The Black Friday weekend kicked off an encouraging shopping season for retailers with the total spend reaching an estimated $52.4 billion. But there’s still a lot of shopping before Santa jumps on his sleigh.

Not everyone was prepared to hit the shopping malls and cyber stores so early. There are a lot of last-minute shoppers with long gift lists that are still a work in progress. They’re procrastinating, waiting for the best deals, or just can’t figure out the right gift for each recipient, so there is still time to sell.

In this sales cycle, repeated outreach and a little bit of competition can win over the dawdlers. Email marketing is a cost-effective way to market what you have to offer customers, whether selling toys, apparel, salon services, etc. To get the most out of your email marketing program during the holiday season, here are some suggestions to help you increase sales in the final weeks before Christmas.

Who Needs Carolers? Let Your Headline Sing

Grab your email subscribers with your first impression. For those who can’t figure out what to buy for friends, families, or colleagues, write a subject line that lets your readers know you are giving away useful information. Something as simple as “Five Gift Ideas for Your Child’s Teacher” or “Top Ten Secret Santa Gifts, All under $25” can turn out to be a gift itself for those who still can’t figure out what to put under the tree.

For shoppers who are looking for the best deals, a subject headline that includes a promotion or discount is more likely to cause them to click on your email. Let them know before they even open the email campaign that you’re offering a special promotion code or a discount if they purchase on a specific day or at a certain price point.

For those who are simply the last to join the holiday party, give low inventory notices on best sellers. Make sure they know when a sale will end or send a reminder about final shipping days for regular and overnight delivery.

Add Reindeer Speed to Abandoned Shopping Carts

If you have an online store, you are aware that some people fill up their shopping carts and then just leave it in the virtual aisle. Instead of wondering if the shopper has left the building or is planning to come back to buy everything in the cart, you can use this information to send out targeted emails. Remind them that they have unfinished shopping on your site. You can even invite them to come back by giving special offers, such as expedited shipping, free wrapping, or even a gift coupon for a 2012 purchase.

Start by sending a couple of different emails to a small group of shoppers who have abandoned their shopping carts in your store. See which offer brings back the most customers and use that incentive for the rest of the shoppers who haven’t closed the deal.

If you have a brick and mortar store, you can still use last-minute email campaigns to increase traffic to your shop. If you’re giving back to the community, make sure your email subscribers are aware of this. It may be a reason to spend money with you instead of the big box store around the corner. On the other hand, a $25 gift card with a purchase of $100 before Christmas may be just the ticket that gets folks to track back to your establishment. Exclusivity and urgency can give your offers that extra appeal that a customer may respond well to.

Transform January White Sales into Green

Customers have come to expect all-year-round deals and promotions. Don’t shut down your holiday email program when you take down your festive lighting. To everyone who bought something from you over the last two months, send them a thank-you email note that includes a discount coupon or promotional code. You should still wish people who didn’t buy a happy New Year and let them know about your January specials.

Take some time to look at your email marketing reports. You have collected valuable information about your subscribers and can use it to segment your lists. For the contacts that opened or clicked a link in one of your emails, make them a priority, as they represent your most engaged subscribers. You may want to offer special deals or incentives to shop with you in 2012.

If they bought something, use that information to send targeted emails during the year. Remember, Valentine’s Day is soon to follow and your customers will be looking for new gifts for their loved ones.

Paul Turnbull is the product manager for Campaigner and is responsible for product design and providing an easy-to-use email marketing solution for SMBs. He can be reached at paul.turnbull@j2global.com.

So, in advance of tomorrow’s FREE virtual conference on email marketing, I wanted to learn more about what kills the love for subscribers (that is, what annoys them and gets them to unsubscribe). I asked our Facebook and LinkedIn friends what their biggest email marketing pet peeves are, and here’s what they had to say:

1. “Long emails. Keep it short and sweet, and I’ll click on the larger article if it’s relevant to me and if I have time that day.”  (Catherine Cervantes)

2. “Typos.”  (Ashley Hin)

3. “I hate getting an email that has a merge field filled in with incorrect data.” (Andrea L. Bierly)

4. “Emails that are too frequent and seem to be taking over my inbox.” (Kimberly McCabe)

5. “When I get an email that is addressed to the wrong person … for example, ‘Mr.’ instead of ‘Miss’ or something similar. Happens quite frequently actually! Bad practice.” (PRWeb)

6. “When the whole email is HTML. If I don’t download the pictures, I have no idea what it’s about. Text is a good thing or you’ve lost me. Especially on my mobile.” (Heather Arneson Caldwell)

7. “Not personalized and with no incentive for continuing my subscription (informative info, special promotion, free treats for loyalty, etc.).” (Social Butterfly Marketing)

8. “Bad design.” (Randy Califf)

9. “For me, it is also frequency. After repeatedly receiving 3 emails each day from a toy store, I unsubscribed. Once a week would have been acceptable but not 3 in the same day.” (Suzi Weidenhof)

10. “Email marketing in general. There are those rare exceptions, in which I actually don’t mind receiving emails from a business. But they had better be relevant, and have some SIGNIFICANT value to me. Otherwise, they are destined for the unsubscribe, block/filter as spam or both. I receive a constant barrage of email as it is (and most of them are actually things I want to read, but don’t have time).” (Michael Windham)

Now, it’s your turn. What’s YOUR biggest email marketing pet peeve?

Ready to inject some love into your email marketing? Join us tomorrow for our FREE virtual conference, Digital Marketing World: Email Marketing, and learn how to build better relationships with your email subscribers.

The “Think Different” campaign—and all that it entailed—helped rescue Apple. This same message, if accepted, will be what rescues B2B marketers today.  Here are some of the lines from the commercials:

“Here’s to the Crazy Ones … The ones who see things differently … You can quote them, disagree with them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing that you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They explore. They create. They inspire.”

These words (change, invent, imagine, explore, create, inspire) encapsulate the approach and attitude that needs to be adopted and embraced by today’s B2B marketer. Marketing receives so much negative press today. We read about the marketing skills gap, our lack of visibility at the C-level, our lack of lack of alignment with sales, our in ability to justify our budget, etc. Unfortunately, much of it is true. That’s because we keep doing the same thing over and over again.

I submit that the time has come to change, to change for the better, to think different. Here are 5 things marketers can do differently:

1.   Don’t Believe What They’re Saying

A good friend of mine played professional baseball for 12 years. He was a relief pitcher—specifically, a closer (the pitcher who comes in at the end of a game to secure a win). I asked him what kind of mindset was needed to be a closer.  He said, “You can’t let yourself get too high, or too low. And don’t read the press clippings after you blow one.”

Good advice for marketers. Too many marketers are “too low,” believing what everyone tells them: that marketing is a necessary evil, providing little value. But that doesn’t have to be true. So, as the commercial says, start to “Think Different.” Rather than accepting the characterization,  begin believing that being a B2B marketer is one of the most exciting and promising careers of today. Embrace what’s in front of you. Go for it. And if you fail (and at times, you will), so what? Just keep plugging. Success over time is the goal. When you achieve it, others’ perception will begin to change.

2.  Defy Tradition

During my tenure as a marketing director for McAfee, I made the decision to move to paperless collateral. This decision was not particularly well-received by some of our veteran field sales people. In their traditional way of thinking, I was overlooking the “need” to have something to hand to customers. They told me that we would lose sales, miss out on opportunities, and that this was a bad decision. I didn’t care. Why not? Because our analysis showed that we could redirect the huge printing budget and spend it in areas that would generate a better overall ROI. Before I announced the decision, I showed our Sales Management how the extra budget would be spent on demand generation and even showed them the forecasted increase of leads. They bought in immediately.

Many traditional marketing activities (tradeshows, collateral, telemarketing, etc.) are done simply because things have always been done that way. But as Mark Twain said, “Sacred cows make the best hamburger.” So, take some initiative and do some study and analysis on what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and the return you’re getting from it.  Tradition should not be a driving factor when it comes to marketing spend.  Revenue and ROI should be.

3.  Fight for the Right Change

“We already have an in-house teleservices team.”  This is what I heard two weeks into my new position with a software company. This comment was a response to my suggestion that outsourcing our teleservices would be more efficient, effective, and economical.

In the process of making my case, I had to have meetings with the head of sales, the head of marketing operations, and the president of our division. The head of the in-house teleservices team made sure he was present at all these meetings, so he could counter my arguments.

During one of these meetings, after quite an animated plea by him to keep things in-house, I said to him, “Dave, this isn’t personal. I believe we can do better. That’s what all of us in the company should strive to be doing  … better.”  The meeting resulted in a “bake-off”:  For 45 days I gave 50% of my teleservices work to my chosen outsourced vendor, and 50% to Dave’s team to see who would win. And  45 days later, we reviewed the results, and my outsourced vendor had 100% of my work.

Was I trying to discredit Dave? No. We simply needed “better,” and I wasn’t going to stop until I got it. As for Dave, he never spoke to me again, and he went out of his way trying to make our team look bad. But our case had been made, and our success was known throughout the company.

If there is something in your organization that needs changing, don’t stop driving for it.  Although people will fight back, if it’s the right change, it will make it worthwhile.

4.  Be Realistic

I was speaking to a client a few weeks ago about our approach to implementing the Lead Management Framework^SM.  Halfway through the discussion, he asked, “Will we be able to get this all completed within three months?”  I told him, “No, that timeframe is unrealistic.” He said, “I figured as much, but I had to ask.”

Anything worth doing takes time. Yet, many B2B marketers (and their management teams) have unrealistic expectations when it comes to turning things around.  Initiatives, such as lead management processes, buyer journey mapping, sales processes, and software deployments take time, people, and resources. The change that has to occur within marketing often requires modifying behavior and culture. Studies show that such change can often take two to three years.

So, develop a plan a plan with realistic timeframes. Include milestones that will allow you to highlight the small changes along the way, but realize that the ultimate change will occur over time.

5.  Lead

In his book, Balancing the Demand Equation, Adam Needles states, “Sales managers and general managers lead, and B2B marketers do not.” This is a bold statement, but is too often true.

Colin Powell has stated the following in terms of leadership:

“You don’t know what you can get away with until you try. You know the expression, ‘it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.’ Well, it’s true.  Good leaders don’t wait for official blessing to try things out. They’re prudent, not reckless. But they also realize a fact of life in most organizations: If you ask enough people for permission, you’ll inevitably come up against someone who believes his job is to say ‘no.’  So the moral is, don’t ask.  Less-effective middle managers endorsed the sentiment, ‘If I haven’t explicitly been told yes, I can’t do it,’ whereas the good ones believed, ‘If I haven’t explicitly been told no, I can.’  There’s a world of difference between these two points of view.

It is time for marketing leaders to adopt this philosophy. Stop waiting to be told “yes” and go for it!

If B2B marketing is ever going to get out of the doldrums of being viewed as inefficient and unnecessary within the organization, they must change.  They must invent, imagine, explore, create and inspire. To put it simply, the must think different.

While I normally delete those letters at the first sight of “Dear Madam/Sir [insert requisite typo],” email marketing has been at the top of  my mind while I’ve been working on promotions for this week’s FREE virtual conference, Digital Marketing World: Email Marketing. The most recent request I received for wiring money to Nigeria got me thinking about how bad the letters really are—and what we, as email marketers, can learn from these scam letters.

