Top 10 Triggered B2B Email Marketing Campaigns

One of the themes for marketers in 2009 is “doing more with less”. While some marketing teams are facing cut backs and spending freezes or reductions, they still need to hit their goals which may include generating X number of leads, Y amount of influenced pipeline and/or Z amount of influenced sales. A key part of “doing more with less” is automating your email marketing campaigns. While many may label this as “lead nurturing”, it goes well beyond lead nurturing. It’s at times like this when you need a bounce in your step and powerful tools that will make it easy to keep you engaged with customers and prospects but allow you to leave work at a reasonable hour.

After reading Ed Henrich’s excellent article on ClickZ Top 10 Triggered E-mail Programs to Build Relevance, I wanted to take a more B2B slant on it but as you’ll see, many of the triggered email programs apply to both B2B and B2C. By triggered email campaigns, I mean an email or a series of emails being sent based on an action of a contact in your database, by their inaction or by their state (for example, a new customer). Here are my top 10 triggered email marketing campaigns:

1. Transactional Messages. Transactional messages or autoresponder emails are some of the easiest and most beneficial campaigns to setup. By transactional email, I’m referring to the automatic email that you receive when you sign up for a newsletter or download an e-book. The open and click-through rates are typically much higher for these types of emails as the web visitor has engaged with your organization and almost expects to receive something in return.
   
   In addition, Michele Linn over at Savvy B2B Marketing recommends that “instead of providing an immediate download of the offer (e.g. white paper, webinar, etc.), send an email with a link to it”. Therefore, the transactional email becomes more than just a record of a transaction but the offer itself. This is recommended for a number of reasons as it provides a greater assurance that the email provided will be legitimate, makes it easy for the recipient to forward the document on and acts as a bookmark to easily find the document at a later date. Here is a perfect example: A web visitor finds your pay per click ad on a Google search results page and clicks on it. On the ensuing landing page, they are able to download a relevant white paper after filling out a short form. Instead of providing the white paper on the confirmation page after the form is filled out, send a link to the white paper in an email. This ensures that you get the most of out your paid search campaigns.
   
   For more information on autoresponder emails, see my post “Email Autoresponders 2.0 in B2B Marketing”.
   
   
2. Welcome email campaign. While an autoresponder may be part of a welcome email campaign, this type of campaign typically includes 2-3 emails sent over a period of 2-3 weeks and should have different messaging.
   
   With some marketing automation platforms, you can automatically check to see if the contact is a new one to your database after they have filled out a form. If it is a new contact, send that person an email that acknowledges that they are a new registrant and provide information on what they will receive and when they will receive it. You should also include a link for them to update their email subscriptions and their profile.
   
   Follow up emails that are part of the welcome email campaign may include sending the latest newsletter, or key videos and/or documents based on the information provided. Some organizations use welcome email campaigns to gain additional information on the registrant for better segmentation – something we call “progressive disclosure”. The key to this campaign is to demonstrate to the new registrant that it was worth it to provide their information and build a long lasting relationship.
   
   
3. Event/webinar campaigns. This is fairly obvious one. When someone signs up for an event, send on the event information to the registrant via email. One item often overlooked is automating the entire event registration and follow up process. A fully automated event contains the following emails:
   -First invite
   -Second invite to those that didn’t respond to the first invite
   -Reminder email for those that registered a day before the event
   -Reminder email for those that registered on the day of the event
   -Follow up email thanking those people that registered and attended
   -Follow up “sorry we missed you email” to those that registered but didn’t attend.
   -OPTION: If an event has size restrictions, have an automated email sent when capacity has been met and send another automated email to those on the waiting list if additional room was made available.
   
   When setup correctly, this type of automated process can save the marketer countless hours as the lists are automatically generated and emails are sent as per the schedule set up ahead of time. For more tips on improving your webinar campaigns see Paul Teshima’s excellent post Four Practices to Increase Webinar Effectiveness.
   
   
4. Inactive or Dormant Lead campaign. By inactive, I mean a contact in your database that has not responded to an email or visited your website within the last six months. I’m not referring to a lead that sales forgot to follow up on but this program may include those contacts as well.
   
   Similarly to your welcome program where you had unique messaging based on their “new contact” status, you’ll want to customize your messaging for those contacts that have not demonstrated any recent activity. The key here is for your marketing automation platform to automatically feed these inactive contacts into a campaign that will fire off these targeted emails. If you have to manually mine your database for these “inactives” or pay someone to do it, you are not “doing more with less”.
   
