By Karen Marchione ( @kmarchione), on January 27th, 2012
This month I’m excited to interview Dan Caro from Whereoware for our “5 Questions” blog. Dan recently presented at our Washington, D.C.-area user group on the topic of marketing automation and the powerful effect automated, targeted emails can have on your program if done correctly. Welcome Dan!
1) Can you tell a little about yourself and your role? How do you spend your work day?
 Dan Caro, senior online marketing manager, Whereoware I’m a senior online marketing manager at Whereoware, an avid Virginia Tech football and basketball fan, and a proud member of Hokie Nation. I work with a group of 12 colleagues who live and breathe Silverpop. We help our clients take full advantage of Silverpop’s powerful marketing automation tools. Whereoware’s philosophy is “right message, right person, right time.” We use that to help push our clients’ email programs to the next level. I spend a great deal of my work day managing my team of five and assisting customers with Engage. We focus on email design, data integration and program execution. We execute, then measure and adjust to maximize our clients’ results.
2) What is your definition of marketing automation?
Each person you ask will probably have a different answer for what marketing automation means to them. Technically, it’s defined as a software platform designed to automate repetitive tasks. While traditionally it’s a B2B concept where you nurture, score and qualify leads, it can be used for so much more. Any step in the customer acquisition, retention and upsell process can use marketing automation. That may mean an abandoned cart campaign for an e-commerce company or an upsell campaign for a software company.
3) Can you tell us about a few successful campaigns you’ve created? What made them work?
 Cart abandonment camapaigns can be highly effective with the right data and integrations in place. We’ve had a lot of success with abandoned cart campaigns. These typically consist of an email that’s sent to individuals who leave items in their online cart; it reminds them to come back and complete their order. It’s a simple email with a simple concept, but we’ve seen it work over and over. Other programs we’ve seen perform well are our lead-nurture campaigns, especially when integrated with Salesforce.com. These tend to be more complex because you need to fully understand the sales cycle of each business. You can, however, break them into smaller, more manageable segments and build them out over time.
The most important step in making any campaign successful is ensuring that the data is in place. The next most important step is to break down even the most complex campaigns into simple segments and then use the data and tools you have available to make it happen. (Read more about cart abandonment campaigns and lead nurturing tactics.)
4) If someone is just getting started with nurturing, where should they start? Is there a silver bullet in terms of the number of emails in a nurture program?
The key to nurturing is your data. Do you have all the fields and information you need to nurture your leads in a targeted, personalized manner? Are all your systems integrated to maximize your results? Also, keep in mind that taking a bunch of contacts that may or may not be interested and dumping them into your nurture campaign is not going to be your best option.
Your best option is to be realistic about who you’re putting into your nurture campaign. Did you have a real and meaningful contact with this individual? Are they genuinely interested in your products or services? That’s where I would start. Nurturing is all about maintaining an already-existing relationship—not trying to come up with one that wasn’t there to begin with.
As for the number of emails, there’s no silver bullet. You should look at your sales funnel and work backwards. What are your typical conversion rates? Work back to get the number of top funnel leads you need. The number will vary based on your business. In terms of timing, I think one email per week is appropriate.
5) Do you have any high-level advice in terms of email design that will captivate an audience?
Start with an objective. While designing, keep in mind what you want to happen after the email is read. Then, your design can be measured in terms of effectiveness. After considering that, my philosophy is KISS (keep it simple, stupid). By that, I mean be clear and concise. Keep your subject line simple. Make sure your email is not too wordy, and be sure that the call to action is crystal-clear. If you have more to say, save it for your website or landing page.
For more great tips from Whereoware, check out its Slideshare presentation, “5 Programs to Implement Today.”
By Dave Walters ( @_DaveWalters), on January 25th, 2012
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how and why marketing buyers make decisions. It’s probably an oversimplification to say “because of Facebook or Twitter,” but I think that’s an increasingly critical issue—social proof. I was reminded yet again of how things have changed by a spirited discussion kicked off around a Mark Cuban blog post a couple weeks ago. His primary contention was that start-ups in general —and tech start-ups specifically—shouldn’t waste time and money hiring an outside PR firm. His point is that when you’re small and fast, there’s minimal time and money to waste on getting (and keeping) an external resource up to speed on every aspect of your business. You’re likely better doing it yourself.