Lesson 1. Speak the Language of Your Audience (Use Words They Use.)

Nigerian scam letters frequently use words like “Sir,” “Madam” and “mandated,” and awkward, grammatically incorrect sentences like, “We shall commence the transfer of the funds immediately we receive the following information by … ” As marketers, we tend to talk about our products and services with language that our target audience doesn’t necessarily use. If you want to engage your audience via email, you must use the language, tone, and style that resonates with them. (Hint: It’s not Frankenspeak!)

Lesson 2: Personalize When Appropriate

I love a nice personalized email campaign, even if I know, as a marketer, that Ann Handley didn’t actually email me directly. (Once and a while, Ann actually does email me, and that makes my day/week/month/year.) Used right, personalization can skyrocket your opens and click-throughs. Used incorrectly (DEAR: CEO, Everytown USA), and you’ll damage your brand and reputation. Forever.

Lesson 3: Trust Takes Time—You Must Nurture

Chances are, once a lead gets added to your email or marketing automation solution, they won’t be ready to buy right away (or wire you money to Nigeria, for that matter). You must nurture them over time, so they build trust in your brand and product. Don’t rush for the close like the con artists do and ask them to hand over their credit card immediately—nurture them over time with best practices, online events, and any kind of content that will allow your prospects to get to know and trust you.

Lesson 4: Segment and Target

Typos and incorrect personalization aside, one of the biggest mistakes the scam letters make is not segmenting and targeting. They mass mail the same exact email to everyone in the world. I’m sure they could increase their response rates by segmenting and targeting their emails, starting with country, age, gender, and then perhaps use that knowledge to personalize emails when appropriate. So can you. Segmented email campaigns will always outperform blasts to your entire list. In fact, segmented emails are easier to execute than you might think. Just update your subject lines and body copy for different audience segments and—BOOM—your response rates will improve.

Lesson 5: Focus on Quality (not Quantity)

You may think that the more emails you send, the more revenue you’ll generate. Right? Wrong. Send one bad email campaign with too much copy and too many typos, and you can lose subscribers forever. Focus on quality and make sure every email you send: 1.) benefits your subscribers, 2.) resonates with your target audience, and 3.) is a great representation of your brand.

Ready to advance your email marketing skills? Join us this Friday, November 11 for Digital Marketing World: Email Marketing. With sessions on lifecycle marketing, email audits, and more, it’ll give your email marketing the fuel it needs.

First, make sure that you’re creating and sharing content of value. The rest of this strategy is moot if you’re not providing any value to your audience.

Next, using whatever methods you have available to you, aggregate your social media activities. I tend to use Twitter to share content the most, and I use the free, open-source package YourTwapperKeeper to aggregate and archive my tweets. This keeps them stored for much longer and more accurately than Twitter’s built-in search. You may want to use a special hashtag to denote tweets that you’ll want to reshare later.

Once you’ve got a selection of content that’s worth sharing, make sure you set up an email newsletter that is devoted solely to sharing this content. I have a weekly newsletter set up using the WhatCounts Publicaster platform that hooks straight into YourTwapperKeeper’s automated RSS feed, so that all of my useful tweets for the week are compiled into a single newsletter issue. You can, of course, use any platform that supports RSS to email.

Is weekly the right frequency? It doesn’t have to be. You can use daily, weekly, monthly—whatever your audience wants. Naturally, you can use various spaces in the newsletter for promotion of your other marketing efforts as well.

Why does this work? As mentioned at the beginning of the article, the social media attention span is short and continues to diminish. Some days, no matter how valuable your content is, your audience simply isn’t able to pay attention. Sometimes, they’re on vacation, literally, and won’t even see your updates. Using email to close the loop and get them your content in another way is a simple, easy way to maximize the value of your social media efforts.

This is the best argument I’ve seen for the value of social media sharing. Having prospects and customers receive, open and pay attention to your email message is good. But it’s great when they share the message further, through email or other social media and help position your subscribers as “insiders.” Others will want to be insiders, too. Customer-instigated sharing acts as a force multiplier that can significantly ratchet up the effectiveness of an email marketing campaign.

What’s more, the potential value of social media sharing doesn’t end there. When marketers put the tools in place to track clicks, conversions, and the progress of messages across social media platforms, they can add tremendous depth and breadth to their customer database. Then, these insights can help guide and refine future marketing efforts.

When you start using social media to improve your email marketing, consider these factors:

• Cadence. Be aware that the footprint of each message grows as it’s shared. You may need to adjust the pace of certain messages to adapt to this longer tail.
• Influence. Reach alone is not the key metric. Impact and conversion are what truly matter. Track which social media channels provide the most conversions, and focus there. Typically, most brands will find three or four social services or networks that touch the majority of their target audience.
• Influencers. Data collection and management allows you to identify your biggest brand advocates. You may be able to leverage their enthusiasm even more through special offers, enhanced communication, or other promotions that recognize their status.
• Offer Management. Groupon has changed more than just couponing; consumers now expect and share only the most daring of offers. Track which kinds of offers “have legs” for your brand so that you can best predict yield. Remember, too, that not every offer has to “go viral.” Keeping some for your most loyal customers may be a good scarcity strategy and build loyalty as well as response.
• Connect. Every share is an opportunity—and be sure to capitalize by making it really easy for everyone touched by you offer to join/follow your brand and sign up for email offers.
• Segmentation. Slicing social media data by channel, time, topic, etc. can help you identify patterns that make it easier to target future email messages.
• Privacy. Brands that overstep, spam and/or fail to disclose their intentions risk customer backlash. “Cross the line” and you’ll be contending with negative, not positive, social media sharing!

Today, word of mouth doesn’t happen just one to one in person. It also happens inbox to inbox and across a wide range of social media platforms. Harness the power of social sharing, and you’ll improve the reach and effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.

Here’s what you need to know to host your own successful Twitter chat.

Have a Twitter account. OK, that part is probably obvious. The not-so-obvious part is that you need to make sure you’re hosting from the right account. In other words, if you use your Twitter account almost 99% of the time for work, make sure you don’t mind all your workmates knowing about your Twitter chat. And if you do mind, then you should probably get a second Twitter account with a note about it being for “personal tweets.” (Or not. Sometimes, personal tweets from your work Twitter account can help folks see you as a little warmer, a bit more “real.” It’s your call.)

Know your theme. All the best parties and events have a theme. Keep your passions and interests in mind—and know why you are getting everyone together for a Twitter chat. What’s the focus? Are you going to chat about the latest samurai flicks? Are you interested in what other steampunk fans are creating? Do you want to get together with people around the world who want to discuss Lemony Snicket’s books? Once you know your topic, you can check online to see if those types of Twitter chats exist—and what you can do to make yours stand out. (You can also decide to just join an existing one if you’d rather not start from scratch.)

Get a suitable hashtag. A hashtag was, in the olden days, called a pound mark: #. Now, it’s the nifty little sign that marks keywords and topics on Twitter, which makes it easier to follow the conversation. You can follow the conversation via Twitter search by typing the # and the name of the chat. You can also use Tweetchat, HootSuite, or TweetDeck. To use a hashtag, all you need to do is, well, use it. And let other people coming to your Twitter chat know to use it, too, so your tweets can be found in the ever-expanding Twitterverse. And be sure to make your hashtag catchy but short. (You don’t want to use up crucial characters just on a hashtag!) If your Twitter chat is just for a yearly event, consider including the year in the hashtag.

Pick the time well … and be aware of time zones. It’s easy to get tunnel vision when you’re in front of your screen, but keep in mind that your time zone isn’t everyone’s time zone. You may be on Pacific time, but people on the East are three hours ahead of you. You don’t have to mention every time zone, but just mention yours. That makes it easy for people in different time zones throughout the world (not just your country) to work out what your stated time means for them.

And know that the time can always be changed if it ends up not being the best. For example, for #profschat (hosted by MarketingProfs’s own Megan Leap), the chat started out with its slot at 8 p.m. (Eastern time). The idea was that it let people who weren’t allowed on Twitter to join—but it didn’t quite work. So, MarketingProfs changed the time.  “We chose Friday at noon because we thought it was a time that most folks would be free,” Megan says. “Most people probably don’t have Friday lunch meetings. And Friday chats would be a great way to wind down the week.”

Invite folks to your party. People can’t attend your Twitter chat if they don’t even know about it! Promote your Twitter chat by spreading the word. Chat it up on your blog, your Facebook Page, your website, and, natch, Twitter. If your Twitter chat is related to event, don’t forget to put the chat name, hashtag, time, and date on all signage, opening and closing slides of a presentation, ads, etc.

Choose a chat style. You can just choose one topic, ask specific questions, and people just answer that one for a specific amount of time. In some chats, the moderator does not allow for other questions until the end of the “official” questions. In other chats, there’s one topic, and the moderator lets everyone just have at it. In another style of chat, the moderator gently guides the conversation, helping it through awkward silences or focusing it if it strays from the topic.

Do your homework. If you’re just having a free-for-all chat, you might not need to do any planning. However, if you’re hosting a Twitter chat on a specific topic, you’ll want to be sure to have on hand: the information that you want to share (it’s even better if you have the tweets written already, so you don’t have to keep fiddling with the tweet to keep it to 140 characters) and questions to ask participants. Make sure your questions are numbered, so folks can answer specifically to that question. (And you might have to remind folks to answer with the number, so you know what question they are answering.)

Consider special guests. Maybe your Twitter chat is about U.S. history, and you’re getting together to discuss “The Conspirator” movie. Consider inviting a professor of history or a famous author like Doris Kearns Goodwin (hey, you never know) to join the Twitter chat to share their thoughts and answer questions. Just as in hosting any event, you need to make sure to introduce your speaker to the guests, share a little about her, and perhaps ask questions to get the chat rolling. And then, depending on your format, the speaker can just tweet about the topic during the scheduled time and answer questions during the talk, or you can save the questions to ask the speaker once the allotted time to their talk is over.

Know when to let it flow—and when to slow it down. “If it gets quiet and people stop having things to say, then I jump in and try to invigorate the conversation,” says Megan. “If they’re chatting and engaged, I let it flow.” Be a good host by making sure conversations are happening. Really listen to the conversation, and be prepared to share an observation or ask a question if it’s getting too quiet. Likewise, a good host knows when to keep mum and let the guests chat away. Depending on the style of your Twitter chat, you may allow for tangents, or you might want to jump in and return the focus to the topic. (There’s no right or wrong. It’s a style preference.)

Consider giving out prizes. Some chats are sponsored by businesses, so the Twitter host mentions the sponsor at the beginning and end of the chat. The sponsor often provides a gift for someone who has participated in the Twitter chat. Just collect names during the Twitter chat, and randomly choose a winner. Perhaps the guest speaker is an author who can offer a free copy of her book to a Twitter chat participant. Or you can skip this whole idea. Consider the knowledge shared to be the parting gift to participants.

