Marketing Insights

Last week, I attended the Marketing Sherpa B2B Summit in San Francisco, CA.  It was a pretty active event with Twitter conversations at #sherpaB2B09 and live streaming courtesy Hubspot TV. I just wanted to take a few minutes to recap some of the highlights from my perspective and hope to continue the discussion that we were having on site with this community here.

“It’s just marketing.”
Best quote of the event, courtesy Jeff Taxdahl owner of Thread-Logic. This comment came from his presentation on whether to work with or not work with an agency to manage his PPC Campaign which currently drives 95% of his sales. At the end of the day, there are no tricks. The fundamentals of marketing still apply. Know your buyer; deliver a compelling message to the buyer. And, if it is important to your business, you may be the best person/team to make it happen and you may need to ramp up the knowledge in house.

Continuing this line of thinking – we spent several hours on social media on Day 1. And, I have to say, I am “kinda over” social media. I am tired of us talking about it with shiny penny syndrome and marketers’ utter confusion on “How does it fit? Is it worth it?” It’s just marketing! The fundamentals of marketing still apply. Know your buyer and deliver a compelling message to the buyer. Build the relationships, don’t force the brand.

“Relevance requires major data”
Second favorite quote. This came from Thomas Hayden, Director of Marketing for Sage Systems. So true Thomas, so true. In the way that an in-person conversation requires excellent listening skills (human data processing), an automated conversation demands pristine data quality. Your data quality represents your ability to listen to your customer effectively.

“Be Helpful.”
OK, this is actually a quote from Chris Brogan who wasn’t at the event but I love the quote and it sums up an important theme in terms of content and delivery of that content. I really enjoyed the session that featured Troy Monney from Novell (and not just because they are an Eloqua client) but because they clearly demonstrated how they mapped out content for buyer personas at different stages of their buyers’ evaluation process (v. the internal selling process). I thought all of the sessions on Day 2 that focused on content and buyer personas really helped us to think in the shoes of our customer v. the mindset of just pushing our brand.

“Can you tell us about the ROI on that example? Ummm…”
Many marketers are still struggling with key metrics and demonstrating ROI. Yes, it is a controversial subject in terms of the HOW, but I think that a clear understanding of Campaign impact on revenue is still a struggle for most. It is still a very anecdotal and correlation game.

“Marketing is still from Venus. And, Sales is still from Mars.”
I can’t believe we are still so siloed in our areas of focus on the funnel. Marketing focusing only on “sales ready” with no clear “acceptance/rejection” points along the way to gain objective feedback on lead quality. The one presentation on Scoring seemed to even accentuate this further. To truly drive sales and marketing alignment – there needs to be a clear mapping of process, communication touch points, and responsibilities at every step of the funnel, not just the top.

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In our series about declining email response rates, so far we’ve looked at:

• Cleaning out inactive contacts
• Online reputation measurement
• Follow-up timing

Today we’re going to talk about purchased list. (Hint: Bad Idea!)

Are you buying email lists from other sources and adding those folks into your database? Don’t. I mean it: stop right now. First of all, the success rate on purchased email lists is approximately .001% according to my in-depth research, not to mention that you’re killing your online reputation. If you’ve purchased lists in the past I encourage you to be ruthless and cull those people from your database. Right now. Go.

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In our quest for better email response rates we’ve looked at cleaning out inactive contacts as well as checking on your online reputation score. Today we’ll look at your follow-up times and how that can affect your response rates.

When you get a new lead into your database (through a website form, trade show booth visit, etc.) are you responding quickly? Or is it thirty days until the prospect hears from you? The longer you wait, the more likely they are to forget you – and ignore you. In this wonderful new world of social media I’ve noticed some marketers dropping some of their old-school tactics (such as autoresponders and immediate follow-ups). Don’t let those new leads go stale and become part of your non-responder baggage.

In our next post we’ll answer the question: Would your mother be proud of your marketing lists?

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In a series of continuing posts looking at email response rates, today’s topic is about your reputation.

If you’ve noticed that your email response rates are declining, it may be time to check your online reputation and make sure that you haven’t fallen into a pit of undeliverability. I recommend visiting senderscore.org for a check-up. Think of it as the “credit score” of your domain name. While you’re there, you can sign up for an email series that will help you correct any issues you may uncover.

Next up… we’ll look at your follow-up times.

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In this brief video Jen Horton discusses the importance of answering the following 4 questions in order to keep your website visitors engaged:

1. Am I where I expected to be?
2. Is it relevant to me?
3. Do I believe you?
4. Is it easy to take action?

Click to watch now!

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I’ve been hearing a familiar refrain lately from the marketers that I work with: “My email response rates have been dropping.” If you’re singing that same tune, I have a some helpful ideas for you that I’ll be sharing over the next few weeks. Our first one: Do You See Dead People?

If your marketing database is more than one week old, you definitely have contacts that are no longer valid. In 2005 (ages ago!) Marketing Sherpa produced a chart that showed that database health declines by twenty-five percent each year. So if you started last year with 100,000 contacts, only 75,000 of those are still valid. Ouch. As those email addresses die off, they become dead weight in your marketing metrics. If your response rates have been slowly dropping over time, it is most likely a correlation to the natural aging of your database.

How can you address this? Split up your database! Ideally your marketing automation system should be able to help you understand who has been active in the last six months or so, and who hasn’t visited the website or opened an email during that time (inactive). Create two groups and send your next big email blast, such as a newsletter, to each group separately. Chances are that your response rates with the active group are still doing fine.

