Tamara Graves, senior director of demand generation at Silverpop partner NetProspex— and the primary Silverpop user at the company— knows her way around a database. I’ve worked with Tamara on several projects and have had the pleasure of seeing how her approach to demand gen drives incremental revenue for NetProspex and also results in improved lead nurturing and marketing efficiency.
Since good lead management starts with a strong database, I asked Tamara to share her insights on how marketers can update, enhance and ensure the quality and cleanliness of their data. Here are her five tips for spring cleaning your database:
 Tamara Graves, senior director of demand generation, NetProspex How’s your spring cleaning going this year? If you’re like me, you’ve been putting it off until the last minute—and with just five weeks left until summer officially begins, the clock is ticking to plunge into that messy closet, see what’s hiding under the bed and dare to reach back to the deepest corners of the fridge.
Likewise, many marketers have allowed their databases to grow a little unruly, letting unknown entities lurk in the depths. Fortunately, there’s still time to whip your data into shape before the dog days of summer arrive. Follow these five steps to get your data spic and span, enabling you to connect with customers and prospects more strongly and ultimately drive revenue:
1) Assess the (messy) situation. Before diving into your data, take a look and see what you have. Are there any records or pieces of records in your database that you weren’t aware of? Email addresses that belong to competitors or are clearly spam traps? Records that don’t have complete sets, or belong to people who aren’t the right buyers for your product? Get a feel for what needs to be scrubbed clean or tossed out with the trash.
2) Build piles and sort through them. Think of your data as a closet you’re cleaning out—you need to sort your data assets into a few different piles, then work your way through each one. To help simplify the process, consider adding a field for “buyer persona” and writing a query to sort your database and capture who your buyers are.
Also, start thinking about what you want to do with your respective piles. Do you want to keep the “non-buyers” group in the messaging mix because they’ve shown interest? What about people who seem to fit the buyer profile but just aren’t responding? You’ll want to get rid of some data sets, archive some until future notice, and try a different tactic right away on others. And remember that you don’t have to go it alone—sometimes third parties can help with this task.
Don’t limit your analysis to inactives. If there are customers who have just bought once, what can you do to get them to buy again? For those who have bought from you multiple times, perhaps an upsell campaign would be productive.
3) Fill in empty spaces. As you’re cleaning the closet, you may realize sections of your wardrobe are pretty empty. Likewise, you may notice big gaps in your data. If you don’t have enough data to do segmentation, you’ll have to think about how to remedy this situation. Maybe you’ll need to append data, or perhaps you’ll want to develop an email campaign or promotion geared toward encouraging contacts to provide additional information.
4) Learn from the experience. Just as you might discover you need to reassess your pantry layout because you’re using some items more than expected and others less (sorry, Mr. Pasta Maker), you’re bound to learn some unexpected things as you’re sifting through your data. For example, maybe there’s somebody that’s buying from you that you didn’t think would be in your wheelhouse. Use the occasion to study your contacts and see if there’s anything you can to do to turn the dial on either side—both re-engaging inactives and turning active customers into even bigger fans.
5) Don’t delay—get started today. Whether you’re jolting inactives from their slumber, trying to get one-time buyers to buy again, or looking to build loyalty among your best customers, think how you can take them to the next level of engagement. Ideas might include:
- Reaching out to them via a different channel (e.g. phone or print)
- Offering a Snooze option
- Asking them to update their preferences or tell you more about themselves via a survey
- Inviting them to like you on Facebook, follow you on Twitter or add you on LinkedIn
- Creating emails promoting items that fit with customers’ previous purchases
- Promoting new thought capital, changes to your website or cool giveaways
So what are you waiting for? Clear the cobwebs out of your database and start engaging your prospects and customers today. You might be able to streamline and eliminate a bunch of inactive, inaccurate and incomplete records. You also just might find some (new) loyal fans, followers and, better yet, qualified leads.
NetProspex drives B2B lead generation as a partner for targeted prospect lists, data cleansing and profiling analytics to understand data for optimal marketing results. Visit Netprospex.com for more information.