Cue the credits when it’s over. Have an official end time for your chat. This way, people will be able to plan their time accordingly. If they know the Twitter chat is ending at 9 p.m. (Eastern time), they might move things around in their schedule, so they can participate. If the time is just open-ended, it might be trickier to moderate.  So, officially end your Twitter chat (and don’t forget to thank the guest speaker). However, do allow for folks to chat afterwards, if they like. (And on Twitter, you can’t really stop them if they do.) For example, after the weekly Latinos in Social Media (LATISM) chat, hostess Elianne Ramos launches into an “after party” during which she shares links to Latin music and a more relaxed (often funny) vibe picks up after the focused talk. View the tweets after the designated time as proof that everyone had a good time. It’s the online equivalent of people still talking in the parking lot long after an event’s over.

Have a recap. Be sure to offer a transcript of your chat. People may be totally into the chat—but they have to drop out of it for whatever reason. Let Twitter guests know what was said, who was there, and what was shared by offering transcripts of the talk.

So, are you interested in starting up a Twitter chat? Do you frequent a few Twitter chats? Let us know about them by leaving a comment. And I hope to see you at this Friday’s #profschat at noon (Eastern time).

photo credit: Bakerella

Buckaroo, a new cloud-based tool designed for small businesses to run their own marketing campaigns, could offer a viable solution. The tool, set to launch in less than two weeks, will allow merchants to send coupons and promotions via email, manage their contacts, segment their lists, track results (e.g., who received invitations, who signed up), and promote their deals via social media sites Facebook and Twitter.

Here’s how it works (in a nutshell): A merchant can log in to the user-friendly tool and use its wizard to build promotions. The promotions can be customized, displaying the merchant’s own logo with very minimal Buckaroo branding. Drop-down menus allow the merchant to choose what type of promotion to create, the minimum and maximum amount of people to receive the offer, and its expiration date.  The user can format the promotion using the tool and even save templates from previous promotions to simplify future blasts. Finally, the merchant can upload, download, and manage its contact list using the tool, making it easy sort and send promotions to the right customers.

Buckaroo is 100% opt in. Consumers sign up for the merchants they choose to receive promotions from.

Here’s how Buckaroo differs from the ever-so-popular daily deal sites:

1. For a flat fee of $50 per month, businesses can run promotions and send them to customers via email without compromising revenue. Though merchants open themselves up to new business on sites like Groupon, the advantages of not giving up revenue are obvious.

2. Businesses can focus on building their own marketing lists. Every time a business runs a promotion, it builds its list and can keep that list (unlike with Groupon).

3. Merchants have the flexibility to run promotions with any time frame they’d like. It could be a daily deal, monthly deal, or seasonal promotion. With many daily deal sites, it’s a one-shot deal.

4. The terms of the deal are open. Businesses aren’t limited to offering a percentage off the price of a product or service. They can, for example, offer “buy one, get one free” deals or “kids eat for free on Tuesdays.”

5. Buckaroo aims to build merchants’ lists and enable them to attract high-value customers.  The tool allows businesses to import and export their contact lists, and sort them by name, join date, address, etc. (And according to Buckaroo CEO Alan Fisher, the tool will eventually have a mobile component, too.)

Of course, there are some questions that come to mind about Buckaroo.  Just how many email contacts can the tool handle? What if you aren’t a small business? Fisher says that although the tool is primarily for small businesses, it has the capability to accommodate enterprise-scale operations with tens of thousands of email contacts. Another concern I asked him about was with respect to privacy. Is it safe to upload all of your client contacts into their tool? According to Fisher, nobody will have access to a merchant’s contact list but the merchant, and the tool’s features have been tested extensively.

What are some of your experiences using daily deal sites (to offer or receive promotions)?

Don’t worry—email was practically made for mobile devices, says Loren McDonald,a MarketingProfs University instructor and vice president of Industry Relations at Silverpop. In his Email Marketing Essentials talk, McDonald offers these quick tips for creating email newsletters that shine on mobile devices:

1. Write snappy, engaging pre-header text. It’s the snippets of info that show up before anything else does. It’s the first peek at your content for the reader, so make sure you don’t waste their attention. Use it, and use it well.

2. Offer clear calls to action in different formats. “Using different language and creative, buttons, and things that all direct people to the same call to action is important,” says McDonald. Folks may completely overlook a graphic element that’s a call to action, but will notice a link instead (and vice versa).

3. Use alt attributes (tags). Give people a quick sense of what’s behind an image by providing tags. Not every email client recognizes it when images are turned off, but it’s still worth using for those email clients that do read them.

4. Incorporate text over images. Make sure the text in a link shows, so that something is still in front of your readers’ eyes, even when images aren’t being loaded.

5. Design for the touch. McDonald says, “Our fingertip is replacing the mouse.” Keep that in mind by designing emails with links and blocks of text that are easy to touch. If your links are too close together, that might be fine for a mouse-click, but it’s a different story for fingers.

6. Use scalable fonts and images. Use cascading style sheets (CSS) for mobile devices. “They can determine the size of the screen that the email will render on and then size the images and fonts up or down to be perfect for that device.”

Have any other tips you’d add to the list?

To learn more about email marketing, sign up for the Email Marketing Essentials course at MarketingProfs University. You’ll enjoy 11-plus hours of intensive, online instruction by 15 email marketing experts. The course features 14 classes broadcasting live May 12 through 27 and then on demand through May 2012 (in case you miss any classes).

1. Social Media
As social media’s influence continues to grow, businesses will need to integrate email with social in order to survive. “The reality of ignoring Facebook because you think it’s a fad is truly a mistake,” McDonald says. “It’s the future.” So, what can you do about it? Consider adding social-media footers and icons to emails. Branch beyond the newsletter by letting people “like” the content on Facebook, forward it to a friend, post it to Facebook, or tweet it. And don’t forget to use social media to grow your email database. For example, on Facebook, provide email opt-ins for existing customers (and potential new ones). “Whenever and wherever possible, offer people the opportunity to opt-in,” McDonald says. “You want to touch as many people in your channel as possible.”
Takeaway #1: Promote following and sharing within all your email communication.

2. Mobile
Think about the last time you were waiting in line for something. Chances are that you grabbed your mobile device and checked your email before you did anything else. “On mobile devices, email is far and away the No. 1 activity of how consumers spend their time,” McDonald says. “Email was made for mobile devices.” To capitalize on this trend, email marketers need to design their content for multiple devices and mobile/touch screens. This means being aware of: snippets of text, links that can be touched (rather than moused over), and scalable fonts and images. Don’t just picture people reading your email marketing pieces in front of their office desk.  Imagine them waiting in traffic, grabbing a spare moment or two at their children’s swim meets, traveling on trains, says McDonald. In other words, picture them everywhere.
Takeaway #2: Design your email marketing pieces for people on the go.

3. The Evolving Inbox
Your email communications used to primarily fight with spam for attention in your subscribers’  inbox. Now, however, your emails’ main battle is against all the other vibrant content found in the inbox. That’s because, thanks to smart filters, consumers now avoid spam altogether—and have their inbox prioritize their mail according to their reading habits. If a consumer reads your stuff, your emails will start gaining a higher priority in a person’s inbox. (And if they don’t, your emails will start being pushed to the bottom of the list.) Plus, now with the inbox now becoming more unified—folks just check one inbox for all their online messages—you’re also competing with the bits of flotsam and jetsam from other channels, such as social messaging, chats, SMS, video, RSS feeds, etc. Email marketers must now focus on producing relevant, engaging content. “Relevance will be a requirement for emails,” McDonald says.
Takeaway #3: Make sure all your emails are relevant to the reader.

4. Humanization
Be a human, not just a brand. This means using faces and names in your communication. It’s a friendlier, more social world out there, and people like to communicate with other people. Engage with people through telling stories, educating them (in a friendly, accessible tone), and even letting customers share their own experiences with your brand and/or services.
Takeaway #4: Use personality to engage and education to sell.

5. Automation
“Think about email as becoming a dynamic content platform,” says McDonald. Use marketing automation to create trigger-based programs to keep people engaged. Set up pre- and post-purchase emails. Have emails set up for welcome campaigns, first purchases, repeat purchases, re-engagement campaigns, etc. And when customer purchase from you, do a cross-sell or up-sell by pulling in personalized content to offer them recommendations. If you have this information, you need to put the technology behind it to produce more engagement and sales.
Takeaway #5: Use technology to send emails more often but using fewer resources.

What tips would you add to the list? Do you send any trends not mentioned here? Speak your mind in the comments below.

To get the full story, with all the details and visuals, check out Loren McDonald’s online seminar on demand. To learn more about email marketing, sign up for the Email Marketing Essentials course at MarketingProfs University. You’ll enjoy 11-plus hours of intensive, online instruction by 15 email marketing experts. The course features 14 classes broadcasting live May 12 through 27.

Excellent point, Max. For most “love letters,” you would want to depersonalize at least. However, asking permission when you get a love letter to use actual names is working really well in our testing.

Consider the following scenario:

1.) An email comes in.
2.) An email goes out thanking them and asking if we can use it for marketing.
3.) Permission is almost always granted.
4.) Email goes out after content is posted, inviting the writer to see the content and SHARE it to their Facebook.
5.) Writer almost always does.
6.) New traffic comes in from both Organic Search and from Facebook Referrals.
7.) Email subscriber list grows.

So, from one email that would have simply died (or, at best, been printed out and put on a bulletin board), you now get search traffic from Google and lots of referral traffic from Facebook.

But the real, more common use-case is with outbound emails from your organization. Think about customer service, account management, investor relations, and sales. All of these folks are writing lots of emails every day. In 100 outbound emails, wouldn’t you think that 10 are blog-worthy? The reality is that it’s a lot higher percentage than that.

And you can start promoting other peoples’ email content while you’re at it. I put up a post yesterday about a MarketingProfs’ education program that I thought was interesting.

I simply pushed the entire email marketing message into my blog with a small intro paragraph. I checked first that it wasn’t indexed (it wasn’t) and bingo … I’ve got great content that helps our SEO and gives more exposure for what I genuinely think will be a good program. This then goes from my blog to the other social channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, where it can be picked up and shared some more.

Now, frankly, organizations should be doing this with their own email marketing programs. Most email marketing content is never indexed. It simply dies. Consider digging through or importing all of your old legacy email into your blogs, and give that content new life.

Bottom line is that content can’t be wasted. Most email, whether it’s from outlook or an ESP, is single-use … gone forever soon after it’s created. If you think about SEO from the content side, it’s about building authority content-brick by content-brick over time.

As think about it, this is actually a blog-worthy email right here!  I’m going push this email verbatim out to a blog, Facebook, LinkedIn & Twitter.

CH: Thanks for the time to get together today. I know you’re busy.

Marketing Automation: Glad I could do it. I always enjoy talking about the impact I am making in B2B companies.

CH: You are indeed making an impact! However, there still seems to be quite a bit of confusion regarding who you are, what you are, how you should be defined, and what companies can expect from you. In your own words, who is Marketing Automation?

Marketing Automation: I get that question a lot, and I am well aware of how many have misrepresented me. I appreciate the opportunity to set the record straight. I would define myself as follows: I am an enabling technology that will power both demand generation and lead management processes. I allow for consistent and repeatable communications to your buyers, tracking of their behavior, lead qualification, data segmentation, metrics, and other features.

