http://ittybitty.bz/CRMSWDec
Email marketing has certainly matured as a b2b communication and lead generation tool over the past several years. Historically, email was that tool that allowed marketers to mass message lists and segments, often pulled from our CRM. While useful in many respects, email blasting or bulk email delivery has failed as a true lead generation medium in a b2b environment. To be clear, by failed, I mean that email blasting, in and of itself does not lead to a high number of lead conversions. By conversions I mean leads who click through the email and ultimately convert to a sales opportunity in CRM.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Monday, October 11, 2010
I learned everything about b2b marketing from infomercials!
I learned everything I need to know about b2b marketing from watching Infomercial!
OK, so I'm spinning a bit of a lie. I didn't learn lead scoring or progressive profiling or email design from infomercials, but in the spirit of catchy subjects, that seemed to work well. The point is, however, that we can learn a lot of valuable and practical strategy for developing b2b marketing campaigns by paying close attention to the structure, language and flow of an infomercial, particularly the short ones (7-15 minutes). Forget the late night 30-minute sessions. I'm talking Sham-Wow, OxiClean and Ginsu Knives. These 10-15 minute vignettes are constructed with a great deal of planning, purpose and the single minded goal of getting the sales.
Our b2b marketing campaigns can learn a lot from the late great Billy Mays. One of the consistencies you will find in any infomercial is that they are crafted very much the same way as a typical b2b pitch is crafted. Whether the pitchmen are selling cleaners, onion choppers or the next great cell phone holder, they are adhere to the a strict format in selling their products
Enter the OnionChopper2000. It is the solution to the pain and situation created by the lack of adequate onion chopping tools. The infomercial dazzles the viewer with the numerous ways one may chop an onion (or pretty much anything in your fridge). The features/benefits of the OC2000 are clearly stated and the problems each feature solves are directly related to the various pain points established in the situation portion of the infomercial.
Now, as a direct marketer for many years, I watch these shows with professional curiosity. I also respect the producers for creating a natural pain/solution chain in 20 minutes. This is what every good b2b salesperson should aspire towards. Beyond being a good lesson for a b2b salesperson, these vignettes also provide a blueprint for how b2b marketers should approach our campaigns.
Situation
Pain
Solution
In breaking down these 3 areas, we can relate how each can and should apply to creating good campaigns that illicit high response and lead conversion for our companies.
Situation: What is the situation our clients face that causes business (financial) pain? Let's take the healthcare space an example. If you sell to hospitals, you must understand that the "Situation" (not to be confused with the endearing Jersey Shore character) hospitals face is about money and the ever-changing regulations to reimbursement from both government and insurers. This "Situation" causes pain for your prospective buyers. This pain creates need. The need is for solutions that maximize their reimbursement without sacrificing patient care.
In creating campaigns for this market, you have to build your campaign around this model. Campaigns must paint the picture of the problem and quickly tie the solution to the pain you provide, caused by the situation. Simple examples are a white paper outlining best practices for managing claim denials from Medicare. The situation outlined in the campaign is "Reimbursement Changes Increase Denials". The solution is providing a software application that manages claims more effectively by incorporating new regulations.
Too often, marketers fall into a trap that a lot of junior b2b sales persons fall into. Show up and throw up is a phenomena wherein a salesperson comes to a meeting, throws up a powerpoint and blindly presents all of the great things that their solution can do for the prospect....without asking questions and identifying the situation/pain.
When designing an email campaign or a landing page, for example, how many times have you over-designed the email or the landing page to include a not-so-small subset of everything on your website? I have seen this time and again in PPC landing pages in particular. The marketer behaves like a dog chasing a car....when you catch it, you're so excited you don't know what to do with it! The same holds true for a landing page or email....you design because you're excited someone has actually opened it or clicked on it...and you try to cram tons of extraneous information into it. Your campaign will suffer because it is not focused on the task at hand.
It is much more productive to create several micro-campaigns than one big all encompassing one. Reason being is the conversion rates on the emails, landing pages, direct mail will be much higher when the message is focused on the 3 elements mentioned above.
So, before you hit send on that next campaign.....watch and infomercial first.....and take heed to just how focused the messaging is on those somewhat corny....yet extremely effective advertising vignettes! And don't laugh...they're on TV because they MAKE MONEY.
OK, so I'm spinning a bit of a lie. I didn't learn lead scoring or progressive profiling or email design from infomercials, but in the spirit of catchy subjects, that seemed to work well. The point is, however, that we can learn a lot of valuable and practical strategy for developing b2b marketing campaigns by paying close attention to the structure, language and flow of an infomercial, particularly the short ones (7-15 minutes). Forget the late night 30-minute sessions. I'm talking Sham-Wow, OxiClean and Ginsu Knives. These 10-15 minute vignettes are constructed with a great deal of planning, purpose and the single minded goal of getting the sales.
Our b2b marketing campaigns can learn a lot from the late great Billy Mays. One of the consistencies you will find in any infomercial is that they are crafted very much the same way as a typical b2b pitch is crafted. Whether the pitchmen are selling cleaners, onion choppers or the next great cell phone holder, they are adhere to the a strict format in selling their products
- Situation
- Pain
- Solution
Enter the OnionChopper2000. It is the solution to the pain and situation created by the lack of adequate onion chopping tools. The infomercial dazzles the viewer with the numerous ways one may chop an onion (or pretty much anything in your fridge). The features/benefits of the OC2000 are clearly stated and the problems each feature solves are directly related to the various pain points established in the situation portion of the infomercial.
Now, as a direct marketer for many years, I watch these shows with professional curiosity. I also respect the producers for creating a natural pain/solution chain in 20 minutes. This is what every good b2b salesperson should aspire towards. Beyond being a good lesson for a b2b salesperson, these vignettes also provide a blueprint for how b2b marketers should approach our campaigns.
