As a marketing automation software company, we focus on the importance of sending trigger-based marketing campaigns and engaging leads through targeted communications.  Email marketing is an important component of these campaigns, so we wanted to share a few tips, best practices and reminders about how to make sure your emails are getting noticed…for the right reasons.

1.    Email subject lines.

Keep them snappy. Subject lines should ideally be 50 characters or less, although one of our own email gurus says 70 characters is an acceptable length, so long as the subject line conveys a very timely and relevant message.

Tell the truth. Keep your recipients engaged by using your subject line to convey the subject matter and value contained within the email.  No one likes “tricky” emails that promise something in the subject line, but don’t deliver relevant content.

2.    From line.

Make it parallel.  Check to be sure your company name makes sense in the context of your subject line.  Nothing screams, “bogus” like a subject line touting “10 Smart Marketing Tips” with a sender name of FreeLove4Less.

Be personal. Using a real person as the sender’s email address is much more credible than the generic info@ or sales@.  Also, if you are adding a personalized signature, make sure it matches the name in the “from” line.

3.    Content.

Triple check spelling and grammar. Yes, we should all know this one by now, but we still see plenty of misspellings in email copy and even subject lines.

Say something interesting. It’s hard to keep recipient’s engaged, and even good offers only go so far in terms of cutting through the inbox noise.  In addition to offers, make sure your content is compelling or gives recipients a reason to open your email, interact with it and come back for more.

4.    Images.

Think balance. While images can reinforce the message and add visual bling to your email, it is important to find a healthy balance of text and imagery.  Too many large images tend to send emails into Spam Heaven, and because many email clients suppress images upon delivery, your message needs to be clear with or without the graphics.  One other important phrase here: ALT text.  Don’t forget it!

Check it out. An important function of email quality assurance is testing your email in different operating systems, browsers, email clients, etc.  For example, a couple of months ago Gmail made a change that caused images and templates to break.  A search on Google revealed several companies including Alchemy Worx suggested adding the following to every image tag: style=”display:block” to correct the problem.  The important takeaway – until this past May, the images had always displayed correctly in Gmail so a consistent testing process is key.

5.    Links.

Kick those tires. Double, triple or quadruple check all of the links in your email.  From personal experience, especially if you recycle newsletter templates, check the footer and image links.  It is very easy to roll out new website pages or navigation, and forget those template links aren’t current when it comes time to launch the next email.

Let them opt-out. Not only is an unsubscribe link your legal responsibility, but also it is important that your unsubscribe link be prominent enough to be easily seen.  Most email service providers and marketing automation platforms add them automatically to the bottom of the email so there isn’t an issue.

We hope this list provides some helpful reminders about ways to keep your email marketing looking good and generating great delivery and response rates!

Marketing automation is a hot topic, and one that deserves the attention it is receiving.  After all, it truly is changing the way marketers communicate with leads, clients and partners.  I sometimes become obsessed with the way marketing automation works in the context of the B2B sales cycle, although plenty of businesses (including some of our customers) are using it successfully for B2C marketing.

As with any new technology, marketing automation still provides the occasional, “D’oh!” moment.  One such favorite moment occurred on a recent visit to Pittsburgh, when a friend shared the amusing story of how her boyfriend received several emails in June from a florist (he’d used previously) that encouraged him to, “remember Mary with flowers on Father’s Day.”

Pretty hilarious, considering Mary is a female and not celebrating Father’s Day. Unless the florist is uber-PC and assumes all genders are celebrating Father’s Day, I think they had a little marketing automation “oopsie.”  Rather than focus on the negative, however, the more useful exercise is to think about the things the florist did right in terms of their database segmentation and email strategy…

1.    Be Specific.  Depending on how you segment your database, you can develop very relevant email messages that target events, holidays, geography, vertical markets, job titles, etc. Given the above florist example, the strategy of sending Father’s Day reminder emails during the month of June was sound.
2.    Get Personal.  When done properly, dynamic field insertion can make communications more personal.  Seeing your name or company in an email feels better than seeing “Greetings” or “Your Business.”  The more information you capture in your database, the more choices you’ll have for separating names and customizing content.
3.    Target Behavior.  In the case of the florist, they targeted customers who had bought flowers from them previously.  This strategy of analyzing past behavior or buying patterns to encourage future actions is very smart.  If it worked in the past, it should work in the future.
4.    Add Value. The florist also included a special offer for returning customers, as an incentive. Rewarding current customers and offering something valuable for their time or business reinforces brand loyalty, promotes retention and keeps recipients engaged.