CH: So, if I heard you correctly, you do NOT provide management process, correct? I ask this because many vendors and industry pundits have labeled you as Lead Management Automation.

Marketing Automation: You absolutely heard me correctly! I am not lead management. Yes, lead management and I are related, but we’re distinct. Lead management is a process that I can help enable. If a lead management process is established, then I automate it. But if a company does not have a lead management process, even though I am indeed robust, I can’t bring it about. I can only automate what is already there. Truth be told, in many instances I automate chaos because that’s what’s there.  The companies who implement me with no forethought on how to best utilize me? … Now, those are rather unfortunate cases.

CH: It must be hard to be put into a situation where you are expected to live up to a lot of hype, but because of someone else’s unpreparedness, you just can’t. Besides process, what else would you want to ensure is in place so you can perform to your fullest?

Marketing Automation: Besides being a well-defined process, I would also want to ensure that there are the right people who understand me for what I am—technology. There’s a lot of pressure when you’re brought into an organization where everyone has been told you’re the savior. People who understand best practices, customer engagement, and who get sales involved early usually get the most out of me.  When I have the right people to work with, the returns are staggering.

CH: Anything else?

Marketing Automation: Timely, relevant content. With content, it’s “a garbage in, garbage out” scenario. I can only send what’s put into me. If it’s bad content, then it won’t engage the buyer. Conversely, nothing is more satisfying then when I send relevant content that aligns to the buyer persona, their buying cycle, and results in 1-1 engagement. I wish more companies would invest in this area. If they did, I’d have a much greater impact.

CH: Let’s shift gears a little bit. There have been many vendors promoting you with messages of “ease of installation” and “easy to use.” Is this a characterization that you embrace?

Marketing Automation: Are you asking me if I’m “easy”?  Just kidding (laughs). You know, I don’t want to sound arrogant or anything, but there is a whole lot I can do. When companies reduce me to terms like “easy” or give me away like I am “plug and play,” it’s as if they don’t understand the power I can have. If you simply want me to fire off emails, well, I guess that’s OK. I can do that in my sleep. However, when it comes to database segmentation, database integrations, complex scoring, multi-stream nurture campaigns, and delivering dynamic content, just to name a few, I don’t think you can equate it to Geico …with all due respect to cavemen everywhere.

CH: So are you saying that you’re hard to work with?

Marketing Automation: No, not at all. What I’m saying is that getting the most from me often requires change. And change is rarely easy. Change needs to occur in the way they approach sales and marketing. They need to adopt a process-based approach, and they need to figure out the best ways to engage their buyer. These changes are not just static. They’re dynamic. The new processes need to be continually monitored, so I can, in turn, perform to the best of my abilities. Changes like these are not overnight fixes. They take hard work and effort to achieve. But when they are completed, they make the difference between a best-in-class company and one that struggles.

CH: One last question before I let you go. It’s forecasted that this could really be your breakout year—but they said the same about 2010. Is this indeed the year for you to hit the mainstream or do we need to wait longer?

Marketing Automation: Ahhh, if I only had a crystal ball. In all honesty, I think the next two years are crucial for me. I don’t think organizations will get away with swapping me in and out every 1-2 years just because they don’t like the results. I think if I am going to really hit my stride, it’s incumbent on the vendors to deliver a realistic message about what I can truly do as an enabler. Likewise, B2B marketers also need to be realistic and understand what it will take to be successful. If these things converge, and companies can truly change like I just mentioned, then I truly believe the sky’s the limit for me.

CH: Thanks so much for the time. This has been great!

Marketing Automation: I am more than happy to do it, and I appreciate the opportunity.

Here’s what she had to say.

1. What are some of the most common email marketing mistakes marketers commit?
The three most deadly sins are:

1. Overmailing (This has nothing to do with frequency and everything to do with relevancy—a three-times-a-day alert that is welcome is not excessive for those who want it, but a boring or non-helpful monthly message is too much for almost everyone.)
2. Not tracking sender reputation
3. Not taking advantage of technology that allows for custom, personalized messages at the subscriber or segment level

Most email marketers truly do care about their subscribers and want to provide value. However, there are business pressures on email marketing because of the high ROI and low cost. “Just send another email message” is the answer to a lot of business challenges and is often out of the control of the poor email production manager. Given that, the sins are not due to lack of knowledge of the penalties for overmailing (clicks on the Report Spam button and depressed sender reputation and inbox placement). They are mostly due to short-term demands rather than a commitment to longer-term customer engagement.

2. Is there a new marketing technology that you’re excited to use this year?
I’ve just started a new role at Aprimo, the integrated marketing platform provider, and am very excited about truly integrated marketing.

In the past, “integrated” often meant that we tracked multiple campaigns over multiple channels with  back-end reporting.  Platforms like the one from Aprimo help marketers actually use data intelligently upfront to pull segment populations, dynamically adjust creative messaging, and plan internal workflow and asset management which streamline processes and improve efficiency. Who isn’t trying to do more with less?

3. What are some easy ways that our readers can improve their email marketing results?
Easy?  Define “easy”!  The only way to improve email results is to improve the subscriber experience.  If you are not doing any segmentation, then start with some simple segments that allow you to customize messaging to important sets of subscribers.  Consider new subscribers vs. long time, or active vs. non active.  Sometimes, gender or urban vs. suburban can make a difference. Even if you adjust only the subject line to speak to those audiences, you will see a lift in response. If you already do some segmentation, then improve the results with finer gradients or by including behavioral data in the mix.

Segmentation forces you to consider the subscriber when you map out the calendar.  That is the “easy” way to reconsider your email marketing relevance and improve engagement.

4. What metric do you track that most people overlook?
I love to track response metrics by subscriber over a quarter (or whatever time frame makes sense for your business).  No customer or prospect opens and clicks on every email message or “likes” every Facebook post. However, if subscribers respond to something in a quarter, then we can learn what engages them and start to matrix the kinds of content and levels of urgency that earn a response across important segments. If I only look at the campaign level, I can miss important trending data that informs good marketing decisions.

Also, let me just say that is it shameful to count the number of marketers I speak with who do not regularly review their standard email and social campaign response metrics. You know who you are. Don’t overlook or outsource this review; it’s critical to your digital marketing success.

5. If you weren’t a marketer, what job would you do?
Fantasy job #1: Work with Ann Handley. I’ll do anything.
Fantasy job #2: Have a cooking show, “Hearty & Festive Entertaining from a Small Manhattan Kitchen.”  (working title)

Want to learn more? Join us this Friday, March 11 for our free virtual conference, Digital Marketing World: Email Marketing, and learn the latest ways to ignite your email marketing results.

Like my in-box, my mind is filled now with the fabulous tips that she shared about gathering and analyzing data and, most importantly, how to use this information to create more relevant messages for your customers.

I won’t be like an overly long movie trailer and divulge every detail, but I will share a few ideas (from the many) worth mentioning:

• Be brilliant a few times a month. In other words, not every email message that you send out has to be yeehaw fabulous. It’s all right if some emails are better than others. Just make sure that, if you’re sending out emails once a week, you’re amazing at least twice a month.
• Use info that’s in the community. Don’t limit yourself to gathering the ingredients from just one place for your email marketing campaigns. Use your call center, the sales teams, emails, and customer service to create a more personalized email.
• Make sure the data you gather is actionable. Data isn’t useful if you’re not using it for something. And it’s not interesting if you can’t do something with it.
• Collect social media info on your forms. Most people don’t use the same names across their social media and business platforms. If you get the info upfront, it’ll be easier to match up the info and get a more complete picture of your customers.
• Realize that what works with one segment might not work with others. The data you collect might not be relevant to all segments of your customers. It doesn’t negate the value of the info—but know that it may not work for everybody.
• Store legacy data somewhere to access it later. Don’t toss old info. It might come in handy down the road. Just make sure you have it organized and placed somewhere that you can easily access later.

Did you miss this session? Were you at another one? (There’s so many tasty ones to choose from!) If you’re registered, you can check out the online video until May 1.

And if you were there, feel free to share what struck your fancy, too.

While the weather is just a wee bit colder than we anticipated when we came up with the tagline of the event—Turn Up the Heat—the Sheraton Austin is sizzling with some of the smartest marketers around, including one of my favorite speakers on the agenda, DJ Waldow, director of Community at Blue Sky Factory. Lucky for me, I had the opportunity to catch up with him and pick his brain on email marketing mistakes, marketing metrics, and what he’d be doing if he wasn’t a marketer. Here’s what he had to say.

1. What is your favorite part of your job?

I feel strongly that life and business is all about connections. My role as the director of Community at Blue Sky Factory allows me to connect with people every single day. I also love writing—articles, blog posts, etc., speaking at events, and working with/learning from other smart people.

2. What are some of the most common email marketing sins marketers commit?

Funny you should ask. Here’s 14 of them. That being said, I think one of the biggest mistakes is not understanding your subscribers. Are you just blasting content to them that may or may not be valuable? Have you asked what they’d like to hear about from you via email? The key to email marketing is to send timely, targeted, valuable content to people who have asked for it.

3. What would say is the most important metric for marketers to measure in 2011?

Conversions. Website pageviews, social media mentions, email open and/or click-through rates, etc. are all great but if they don’t result in more leads, more sales, more business, you are not really growing your business. In 2011, focus on the stuff that moves the needle, the stuff that matters.

4. Do you blog? Why? What does it do for your business?

I blog both personally Social Butterfly Guy and professionally Blue Sky Factory blog. On a personal level, it forces me to become a better writer, allows me to my chronicle my thoughts, and keeps a living historical record of my life. On a professional level, blogging drives leads (see question about “most important metric”), establishes credibility in the email marketing industry, and creates an archive of email marketing articles for easy future reference.

5. If you weren’t a marketer, what job would you do?

Wow. Where to begin? I’d love to be on TV or radio in some capacity. I’ve had a few “15 seconds of fame” moments and loved them. Also, as a huge fan of both the New York (football) Giants and the Michigan Wolverines (my alma mater), I could see myself working for either of them.

* Bonus question! Do you like your chili mild or spicy?

Spicy for sure. I grew up in Upstate New York, home of Buffalo wings. I’ve been eating spicy food since I was born!

If you’d like to catch DJ’s session on 7 Email Marketing Mistakes I Made & How to Avoid Them, and also get over 26 hours of digital marketing advice from the industry’s brightest minds, join us for Digital Marketing Forum Online, your front row seat at our popular in-person event in Austin, Texas. Watch the sessions live or on-demand at any time.

Yet the channel is still not satisfied.  As the in-box fragmented into so many devices, social networks, and specialty mailboxes, engagement became more important.  Mailbox providers like Yahoo! and Gmail—immune to the revenue contribution that so enthralls business owners—are  paying a lot more attention to whether anyone actually opens or reads or interacts with messages.  Otherwise, email is relegated to the junk folder.  The inverse of the click through rate is not neutral.  If 10% clicked, that means 90% didn’t.  Mailbox providers increasingly judge marketers on the 90% who are inactive.