Situation
Pain
Solution
In breaking down these 3 areas, we can relate how each can and should apply to creating good campaigns that illicit high response and lead conversion for our companies.
Situation: What is the situation our clients face that causes business (financial) pain? Let's take the healthcare space an example. If you sell to hospitals, you must understand that the "Situation" (not to be confused with the endearing Jersey Shore character) hospitals face is about money and the ever-changing regulations to reimbursement from both government and insurers. This "Situation" causes pain for your prospective buyers. This pain creates need. The need is for solutions that maximize their reimbursement without sacrificing patient care.
In creating campaigns for this market, you have to build your campaign around this model. Campaigns must paint the picture of the problem and quickly tie the solution to the pain you provide, caused by the situation. Simple examples are a white paper outlining best practices for managing claim denials from Medicare. The situation outlined in the campaign is "Reimbursement Changes Increase Denials". The solution is providing a software application that manages claims more effectively by incorporating new regulations.
Too often, marketers fall into a trap that a lot of junior b2b sales persons fall into. Show up and throw up is a phenomena wherein a salesperson comes to a meeting, throws up a powerpoint and blindly presents all of the great things that their solution can do for the prospect....without asking questions and identifying the situation/pain.
When designing an email campaign or a landing page, for example, how many times have you over-designed the email or the landing page to include a not-so-small subset of everything on your website? I have seen this time and again in PPC landing pages in particular. The marketer behaves like a dog chasing a car....when you catch it, you're so excited you don't know what to do with it! The same holds true for a landing page or email....you design because you're excited someone has actually opened it or clicked on it...and you try to cram tons of extraneous information into it. Your campaign will suffer because it is not focused on the task at hand.
It is much more productive to create several micro-campaigns than one big all encompassing one. Reason being is the conversion rates on the emails, landing pages, direct mail will be much higher when the message is focused on the 3 elements mentioned above.
So, before you hit send on that next campaign.....watch and infomercial first.....and take heed to just how focused the messaging is on those somewhat corny....yet extremely effective advertising vignettes! And don't laugh...they're on TV because they MAKE MONEY.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Email marketing's evolution challenges some popular notions about new marketing channels
So email marketing is a dying channel? Social media has taken over and now rules the roost? Not so fast.
In the trenches, where actual marketing and lead gen occurs, outside of the scope of industry articles and blogs that state otherwise, email is growing in use at an exponential rate among b2b marketers.
While the days of generalist mass email blasts are going the way of the dinosaur, the use of email as a nurture marketing and content delivery vehicle are rapidly expanding. We may not see a similar volume of email, but the usage by savvy marketers is certainly growing fast. This post explores the new ways smart b2b marketers are using email to increase their lead conversion and improve their overall marketing presence.
Get personal - the b2b marketer should rethink email marketing firstly from the perspective of what it is attempting to communicate to the potential buyer. Personalization in email is not a new concept. Marketers have been applying personalization to email for some time. So what do I mean when I say "get personal"? I mean get personal in the the content you deliver and how you deliver it with email. Go beyond dropping the person's name/company in the email and start to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time. That is the essence of getting personal in email marketing. In order to execute a more personalized chain of communications, you need data. What data you needs depends on how automated you want to go or how deep your content catalog is. A simple example is you have solutions that support 3 vertical market segments. A lead comes to your website and downloads a white paper relevant to Vertical segment 1. You will then execute a series of follow up emails (usually automatically based on triggers) that provide supporting and relevant content.
A typical email trigger series may look like this:
Action - Download vertical white paper 1
Save Time and Money with Triggers
Trigger-based emails are becoming extremely popular amongst savvy marketers. The reason is simple, Triggers never sleep. While you're on vacation, in a meeting, at a trade show, home sick....whatever, you're triggers are sitting there, faithfully doing what was once a rote task that you had to be there for. Well, I'm here to tell you that while they may sound simple, trigger-based emails are not as easy as an auto-responder. Like any good campaign, they should have expected outcomes, planning and follow up actions. Trigger-based emails, like the ones found in SalesFUSION, are often tied to the website. You're website is presenting content out to the masses. Someone comes in and accesses an asset. The trigger-based email fulfills the asset automatically, then waits a day, thanks them, waits a few more days, thanks them again.
The importance of triggers cannot be understated. They allow the marketer to always be on. They also enable you to make actionable the content on your website. You can also ensure that all leads that hit your website are treated equally, at least initially. This has a real and measurable impact in your lead conversion rates.
Drip Campaigns
Unlike trigger campaigns, drip-based marketing campaigns are used more as a series of communications that are related to each other. The primary difference between drip-based email and trigger-based email is who receives it and when. In drip campaigns, you are communicating initially with a group, segment or list on a specific calendar date and time. Most typically, the drip campaigns have specific follow up emails that are sent to groups who have behaved or interacted with the previous email in a certain way. This string of communications can be relatively short (say 30-days) or long (90-days). The benefit of drip campaigns is that they allow for continuous branding and messaging of relevant content to a group of people over time.
Email marketing has not succumbed to social media, or any other channel for that matter. It is rapidly growing in usage amongst b2b marketers. Email is being used more efficiently and effectively and has grown up in its overall efficacy as a marketing channel in and of itself.
In the trenches, where actual marketing and lead gen occurs, outside of the scope of industry articles and blogs that state otherwise, email is growing in use at an exponential rate among b2b marketers.
While the days of generalist mass email blasts are going the way of the dinosaur, the use of email as a nurture marketing and content delivery vehicle are rapidly expanding. We may not see a similar volume of email, but the usage by savvy marketers is certainly growing fast. This post explores the new ways smart b2b marketers are using email to increase their lead conversion and improve their overall marketing presence.
