One of the biggest topics in organizations today is the need and desire to grow their subscriber list. Most companies believe that the bigger the list they have, the greater chance they have to sell more stuff. More stuff sold + more revenue = happy companies.

Some organizations take the hard road and build their list organically and spend money and resources on properly activating and creating brand advocates in their subscriber base. They recognize that the size of their list is not as important as the overall lifetime value of their subscriber. These organizations often have pressure internally to grow faster by out of touch executives with unrealistic expectations on subscriber growth. In most cases though, these companies follow the good path to growth and are prosperous in the long run.

Then, every once in awhile there are organizations that take the easy road. They use so many different channels, spend a ton of money on third parties that promise the world who often are using the same 50 Million Opt In, Can-Spam compliant list to try and bring in as many subscribers as they can. These organizations say they are interested in quality, but often mask that with a “yea butt” statement of “we still need to get to X million subscribers by X date”.  Activation, welcome and engagement strategies are thrown out the window and the focus becomes on getting their X subscribers to buy stuff so their investment is not wasted.

Sit back for a minute and think of acquiring a single or 5 million new subscribers as a party that you are hosting. You certainly would not invite anyone over to your party unless you had cleaned up your house, got the hors d'oeuvres, the drinks, music etc. When your guests arrive, do you open the door and let them stand there or do you give the tour of where everything is so that they can enjoy themselves. As more and more people hear about how great your party is, folks will want a piece of the action and convince you to invite their friends. Eventually it will lead to a bunch of riff raffs wanting in which will eventually ruin it for everyone.

Before you put some super aggressive acquisition plan together, ensure that your house is in order and you are ready to greet your guests. One of my colleagues and fellow bloggers here, Matt Vernhount says is beautifully: “It’s not the size of your list, its what you do with it”

Invest time and money to the more important part of acquisition. You and your subscribers will be glad you did. ]]> http://trueinfluence.com/blog/email-marketing/355-ready-acquire-aim.html/feed 0 http://trueinfluence.com/blog/email-marketing/355-ready-acquire-aim.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trueinfluence-blog/~3/4pufOw46Y8M/345-how-can-you-get-a-better-repsonse-to-your-email-marketing.html http://trueinfluence.com/blog/list-management/345-how-can-you-get-a-better-repsonse-to-your-email-marketing.html#comments Fri, 30 Apr 2010 10:46:55 +0000 Brian Giese http://trueinfluence.com/blog/?p=345

Most marketers ask, “How can I get a better response to my email marketing?

First, determine who your best prospects are, then target your marketing efforts at companies who are similar.  Seems simple but often overlooked. You can start by ranking your current customers by these three criteria:

• How much revenue do they represent over time?
• How profitable might each customer might be?
• How well do their needs “fit” what you have to offer?

Second,  look for similarities among the unique attributes of these top customers.

• What industries are they in?
• What is similar about how they use your products?
• Are they large, medium or small?
• Where are they located?
• Who are the key decision-makers and what are their titles?

Then buy some outside lists (contact us for information about this) of companies and contacts that match and add them to your email campaign.  Focus your marketing with these  marketing strategies and you’ll improve the overall quality of your campaigns. And remember, test everything!

My colleague, Shepherd Smith posted awhile ago about the importance of aligning sales and Marketing’s definition of “what is a lead”.  I agree that too often these definitions have diverged without the other team realizing that each are using different definitions. Of course this can really heighten the divide that commonly exists between Sales and Marketing. Companies that are using a Marketing Automation platform know that aligning marketing and sales is a necessary first step to ensure that the pipeline is generating what everyone agrees are “better leads”.

MarketingSherpa gave a great summary of how to best achieve this alignment and ultimately generate and close more leads:

1. Get commitment from the top. The marketing and sales teams need to communicate, and it needs to start from the CMO and CSO. Says Fernandez. “The VP of Sales and VP of Marketing should go get a beer together.”
2. Model the marketing/sales funnel. An integrated revenue funnel helps each team understand what the other team is doing, and how their actions impact revenue.
3. Develop a common vocabulary. A common marketing/sales funnel also provides common language and metrics, which is especially important for defining when a lead is qualified and/or ready to be handed over to sales.
4. Look for operational disconnects. Make sure that goals, initiatives, and promotions are aligned by developing plans jointly and meeting monthly or at least quarterly.
5. Test key metrics to track. Trying to tackle all sales-marketing alignment issues at once is too daunting, so start by tracking two important metrics, such as lead volume and lead quality. This is a great way to start the dialog.
6. Create a closed-loop reporting process. Make sure marketing has a way to follow-up with sales to see how well leads are performing. This can help tune lead gen efforts, and is an important way to take qualified prospects that are not yet sales ready and recycle them back into marketing.
7. Share accountability between the teams. Marketing is a very measurable process, but the results are head to measure; it’s easy to measure Sales outcomes but Sales activity is hard to measure. As a result, compensation and rewards tend to be very different, which creates further problems. The better your marketing accountability and ability to measure marketing’s impact on the bottom line, the easier it is to bridge this gap

Marketers know the importance of sending relevant, tailored communications. But how well are we doing? Not so well according to a  poll by Chief Marketing Officer Council. This poll reveals that of 91 percent of consumers who opt out or unsubscribe to emails, 46 percent are driven to brand defection because the messages are simply not relevant. Ouch.