In response, the email channel remains ambitious and continues to evolve.  Today, email marketing is no longer one size fits all. It’s part broadcast, part transaction-driver, part loyalty, and engagement succor.  In fact, because of this diversity of roles, email has become the glue by which marketers start and nurture conversations with subscribers and customers.

Glue? Is that an advancement from immaturity?  I think so—and so, it seems, do others who participated with me (@StephanieSAM) in the MarketingProfs Twitter conversation on Friday (Jan. 14) as part of the #profschat series.

1. At the start of the session, I tossed out a definition of “conversational glue” to be a series of messages that nurture/engage over time.  As we conversed, consensus focused around creating “content/messaging, over time, with a purpose, that is meaningful to customers.” And  @megfowler summed it up well, “Conversational glue is that sweet spot where your interests and your readers’ interests mesh.”
2. @jvanrijn got provocative, offering,  “Conversation can also be non-interactive. I’m not making myself popular with marketers, but not all messages need a response.”  We debated that for a while, and determined that in conversations, we do want to drive a response—or at least encourage another step in some direction. Other goals may be reached with messaging that doesn’t drive a response. To this point, @megfowler said, “Give them ways to respond/actions to take that benefit them. That adoption tells a huge story.”
3. We noted that newsletters that share information are not conversations. Still valuable, but not interactive in the same way as a conversation. We also discussed how promotions that focus on conversions and transactions are not conversations. I don’t need to converse with you to buy something.  Both of those are great uses of email marketing. They are just not conversations.
4. The timing of conversations builds value in both information and promotional messaging.  A conversation can drive a purchase.  A purchase can improve a customer’s willingness to have a conversation.  All these types of email marketing can synchronize and support each other.  A few participants noted that balance is important, as is timing.   A great tweet from @livepath speaks to this point: “conversation before conversion … and listening never optional.”
5. We brainstormed ways that marketers can collect data in order to customize experiences.  Past responses, surveys, competitive analysis, social communities, and comments on your blog are some of those offered.  And@sharonmostyn added, ” what YOU have to offer/differentiating factor”—a reminder that we must always work to show value in every message and at every touchpoint. And  @CarissaO reminded us, “So many brands struggle to know what their customers really want: The opp to ask is always there.”
6. That got us talking about content development.  Self-interest and internal pressure often prioritize what’s important to the brand rather than what’s important to subscribers.  I wondered aloud during the #profschat if “sometimes [there is] a disconnect between marketer desire to have conversation & subscriber willingness to converse.”  The marketer must become an advocate for the subscriber and not just for altruistic reasons.  Simply, relevancy improves response and revenue.
7. We debated if there should be more than one call to action (CTA) in any email message.  If email is the glue, must it be linear?  Most of the participants agreed that one CTA is all that most subscribers can effectively absorb and act upon.  Secondary calls to action can be provided if you have trouble getting internal teams to commit to one CTA.  My suggestion that “if you need more than on CTA then you have a segmentation problem” was widely re-tweeted.  @pcmguy offered that ” CTA doesn’t have to be a sale; Easier to get a relationship first then the sale.”  Now, that is conversation power!
8. Several participants talked about the importance of landing pages to the conversation, particularly when it comes to continuing a conversation once started.  @megfowler said, “Landing pages can build a conversation if they continue offering ways to respond and give feedback. Social elements help.”   @ChrisFougereHFX offered a widely retweeted insight: “Saw quote ystrdy “goal of landing/home pg is to get you off it!”    @Javiervw: suggested that “Landing pages are probably a continuation of the story to entice a call to action.”
9. We also talked a bit about the weather.  That’s just the nature of a Twitter chat!

What do you think?  Post a comment or ping me @StephanieSAM.  Check out the full conversation on Twitter.   Thanks to all who participated and for all the great ideas.  (And thanks to MarketingProfs for having me moderate.)  And please do join a future #profschat. They are every Friday at 12 noon ET.

But I neared the barn, I suddenly realized I didn’t know how to stop.  The barn kept getting closer, and I kept getting  more concerned.  Desperately, I pressed the brake as hard as I could!  The tractor was still in gear. It lurched and choked then crashed into the side of the barn as it stopped.  I went from king to court jester in just minutes.

Rather than rely on a crash course and jump into action, I should have been more prepared. That would have prevented my crash. Likewise,  many companies leap into marketing automation without being completely ready.

If you are thinking of automating your marketing, here are 5 thing to know before buying marketing automation.  If you have already purchased it, don’t worry, it’s not too late. These 5 tips can help you too.

1.  Technology alone is not the answer.

Many companies have made or are looking to make the major investment into marketing automation because they believe that, once they get it implemented, their marketing issues and challenges will be solved. Nothing could be further from the truth, yet still many companies are buying into the “technology as savior” myth.  We all watched this same dynamic unfold in the 90s during the early stages of the CRM market.  Sales management believed that CRM would improve the performance of their sales teams.  What happened, however, was that sales teams failed to adopt the technology. They became frustrated, and instead of improvement, many sales teams experience a decline in their performance.

Though marketing automation can be a valuable asset to a marketing organization, the technology alone will not provide a cure-all to an organization’s ills.  Before making the purchase, make sure you have the right foundation in place for automation to be a success.

2. It’s so easy a caveman could do it.

While this may be true for some insurance companies, it’s one of many myths that several of the marketing automation vendors are claiming.  Promises of 5-day installations and even giving the software away as a way to show “ease of use” are all gimmicks that have arisen as of late.   If you are looking to simply use marketing automation as a place to house your database and fire off some emails, then I would agree that the “5-day, easy-to-install” message would apply.  However, automation is used for much more than just email.  Marketing automation helps to streamline data segmentation, dynamic content delivery, metrics, etc.  Rushing to set up those processes with a new software platform can actually be reckless.  There is a difference between doing it right and doing it right now.  Marketing automation done right will take time.  This is evidenced by the 75% of marketing automation owners who claim they are still not getting the full value from it.

3.  Process is key.

Along with the idea that the technology alone is not the answer, companies that have taken the time to develop a defined lead management process often get the most value from their automation investment.

Aberdeen concluded that process is key when it said, “Nothing is more important than process when it comes to building a best-in-class lead management engine.”  Notice Aberdeen did not state technology, but process.  Companies that adopt automation with no forethought to process will in all likelihood automate chaos.  To reverse this effect and get the most out of an automation investment, companies should develop a Lead Management Framework consisting of the following processes:

• Data
• Lead Planning
• Lead Routing
• Lead Qualification (includes Lead Scoring)
• Lead Nurturing
• Metrics

Once this framework is defined among marketing, sales and other key groups, the implementation of automation will be the next logical step.

4.  You need people.

Any kind of new technology requires people to run it.  Whether it’s your own internal team, or an outsourced team, you’ll need to have someone (or more than one person) responsible for the day-to-day management of the tool. I’m not just talking about a junior marketing coordinator, or simply training your interns on the speeds and feeds of the software.  To have marketing automation work, you need the right people, people who are process minded, who understand sales’ importance, and who measure effectiveness.  Without them, you won’t get the desired return from your automation investment.

5.  It’s all about the customer.

Often times when discussions turn to why marketing automation makes sense, the reasons are focused internally  . . . making marketing more efficient, doing more with less, automating the every day tasks.  While these certainly are all benefits that can be derived with automation, it should be noted that the drive behind marketing automation should be focused outwardly… to improve communications with your prospects and customers.  Specifically, the goal of automation should be to have an ongoing 1-1 dialogue with your buyers, allowing you to develop and grow a business relationship.  Automation allows you to deliver the right content at the right time, which can often be the difference between developing a relationship and losing a potential customer.  If automation isn’t being used to grow the customer base, then what’s the point?

Acquiring marketing automation without being prepared can have a profound negative effect for your organization.   However, if you take the time to prepare yourself and your company, then maybe you can avoid crashing the tractor into the barn.

Consider this post a refresher for folks who have been emailing since the days of shiny AOL disks—or feel free to share this post with friends and family who still view email as an online version of passing notes in class.

Write an eye-catching subject line.

The recipients of your email are as busy as you are. Chances are they will skim their in-boxes for the hottest, most urgent emails first and then make time for the secondary fires later. You want to get their attention quickly and prompt them to open your email.

If the information is vital and timely, make sure the subject line says so. A true-life example: “My neighbor is giving away his piano” is a better subject line than “Yo. Whazzup?” The former would have let me known that I could have gotten a free piano. Instead, I waited until evening to answer my relative’s e-mail and completely missed out on the free piano. (If you want to boost your subject-line writing skills, check out the bite-size  Take 10: How to Write the Perfect Email Marketing Subject Line webcast.)

Keep your facts straight and clear.

Ask yourself, “Why am I writing this email? What does this person need to know? Is there a date, place and time to keep in mind?” Imagine that you’ve only got a minute or two to get your point across. You need to be friendly, direct and clear in your communication. Don’t provide a rambling back story to the email.

Also, if you are mentioning numbers, dates, and times, be sure that you don’t make the email sound like a word problem on a math test. This week, I received an email that my middle son’s game was scheduled for 9 a.m. but  we could get to the field 30 minutes early for a 20-minute drill for a 20-minute game at 9:30 a.m. after the practice if we wanted to but it was mandatory yet not and the field was reserved for 50 minutes.

Choose your audience carefully.

You’ve clicked on all the right names from your address book. Haven’t you? Make sure to look through the list one more time. Does everyone on the list need to know your question or read the email?

If you’re answering an email, don’t automatically hit “reply all” to mega-lists. Consider whether you really want all those people reading your reply. You might end up sharing the comment or question with entirely too many people. Plus, hitting “reply all” is like the equivalent of stepping forward from the crowd and speaking for everyone.

This week, a snarky parent answered a rambling email from a coach by hitting “reply all” —and we all got to read a condescending, poorly written email. It was the equivalent of watching a kid throw a temper tantrum in the middle of the store where you are shopping. You want to avert your eyes, not react, but you can’t avoid what’s in front of you.

Of course, “reply all” works well when you’re part of a team or a collaborative effort. But don’t hit “reply all” automatically. Think first.

Check your spelling.

It doesn’t take very long to hit spell check and see what went awry in the crafting of your email. Newbies sometimes feel that the typos and hasty scribbles make the email sound “real.” It only lets your readers know that you didn’t take time to write the email—so why should they take time to read it?

Use the right “from” address.

Most people have more than one email address. Take the time to log in under the appropriate name for the email. If you send 492 emails from work about non-related work issues, don’t get upset if we use that address to answer your email. What do we know about your different accounts? Most people reply to the email that was sent.

Give readers closure.

You don’t hang up the phone abruptly without signaling that you’re ending the conversation. You don’t just walk away after you’ve made your point (unless you’re mad). Be sure to signal the end of your email. You can include a reminder for the next meeting, recap in a quick sentence what you will do, or write a run-of-the-mill-but-oh-so-purposeful “feel free to contact me  with comments or questions.” It’s good manners.

Feel free to add your own tips in the comments section.

