• Subject lines. Send your control email to one group, but swap in a different subject line on your challenger email.
• Headlines. Leave everything the same between control and challenger, except for the text of the headline.
• Body copy. Here’s where you put your copywriter to work. If your control has long copy, test shorter copy in your challenger (and vice versa). Or, if your control takes a gentle approach, test a punchy, in-your-face challenger.
• Calls-to-action. Reword your call-to-action in your challenger. Note that this does not mean you change the offer itself—only the way you drive people towards it.
• Single design elements. Let your graphic team get creative. Swap in a new banner, Download button, link color, or sidebar. Again—make only one change at a time!

• Aprimo Marketing Studio has campaign management tools to randomly split your groups for A/B testing of outbound messages. In addition you can use criteria to dynamically serve up different content in emails and microsites and monitor results through your dashboard to focus on the best results and learn for future efforts.
• Google Website Optimizer is a free Google service that lets you present different content and design options to your visitors. Google tracks the conversion results.
• SiteSpect lets you run not only A/B testing, but also multivariate testing in which you test many changes at the same time.
• Omniture Test&Target is an interface for designing and executing your tests.
• Webtrends Optimize provides a unified testing and targeting platform.
• Vertster speeds up the process of performing multivariate testing, when you’re ready to go there.

Got a gut feeling about what works and what doesn’t? Use testing to check those hunches and back them up with measurable results. You can be sure your top competitors are already doing it. So, move A/B testing to your front burner today—and make it an ongoing part of your efforts.

During a recession you not only have to compete against your regular competitors, you must also fight the most dreaded enemy of all—no decision! During tough economic times the only thing you can count on is that you’re going to have to work twice as hard to close the same amount of business as before. Therefore, you must ramp up your campaign management efforts accordingly.

RFM and data mining help you find a subset of your customers that are most likely to react/respond to your marketing campaigns (personalized emails/microsites, direct mails, call center, etc.).  By targeting ONLY those likely to respond, you achieve about the same response/sales at a fraction of the cost.


Aprimo's Multichannel Campaign Management and Data Miner solutions provide the tools you need to survive and even flourish in the current economy.  No data miners on staff? Simple RFM (recency, frequency and monetary value) can help you increase response rates and overall campaign performance.  The notion is those that bought most recently, purchase more frequently, and have spent the most, are your best prospects for future marketing campaigns.

If you're a B2B marketer, Aprimo Lead Manager (LM) can automate the nuturing and scoring of your prospects until they qualify for "Lead" status.  At that point, LM can automatically assign and route the leads to the appropriate sales person.  With Aprimo, no leads escape your sales funnel.  More to come on all of these topics soon!
 

• Interactive Marketing Campaigns - Replace email blasts that don't work with campaigns that run continuously (24/7), serving up variable highly personalized content in the form of email messages, offers, inbound forms/surveys, microsites (PURLs), etc -- based on an individuals off and online behavior.
• Creative Control - Give Marketers an easy-to-use HTML designer that lets them create professional-quality marketing content for their online communication vehicles while protecting brand standards with templates and reusable content blocks.
• New Communication Devices (e.g., microsites, PURLs) - Reduce dependence on corporate web site team, and allow Marketers to create powerful "weblets" within a campaign to improve customer engagement outcomes
• Demand Generation - Provide controls to manage online marketing tactics or tools  that "sit outside" the 1:1 marketing campaign, but directly affect the outcomes such as search engine management, web analytics, web alerts, and banner ad management. 

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.



 

I've had the opportunity to build a lot of product functionality focused on database marketing. One of the critical challenges of database marketing is dealing with enormous amounts of data in the campaign process. Database marketers were on the forefront of marketing’s evolution towards leveraging vast amounts of customer and prospect data to build more targeted segments and ultimately utilize data in the campaign management process. Interactive marketers are beginning to go through a very similar data transition.

Database marketers have embraced the ability to use data to enable decisions and rules where once there were none. The days of sending out direct mail to ‘everyone in the database’ are gone given both the expense and the ROI in marketing of generic blasts. That direct mail offer you got in the mail yesterday may have utilized dozens of attributes about YOU to drive 1) whether you even got the offer, 2) the details of the specific offer, and 3) the creative used in the physical offer you received.   This need to leverage large volumes of data efficiently and effectively made database marketers one of the first functions in marketing to embrace software tools and automation. Database marketing selection and segmentation tools have grown in sophistication and power given the explosion of customer data and the campaign complexity requirements.

Interactive marketers are now facing very similar challenges – build highly targeted segments, create personalized and dynamic content, process people uniquely given their data and behaviors. To meet these challenges, interactive marketers need to combine their new access to all customer/prospect data and software tools that can leverage that data in the interactive marketing process.  Through products like Aprimo Marketing Studio, interactive marketers can now fully leverage this rich customer data within their marketing campaigns.

In future posts, I’ll look at specific areas where Interactive marketers can use data about the people they market to in many different facets of their campaigns including target audience selection, personalized and dynamic email and microsite content, interactive and progressive forms, and real-time 1:1 communication dialogs.

