simply makes it easier to execute and manage.
Anonymous to known is a key concept inside of interactive marketing in the BtoB world. The basic approach is that once a person becomes "known" to you on your web site via a form entry, you want to collect their previously anonymous behavior with their newly created contact record. The value is clear, the first time someone fills out a form on your site is almost always not the first time they have spent time with your on-line content. What they were reading, how long they were reading it, can all be valuable information pulled into the marketing process from the first contact forward. It is the basis by which you can remain relevant in your next set of email marketing communications, landing pages, or micro-sites. No longer should you be limited in your response based on the few fields you actually collect on the form itself.
Too often, our web analytics products are holding hostage all this valuable information. Its' use is limited to basic web and traffic reports. However, using today's marketing software, you can now make this web data actionable at an individual, contact level. This will greatly expand the options for your campaigns and increase the probability you remain relevant to your prospects, and ultimately, improve your conversion rates.
Well I'm finally starting to see some of the hype subside on social marketing. I don't want to imply that I don't see great potential for social marketing. I just wish we didn't have to go through these euphoric hype cycles on every new concept. Twitter is great, but only as great as the ability for everyone to get the right people to follow you and for you and everyone else to put the time into keeping it up to date. So, perhaps the death of email marketing has been somewhat overstated.
The good thing about social marketing (other than social marketing itself) is that it will make email marketing better. I think most of the filters have advanced to get most of the spam out of the way. Now, we can focus on getting the legitimate email marketers to do a better job of targeting and personalizing their email. This will take some technology, but just as important, it will take some conviction and improved processes to support the use of the technology.
Social Media tools will continue to evolve and continue to provide a new means for connecting with customers and prospects. But, this will force email marketing software providers to improve their tools and email marketing professionals to get better at building emails that are relevant and targeted. Nothing happens as quickly as prognosticated and usually not the way they suggest. Emails not getting older...it's getting better!
If you have not experienced running a search advertising campaign in awhile, you might be missing out on the latest and greatest full contact sport. It is getting crazy out there. So many companies trying to win so many search terms both organically and paid it is truly the new Colosseum of marketing. Recently, with the launch of Aprimo Marketing Studio, we have begun to invest more in search advertising. One of our battle ground topics is email marketing. Over the past 3 months, over 2 million people searched for email marketing software. If you add on top of this all the other derivatives (email marketing solutions, blast email marketing, business email marketing software, etc.), there are tons of searches to win and many potential prospects to capture. However, no one, and I mean no one, can simply "buy" themselves to the top anymore. It is just too expensive.
For example, there are so many vendors now fighting for the key email marketing terms, some clicks skyrocket to over $20 per click on a given day. Yikes. $20 just to get a click if you want the top position for certain terms on a given day. In this environment, everyone needs to start having strategies that go beyond just paying more to maintain a position and include finding ways of getting your qualified traffic in the most efficient way possible.
Once you get a click, you also need to make it count. So, all the landing pages need to take a step up in terms of testing, quality, and conversion measurement. Winning in this environment requires both a sophisticated strategy, a robust measurement system, and the tenacity to work on it each and every day.
To be blunt, there is no "auto pilot" in search marketing any more. If you sit idle, you lose. If you do not keep challenging yourself to try more, measure more, test more, you lose. For marketing, this can be an exciting time. There are few other marketing arenas where you get to daily compete with your top competitors. Where you can literally "out think them" on a daily basis. It gives marketing the feel of a true full contact sport.
I know Aprimo is not yet a favored contender in this competition. Frankly, we have done most of our marketing through a traditional sales centric approach. However, we love the competition. So, here's to having a good day on the search advertising field of play. We are happy to be here.
More and more, I'm getting emails that are all images. Many email clients and personal settings make these types of emails just plain uncompelling to open. Here is an example of one I just got
from a large retailer. It's obvious the sender is not embracing email marketing best practices. Note the fact that my personal settings are blocking the image downloads -- a typical setting for many people. Also note that many of the ALT-text comments (a good practice that is often overlooked) aren't obvious or are hidden. This retailer may have the best microsite pages personalized for a visit. But, if I'm not drawn-in by this message, I'll never see them.