   These types of emails can include the following:
   -Special offer that re-engages the contact
   -Survey that asks the contact what type of information they would like to receive
   -Notice that if they don’t respond, they will be removed from regular communications.
   
   I’ve seen campaigns that flag contacts as “inactives” and removes them from receiving "regular" emails but if these inactive contacts demonstrate any activity, the inactive flag is removed and they set to receive regular email communications.
   
5. Customer service survey. Automatically send out a follow up email after a customer service case was closed asking for feedback. This is again a simple idea but often overlooked. This type of campaign can prevent issues from boiling up.
   
   
6. Renewal reminders. If your product or service is subscription based, automatically enter key customer contacts into an email campaign that sends auto email notifications that their contract is about to expire at the 90, 60 and 30 day mark prior to the renewal date.
   
   
7. Trial tips. If your product includes a limited free trial, enter contacts into a trial campaign that will send targeted emails throughout the trial with value add materials that encourages the lead to take the next step in the purchase process.
   
   
8. New customer program. For new customers that have purchased your product or service, enter them into an email campaign that introduces them to your product as well as your company. Your product may have been purchased by a select few but will be used throughout the organization. Having a “new user/customer” campaign can help people that aren’t familiar with your product get better acquainted.
   
   
9. Education programs. By education programs, I’m referring to the traditional lead nurturing campaigns. This is typically a series of emails sent over a period of time that helps keep your company top of mind for potential customers. While I’m not going to focus on the substance of these emails, I will indicate how these campaigns are triggered. These types of campaigns can be triggered by:
   -Sales reps entering leads into a nurturing program via a trigger in your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database. Many CRMs are fully integrated with a marketing automation platform which easily allows for these types of campaigns.
   -Lead Rating not being high enough. If a lead is deemed “not yet ready to be sent on to sales”, they can be automatically added to a lead nurturing campaign with the goal that they lead will eventually raise their hand to indicate they are ready to be engaged.
   -Activity/User interests. As an example, if a certain link was clicked on an email (or not clicked on), a contact can be added to an email campaign that will send on more targeted information. Another example is when a web visitor was looking at a page or series of pages on your website, automatically send them a follow up email that provides additional information with a call to action to speak to an expert that can answer any questions that they may have had. Ed Henrich referred to this as a “browse program”.
   
   It’s these types of automated email campaigns that when set up properly can produce tremendous results. The key to this is ensuring that you are measuring the outcomes of these nurturing campaigns. See my post “Lead Nurturing - How to track ROI?” for more details.
   
   
10. Reference Program from Net Promoters. This was an idea I brought up to my own company but it took Ed Henrich to remind me about it. If your organization runs a Net Promoter survey, send an automatic follow up email to those that are “promoters” asking them if they would act as references

These are my top 10 triggered email campaigns but this is by far not a full list. Having the right tools allows you to create highly customized automated campaigns. I hope that you found this useful and please let me know of other automated email campaigns that you may have deployed and how they fared.

Chad H.

Technorati Tags: lead nurturing,e-mail marketing,lead scoring,autoresponders. automated email campaigns,ClickZ,event marketing,webinars

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Email Branding Tip to Increase Open Rates

This is a quick post on a great tip from Stefan Pollard in hist post: Use Brand-Recognition Elements to Combat Inbox Triage.

Stefan recommends putting your company name in the "view online" link at the top of your email. For example:

"BEFORE: If you can't see the images in this e-mail, please click here to view this e-mail through your Internet browser.

AFTER: If you can't see the images in your edition of Browning eBlast, please click here."

I liked this tip as it's easy to implement and should make a difference. Since this link is typically at the top of the email, it's one of the first things that people see when they receive your email.

The other interesting suggestion was to ensure that not only the email from "name" is branded but also the email alias [brand@domain.com]. For those companies that have an ESP (Email Service Provider) where you can specify this, you'll know what I mean (or you can read his article.

Chad H.

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Latest Trends in Email Marketing: RSS and Calendar Reminders

As we move into a new week there are some interesting trends and technology enhancements that will start to change the way that B2B companies use email. For those that are thinking "email is email - how can it change?", keep reading.

Trend#1: The Blogletter is Coming - Actually, it's Already Here.

You may recall I blogged about a concept called the Blogletter (combo of email newsletter and blog posts). I don't hold anything against the blog readers out there who unsubscribed from my feed en mass after that post (OK, well a few of you I do). Here's the truth - the blogletter will be arriving very soon and will revolutionize the way some companies can create and execute an email newsletter or any email campaign.

