Marketers (and demand generators) have to be good storytellers.  They have such a small window of opportunity to engage a person with an idea or message, they need to make it count every time.  A great book was written by Chris Heath and Dan Heath, called “Made to Stick“, and it is a book on why some ideas survive and some die.  They summarize this in six key principles that can be articulated in one sentence: Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story (or SUCCESs).

I thought it would be worthwhile to examine the six principles they discuss, and see how marketers could take advantage of these concepts to tell better stories.

Principle 1: Simplicity

It’s not good enough to be concise, you need to be concise and profound. “A one sentence statement that is so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning it”.  Marketers face this challenge every day – whether it is trying to develop your next brand platform or watching the available spaces countdown in your ad word editor.  How can you communicate your message so that it drives others to think,  and continue to be interested?  This is probably the toughest part of effective marketing.

Principle 2: Unexpectedness

To get people to pay attention to your ideas, “We need to violate people’s expectations. We need to be counterintuitive.”  And it isn’t enough that you just shock or surprise someone, you need to generate real interest or your idea won’t last.  Marketers are some of the best at coming up with creative ways to present their message – one of my favorite customer campaigns recently was Tanberg’s “I want my hour back“.  Which posed an interesting question on “what would you do if you could get 1 hour back?” And then tied it to Tandberg’s video conference solution as a way to get that hour.

Principle 3: Concreteness

We need to make our ideas clear, and to do that, we need to explain those ideas in terms that are real.  Although some analogies can be very successful – they can also be a crutch.  If you are a marketer who has a complex solution or service – try and speak in terms that your customers can relate to and understand.

Principle 4: Credibility

Sticky ideas have to carry their own credentials.  Meaningless stats and calculations don’t always leave people convinced something is true.  A good example of this is the concept of email deliverability – no matter how data shows this is important, a much more compelling argument is “have you ever gotten a flaming email from the CEO that one of your campaigns ended up in a prospect’s junk mail?”  All of a sudden a story on bad email deliverability has more credibility than any number of stats you could present.

Principle 5: Emotions

“We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions”.  And we all know that people buy more on emotion than logical choice.  So how can a marketer create a connection with their prospects?  The importance of relevancy cannot be understated in marketing communications.  I believe there are four dimensions of relevancy (personalization): content, timing, delivery and sender. For more details on this concept – check out this article.

Principle 6: Stories

The best way to get people to act on your ideas, is to tell  stories.  By telling stories you mentally prepare yourself and others to deal with situations when they occur.  The best marketers and sales people in my organization, are the ones that have either lived through or learnt the key stories that make our customers great, and can tell them time and time again.

So there you have it, six principles to making your ideas stick.  So the next time you are tempted to rewrite all of your customer case studies into the same boring generic format (Pain, Solution, Results), think twice.  Maybe it is time to figure out how you can leverage the six principles on your stories and really “make it stick”.

Hey look kids, there's Big Ben, and there's Parliament! --Clark Griswold

Eloqua’s recent Customer Success tours have spawned good discussion around lead nurturing.  One question that stuck out to me was “When do you stop nurturing a lead?“

Let’s start by reviewing the basics of a good nurturing program…  First, the goal: to progress a lead from one lead stage to the next with the goal of acquiring a new customer or of retaining or developing an existing one.  To obtain a new customer though, you have to start by building a relationship.

Before you go crazy with marketing automation, let’s think about the journey.  First, recognize where your lead is in your funnel.  Is your intended audience comprised of suspects that you know little about? Are they sales rejects – not yet ready to purchase? Are they pure responses – someone who has responded to a campaign, but who doesn’t yet meet the qualification criteria necessary to send them to Sales for follow up?

Tailor the campaign content, frequency of communication, and messaging vehicle to funnel stage.  Many clients shared successes around their welcome programs.  This early-stage opportunity allows frequent communication and can often yield high conversion.  For sales rejects, less frequent but more personalized content that relates to your original interaction may be more appropriate.

But back to the question at hand:  just how long is this journey?  Sirius Decisions reports that the leads in your database will likely make a purchase within 24 months – either from you or from your competitors.  By process of elimination, the journey may be short for two groups within your target audience – those that convert on to the next stage – and into another phase of the relationship – and non-responders.  (If someone hasn’t clicked or been prompted to visit your site following your communication, it’s just not working.  Remove them, set their status to inactive and try a different tactic to re-engage them.) 

The most challenging group is like an annoying ex-boyfriend – they show occasional interest but just can’t commit.  They click but don’t convert.  They’re active, just not active enough for our pipeline-loving taste. 