So, how do email and interactive marketers develop rich image-based emails that are flexible enough to increase open and click-through rates? Best email marketing practices should include:
1) Use some plain or HTML text in the body of the email so recipients that are blocking images get more of a sense of the message -- one which is deeper than the Subject Line.
2) Use captions under the pictures for the same reason stated above.
3) Use ALT-text descriptions so a text explanation of the image/offer is available.
4) Put a text-based link on the top of the page that offers a web page version of the email.
4) Consider using personalized emails where just a couple of content blocks and images will appear based on customer attributes and stated preferences/interests. See the examples below.
The email to the left renders information specific to a fictitious "high value" bank customer about a Personal Financial Plan. 
The email to the left here has an identical look (standardizing the brand) and some similar content and links to other information, but it presents an offer on a 2nd Free Account to a "Low Value Customer." Both emails were created from the same single template (developed in Aprimo's email marketing solution) but rendered differently based on customer attributes.Relevant content that is not "image laden" may keep more email recipients from universally blocking all email images, thus helping everyone in the email marketing space.
Getting the prospect to open and click on a link are the first two hurdles. Using personalized Microsite Pages (covered in a forthcoming post) to increase conversion rates is the next.
Welcome to these pages. I'm Tim Charlesworth, part of the Aprimo team based in Australia. With this Blog, I'm dipping a toe in the waters of interactive marketing through social media, and will be sharing my thoughts and experiences as we build the market presence of Aprimo here in the Asian timezones. Aprimo has a broad solution footprint so you'll be able to read some lessons learnt from a variety of projects here, everything from marketing planning, workflow and digital asset management through to email marketing, personalised microsites and automatic lead distribution.
There seems to be a lot of confusion out there in marketing land, the real world from my technology vendor land, about how to get the best return from your Multichannel Campaign Management (MCM) system. Just to be clear, this MCM super category includes list selection, eMarketing, email marketing, and lead management functionality.
Insanity
They say, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results. This is the same with MCM. If you market the same way after implementing MCM as you did before implementing it, you are not going to get significantly improved results just because you have a system now.
Your marketing has to change to take advantage of the strengths of the MCM system. For example, a marketing department that performs a lot of small ad hoc or one off campaigns and then continues to perform a lot of ad hoc and one off campaigns after the implementation will not enjoy any significant efficiency gains from MCM. The marketing department will just be doing the same marketing in a new system. Sure, the marketing department will be more organized and eventually gain some productivity improvements, but not the double digit percentage improvement that was projected in the business case.
How can you get more value from your MCM implementation?
1. Automate. Start thinking about what marketing programs can run unattended or automated. MCM is your never tiring, unrelenting, marketing cyborg that will keep chugging until the chip is ripped from its server. Leverage this capability as much as possible. Good candidates for automation include - New Customer programs, eShopping Cart abandonment programs, automated information request, eFulfillment of white papers and newsletters, eSurvey marketing programs, lapsed customer programs, lead nurturing or research, alerts, renewals, new product notices, etc.
2. Communicate. Stop thinking about marketing in increments of a single email or touch point and automate the entire communication plan across all marketing channels. The overhead of lots of one off emails or mailing pieces makes these small campaigns inefficient. Also, your marketing can improve if you change from singleton efforts to having an ongoing conversation with your customers. This multi-touch communication process through repetition makes your target customers gradually more aware of your company and more comfortable with your marketing. They retain your message better, and it gives them more opportunities to respond. This all adds up to improved response at lower cost. Many MCM systems are designed to run these types of multi-touch programs.
3. Consolidate and Integrate. In with the new and out with the old. If you want immediate efficiency gains for your marketing team, think of the many diverse systems with which your team interacts daily or weekly that can be eliminated and replaced with one marketing platform (cough, like Aprimo). This is simple math, each redundant system eliminated also eliminates the costs of supporting the systems - licensing, support and maintenance, and administration costs.