Unfortunately, all of these positive aspects don’t erase the fact that the email was sent to people who didn’t qualify for this campaign. I’d guess the problem stemmed (get it – stemmed) from the contact database lacking thorough gender information – or – an error in the segmentation strategy that neglected to exclude any prior recipients who are female.  I imagine the florist has a very large and robust database so maybe a small subset of data should have been tested before launching the national campaign.

Again, kudos to the florist for having the right idea about sending automated email communications and implementing a marketing automation strategy that makes sense.  Have you received any automated emails that missed the mark?  Send us a tweet about them.

Have you ever been quietly sipping a pint or four at your local watering hole and found yourself engaged in a spirited (pun intended) debate about, “Who’s better?  Beatles or Stones?”  While I have my opinions and theories (and our COO has his), a few songs from both bands lend themselves perfectly to 4 steps you need to take prior to diving headlong into marketing automation.

1.    Start Me Up – yes, clichéd and possibly overplayed, but legitimate advice.  Before jumping into marketing automation, it makes sense to start your initiative with a clear direction and focus.  First, define your pain points and how marketing automation software would ideally help solve them.  From there, outline the features of the marketing automation solution and how each component can work together to reduce, if not remove, these pain points.

2.    Come Together – track one on Abbey Road gives you a crucial piece of advice about shaping your marketing automation efforts – come together and get buy-in from the areas of your organization that will be working to implement the solution such as sales, IT, operations, etc. If there is any dissention about the technology, methodology or value, it is best to resolve it BEFORE you get into the nitty-gritty of implementation.

3.    Paperback Writer – this catchy tune is about a novelist submitting his book to a publisher, but you get the gist of it. Great content is the foundation for a successful inbound marketing campaign.  Keeping readers engaged requires educational, interesting or just plain cheeky content that is more than a chest-thumping sales pitch.  Audit your current materials, identify gaps and work to produce articles, posts, videos, etc. that educate prospects in new and informative ways.

4.    Time is on My Side – this song is all about patience and that’s something you’ll probably need as you fine-tune and hone your first marketing automation campaigns.  As with any new platform or tool, there is always a learning curve associated with understanding how to use it, best practices, etc.  Set realistic expectations with your leadership team about the different stages and objectives so everyone is on the same page.

With these four tunes in mind, you’ll be well on your way to get started with marketing automation so you aren’t singing, “The Last Time” or “Yesterday.”  Who is your favorite musical muse – Beatles or Stones?

Talented sales people have known for years that the best way to keep the pipeline full is to identify prospects, develop relationships with them and then close the sale when the time is right.  But, if it were that easy, very few sales people would ever find themselves “excused” from work due to lagging numbers.

Most sales people are very skilled at the last part – closing the sale – but lack the time or resources to spend cycles identifying the leads and developing the relationship.  This scenario is where lead nurturing can fill the gap.

We think of lead nurturing as the process of developing a relationship with potential leads and engaging them in quality conversations to assess their level of interest and sales-readiness.   Marketing automation software can play a valuable role in lead nurturing strategies by automating these relationship-building communications and sending recipients down different decision-trees, based on their interactions.

Sounds like a great plan, right?  Marketing qualifies the prospects using a systematic lead nurturing approach, and once the leads are deemed qualified, sales scoops in to close the business.  However, much like the thought “if sales was easy, no one would get canned,” if lead nurturing were that simple, every company would be doing it.

With that in mind, we’ve taken a moment to run through 4 objections to lead nurturing from various internal departments and how to successfully overcome them…

• “I don’t like turning my leads over to someone else because who knows what promises you’ll make or what you’ll do with them.” – Johnny Sales Wizard
  Overcome this sales’ fear by working together to road map the communication cycle and listening to what sales has to say about how they sell successfully.  See if you can emulate some of their one-on-one dialog on a lead nurturing scale of one-to-many.