I believe the crux of Mark’s argument (which I agree with) is that old-school marketing has been effectively and aggressively disintermediated. In his example, it’s the PR agency. In other examples, it’s digital functions like buying banners (hi AdWords) or building websites (Joomla, Drupal and WordPress are fun). The same is true of building an audience of buyers for your product or service. Gone are the days when you need to be in one of the 30 product categories covered by PC Magazine, and you’d better win the annual roundup to pull units through the retail channel. And your exact position in a quadrant is no longer a guarantee of success—or even survival. The gatekeepers of the past are just that—of the past.
Today, we build market credibility and buyers by reaching out directly to people and companies. Channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. have opened a new dialogue with a much wider audience. And the “informed collective” (as I like to call it) wields an incredible amount of sway over who’s considered when it’s time to buy technology. This has turned many brands of yesterday on their heads such that they simply can’t compete with this new breed of leaner, faster technology company. Look no further than how Salesforce is displacing Siebel in large-scale business. Ten years ago, no single company had a product that could span price points from $35 to $35 million.
So what does this mean for marketers? Clearly, changing the entire marketing approach is not easy stuff. The scale of dealing with 50 publications and 10 analysts to carry your message to market required less effort than having to engage all your social network followers across five to seven disparate networks—all at the same time. And this is the tip-of-the-spear for disintermediation. At this exact point is where scalable technology steps in to save the day.
The marketers best positioned for future success remain grounded in the time-proven tactics, but are quickly integrating a social strategy at the highest levels of their organization. They clearly understand that prospects don’t show up uninformed and ready to buy whatever they’re hawking. Today’s buyers are increasingly more educated on a particular segment’s competitors and products than any normal, human salesperson could ever be.
So how is this achieved? Via professional groups on LinkedIn, at networking events, in Google+ circles—the list is almost infinite. But they all have one thing in common: no brand owns them. You can’t buy a truckload of media and slam your way into consideration or market share. In fact, I’d contend the massive spending habits of the past (think Microsoft’s launch budget for Windows 8) will increasingly be perceived as a sign of social weakness. Super-fans (created through epic brand advocacy or immense peer-driven social draw) do more to convince the world that tools like 37Signals’ Basecamp or Facebook are must-haves in one’s digital life.
The same is true for marketing technology. The rise of Google Analytics opened the eyes of thousands of mid-sized business to the metrics that were possible on the digital platforms. And SaaS-based ecommerce platforms like Storenvy and BigCommerce brought store-building directly to anyone creative or brilliant enough to offer items people want to buy. And yes, these platforms have created social groups who share, enhance and evangelize about the platform they love. And guess what else? The ease-of-use and flexible designs have seen these tools become part of the consideration set for real-deal marketers.
So if you’re a marketer, it’s a double-edged sword. You’ve got to deal with a much wider sphere of interactions, but the super-fans you build will go to the ends of the earth with you. Your marketing technology now requires a different degree of consideration and execution. It simply won’t cut it to add a survey to next month’s newsletter. Step back and think about everything your customer does, and figure out how to elegantly automate behavior-driven messaging in a way that highlights your brand personality. No one wants to buy from a monolith, and you might be surprised by how aggressively your small- to mid-sized company can take customers from your Fortune 500 competitors by being authentically human.
By Richard Evans ( @rlevans), on January 23rd, 2012
The start of any good relationship requires listening to, appreciating and acting on the preferences and interests of another person. The start of a successful email marketing relationship isn’t any different.
Preference centres are one of many email marketing topics that draw a wide range of responses from practitioners and pundits alike. Some, like me, find a great deal of value in them, while others feel that while good in theory, they aren’t quite as good in practice.
Here are my thoughts on why preference centres do matter—now more than ever. And below, you’ll find 31 tips for creating a world-class preference centre of your own.
Why build a preference centre? To me, email marketers should employ preference centres to accomplish the following three goals, in order of priority:
- Give more power and control to subscribers.