Also, look at systems that your marketing team must update that often require manual effort or double entry. These systems are great candidates for integration. Think of the time that could be saved by eliminating the double entry of invoices, the manual uploading of leads in the SFA system, the manual loading of lists into a campaign from other internal marketing data sources and/or the manual uploading of offers into your customer service system. With a few targeted integration projects, you can make your team more efficient. MCM systems, those based on a marketing platform, can become your integrated marketing information hub. Hah! You can't do that in a spreadsheet.
4. Personalize-ate. Okay, I could not think of another word ending in ate. MCM systems provide marketing greater access to your data and it is designed to deliver more personalized content. I am not talking about just being able to slap a first or last name in the email text or put in a different picture in an email based on the customer's demographic. That personalization is very cool and powerful. The personalization that I am talking about is more about getting personal with your customers.
MCM offers you greater access to your customer data, especially transaction data like purchases or web visits. Use it to answer questions about your customers. What products or product categories does your customer purchase most often? What did they purchase last year during the Christmas season? When do they purchase? Did they stop purchasing? What do they view on your web site most often? Did they move or change titles recently? Answer these questions and others to better target your customers with the right message and offers. Also, build models and scores using tools like SPSS/IBM Modeler to mine for hard to find patterns in your data. Access this wealth of customer behavior with your MCM system to deliver more personal and relevant messages to your customers.
Don't Procrastinate. These headings are getting a little silly. Good news. This is the last one. Start planning now for how your future multichannel campaign management system will allow you to do more and make more. Or, if you already have an MCM system, think of ways to further leverage its capabilities to your company's benefit. There are so many opportunities to gain value from an MCM system, now just do it.
Insanity
They say, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results. This is the same with MCM. If you market the same way after implementing MCM as you did before implementing it, you are not going to get significantly improved results just because you have a system now.
Your marketing has to change to take advantage of the strengths of the MCM system. For example, a marketing department that performs a lot of small ad hoc or one off campaigns and then continues to perform a lot of ad hoc and one off campaigns after the implementation will not enjoy any significant efficiency gains from MCM. The marketing department will just be doing the same marketing in a new system. Sure, the marketing department will be more organized and eventually gain some productivity improvements, but not the double digit percentage improvement that was projected in the business case.
How can you get more value from your MCM implementation?
1. Automate. Start thinking about what marketing programs can run unattended or automated. MCM is your never tiring, unrelenting, marketing cyborg that will keep chugging until the chip is ripped from its server. Leverage this capability as much as possible. Good candidates for automation include - New Customer programs, eShopping Cart abandonment programs, automated information request, eFulfillment of white papers and newsletters, eSurvey marketing programs, lapsed customer programs, lead nurturing or research, alerts, renewals, new product notices, etc.
2. Communicate. Stop thinking about marketing in increments of a single email or touch point and automate the entire communication plan across all marketing channels. The overhead of lots of one off emails or mailing pieces makes these small campaigns inefficient. Also, your marketing can improve if you change from singleton efforts to having an ongoing conversation with your customers. This multi-touch communication process through repetition makes your target customers gradually more aware of your company and more comfortable with your marketing. They retain your message better, and it gives them more opportunities to respond. This all adds up to improved response at lower cost. Many MCM systems are designed to run these types of multi-touch programs.
3. Consolidate and Integrate. In with the new and out with the old. If you want immediate efficiency gains for your marketing team, think of the many diverse systems with which your team interacts daily or weekly that can be eliminated and replaced with one marketing platform (cough, like Aprimo). This is simple math, each redundant system eliminated also eliminates the costs of supporting the systems - licensing, support and maintenance, and administration costs.
Also, look at systems that your marketing team must update that often require manual effort or double entry. These systems are great candidates for integration. Think of the time that could be saved by eliminating the double entry of invoices, the manual uploading of leads in the SFA system, the manual loading of lists into a campaign from other internal marketing data sources and/or the manual uploading of offers into your customer service system. With a few targeted integration projects, you can make your team more efficient. MCM systems, those based on a marketing platform, can become your integrated marketing information hub. Hah! You can't do that in a spreadsheet.