Depending on the length of your sales cycle, you may consider several scenarios.  Try mixing up the channels - introduce new tactics such as direct mail, phone outreach, or social media if you’ve not previously.  If your benefit-focused campaign has exhausted all enticement, invite them to subscribe to your e-newsletter or some less-specific content in order to preserve the relationship without the burden of creating additional content.  Conversely, a polite but bold campaign that requests the user to bluntly signal their intention gets to the heart of the matter. 

“We noticed that you’d not responded to our recent emails. We don’t want to continue to fill your inbox if you’re not interested.  If you’d like us to continue to periodically send you information, please click here. Otherwise, we’ll remove you from our regular communications.” 

Bottom line:  There’s no exact answer to how long your nurturing program should last.  Above all, remember, this is a relationship you’re building.  Even if frequency and format change, it’s worth it to stay in touch.

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Then I ran across a post by Dennis Dayman, Eloqua’s Email Delivery and Privacy Officer. Dennis blogs on Deliverability.com where he recently shared this holiday story that his friend Rick Buck of e-Dialog had sent around. Thanks Rick!! This certainly resonated with me and I wish I could send this message to all those vendors spamming me this month.

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‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the land,
marketers were scheming to hit year-end plans.

Their e-mails were designed in great detail and care,
in hopes that all of their customers soon would be there.

Mail the entire list. Mail them all!
Mail away! Mail away! Mail away all!”

The executives were nestled all snug in their beds,
with visions of Q4 revenue dancing in their heads.

When back in the office arose such a clatter,
that delivery support ran to see what was the matter?

Away to their reporting tools they flew like a flash,
investigating each client’s mailing to look for the trash.

The data before them on the newly sent mail
gave all indications of why they did fail.

When what to their wondering eyes should appear,
but a slew of bounce codes that no one would endear.

Unknown User! Inactive Account! Mailbox Doesn’t Exist!
Blocks from the ISPs were hard to resist.

If only they’d listened and segmented their data.
Their mailing would have been delivered,  staying off of the ISP’s radar.

Relevance, hygiene, permission and more,
ultimately gets the campaign safely out the door.

Reach out to your clients now and give them a shout.
Make sure they understand what this is all about.

Eliminate unknown users, non-responders, and hard bounces alike,
and watch delivery and response rates soar and spike.

It is important to take heed of this trustworthy advice,
because the ISPs know if you’re naughty or nice.

During this important mailing season we must get it right.
Happy Holidays to all, and to all a good-night!

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More mistakes that Marketers need to avoid in 2010 can be found at Anything Goes Marketing. One of the five mistakes listed: “If you continue to only send email blasts on a schedule that you dictate to your email subscribers, you risk massive list attrition, damaging your overall email deliverability.”

Happy *successful* email deliverability in 2010!

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Divide and Conquer Your List

• The Average Group: 29,000 contacts received 5 emails over the last 5 months
• The Oh Oh! Group: ~ 1,000 have received more than 6 emails
• The Lonely Group: 37,000 contacts received 1 email

The Average Group
At first glance, you may feel that 5 emails is way too much to send in 3 months (you also may not feel that way).  But really it gets down to analyzing your response rates?  Are they decreasing? increasing?  The average Eloqua customer sends 4-6 emails per quarter last time I checked, and really you need to further segment your list to make a call on whether it is too much or too little.  But as long as this isn’t 1 or isn’t 15, you are probably good as long as your response rates are not declining.

The Oh Oh! Group
This is the group that people worry about the most.  But in reality it often is a very small part of your list.  Also, when you look into individual email history, most of the time they are either company employees or partners.  What I advise customers to do, is to take one contact and examine the emails that were sent to them, and ask themselves – should they have gotten those campaigns?  Out of the 50 or so times I have done this with customers, the answer usually is – yes, they should have gotten all of those communications, some were support, some were reminders for an event, etc.

The Lonely Group
You pay way too much for new leads, why only communicate to leads you already have in your database < 1 time per quarter?  This is the group you need to pay special attention to, and here are some steps to take.

1. What is the lead score of this group? and if you are not lead scoring yet, just open a report of them in excel and scan them to see if there are some quality names in that list
2. How new are those leads? If they are new – you really need to investigate implementing a “Welcome Program“, which is a lead nurturing program targeted at new leads to your database.  If they are not new – are you seeing any response activity that would warrant an increase in communication frequency?

So there you have it – email frequency is not a simple issue to work through, but if you take the right steps, you can debunk the myth that there is a magic number per month to send, and maximize the potential for generating quality leads, from the database you already have.

• 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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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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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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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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