The question today is not should I be marketing on Facebook, but how can I create real, personal relationships with Facebook fans? And how can I generate measurable ROI from my investment in Facebook?
Silverpop decided to do something to help marketers answer these questions. Today, we’re announcing the release of Social Pull—a free online form builder for Facebook pages that makes it incredibly simple to capture leads, collect sign-ups and get more “Likes” on your Facebook page.
Social Pull provides a simple way to collect information from customers and begin building a personal relationship with them through email and other channels. And as an added bonus, Social Pull makes it simple to add a “Like Gate” to your Facebook pages, ensuring that users have liked your page before accessing your content. In addition, the forms and pages created in Social Pull are brandable, so you maintain complete control over their look and feel.
What are some ways you can use Social Pull on Facebook?
- Collect email newsletter sign-ups
- Offer registration for white papers, videos and other content
- Offer coupons to customers who have liked your Facebook page
So what are you waiting for? Head over to socialpull.silverpop.com to create your free Social Pull account.
More Facebook Resources:
1) Tip Sheet: “8 Tips for Turning Facebook ‘Likes’ into Customers”
2) Blog: “Using the New Facebook Timeline to Drive Email Opt-ins”
3) Infographic: “Using Mobile, Social and Local to Build Your Email Database”
This is the fifth in a series of guest posts for Silverpop written by Jeff Ogden, president of B2B lead generation company Find New Customers.
Working with a software company in Connecticut, I’ve been struck by the missing link in its content. After all, the company is creating lead nurturing programs and producing press releases, Webinars and other events. But something is missing, and I think a lot of companies miss this:
Start the relationship with “Hello.”
 The single most important thing you send a new prospect is the first thing you send, so spend time focusing on this critical step. In my popular white paper, “How to Find New Customers,” I call the first stage of the buying process “Untroubled/Unaware.” Simply stated, folks in this stage don’t know they have a problem or aren’t aware that better ways exist. These are the folks who say “Not interested” when we call. (Feel free to download that white paper. It’s free.)
How do you talk to someone in the untroubled/unaware stage? I suggest you start with “Hello” and not “Will you marry me?”
“Will you marry me?” is sharing information about your products and services. That’s what our client was doing. Don’t do it.
Think about it. What if a stranger walked up to you, opened his wallet and showed you photos of his wife and kids? Undoubtedly, you’d be turned off. But companies do that very thing every day. Their “kids” are their products and services. (Check out my related post, “The Problem with Kids: How Your Products and Services are Truly Perceived.”)
As I tell clients of Find New Customers, lead nurturing is about sharing valuable content (to the recipient) that takes the prospect from problem to solution in a story-telling format.
The single most important thing you send a new prospect is the first thing you send. That’s what kicks off the relationship. It’s the start of a hopefully robust and mutually beneficial relationship. So spend considerable time and thought focusing on this critical step.
Every great relationship starts with hello.
Related Resources:
1) Blog: “Progressive Profiling: The Key to Collecting Data Without Weirding People Out”
2) Video: “Silverpop Progressive Web Forms Demo”
3) Blog: “Feeding the Content Beast”
4) Slideshare: “Welcome Email and Unsubscribe Best Practices”
The use of cart abandonment campaigns has risen steadily in recent years, and with good reason: They’re a smart, effective way to bring customers back into the fold, especially if you follow best practices regarding timing, frequency and incentives. (Read our cart abandonment white paper.)
More and more, though, I’m finding that savvy marketers are also starting to look beyond the cart, taking some of the basic tenets of cart abandonment and applying them to unique situations in which a customer or prospect heads down the path toward a certain behavior, but stops somewhere short of taking the final desired action.
Given that the contact has shown a clear intent to engage with the company, the smart move is to try to reconnect. As I alluded to in my recent article on “Taking a Progressive Approach to Increasing Frequency,” someone who abandons a shopping cart, download form, digital tool or browsing session before checkout might need an email—or two, or three—before he or she comes back to finish the process. A follow-up email delivered with the right tone, content and offers can recover these lost opportunities and translate them into gains for your company.