4. Personalize-ate. Okay, I could not think of another word ending in ate. MCM systems provide marketing greater access to your data and it is designed to deliver more personalized content. I am not talking about just being able to slap a first or last name in the email text or put in a different picture in an email based on the customer's demographic. That personalization is very cool and powerful. The personalization that I am talking about is more about getting personal with your customers.
MCM offers you greater access to your customer data, especially transaction data like purchases or web visits. Use it to answer questions about your customers. What products or product categories does your customer purchase most often? What did they purchase last year during the Christmas season? When do they purchase? Did they stop purchasing? What do they view on your web site most often? Did they move or change titles recently? Answer these questions and others to better target your customers with the right message and offers. Also, build models and scores using tools like SPSS/IBM Modeler to mine for hard to find patterns in your data. Access this wealth of customer behavior with your MCM system to deliver more personal and relevant messages to your customers.
Don't Procrastinate. These headings are getting a little silly. Good news. This is the last one. Start planning now for how your future multichannel campaign management system will allow you to do more and make more. Or, if you already have an MCM system, think of ways to further leverage its capabilities to your company's benefit. There are so many opportunities to gain value from an MCM system, now just do it.
Email marketing has great ROI when combined with a thoughtful "transactional email" strategy. But, its like taking aspirin -- just because two makes you feel better, doesn't mean you should take four, five or six over a short period of time. It's not necessary, and can even lead to more problems down the road. Overdoing email can cause you problems as well. The most common problem is email fatigue from your customers standpoint.
Let me give you an example...
I am a customer of a well known vitamin retailer. I shop online and also do brick-and-mortar. About four months ago, I noticed I was getting a lot of email from them. So much in fact, that I stopped reading them. This happened to coincide with my being asked to develop a webinar about Aprimo's Contact Optimization module (a part of Aprimo's Multichannel Campaign Management solution). I decided to "go personal" and try to get each webinar attendee to really see for themselves how non-optimal contact strategies can hurt a company's marketing efforts. I went into my personal Outlook and sorted my emails based on "From". I then quickly looked to see how frequently I was getting emails from my vitamin company. What I found was surprising. Over a 20 day period, I had gotten 11 emails -- about 1 every other day. And on top of that, the offers were not self-reinforcing. The offers were all over the place and confusing. As I continued to build out the webinar content, I decided to see who else was spamming me. Surprisingly, a well know CRM publication had sent me 14 emails in 14 days -- I even got three emails in a 30 minute time period! My audience laughed-out-loud when they saw this slide -- many mentioned they could relate. Humor aside -- this kind of email blasting hurts everyone -- from companies that do indiscriminate blasts to those that don't.
What's needed is the development and utilization of an optimized contact strategy across the enterprise. Aprimo Contact Optimization allows marketers to develop comprehensive contact strategies that are easy to maintain and manage. There are a couple of high level approaches to contact optimization -- rules-based, and statistics-based (more on the details of these in another forthcoming post). Aprimo uses a rules based approach that allows marketers to easily enforce global (cross-campaign and channel) suppressions, contact fatigue rules (e.g., no more than two contacts over a 14 day period), offer prioritization, channel capacity constraints and more.
Let's look at a real-life example. One of our customers (a large online retailer) applies different contact frequency rules to different customer segments. They restrict the number of communications as follows: Prospects get one per month; Active Customers can get one per week; and Lapsed Customers can get two per month. After implementing this type of throttling mechanism, our online retailer found significant improvements in open rates.
Tune in for more details on Contact Optimization and how it can help you build better customer relationships in my next post.
Let me give you an example...
