Marketing Insights

For the next several weeks I will be focusing the Friday Quick Tip on helpful productivity tools that can make your work life a little easier.

Today’s tool is PureText, which was suggested to me by my fellow Eloquan Andrew Stafford. This is a simple little application that runs in the background on your Windows machine (sorry, it doesn’t work in a Mac). You access it via a hotkey combo that you can customize (for example, Windows key + V). It will take the text that you’ve copied and convert it to plain text format and make it available for pasting. They explain it well on their site: “PureText is basically equivalent to opening Notepad, doing a PASTE, followed by a SELECT-ALL, and then a COPY. The benefit of PureText is performing all these actions with a single Hot-Key and having the result pasted into the current window automatically.”

How is this helpful? If you routinely copy text out of Word and paste it into your marketing automation system, for example, you’ve noticed that all of the yucky Word formatting comes along for the ride. This tool will strip out that extra “fun” and let you start with squeaky clean goodness.

Do you have a tool to share? Drop me a note and I’ll feature it in an upcoming tip (heather dot foeh at eloqua dot com).

Best practice tells us to ensure alignment between marketing and sales for lead scoring programs.  After all, the sales team is the beneficiary of what marketing implements for lead scoring.  If you have the sales teams’ buy-in, it will make your life as a marketer much easier.

So how can I make sure there is buy-in from sales at the beginning of the process?

One of our customers, Astute Solutions created a lead attribute worksheet they provided their sales team to rank each value to make sure they were part of the process.  They worked with a few key sales people, explained the process and had them complete the worksheet.  Once each had completed with their answers, all the data was aggregated and provided marketing with a definition of what makes a qualified lead to the sales team.

Here are the steps they followed:

• Step 1 – Defined Explicit and Implicit Criteria, for example – Job Function, Webcast Attendee.
• Step 2 – Define Values for each Explicit Criteria, for example – values A – G.
• Step 3 – Choose sales reps to complete the worksheet.  Provide them with the Criteria and Values and ask them to weight each 1-3.  1= Low Value, 2= Moderate Value 3= High Value.
• Step 4 – Aggregate all the sales reps’ answers into one worksheet .  Total the entire score.  The weighted average is the total score divided by how many sales reps involved in the process.  For example Value A for Job Function was 15 Total Score, divided by 5 sales reps = Weighted Average 3.0.
• Step 5 – Based on the Weighted Average, each is High Value, Moderate Value or Low Value.  Now you can use this information to ensure your lead scoring categories and attributes are 100% in alignment with sales’ approach to a qualified lead.

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Webinar, webcast, virtual or online event… whatever you call them, they are still being used by marketers and they are still working. As I shared in my “Where Do You Start” post, webinars are “one of the top two lead-generation tactics for B-to-B marketing”. As well, a recent report “looks at the expected decline in attendance at trade shows this year and the expected increase in attendance at virtual shows.”

Click here to view.

The Marketing Insights team recently did some short marketing best practice videos and one was on four key areas you need to focus on to drive registration and drive attendance to your online event.

They include:

1. Multi channel promotion
2. Landing page conversion
3. Confirmations
4. Reminders

Take a moment to view some good tips for driving registration and attendance in this
short 3 minute video.

For those of us who have been doing online events for years I want to highlight one tactic I mention in the video that you should try… if you haven’t already. This works not only get your target audience to register, but more importantly to actually view your event.

I’m talking about ‘reminders’. Don’t rely on a single email reminder the day before your event! MarketingSherpa has tested their own approach and seen significant results on email reminders sent ‘one hour before’ the event, as well as the ‘day after’.

Lastly, don’t forget to leverage your call center or call-on-demand technology to remind registrants the day of the event. This has shown an average increase in attendance of up to 20%.  Remember, online events provide an interactive experience that will energize your marketing efforts. Take the opportunity to fully leverage them, they connect you with people you wouldn’t normally see and when you archive them they provide an asset you can use time and time again.

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No, I’m not talking about the 265 channels you can get on DirecTV, I’m talking about Marketing Channels.  In the last few years we’ve become (overly?) reliant on email because it’s comparatively cheap and fairly measurable.  Sometimes we throw a little direct mail into the mix, especially for those folks we don’t have email addresses for. But have you thought about reaching your prospects and customers via other methods?

In my role at Eloqua I work with a lot of customers every week. Over time, I’ve learned which ones like to communicate via email and which ones prefer a phone call instead. This hit home to me this week when one of my customers had not responded to the last several emails I had sent to her. When I picked up the phone, we ended up having a great chat and now I’ll remember that she prefers that method of communication instead.