Here are five sample scenarios in which a process abandonment message or series or messages can yield big returns:
1) Browse Abandonment
As opposed to cart abandonment, where customers are at the bottom of the funnel, people who browse a certain page on your website and leave may or may not have a strong intent to purchase. So why send a triggered browse abandonment message to those site visitors for whom you have an email address?
For starters, if you have educational materials—how-to guides related to your product, for example—this is the perfect opportunity to deliver helpful content and establish your company as the industry expert. Furthermore, even if you can get a small percentage to convert off a large number of browsers, that could still have a huge impact on the bottom line.
Test style and content to make sure you’re presenting helpful information the recipient appreciates without coming across as too big brother-ish. Personalize the message with images and details from the product category the shopper visited but ultimately didn’t purchase from. Include customer reviews and reinforce why you’re better than the competition.
2) Webinar Registration Form Abandonment
Depending on the situation, a triggered Webinar form abandonment message can be an effective way to increase registrations and continue nurturing a prospect through the sales funnel. Just because someone clicked through on your email and visited your Webinar sign-up page but didn’t register doesn’t mean they’re not interested—perhaps they won’t be available on that date, or they weren’t sure of their other time commitments when they originally clicked through and have forgotten about the Webinar.
As the event date approaches, you could send prospects who meet certain criteria (e.g., visited page but didn’t complete form) a general registration reminder, but also provide additional calls to action built around messaging that acknowledges that the person may not be able to attend your Webinar. For example, you could offer links to other presentations on Slideshare, offer to send a recorded version of the event post-Webinar, and ask if the prospect would like you to call them. The idea is to keep a service tone: “OK, you can’t attend, but maybe there’s something else I can help you find.”
3) Mobile App Abandonment
Many companies are using mobile apps to connect with customers anytime, anywhere—a wise move given the proliferation of smart phones. But considering the evidence that many apps are only used a handful of times—one study showed that 25 percent of mobile apps are used just once and then forgotten—companies would be smart to take steps to combat this disengagement.
One option is to set up a rule set so that when customers download an app and then don’t use it again within a specified time period, they’re placed in a nurture series that educates them about the app’s value proposition and features tips for getting started—both yours and those from other users.
4) Online Tool Abandonment
What should you do if a prospect or customer uses an online tool—a questionnaire guiding them to the right product or an ROI calculator, for example—and then doesn’t follow through on the next step, whether that be making a purchase or requesting salesperson assistance?
Again, the contact has shown a clear intent to engage with you, so consider following up with a service-oriented message or series of messages that provides additional educational resources, offers multiple service-related calls to action, and includes promotional info on why your product or service will address the recipient’s needs.
5) Wish List Abandonment
Have you ever left an item in a shopping cart as a reminder that you want to purchase it at a later date—or maybe invite someone else to purchase it for you? So have many of your customers, making traditional notions of “cart abandonment” obsolete for these shoppers.
These customers aren’t really abandoning their carts, they’re just using them as makeshift wish lists. Consider giving them separate “wish list” functionality and then delivering an email message stream that promotes the items they’ve singled out.
So, what other types of process abandonment scenarios have you implemented? Share your stories below.
For more process abandonment tips and strategies—including cart recovery best practices—download Silverpop’s new white paper, “Abandonment Issues: Turning Lost Carts, Incomplete Forms and Interrupted Browse Sessions into Revenue.”
Recently I listened to Michael Hyatt’s excellent podcast on “The Power of Incremental Change,” and it got me thinking about how we can apply Michael’s advice to help improve our marketing campaigns. Michael describes how, during a summer trip to Colorado with his wife, he was captivated by the Royal Gorge, a 10-mile-long canyon that was cut into solid granite over 3 million years at the rate of a half-inch per year.
OK, so most marketers don’t have 3 million years to show results—or even, in some cases, three months. But the point is that most people underestimate the power of incremental change over time, thinking they’ve got to take massive action to achieve something significant. As a result, they give up before they even start, thinking they can’t make the investment.