How connected are marketers to their customers? Not doing well here either, with nearly three quarters of consumers reporting they have received promotions for products they have previously purchased from the company.

If marketers know how important it is to be timely, relevant and personal, why is this such a challenge? One might argue marketers have a wider array of tools and technologies at their disposal, so shouldn’t they be doing a better job? While its certainly true there are more technologies to choose from, the reality is having a tool in your tool belt and knowing how to put it to best use are two entirely different things.

So, how then to achieve the holy grail of personalized and relevant email marketing? By adopting precision marketing approaches that utilize more tailored and targeted messaging throughout the customer life cycle. Continuous data collection, as well as integration and on-going analysis are needed to produce customer insights. These insights enable marketers to achieve mass-customization of messaging to customers and generate improved response, engagement and retention.

Marketing databases allow sales and marketing to reach customers and nurture relationships more effectively (and efficiently). If they are designed properly and used correctly they are the “secret sauce”. Unfortunately, this is often not the case. Here are some of the most common mistakes made by direct marketers as they build a data-driven marketing engine:

1. No method or procedures established for monitoring the vitality of the customer base over time. Statistics such as retention, reactivation, conversion and percent new-to-file will allow a direct marketer to more easily determine the success of various marketing strategies.
2. Lack of standards or process in place regarding data hygiene including householding the file prior the delivery of promotions, etc. The result being mailing inefficiencies and potential customer service problems. Avoid this and scrub that data!
3. All response models are not created equal. Many managers don’t realize that roughly 75% of analysts’ time should be spent becoming intimate with the customer data through data manipulation and review to ensure it’s predictive power is exploited to its fullest potential.
4. Lack of basic knowledge regarding database architecture, hardware and software. Without some basic database knowledge, a marketer is not well suited to establish marketing specifications for good database development which are reasonable and will maximize effectiveness.
5. Little knowledge of the rules that must be followed when establishing promotional or list tests to ensure results are readable, reliable and projectable and/or a lack of understanding of how to read test results once final.

Bonus mistake:

6. Purging customer records after 24 months of inactivity (or less). Most marketers don’t understand the implications of doing this. At a minimum, a direct marketer should roll up key data for inactives including all promotional data and make available for future analysis purposes for at least 4 years.

Bottom line, sometimes what you don’t know can hurt you more than you think.

A December article by eMarketer cites two recent studies to show the continuing dominance of email (as opposed to Twitter, Facebook, etc.) as the most popular method used by individuals to share information via the web.

The following study findings are of particular interest:

1) email (as opposed to Twitter, Facebook, etc.) is still the most popular method used by individuals to share content with friends.

2) content shared via email leads to more page views than any other method

3) most significantly, content shared via email is far more likely to lead to a purchase, subscription, etc. – 36.8%, as opposed to just 3.2% for Facebook and 0.4% for Twitter.

There are positives for social media as a means for sharing content – links shared through Twitter, for example, have the highest click-through rate of any sharing method.

That said, it is clear that direct marketers should be aware that the the overwhelming majority of the actual business generated by social sharing of content comes not from the new wave of social media vehicles, but rather from our old friend, email.

Source: “Users still sharing by email”

With so many disruptive, addictive technologies such as Email, IM, RSS and Cell Phones prospects are distracted like never before—and chances are, so are you!

So what can you do?

Key Tip: If you provide something of value to prospects, they will give you their respect, loyalty, time AND ultimately their business.

Consider the facts. Studies show that execs value Business Briefings (aka White Papers) most—more than case studies, product literature, articles from industry journalists, analyst reports, company websites, webcasts, blogs, online video and podcasts.

One thing is for sure – senior-most executives hate to be sold.  They want to be in control and make their own decisions to buy.  They view themselves as thought leaders and and love to have a “trusted advisor” (like you) nearby that they can count. So if you give away some of that proprietary, hard-earned insight in the form of a business briefing or ebook, you actually can propel yourself to a position of thought leader/trusted advisor and attract opportunity.  This may seem counterintuitive but it works.

Of course there is a right way and a wrong way to do this…  What’s the right way?  Give your readers plenty of sample content before they are asked to trade their personal contact information for access.  So many web sites ask for detailed information and lose valuable leads.  Make this an interactive, engaging process that gives more value than you get and they will come in droves.