Next time you’re kicking off a campaign, consider making it multi-channel. Perhaps some of your past non-responders would do better with an automated phone message this time around? Do you have an opt-in list of SMS contacts? If so, send them a text message with a URL to register for your event or learn about your offer. Don’t forget to add Twitter and Facebook to your next campaign outreach as well.

Your prospects are listening on different channels, so make sure you’re talking to them in the places where they’ll hear you.

[Photo credit: RickMacMerc via Flickr]

Many marketers wear multiple hats during the course of a quarter (or even a week!): event coordinator, copywriter, collateral order-er, website content refresh-er, data analyzer, and many more. Here’s a new one for your collection: Content Publisher.

With the advent of social media some of the boundaries of marketing are shifting.  It’s not all about features and benefits anymore. Your prospects and customers are now looking for trusted advisers who can provide relevant content in the dialog around a sale. Note that I said around a sale, not just before a sale. If you’re publishing the right content, you can keep that dialog open with your customers after the sale closes.

I recently attended a webinar produced by my friends at Powered and they summed it up nicely:

• Traditional marketing is product/transactional focused and includes punctuated exchanges between you and the prospect.
• Content marketing is focused on the whole lifecycle of a customer and features an ongoing conversation.

Does content marketing replace traditional marketing? No way. Its additive – that means you can’t take off one of your old hats, you just have to add a new one to the pile if you want to pursue this. And if you’re ready to think about moving in this direction, here’s a bare bones road map:

• Start with the Product content that you already have (example: We sell digital cameras)
• Next, move to Category content (example: Here’s how to buy a digital camera)
• Finally, take the leap to Lifestyle content (example: Here’s how to take better pictures on your next trip). [Bonus tip! Are some of your customers producing content that you can repurpose?]

Do you have good examples of any sites that you regularly go to for lifestyle content?

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[Photo credit: binkmeisterrick via Flickr]

If “Always Be Closing” is the mantra for sales professionals, then “Always Be Testing” should be the mantra for marketers. Best practice guidance is a great place to get started; but, there is no substitute for understanding your own audience, your own brand, and the right tactics to most effectively engage your customers.

Regular, disciplined testing strategies are critical to transitioning to a results-driven marketing culture. Unfortunately, starting out with testing can seem about as daunting as starting a new exercise routine. Its too hard. I need a Personal Mathematician to really figure it out. We don’t have enough time – we just need to get campaigns out the door.

Well, I am here to tell you that it is time to get in shape – no more excuses. When budgets are tight and resources stretched – now is the time to get serious about optimization testing. Anne Holland (Founder and Former President of Marketing Sherpa and now behind Which Test Won?) shows us that the conversion rate of a typical campaign landing page can be increased up to 40% (on average) with a few well-designed tests.

Get started with a simple split test. Testing should always answer specific questions. For example: Are we asking for too much information on this form? Which email layout drives the highest conversion? Would I get a higher webinar attendance rate if I shortened my promotional timeframe?

Which image drove a landing page conversion of 48%?

4 Elements Worth Testing

- Email From Lines: One client that I was working with saw a 36% increase in open rates by simply adding the company brand name to the from line of their communications.

- Layouts: Layouts should effectively guide our eyes whether it is an online or offline asset. Simple layout changes or location of images help us take the right actions. And, do not let your layouts get stale – variation keeps people engaged.

- Imagery: Images are the visual cues that tell us to pay attention to the content. The important thing to consider is – are the images emotionally supporting the value proposition or just there for the sake of design? Check out this free resource Fivesecondtest.com.

- Timing: Many clients are experimenting with time as elements in their campaign. Try decreasing the frequency between touches on a nurturing program. Add urgency to a promotion with an “offer ends” or “limited availability”. One software vendor decreased their Free Trial from 30 Days to 5 and saw product purchases increase by 28%.

Make It Count

Testing shouldn’t be for the sake of testing – it should be about improving results. Determine the metrics that will clearly indicate the success or failure of elements being tested. Be sure to look at both short-term conversion metrics as well as the bottom line to gain deeper insights into performance.

And, testing shouldn’t be seen as a “one-time” event – adopt it into your every-day campaign methodology. People change, online behavior is evolving, and new ideas will continue to emerge across your team. With a testing strategy in place – no idea is a bad idea if its effectiveness can be proven!

What has your team learned from optimization testing? What will you focus on learning in the second half of 2009?

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