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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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.

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!

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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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