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.

————————–

‘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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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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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.

Everyone is busy, so we need to make sure it’s relevant and compelling, so we don’t get ignored!

So here are your 4 copywriting dos…

1. Get to the point! We’ve all seen the never-ending email…you need to capture attention, so get to the point as quickly as possible…short paragraphs, short sentences…create the urgency with an active voice

2. Be relevant! Use real data to make key points, helps with credibility and proof, make sure your content and your offer is relevant to the audience.

3. Be real! Enough with the corporate speak, get real and have a conversation, using simple and conversational words. Use industry or technical language depending on your audience, but avoid catch phrases, clichés or buzz words

4. Get a response! Don’t make the user scroll, place the primary call-to-action links above the fold

So let’s summarize…Get to the Point, Be Relevant, Be Real, Get a Response.

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One of our Eloqua customers, Mark McCary, Senior Director of Global Marketing at Platts, uses the term “customer-generated marketing”. (You know, as opposed the marketing-generated marketing that most of us are currently doing.) Marketing Sherpa calls this concept “triggered email”. No matter what name you give it, it’s your goal.

I’m not naive. I know it’s easy for me to spout off about what you should be doing, and blithely overlook the fact that this is a massive change in your strategy. Your email blast numbers will dramatically decrease. However, conversely, your email campaign metrics should dramatically increase. As an added bonus, your campaign will have a longer lifespan since users can be triggering the campaign for as long as you have it running. 

If you’re experiencing resistance, offer to test marketing-generated versus customer-generated campaigns and let the numbers speak for themselves. Here is an excellent takeaway from the recent Marketing Sherpa Email Summit:

John Heidrich and Joe Nettum from Allstate described how their team is moving toward a triggered email strategy…They compared results from a campaign to encourage customers to sign up for an online account service system. One set of messages was sent batch-style to the entire list, and another set was sent to new customers, triggered by policy purchases:

• Open rates for the triggered email messages increased 84% over the batch messages
• Clickthrough rates for the triggered email messages increased 32%

Yeah, those numbers will speak quite eloquently for themselves.

What types of things should trigger an email campaign?

Certainly a purchase qualifies. But website surfing is your next best friend. For example, if you have three main products described on your website, you can measure the number of page visits to each area. Which product has the most page views? That should trigger an email to the prospect about that specific product. (What if they’re all three equal? Send an email with a comparison matrix to help the prospect differentiate your offerings!) You can also trigger off of whitepaper downloads, product trial downloads, abandoned purchases, and much more.

We’ll write about other triggers in a future post, but first….tell us your ideas! Have you seen anything work well? Is there something you want to try?

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Photo credit: timsnell | flickr

It’s interesting to see the reporting data back-up what I’ve been noticing anecdotally. I spend my days guiding Eloqua’s small-medium business customers in their marketing automation projects. One refrain I’ve been hearing over and over is “lead nurturing”. It’s not about lead acquisition right now, it’s about mining the leads you already have, warming them up and getting them ready for sales.

However, it’s definitely time for a shift even further down the lead funnel. Sales cycles are now longer because of the economy and that gives marketing more of a chance to get involved in the sales process.

Alden Cushman, SiriusDecisions’ research director and benchmarking analyst says:  “From discussions with clients we’ve benchmarked, we estimate b-to-b companies are doubling their number of pipeline acceleration programs. Instead of focusing on generating new leads, these programs represent a more effective way for marketing to impact the extended sales cycle by helping to move deals that have stalled in the pipeline. Without question, the economy is driving this trend…”

What Can You Do?

• Re-engage Stalled Opportunities: Consider a short nurturing campaign to all contacts that have been sitting in the same Opportunity stage for more than 30 or 60 days (or whatever makes sense for your business). What can you offer them that will give them a nudge in the right direction? Customer testimonial videos are an excellent choice, or perhaps a “Top 10 things to consider when purchasing a…” checklist.
   
• Nurture the Account: For large deals that involve multiple contacts at one account, think about building a customized landing page for them. You can offer links to the collateral they’ve already seen and maybe some they haven’t yet (add green checkmarks to what they’ve been sent in the past). Be sure to give prominence to the name and number of the sales person for the account. Then add in some exclusive content that is normally only available via a form on your site. This is your chance to show them how well you treat your customers by giving them VIP treatment even before they’re a customer.
   
• Share “Privileged” Information: Maybe it makes sense to show your late-stage prospects a sneak peek of your upcoming product features or new service offerings?
   
• Food for Thought: Do you have a lot of ’stuck’ prospects clustered in a geographic area? Host a breakfast and invite those prospects along with two or three of your current happy customers and let them mingle.

I’d love to hear your ideas! Are you moving down the funnel and focusing less on new leads and more on maturing the leads you already have?

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Photo credit: Slowburn

There are two critical points in your relationship with a buyer where you have their greatest attention:

(1) when they learn you might be able to provide something of value to them; and,
(2) when they actually do business with you.

 As marketers – we are typically great at welcoming our customers into the family after they sign the contract or give us a credit card number. But, why do we wait so long to “welcome” someone to our organization? Why not welcome them at the point they explicitly express interest in our organization?

When to welcome. You want to welcome someone because they raised their hand for more information. Think information desk visitor versus door-to-door vacuum sales. Also, consider where your buyer is coming from and why so that you can tailor your welcome appropriately. In a transactional purchase – it may very well be the first purchase. In a more considered purchase, it may be the first time they download some information from your resource center.

 “Thank you for your interest in {what they expressed interest in, or came from, etc.}.
We would like to take this opportunity to welcome you to the {insert brand name here} family.”

Be human. Nobody wants to be welcomed to a distribution list and reduced to a mere email address. Use language that really highlights specific value to your buyer when welcoming a new email subscriber. And, set the tone and let them know what type of communications they can expect. Chad White of Email Insider Blog gives some great examples from retailers that “get it” and those that don’t.

“Welcome to our VIP group! As a member of this group,
you will get first dibs on special offers and savings with us.”

Build loyalty. Delivering value is the best way to build loyalty with your customer. If you are going to ask them to provide more information about themselves, be sure to use that information to personalize and tailor the next communication in a way that adds value to them. If you demonstrate that you are leveraging the datapoints to create value – they are more likely to provide additional details in the future. And, please do not ask for the same datapoints over and over again.

“Thank you for taking the time to tell us more about yourself.
We thought you might find {insert unique offer here} of value.”

Go beyond a single touch. A multi-touch Welcome Campaign is a great opportunity to watch and determine what their level of interest really is. If they engage with your initial welcome continue to the dialogue based on their interests and then score them at the end to determine if they are close to purchase or not. If they are – ensure the right sales resources are alerted. If they are not – nurture them until they are ready. A simple program may look like: 

Step 1: Look to see if inquiry is new to the database.
Step 2: Send initial welcome email from Company X . Provide special offer by answering one or two profile questions.
Step 3/4a: If person engages, serve offer relevant to question answers. Send final email with links to additional resources person may be interested in.
Step 3/4b: If person doesn’t engage, acknowledge intent is to help and not annoy, so please let us know if you would no longer like to receive these communications.

Your buyer wants information. You have their attention. This is a great opportunity to listen to your buyer, route them to the right resources, and consistently introduce new audiences to your unique value proposition. If you do not have an automated Welcome Campaign for your new prospects – do not wait any longer to get one in place. If you have one in place, please re-evaluate from your customer’s point of view to identify opportunities for improvement.

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