The concept behind a blogletter is to be able to publish blog posts (or any RSS feeds for that matter) directly to an email and send it to subscribers. One of my readers back then asked me how this concept would work. At the time I didn't have any answers except for Feedblitz's tool which allows web visitors to get updated via email every time you submit a blog post (they have some new paid tools as well). This approach works for the average blogger but companies need better tools. The tools are now here and here are two approaches that you can use to take advantage of this technology:

• Integrating RSS feeds and emails. Imagine if you could integrate an RSS feed (if you don't know what RSS is and you are in marketing, you may want to read the following) with an email. For those of you who have feeds already (which include blogs) this would mean that you don't have to update content in multiple areas. You can update an RSS feed and have it publish to your website and email.

• Automating email using RSS feeds. Let's take this a step further with automation. If you regularly post content to your RSS feeds, you could potentially create an automated program that would send an email newsletter (Blogletter or RSSletter) automatically on the date that you defined. The newsletter would consist of the latest articles/posts from your RSS feeds as well as any other elements of your newsletter. What's key here is that the whole process to create a newsletter becomes much easier as you have an automated program that sends the email for you and the content is content that you've created for a blog or other RSS feed. This process works very well for new subscribers to your site as they can get a newsletter with the latest articles from the RSS feeds that you have defined.

Other advantages? As I mentioned in my previous article on the subject, your readers can comment on articles which adds a new dimension to email as it's no longer a one way push marketing channel.

I hope you find this interesting as the technology now exists to do this. The above examples are the tip of the iceberg.

Trend #2: Helping Your Customers/Prospects Organize Themselves

This tip/technology isn't new but it's now easier and thus has many more implications. A while back I wrote about how you can improve webinar/webcast attendee rates by creating a file that when clicked on, can book off the time specified in your email recipient's Outlook (and other programs too) calendar.

This process was a bit of a pain as you need to create the .ics file and then upload it to your server. It's much easier now as some systems will allow you to create this on the fly and integrate directly into your email or website. What does this mean? Here are some ideas:

• Set real milestones: There are many "How to" white papers out there that pose a problem that that you may be experiencing and provide a solution with next steps. For example, a white paper that outlines a ten step plan to turn around their business using your product or service. Imagine if you could create a solution with key milestones including REAL dates that the your prospect/customer can save on their own Outlook/Lotus calender. In addition, this information (email clicks) can be tracked. By tracking this information, you can have your inside sales/demand gen team follow up with these prospects on the actual date of the milestone that was outlined and ensure that they are on the path that was outlined which may include a meeting with someone from your company.
  
  
• Read later reminder: Do you hate an inbox full of email? I know I do. I can't hit the delete button faster in many cases (still waiting for that voice activated delete email function). What if you created a standard feature for all of your emails that was a simple link that said "I want to read this at a later date". By clicking on the link, the user would be presented with a calender item that had an online link to the newsletter and a recommended calender reminder to read the email at a later date as well as a suggested time/day. This approach may book off 10 minutes of a person's actual day to read your email. The email recipient can adjust the date to suite her/his schedule. The mobile folk may also like this feature as they can set a reminder to read the email when they are back in the office. Will this work? maybe. Is it worth trying? Definitely as it's very easy to do with some of the new enhancements out there.

Email is going well beyond the traditional approach where it was used to just push out information. The interactivity described above is part of a trend in B2B marketing which is focusing more on the ongoing conversation with prospects and customers rather then a one-off batch and blast approach. The ideas described above may seem a bit off the wall but should be considered along with other ideas on how to make email more interactive and to integrate it with overall marketing processes rather then as a tool in itself. I hope I have at least made you start to think about new approaches.

Chad H.

PS - Thanks for the image Just Say Hi

Technorati Tags: blogletter, blog newsletter, calendar reminders for events, deleting email

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5 Ways to Set Expectations in Online Marketing

I was camping this past weekend and my sister brought with her a CD of this hilarious comedian, John Pinette. If you haven't heard of him, you will soon enough. Here's a clip of him describing how he hates lines of any kind.



Why is this so funny? I think we all hate lines. We all hate waiting. We want what we want and we want it now! The reality is that we're going to have to wait. If this means waiting for a Starbucks latte that you ordered or for that technical assistant from your local cable/Internet company we all know that waiting is a part of life. If that's the case, lets make sure that we know what we're getting ourselves into ahead of time and if we do need to wait, provide some added value.