• “I don’t have time to develop a bunch of articles, emails, case studies, etc. and implement it…my day is already jam-packed.” – Sue Marketing Guru
  Help marketing come aboard the lead nurturing train by identifying existing content that can be repurposed for the nurture campaigns.  And don’t be afraid to start small with a 4 or 6-week cycle of communications that can be expanded as nurturing efforts take shape.

• “You people are always spending the company’s money on some new tool or system that no one uses after 3 months.” – Richard Bean Counter
  As much as it pains us, the CFO has a legitimate point.  Shiny new toys don’t do anyone much good if they aren’t used.  Have your game plan and content mapped out with both sales and marketing’s buy-in beforehand. If you’ll be using a marketing automation tool to streamline the processes, check into CRM integration or an API so you can manage your contact’s activities from one centralized place.

• “Does lead nurturing really help or is this another complicated excuse for why sales and marketing can’t work together?” – Mitch E. CEO
  The key to overcoming the dreaded “does it work” question is to first establish metrics that denote success.  While the end-game goal will always be more opportunities and closed deals, that probably won’t happen overnight.  Maybe the first metrics are improved email interaction and content downloads. Set realistic expectations and metrics from Day One.

With these tips in mind, you should be able to get buy-in and ideas for shaping your lead management and nurturing efforts.  Happy nurturing.

Marketing automation software encompasses many features such as email marketing, lead scoring, database segmentation, website lead tracking, etc. – and when those parts are used together to shape marketing campaigns, they can qualify leads on a deeper level.  But rather than toss around marketing automation phrases willy-nilly, I thought I’d share a true story and how it relates to marketing automation.

Last night as I was brushing my teeth, I heard a faint chirp that seemed to originate in the vicinity of a smoke detector in the bedroom.  I hopped onto the bed to further investigate the situation, but just as I was standing there, a chirp now sounded from down the hall.  As I ran toward the sound, the chirp was now audible in the basement, and then the kitchen, and then back upstairs.  Clearly, the smoke detectors were mocking me.

In a desperate effort stop the torture of this incessant and mysterious chirping, I began blindly ripping detectors out of the wall, yanking at wires and batteries, knowing (but not caring) in the heat of the moment that I was destroying the first line of defense from going up in flames. Once I successfully and gruesomely dismantled all of the detectors, I sat quietly, hands full of alkaline battery goo and miscellaneous smoke detector parts until…CHIRP.

How does this story relate to marketing automation? Marketing automation, when implemented strategically, can reduce false alarms and time spent pursuing leads that just aren’t very interested in your solutions or services.  Simply put, it will help you stop chasing the leads that you thought were ready to buy…but were really as cold as a dead battery in the carbon monoxide detector (the actual culprit in my real life chirping mayhem).

By automating your demand generation processes, you’re categorizing your leads based on their interactions with your website and marketing pieces. Instead of following up with leads because they opened your email or visited your homepage, you are identifying hot leads by not only their email interaction, but also by their time spent on your website, time viewing specific products, navigation through the site, and any content downloaded throughout the site.

In addition to systematically tracking each move on your site, you can configure emails that are triggered based on those actions, so you can reach out to leads at the right moment in their decision-making process.  This strategy of automated, behavior-based communications can improve the lead’s engagement with you and your solution without bulking up your manual follow-up processes.

Automating your lead management process does more than increase insight into your leads’ level of interest and qualification to show you who is ready to buy – it also will show you which site visitors were just giving a few “chirps” but not really interested in your solution.  Now you’ll be able to focus on the most qualified leads and eliminate those false alarms (or in my case, replacement smoke detectors).

Do you have a recent smoke detector horror story (c’mon don’t be shy) or a story about how marketing automation is helping you zero in on the right leads?

Earlier this week, Net-Results was a participant and sponsor at the BMA Colorado PARTEE on the Green.  Pun-errific name notwithstanding, the golf was a blast at the picturesque Arrowhead Golf Club, nestled in the foothills of the Rockies.  With a wide variety of golfing abilities and experience, everyone witnessed plenty of memorable shots, although a few might make the memory-bank for the wrong reason.  As one member of our foursome looked on at an exceptionally graceless shot, she mused that online marketing is a lot like golf – while practice might make perfect, it helps to have the right foundation from the beginning.