I see this sometimes with marketers who know there are powerful tools and techniques available, but feel the time needed to learn and execute these tactics would be prohibitive.
It’s true that change is hard and can be overwhelming. But as my colleague Loren McDonald likes to say, you don’t have to boil the ocean. Instead, take incremental baby steps to move you along the path to success. Here are just a few examples of some areas in which you can use a series of small steps to help you realize big goals.
PREFERENCE CENTERS
Step 1: Build a preference center and offer choices at opt-in. By giving customer and prospects greater control over their relationship with your brand and the marketing messages they receive, you’ll immediately build goodwill and engagement.
Step 2: Offer alternatives during opt-out. Many people who hit “unsubscribe” don’t want to leave—they just want the relationship to change. By offering alternatives to unsubscribing such as switching email address, “snoozing” and changing mailing frequency or channel, you can reduce overall list churn.
Step 3: Use dynamic content to only send around subscribers’ preferences. Deliver more relevant content that aligns with your contacts’ interests, and you’ll improve the performance of your campaigns across the board.
Learn more:
BUILDING YOUR DATABASE
Step 1: Feature opt-ins prominently throughout your website. Move beyond a tiny opt-in link at the bottom of your home page and include a strong opt-in call to action above the fold throughout your site, thereby increasing your chances of capturing those who arrive via search and social.
Step 2: Use social to drive email opt-ins. Build out an opt-in tab and form on your Facebook page, tease to your email program on Twitter, and include links to your newsletter sign-up on LinkedIn, Google+ and others.
Step 3: Utilize mobile to boost opt-ins. Take advantage of foot traffic to retail stores, trade shows and more and promote opt in via SMS or scanning a QR code. Also, invite downloaders of your mobile app or those who check in at your store or event to opt in.
Learn more:
AUTOMATION
Step 1: Send campaigns triggered by a date or time frame. Whether it’s a special sale, a Webinar or countless other events with a specific date or time, move from a manual “press send system” to an automated process.
Step 2: Personalize your messages. Add first-name personalization to the message salutation, have the email “signed” from a specific salesperson, or use dynamic content to populate the message with content specific to each recipient’s interests.
Step 3: Deliver messages based on email behavior. Set up programs to send automated messages based on whether a recipient opened or clicked on an email. Later, you can incorporate website, social and offline behaviors into your if-then messaging programs.
Learn more:
INACTIVE CONTACTS
Step 1: Define and segment inactives. Sift through your data and use a range of parameters—such as email activity, number of sales channels and market environment—to determine which inactives you want to try to re-engage.
Step 2: Employ reactivation campaigns. Try re-engaging certain inactives with tactics such as offering a purchase incentive, asking them to fill out a short survey, inviting them to engage via social media channels, print or SMS, and promoting updates on your website.
Step 3: Engage contacts before they become inactive. Initiate an early warning system that uses reporting and scoring to identify inactive contacts within a few months of opting in. Move these contacts into their own “activation” track designed to get them engaged through different types of content and by inviting them to update preferences.
Learn more:
SOCIAL MEDIA
Step 1: Join the conversation. Get active on social sites pertinent to your audience and establish yourself as a valuable source of helpful, customer-centric information and content snacks. Once you’ve built some credibility, you can include a little social bait to lead others into your world.
Step 2: Use social networks to turn prospective customers into customers. Convert “fans” to the cause and use your corporate social sites to offer white paper and Webinar sign-ups, serve up coupons for your physical or online store, display customer-centric videos and more.
Step 3: Build email campaigns around social sharing. Design an entire email (or series of emails) around content you think is shareworthy and facilitate the conversation by prominently featuring social-sharing links and prepopulating these links with a message (including hashtags) that’s suitable for sharing.
