Marketing Insights

Your ability to gauge the health and activity level of your contact database is the basis for accurately measuring engagement levels, positively impacting deliverability scores, and effectively projecting campaign response rates. In addition, data quality drives better segmentation, better targeting, better personalization, and of course, more accurate lead scoring. In this 2 minute video Paul Teshima, Eloqua EVP of Customer Strategy and Success, talks about why an organization can increase their lead generation by over 250% when a data quality program is present.

Click to watch now!

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Typically when clients first start with marketing automation they have to complete a data audit where they begin to understand how their data (the good, the bad and the ugly) affects their marketing effectiveness. 

One area I see most often in B2B (businesses that sell to other businesses) organizations is the need for moving from a free form, text field for Job Title, to two drop down fields – Job Function and Job Level.  This allow for consistency and accuracy for marketing purposes. 

By using the Job Function and Job Level fields you can market more effectively to the prospect’s pain points by area of interest and the type of content you’ll need to provide based on their level within the organization.

Some examples of each are:

Job Function

• Marketing
• Operations
• Human Resources
• Finance
• Professional Services
• Information Technology
• Sales

Job Role

• C-level
• Vice President
• Director
• Manager
• Consultant
• Specialist
• Student/Intern
• Other

Keep in mind, Job Title can still be collected as a data point for sales, but for list pulls, triggers to enter and exit into nurturing or scoring programs, you’ll want to use Job Function and Job Level.

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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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I created a post on a Best Practice Tip for Lead Stages a while ago  and since then a coaching situation has come up again and again….some organizations combine Lead Stage and Lead/Contact Type in one field.

Most marketing organizations are trying to understand (1) where is the prospect in my buying cycle? and (2) who are they to my organization? And these two questions do not have the same answer key…

You should not combine Lead Stage and Lead/Contact Type in one field.

Lead Stage fields we recommend:

• Suspect
• Inquiry
• Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
• Sales Accepted Lead (SAL)
• Sales Rejected / Recycled Lead (SRL)
• Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
• Customer

Lead / Contact Type fields we recommend:

• Prospect
• Customer
• Partner
• Competitor
• Employee
• Press
• Analyst
• Student
• Vendor

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Relevance drives conversion! How relevant your message or offer is to the recipient determines how likely it is they will respond. #1 reason why people unsubscribe or opt-out is due to irrelevant messaging, the communication does not make sense or is not targeted to me, so I do not respond and I opt-out. So how can we make sure we are highly relevant to drive conversion and avoid erosion?

We do this with effective segmentation strategies. To help, here are 6 ways to segment…

• Segment by lead source
  • Where did the lead come from? A tradeshow, online ad, webinar, contact us form, an inbound call?
• Segment by behavioral criteria
  • Examples include activity on your website, click-throughs from your email, responses to specific offers and event attendance.
• Segment by lead stage
  • Where they are in the buying cycle? Have they just raised their hand as an inquiry? Are they further down the funnel as a marketing qualified lead? Has sales accepted them and they are an Opportunity or are they already a Customer?
• Segment by contact type
  • Based on who they are to your organization you will need to segment. For instance, prospect vs. customer vs. partner vs. vendor vs. employee.
• Segment by demographic information
  • Based on your business model you may have things like job function, geography, industry, company size.
• And finally, Segment by past purchase history
  • This helps you understand what they’ve purchased – product, version, solutions, etc. and then what you can renew, cross-sell, up-sell or communicate about.

And keep in mind that most effective segmentation strategies will use a combined approach.  The more data you have (target fit criteria and digital body language), the more complete your profile and segmentation strategy will be…further driving relevance.

Remember, relevance drives conversion!

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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We spend a lot of time in B2B marketing talking about email segmentation, but I recently came across a great example of website segmentation that I’d like to share: www.rallydev.com.

The folks at Rally Software help organizations develop software using Agile practices, so they have several possible purchasers at a company all the way from a Developer to a VP. Take a look at this screen shot from their home page:

I really like this guided, personalized approach because it takes the guesswork out of the web experience for the visitor. If I’m a developer, I can listen to another developer describe the benefits of Rally’s solution. Quick and simple. I don’t have to wade through pages of information to get to the heart of what matters to me.

In the demo center, this concept is carried through again with role-based demos:

Yes, there are product-specific demos on this page as well, but you have to scroll down to find them, presumably for people further along in the buying cycle who are willing to spend a bit more time on the site.

Do you use this guided approach on your website? Have you seen another great example of this concept? Please let me know by sharing a comment.

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Many of us started our email campaign careers in batch and blast mode. Many are still there. But with the tools on the market available today to track your user’s behavior and the ability to sync those tools with your CRM software, the barriers are coming down. It’s time to leap over the hurdles and change your marketing strategy.

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