Now you have to get firm with that inactive group. Try a two touch re-engagement campaign specifically targeting those folks and for those that don’t re-engage, quarantine them in your database and stop sending to them. I know, I know… I can hear you freaking out right now. But trust me, you’re not really losing anything. In my next post on this topic we’ll talk about why these dead people are not just dragging down your response rates, they’re also hurting your deliverability reputation. Stay tuned….

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In this short video, Laura Cross shares quick tips to ensure your email does not get ignored. Watch it now!

Click to watch now! (2 min)

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Anyone who can leverage a hair band as part of their marketing campaign has to be interesting, right? Next up on our roster…

Kris Shorter: Marketing Manager at Roche Diagnostics

How did you get where you are today?

4 Words – Path of Least Resistance

What’s interesting in marketing for your space right now?

The entire Life Science Research Community is trying extremely hard to capture as much of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds coming from the NIH as possible. Companies and institutions that do a superb job of this will have a giant advantage over their competition.

How do you get good ideas and inspiration?

I constantly ask myself, “What would Jack Bauer do?”.

What campaign have you seen recently that really blew you away?

Samsung LED TV Series campaign.  Samsung’s recent television ad portraying a digital  humming bird is extremely interesting from a creative and visual standpoint.  I also think their messaging does a nice job of trying to distinguish themselves from the competition.  When you visit their website, they maintain the same look and feel of the ad and have a very cool and dynamic product selection guide.

The Clip

The Web Site

If you were a font, which font would you be?

Chiller.  Because it sounds cool.

Please share with us a nugget of your marketing wisdom for our readers.

It is very important to understand and be able to stratify your current customer base – as well as the prospects that you are either not working with or do very little business with.  I always try to develop a contact strategy based on these segments and then allocate a higher percentage of budget towards the top prospects and less towards prospects with low potential.  For instance, a high-end direct mail campaign with telemarketing follow-up may be utilized for top prospects and a simple nurturing email campaign may suffice for those prospects with low potential.

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I haven’t met Aaron in person. Although I hope to soon as we both do live in the fine city of Austin, TX. I have always been impressed with the quality of content that his marketing team at Powered delivers to its audience.

I also have been following Aaron on Twitter for some time and have really enjoyed his insights and blog posts.  So well, in fact, I am blatantly stealing his idea with this Marketing Masters series. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and so I see it only fitting that Aaron is featured first on our humble imitation.

Aaron Strout: CMO at Powered Inc.

How did you get where you are today?

Well, for an old guy like me, that’s a “bigger than a breadbox” type question. But in fairness to your project, I’ll give it a shot. It all started with waiting tables and bartending. That’s where I learned a TON about customer service and multitasking. I taught myself what I know about the Web back in the early 90’s (which had roots back to my dad’s computer programming career in the 70’s and 80’s). Fidelity Investments taught me nearly everything I know about marketing. And then in the early 2000’s, I took the people skills I acquired from aforementioned waitering/bartending jobs and started down the online “social” path with LinkedIn and Facebook. Oh, and then along came Francois Gossieaux who taught me a ton about marketing 2.0. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention Barry Libert, my last boss, who taught me how to properly channel my thought leadership skills.

What’s interesting in marketing for your space right now?

The intersection of “social” and “marketing.” There are two keys to this phenomena… a) great content and b) measurement and insight. Social marketing in my mind is the future of business.

How do you get good ideas and inspiration?

From a number of different traditional and new media-esque sources like NPR, marketing blogs and Twitter. Most importantly though, getting together with friends like Dave Evans, Kyle Flaherty, Bryan Person, Peter Kim, David Armano, Jim Storer and Tim Walker – along with my super smart colleagues at Powered – helps me distill these new ideas into “implement-able” tactics.

What campaign have you seen recently that really blew you away?

Hmmm, I’m not sure there’s anything that’s blown me away. However, I’m a big fan of what smart CMO’s like Jeffrey Hayzlett of Kodak and Barry Judge of Best Buy are doing. Those guys are good people to watch.

If you were a font, which font would you be?

As boring as it sounds (love the question though), probably Calibri. It’s simple, clean but easy to read. I always try and keep things simple and make any of my recommendations to others prescriptive.

Please share with us a nugget of your marketing wisdom for our readers.

I’m a huge believer in Karma. To me, that means that I try and do nice things and be respectful of anyone and everyone, irrespective of what they might offer back to me. What I’ve found is that in the grand scheme of things, this always pays back in spades. It also makes people happy and grateful which are nice traits to see in people. I also am a big fan of work/life balance although I’m not always as good at practicing it as I would like.

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[Photo Credit: Brian Solis, www.briansolis.com and bub.blicio.us]

When I polled my colleagues for their recommendations on productivity tools, Snagit was on everyone’s list and it’s definitely at the top of mine. I use Snagit approximately 8,456 times per day on average (okay, maybe not quite that many…) and I find it indispensible.

What is it? It’s screen captures on steroids. You can highlight areas of your screen, combine two captures into one, make notes with the text tool, and much more. The new version 9 also has excellent image tagging and library functionality which have been a lifesaver for me.

As marketers, much of our work life is visual and Snagit makes it easy for me to share those images easily with my clients and coworkers.

BONUS: I encourage you to sign up for the free 30-day trial of Snagit because they have a masterful follow-up campaign. On the confirmation page for the download (right here) they only ask for one piece of info: email address. Then over the course of 30 days you learn how to use many features of the software through their drip campaign. There are some great lessons here for marketers!

Do you have a productivity tool that you can’t live without? Tell me about it: heather dot foeh at eloqua dot com.