- Drive higher relevance and greater personalisation.
- Help divert unsubscribes and reduce list churn.
I believe preference centres are particularly essentially today, primarily due to the fact that the variety of channels through which we “touch” our customers and prospects is more diverse than ever. And with that diversity comes a shift in consumers’ desires to have increased control over how they are being marketed to in these channels.
Here are five reasons why preference centres matter now more than ever:
- With email, social, mobile, your website and more, there are more channels available to your customers than in the past.
- Increasing engagement and interaction with messages now has the potential to improve delivery and inbox placement. Relevant messages, tuned to the preferences of the recipient, have a higher likelihood of achieving this level of engagement.
- Consumers expect greater control over their relationship with your brand and the marketing messages they receive.
- Having a central facility to manage all touch points with the customer helps improve cross-channel marketing efforts and improves the likelihood that you’ll deliver the right message to the right channel.
- By providing alternatives to unsubscribing such as snoozing or changing mailing frequency, and by providing improved change-of-address facilities, you can reduce overall list churn.
Interested in learning more about the specific tactics that go into building a world-class preference centre? Have a look at this presentation, which highlights 31 tips for doing just that—through the lens of real-world email marketing examples.
Where do you stand on the topic of preference centres? Let me know in the comments below.
By Loren McDonald ( @LorenMcDonald), on January 20th, 2012
Recently I’ve written Email Insider columns about thinking big and getting things done, and one of the questions I’ve gotten a lot in response is, “Do we have the right technology, resources and creative partners in place to reach our goals and achieve success?”
One key to answering this question is determining how much you’ll need to have your own hands in the marketing mix. The old enterprise email marketing model—where most correspondences were one-off broadcast messages—is being replaced. The “we’ve got five product emails we’ve got to push out this week, let’s toss them over to the agency or creative ESP team, send them off and move on to the next communication” approach isn’t going to work much longer.
In its place is a move toward multifaceted programs and campaigns that are triggered by customer behaviors. That relates directly to one of the biggest trends among savvy email marketers, which I touched on in my most recent Email Insider post: creating more behavior-based and automated programs. These campaigns are much more strategic, requiring a deep knowledge of the business. They need to be designed, tweaked, monitored and continually optimized by someone who understands the intricacies of the company.
In addition, transitioning from batch-and-blast emails to more behavior-based automated programs typically requires working closely with your IT team as you’re pulling data from multiple sources (CRM, ecommerce, business intelligence and more). Much of this work is frontloaded as your email strategy changes, but it’s also critical that you have internal control over these relationships so you can make changes quickly.
For these reasons, sophisticated campaigns are more difficult to fully outsource. Think of email marketers as NASCAR drivers behind the wheel of a high-tech race car. They may get some assistance from team members in the pit, but during the actual race the driver is the one in there with their hands on the wheel maneuvering the vehicle. And just as a race car driver has to adjust on the fly to track conditions, vehicle performance and other drivers, an email marketer must juggle many different messaging tracks and data points simultaneously, requiring quick mid-course adjustments to keep a few laps ahead of the competition.
So while a full-service model may make sense for some of those “throw-it-over-the-wall” companies, many will want to focus on improving efficiency and performance by maintaining greater control of their integrated email marketing efforts. That’s because YOU know your audience best and will benefit from a solution that puts the power in your hands so you can, for example, modify post-purchase email campaigns that drive revenue on the fly.
How does that translate in terms of making sure you have the right tools, team and resources in place? In my experience, it’s difficult for a vendor to be both a best-in-class software provider and a world-class agency. So if you need both top-tier technology and agency services, you may want to consider going with the best of breed from each discipline.
The good news from a technology perspective is that the best marketing technology solutions today are both sophisticated and easy to use, enabling you to improve efficiency by reducing the need for external campaign and deployment services. My advice is to dig beyond analyst reports and get demos of the marketing technology platforms you’re considering to see how they stack up in terms of ease of use, data collection options, behavior-driven features and integration of mobile, social, local and email. (See our infographic on how companies today are integrating “mocial” channels.)