Think about it – her statement makes a lot of sense.  Even though many people hit the links regularly, with the intention of hitting ball after ball until they “get their swing right,” they may be reinforcing bad habits, inefficient techniques or worse!  Ultimately, after months or years of trying to improve their skills based on the do-it-yourself-golf model, many people will become frustrated with their lack of progress and quit.  Translate this scenario to online marketing – not pretty, is it?

At Net-Results, we want you to unleash both your inner rock star marketer and fantastic golfer. To that end, we’ve outlined a few components of a typical online marketing campaign and suggestions for when it’s time to visit the neighborhood pro…

1.    Website Redesign. While most of us are smart enough to know we need a pro to design our website, many people insist that their website isn’t ‘working’ due to poor design.  Before embarking on that 3rd redesign in 12 months, ask yourself, “What do you want your website to do?” and, “How are you quantifying success?”  Based on those answers, you might find the look and feel of your website isn’t the problem, but rather, your messaging or calls-to-action are vague or unclear.

2.    Search Engine Optimization.  We all want to rank number one on Google for that ultra-juicy, ego-stroking, best ever search phrase, right?  While it makes complete sense to focus on those high priority search terms, remember the more competitive the phrases, the more difficult it is to rank for them.  If you place all of your effort on 3-4 phrases, you might be missing some tremendous value in long tail keywords.  Be sure to do your homework and pick a mix of both high-value keywords along with some lower hanging, less competitive ones.

3.   Email Marketing.  In the good old days of 1998, you could pretty much send an email out to a list of marginal quality and anticipate double-digit open, click-thru rates and perhaps conversions.  Back then, email was relatively new and inboxes were gloriously uncluttered.  Sadly enough, those days are long gone and your email marketing strategy needs to reflect such changes.  Marketing automation software will allow you to send smarter, trigger-based email campaigns that demonstrate improved response rates, but just like any other marketing initiative, it must be part of a well-rounded strategy.

4.    Pay Per Click. Much like bullet point #2, in paid advertising, we all want that top spot on Google, Yahoo Search, etc.  Let’s be realistic though, because that top spot can cost a boatload of dough.  Moreover, PPC requires serious attention – it’s not like a “set it and forget it” Ron Popeil rotisserie oven.  What worked well one day may be a bust in two months.  With diligent campaign monitoring, you may find that the third position converts just as well as the first.  Or if you concatenate high-value search terms with geographical areas, your bids might be much less expensive but still provide plenty of conversions.

5.    Statistics and Metrics. Ever heard the question, “Why doesn’t my online marketing work?”  I like to respond, “Because it’s lazy.”  (No, not really!)  That question is first rooted in defining the word, “work.”  Understanding both the objectives of your marketing strategy and how you’ll measure success are critical.  While social media outreach could be measured by the number of followers, mentions or retweets, PPC might only be measured by total conversions.  Let me repeat, defining the objectives and then utilizing analytics/statistics to measure and track campaigns is a critical step.  After all, how can you share your successes if you don’t really know what a success is?

Online marketing encompasses so much more than monitoring and optimizing these 5 parts, but much like learning how to golf, you need to pick a starting point and decide how much you want to tackle on your own and what parts need the guidance and specialized services of a pro.

How’s your golf swing and online marketing looking this summer – crisp, long drives or shanking off the fairway?  Please comment below or send us a tweet.

About six months ago, I subscribed to a Caribbean vacation site that provides alerts for deeply discounted Caribbean vacations for last minute travel. I began to receive emails about once a week, and actually ended up purchasing a vacation through one of the alerts. All was well…until I began to receive daily, meaningless travel alerts.  Some were even the same vacation offer sent six consecutive days!  Even more frustrating, I received a bunch of special offer emails for the resort I just stayed at!

Sick of the volume of worthless emails, I ended up unsubscribing to a service that could have been very useful if the timing was more closely monitored and the targeting was more strategic.  In thinking about this scenario, I wanted to highlight a few tips that would have been helpful for the vacation provider to utilize, as well as ways to think about your email marketing strategy.