Learn more:
These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. From optimizing your forms and improving your transactional messages to implementing lead scoring and getting started with location-based marketing, there are many ways to make the power of incremental change work for you. So why not make this the day you take your first baby step toward big-time success? By taking just a few small steps every week, you’ll be able to look back and realize you’ve actually made substantial progress toward improving your marketing efforts.
I’m a big fan of using all channels to acquire new prospects/customers and their email addresses so you can nurture and engage with them via the email channel. However, it’s critical to align your form and registration process with the channel and context the prospect used to opt in or register.
Here’s what made me think of this: While paging through a magazine recently while eating dinner, I saw an outdoor paver-brick advertisement that offered a QR code for more information. So, I hauled out my trusty iPhone, scanned the code and was taken to the form shown at right.
Whoa! This looks like the standard form you’d get if you clicked through to the advertiser’s site on a conventional desktop computer. It had 21 data fields and/or checkboxes. Fortunately, not all were required.
As a marketer, you know that 100 percent of the prospects scanning your QR code from a magazine ad, brochure, table tent or airport poster ad are doing so with a smartphone or possibly a camera-equipped tablet.
There’s really no guessing if they might be using a desktop PC with a 23-inch monitor. They aren’t.
Also, if your QR code is on a table tent at a fast-food restaurant or seminar, a sign in a trade booth or an airport poster, you know your prospect is on the go, has limited time and is likely engaged simultaneously in other activities (eating, walking, reading, listening to a presenter, etc.).
So, it’s vital to consider both the channel’s form and your prospect’s context and environment at the time of registration.
For example, if the QR code offer has an immediacy to it, such as an instant coupon, then the content should be presented on the Web following the form submission.
If, however, the prospect is registering for a lengthy white paper while stopping by your trade booth or listening to your seminar presentation, your best route might be to provide a link via email to download the content later.
Here are a few tips to consider when designing your QR code strategy and mobile landing page and form:
- First, make sure you’re using a QR code in the right context. It should go on a surface that the user can scan easily, such as a magazine ad, booth sign or ad poster close to foot traffic.
- Don’t ask for too much information on the form. An email address might be enough to launch your opt-in process. You can use progressive profiling to collect more information, either to target messages or to qualify the prospect.
- Consider using social sign-in functionality to make it quick and easy for prospects to register with their social identities and a couple of finger taps.
- Put your key information at the top and “above the fold” (within the first screen without scrolling). Test your mobile landing page on the most popular smartphones where the QR code will be deployed. See where your page or form cuts off. If key information or form fields are cut off, move them up.
- Don’t use Flash. iPhones and iPads don’t render Flash. So, your landing page visitor will see a big blank.
- Minimize load time. Many users will be accessing your page over their cellular network, or perhaps a slow Wi-Fi connection. If your page takes too long to load, many people will bail.
- Avoid making visitors type lengthy responses, which can be difficult and error-prone with virtual keyboards. Instead, consider using checkboxes, lists, radio buttons and select menus.
- Try to avoid making visitors scroll to complete any registration process or to see vital information. If you must, have them scroll down and not sideways.
- According to Smashing Magazine, top-aligning form text is preferred over left-align, as text can be cut off when using the field zoom function.
- Another great recommendation from Smashing Magazine: Specify input formats. For example, with HTML5-friendly mobile browsers, specifying an input of the type “email” brings up a virtual alphanumeric keyboard with “.” and “@” keys.
- Avoid lists of hyperlinks, such as a set of resources, one on top of each other. They can be hard to click on a touch-screen, and people will bail when they hit the wrong link a few times.
- Increase icon and font sizes to make them more readable on a small screen.
- The Apple iOS Develop site recommends that all things “tappable” be at least 44×44 points. (Note: Points are not pixels; a point is 1/72 of an inch.)
- Don’t drive prospects to a Facebook page. If you plan to drive a visitor to a specific tab on Facebook, they won’t be able to view it on a mobile browser.
- A QR code isn’t an excuse for a super-long URL. Pick out a short, clean URL for your campaign. List out this URL on the ad so that users can easily type in the URL if they don’t know what a QR code is.