So how do you know if you have the right elements in place to reach your goals and achieve success? That’s a tough one to answer, since one size doesn’t fit all and different companies use email with different goals in mind. But if you’re looking to think big in 2012 and increasingly employ the types of behavior-based, automated emails that can often boost revenue to exponentially higher levels, keep in mind that it’s easier to win the race if you’re actually driving the car.
By Loren McDonald ( @LorenMcDonald), on January 20th, 2012
We’re picking up where we left off in my interview with Dela Quist, CEO of the email agency Alchemy Worx. Here, he argues against the conventional wisdom on inactive subscribers and subject-line length and tells marketers how to overcome their inferiority complexes.
You recently knocked Dell for removing you, a paying customer, from one of its lists because you hadn’t clicked recently. Should marketers ever remove inactives from their database? What is your overall prescription for how email marketers should deal with the growing problem of inactives?
 Dela Quist, CEO of Alchemy Worx I’ve probably bought more than 150 Dell laptops, desktops and servers over the years, and I had been on Dell lists for five or six years. I might go three months or so without actually opening a message, but I loved having them in the inbox because I could tell exactly where Dell was in its sales cycle.
About three months ago, I wanted to see where Dell was because I needed to buy, and I went into my inbox to find the most recent email. It wasn’t there. Dell had taken me off their list. How stupid was that?
Here’s how the nudge effect works: Right about this time, I had been thinking, “What are we, a Dell shop?” I had begun to think about HP for pricing. Was that coincidence? I haven’t stopped buying Dell, but I haven’t resubscribed, either.
Are you saying marketers should never remove inactives from their databases?
Well, you know, at one time I was one of those preaching this stuff, that when you take away half of your list for inactivity, you’ll double your open rate.
The first of my clients that I tried to make do that ignored me. So we split his list in two and mailed to the inactive list in the same way as we mailed everyone else.
The conversion rate on the inactive list was pretty high. Between 2 percent and 5 percent of the people who never opened before would open. I realized that for the cost of sending the email to everybody, the return was pretty good.
The problem is that we have a distorted view of what people do with email. We are focused on opens and clicks, not on sales. If someone opens an email that’s a month later, they will buy.
The value of an open is significantly different early in on the campaign than at the end of the campaign. If you start to value these opens differently, it changes your strategy.
You realize that every email you send affects every other email you send and influences the decision to buy. Customers will go back and look for a good offer and see if it’s still active.
No one has ever shown me conclusive proof, with hard numbers, that taking people off your list makes you more money.
You were one of the first thought leaders to buck the “short subject lines” practice with a study that showed longer can actually convert better. But isn’t it really all about the copy and offer in the subject line, not the length?
That’s right. Our study found that the longer a subject line, the lower the open rate. But, very bizarrely, we saw that clicks went in the opposite direction: The longer the subject line, the more the clicks.
We came to the conclusion that it’s all about meaning. The shorter the subject line, the less likely you are to convey meaning. People have to open your email. So, overall, they tend to be less qualified.
With a longer subject line, the person can decide if the email is relevant. Although fewer emails are opened, those who open them are more qualified.
After we published our white paper, “Subject Lines: Length is Everything,” subject lines in the United Kingdom grew 15 percent on average.
I’m completely excited again with the branding potential of longer subject lines. Marketers like Gilt Groupe and Groupon have astonishingly long subject lines because they have multiple propositions.
Does your data hold up as more consumers read email on their mobile devices?
I don’t think mobile is going to take us back to shorter subject lines. Go to any marketing email on your smartphone, and tell me what you see. The smartphone is optimized for subject lines. The creative is irrelevant.
So, that also makes the obsession with creating mobile versions ridiculous, because you don’t even see that.
You’ve often said that the email marketing industry is plagued by “fear and self-loathing.” Although email marketing delivers the highest ROI, marketers beat themselves up over frequency and deliverability. Why do they focus on the negative, and what is your antidote?
Marketers have a visceral fear that the public hates getting email or that they’re getting too much email. Their challenge is, “How do I get my list wanting another email from me?”
The answer is value. It’s taking care. It’s having great creative, great content and great ideas.
This fear and self-loathing comes from what happens when you tell people you do email marketing for a living, and their first reaction is, “You’re a spammer.”