I am a customer of a well known vitamin retailer. I shop online and also do brick-and-mortar. About four months ago, I noticed I was getting a lot of email from them. So much in fact, that I stopped reading them. This happened to coincide with my being asked to develop a webinar about Aprimo's Contact Optimization module (a part of Aprimo's Multichannel Campaign Management solution). I decided to "go personal" and try to get each webinar attendee to really see for themselves how non-optimal contact strategies can hurt a company's marketing efforts. I went into my personal Outlook and sorted my emails based on "From". I then quickly looked to see how frequently I was getting emails from my vitamin company. What I found was surprising. Over a 20 day period, I had gotten 11 emails -- about 1 every other day. And on top of that, the offers were not self-reinforcing. The offers were all over the place and confusing. As I continued to build out the webinar content, I decided to see who else was spamming me. Surprisingly, a well know CRM publication had sent me 14 emails in 14 days -- I even got three emails in a 30 minute time period! My audience laughed-out-loud when they saw this slide -- many mentioned they could relate. Humor aside -- this kind of email blasting hurts everyone -- from companies that do indiscriminate blasts to those that don't.
What's needed is the development and utilization of an optimized contact strategy across the enterprise. Aprimo Contact Optimization allows marketers to develop comprehensive contact strategies that are easy to maintain and manage. There are a couple of high level approaches to contact optimization -- rules-based, and statistics-based (more on the details of these in another forthcoming post). Aprimo uses a rules based approach that allows marketers to easily enforce global (cross-campaign and channel) suppressions, contact fatigue rules (e.g., no more than two contacts over a 14 day period), offer prioritization, channel capacity constraints and more.
Let's look at a real-life example. One of our customers (a large online retailer) applies different contact frequency rules to different customer segments. They restrict the number of communications as follows: Prospects get one per month; Active Customers can get one per week; and Lapsed Customers can get two per month. After implementing this type of throttling mechanism, our online retailer found significant improvements in open rates.
Tune in for more details on Contact Optimization and how it can help you build better customer relationships in my next post.
A common statement inside of many organizations (especially BtoB organizations) is that they are a "sales led" organization. Interestingly, depending on who is making this statement, this is seen as either a strength or a weakness. If it is coming from the CEO or head of sales, in most cases, this is a considered a compliment. They view this as an organization focused on the front lines of building a successful business vs. a business distracted by internal obstacles and debate.
However, when spoken by leaders in marketing, this is often considered a weakness. They see this is an organization driven by the "deal of the day" and not necessarily a holistic view of the market and the needs of the customer. They would like to see the organization become "market led" vs. "sales led."
While this debate has raged for a long time, I believe the web is changing the face of this debate. Rapidly, the web is becoming such a dominate force inside a company's business development process, they simply cannot ignore its' strategic importance to the lifeblood of the company. Whether this takes the form of email marketing, social media strategies, banner ads, SEO, or search engine management, it all affects the core of how many companies are attracting their prospects today. Given marketing is almost always the owner of these various web strategies, with the rise of web based marketing, there is also a rise in marketing's strategic position within the enterprise.
You might ask how this is different than any other marketing strategy of the past. Didn't marketing always play a role in finding new prospects within the business development process? There is one huge difference. The prospects of today have dramatically different expectations of the sales process. In mass, the prospects of today simply do not want to be sold. They expect to find what they need, when they need it, using their desk top, a few search terms, and a trillion web pages almost all controlled by individuals outside your company. With this expectation, they cannot be "sales led" because, at the beginning, they now expect to lead themselves to the right solution using far more resources then your sales team to make that decision.
The group responsible for them finding the "right solution" and resources during this critical early search is marketing. Therefore, if your new prospects cannot find you on their own terms using today’s expectations, they will probably never be around to be sales led no matter how many times you call them or have your reps send them a letter. Hello new world. We are all going to have to become market led or potentially become isolated to just serving our existing customers because the new prospects are leading themselves to the right solutions on their own being effectively influenced by web based marketing from other "market led" competitors.
Google's search engine marketing tools can be used by nearly anyone with Marketing in their job title. Many interactive marketers have known this for a long time. But, it's my bet that not all marketers are up on Google's search tools. Email marketing, for example, can benefit from some of the free tools Google offers.
When planning an email campaign, Google's Keyword Tool can help email marketers pick the right words for the content of an email, and especially the email title. Of course, other email marketing tools should be included, but let's take a look at Google SEO tools to see how they might be used with email marketing .
Google's keyword tool will generate a robust list of keywords that give markerters insight to how often a a keyword is used in searches, the competitiveness of the word and how much the word would cost PPC marketers. While not all of this data is relevant to the true email marketer, email titles can make or break an email marketing campaign.