Get personal - the b2b marketer should rethink email marketing firstly from the perspective of what it is attempting to communicate to the potential buyer. Personalization in email is not a new concept. Marketers have been applying personalization to email for some time. So what do I mean when I say "get personal"? I mean get personal in the the content you deliver and how you deliver it with email. Go beyond dropping the person's name/company in the email and start to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time. That is the essence of getting personal in email marketing. In order to execute a more personalized chain of communications, you need data. What data you needs depends on how automated you want to go or how deep your content catalog is. A simple example is you have solutions that support 3 vertical market segments. A lead comes to your website and downloads a white paper relevant to Vertical segment 1. You will then execute a series of follow up emails (usually automatically based on triggers) that provide supporting and relevant content.
A typical email trigger series may look like this:
Action - Download vertical white paper 1
- Trigger 1 - "Thank you for accessing white paper - cross promote white paper 2"
- Trigger 2 - "Thanks for accessing white paper - here is a link for product data sheet for vertical 1
- Trigger 3 - "Promote webinar/event relevant to vertical 1
Save Time and Money with Triggers
Trigger-based emails are becoming extremely popular amongst savvy marketers. The reason is simple, Triggers never sleep. While you're on vacation, in a meeting, at a trade show, home sick....whatever, you're triggers are sitting there, faithfully doing what was once a rote task that you had to be there for. Well, I'm here to tell you that while they may sound simple, trigger-based emails are not as easy as an auto-responder. Like any good campaign, they should have expected outcomes, planning and follow up actions. Trigger-based emails, like the ones found in SalesFUSION, are often tied to the website. You're website is presenting content out to the masses. Someone comes in and accesses an asset. The trigger-based email fulfills the asset automatically, then waits a day, thanks them, waits a few more days, thanks them again.
The importance of triggers cannot be understated. They allow the marketer to always be on. They also enable you to make actionable the content on your website. You can also ensure that all leads that hit your website are treated equally, at least initially. This has a real and measurable impact in your lead conversion rates.
Drip Campaigns
Unlike trigger campaigns, drip-based marketing campaigns are used more as a series of communications that are related to each other. The primary difference between drip-based email and trigger-based email is who receives it and when. In drip campaigns, you are communicating initially with a group, segment or list on a specific calendar date and time. Most typically, the drip campaigns have specific follow up emails that are sent to groups who have behaved or interacted with the previous email in a certain way. This string of communications can be relatively short (say 30-days) or long (90-days). The benefit of drip campaigns is that they allow for continuous branding and messaging of relevant content to a group of people over time.
Email marketing has not succumbed to social media, or any other channel for that matter. It is rapidly growing in usage amongst b2b marketers. Email is being used more efficiently and effectively and has grown up in its overall efficacy as a marketing channel in and of itself.
Friday, July 23, 2010
Trash to treasure? How to use your existing marketing & sales collateral to drive cheap lead generation.
In the growing spirit of austerity, i thought I would re-start SalesFUSION's blog with a new post that is a follow up to a recent webinar created and presented by SalesFUSION and leading B2B Agency, Renaissance Direct. The theme of the webinar was "re-purposing your existing marketing collateral to generate new leads". Without beating the hackneyed drum of "how to generate leads in down economy", this post will explore practical advice and usable tactics for making the most out of what you already have.
The realities of the current marketing environment dictate that we take a more rigorous approach to tracking and managing the opportunity value generated from the campaigns and corresponding spend. We as professional b2b marketers are being asked to generate the same or more leads with less budget, personnel and resources. We can however, leverage new tactics for old materials. Chances are your company has a veritable treasure trove of collateral that has been collecting dust or sitting static on your website. Or worse yet, your marketing collateral and sales collateral sits idly on a C: drive somewhere and is only accessed by sales reps engaged in a sales cycle.
While marketers grasp with these challenges and attempt to achieve their goals with less, they often overlook the obvious. Let's start with the website. Many innovative companies now employ an online resource center as a standard page in the corporate website. The resource center is meant to be a public facing document repository that is updated frequently with new content and promoted to the masses. A typical online resource center will contain categorized links to White Papers, product data sheets, case studies, press, videos (testimonials is the hot one), screenshots (for software companies) and sales presentations. Whats important to note is that the majority of what would make for a good resource center for most companies is material that already exists. Once you buy in to the notion of creating an online repository of materials, a few key elements must be put into place. Firstly, you have to make the decision to put some or all of the materials behind lead capture pages. The lead capture page should be treated like a landing page for pay per click. It should be user friendly and capture enough information to start a digital conversation with the lead. Solutions like SalesFUSION's eDialogs provide a variety lead capture page types and configurations to accommodate all websites.
Once you have the content and mechanism for capturing those who access the content in place, it's now time to promote the materials on the resource center. There are several no-brainers when it comes to this. If you have an existing house-file of leads/contacts, you can start with regular email blasts out to these lists. It's important to provide regular updates to the resource center as it gives you a reason to send email updates out at some interval. When sending out your emails for the resource center, don't get fancy. Keep the emails simple and to the point. Provide only one external link in the email; for the resource center.
Beyond email, we'll explore some other ways to promote this great new sales and lead generation tool on the cheap. Social media outlets provide the next logical medium to promote our materials. Any social media outlet with categorized groups is prime real estate for publishing good content. LinkedIn is a perfect example and lends itself well to these types of posts. Proceed cautiously however because how you post is as important as what you post. Many social media group-type sites frown on over sales messages. When posting your web content in social media sites, be sure to post educational content first and inform the reader in the post that the materials require a form to fill out to access the materials. This up front notice actually increases the form completion rates.
