Digital Marketing meets ROI

Peter Hayman is Business Development Manager at List Engage, Inc.  Joining List Engage, Peter adds his 29 years of business development and software engineering skills to a company that has a decade of experience successfully helping companies in e-marketing. 

Peter sums up his enthusiasm working at List Engage as follows, “E-marketing is here and the ROI is outstanding.  Good organizations going forward must intelligently engage in it or be left behind.  List Engage’s record demonstrates they are a top tier e-marketing firm.  Together we will help many good organizations benefit from this amazing technology.”

Peter is enthusiastic to help organizations discover strategies for using email and social media to engage and foster prospects and valued clients.  His job one is to help organizations see and begin the steps toward amazing growth and ROI through e-marketing.

Peter has worked in software engineering, marketing, product management and direct sales.  His prior areas of expertise include telecommunications, data security and industrial construction.  He believes e-marketing is the very best place to be and plans to close out the second half of his career in it.  Yes, he is planning on another 29 years.

Peter holds BSCS degree from Bowling Green State University.  He enjoys playing guitar, reading, fishing and spending time with my wife of 29 years.

Here’s more on the numbers - check out the discussion on it.

• 75% of small to medium-sized U.S. business websites (SMBs) lack an email link on their home page for consumers to contact the business  (BIA/Kelsey).
   
• Including the word “exclusive” in email promotional campaigns increases boosts unique open rates by 14% (Experian).
   
• Investment in email marketing is projected to grow from $1.3B in 2010 to $2B by 2014 (Forrester).

As a marketer, I would hope that you don't have trouble being fun and quirky - but that just may be the case. If you are plagued with "un-fun", make sure you take a look at Instagram and consider adding it to your emarketing tools. B2B marketers who have yet to find a way to take advantage of all that Instagram has to offer may be missing out on integral opportunities to gain leads, engage prospects and raise company awareness. 

If it is like most B2B marketing campaigns, it’s uninspiring. 

Lionel Knight of Upshot ask, “Why are business-to-business (B2B) marketing communications so dull?  Check your office junk mail folder for B2B sales emails, I think you’ll agree that the standards are dreadful.”

I agree with Knight when he goes on to say, “Why is this? The common answer is that business people (apparently unlike “normal” people) are totally rational and can’t be influenced by anything as squishy as “emotion” in sales or marketing pitches. I just don’t buy that. People don’t change how they react to marketing when they’re at work,”

Here one study Upshot did of to see the impact of a depressing message versus an inspiring message.  The results are worth noting:

http://www.upshot.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Upshot_B2B_Emotion.pdf

The study concludes, “You can (and should) work to affect emotions in your messaging and visual stimuli. Emotion is a powerful tool and deeply affects the way business decision makers react to marketing communications.”

I agree with this and only wish to add… This is what List Engage can help you with.  It’s in our DNA to have email campaigns that inspire, that pop and lift up emotions.  Ask us about the difference we feel when we are challenged to make it inspiring – we love it!

Behavioral triggered email, based on action (and non-action) of your customers, often yields much higher open and click through rates than non-triggered email.  So, it makes sense to get the most out of it.  Here are some ideas for doing just that. Using customer behavior effectively in every aspect of your email-marketing program can help lift your results from "so-so" to "spectacular."

Behavior triggers highly relevant emails that reflect what your customer actually does, such as opting in, purchasing, browsing your website or downloading a file. But you must know where to find and collect the data and integrate it into triggered email messages. Before you take the next step, study up on these rules of the road that will help you make the most of your behavioral data:

1. Capture behavioral data everywhere. You know already that you should track what your customers do online, whether it's in email, on your website or in your social networks. Now, think beyond Web and email, though. Offline and mobile channels can yield data gold via call-center interactions, response to direct mail, check-ins, coupon redemptions or event attendance.
    
2. Turn your email message into a dynamic content platform. Transform your emails from static promotions to dynamic, relevant messages with product reviews that reflect either past purchases or customer recommendations, social-media posts and other online activity. Integrating offline data can trigger emails that match content to customer activity, such as following up on store visits, issues handled at the call center, email opt-ins or abandoned carts.
    
3. Marry data to action with automation. Effective behavior-based messaging requires a marketing automation platform. These technology solutions integrate with third-party CRM, analytics, ecommerce and other systems and add features such as contact scoring. Messages are triggered automatically in a series of “tracks” based on if/then statements.
    
4. Solve your biggest business problem first. Instead of making incremental changes, decide what your greatest challenge is and how to solve it with behavior and automation. Don't worry about being perfect right out of the gate. You can always refine your abandoned-cart reminder later. When you ask the C-suite for the resources you'll need, emphasize the financial gains or business goals this behavior and automation approach will deliver. Show the big picture -- and save the details for the case study you'll write when you succeed.
    