Allons-y,

Veronica

To continue to earn high revenue from the channel, e-mail marketers must adopt a new attitude about the importance of subscriber experience and loyalty—and focus on making our e-mail messages worthy of the inbox.  Earning entrance onto a subscriber’s personal address book is huge now, but what makes your program really worthy of this level of connection?  Consider also how important the first couple of messages have become.  If you can’t engage new subscribers early, they will quickly start to ignore or filter your messages.  Subscribers have a lot more tools to keep us out of sight–and out of mind.  That is bad for revenue and long-term relationships.

There are three really central strategies every marketer must consider to begin to adjust to the new reality.  Embrace them before the full suite of inbox management tools become ubiquitous over the next few months.

1. Segment your “from” addresses. From what we here at Return Path can tell from using the new tools, the Hotmail Sweep feature bases filtering on the “body from” domain, so the entire from address is what is filtered.   Therefore, marketing@returnpath.net and transactional@returnpath.net should be treated differently.  Unlike their current personal block list, Sweep won’t give the option to block by domain, only the entire address.  (Subscribers can still block domains with other tools.)  Please consider this carefully. As marketers, we know the nuance between marketing@ and transactional@, but subscribers may not.  The actual e-mail experience must be unique and tied to the from address; each e-mail message type must have a clear purpose to be viewed by subscribers as unique. Otherwise, they may sweep a marketing@ from address and wonder why newsletter@ is still coming to the inbox. That second set of messages may be quickly marked as spam.

2. Turn frequency into cadence.  When everything reached the inbox, being present was enough to earn a brand impression.  As users employ more filters, being relevant and timely will trump volume.  When I open the folder, I will expect to see timely messages tailored to my interest.  On the other hand, repeated reminders about last week’s sale may turn me off from visiting this folder again.

3. Segmentation by activity trumps demographics.   Messages sorted into folders are likely to be viewed by utility.  Defaults at Hotmail include Social Networks and Upcoming Events.  There is no “special offers” flag, so users will either create folders by sender (e.g., L. L. Bean) or activity (e.g., Sales, Banking, Read Later).  It’s up to marketers to create content and offers that is worth reading later. In the mix of message types, transactions are the new connectors.  As always, transactional messages are very welcome and could be a great co-marketing opportunity.  Consider appropriate marketing that is tied to the transaction rather than pure promotions that dilute the value of the original purpose.  (Also, remember that CAN SPAM governs what is considered transaction vs. marketing in the United States.)

As you look at these strategies, keep in mind the mobile implications.  Portable devices may have fewer features than PC-based email clients.  For example, Hotmail on a smartphone does not allow movement to any folder but trash. If you have a high mobile readership, consider segment and frequency options to reduce the clutter and engage more deeply.

The Ultra Managed Inbox can spell opportunity for marketers.  In fact, inbox management is not new—all these types of filters have been available for a long time. Soon, however, they will be automated and promoted heavily to new users.  There’s lots of good news for marketers here, but only if we get ready now and start testing what it really means to engage and compete with the clutter surrounding our messages.

The “rainy day” you’ve been waiting for to do a serious audit of your optimization of the email channel has arrived.  How are you planning to adapt for the new, ultra-managed inbox?  Let me know any questions or thoughts in the comments section below.

Following are 5 must-follow tips to ensure email marketing deliverability success and optimize this critical marketing tool.

1.  Always include a compelling welcome message

A welcome message is extremely powerful and falls under the category of email marketing 101.  Yet most companies neglect to send a welcome message.  It is essential as it sets the tone for what readers can expect from the email, plus if placed at the beginning it ensures deliverability.

Best practices for the welcome message include:

• Isolating welcome messages on a separate IP to catch unknown users and improperly formatted addresses immediately.
• Track responses to welcome messages by source to identify high performing partners, keywords or ads (then, you’ll have data to allocate more funds to sources that drive the highest engagement).
• Use welcome messages to educate new subscribers about areas of your service/Website they may not have known about.

2. The cleaner your list, the better

Poorly kept email lists are a top factor hindering email deliverability.  Continual upkeep on a list is vital in order to maintain quality and clear off bad addresses.  Generally speaking, these bad addresses fall into three buckets:

• Unknown users: email addresses that have been turned off.  These accounts usually just bounce and should be removed from your list immediately.
• Inactive addresses: These addresses are still in use, however are not responsive, or addresses that have been abandoned yet not closed.
• Spam traps: Aspam trap is an address that was created to catch senders who harvest records.

Focus on eliminating these addresses from your current list, and add steps in place to keep your list clean, such as quarantining new data, making it easy for customers to provide updated information, considering a confirmed opt-in, and vetting new data sources carefully.

3.  Always authenticate

Authentication is an important step to be a trusted sender of information.  The good news is that authentication is simple, all it means is that you validate emails submitted are being distributed by you. The benefits of authentication are separating you as a legitimate business as opposed to someone involved in spamming or phishing scams.  The two types of email authentication are IP-based, which uses a path registration approach and cryptographic, which uses a message-validation approach.  It’s best practice to implement both of these (if practical) for your business.  But be sure to implement at least one.

4. Organize your infrastructure

The quality of your reputation as an email marketing sender is directly tied to the quality of your infrastructure.  Work in conjunction with your IT department or email broadcast provider to pinpoint and then fix issues.  This can be challenging, but the pay-off is well worth it.

5.  Send ultra-relevant messages

Take the time to listen to your audience.  Learn their behaviors and motivations; do this through both qualitative and quantitative methods.  Also, study your past campaigns in order to determine what content archetypes work best.  Overall, refine as you move forward and sharpen messages carefully over time.  Relevancy is critical to maintaining subscribers and growing your email marketing ROI.

Of course, these tips are just the start. Getting to a mature point with your email marketing requires iteration, practice and constant learning.  What else would you add to help those who are new?

Penn asserts most marketers understand conceptually what ROI is, but many are still foggy on what it is not. He clarifies: “ROI is an objective metric, a bottom line truth. Things like number of Twitter followers, pageviews, blog comments, etc. are diagnostic metrics. Imagine you were on a road trip. Diagnostic metrics tell you how the trip is going. Objective metrics tell you if you’re there yet.”

Explains Penn: “Consider this from the perspective of losing weight. You have an objective metric: lose 10 pounds. Now let’s say you use a treadmill as part of this goal. You have plenty of diagnostic metrics, like treadmill speed, miles run, etc. If you make the mistake of thinking a diagnostic metric is an objective metric, then your progress will automatically skew towards achieving those diagnostic metrics by any means, even incorrect ones. For example, if your goal is six miles a day no matter what, you could just stick your cat on the treadmill for an hour. At the end, you’ll have gotten the number you want – six miles – but not gotten any closer to achieving your objective goal. Also, your cat will probably be mad at you.”

The results of such an analysis can be dramatic. For example, when Boston Martial Arts measured its marketing efforts in terms of objective results, they discovered email ROI was a whopping 1,755%! Facebook and Twitter efforts on the other hand both showed negative ROI.

To evaluate what’s working in marketing, Penn says marketing ROI should be measured in terms of “cost per lead”, and ultimately, how many of those leads result in cold hard cash flowing into the company’s bank account. Tracking efforts to this extent requires marketing to work in concert with sales to make sure that all efforts are coordinated, cooperative and truly supportive.

That’s why Penn requires his marketing staff to attend sales meetings and stand with sales on the front lines. He says this helps them come face to face with their audience and as a result, better equips them to design campaigns that will deliver qualified leads to sales. Penn says there’s absolutely no excuse for marketing not knowing what prospects want.

“Attaching a dollar value to each tactic gives you a clearer picture of what is and isn’t working. That allows you to focus resources on supporting the marketing efforts that are earning the most money,” says Penn. Simply put: If it’s not earning any (or worse, losing) money — stop doing it. Caveat: unless you have compelling evidence that gives you a reason to believe that the investment will pay off in the future.

Ideally, the flow should look like this: Marketing provides sales with qualified leads, sales turns the leads into customers, customer service makes those customers into evangelists, who not only will keep buying from you but who also will help you spread the word about your product or service. But the cycle is initiated by marketing and the quality of the turn hinges on its effectiveness.

For more information about how to think about this topic and a deeper dive on how to do the ROI calculations (including handy worksheets) check out the 20-minute web seminar “Calculating Marketing ROI in Three Easy Steps”  on the Blue Sky Factory website.

Related post from Penn’s blog, Awaken Your Superhero: Are we there yet? Diagnostic versus objective social media metrics.

Certainly, there have been numerous challengers to email marketing’s throne, not the least of which is social media. However, email is still a vibrant, growing medium that has a future for a number of reasons.

Reason #1: Email Sending Platform Vendors

There are way too many email marketing platform providers for this industry to die. Do you think companies like Vertical Response, Constant Contact, Lyris, MailChimp, Exact Target, Emma, iContact, Bronto, Blue Sky Factory and other such providers are going to simply lie down and let email marketing go the way of the albatross? Not for one minute!

Read this recent post from Bronto that speaks directly to the notion that email is dying: “Email marketing can co-exist with any marketing channel; more importantly, email can help leverage social media and vice versa … Consumers aren’t choosing one medium over the other; they are simply utilizing more mediums than ever before.”

Also, consider the fact of how many more email marketing platform providers there are now. The list above includes several newer industry participants, MailChimp, Emma, and Blue Sky Factory to name just a few.

Reason #2: Email is Ingrained in Our Marketing Psyche

Email has been around almost since the advent of the Internet. It’s a staple of the marketing milieu and one of the most commonly used forms. It’s still effective, both from a cost and conversion standpoint.

For example, according to research conducted by the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing generated an ROI of $43.62 for every dollar spent on it in 2009. The expected figure for 2010 is $42.08.

Reason #3: Email and Social Media Can Work Together

For years, I taught that blogs and email are akin to a digital peanut butter and jelly sandwich. They are made for each other in terms of repurposing content and as complimentary channels by which brands can stay top of mind with their customer.

That’s true of other forms of social media as well. Consider that social networks like Facebook rely on email as a vital communication channel. Email notifications can be sent to everyone of a brand’s fans from their Fan Page, for example. These messages are not merely transactional in nature either, but often marketing-oriented.

While benign by comparison to more full-fledged platforms such as those listed above, the fact is email is there, baked right into a key piece of the largest, fastest-growing, most ubiquitous social network known to man.

Reason #4: Small Businesses Aren’t Using Email, But They Will

For all the organizations using email marketing effectively, many are not, especially small businesses.

That leaves room for a lot of opportunity, which is why email marketing platform providers such as Vertical Response and Constant Contact are mounting intensive marketing efforts to change that;  small businesses are their bread and butter. (VR even has a Twitter channel devoted specifically to small business, @vr4smallbiz.)

Email marketing is not going anywhere but up in my opinion. It may no longer be the only channel by which marketer’s communicate with customers, but it’s certainly not dying. So, can we lay that argument to rest?

Bruce Biegel, managing director of Winterberry Group, presented to the Email Insider Summit conference this week, and I am pretty sure it was good news.

We all lived through a 2009 when our inexpensive and high ROI email channel was expected to carry a larger share of retention and customer upselling, even with no new budget.   Biegel seems to hint that 2010 will be another year when email marketers will have to fight hard for a budget.  That worries me a bit.  If Biegel is correct and this is the year that companies invest in digital channels to build top line revenue, focusing on acquisition and media optimization, will companies resist new investment in retention and email marketing?

