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!

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?

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!

As specialists in the field of marketing automation, it is easy to assume everyone is using email to communicate with prospects, customers and technology partners.  When you stop and think about it, however, is that assumption really accurate?  Are most businesses really using email – and using it effectively? Read more

Although Marketing Automation is certainly not “New” it’s also not a concept that is deeply engraved into the mind of every marketer.  Net-Results provides one of the most effective and user friendly marketing automation platforms out there, but we too must send our own sales soldiers out to encourage consumers to shed the shackles of basic marketing and learn to love the web 2.0.  In our efforts to spread the good word, we come across every size, shape and color of marketer, and gather quite a few interesting questions on the way. One of the most recent, which seems to be quite common, is the unsettling rebuttal to our pitch: “But I already DO marketing!” Read more

Have you ever sat down at your favorite Mexican restaurant and been so hungry that you can’t decide what to order?  From chicken enchiladas and rellenos to carne asada and shrimp ceviche, it all looks so good that you sit there…stumped.  The wait staff may have to make several extra trips because you are distracted by the choices and can’t decide.

Now think about this scenario in the context of setting up a multi-week, multi-step marketing automation campaign.  Sounds familiar, right?  You have so many decisions and moving parts to control that getting started can be overwhelming.

We suggest answering these four simple questions beforehand to make structuring your first few marketing automation campaigns a little easier…a little more digestible, if you will.

1.       Who are your leads and what is their source?  Answering this question will help determine their initial interests and how you first communicate with them.  For example, leads from outbound calling efforts should probably be segmented and receive different communications than those generated via an affiliate email program.
2.       What would you say in a 1:1 conversation – why should these leads care about your communications?  Are you offering them something of value such as a special offer, educational material, free assessment, etc?
3.       How can you support your campaign?  Content rules as a way to interact with leads so audit your existing content and determine what is relevant or can be repurposed.  White papers, case studies, testimonials, webinars and videos – you probably have more than you think!
4.       What do you want to accomplish?  Are you qualifying leads to hand off to sales or are you driving them to an online demo?  It makes sense to identify your end-goal at the beginning of the campaign because you can review every step to see if it logically supports the overall objective.

Armed with the answers to the above questions, the next step is to actually hit the whiteboard, Visio or old-fashioned pen and paper to map out the decision-tree and possible outcomes.  The few minutes that spent answering these four questions will have a huge pay-off as you become familiar with developing and structuring your marketing automation campaigns.  Be prepared for delicious results!

In this post, we’re continuing to share tips and tricks for ways to use marketing automation to augment the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, beyond email. Read more

Email marketing is an extremely cost effective and efficient way to promote your business. Unfortunately, many small businesses are reluctant to engage in email marketing for fear of legal implications surrounding the practice. This post is intended to clearly spell out what elements should be included in your email marketing campaigns (and what should not). Read more