This idea comes from the video game market. Remember playing video game demos that provided you access to the first two levels?  The same strategy can be applied to free business briefings.  When your registration form finally appears, this is the prime opportunity to ask readers if they want to join your email opt-in list, in addition to receiving the briefing.  Try it and you’ll see.

One of the many healthy side effects of introducing a marketing automation system is the updating of definitions for each stage of the sales/marketing pipeline. The definitions of what constitutes a lead are often reviewed, discussed and determined during the implementation of a new Marketing Automation system. This takes place so companies can easily communicate with different kinds of potential customers in tailored, appropriate ways.

Many companies find, during this process, that Sales and Marketing have developed different definitions over time, and regaining unanimity via a fresh round of discussions can help to align potentially disjointed efforts and make the pipeline more efficient.

One set of definitions might be as follows:

Prospect – an individual who, based on title, company, and/or industry, should be interested in a product/service
Lead – has responded to some form of Marketing outreach (downloaded a white paper, took part in a webinar, visited the website, etc.)
Opportunity – has been contacted and qualified (via BANT or similar method – budget, authority, need, timeframe)

The call to action, then, for any company that has not brought together Sales and Marketing together within a reasonable period (say 18 months) is to bring them together to discuss how each department views and communicates with Prospects, Leads, and Opportunities. If your company is evaluating a Marketing Automation system, this discussion is even more urgent, as Marketing will be better equipped to use this information to nurture each category of potential customer in a focused, targeted manner with nurturing campaigns on an ongoing basis!

I  get asked, “How do I get my prospects to respond to my campaigns?”

This best way is to look at your best customers, and then target direct marketing efforts at companies with similar profiles.

At True Influence we rank current customers by three criteria:

1. How much revenue do they represent over time?
2. How profitable might each customer be?
3. How well do their needs “fit” what True Influence has to offer?

Then look for similarities among the unique attributes of these top customers. What industries are they in? What is similar about how they use your products? Are they large, medium or small? Where are they located? Who are the key decision-makers and what are their titles?

Targeting is everything. There are few things worse than marketing to uninterested prospects.  It’s really important to find fresh, filtered data from a reputable data provider to add to the direct campaign mix.   There are a few really good data providers depending on your needs but for most cases Jigsaw is very good. They have a great model to keep B2B data fresh and relevant and our customers have very good results using their data especially for email campaigns.

Focus your marketing with these basic direct marketing strategies and you’ll improve the overall quality of your campaigns. And remember, test everything.

Its a safe bet that many companies have made New Year’s resolutions to increase revenue streams as so many companies, large and small were hard hit in 2009. While becoming leaner and meaner as some companies have done can help reduce expenses, there are other strategies that can be employed. Namely being smarter when it comes to sales.

If you’ve been asking yourself  “what can I do to get leads flowing again? Here are five areas where businesses can look to improve their sales potential:

1. Poor Lead Stewardship. The number one reason sales are lost is that they are forgotten. Many companies have poor systems, or no systems in place for tracking leads from the moment they are aware of them to the time a customer deal closes. Take a hard look at the “lead leakage” in your business, adopt or modify your existing process, and you’ll see sales climb quickly.

2. Are you Listening?  Any successful salesperson knows that “Sales is a transfer of enthusiasm.” You must be enthusiastic about what you are selling, but you have to also keep your focus on the customer’s needs. Make sure you are asking focused questions about their business process, their sales needs, what’s working, what isn’t and how you can help them achieve their goals. Be relentless, less ”selling” and more listening! IMHO, buyers will choose the company that they feel hears and understands their pain points and has a solution that seems designed just for them! (After all, each of us want to be heard; this simple shift can bring some profoundly positive results.)

3. Lack of Urgency.  Hand in hand with the previous point, is how well you are managing urgency. You’ve probably heard many times: The most important question in sales is not “Why should I buy your product or service?” but “Why should I buy your product or service NOW?”  Buyers are more cautious than ever, so coming up with compelling reasons why they shouldn’t delay making a commitment to your products/services is very important for success. 

4. Craft a new elevator pitch. The beginning of any dialogue often starts with: “So, what is it that you do?” Even experienced, savvy sales people may use a list of bullet points to explain what they do. What they’re not getting is that your prospects don’t care about what you can do. They really only care what you can do for them to solve their problems. Tell them why you are the best one to provide this solution. Its time well spent to understand exactly what your core value is to your customers and develop the strongest focused messaging to communicate this effectively.

5. Pay for Performance Marketing. Shameless plug : True Influence has developed LeadPacs to help companies who don’t have the time, resources or money for in-house multichannel marketing campaigns but need more warm leads for Sales. Pay-for-performance leads mean you get exactly who you want, leads scored on the behavior you specify. Once you provide the content to us, we launch a campaign on your behalf and immediately deliver the results to your Sales Team!

Wishing everyone a Happy and PROSPEROUS New Year!