Other ways to leverage social media are allowing sales team members and other members of the company to post content in their respective twitter and facebook accounts. There are a couple of caveats to consider before proceeding. Firstly, HR should establish a policy for posting corporate content in social sites. Personal Facebook pages and twitter pages may contain material that is inappropriate for business use. It must me made very clear that content cannot be posted alongside personal photos that may be too risque for the legal team. Another consideration is how to track inbound clicks from social sites. SalesFUSION just released a series of add-on social media posting tools for its dialog products. These tools convert the landing page or dialog URL's so that they are track able to the person posting and fit within sites that have character restrictions such as Twitter.
An extension of social media, business social publishing sites have emerged as very good outlets for a variety of materials from a variety of industries. Customer Think is a great example of these emerging user-driven publishing sites. Members can join these sites for free, create an online profile and then post educational content and materials. This is a wonderful outlet for your existing white papers, press releases and more. Depending on the specific rules of any site, you can even post product-centric information. Another social publishing site that has emerged is FOCUS. Focus is tied to a popular LinkedIn group and like Customer Think, allows its members to drive the content. What's interesting about Focus is that it rewards its regular posting members with different Status'. This encourages users to strive for the elevated status by posting good content on a regular basis, thus enhancing the information quality on the site.
Don't forget to dust off those power point presentations! Other outlets, which are more product centric but can be linked into social media profiles are SlideShare and Box.net. These are more file-sharing in nature but allow users to post content that eventually becomes indexed by Google. Grab all of those old power points that have been created. Turn them into presentation for Slideshare and box.net in your LinkedIn profile. Encourage your reps and other employees to do the same.
What's important about the social outlets is that you can direct social traffic back to your online resource center. You can also spread your name through the web via social business publishing sites...both of which carry no cost. In the end the more you post into the social and business sites, with PDF's that havce active links back you your site, the better your SEO will ultimately perform.
I summary, it's important that marketers look to their internal collateral as a valid means of increasing your exposure through multiple channels. You don't expensive agencies or consultants to create campaigns around this content. Just get it out there. Make sure it has LOTS of links back in to your site and work towards creating a regularly-updated online resource center and you will dramatically improve your industry footprint.
In SalesFUSION we use a suite of tools known as eDialogs. These are sort of like landing pages, sort of like social publishing tools, and many things in between. Ultimately the goal of pushing content through eDialogs is to make the inbound traffic track-able. All marketers need to strive towards tracking inbound leads right through to the CRM. SalesFUSION, as a marketing automation platform, is built specifically with this process in mind.
The realities of the current marketing environment dictate that we take a more rigorous approach to tracking and managing the opportunity value generated from the campaigns and corresponding spend. We as professional b2b marketers are being asked to generate the same or more leads with less budget, personnel and resources. We can however, leverage new tactics for old materials. Chances are your company has a veritable treasure trove of collateral that has been collecting dust or sitting static on your website. Or worse yet, your marketing collateral and sales collateral sits idly on a C: drive somewhere and is only accessed by sales reps engaged in a sales cycle.
While marketers grasp with these challenges and attempt to achieve their goals with less, they often overlook the obvious. Let's start with the website. Many innovative companies now employ an online resource center as a standard page in the corporate website. The resource center is meant to be a public facing document repository that is updated frequently with new content and promoted to the masses. A typical online resource center will contain categorized links to White Papers, product data sheets, case studies, press, videos (testimonials is the hot one), screenshots (for software companies) and sales presentations. Whats important to note is that the majority of what would make for a good resource center for most companies is material that already exists. Once you buy in to the notion of creating an online repository of materials, a few key elements must be put into place. Firstly, you have to make the decision to put some or all of the materials behind lead capture pages. The lead capture page should be treated like a landing page for pay per click. It should be user friendly and capture enough information to start a digital conversation with the lead. Solutions like SalesFUSION's eDialogs provide a variety lead capture page types and configurations to accommodate all websites.
Once you have the content and mechanism for capturing those who access the content in place, it's now time to promote the materials on the resource center. There are several no-brainers when it comes to this. If you have an existing house-file of leads/contacts, you can start with regular email blasts out to these lists. It's important to provide regular updates to the resource center as it gives you a reason to send email updates out at some interval. When sending out your emails for the resource center, don't get fancy. Keep the emails simple and to the point. Provide only one external link in the email; for the resource center.
Beyond email, we'll explore some other ways to promote this great new sales and lead generation tool on the cheap. Social media outlets provide the next logical medium to promote our materials. Any social media outlet with categorized groups is prime real estate for publishing good content. LinkedIn is a perfect example and lends itself well to these types of posts. Proceed cautiously however because how you post is as important as what you post. Many social media group-type sites frown on over sales messages. When posting your web content in social media sites, be sure to post educational content first and inform the reader in the post that the materials require a form to fill out to access the materials. This up front notice actually increases the form completion rates.
Other ways to leverage social media are allowing sales team members and other members of the company to post content in their respective twitter and facebook accounts. There are a couple of caveats to consider before proceeding. Firstly, HR should establish a policy for posting corporate content in social sites. Personal Facebook pages and twitter pages may contain material that is inappropriate for business use. It must me made very clear that content cannot be posted alongside personal photos that may be too risque for the legal team. Another consideration is how to track inbound clicks from social sites. SalesFUSION just released a series of add-on social media posting tools for its dialog products. These tools convert the landing page or dialog URL's so that they are track able to the person posting and fit within sites that have character restrictions such as Twitter.