• http://www.aprimo.com/marketingstudio/splash/splash.html (a 3D Marketing Studio splash introduction)

Purpose of Marketing Studio Splash Page

• Blender 3D (blender.org) - create Box Animation: Output Targa
• Adobe After Effects  - import TARGA & animate icons; output FLV
• Adobe Flash - used to embed FLV and actionscript was used for the lights in the background

Challenge

So what's the big deal here? Well, here's what we know - as interactive marketers, we ...
 

• already use a collection of tools to manage paid search, search engine optimization, banner advertising, commercial email, triggered email, social media marketing, microsites, website traffic, lead management and the like.  Basically a bunch of execution tools.  Separate tools.  Disconnected tools.  And you (yes, it's safe to admit it) are the person responsible for meshing all this digital data and  producing intelligent insights (ahh yes, the elusive dashboard). 
   
• live in isolation from the rest of our marketing organization, in part because we're so different (and cutting edge) and in part because we're focused on the new stuff - the online world. 

Now let's be honest with ourselves.  As interactive marketers, we ...
 

• know it's impossible to integrate all these point tools and your customer's experience is falling short of it's potential.

• don't really want to operate as an island disconnected from our marketing mothership, as we fully realize that our online marketing activities have much greater impact when weaved into our offline marketing campaigns (and vice versa) - creating a seamless customer experience.

Yep, I agree it's a big deal - a really big deal!  So let's do something about it.  I invite you to learn about a new and truly innovative solution for managing your world of interactive marketing.  Visit aprimo.com/marketingstudio.  It's interactive.  It's integrated.  It's intelligent.  More importantly, I think it'll make our life a lot more enjoyable and bring a WOW factor to your online marketing. 

• Web Design (all graphical elements behind a website)
• Interactive Flash (interactive objects created using Adobe's Flash)
• Interactive Video (using Canon A1 + Adobe After Effects, Premiere, Flash, Encore, etc)
• Web Programming (everyone loves making forms!)
• Print Media (brochures, booths, flyers. etc)
• Web Analytics, Search Engine Optimization and Traffic
• How we use our Aprimo Marketing Software to fit our Microsite and Email Needs

• Integrated marketing communications
• Integrated marketing planning
• Integrated marketing operations
• Integrated online marketing

Hello World.

If you search for “Hello World” on Google and Bing you get  10,200,000 and 200,000,000 results respectively.  And, once Aprimo Marketing Studio publishes this blog post, those numbers will go up by one.   I doubt this post will do much to help me win the organic search for that term but you have to start somewhere, right?

Given my programming background, I thought "Hello World" was a fitting (but cliché) first blog post.  I started coding on my Atari 400, way back when getting the computer to spit out those words the first time was a great achievement.   Getting your desired results on the monachrome monitor required just the right mix of technology, creativity, and persistence. Moving from a program of only PRINT outputs to also include INPUTs opened up a whole new set of program possibilities.

Today's environment in Interactive Marketing has a lot of parallels to those early programming days.  Technology provides the tools to help marketers communicate, innovate, and automate.  Creativity provides the content to capture and engage the audience.  But you need the determination and the capability to effectively put them together.   And, just as the best early computer programs became more interactive with the user, marketing programs must progress from an endless stream of one way communication outputs to an interactive dialog that our prospects and consumers actually desire.

Software languages evolved from a set of basic math and logic instructions into integrated and coordinated subroutines, functions, and libraries.  Marketing technology is also evolving from a series of disconnected individual tools and applications.  Generic email marketing is the GOTO equivalent for interactive marketing - useful but overused, effecient but not effective.  Instead, email must become an integrated component of Interactive Marketing along with other technologies including search and social media and microsites and dialogs and web analytics.  Alone the pieces are useful.  Together they are powerful.  Fully integrated they are game changing.

In future posts I will explore the world of Integrated, Interactive Marketing from many different angles - technology, process, execution, measurement, optimization.  Neither I, nor Aprimo have all the answers but we look forward to the discussion and the evolution of Interactive Marketing!

PRINT "Thanks";
PRINT " - Jeff";
END
 

It’s been just a little more than three months since I decided to shut down my marketing services company, jump back into my pumps and back into the proverbial hot seat of a high-tech CMO.  It’s been just a little over a month since joining my new company, Aprimo.

What is going on in the Marketing Automation space, let alone here at Aprimo, is just too exciting not to jump in.  Name it. Budgets are slashed so B2B and B2C marketers are flocking to improve pay per click management, organic search, social media and blogging to reach new prospects and consumers at a fraction of the cost.

Guess what happens when marketers flock?  Innovation occurs. And as B2B marketers try to scale and B2C marketers try to entice...CMOs like myself are looking to automate not populate to get more personal and more relevant with their marketing strategies and tactics.

Enter Aprimo. Our flagship product, Aprimo 8.5, automates the hard work of marketing -- budgets and financial planning, mass amounts of digital assets as well as integrated, multi-campaign management.  Our new product line, Aprimo Marketing Studio, offers a suite of software as a service applications for interactive marketing -- including the blog I'm writing...as well as microsite tools, pay per click management and social media optimization.

So as Aprimo's CMO -- my team and I get to innovate our own marketing efforts -- and those of some of the most savvy marketers on the planet.

Can you blame me for jumping back in? Come join me -- let's talk about how we can innovate together.