Being called spammers has an insidious effect on us. But we allow the word to be used far too loosely. No marketer I work with spams, but we allow people to use that word casually. We even use it amongst ourselves!
I try to bring out the positive. Email is bigger than Google. I would say 50 percent of all clicks online are generated by email. How likely are you to Tweet about a product? Maybe 5 percent will.
Marketers also are terrified of making a mistake. They live in fear of best practices. When did a company go out of business because it put “Oops!” in a subject line?
Finally, ecommerce thrives on email. If we can get that message out, everyone would love what they do.
Read Part 1 of my interview with Dela, “Guest Q&A: Dela Quist Talks Email Frequency, Branding.”
By Adam Steinberg ( @adams472), on January 19th, 2012
2011 was a major stepping stone for location-based services, as we outlined in our recent “Year in Review” infographic. For starters, more than 15 million people are now using Foursquare—double the number from a year ago—and millions more are using location-based services on Facebook and Twitter. 2012 will be another critical year for location-based marketing, as check-ins continue to cross over into the mainstream.
Based on our conversations with marketers and technologists in the industry, as well as our own observations and intuition, we present eight predictions for location-based marketing in 2012:
1) Foursquare Creates Advertising Network. Foursquare has long allowed businesses to offer specials to customers that check in. And its Merchant Dashboard has driven consumer adoption, as more and more people check in to receive deals and offers.
With more than 600,000 businesses using its business tools, look for Foursquare to begin monetizing this service as it seeks to generate revenue. Our expectation is that Foursquare will begin to charge businesses that seek to run specials on more than one location.
2) Foursquare hits the 30-million mark. Foursquare is growing at approximately 30,000 users a day, and we expect this to gradually increase during the upcoming year. After announcing its 15 millionth user last December, look for Foursquare to tally 30 million users by the end of 2012.
3) Integrations between check-ins, loyalty CRMs and credit cards increase. 2011 saw brands such as American Express and Starwood begin incorporating check-ins into their reward programs. Expect more brands to convert check-ins to loyalty points (e.g., “Check in and get 50 bonus points!”) instead of simply providing rewards at the point of sale.
4) Facebook will enable location-specific mobile advertising. As Facebook continues to grow revenue ahead of its 2012 IPO, look for the social network to finally turn on location-based advertising within its mobile application. This will enable marketers to deliver ads based on both current location and past check-ins.
5) New competitors emerge that automate the check-in process. Consumer growth has proven that users enjoy sharing their location, connecting with nearby friends and earning rewards. The largest headache with services such as Foursquare and Facebook is that users must still manually check in to each location. This creates opportunities in 2012 for innovative start-ups that automatically check users into venues when provided permission.
6) Groupon Acquires Foursquare. With Groupon still flush with cash, and Foursquare continuing to drive more-and-more merchant transactions, we predict Groupon makes Foursquare an offer it can’t refuse. This would expand Groupon’s merchant toolset and give it access to millions of new consumers through Foursquare’s mobile app.
7) Marketers increasingly incorporate check-ins into sweepstakes and contest programs. 2012 appears to be the year that check-ins secure their place within marketers budgets. Marketing agencies and brands will consistently include check-ins in their marketing mix this year, driving traffic to their brands and creating even more awareness for location-based services.
8) Marketers embrace “big data” and integrate location-based marketing. As more marketers include location-based marketing in their 2012 campaigns, reporting will become a hot topic. Check-ins provide incredibly valuable data to marketers about what their customers do and when they do it. This will lead savvy marketers to begin integrating their location-based data into their existing marketing platforms, enabling them to learn even more about their customers and incorporate these learnings across all marketing channels.
What are your predictions for location-based marketing in 2012? And do you agree or disagree with our list? Post your comments below.
Interested in running your own location-based marketing campaigns? Contact us for a demo of PlacePunch’s marketing capabilities to see how you can get started today.
By Jeff Ogden ( @Jeff_Ogden), on January 18th, 2012
(This is the first in a series of guest posts for Silverpop written by Jeff Ogden, president of Find New Customers.)