Setting Expectations the Right Way in Online Marketing

1. If you want people to register or sign up on your site, tell them exactly what they're going to get. This means using images to provide context. For example, if it's a webinar that people are signing up for, provide a pic of the person who is going to speak. If it's a contest for an IPhone, show an IPhone.

2. Make the registration process as easy as possible. Only ask for the information that you need and let the visitor know that they will only need to register once (it's a best practice to configure your site this way if possible). If you're looking to setup an e-commerce site, look at the heavy weights such as Amazon and EBay.

3. Make sure the information is relevant. Don't blast your entire database and expect magic to happen in terms of conversion. Use relevant information such as a person's title or the pages that they have previously clicked on to determine the messaging.

4. Allow your customers/prospects to set their own expectations for marketing messages. They should control the type of email, the frequency and the content. If you don't give them this control (and you should), make sure they know what type of marketing messages they can expect to receive and how often. If you don't, welcome to unsubscribeville - population, your company.

5. Use appropriate messaging on your site and email and provide something in the meantime if you can't deliver the goods right away. I can see why John Pinette is losing his brains at McDonald's. I was there yesterday at a roadside service center (OK, I admit I have the odd Big Mac attack) and I was waiting for what it felt like was forever. Whether it's unacceptable or acceptable the only thing that kept me sane was my Blackberry. I'm not asking for Ronald and the gang to sing show tunes while I wait but it would be nice if:
a. I had a sign that told me that the wait would be less then 5 minutes (this would be updated automatically like a scoreboard)
b. If there was a TV or something so I could watch a sporting event while I wait. How about a contest of some sort like "Where's Waldo?". Get creative!

I don't think I'm asking for much here. Do you? I'm sure John doesn't.

When it comes to email and your website, tell people when they should receive a confirmation email regrading a webinar that they signed up for or for a recent purchase. Tell them when they can expect their new computer to be shipped to them. Provide easy access to FAQs and contact information and have someone on the other end of the line. If I send a customer request to Bell, I want to receive an email that tells me how long I will be waiting until I hear from someone.

Here's a bonus one:

6. Go Beyond Expectations. Have you ever been at Starbucks sipping a coffee and they offered you a free sample of a cookie or beverage? Typically I've had way too much caffeine at that point and another coffee may turn me into a jabbering idiot but the offer is appreciated. Why? Because the interaction is personal and shows that you, the customer is rewarded for being a customer and that Starbucks cares about its customers (if only they could fix their line ups!). I'm not saying that McDonald's should go around giving out free hamburgers to kids who are playing in the play area but there are many opportunities that companies miss out on.

Here's an example: Company X has been a loyal customer for the past 5 years. Treat them like they are private members to your exclusive club and offer additional incentives such as a free upgrade - go beyond their expectations and they will remain loyal to you.

Let's get even simpler: I just signed up to receive your newsletter. They are sent every three weeks. Here's an idea: Send me the most recent one right away! Here's another one: I just purchased a computer or expensive software from you. Why not send an email with links to tutorials, social networks etc... In this way, you can keep the enthusiasm going that you had when you purchased the product/service and relieve some of the cognitive dissonance (wasn't psych 101 great?) that you may have after the purchase or after you just provided your contact information.

Getting to the Front of the Line

Web visitors need to understand how much time they need to invest in an activity and how it will benefit them. Those that are loyal deserve some extra TLC so giev it to them. Think about the tips above and how your company can bring potential customers and prospects to the front of your line, and how to get them there as fast as possible.

Chad H.

PS - any examples that you have on setting expectations would be greatly appreciated.

Tags: Starbucks, setting expectations, IPhone, McDonald's, Online marketing, cognitive dissonance

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How to Improve Your Email Newsletter

Do you have an email newsletter? Many B2B and B2C companies produce a newsletter or newsletters that are geared to a specific audience or audiences. There is no question that newsletters are a great way of keeping your company top of mind to your customers and prospects and increasing brand awareness as well the perception that your organization is the industry expert. Here's the issue: How can you distinguish your newsletter from your competitors and take it to the next level? How can you improve your email opens and click-throughs?

Email Newsletter 2.0

Taking your newsletter to the next level really isn't that difficult. In the "new world" of web 2.0, your target audience no longer just wants to receive information from you but they want the ability to respond and have their say. How do you do this? You allow people to comment on your newsletter articles. A while back I wrote about the concept of a "blogletter" that combines a newsletter and a blog. We see this concept more and more. In fact, many newsletters will display the number of comments that an article has right in the email (you can see the example I provided from the Globe & Mail)!