By knowing what terms relative to your email marketing strategy are popular among search engine users could help the email marketer pick the right words to attract the attention of their target market.
When planning an email campaign, Google's Keyword Tool can help email marketers pick the right words for the content of an email, and especially the email title. Of course, other email marketing tools should be included, but let's take a look at Google SEO tools to see how they might be used with email marketing .
Google's keyword tool will generate a robust list of keywords that give markerters insight to how often a a keyword is used in searches, the competitiveness of the word and how much the word would cost PPC marketers. While not all of this data is relevant to the true email marketer, email titles can make or break an email marketing campaign.
By knowing what terms relative to your email marketing strategy are popular among search engine users could help the email marketer pick the right words to attract the attention of their target market.
Well, change is in the air. I've just moved to a new role at Aprimo and I am extremely energized. I started my life in Product Marketing and now find myself getting the opportunity to head back there. After a three year stint learning the ropes in traditional corporate marketing and marketing operations, I now get the opportunity to run Product Marketing for an exciting new on-demand version of our product that is optimized for online marketing - Aprimo Marketing Studio. I'm like a kid in a candy store!!It's really almost too good. I've been driving our move to online marketing internally (with the help of some really great and experienced people, of course). Honestly, three years ago I didn't know about Search Engine Optimization, Pay-Per-Click or Campaign Workflow to any level of detail. Now I've been through it and it has really opened my eyes. With this recent economic challenge, the move to Online Marketing has accelerated and it's clear there is no looking back. So, the tune of my blogs will change moving forward. I'll be sharing our thoughts about product direction and the challenges I'm hearing from our customers and prospects. I would love to hear from you. What are your challenges with online marketing? Are you using social media and getting value from it? Is your email marketing generating the response and return you expect? Are you able to build a profile of your prospects, customers and partners so you can communicate the way you want?
A common misconcpetion about pay per click (PPC) marketing and PPC advertising is that if you throw enough money at it, you can have a top paid search placement with search engines. This is just not true.
PPC marketing requires marketers to utilize many of the same rules that are required for organic search engine optimation. When creating a PPC campaign, here are three considerations any interactive marketer must keep in mind: bid amount, click through rate (CTR) and quality score.
Let's exmaine these three areas a little closer.
PPC marketing requires marketers to utilize many of the same rules that are required for organic search engine optimation. When creating a PPC campaign, here are three considerations any interactive marketer must keep in mind: bid amount, click through rate (CTR) and quality score.
Let's exmaine these three areas a little closer.
· Bid amount does not necessarily ensure a high position. A PPC advertiser can have the highest bid for a keyword, but the PPC ad may not rank well. Google will factor in CTR and Quality Score as well as Bid Amount to award a PPC search ranking.
· CTR must be a certain rate, generally .05 percent, to even continue the campaign. Google will disable PPC campaigns if the CTR falls much below .05 percent. The higher the CTR the better the chances for the top spot for your PPC ad. Typically, the more focused the PPC ad, the better your CTR will be. Of course, this is subjective as to the keyword and the PPC ad.
· Quality Score: Google will assign a measurement or grade to the overall campaign. The higher the Quality Score (from 0-10) the better chances your ad will appear in the No. 1 spot. To achieve a high quality score, the PPC ad should use the keyword at least once. And, the landing page should have considerable keyword density as well as content that directly relates to the what the PPC advertisement is selling. For example, if your PPC ad is pushing an Email Marketing Webinar, your landing page should be focused on offering the Webinar. Your density would go down if the Webinar is only a small part of the landing page. If your landing page does not offer a Webinar at all, it is highly possible that Google would disable the PPC campaign, or, at the least, your quality score would be so low that your PPC would not show regardless of CTR and bid amount.
As a copywriter and editor, I read a fair share of copy that flies around Aprimo. As you can imagine, this runs the gamut, from collateral writing, to website copy, to emails. Majority of our sales reps take it upon themselves to write emails that they want us to send out to our prospective customers - i.e. ALL OF YOU. Who better to talk shop than those selling it, right?