An extension of social media, business social publishing sites have emerged as very good outlets for a variety of materials from a variety of industries. Customer Think is a great example of these emerging user-driven publishing sites. Members can join these sites for free, create an online profile and then post educational content and materials. This is a wonderful outlet for your existing white papers, press releases and more. Depending on the specific rules of any site, you can even post product-centric information. Another social publishing site that has emerged is FOCUS. Focus is tied to a popular LinkedIn group and like Customer Think, allows its members to drive the content. What's interesting about Focus is that it rewards its regular posting members with different Status'. This encourages users to strive for the elevated status by posting good content on a regular basis, thus enhancing the information quality on the site.
Don't forget to dust off those power point presentations! Other outlets, which are more product centric but can be linked into social media profiles are SlideShare and Box.net. These are more file-sharing in nature but allow users to post content that eventually becomes indexed by Google. Grab all of those old power points that have been created. Turn them into presentation for Slideshare and box.net in your LinkedIn profile. Encourage your reps and other employees to do the same.
What's important about the social outlets is that you can direct social traffic back to your online resource center. You can also spread your name through the web via social business publishing sites...both of which carry no cost. In the end the more you post into the social and business sites, with PDF's that havce active links back you your site, the better your SEO will ultimately perform.
I summary, it's important that marketers look to their internal collateral as a valid means of increasing your exposure through multiple channels. You don't expensive agencies or consultants to create campaigns around this content. Just get it out there. Make sure it has LOTS of links back in to your site and work towards creating a regularly-updated online resource center and you will dramatically improve your industry footprint.
In SalesFUSION we use a suite of tools known as eDialogs. These are sort of like landing pages, sort of like social publishing tools, and many things in between. Ultimately the goal of pushing content through eDialogs is to make the inbound traffic track-able. All marketers need to strive towards tracking inbound leads right through to the CRM. SalesFUSION, as a marketing automation platform, is built specifically with this process in mind.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Best practices for b2b nurture marketing
Understanding nurture marketing
Nurture marketing is a term that has gained visibility and interest in the B2B marketing space over the last several years. Initially, the concept grew out of the capabilities of CRM systems to track and manage sales interactions with early stage prospects over time. In the last 3 years, technology has flooded the market to help B2B marketers identity, generate and manage leads in the pre-qualification stage. Essentially, the strategic shift in B2B sales has been that marketing owns the top of the funnel while sales owns the middle to bottom of the funnel. In some cases inside sales/telemarketing has direct line reporting into marketing more so than sales. As this shift has taken root, marketing has increasingly expanded its role and capabilities around lead and demand generation. As eMarketing applications have flooded the B2B marketing community, there have been great strides in technology-enabled marketing to help professionals increase their capabilities relative to demand and lead generation.
With the new technology (email, SEO/SEM, social….etc) comes new challenges. In the age of internet-driven lead generation, the sheer volume of leads has increased dramatically, often times overwhelming marketing and inside sales departments. The issue a marketing department may have faced in years past was around generating enough leads to build the funnel on a quarter by quarter basis. Today, the challenge becomes filtering through the “noise” of hundreds of leads per month to ensure the best leads are being “touched” and the least qualified leads are being developed for the longer term.
Having a well balanced sales funnel with early-stage and late-stage leads is critical for a company to perform well against earnings targets over the long haul. What you do today as a B2B marketer may very well make the difference between success and failure 9 months from now. Your successful 4th quarter begins in the first or second quarter.
For the B2B marketer, the technology is now in place to manage the process of nurture marketing and ensure that no lead gets left behind. However, as with all technology adoption curves, there is an initial dearth of functionality but an overall lack of education and understanding about how best to leverage new technology in day-to-day circumstances. Nurture marketing is a perfect example of this. The term itself can be somewhat misleading so we'll first spend some time defining what nurture marketing is, what technology makes up "nurture marketing" and then we'll provide some real world examples of how B2B marketers can leverage this technology to improve their coverage and reach.
What is nurture marketing?
Nurture marketing can be defined as a process that automates a flow of communication with a prospective customer. The seller pre-defines a path of automated communications based on certain criteria. This criteria typically falls into 2 categories; Demographic and Behavioral. For demographic, you may have a certain email campaign for one vertical and another set of content for a different vertical. Behavioral criteria are dependent upon a prospect’s interactions with the seller. These interactions may be based on website behavior (visits to website, pages, downloads of documents on the seller website...etc) or campaign response behavior (email responses, open email responses).
Nurture marketing is basically the process of presenting content to a lead based on their current-state interest level and leading the prospect to continue interacting with you over a period of time until they either qualify in or qualify out.
Types of Nurture Marketing Campaigns
In B2B, nurture marketing campaigns can be a combination of many things over a relatively long period of time. Email campaigns, telesales, direct mail, can all play a role on nurturing a lead from identification to qualification. Today however, nurture marketing is most closely associated with email marketing. And within the context of email marketing, there are 2 distinct types of emails that are used by marketers for the purpose of lead nurturing.
Trigger Email
As the name suggests, trigger emails are emails that are executed when a condition is “triggered” or met. Simple examples of trigger emails are a “confirmation email” that is sent to a lead upon completing a form on the website. The email has no date associated with it, rather it queries the database and when the condition is met, the email is executed. Trigger emails use one or more dynamic segments to execute. A dynamic segment is nothing more than a pre-defined query of the marketing database who’s membership is made up of people who do certain things.
Sample Dynamic Segments
Web Activity – Individuals who have an active session on the website within the last 24-hours.
Form – completion of a form
Campaign – Opened and clicked through a certain email
Trigger emails are a simple yet invaluable way to continually “touch” a lead and ensure interactions are followed up on. Trigger emails can also be the launch point for more lengthy drip campaigns. If a web activity triggers an email and that email is then opened and clicked through, then that activity in and of itself may trigger a new set or string of email communications.
Drip Emails
These are similar in nature to a trigger email with one fundamental difference – a Drip email is a scheduled email. It will be set to go out at a certain time/date. It may still include the use of dynamic or conditional segments but again, they will go out at a scheduled time.