- Record the mobile preference. You now know this user is an experienced mobile user—make sure emails you send them are mobile-optimized.
So, how should your QR code landing page look? The form below (shown with related QR code) is a more mobile-friendly example:
QR codes can be great sources of email opt-ins by prospects who aren’t in front of their computer screens. Just be sure your landing page doesn’t turn away the prospects who get to it “via mobile while mobile.”
Have any favorite mobile landing page tips, success stories and big #FAILS? Please share below.
To keep up with Loren’s latest tips and observations, connect with him on Google+.
Related Resources:
1) Infographic: “Using Mocial Channels to Grow Your Email Database“
2) Blog: “Email Opt-ins: Be Where Your Customers Are“
(This is the fourth in a series of guest posts for Silverpop written by Jeff Ogden, president of B2B lead generation company Find New Customers.)
Recently, I was invited to deliver the keynote address at the BMA-NJ Social Media Symposium, which included speakers from Google and Linkedin. My goal was to entertain and deliver a fun and engaging talk.
As a national speaker for the Business Marketing Association and the host of Mad Marketing TV, this was a great opportunity to get in front of many B2B marketing folks.
I started by sharing 10 things that one can accomplish using social media:
- Gain visibility with prospects, partners, customers and community
- Share your brand story
- Become recognized as an expert
- Increase deal conversion rates
- Introduce your new products and services
- Pump up prospecting referrals and lead
- Get speaking gigs
- Listen and earn new leads for your business
- Network and find new business partners
- Hire smarter and faster
We also shared how much social networks have grown: Facebook surpassing 845 million members as of February 2012, 340 million Tweets every day, and executives from nearly every Fortune 500 company on LinkedIn. The bottom line? Social is too big to ignore anymore.
No good social media presentation skips the ROI discussion. But I consider social media a form of communication. We don’t always look at ROI on communication tools like the telephone and email, so why do we have to find an ROI on social?
We also shared our new Fearless Competitor blog and discussed the reasons why your blog should be your home base. In fact, Google discussed a form of search results which highlights fresh content in the last 48 hours. We discussed our investment in our new blog—how slider images appear, how it’s clearly labeled and easy to share, and how it’s optimized for search results.
We also said any good keynote presentation has to offer one big idea that people can use. So we discussed newsjacking, an idea from David Meerman Scott.
The idea of newsjacking is to jump on a new story right away and share insights with the press. Look at the “Life of a news story” graphic below and see how quickly you have to engage:
What are the steps for newsjacking? Below is a diagram of how newsjacking works:
Finally, we shared the key points to remember when engaging with social media:
- Don’t aim to be good at social media. Aim to be good at biz using social media.
- Before jumping in, ask why people are there.
- Keep in mind that some social platforms are highly mobile, especially Instagram and Foursquare.
- ALL social media must move the biz needle.
- Worst reason to do social? FOMO (Fear of Missing Out).
Deep research, careful planning and good content are all keys to success in social media in B2B marketing. For more on the topic, check out my Slideshare presentation on “Driving Business Results with Social Media”:
Related Resources:
1) Blog: “Why B2B Marketers Need to Be More Social”
2) Tip Sheet: “10 Tips for Using Social and Mobile to Capture, Communicate & Understand”
3) Blog: “Hey Marketer, Where’s Your Social Bait?”
Many marketers who are considering stepping up to a marketing automation platform understand the benefits it can provide, but hesitate to make the technological leap because they’re uncertain whether they’ll be able to demonstrate a quick return on investment. One of the most common questions I hear from these marketers is, “Are there baby steps we can take to get started with marketing automation that will be easy to implement, but will yield returns right off the bat?”
The simple answer is “yes.” Since I started working on marketing automation more than 10 years ago, I can’t think of a single customer who purchased a marketing automation solution, then left to go back to an email point solution. I think that’s testament to the added value of marketing automaton over email regardless of how deeply it’s adopted.