According to Wikipedia, Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) is defined as a:
customer-centric, data-driven method of communicating with the customer. IMC is the coordination and integration of all marketing communication tools, avenues, functions and sources within a company into a seamless program that maximizes the impact on consumers and other end users at a minimal cost.[1] This management concept is designed to make all aspects of marketing communication such as advertising, sales promotion, public relations and direct marketing work together as a unified force, rather than permitting each to work in isolation.
Got that? All marketing communications tools, avenues, functions and sources. If you’ve been in the marketing leadership role for very long, your head is swimming right now. But we have good news for you. Silverpop has a white paper coming out soon on this very issue.
 Think of how many marketing communications tools and avenues exist — TV, radio, print, pay per click, organic search, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, website, blog, outdoor, events, YouTube — the list goes on and on and on.
OK, so let’s just send an email. But what will the recipient be using — laptop, smartphone or tablet (and do Blackberries, iPhones and Android devices look the same)? Will our email look good on every device?
Welcome to the crazy new world of the CMO!
And by the way, your bosses want results — fast!
Maybe you feel like the thirsty man in this photo — way too much of a good thing.
Most marketers face bewildering questions:
- Where should I start?
- Where is the best place to invest?
- How can I measure success?
- How will I know what isn’t working?
In our opinion, careful planning and research is needed.
Before you begin, first consider how big the job really is. What is the new customer revenue for the upcoming year? From there, simple formulas can map the needs. What percentage of new deals will you win? What percentage of sales-ready deals actually close? What percentage of marketing-ready deals become sales-ready deals? How much does it cost to generate a marketing-ready lead? How many do we need?
Next you need to go talk to your customers. Jack Welch, the famed former CEO of GE, once said to an up-and-coming GE executive, “Go talk to the customers. At least they won’t lie to you.” Jack is right. Buyers give you the unvarnished truth.
What should you ask? We suggest you start with buyer personas (read the Buyer Persona Manifesto.) The idea is simple: The better you understand buyers, the better you can talk to them. You’ll learn what devices they use and what social networks they visit. You’ll learn to “fish where the fish are.”
Start crafting content to answer the questions prospective buyers have. What questions do they need answered in order to buy your product? Think of how they move from a problem to a solution and map your content to that process.
Finally, craft some metrics to track your progress and prove results. I recommend you start with experts such as the Lenskold Group.
If you start the right way and follow a plan, then you’ll be in good shape,
Jeff Ogden is president of the B2B Lead Generation Company Find New Customers, which offers a comprehensive B2B marketing plan. Contact us if you’d like it.
By Loren McDonald ( @LorenMcDonald), on January 13th, 2012
From email marketing to marketing automation to social media, Silverpop posted more than 20 presentations on Slideshare in 2011, which in turn tallied more than 60,000 page views. Here’s a look at our top 5 most popular Slideshare presentations of 2011, ranked by total views:
5) “Engagement Marketing: Modern B2B Marketing Using B2B Marketing Automation”
Will Schnabel, Silverpop’s Senior Vice President of International Business Development, outlines why and how B2B marketers must shift their focus from raw leads to managing buyer dialogue, using marketing automation to nurture sales-ready relationships and improve revenues.
4) “Email Marketing Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2011”
From Screensize-apalooza to email becoming more social and sophisticated, this preso runs down the key email marketing trends of 2011 – almost all of which continue to resonate strongly in 2012 – and how companies need to adjust, from getting more “mocial” to leveraging user-generated content.
3) “7 Trends to Watch in 2012—and Key Tactics You’ll Need to Address Them”
For this presentation, I teamed with Silverpop Vice President of Product Marketing Laurie Hood to examine some of the most important marketing trends of 2012, including location-based marketing’s growing popularity, behavioral segmentation’s increasing sophistication and remarketing’s coming of age.
2) “Email Practices of the Top Online Retailers”
Highlighting findings from our Top 500 Retailers Study, which examines benchmarks, trends and tactics of the biggest retailers, this slideshow offers related tips and examples for better marketing. Areas covered include use of welcome emails, cart abandonment campaigns, use of social-sharing links and much more.