I see a major pitfall with email copy that I want to share with all of you and I have definitely noticed it with the email marketing that I receive as a consumer as well. Companies and individuals who email prospective customers want to talk about themselves - talk in the company speak and toot their horns - instead of thinking about or talking through the problems a consumer may be facing where the solution would be the product.
This should be the number one approach in email best practices - talk about the pain points of the consumer, don't talk about your company first. Let your customers or potential customers know that you understand what they are going through. As a provider of email marketing solutions we see this mistake firsthand. You lose your prospect before they ever really were one.
In your next email blast, address the pain points of your customer first before you educate on everything from soup to nuts about your company. They don't care yet.
I see a major pitfall with email copy that I want to share with all of you and I have definitely noticed it with the email marketing that I receive as a consumer as well. Companies and individuals who email prospective customers want to talk about themselves - talk in the company speak and toot their horns - instead of thinking about or talking through the problems a consumer may be facing where the solution would be the product.
This should be the number one approach in email best practices - talk about the pain points of the consumer, don't talk about your company first. Let your customers or potential customers know that you understand what they are going through. As a provider of email marketing solutions we see this mistake firsthand. You lose your prospect before they ever really were one.
In your next email blast, address the pain points of your customer first before you educate on everything from soup to nuts about your company. They don't care yet.
I went out for a morning run during a trip to the UK and, belive it or not, I found a parallel between running and email marketing. I started running about 15 years ago to try and lose some weight and get healthy. I'm not one of those that loves running more than life and has to get out every day. But, I have gotten to the point where there are times I know I need to get out and clear my head. One thing I've clearly found, though, is that I run much better and much more regularly when I have a purpose. If I sign up for a small 5K race at home or I put a goal out there, I will get going more often and get more out of my running. It does, however, take a little more planning and work on my part but it is worth it.And so it goes with email marketing. The tendency is to just start sending emails to your list and hope that you get some responses. In reality, you need to map out a plan for your emails and have a purpose. As soon as you start to do this, you will find that you don't want to communicate the same thing to everyone. Even if you only sell one product, the way different roles or industries use or speak about your product will be different. This warrants a different type of email marketing strategy. The terminology in your email needs to be different and the landing pages and offers need to be different. Similarly, when you are training for a run in a hilly area, you train on hills and when you are going to run in a hot climate, you train in heat. It does, however, take a little more planning and work...but it is worth it.
We've all been doing it, right?
We purchase our lists, we obtain lists from conferences, we gather prospect lists from our websites. Then, we start sending emails.
Is it working? Let me rephrase the question: Is it working the way you'd like it to, or the way your business would like it to? Are you able to track more than click-throughs? Are you building a database of information about your prospects? Is it worth the time and money, when social media is taking over the world?
Let's look at some statistics:
- According to research conducted by the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing generated an ROI of $48.34 for every dollar spent on it in 2007. The expected figure for 2008 is $45.06, and the prediction for 2009 is $43.52. As such, it outperforms all the other direct marketing channels examined.
- The Ad Effectiveness Survey commissioned by Forbes Media in Feb/March 2009 revealed that email and e-newsletter marketing are considered the second-most effective tool for generating conversions, just behind SEO.
But, how can you make it work better for you?
Learn what you can track, and why you should track it.
Learn how to build your database of information, so that you can have multiple, meaningful conversations with your customers.
Learn how to show your company the specific ROI generated from your campaigns.
Is email marketing worth it?
You bet!
You just need to find the tools and information to make it work better for you!
Jeff Baker wrote a recent post, “Autopilot for Marketing," while flying from Indianapolis to Phoenix. He wrote it in the air, and I find myself doing the same thing right now. The wonders of social media applications.
We live in such an all-access society. It doesn’t matter that I have no access to the internet (although some airlines will soon offer wireless!) or my Blackberry (gasp!) and am forced to maintain the same uncomfortable upright position for three hours. As long as I have my laptop, I can let my creative juices flow. In a moment of honesty, I will admit that I wouldn’t be writing a post right now if my only tools were a pen and paper. When I’m back online in a few hours, I can submit this post for review and it’ll soon be live on the Aprimo blog.