A good example of a drip email is a reminder email for a webinar campaign. The email may be set to go out on Tuesday at 10AM – but it will only go out to those individuals who have registered or completed the form for the webinar.
Drip emails are the core of Nurture marketing. You can set up a string of pre-determined emails in multiple branches in advance and let the campaign run in the background. Most typically, drip campaigns will last 30-90 days and no more.
Segmentation
While drip and trigger emails are the primary “executable” for nurture campaigns, they are driven by 2 types of segmentation. Segmentation can be broadly defined as a group of individuals who meet a certain criteria of a query. You cannot have nurture marketing without a good segmentation tool. While segmentation is nothing more than a query of the database, with respect to marketing automation technology, segmentation should be user friendly and allow users to “ask questions” of the database without the need for executing SQL.
Profile Segments – these are driven off of profile data in the lead record in either the marketing database or CRM database or both. The most common profile segments are related to titles, geography and company size/type.
Behavioral segments – these are conditional segments and group individuals based on their activity or behavior relative to interactions they have with you. A simple behavioral example, as mentioned before, may be – “everyone who has visited a certain web page in the last 24 hours.
Behavioral Data as a trigger for Nurture Marketing
What interactions does a prospective buyer engage in with the typical B2B firm today that may indicate potential interest in purchasing your products or services?
· Web Interactions – How did the prospect find your website? Search, PPC, Campaign Response? In regards to search, it is important to understand how and why the prospect found you. Identifying the keywords used or referring website may help and standard web analytics will identify this. Keywords gives insight into what the prospect was “thinking” or interested in when they came to your website.
· Email Response Activity – Has the prospect opened, clicked through or forwarded email communications from marketing?
· Campaign responses – Is the lead receptive to your campaigns? Are they responding to single or multiple campaigns?
Sample Nurture Marketing Campaigns
A good way to understand how nurture marketing works is to explore examples of campaigns. In the example below, a webinar campaign is described. Webinars are online events that allow vendors to promote a solution or industry expertise to a large group of passive attendees.
Campaign Type - Webinar
· An initial email invitation is sent to a list and/or other promotional vehicles (banner ad, email sponsorship....etc) are implemented. The email invitation contains a link to a registration page. The registration page captures the name, company, email and any other information the webinar sponsor is trying to capture from the attendees.
· For Registrants, a “Thank-You” or “Confirmation” email is Triggered immediately following completion of the registration. This Trigger email will contain the webinar detail and may cross-promote additional content.
· 2-3 days after the initial webinar email invitation goes out, a drip email is sent to the original list but segmented based on individuals who did not open the original email - a subject line swap email is implemented. In this case, the original email subject line is changed to a new subject and automatically re-sent to all those in the original list who did not open the first email. This is a drip email because it has a launch date associated with it.
· 2-3 days later, a first reminder drip email is sent for all registered leads for the webinar.
· The day of the webinar - a second drip reminder email is sent 1 hour before the start of the event.
· Post-webinar - 2 primary branched follow up campaigns are then executed following the webinar.
Branch 1 - Attendee email follow up campaign - For attendees, a follow up email is immediately triggered thanking the attendees for attending. The email may include a redirect to a companion white paper, a pdf copy of the presentation or to the website for additional information.
Potential follow up activities for branch 1
· Attendee responds to email - triggers call from sales (CRM integration)
· Attendee does not respond to email - put into 7-day drip email
· Attendee responds to email - triggers invitation to next webinar
Branch 2 - Non-Attendees - those who registered but did not attend webinar - for this branch you may go in several directions. The key is to stay engaged with this group as they were interested enough to register but likely had something come up that prevented them from coming.
Potential follow up activities for branch 2
· Send "sorry you couldn't attend" email immediately following the event - redirect to a re-broadcast registration (if applicable)
· Send email with link to copy (pdf) of the presentation
· Email inviting to a similar webinar
· Email inviting non-attendees to download a copy of a white paper
As you can see from this very simple example, companies can get very creative and detailed in trigger/drip follow up emails. A simple 2-branch event may contain up to 15-20 different emails with discrete content. Each of those emails may contain responder/non-responder branching as well. The management of nurture campaigns is not feasible without automation. There are simply too many variables to track and manage. The key to making nurture campaigns work is having the right technology available to helping a marketer schedule, plan and implement a complex multi-contact campaign.
Lead Scoring and Sales Integration
Lead scoring is a technology that ranks and sorts leads based on the aggregate value of their integrations and quality of their demographic profile, relative to your company’s ideal prospect. Lead scoring is a critical component to a nurture marketing and absolutely necessary when integrating marketing into the CRM/Sales process. Lead scoring will typically look at 4 buckets of data. Each is described below.
Profile Data – this is the basic validation of a lead.
· Company information – size, geography, vertical
· Title – validation of title – is this the type of person we sell to?
· Email validation – non-free mail
Web Behavior – may score on a number of elements including
· Recency and frequency of web visits
· Website downloads
· Return visits
Survey Data – looks at how individuals respond to questions in surveys forms
Campaign data – scores leads based on responses to single or multiple campaigns
Scoring will assign a relative point value to each element in the data buckets mentioned above. The aggregate score will help marketing and sales determine the “value” of the lead or “interest level”. Further marketing may take place for low-value/interest leads while immediate action and integration/alerting to sales may occur with high value leads.
When integrating with sales, it is important that there is good integration between the marketing database and the CRM database. Basic information should be passed from marketing such as the demographics and lead score, the campaign activity and any other relevant information that sales can use in their first call. Sales should then be able to provide a feedback loop to marketing. By changing the lead status, the lead should either be validated or disqualified in the CRM system and this information should make its way back to marketing for validation of scoring rules.