The answer seems to be, “Yes, just steal from other channels to get what you need.”  Winterberry finds that the recession is still holding back consumer spending, but in Q1, companies are starting to invest in marketing again, particularly focused on growing the top line. That means most of the marketing spending will shift back toward acquisition and demand generation, but a lot of consumer caution will remain at least for another couple of quarters.

Even though email marketing is not typically included in acquisition budgets, Biegel remains optimistic for the email channel.  He says that when asked, marketers do say that they will increase spending in email marketing, but that since this is an internally managed function, it doesn’t always show up in the spending forecasts.  Winterberry does forecast a modest increase of email spending to $1.4B up from $1.2B last year. Biegel says he thinks that may be too low, and suggests the spending may actually reach $1.6B.  He also says that retention spending will move from postal marketing to email marketing, and that the email will benefit from the general shift of dollars into the digital toolbox.

I think what that means is that email marketers who want new budgets must convince executives that email is a “hub” for customer communications and needs support for integration, content management and data management.  Email works really well with all the acquisition and lead generation channels: search, online outreach, commerce, and social and apps marketing.  Certainly, most house files include prospects as well as customers.  An email platform that works really well with social and eCRM is essential.  Investment in data management, campaign automation, and content optimization will result in increased response and customer satisfaction. The argument for more automation and data integration should be straight. Many marketers have already proven the connection between targeting and response.

“Email spending is still out of sync with its importance as a channel,” Biegel says.  True.  So the challenge for email marketers is to build a strong business case for integration and optimization in order to use email as a strategic weapon, and bury it’s legacy as a cheap batch and blast broadcast cash cow forever.

I know we all whisper it, but it’s true.  B2B buyers are liars. They are.  There, I said it.

If you’re in B2B marketing and sales, you probably aren’t surprised by that statement, and you probably suspect it yourself.  But where’s the proof?  How and why do B2B buyers lie? And what are the implications for your demand generation programs?

The “lying” by B2B buyers is a nuanced reality.  It’s not something that buyers do out of spite; it’s something they do both intentionally and unintentionally to better manage the dynamics of their interactions with vendors—to gain control in the buyer/seller relationship.  But if we are going to anticipate and respond to this situation, we must better understand these nuances.

So here’s my take on the nature of the “lies” and how we can respond as marketers.

How and why do B2B buyers lie?

Here are some of the key points to understand about our interactions with B2B buyers:

Buyers are only willing to share a limited amount of information at the initial point of contact with your organization. In the beginning of cultivating the buyer/seller relationship, you don’t know the buyer, and (s)he doesn’t know you.  Yet we as marketers too often ask the buyer to tell his/her complete life story to download a white paper—even though that is the first point of contact you’ve ever had with that buyer.  There is something wrong with this approach.

The results of a recent study indicate that, at initial stages of contact, buyers only provide accurate and complete information on the most basic of information they’re asked to supply for things like white paper downloads.  Only name, email address, industry, company name and job title have high rates (i.e., greater than 50% of the time) of being “always” completed correctly.

What about those questions we use to further qualify potential leads?  According to the same study, technology buyers say they “always” provide accurate answers to custom questions only 29% of the time.  That means 71% of the time there’s some degree of lying going on.

Craig Rosenberg (a.k.a. the ‘Funnelholic) commented on this in a past post on his blog.  He explains it’s just too early in the process of getting to know a buyer to go so deep with qualifying questions:

It’s noble to try, but don’t use reg forms to do the job of your lead qualification or sales team.  You are scaring great prospects off, and are hurting conversion to little benefit.  Use your reg forms to confirm interest, target your market, and get their info.  Gather more data on your second date or your third when you’ve both invested some time.

This point of view is supported by other marketers that have tested the impact on quality and quantity of registration requirements for their own demand generation programs.  “[A] lot of people—more than 75%—DON’T sign up for papers requiring registration, which means the vendor is missing the opportunity to share and disseminate their knowledge,” comments Jay Hallberg, VP of Marketing for Spiceworks in a recent Q&A with the Savvy B2B Marketing blog folks.

So-called “BANT” information for buyers and their organizations increasingly must be discovered on an implicit basis, not asked for on an explicit basis: What does this mean?  BANT stands for budget, authority, needs and timing, and it is a basic set of criteria that nearly all B2B marketing and sales organizations use to assess potential buyers and their organizations.  Implicit data is behavioral data (i.e., the things buyers tell us through their actions).  Explicit data is self-reported data (i.e., the things buyers tell us directly, such as by filling out a form online).  And the issue I’m calling out?  It is simple:  Not only do buyers not want to share this information at first contact, but more than ever buyers often don’t really have accurate, explicit answers to BANT questions, so we have to figure out when/where they’re moving forward on an implicit basis.

Recent research by DemandGen Report found that the B2B buying process is less formalized than ever before.  “More than 8 in 10 respondents said the buying process did not follow a traditional path where a budget was established, criteria outlined and then an RFP distributed to a pre-set list of solution providers,” according to a post by Andrew Gaffney summarizing the report.

B2B buyer organizations are becoming more agile and making more decisions on a non-planned basis.  But this is bad news for our BANT criteria.  A lack of formal process means we can’t really get the information we need when we ask about that process.  So the best indicator of a buyer’s real intentions is his/her behavior (i.e., actually doing the things that indicate they are considering a purchase).  This means that BANT increasingly is something that must be gathered on an implicit basis, and it speaks to the importance of B2B marketers using behavioral factors to better score and route interactions with prospective buyers via marketing automation.

Your prospective, individual buyer is not the sole decision-maker at his/her organization. Even if answered truthfully and accurately, the responses of an individual buyer to questions posed via online forms only constitutes a portion of the buying picture.  Perhaps we can call this “unintentional” lying, but it is the skew that results from one contact inside an organization having his/her perspective on the situation—which may not be consistent with the perspective of the larger group that will approve the final purchase.

The fact is that B2B purchase decisions are not made by a single buyer most of the time.  Increasingly, a complex, savvy buying unit makes B2B purchase decisions inside organizations.  For purchases in the $25K to $99K range, nearly 2/3 of the time there are four or more buyers engaged in the decision, according to data in recent marketing report. For purchases in the $100K to $999K range, 92% of the time there are four or more buyers engaged in the decision.  And it goes up from there.

Buyers aren’t ready to talk to us when they are downloading a white paper, anyway. Any content marketing strategy requires understanding the B2B buying process and rationalizing content and engagement around this process.  Earlier on in the process — when a buyer is first becoming acclimated to, and wrapping his/her head around a problem, it’s more important to help educate and shape the direction of a buyer’s thinking  in a hands-off fashion than it is to capture his/her information yet.  Initial lead capture must be staged a step or two below the point of initial research and consideration.  Lead capture is the launching point for dialogue with a prospective buyer, but it requires having established a growing relationship and having credentialed your organization upstream.

Not only is this good practice, but this is increasingly how buyers expect to act.  The nature of the B2B buyer has changed in a Web 2.0 world, and buyers expect to be able to do more research on their own time and unhindered by proactive vendor interactions.  B2B buyers spend 79% of their time in what Robert Jolles calls the “Acknowledgment” phase in his classic text, Customer Centered Selling.  Acknowledgment phase is the phase where buyers are on the fence, thinking about a problem but not yet ready to act or to pursue a formal buying process.

Buyers need to go through a process of self-education before they move beyond the Acknowledgment phase and before they are ready to become a lead.  So attempts to glean information from them through forms, early on in this process will only lead to buyers providing incorrect information because they want you to leave them alone … until they’re ready to talk to your organization.

How can B2B marketers tune their demand generation programs to anticipate (and overcome) these buyer lies?

The good news is that there are several techniques that have emerged in recent times to help B2B marketers cope with this situation and to gain leverage in their interactions with potential buyers.

Three ideas you can embrace today:

> Require less up front; progressively profile and append data instead: Make your content targeted at the earliest stages of the buying process free.  Don’t require registration.  And when you have that first white paper that requires registration—because it represents the next step in the buying process—just get their email address.  You can continue to send nurture emails and invite prospects to Webinars and events where you can iteratively ask more information from the buyer as they continue their process.  This approach is known as progressive profiling.  You can also append information such as industry data after the fact, using resources from folks like Dunn & Bradstreet.  Such an approach is more appropriate to the rhythm of interaction with buyers in a Web 2.0 world, and it is more appropriate to the give and take that is part of real relationship building.

> Score based on a combination of demographic and behavioral data: Don’t explicitly ask buyers everything you want to know; instead, observe and infer.  If you have found that 49 out of 50 prospects that take X action, such as visiting a specific page on your website, have a high probability of wanting to buy from you, then use that information to increase the buyer’s lead score and have a sales person contact him/her.  A lot smoother than having a check box on your first reg page that says, “Would you like someone to contact you?”

> Combine marketing automation with human contact: Craig Roseberg called this out in his quote.  Don’t expect to learn everything about a prospective buyer through online or automated interactions.  Marketing automation should exist to help power your lead management and content marketing strategies and give you greater operating efficiency, but you still need a combination of smart processes, people and technology to be successful.   A piece of these strategies should include live contact via Webinars, field events, inside sales and field sales interactions.  Use these live points of contact as key steps in your progressive profiling—building this into what you know about your prospective buyer and informing the next steps in your interaction.  Again, technology can weave all of this online and offline insight together, but the buyer facing piece must be a combination of online content and offline interactions.

What do you think?

What are your experiences with buyers “lying,” and how has your company responded in its demand-generation programs?

Is your inbound marketing up to speed? Watch here to find out.

The good news is that while many marketers still don’t use segmentation or keep their files particularly clean, marketers are planning to adopt more of these strategies, including advanced segmentation (42%), personalization (37%) and behavioral targeting (34%), according to the Email Marketing Industry Census 2010 from eConsultancy and Adestra. 

Does that seem like only a minor victory? I confess I’m an optimist by nature.  It’s not like we’ve arrived, true, but it’s a lot more encouraging than in past years when marketers planned only to keep the status quo.  In some ways, email marketing is its own worst enemy.  It works so well and provides such high ROI that it sometimes seems like the magic fountain of email marketing revenue never abates.  It’s hard to make a case for doing the hard work of segmentation, list hygiene and creative testing if the channel still “works” without them.

Fact is that most email marketing programs don’t work as well as they could, and many leave  significant revenue on the table.  Even simple segmentation can boost campaign results by 150% or more, in my experience.   If there is a lack of targeting or too frequent mailings we have churn, subscriber fatigue, missed results, higher complaints, lower inbox placement, and slumped  LTV.  With a thoughtful, subscriber-centric content and contact strategy, we earn more sales and revenue, higher short term and long term response and value, stronger subscriber satisfaction and improved word of mouth.

That seems like a very clear choice to me.  Why not segment to create a better experience for subscribers?  And earn higher revenue for our business?!