Automation in general is everywhere. We use automation to schedule bill payments online. Many use it in email marketing. You don’t honestly think that seconds before you received that e-newsletter from [fill in the blank company], someone in their office clicked a big, red button labeled “send,” do you? We use automation for workflow and project management. Even your favorite pizza joint automates pick-up and delivery orders online. I think the biggest benefit of this is pre-paying with a credit card. I never have cash when the pizza guy knocks, but I can fill in my tip on the receipt and… voila.
As I fly toward San Diego for the DMA09, I must be somewhere over Arizona. When I’m back on the ground and this post goes live, I’d love to hear from you. What automated process in your personal life can't you live without? Is it your washing machine (wash, rinse, spin)? Is it online bill payment?
What about in your work? What process has your team automated that gives you daily benefits? What processes do you wish you could automate? Could Aprimo provide relief?
One of my clients had an interesting request while implementing our email marketing software. Most of my clients have at least one interesting request per project and that is why I am here. The client wanted to provide a specific email response sent out based on what embedded links the target prospect clicked on in the initial email.
Often, when a marketer embeds URLs in emails, we (I am a marketer, too) just count the clicks and pat ourselves on the back because we received a response. Yeah, success! But clicks can provide so many more possibilities - if you can make them actionable.
Actionable clicks are clicks that drive subsequent actions. Sure, I used the same word that I am defining in the definition, but you get the idea. In this case, depending on what the target prospect clicked on in the email, the appropriate next email and dynamic content was sent in response.
If the prospect clicked on two URLs, he or she was sent email version A. If the prospect clicked on two other URLs, then email version B. If he or she clicked some of each set, then email version C was sent. All emails sent with personalized and dynamic content. This was all done within the context of a Dialogue or multi-step communication plan in our product - moving the email recipient from a prospect to become a marketing qualified lead.
So think beyond the Click and take action based on clicks to create a dialogue with your customers.
So, when you go to the local Wal-Mart for something, do you walk in the door, throw a net over most of the store and pull back to get what you need? No, of course not. You walk to the right shelf and pick what you need.
So, why do so many people take that approach to email marketing. Let's get into one of the first tips for email marketing best practices. B2C direct or database marketing has refined this art...segmentation of your target audience. They use volumes of data about individuals to determine whether they are a good target for their message.
The good news is there are products on the market (here's ours) that allow you to collect information about an individual or company's online and offline behavior and take that information into account easily by sending your message to segments or developing dialogues that provide infinite options to communicate relevent information.
But you don't have to boil the ocean on the first pass. If this is new to you, then start with information you have (industry, company size, titles) and tailor messages to a few key segments. Then you can start the communication process and gain more information over time to refine your message and make it more and more relevant. Your prospects will thank you and their in-box will thank you, too!
This is not shocking data (most already know it), response rates on commercial email marketing are collapsing. At last count, 210 billion emails were being sent daily. I believe that computes to several hundred emails per every email account that exists in the world. That is a lot of email marketing! The vast majority (90%+) is unsolicited. Frankly, the email is beyond saturated and performance within the email channel is reflecting that reality.There are two basic steps to improving this marketing situation. First, make your commercial email more effective through micro-segmentation techniques perfected in the database marketing field to increase relevance. Frankly, without highly relevant content, you have no chance. Second, move your commercial email strategies to transactional email strategies.
What is a transaction email strategy? It is marketing to prospects and customers when they expect to receive your communication, not when you want to send it. So, when do customers expect to get email? The obvious times are when they have requested something. That is an ideal time to include some marketing content into that communication. There is no rule that says after fulfilling the customer's request, you cannot share more information about your services and offerings. Other times are based on real time events (anniversary dates, major offline actions, renewals, and more). By starting to time email communications by when the target expects it (or welcomes it), response rates will climb along with your reputation. By continuing to send email only when you want to send it, a continued collapse of performance should be expected.
Effective transactional email strategies are directly connected to effective profiling data strategies, but that is for another post!
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