Provide frequency expectations

If you plan to send your prospects a large volume of email communications, or a string of various emails throughout a drip campaign, giving them advance notice of the number of communications and the timeframe will help recipients set expectations…and help keep them interested (and potentially from visiting unsubscribe-ville) because they know what to anticipate from you.

Provide options

By asking a consumer how often they would like to receive emails and what type of services or product they are interested in, they are now empowered to decide the frequency and content they’ll receive.  This level of control makes recipients more apt to open your emails, and to potentially purchase from you in the future.

Pay attention to the numbers

• Although it’s obvious that you should be monitoring your aggregate open and click rates, you should also be monitoring your list activity and the percentage of your list that open, click and buy within a period, such as quarterly or annually.
• Monitor your recency of response, the average for the last open, click or purchase. It’s a good idea to store recency in your email database as a custom field to score list members by their activity.
• Break down your list frequency by dividing your lists into segments (Ex: if you segment by demographic, a younger demo may be more receptive to more frequent emails than an older demographic).
• Segment your list by the length of time they have been in your contact database, as a rule, the longer a contact has been a member of your database, the less responsive they will be over time.

Test to find your optimal frequency

• You don’t want to reduce email frequency for all members on your list, because this change could reduce overall sales.  You should, however, aim to reduce frequency to those list members who have tuned-out of communications with the objective of engaging them more through less frequent or higher impact emails. For example, if the numbers tell you that your database isn’t very engaged or interested, you may want to only provide “breaking news” type items and limit all other communications.
• Increase other communication (social media, direct mail, newspaper inserts, etc.) for less-responsive customers to see if they prefer a different medium of communication.

In addition to these tips, it is critical to remember that frequency is a two-way street.  Communicating isn’t solely a function of how often you want or need to send your messages – it must incorporate how often your recipients want to hear from you.

Calibrating your ideal frequency is also due in part to how well you are able to segment and slice your database.  Read more about Net-Results segmentation features.

It’s hard to believe how fast marketing automation is evolving – and the wealth of information available about the space.  If you have a Google Alert set for “marketing automation,” you know what we mean.

With that in mind, we’d like to give a quick shout-out to a few folks that help the rest of us think about demand generation, lead nurturing and marketing automation in new, creative or fun ways.  Each person’s name is a link to his/her Twitter account for easy follow-ability.

Disclaimer: while many marketing automation vendors are posting great information and articles about these topics, we wanted to keep the list vendor-neutral and focus on individual contributors (who are listed in no particular order).

1.    Carlos Hidalgo – with over 1,700 Tweets, you just know that at least once a day, Carlos is going to share something insightful about marketing automation, especially from his clients’ perspective.
2.    Matt Heinz – his blog “Matt on Marketing” is fresh, funny and contains tons of free tips and advice about more than just marketing automation – from lead nurturing emails to print collateral tips, his posts are worth a read.
3.    Laura Ramos – her knowledge and insights about using marketing solutions and technology to cut through the noise in complex B2B sales cycles are delivered in a clean, no-nonsense style.
4.    Jep Castelein – with the promise of helping clients uncover untapped revenue in their database, Jep launched LeadSloth as a resource center with useful marketing automation tips from an unbiased viewpoint.
5.    Andrew Hunt – his Blog “From Clicked to Closed” gives readers practical inbound marketing advice in an anecdotal style that is refreshing, informative and fun to read.
6.    David Raab – an experienced analyst with a keen eye on using the latest technologies to enhance marketing, his blog “Customer Experience Matrix” provides its readers with useful information, especially during the all-important vendor selection process.
7.    Ardath Albee – her book “eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale” is chock full of actionable information and Ardath is a talented and savvy contributor about hot topics such as marketing automation, social media, lead nurturing and more.
8.    Craig Rosenberg – so the name the Funnelholic makes us crack a smile every time, but Craig backs up his “addiction” with great tips and strategies about B2B marketing, lead generation and lead nurturing.
9.    Mac McIntosh – with 20 years of advertising, marketing and sales experience, he helps readers and clients understand the “big picture” of lead management from pre-pipeline to a closed sale.