Here are some marketing automation capabilities I’ve seen customers get value out of independently of implementing others, in order of the quickest and easiest to adopt:
- Smarter Email: Automate messages so they go out based on a person’s interaction and interests instead of hitting send to the database at 9 a.m. on Wednesday.
- Lead Management: Facilitate offer registrations through progressive forms and online lead capture. Score and qualify leads and route them to sales. (Watch our progressive Web forms video.)
- Lead Nurture: Automate multitrack/step programs so you can communicate with individuals over a period of time to move them forward in the engagement process.
- Integrated Multichannel Marketing: Leverage website, social, email and CRM behavioral data to drive conversations with individuals over email, direct mail, telesales and website. Track and leverage behaviors across all channels.
- Revenue Measurement: Measure the effectiveness of lead generation ad sources as well as content offers/campaigns through the various stages in the sales funnel all the way down to revenue attribution. (Read more on gaining insights into your lead-management efforts.)
The important thing is to avoid setting expectations that you need to completely rewrite your sales business process, overhaul demand gen, rebrand the website, and create all-new, compelling content for each buyer persona. This is a recipe for not seeing results for some time.
Instead, take an agile approach where you set out for quick wins along a strategic path of implementation to get to where you see yourself in the future. By starting off with automated tactics that are simple to implement and measure, you should see results early on. Sample quick wins you might garner after just a few weeks or months of implementing marketing automation include:
- “We’ve sent XX number of relevancy-based lead alerts to sales (e.g. “highly qualified lead has just watched the five-minute services implementation video.”)
- “Through progressive forms, we’re seeing XX% higher form conversion with existing traffic ad sources.”
- “The sales team reports having more relevant conversations with prospects by being able to see what content/offers their lead has engaged with.”
- “The appropriate marketing-sent nurture emails are now delivered as if from the assigned sales rep—so we’re introducing the reps into the relationship.”
- “I save five hours a week because I no longer have to manually import and sync data from my CRM system.”
The point is that with the right approach to marketing automation, you can see results in quarters rather than years, enabling you to overcome obstacles such as budget squeezes, skeptical executives and indifferent sales team members. That’s not to minimize the importance of long-term processes and tactics, which are essential to achieving growth over an extended time period. But if you’re under pressure to deliver results out of the gate, you can snag a few quick wins and use that as a foundation for future successes.
Want more? Connect with Bryan Brown on Google+ or contact us for a demo.
Related Resources:
1) eBook: “Marketing Automation Best Practices”
2) Blog: “5 Things Marketing Automation Can Help You Do—With or Without Sales”
3) Blog: “Marketing Automation: Crawl, Walk, Run”
The term “loyalty” has a convoluted history and wildly different implications for many digital marketers. Plenty of big companies have spent millions of dollars on loyalty programs that often drive sales and customer satisfaction, but sometimes have the undesirable effect of creating discount-happy customers. And even more small- to medium-sized businesses like sandwich shops and car dealers have implemented some form of punch card that rewards repeat customers and spend over time.
This low-fi version of loyalty tends to draw a bit more fraud, and much of the important customer information (visits, purchases, etc.) isn’t captured in a meaningful way. Since early 2006, I’ve championed an approach I call “Experience-Based Loyalty,” which I’ll outline in today’s post.
As a 20-year digital marketer, I’ve spent lots of time in the loyalty and relationship marketing spaces. One of the market’s weaknesses is that the default “offer” has always been a discount of some flavor—even if it required the customer to buy 10 of something or attend three workshops to get the discount. This dynamic creates a customer expectation that they must always have a coupon or discount before buying anything from a brand. The simple existence of promo code aggregation sites is witness to this margin-killing dynamic.
Two solid large-company examples of experience-based loyalty have been built into two category-leading loyalty programs: Delta SkyMiles and Best Buy Rewardzone (both of which we worked on extensively during my time at Digitas). Best Buy was among the first big programs to crack the code on cash back, but they eventually incorporated members-only shopping events that were only available based on your program credentials. More recently, Delta Air Lines has enhanced the reward set for American Express customers by allowing one free bag per ticketed passenger—a “discount” of sorts, but not something airlines charged fees for until two to three years ago.