Again – a key success factor is having the right database and technology to make all of this work in harmony.
SalesFUSION 360 provides simple yet powerful technology that enables marketers to engage in true nurture marketing activities in a highly automated fashion. The solution is comprised of eMarketing suite. In the suite, tools are available that allow users to set up and manage a variety of campaigns including drip emails, trigger emails, automated rules-based emails, follow up emails and logic-based landing pages.
Nurture marketing campaigns in SalesFUSION can be developed by non-technical users and executed using any number of profile and activity-based triggers. A powerful segmentation engine empowers marketers to define a path of communication that combines static and dynamic segments.
The segmentation engine is driven off of profile data and campaign data. Campaign-based segments allow marketers to take action on the response or non-response to campaigns or steps in campaigns. This functionality, in combination with lead scoring and the drip, trigger and follow up email capabilities is what makes SalesFUSION’s solution powerful yet simple.
Scoring-based triggers are an invaluable asset to the marketer, particularly marketing departments with limited budgets and resources. Leads may be classified into “interest groups”. Once a lead is assigned to an interest group a trigger campaign may be executed against that lead. The trigger campaign will then begin a series of communications based on action/reaction to the outbound emails. The marketer need not worry about whether leads are being “touched” or followed up on. The system is continually monitoring the lead activity/scores and deciding who gets what. This is the essence of ‘set it and forget it’ technology.
Lead Scoring by SalesFUSION is a simple solution to a complex problem. It allows the user to work within a simple user interface to define the interest level of a lead based on the most common elements of marketing activity: Campaign Response, Profile Data, Survey Data and Web Behavior. Because SalesFUSION includes a full suite of web analytics, it is easy to incorporate web behavior into lead scoring, which is one of the key indicators of interest level.
While some solutions focus on reporting on “who’s on my website”, SalesFUSION allows you to take action against this valuable information.
Powerful analytics and alerting keep the marketing and sales teams updated on all activity and sales is directly tied into the lead nurturing process with email alerts. Lead routing and assignment technology ensures that each rep is notified when a high-value lead has been “active”, either in response to a campaign or through an organic visit to the website. These alerts may trigger rules in your CRM system that prompt a direct phone call by sales. It has been proven that timing is a critical component in having a successful first phone call with a lead.
About SalesFUSION
SalesFUSION 360 is a truly integrated eMarketing solution that combines ALL aspects of the eMarketing mix into one easy to use application. SalesFUSION 360 enables companies to set up and manage the exact campaigns (drip, trigger, nurture) described in this paper.
SalesFUSION 360 is an on demand enterprise lead management company committed to changing the way the world creates and manages leads.
SalesFUSION 360 provides software that accelerates revenue by connecting sales and marketing with prospects at the moment they are ready to buy. This is made possible through the SalesFusion 360™ suite, which complements Sales Force Automation applications by adding an on-demand enterprise lead management service. SalesFUSION 360 increases lead quantity, lead quality and revenue conversion rates by integrating and automating the lead management process.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Understanding nurture marketing
Nurture marketing is a term that has gained public visibility over the last several years. As eMarketing applications have flooded the b2b marketing community, there have been great strides in technology-enabled marketing to help professionals increase their capabilities relative to demand and lead generation.
As with all technology adoption curves, there is an initial dearth of functionality but an overall lack of education and understanding at how best to leverage new technology in day-to-day circumstances. Nurture marketing is a perfect example of this. The term itself can be somewhat misleading so we'll first spend some time defining what nurture marketing is, what technology makes up "nurture marketing" and then we'll provide some real world examples of how b2b marketers can leverage this technology to improve their coverage and reach.
As with all technology adoption curves, there is an initial dearth of functionality but an overall lack of education and understanding at how best to leverage new technology in day-to-day circumstances. Nurture marketing is a perfect example of this. The term itself can be somewhat misleading so we'll first spend some time defining what nurture marketing is, what technology makes up "nurture marketing" and then we'll provide some real world examples of how b2b marketers can leverage this technology to improve their coverage and reach.
What is nurture marketing?
Nurture marketing can be defined as a process that automates a flow of communication with a prospective customer. The seller pre-defines a path of automated communications based on certain criteria. This criteria typically falls into 2 categories; Demographic and Behavioral. For demographic, you may have a certain email campaign for one vertical and another set of content for a different vertical. Behavioral criteria are typically dependent upon a prospects interactions with the seller. These interactions may be based on website behavior (visits to website, pages, downloads of documents on the seller website...etc) or campaign response behavior (email responses, open email responses).
Nurture marketing can be defined as a process that automates a flow of communication with a prospective customer. The seller pre-defines a path of automated communications based on certain criteria. This criteria typically falls into 2 categories; Demographic and Behavioral. For demographic, you may have a certain email campaign for one vertical and another set of content for a different vertical. Behavioral criteria are typically dependent upon a prospects interactions with the seller. These interactions may be based on website behavior (visits to website, pages, downloads of documents on the seller website...etc) or campaign response behavior (email responses, open email responses).
How is nurture marketing implementing?
In the context of eMarketing, nurture marketing is typically comprised of of 2 types of email communications; Drip Email and Trigger Email. Drip emails are timed emails that go out to a pre-defined segment of contacts at a pre-defined time/date. Trigger emails are only sent when a certain condition is met such as follow up email sent based on a campaign response.
Probably the best way to describe nurture marketing is to describe a sample campaign.
Basic nurture campaign:
Campaign Type - Webinar
Campaign Type - Webinar
An initial invitation will go out or other promotional vehicles (banner ad, email sponsorship....etc are implemented. Initiations direct individuals to a registration page for signing up for the webinar.