Why Should I Allow Comments on my Email Newsletter

Here are the benefits:

• New metrics to measure success: With many email software providers you can see who has opened and clicked through from your email newsletter. Allowing comments takes this further as you can better gauge the uptake of your newsletter. A new email newsletter metric could be number of comments per newsletter or average amount of comments per article
  
  
• Receive valuable feedback: Email communication is typically one way. Your organization writes articles and you blast them to your list. Comments allow your readers to have their say. They can tell you what they like and what they don't like about your newsletter.
  
  
• Lead qualification: There are two benefits here. In order to leave comments, you could add some additional lead qualification questions to the registration process. Typically you would probably only request the basic information for someone to receive your newsletter (name, email, company for B2B). When someone wants to leave a comment, it provides an opportunity to request additional information to help your marketing and sales team have a better understanding of the customer/prospect.
  
  In addition, if your organization gets its share of leads, you can use newsletter comments to help in the lead qualification process. For example, how about metrics such as the number of comments that contact has written and the recency of the last comment? These stats could be used as part of an automated lead qualification process and be displayed on the contact record of the CRM (Customer Relationship Management like Salesforce.com) that you use.
  
  
• Better insight into your customers and prospects: Positive, negative or indifferent most comments are important. If you were able to include these comments in the contact record of your CRM, your sales and customer support team can get a better sense of the contact, their business and any issues/opportunities that exist. When you leave a comment on my blog, I get an email that tells me what you wrote about. What if you were able to have comments go right to the customer/lead owner as defined by your CRM (If you are doing this right now then I am thoroughly impressed - this can be done)? If the comment is negative, have that person contacted right away! If the person has a question about your industry, product or service have that person contacted right away!
  

• Newsletter readers become newsletter contributors: Your email recipients are no longer just contacts that make up a list. They become real people who have opinions. Your newsletter may even create a community of loyal readers and contributors (like an online "Cheers" where everybody knows your name and they may or may not be glad you came). You'll get your regular "commenters" who will express their opinions. You may even want to let one of them write an article. The great part of this is that they will give you ideas about what you can write about in the future. When no comments are provided, this speaks volumes as well as your newsletter article may not appeal to your target audience or it may be over their heads.
  
  
• Your newsletter gets better results: The more you allow people to participate in the conversation, the more you engage them and the better results you will get. If you don't believe me, I urge you to test out this concept for a month and see how it goes. If your results improve, I will expect a cheque.
  

Here are drawbacks:

• You need to monitor the comments: Typically, you will want to approve comments before they are added. In addition, you will want to have someone that can quickly respond to negative comments. This can take time and cost money. There are systems that automate this process though.
  
  
• The comments can be negative or just plain stupid: You may have some disgruntled people out there that don't like you or what you have to say. That's OK actually. Having some negative comments shows that you're company is human - hey everyone makes mistakes. The important point is how you respond to those mistakes and turn negatives into positives. As mentioned in my first point, you need to respond to these fairly quickly. You also get the idiots out there who have nothing to contribute except for wanting to advertise their product or service. These just waste your time and there are ways to automatically filter them out.
  

What do I do to get this moving?

This really isn't too difficult. Most email newsletter articles are posted on web pages. There are a number of software packages out there that will allow you to add comments to your newsletter web pages or to merge a blogging software (like Wordpress) into your website template. Your IT team can assist here or there many consultants out there. I know MarketingSherpa does this and I'm sure they would let you know how they did this. Some of the ideas around lead qualification and capturing metrics in your CRM still need to be flushed out. This was me thinking out loud. To add the number of comments to your email newsletter, why not either publish your newsletter to your site a day before you send out the email so you get some initial comments and then add in the code on your email newsletter. Some software packages out there may allow for this to be dynamically generated - I don't know enough about this (that's not the case for the Globe & Mail example above).

Good luck with this and I hope that it improves your results. If you have tried this already, please let me know.


Chad H.