So how would a small or mid-sized company use Silverpop products to tackle the fundamentals of experience-based loyalty? Clearly, embracing a marketing automation mindset can unlock much of the potential of timely, behaviorally triggered messages without spending millions on POS integration and mailing monthly statements. In fact, I’d contend you could use promo code redemption, Web tracking, lead scoring and automated emails to devise the majority of a game-changing solution.
You can begin by defining the 10 to 15 trackable user actions you know indicate deep interactions with your brand. And yes, they’ll be slightly different by company and industry, but try to stick to natural customer actions—not what you want them to do. Examples would be watching videos on your site, attending an event, redeeming an offer, etc. From there, define a scoring model that quantifies user interactions and trigger emails based on task completion—and in an effort to incent social sharing.
You can even set up a monthly email to each user outlining their actions and associated level within the program. And don’t forget relational table functionality if you want to integrate virtually any flavor of external data into the mix. (See our CARFAX case study for great insight on implementing relational data.) The possibilities are almost endless.
And if you’re a brick-and-mortar, you should definitely be thinking about location-based marketing strategies that track and reward customers who check in at your locations via Foursquare or Facebook. My colleague Adam Steinberg covers these topics in depth here on the blog, but claiming your own venue should be first on your list of things to do. From there, developing offers like early-access shopping days and complimentary services is a great way to get started without giving away your tight margins (remembering you have all those nice leasing costs above and beyond your product costs).
So go ahead and think deeply about what kinds of experiences would amaze your customers. What could you offer that no one in your industry has ever thought of? And consider how the fundamentals of marketing automation can help you leverage their actual behaviors to signal when it’s time to deliver that magic moment.
The recent Facebook decision to make brand profiles use the timeline view has caused some companies to lose traction on the volume of new email contacts gained through the social network.
The timeline, as the name suggests, is a dynamic element that changes over time, with older posts moving down the page and becoming “invisible” unless the visitor chooses to look at that particular week, month or year in the timeline.
Fortunately, a few quick updates are all that’s required to continue using Facebook as a high source of new opt-ins to your email database.
So, what can be done? First of all, above the timeline there’s a header that never changes position. Within this area is the “Views & Apps” banner, which can contain up to 12 items, distributed in three rows of four.
This is the first opportunity to highlight important items such as your email opt-in link. To ensure that the timeline change doesn’t reduce your list growth, put a visual link to your email programme here. Remember to include a “source” field on your form so that you can keep track of where new customers have come from.
Here’s how Silverpop client Teletext Holidays has highlighted email sign-ups on its Facebook page:
For those of you in the B2B space, when you include an item in the banner such as “Solutions” that links to a “Request more information” page, remember to score this action and continue to rank prospects through all their interactions with you.
 The "Pin to Top" option in Facebook can help increase the visibility of key posts. As for the timeline, there are several ways to maintain visibility. The first is to “pin” a post. This option keeps that post at the top of the timeline for seven days. It’s a great option for competitions and email opt-ins, especially when you’re running a sign-up promotion, since it will help keep the post front and center on your Facebook page.
Additionally, when posting email content to your wall, always include a highly visible image to grab visitors’ attention. If you’re seeing a lot of activity on specific dates in your timeline, include a link to your email opt-in page in these posts so that you can capitalise on the interest shown.
Taking a few simple steps to strengthen the link between Facebook and your email programme by implementing the recommendations above will minimize any disruptions to the great ROI your email programme is experiencing through its integration with Facebook.
For those Silverpop customers attending Amplify 2012, be sure to catch the “Taking Advantage of Engage Webforms” seminar to learn how easy it is to create an opt-in page on Facebook.
Related Resources:
1) Tip Sheet: “8 Tips for Turning Facebook ‘Likes’ into Customers”
2) Blog: “Email Opt-ins: Be Where Your Customers Are”
3) Infographic: “Using Mobile, Social and Local to Build Your Email Database”
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