5. Think in terms of series and programs, not stand-alone messages. You'll generate better results from behavior-based messaging when you expand a one-off email into a series -- or better yet, tracks that respond to additional recipient behaviors.
    
6. Generate multiple follow-up messages from a single message triggered by demographic data. March brings me a shower of birthday emails and offers. So far, though, nobody has sent me any follow-up emails urging me to act on my offers before they expire. Add behavior-based tracks that are triggered by recipient action and non-action to your event- and demographic-based messages such as anniversaries and birthdays.
    
7. Design for the platform or message context. People use their smartphones to scan QR codes. So, if someone scans your code for more product info, be sure the follow-up email you send is also designed for the customer's small screen, not a 21-inch desktop monitor. Also, consider the message context. A cart-abandonment email should convey a friendly sense of support, not the message that Big Brother is watching everything your shopper does online.

Read the rest of the rules here.

The beauty of automated behavior-based messages is that once you set them up, you never have to push the send button. So while you are on the golf course or lying by the pool, these emails are flying out the door and producing results.

 

image via http://www.marketingvox.com

You can have the cleanest lists in the world, never purchase lists, and have very genuine opt-in practices, but somewhere along that path you'll wake up one day and find your email is blocked by a blacklist.

Image: Patchareeya99 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

An emarketing strategy is something that every company needs to move forward in this technology and social media driven market. Budgets are tight in this economy and every company is trying to leverage online marketing techniques for the lowest cost. Even though budgets are tight, businesses are finally realizing that they need to loosen the purse strings on their marketing and learning to embrace what can be gained from email marketing in 2012.

via Small Biz: The world’s economic future in 2012 seems bleak, and could become even bleaker.

The debt crisis in Europe still has not been fully resolved. Greece is getting it’s financial affairs in order, but there are other problems within the European Union.

Image: Kookkai_nak / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

With the marketing  mix becoming  much  more varied - as online technologies mature - and previously separate marketing channels become far more integrated, it easy is to get caught up in the latest trends and lose sight of the things that make business to business marketing successful.

2011 saw social media rise to new heights and it was inevitable that it would soon be adopted as a core business tool. Social media marketing in many ways reinvigorated firms' online marketing efforts and allowed them to refocus their aims on producing far-reaching campaigns that spanned a plethora of different platforms. It was this 'all inclusive' attitude towards social interaction that set the pace of marketing in 2011, which is why we saw firms returning to tried and tested methods - like B2B email marketing - but using them in fresh, integrated and innovative ways.

While there were a number of new tools also pushing their way into the mainstream - such as online video and the rapidly growing platform of mobile marketing - it is clear that underpinning all this innovation were familiar techniques and methodologies. While content was to remain king for 2011 web-based marketing strategies, data was the cornerstone of B2B marketing - in particularly, segregated, up-to-date, highly-organised business lists.

It is this underpinning of sound business data and insight that meant so-called 'traditional' marketing platforms - like email - remained extremely popular. This looks set to continue in 2012 with email marketing is set to undergo something of a resurgence and staying high on the agenda for digital marketing specialists.

Interestingly, one of the key reasons that email will have such as successful 2012 is because of the rise of new methods of communication which were previously seen as rivals - namely social media and mobile. Far from undermining email as a rock solid business to business marketing tool, social media and the rise of smartphones and tablets have, in many ways, made it far more useful to the marketing professional.

For starters, access to email has become both instant and continuous. People can check there emails 24/7 using any number of new technologies - you can even gain access to it through your TV and mp3 player. This 'always on' view of email has cemented its reputation as the all-pervasive communication tool of choice. Its benefits over and above social media marketing are clear. It is targeted - if you have the right business data to underpin it - it can be easily personalised and it is easy to measure the success of it. What's more, with the clever use of new technologies, it can be far more responsive than it has been in the past.

So what will the key goals be for the email marketing professional in 2012?

First up, businesses need to get the targeting of their marketing messages right. Email marketing is ubiquitous and millions of messages will simply go unread or be blocked by spam filters - particularly as a result of poor email design. This means the data used for your mailshots needs to be high quality. It is no use going into 2012, spamming potential clients and customers from lists that have out-of-date information on them. Businesses will need to start using their B2B marketing data lists more intelligently if they are to boost email penetration rates.

Secondly  there is the design. Many messages are deleted because they don't display properly or cause inboxes to malfunction. Email design will continue to be a hugely important factor when it comes to business to business marketing. With the rise of mobile technologies you must also consider smaller screen resolutions if you intend to run  mobile email marketing campaigns.

Read more here...

Image: digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net