Kudos to Mark Brownlow at Email Marketing Reports for helping us laugh at ourselves and a few of those "bad practices" we all try to avoid (yet still see all too often) in B2B email marketing. I encourage you to watch it with your marketing team to see if any of the content reminds you of your organizational emails--or just gets you a bit red in the face:

Brownlow's humorous depiction of an email that's come to life serves as a vivid reminder of some no-no's in B2B email. A few examples of how NOT to email market:

1) Personalization
a. "Dear First Name ... or is it Suzy?"

2) Timing
a. "We met eight months ago at a trade show..."
b. "You may be busy on Tuesday morning, but statistics show that this is the best time to send, regardless of what the user wants."

3) Relevancy
a. "Here's some important company information about our new London office ... What, you live in Argentina? Well, you never know when you might be abroad..."
b. "This offer is for a small business, but even though you're a global enterprise, maybe you'll need this in the future anyway!"

4) Customer-centric
a. "We're committed to customer-centric initiatives... but hold the feedback for now. We weren't able to get the resources to have true two-way dialogues. Please don't interrupt us while we're talking!"
b. "We have pictures of British people--which implies our great service and customer focus!"

Mark makes some great points, and he saves the best (and most honest) part of the dialogue for last: "It’s been fantastic talking at you!"

Lessons for all.

Posted by Will Schnabel at 4:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Though we're in a recession, the pressure for B2B marketers to deliver more and better qualified leads to sales hasn't changed. And often, this process requires more than reevaluating and fine-tuning existing marketing strategies. Determining which leads are hot and have the budget to purchase your company's products and which may need more time for decision making requires a behavior-tracking asset outside of most people's purview.

Silverpop Engage B2B client, USA Financial, faced the same challenge as many other B2B companies: determining which of its leads were quality leads. Recently the company shared how it was able to implement our solution to score and nurture leads. Within a short time period, USA Financial's marketing department increased the number of leads sent to sales by 50 percent. In addition, implementing a sophisticated lead-management solution helped the company refine and maximize the roles and scope of its marketing and sales teams, leading to a more collaborative relationship between the two. To learn more about how USA Financial overcame the marketing challenges it faced, click here.

Posted by Will Schnabel at 4:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In almost every discussion around lead management, the question arises as to which metrics are the most important to measure success. Recently, I participated in a Q&A with Craig Rosenberg, author of the Funnelholic blog, in which I highlighted my top three metrics for success, supporting some of the same metrics that were highlighted in a prior post titled, "Memo to the CFO: 3 Lead Generation Metrics that Matter."

It is true that tracking the funnel math (e.g. MQL, SAL, SQL) as SiriusDecisions has so insightfully defined, as well as the related Cost Per Opportunity and Total Pipeline Created analysis, is useful for optimizing your lead management process. As well, ROMI can still be argued to be useful in identifying the financial success of various marketing programs. However, I believe an important component missing from many metrics is the length of time it takes to convert an inquiry into revenue for your organization. Many direct marketers are familiar with the term "revenue velocity" as it is used to identify high-value customer relationships. I recommend putting a new lead-management spin on this to focus on the lead cycle and measuring the Lead Management Revenue Velocity. The following steps can help you achieve this:

- Measure the Time-to-Revenue (TTR) based on the average time it takes you to capture the first initial inquiry through your lead generation campaign to when the first revenue is booked or won. TTR could be in days, weeks, or months depending on the level of granularity you require for your average sales cycle.

- Next, take your revenue generated (or profits) and divide this by the newly calculated TTR to get your Lead Management Revenue Velocity.

- Another variation would be to use ROI instead of revenue, divided by TTR. This would be an indicator of which marketing efforts provide faster ROI than others by normalizing our ROI results and getting us closer to CFO-aligned metrics like net present value.

Of course, there is an argument for limiting our lead management metrics to only those for which we ultimately control, that being inquiries, sales qualified leads and sales opportunities. However, by keeping tabs on the entire lead cycle, we can help spot potential sales and marketing alignment issues, and facilitate cross-team discussions on the best ways to improve the overall lead management process.

Ultimately, I believe that reviewing both TTR and Revenue Velocity can help marketing better report on the overall impact they are having on sales, not just in total opportunities delivered, but by the speed by which revenue is being generated through our lead generation efforts.

And in these difficult economic times, delivering revenue is ultimately the only metric that matters.

Posted by Will Schnabel at 12:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I recently received an email from a company whose product we happen to use within our organization. The message was pretty enticing (kudos on this point), so I downloaded the white paper the company was offering.

Not five minutes later my phone rang, and low and behold, who should it be but the same unnamed company whose white paper I had downloaded.

The conversation went something like this:

Unnamed Company: "Hi, this is Chris, I'm calling from X Company. I noticed that you downloaded our white paper and wanted to talk to you more about our product."

Me: "Hi Chris, I appreciate you calling, but we actually already use your product."

Unnamed Company: "Oh, oops, sorry to take up your time. Have a nice day."

[End of conversation]

When I hung up the phone I realized I had lied--I didn't appreciate him calling me. I found myself looking over my shoulder to find the big eye-in-the-sky camera, because surely Big Brother was watching me from somewhere. I also didn't appreciate that company X apparently had no idea we were current customers.

Now here's what I would have appreciated:

• An email that contained additional white papers related to the topic that was interesting to me
• A conversation, if company X felt compelled to pick up the phone, that acknowledged we were existing customers (maybe a thank you in there somewhere), and a question about what other types of information I might find useful

In my particular example, company X needs a refresher on smart marketing practices. The lesson to be learned? Don't let technology be a replacement for smart marketing practices--technology is a complement and catalyst to improved processes and efficiencies. The two go hand-in-hand. Set your best practices and then leverage your technology in conjunction with them to perform tasks like identifying a prospect versus an existing client. Technology such as marketing automation is the key to making sure you don't send your poor salespeople into an awkward situation. Send them out armed with knowledge, make them valuable to the person they're calling ... and don't let them be another annoyance.

Posted by Sarah Lander at 5:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)