Tags: email newsletters, enewsletter, Cheers, Norm, CRM, Salesforce.com, blogletter, Globe & Mail

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A/B Testing E-Marketing Tips

Does the word "test" still make you tense up and think of your high school math teacher with the bad comb over? When it comes to e-marketing, testing takes on a whole new meaning. If you read Anne Holland's weekly email newsletter, you will typically hear her preaching to e-marketers to TEST, TEST, TEST... at least a few hundred times. OK, that's a bit of an exaggeration but if you read her stuff, you know what I mean. Just for fun I went to the home page and saw the article: How to Test Email Landing Pages (More Easily). :)

Testing in e-marketing is definitely important in terms of getting the most bang for your buck. You want to make sure that your message will resonate with those that see it and that it has been fully optimized. This can mean testing a new landing page to see what the overall conversion rate is or testing a webinar invite email to determine the open rate. There are some mistakes in A/B testing though that you need to look out for. Matt Beslkin over at the Ominiture blog points out a few of these in his recent post: The Dark Side of A/B Testing: Don't Make These Two Mistakes!.

A/B Testing Mistake #1: Only Test One Element at a Time

If you're sending out an email it's easy to say: "Let's test a different subject line and a different opening paragraph" as compared to the original email. This is a no-no. In A/B testing you can only provide accurate results if you test one element at a time. As Mark explains it "Changing more than one element in an A/B test makes it impossible to determine which change drove better performance and which did not." If you want to test multiple elements at the same time, you need to conduct multivariate (multivariable) testing. While this can be more difficult, it can save you time in trying to determine what is the key element that will help you reach your e-marketing goals.

A/B Testing Mistake #2: Not Going Deep Enough

Matt then goes on to explain that you may not be delving deep enough into your web stats to determine how well your tests are doing (this is completely understandable coming from an Omniture blog). He is correct that you really need to dive deeper into who is responding to your email newsletter or whitepaper download. Ask yourself the following question when determining the success and failure an A/B test: Who is actually responding to the test email or landing page? Once you ask the question, ask some more questions like the following (geared to B2B):

• Is it someone in your marketing database that you already know?
  
• What type of industry are they in?
  
• Which business groups are they? - in B2B it could be engineering, accounting etc..
• What business titles are responding? C-level executives, managers, Joe Schmo with a hotmail account looking for a free ipod.
• Are the people who are responding more qualified?
  

In some cases, the response rate may be better with one test group but the quality of responses may be better in another test group in terms of bringing in more qualified leads that are in your sweet spot. In order to determine the true success of an A/B test, it's best to look beyond your open rates and pageviews. However, if you're just getting started in A/B testing, slow down a bit and read the following.

A/B Testing: Getting Started

If your just getting your feet wet, what I recommend for testing emails is to first test the subject line. It's the subject line that will along with the "from address" that will determine if your email get opened. You can test a longer vs. shorter subject line, test using your company name, add personalization, etc... Typically testing consists of a smaller number of your email list (say 10%) so you can first test these results and send the most successful email out to the majority of the group.

For landing pages, typically the offer and number of fields are the elements that I would test. For example, if you're running a PPC campaign, find out which whitepapers or case studies are getting the higher conversion rates.

While Anne Holland, is all over the need for testing, we all know that this can be time-consuming. It's best to start slowly and look for small wins and then convince others that testing really does improve performance and is worth the resources.

Chad

PS - Do you have any testing stories? nightmares? successes?

Tags: A/B Testing, multivariate testing, Anne Holland, ppc campaign, Omniture

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Viral Marketing in B2B - It Works!

When comparing B2B marketing to B2C, many see B2B as having very generic campaigns that lack the excitement and creativity of B2C. For example, you rarely have celebrity endorsements or crazy contests that reach millions that you typically see with brands such as Nike or Coke.

B2B Marketing is Boring

B2B marketers tend to use the same marketing tactics over and over again such as direct mail, email, paid search, telemarketing, and live events to name just a few. It usually involves a landing page that contains a blurb about the offer and a form that you need to fill out. B2B marketers rely on their targeted audience and customers to spread the word by forwarding on an email invite to a webinar or telling a fellow colleague about a great new software package that they just starting using. This is all great and has proven to be effective but is there another way to bring the same excitement that B2C marketers use to B2B? Just because you are targeting a business, does it need to be all about newsletters and white papers?

It's Time to get Interactive. It's Time to get Viral

If you think long and hard enough about what motivates your target market you have to think that there is more then providing them with a perfect case study (unless that's what they've asked for). If you're trying to grow your lists and get your name out there, how can your audience get enthused about your company or your product? A few B2B companies are now trying to use more interactive viral campaigns designed for their target audience. The goal is to entertain while demonstrating their understanding of what their target audience goes through in their day to day business functions. Viral marketing campaigns are typically "games" that provide a brief distraction from a stressful day or may bring some humour into the office. Think about a funny email one of your friends have forwarded to you. It may have made you have a brief laugh and was something that you could share with those around you.