We picked these 9 experts because they provide great information, but we know this list is far from complete.   If you’d like to suggest your favorite demand gen or marketing automation expert, please comment below or send us a tweet @NetResults and we’ll include them in a future post.  Happy automating!

Soccer fans, sports enthusiasts or pretty much anyone who owns a TV knows the 2010 World Cup is well underway in South Africa.  In addition to the amazing athleticism and intense displays of national pride, this World Cup will likely be remembered for another phenomenon – a three-foot trumpet-like instrument, the vuvuzela.  If you’ve watched a World Cup match, you know the sound – something like a swarm of locusts that got stuck in a ceiling fan stuck on high speed.

We’re not here to take sides regarding whether the instrument is a traditional part of African soccer or a heinous ear-splitting nuisance – but we did see a parallel between the beloved (or maligned) vuvuzela and marketing automation.  Think it’s not possible?  Read on…

Last week, in response to literally hundreds of complaints, Britain’s BBC announced that it is exploring a way to give its viewers using digital service a mute button for the vuvuzelas.  Sounds like a great idea, right?  Viewers who like the vuvuzelas can enjoy the sound and everyone who doesn’t care for them can mute them.

But wait a minute…if viewers can suddenly, at will, mute certain sounds from their television sets, do you think TV show producers or advertisers will be very happy?  Annoying commercials, theme music, TV hosts, etc. could be controlled with the click of a button.  But that’s a topic for another day…back to how the vuvuzela debate relates to the concept of marketing automation.

It reminds us that people want to control what they see – they want to control their viewing experience, whether online, TV, their smart phone, etc.  And that’s what marketing automation can help you do so well.

By communicating based on a viewer’s unique interactions with emails, web sites, blog posts, etc, a marketing automation solution can educate and qualify leads about what subject matter they find interesting.  In turn, the viewer is not subjected to a myriad of communications they have zero interest in receiving.  When executed properly, marketing automation can be like the proposed BBC mute button.  Leads can listen to what they like and find interesting, but tune out the rest.

As an organization, you can track the ones who are “listening” and further qualify them.  Those who don’t engage – who mute, or in this case, don’t interact with communications, can receive less attention. So grab your soccer spirit, vuvuzela, mute button and start automating!

I’m not sure anyone really asks, “What’s your sign?” as a pick-up line these days, but with the rising popularity of marketing automation, perhaps more people should be asking, “What’s your score…lead score, to be exact?”

Isn’t it every sales person’s dream to know exactly how qualified a prospect is and the intended purchase timeframe?  By knowing this information, sales could focus on the hottest prospects – the ones that are in the buying phase and judged most likely to close.  The remaining leads could receive additional follow-up communications until they move closer to the decision-making process.

Using the lead scoring feature within a marketing automation system, this dream scenario can become reality.  Lead scoring tracks the leads’ interaction with your website, emails, online events, etc, and then automatically assigns a numerical value.

The guesswork associated with a prospect’s level of engagement is substantially reduced, if not eliminated, because you can assess interest based on a finite value…the lead score.  Additionally, the score is adjusted automatically by the system so you don’t need to login each time an event occurs and adjust the score manually (although that can be done if an offline action occurs that necessitates a change in the score).

To get started thinking about how lead scoring applies to your lead database, imagine the different actions, attributes or behaviors a lead might have that would make him/her more qualified.  Here is a quick list of lead criteria that we’ve found particularly helpful:

Visitor attributes

• Referred by a high-value lead source such as a technology partner, application exchange website, etc
• Searched for a specific keyword strand that implies familiarity like brand or product name
• Came to the website from a specific geographical area where your company is well-positioned

Website activity

• Clicked on a high-value link such as a white paper download
• Viewed a certain amount of pages or spent a specified length of time on your site
• Returned to the website multiple times
• Submitted an inquiry form such as “Contact Us” or subscribed to your Blog feed

Emails

• Clicked on specific links within the email or went to landing pages
• Interacted with a specific number of emails received

Online events

• Registered or attended an event such as a webinar

As you can see, the possibilities of assigning and adjusting a lead score based on a lead’s attributes or actions are limitless and provide a great way to identify the most qualified leads without adding manual bulk or processes.  Here’s to knowing your leads’ scores instead of their signs!