Marketing Insights » Contact Management

2010 Goal #1 – Benchmark and Assess for Demand Generation Improvement

Laura Cross — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 18:49:32 +0000

As I mentioned in my blog post on January 22, 10 Goals I have for Marketers in 2010, the first one is to benchmark and assess for improvement in marketing effectiveness. According to Merriam-Webster, benchmark means to have a point of reference from which measurements may be made OR something that serves as a standard by which others may be measured OR a test that serves as a basis for evaluation or comparison.

As we begin 2010, think of ways you can create points of reference within your organization where you can create standards. Then evaluate and compare against past performance to ensure you are improving your overall marketing effectiveness.

Standards should be created in each of the four disciplines of the Demand Lifecycle™ – lead management, contact management, campaign management and marketing effectiveness.

To get you started, Eloqua Best Practice recommends the following standards for measurement to create a baseline for evaluation and comparison.

Demand Lifecycle(TM) Recommended Metrics for Benchmarking

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What I Learned About Demand Generation, From Fantasy Football

Paul Teshima — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 09:00:24 +0000

So with the Superbowl coming up this weekend, I thought I would divert from the “I told you there would be no math” series and focus on something equally important…Fantasy Football and Demand Generation. Yes I am one of those people who play Fantasy Football. I have the large HD LCD flatscreen, the NFL channel, and PVR (Tivo) to record every game. I have taught my 2 year old son to both recognize Tom Brady, and also make a wicked throwing motion – when I need a long bomb to Randy Moss to clinch my game.

I was thinking that there are many parallels between how you run a successful fantasy football season, and what it takes to run a successful Demand Generation organization. Indulge me…here we go.

It’s All About How You Matchup Against the Competition

Fantasy football is all about knowing your players and how they matchup against their opposing teams that week. Even though you may have a great QB, if he is facing the no. 1 pass defense, maybe you should sit him that week. Well the same goes for marketing campaigns. Many marketers today are using tools that allow them to see how prospects are visiting their website, and what they searched on to get there (great blog on search queries here). This is becoming a new way of targeting follow-up campaigns or driving lead scores. The reason search queries are so powerful, is that you know exactly what the prospect was thinking when they came to your site, how deep they are in their buying process, and are they evaluating any of your competition (“us vs. them”)? By understanding who you are up against, you can zero-in on the strengths to highlight, and weaknesses to defend.

It’s Hard to Know Everything, So Rely on Others for Advice

There are so many things that go on during an NFL week, that it near impossible to stay on top of everything. I heavily rely on data and advice provided to me by ESPN and other sites. This allows me to stay on top of key trends and changes during the week.

Well the same goes with Demand Generation. I am lucky at Eloqua to be involved with hundreds of successful customers, but not everyone has that luxury. Get engaged with a community, read blogs (such as this one), and spend time with other demand generation professionals (see Eloqua Customer Success Tours). Many marketers admit that they “don’t know what they don’t know”, but by spending time learning from others, you can at least “know more about what you don’t know”.

Time Kills All Deals (Inquiries)

In Fantasy Football timeliness of action is so critical. Whether it is picking up a player on the waiver wire, or accepting a trade offer from another team. You need be ready to take action, every day, every hour, every minute. Well the same goes for Demand Generation. You have heard the phrase “time kills all deals”, but how about “time kills all inquiries”? In a study completed by M.I.T., they showcased that hours matter when following up to inquiries. In fact, the chances of converting an inquiry to a qualified lead, is increased by 600% if you call in the first hour vs. the second hour. 600%! That is really unbelievable.

Well there you have it. If you are reading this article and won your fantasy football season, perhaps you should consider a career in Demand Generation. Either that or you were just lucky enough to grab Chris Johnson or Aaron Rogers this year. See you at the Superbowl.

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10 Goals I have for Marketers in 2010

Laura Cross — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 17:39:00 +0000

Based on feedback and talking to hundreds of Eloqua clients, I’ve created a list of 10 goals that every demand generation professional should focus on in 2010 to increase their marketing effectiveness. Each month I will blog on one of the goals in depth and provide examples. In the meantime if you have any ideas or great examples, let me know.

1. Benchmark and assess for improvement in marketing effectiveness

2. Review the health of your database

3. Lead stage definitions – get in alignment with sales and implement in CRM and Eloqua

4. Implement lead scoring and make sure you are monitoring results

5. Identify manual processes and automate where appropriate

6. Track everything you possibly can, but only report on actionable data

7. Have fun with your campaigns

8. Identify MBOs that are jointly shared with sales

9. Document your marketing processes

10. Take inventory of your campaigns, update where appropriate

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Identify and Engage Inactive Contacts

Rhonda Wunderlin — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 14:36:09 +0000

Whether you call them inactive contacts, emotional unsubscribes or dead people – if you continue to market to contacts in your database who are ignoring your communications it impacts your metrics, your reputation and your effectiveness. Watch this 3 minute video to learn more about identifying that part of your database that are emotionally unsubscribed.

Click image to watch now!

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Twas the night before Christmas and Marketers were…

Rhonda Wunderlin — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 13:30:28 +0000

Over the last few weeks I have been overwhelmed with email from every vendor whose website I have possibly visited in the last two years. It struck me that this is “end of year” and companies have revenue targets to hit so they are making this last effort in the 11th hour. It just really surprised me however that I haven’t heard from some of these companies in months… MANY months! As I glance at the FROM and SUBJECT line and delete more than I read, I wonder why aren’t they sending me something relevant? Why aren’t they communicating with me more frequently??

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!

————————–

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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What’s the [Email] Frequency Kenneth?

Paul Teshima — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 18:06:39 +0000

Although I stole this title from a great R.E.M. song that references a confusing incident with Dan Rather, I hope you have come here to read about the “ideal email frequency” – a concept that is also confusing to many marketers.

Email frequency is a relative concept. What might be too many emails for you, may be perfect for me as an interested buyer. That is why it is extremely important to not set a hard rule of “no more than 2 emails per contact per month”. What if that 3rd email was the directions to your Executive breakfast event? I want to walk through how we approach this with customers, and then also discuss where we can go from here.

Divide and Conquer Your List

The highest order of segmentation is whether or not someone is interested or not interested in your message. The concept of measuring the “activeness” of your list, is one that every marketer should do. What you need is a report that allows you to see the frequency of emails sent to contacts over a given time period. Here is a sample report, that showcases different groups of contacts receiving a different numbers of emails.

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.

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
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.

Data Quality: The New Black

Rhonda Wunderlin — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:03:41 +0000

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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Best Practice Tip – Use Job Function and Job Level Fields

Laura Cross — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 13:26:57 +0000

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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Would Your Mother Be Proud of Your Marketing Lists?

Heather Foeh — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 12:51:11 +0000

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

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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Best Practice Tip – Don’t Combine Lead Stage and Lead/Contact Type

Laura Cross — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:51:22 +0000

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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