1) “Getting Personal: ‘Humanizing’ Content to Connect with Customers”
Want to better connect with customers, increase relevance and engagement and drive revenue? It’s time to get personal. Here, Richard Evans, Silverpop’s director of marketing for EMEA, shows how humanizing content can increase engagement, presenting key tactics and related case studies.
Looking for more presentations packed chock full of marketing tips and insights? Check out Silverpop’s Slideshare page.
By Loren McDonald ( @LorenMcDonald), on January 12th, 2012
We at Silverpop are big on birthday emails, and not just because we enjoy receiving them on our special days.
A well-designed birthday email program has the potential to generate high ROI on a relatively low level of effort. Birthday emails also give you another opportunity to reach out to your customers with a highly relevant message.
 Despite these benefits, Silverpop found in a recent study that seven in 10 email marketers don’t send birthday emails. On top of that, three out of the four email marketers who don’t send birthday emails say they don’t intend to start.
We put these findings and much more in a report, “Birthday Blueprint: How to Build a Top-Tier Birthday Email Program,” which looks at the state of birthday email marketing and addresses the reasons why some marketers don’t do birthday emails.
Blueprint for Building Your Birthday Email Program
The report also includes our seven-step Birthday Blueprint and loads of examples and illustrations. Here’s a condensed version. I invite you to check it out and then download the complete report.
Step 1: Set your birthday program goals.
 Your birthday email program can serve one or both of these basic goals:
- Build branding and customer engagement: You send an attractively designed message that doesn’t include a purchase incentive with the “Happy Birthday” greeting. This approach dings your marketing budget the least, and you might even realize some incremental revenue.
- Drive online or offline visits and revenue: Using a purchase incentive such as a discount, upgraded service or no-strings freebie generates measurable results but can also affect your margins or marketing budget.
Step 2: Determine a delivery schedule.
Generally speaking, the more effort a recipient has to expend to benefit from your message, the farther in advance you should send it.
If you don’t use incentives, you can send the message on or near the recipient’s birthday. At the other extreme, a travel company sends its birthday emails six weeks early to give recipients time to plan a trip.
Step 3: Collect the data.
Decide where and how to collect your data, whether to require birth date and how much data to collect. Your delivery schedule and the number of other required fields drive some of your decisions.
Requiring day/month/year data will give you the richest amount of data but can reduce form completions. A/B split tests on your registration form might show you how much data your customers are willing to provide.
Step 4: Greeting or incentives?
 If using incentives is a common part of your email approach, then incorporating them in your birthday messages should be a no-brainer. More than half the marketers in Silverpop’s benchmark study provide some incentive.
Without an incentive, your email content must be strong and creative to make an impression.
If you’re unsure, or you need to sell management on the benefits, test both approaches side by side for a few months.
Step 5: Single or multiple emails?
Sending a single birthday wish is the most common and easiest strategy. However, sending multiple emails can motivate your subscribers to redeem an incentive before it expires.
Step 6: Design your message.
Because birthdays are usually fun days for subscribers, your creative approach should reflect this. Push your designer to create something fun and engaging that’s distinctive from your other messages while still following your graphic standards and email design best practices.
 Copy styles can take many forms. Be sure the copy drives the action you want, is simple and straightforward and meshes with your brand or corporate image.
Step 7: Test and optimize.
Although listed last, testing and optimization should be part of every step in your pilot program as well as after as you refine it.
Here are some facets to test:
- Data capture: Try different form layouts and data-field locations to see which ones deliver the most completions.
- Incentives: Try at least two to see which drives the best combination of conversions and margin impact.
- Subject lines: Consider whether tactics such as first-name personalization or listing the incentive in the subject line affect conversions or opens.
Ready to Dive In?
You’ll find the complete blueprint and more examples in Silverpop’s report, “Birthday Blueprint: How to Build a Top-Tier Birthday Email Program,” which you can download with our compliments.
Marketing used to be more straightforward. Potential buyers picked up the phone and called us as soon as they had any inkling they might be interested in our solution. They were open to us calling them and coming on site to begin establishing a selling relationship. In marketing, we focused on great advertising and brand programs to make sure we had high awareness, and sales owned the entire sales cycle. Those days are long gone. Instead, we have what I call “The New Normal.” Let’s look a bit more closely at characteristics of the New Normal and what marketers can do about this dramatic shift in how to engage with these empowered buyers.