Mailbox providers like Yahoo! and Gmail, and blacklists owners like those at SpamHaus blame marketers for sending too frequently to subscribers who are not engaging.  The penalty is that senders will be blocked from reaching any subscribers on their networks. And once a sender or marketer is blocked, it’s increasingly hard to convince the mailbox providers that subscribers really do want those messages.  Marketers must maintain active files in order to prove that their efforts are actually providing value to subscribers. All that dead wood on our files will eventually come back to haunt us.

Consider these three new truths about email marketing and deliverability:

1. Permission is not enough to ensure messages reach the inbox or earn a response.  Return Path’s Global Email Deliverability Benchmark report found that 20% of legitimate commercial email never reaches the inbox in North America, and 15% goes missing in Europe.   Marketers and other senders must track and improve the key metrics that affect email deliverability like complaints, unknown users and file responsiveness.

2. Despite the noise about “engagement” being the new metric to watch, complaints are still the key factor in sender reputation and inbox placement. Complaint data (clicks on the Report Spam button) have always been about engagement.  They are a proxy for subscriber satisfaction.  Some ISPs also use subscriber level data as part of the “cocktail,” but complaints are still the most influential element. There will likely always be new metrics introduced into sender reputation calculations because spammers are always changing their tactics. For instance, Hotmail has a panel, Yahoo! is experimenting with click-through rates as a qualifier of subscriber activity, and several global ISPs use “This is Not Spam” data (clicks from the junk/bulk folder) as a way to track “false positives” (messages in the bulk folder that subscribers want in the inbox).

3. No ESP or delivery vendor can correct a poor sender reputation. Sorry, but marketers must own their own sender reputation. A good email broadcast vendor (either hosted or on-premise) will maintain a solid infrastructure and help you authenticate, track complaints and manage bounces properly. But no vendor controls your data sourcing, frequency or content strategy – all of which contribute to sender reputation.  Do not get complacent.  Make sure you have the data you need to actively manage and optimize inbox deliverability. Sender reputation is not a one-time project; it’s an ongoing measure of your current practices.

Let’s do it in 2010, everyone!  Let’s prove the naysayers wrong, and show that email marketers are smart, savvy and disciplined enough to do the right thing by subscribers.  And let’s show those smarty-pants social marketers that email still can earn the highest revenue in the digital marketing mix!

The short answer is YES, of course it’s better to get permission. It’s always better to get permission.  Permission is the first step toward setting expectations, creating relationships and keeping data clean.  Permission is a subscriber engagement opportunity.

However, it’s only a first step.  Permission does not give marketers a license to just send whatever, whenever.  In fact, more than just a one time exercise, permission must be re-earned with every message.  Lots of subscribers who gave permission unsubscribe or just ignore future messages.  They also complain (click on the Report Spam button), which depresses inbox placement for all campaigns. You can’t earn a response if you aren’t in the inbox.

What really matters is not that permission was granted, but that it is earned.  Adopting this attitude leads to decisions like:

1. Sending only messages that have real value, at the time when they help subscribers most.  For example, sending newsletters every month on the third Thursday might be a fine strategy to just “stay visible,” but sending promotions on days when subscribers are ready to take action on timely deals is a better one.  Send more messages when a subscriber is “in market” (e.g.: just purchased, up for renewal, etc) and fewer when they are not.
2. Re-engaging with non-active subscribers before too much time goes by.  If the messages are not resonating, stop them, or offer to change frequency or content type.
3. Preventing list churn and fatigue by moderating frequency. More messages are not welcome.  More messages that are valuable and relevant are welcome. 

I’m sure that advocacy of permission over forgiveness will take the wind out of a few readers’ sails.  Permission requires a strong value proposition. It also means your file could be smaller.  That is more work for fewer records.  On the surface, it might sound like poor marketing strategy, but actually, it results in a better situation.  Subscribers who really want to be on your file are always going to be more engaged and return higher response and revenue. Lots of “sleepers” on the file only return somnambulant results.  Subscriber satisfaction and the resultant ROI is, after all, the whole point.

Marketers might also consider that not every subscriber has to be subscribed for everything, or forever.  If you gather business cards at a trade show, for instance,  it’s not illegal to email them a single follow up note (or maybe 2-3) that thanks them, offers a nice treat and invites them to opt-in for your email newsletter.  Woo them rather than just assume they want to be on the file. Similarly for co-reg data or whitepaper download requests or sweepstakes.  Interest in a particular offer like these does not necessarily also mean ongoing interest in a newsletter or promotional offers.  Take time to nurture these prospects, rather than flood them with messages they didn’t ask for, and don’t really speak to their needs or interests.

I’d love to hear from folks who have adjusted permission rules and found good (or bad) results.  How are you thinking about permission as a strategic engagement tool, rather than a barrier to list size?

Please take this 3-question survey, and then come back and read the rest of this post.
Here’s the rub. I’ve had this conversation several times over just the past few days, but it occurs nearly weekly all year long.
A smart markter will say, “We get 98% of our email marketing in the inbox.”
I say, “Great! How do you know?”
Marketer: “We get a report from our ESP/MTA vendor/IT guy.”
Me, “Are you sure that means inbox placement? Sounds like it might be your bounce rate.”
Marketer: “No, it’s reported to me as ‘delivered’ or ‘deliverability.’ Doesn’t that mean inbox?”
Me: “Not always. Let’s check it out.”
In every case, it turns out that the number being reported is the bounce rate. Bounces are a good number to track, but they have nothing to do with inbox placement.
“Bounce rate” and “inbox placement” are not even really related to each other. The first is a measure of list quality and the second is your opportunity index. If you don’t reach the inbox, you cannot earn a response. Inbox placement is the first line of opportunity for response and revenue. You can’t manage and optimize it if you aren’t tracking it.
It’s critical that every email marketer know both numbers.
The survey will help me try to assess how widely held is this misunderstanding. I’ll be sure to report the results back via the MarketingProfs blog.
Pass the survey along via Twitter (I’m @StephanieSAM) or in your own blog. And please give me feedback in the comments section below.

No wonder the director of marketing looked at me and said, “Is this really the best way to spend our precious time, energy and IT resources?!”
So many email marketers say that they know a preference center will enable more choices and value for subscribers–particularly as we build relationships across a matrix of brands, social networks and email message types. Do moms want to be alerted via email to community discussions on Facebook? Do business users want LinkedIn weekly news headlines but prefer event invites via email? Are Australians particularly sensitive to “service” messages in the guise of marketing?
We’d all like to give our customers and prospects those choices. Does it have to be that hard to build such a self selection tool that will actually work?
We are already fighting hard to get a preference center on the planning table. Management wants us to keep the list large and growing, and to send more messages rather than fewer. There are penalties to not offering preferences, usually too high frequency with low relevance. These strategies (or lack of strategy) will quickly depress inbox placement due to higher complaints (clicks on the Report Spam button at Gmail, Yahoo! or in Outlook). An untargeted approach also churns the file, reduces response rates and lowers lifetime value.
Those penalties are real, but the pressure is also real to accept the long term hit for a short term gain. Selling a preference center internally often fails because fundamentally, most companies don’t want to give up control. We want to keep our marketing options wide open. If we respect subscriber preferences, we may not be able to e-mail anything we want at any time.
Yikes. It’s hard to compete with that sort of thinking, especially if the IT team is telling management that building a preference center is costly and time consuming.
There are soft costs to every marketing decision–and particularly when it comes to subscriber-centric ones like lowering frequency to increase relevancy, removing inactive/non responsive addresses from the file–and building a preference center where subscribers can choose their own message types and frequency.
Advocating for these things can quickly make the email marketing person very unpopular. That’s no fun, even if you know you are representing a good cause: The interests of your customers.
The ways that I’ve been successful advocating preference centers and improving relevancy by sending fewer messages with higher relevancy always couples the hard costs, real rewards, lost opportunity value, and the impact of those longer term “soft costs.”

1. Revenue–now and later. Sending information that subscribers want, even if it’s less frequent, will earn higher response now, and improve the chances that subscribers will continue to engage and respond in the future. Prove your revenue opportunity by measuring for the same set of subscribers, the difference in response rates between messages that have explicit permission (information specifically requested by this subscriber) and messages with assumed permission (everything else). That lift can range between 2% and 200%, and is generally what you can expect to earn in overall revenue by targeting all your e-mail marketing by preference.
2. Cost. Over mailing or sending irrelevant and untargeted e-mail messages has a cost …. both in opportunity and real dollars. Subscribers who do not find value will complain (clicking the Report Spam button) which depresses inbox placement for all your messages. If you don’t reach the inbox, you can’t earn a response. There is also a small but real cost and wasted marketing resource (pennies per message) to sending e-mail that no one is interested in reading.
3. Data. Subscribers tell you about their interests and needs when they visit the preference center. Use that data to guide social and other digital content and improve the depth of connection with prospects and customers.
4. Persona. Customers are not all created equally, and nor do they have static needs. All great B2B marketing operates dynamically within the sales lifecycle. Preference center data identifies subscribers who are moving in the cycle or have new needs (e.g.: changing content selections) or are feeling neglected (e.g.: lowering the frequency). Use that data to guide segmentation and targeting, and sales team outreach.
5. Investment pays off. If you build it, they may not come. A preference center has to be marketed in order to provide value. Be sure to celebrate your preference center in the welcome message, on the unsubscribe page, in your website navigation, via Twitter, in your footer and with dedicated e-mail messages. Like any other feature of your website, a preference center must have real value or it won’t be used.

How have you made the case for your preference center? Also, if you are technical, what sort of ideas can you offer to help us design tools that are easier to build and simpler to keep current?
Love to hear thoughts on this, thanks!

We’ve heard today about social and engagement strategies from big brands like Intel and Dell, smaller brands like Hansen’s Soda, Salon.com and Radian6 and B2B marketers like Symantec. The consistent message is to listen first, ask later. Creating fun, cool experiences (like a t-shirt contest from Intel or a photo sharing community from Hansen’s) are about engagement, but only work because the brand already has credibility from being present and active in ongoing conversations.
Some other great advice to consider as you grow your social presence:

1. Start from a position of strength. Build from the value you provide today via email and content assets like whitepapers. Use response data from these channels to understand what topics engage. Build on them via social conversations.
2. Ask questions. Start your social strategy with, “How can I help you?” Only sell after you have relationships. (Just like in offline, in-person sales, if you build the relationship well, and focus on needs identification, you never have to hard sell.)
3. Put community on the “front page.” Remember that there is no front page any more …. search landing pages and community sites that are owned elsewhere can be just as important as your home page.
4. Track it. Measure engagement and not just reach. Although this could be defined in a lot of ways, and there is buzz now around tracking visibility and ideas and share of voice; the bottom line is the bottom line. This is business. Measure ROI by how much lift/revenue you received.
5. Be disciplined. Not everyone will be interested in every thought you have or every movement of your company. Keep the subscriber/customer interest in mind.
6. Thank everyone. While you can offer tangible incentives, loyal fans mostly want to be thanked. Celebrate them. Let them know they matter. Say “Happy Birthday” to your fans.
7. Personal brand matters. You are stuck with yourself even if you change companies. One builds the other. This works both ways …. as employees who build your corporate brand may depart, while others step up.

What do you think? What’s your best advice for successful digital conversations? Follow all the action on Twitter by searching the #mpdm tag.