Get Your Viral Game on: Intel & Quantum

Intel has just launched a new game that they are calling the PEBCAK I.T. Translator. PEBACK is an inside "geek" term that stands for ("problem exists between keyboard and chair"). It's like FUBAR or other acronyms that are used to quickly summarize a situation. In this case, IT people refer to stupid questions that they may be asked as PEBCAK. The PEBCAK I.T. translator acts like a typical client or fellow employee approaching their I.T. person for help. It chooses random questions like "How do you move that little arrow around the screen?" and allows you to provide a response that you wish you could say. It then translates your response into something more appropriate. For example, to the above question I responded "Try using your finger to move the arrow" was translated to "Your genius lies elsewhere". It's these small concepts that typically do really well.

MarketingSherpa did a case study on a data storage company called Quantum. They created a trivia contest designed for IT managers and directors. The target audience was sent a direct mailer and were directed to an online IT trivia game to receive an IT related book, and be entered to win a full size video game. Once completed the trivia questions, you could challenge your buddy as well. The campaign worked as it not only tested the IT knowledge it sprinkled in other questions based on the interests of their target market including questions about Star Wars etc... The response rate was so so (2.45% response from the direct mailer) and a 10% viral effect which may have been inflated. However, the genius part of this campaign was that Quantum used the response to the questions as a way of qualifying their leads. That is brilliant! B2B marketers create surveys all of the time. Why not position your survey as a fun trivia game?

These are just a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing. MarketingSherpa has kindly kept their top 12 viral campaigns from 2006 article open to public. I would definitely have a look and think about ways that you can make your site more interactive and think about ways in which you can engage and interact with your target market.

As a B2B marketer, you can keep this simple and more inline with the B2B world. For example. you can create video case studies of your customers, users, or trade show booth attendees that they can send to their friends. Hey - everyone wants to be on TV and the internet is way to make this happen. Even creating a piece of content that no one else has such as a study or a how to paper is something that typically works. I've created a "Feed Icon Library" that bloggers can go to and access cool blog feed icons for their own blogs. This is has been highly popular and drives a ton of web traffic from around the world. If you're in B2B, you need to think about how you can differentiate yourself from what your competition is doing and make the web experience one that people will not forget. Leverage the investment that you have already made in your other online marketing investments by creatively thinking of ways to drive people to your website and turning them into leads.

Chad H.

PS - as a blogger, you can also think of ways to bring people back to your blog. Yaro Starak over at Entrepreneur's Journey is brilliant at this. He has created tutorials, podcasts and other interactive elements that engage and motivate fellow bloggers.
PPS - Here are some additional resources on B2B viral marketing:

• ClickZ: Can Viral Marketing Be Serious?
• B2B Online: Word-of-mouth marketing gets people buzzing
• HP's European viral marketing campaign – meet David B
• UPDATE: Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) has a great resource library - check it out!
  

PPPS: If you've tried a viral campaign. it would be great to hear from you.
PPPPS: Why not do a comic strip like Dilbert based on your target audience?

Tags: viral marketing, clickz, intel, word of mouth, business to business marketing

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Email Marketing 101: Tips and Best Practices

If you're new to the world of email marketing then I have a few good resources for you!

Are you moving from a B2C company to B2B? For a basic overview of some of the differences between B2B and B2C email marketing, check out check out Tricia Robinson's article called "B2B vs. B2C Email Marketing".

Email Marketing Best Practices

Looking for some up to date best practices? DM News has published their "Essential Guide to Email Marketing". This is definitely worth a read as there are some great articles from industry experts regarding email design, copy, best practices and strategies. There's also a lot of fluff and advertising BS but its worth having a look at.

There were a few articles that stuck out for me:

• Key Elements of a Winning Opt-in Offer: Provides some good copy tips to entice prospects from providing you their email address. For example, if you're providing a free white paper, show the implied value "This Special Free Report is $19 value" and let them know how easy it is to just fill out a form and how fast they'll receive the information once they sign up.
• Writing Subject Lines that get Your Email Opened: Here are some great ideas for the copy of your subject line. For example - Make an announcement, make the intended receiver curious, create a sense of urgency or emphasize how the reader will benefit from your email.
• Reputation not Content Affects Whether Consumers Receive Your Email: This article explains how reputation (your IP address that you send emails from) affects your deliverability rates.
  