Enter a New Era
A recent study by Market Transformation indicated that 73 percent of clients won’t accept a phone call from a vendor. Meanwhile, various studies highlight that potential buyers want to perform solution research on their own, moving through 50 percent to 90 percent of the sales cycle by themselves. Clearly, the old days are gone, replaced by what I call “The New Normal.” As marketers, we have to move quickly to adapt to this new way of marketing and selling, or we will not thrive.
Addressing the Gap
According to Marketing Leadership Roundtable research, this shift in the buying cycle has resulted in a new gap in the purchase process. During the latter half of the information-gathering stage and the first half of the evaluation stage, prospects are no longer interested in engaging with salespeople. Many marketers have been slow to fill the gap and deliver the content these leads are looking for as they evaluate who they might like to engage. To avoid prospects stalling in or falling out of the funnel, marketers must own this portion of the buying cycle by nurturing those “not yet ready for sales” leads.
Meet the Silent Surfers
Let’s look a bit more at the New Normal. During the research phase, potential buyers begin by searching for industry, market and solution information—usually on Google or another search engine. I call these potential buyers “Silent Surfers.” They just want to begin learning and don’t want to become known to the vendor.
As a vendor, what should you be doing at this point in the sales process? First, you need to turn on Web Tracking. This will allow you to track Silent Surfer activity and determine the originating source of all opportunities. During this phase, you also need to make sure you have laser-focused SEO and outstanding content, investing the right resources and/or budget to make this happen.
Concierge-Style Engagement
Now, review your content assets. Some things you should give away without requiring a Silent Surfer to provide identification. This will allow you to begin to show a bit about who you are and what you do. Blog posts certainly fit this category, but I would encourage you to also include some downloadable assets that don’t require filling out a form.
What about high-quality deliverables such as white papers or research-based findings? These are the assets you want to “gate” or put behind a sign-in form in order to receive the document. At this point, many of you provide what I call the Bouncer Sign-on Form. You ask the Silent Surfer to provide as many as eight to 12 pieces of information. That’s akin to putting a big burly bouncer in front of your content, and it will turn off more people that you’d like. Instead, consider using a technique such as progressive forms, where you only ask your Silent Surfers for one to three pieces of information, then request a bit more on subsequent visits.
Another option is to give your Silent Surfers the option to sign on socially using their Twitter, Facebook or other social network information. Studies show that more than 60 percent of site visitors prefer this option. And because you turned on Web tracking, you can now use the information gleaned from the prospect’s social profile to knit together Silent Surfer Activity with the newly identified Jane Jones to better understand how Jane is interacting with your website. These few steps will enable you to begin tailoring your marketing campaigns based on each individual’s behavior.
The Power of Questions
During the consideration phase, in which Jane Jones begins interacting with your website, you can begin to ask good questions (via landing pages and Web forms), establish strong nurture campaigns and progressively customize your messages, content and offers. Tools such as dynamic content and PURLs can be highly tailored to increase the intimacy of the relationship and dramatically improve results.
Better Reporting in the New Normal
Behind the scenes, you want to make every offer a campaign in CRM and separately track offers and lead sources. For instance, you should track a white paper separately from how the visitor found your site, which might be a Pay Per Click ad. If you provide a resource center for your visitors, you should track each content offer separately; otherwise, you won’t be able to track the effectiveness of each offer. Finally, you never want to write over the original source of the visitor. That original lead source can provide valuable insight into which demand generation approach is most effective.
Rise Up to the Challenge
Instead of mourning the death of the good old days, as marketers we need to rise up to the challenge of Silent Surfers and assume more responsibility for the sales cycle than ever. Encourage prospects to begin a low-friction relationship with you and your websites using marketing automation technology. Use the power of data collected through their subsequent visits to customize and personalize how you market to your prospective buyers. Done well, your site visitors will be more than happy to move from marketing interactions to a positive sales relationship.
For more tips and tactics on marketing in “The New Normal,” download our tip sheet.
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