2-3 days after the initial webinar email invitation goes out, a subject line swap email is implemented. In this case, the original email subject line is changed to a new subject and automatically re-sent to all those in the original list who did not open the email.
2-3 days later, a reminder email is triggered for all registered leads for the webinar.
The day of the webinar - a second reminder is sent about 1 hour before the start of the event.
Post-webinar - 2 primary branched followup campaigns are then executed following the webinar.
Branch 1 - Attendee email follow up campaign - For attendees a followup email is immediately triggered thanking the attendees for attending and the email may include a redirect to a companion white paper, a pdf copy of the presentation or to the website for additional information.
Potential follow up activities for branch 1
The key to making nurture campaigns work is having the right technology available to helping a marketer schedule, plan and implement a complex multi-contact campaign.
- Attendee responds to email - triggers call from sales
- Attendee does not respond to email - put into 7-day drip email
- Attendee responds to email - triggers invitation to next webinar
Branch 2 - Non-Attendees - those who registered but did not attend webinar - for this branch you may go in several directions. The key is to stay engaged with this group as they were interested enough to register but likely had something come up that prevented them from coming.
Potential follow up activities for branch 2
- Send "sorry you couldn't attend" email immediately following the event - redirect to a re-broadcast registration (if applicable)
- Send email with link to copy (pdf) of the presentation
- Email inviting to a similar webinar
- Email inviting non-attendees to download a copy of a white paper
As you can see from this very simple example, companies can get very creative and detailed in trigger/drip followup.
The key to making nurture campaigns work is having the right technology available to helping a marketer schedule, plan and implement a complex multi-contact campaign.
Solutions like SalesFUSION (www.salesfusion.com) are specifically designed to help marketers implement these types of campaigns.
To learn more - visit us at www.salesfusion.com
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Monday, March 9, 2009
Marketing automation and your budget
Marketing automation solutions have enjoyed tremendous growth in use by B2B marketers over the last 2 years and the trend is clearly in favor of eMarketing vendors. eMarketing solutions encompass a wide array of technologies including: Email Marketing, Web Analytics, Lead Management, SEM/PPC Management and Landing Pages. Much has been written about the fundamental shift away from "traditional" marketing mix items such as direct mail, trade shows and magazine advertising to more interactive, real-time emarketing venues. That blog topic has since past. eMarketing IS the marketing mix in B2B.
One of the key issues facing b2b marketers now is "how much can we spend on an eMarketing solution?" Pricing for eMarketing applications range vary widely. There are 2 classes of applications; Platform (meaning most components like email, landing pages...etc) are part of a single application or Point Solutions (email) wherein only one area is focused on in the application.
Platform application costs typically range from $1500 per month upwards of $5000 per month. Costing of SaaS marketing platforms is often times based on email volume per month/year and database size.
Marketers need to be very cautious when applications price based on database size. Depending on what is applied against the database size (customer records, emails, landing pages) the size of the DB can balloon very quickly and you're suddenly on the hook for a much larger monthly fee than you were planning on.
Additionally, be aware that email volume is not based solely on first outbound emails. Trigger, drip and nurture emails need to be factored into your total email volume per month.
If you're planning on using an email marketing solution for drip and trigger emails and you plan on marketing to a database of 10,000 names, you should estimate your volume at 10,000 x 2.5 per month. That will ensure you've budgeted for enough email to cover trigger emails.
Other things to factor in with email is metering. With some applications, you can meter bursts at a pre-determined rate. Other applications allow you to borrow from other month's allotments. There is no one perfect way to do this. You should work closely with your eMarketing vendor to ensure costs are well defined an your vendor should know what you're trying to accomplish in advance so they can recommend the best plan based on your budget.
Regarding budget, what percentage of your total budget should be allotted to eMarketing software? 10-20% is a number agreed upon by most but is by no means a hard and fast rule.
If your annual marketing budget is $100,000 then 20% works out to to about $1600 per month.
Obviously, the percentage varies based on your needs/activity but if you're total spend on technology is exceeding 25% of your total marketing budget, you are very likely paying too much for a platform based application.
One of the key issues facing b2b marketers now is "how much can we spend on an eMarketing solution?" Pricing for eMarketing applications range vary widely. There are 2 classes of applications; Platform (meaning most components like email, landing pages...etc) are part of a single application or Point Solutions (email) wherein only one area is focused on in the application.
Platform application costs typically range from $1500 per month upwards of $5000 per month. Costing of SaaS marketing platforms is often times based on email volume per month/year and database size.
Marketers need to be very cautious when applications price based on database size. Depending on what is applied against the database size (customer records, emails, landing pages) the size of the DB can balloon very quickly and you're suddenly on the hook for a much larger monthly fee than you were planning on.
Additionally, be aware that email volume is not based solely on first outbound emails. Trigger, drip and nurture emails need to be factored into your total email volume per month.
If you're planning on using an email marketing solution for drip and trigger emails and you plan on marketing to a database of 10,000 names, you should estimate your volume at 10,000 x 2.5 per month. That will ensure you've budgeted for enough email to cover trigger emails.
Other things to factor in with email is metering. With some applications, you can meter bursts at a pre-determined rate. Other applications allow you to borrow from other month's allotments. There is no one perfect way to do this. You should work closely with your eMarketing vendor to ensure costs are well defined an your vendor should know what you're trying to accomplish in advance so they can recommend the best plan based on your budget.
Regarding budget, what percentage of your total budget should be allotted to eMarketing software? 10-20% is a number agreed upon by most but is by no means a hard and fast rule.
If your annual marketing budget is $100,000 then 20% works out to to about $1600 per month.
Obviously, the percentage varies based on your needs/activity but if you're total spend on technology is exceeding 25% of your total marketing budget, you are very likely paying too much for a platform based application.
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