UPDATE: Here's another good article on BtoBOnline that provides some additional design and copy tips for B2B email marketing:

• Open rates increase when you have your corporate name in the subject line (on a side note it would be interesting to know if the "from address" contained the company name as well).
• Post card style (one large image and single offer) and varied-cell (uses different boxes of text area images) emails had higher clickthrough rates. From my own experience I've seen a fantastic postcard email that just had two words as a call to action. Open and clickthroughs were some of the best I've ever seen.
  
• 3 links in an email is optimal number of a high clickthrough rate and text links fared better then image links (makes sense with more images being blocked these days)
• The top offers were a price discount or a free gift (hey, free Ipods still seem to work!)
  

Update Nov 19, 2006: I've included some additional tips from the Silverpop study called "Email Creative that Works". Here are the key findings as they relate to B2B email marketing:

• Placing the call to action above the fold is crucial
  
• Text style links averaged 3% more clicks then images
• A person's name rather then a company or product produced better open rates
  

Update Nov 21, 2006: I found a great white paper by MailerMailer called "Email Marketing Metrics Report". It has email marketing benchmarks that include open and clickthrough rates across industries, advantages of personalization, HTML vs. Text emails and much more.
Hope you enjoy these!

Chad H.

Related Posts:

• "Email 2.0": Email Marketing is thriving
• Email marketing tip - break out your lists
• Writing for the Reader: Preview Pane and Blog Feeds
• "Email 2.0": Email Marketing is thriving

Tags: email marketing, e-mail marketing, DMNews, high clickthrough rate, email best practices, email benchmarks

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How to destroy your e-marketing presence in 5 steps

These days everyone has advice on how to improve your online presence for your business and generate leads through e-marketing strategies. What if you are having a bad week or day and are fed up with the ridiculous time involved in maintaining your website, low web traffic, rising costs of AdWords and failed conversion rates from your email campaigns? If you've had enough of e-marketing, here is what I recommend:

• Simplify your website. You can simply take down your website but that would be too easy. I recommend just having one page as your home page with the following picture and a caption "Pick up the f%#^&@ phone and call us at 1-800-555-5555". At the bottom of the page (below the fold), make sure that you have a few paragraphs as to what your company does. You will need this for some of the search strategies below.
  
  
• Send one last email blast. Email your entire database (including those that have unsubscribed) as well as any random email addresses that you find with the same picture above and the text "You have been unsubscribed from [YOUR COMPANY]. For more details, please go to www.yourcompany.com. You have been warned." Notice how we have used consistent branding between email and your website. Hey, if you're going to tank your e-marketing channels, make sure you use some best practices!
  
  As another best practice, you should test different subject lines to a subset of your list before sending out the complete email blast. For example, try these subject lines "Please confirm your unsubscription" or "This is the final email we are sending you". The "from" name of your email should always include the name of your company.
  
  As an added tip - don't really unsubscribe these people, you may need to send a follow up email. :) However, ensure that you allow people to really unsubscribe (we don't want to violate CAN-SPAM too much).
  
  
• Paid search and ads blow out. If you have already setup Yahoo and Google paid search ads, change the caption so that instead of the typical text that would entice people to click on the ad, it reads "Why go to this website? It's not like you have in the past". Make sure that all links go to your home page. If you don't have any paid search ads, buy some and make sure that you have keywords that are related to the text on our home page (see above). Use the same caption.
  
  You can also purchase ads on industry related websites. If you have the chance to create a banner ad, use the same picture above and use the same caption.
  
  
• The business blog to end all business blogs. If you were smart and started a business blog you can use this to help bring down your e-marketing strategy. Add one last post that says "Stop reading this blog and go to www.yourcompany.com". That was why we created this blog in the first place". If you don't have a business blog, don't bother starting one as it's not worth it if you don't plan on spending any more time or resources on your e-marketing strategy.
  
  
• Monitor and adjust. While this strategy may do the job, you may need to tweak a few things to seal the deal. This may include sending out a follow up email that warns those that did open your last email that their houses will be bombed if they open any more emails from your company. Paid search ads may need to be changed to "Thanks for not clicking on this ad".
  

Do you think this will work? Did I miss anything?

Chad H.

PS - Besides having a product or service that people actually use and a good receptionist or sales team to answer the phone, this post assumes that your company has a good brand recognition and offline marketing presence so that people know who your company is and what they do. If this isn't the case, please refrain from the above. If you're e-marketing strategy isn't working, you may need to take a step back and either get some help, get some new tools or do both.

Technorati tags: e-marketing, emarketing, online marketing, business blog, paid search, email marketing

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