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.
By Dave Walters ( @_DaveWalters), on January 11th, 2012
A few months ago, my colleague Loren McDonald wrote a blog post titled, “Leverage Facebook to Grow Your Email Database,” where he outlined all the super-smart reasons to add an email opt-in form to your Facebook page. I’m not going to rehash all the business drivers, but instead let’s focus today on what it takes to build the form in a marketing technology platform such as Silverpop Engage and to create a new app in Facebook.
But first, a disclaimer: During the process, you’re going to log in to Facebook’s Developer site. Do not panic, it’s way easier than it sounds. If you can cut and paste a URL, you’re golden. Plus, you can tell all your friends you’re now a Facebook developer — how cool is that? Here are the step-by-step instructions:
1) First, you need an opt-in form that’s associated with a specific database in your marketing technology platform. I’ve created a Facebook brand page for a sample company called Scrobbl that we’ll use for this example. You probably already have a database — and may even already have an opt-in form. You can use your original form, or simply add a separate opt-in form. Guess what? That’s the hard part!
2) Pro tip: If you’re creating a new form, don’t miss the opportunity to add a “CRM Lead Source” value like “FBOptIn” that you can query against when it comes time to email these recipients. For this example, let’s assume this is a dedicated form, so we can simply add the value in the “FBOptIn” at the form level by adding to the field named “Lead Source.” It carries that value along when the user clicks submit, and now you instantly know where that lead originated from. There are a couple different ways to accomplish this, but we’ll look at more methods in future posts.
3) Next, let’s head over to Facebook. For this example, let’s assume you have a brand page already. (If not, here’s where to get started.) Just open your favorite browser and hit www.facebook.com/developer. You may have to run through some second-level verification via your mobile phone, but that’s it — you’re a Facebook “developer” now. The first thing to do is click on the gray button on the top right called “+ Create New App.” Give it the title you want to appear in your left-hand navigation on your Facebook page. I’d suggest something straightforward like “Newsletter.” When you’re done, this is what the completed page will look like:
4) Now let’s look at the main page for your new newsletter app. First, I’d suggest uploading an icon to replace the temporary graphic. (I just grabbed one from Google Images for this example.) The image will display next to the title in your left-hand navigation, and having a relevant image increases your user’s at-a-glance understanding. You can pretty much ignore the “Basic Info” and “Cloud Services” sections for now — unless you want notifications sent to an email address other than the one you’ve associated with Facebook.
5) Now let’s get down to the hard part – like pasting your form URL into a couple form fields! Under the section that asks how you want your app to integrate with Facebook, choose “App on Facebook.” You’ll see the two form fields open up, and here’s where we need the URL from your form. You’ll also want to open the “Page Tab” section, and stand by to paste the URL into that section as well.
6) Before going any further, make sure to check the exact syntax for the URL to make sure everything works perfectly. With Silverpop Engage, for example, users need to add “?sp_init=1” to the end of the URL. Because there’s an initial technical handshake between Facebook and the form, it’s necessary to tell the app to ignore that first session. This little piece of code does exactly that.
7) Now just copy your URLs from the “Canvas URL” field, and paste it into the “Secure Canvas URL” field in the “App on Facebook” section, adding the “s” to the “http” to create a secure version of the URL. Now do the same exact thing in the “Page Tab” section, and give it the name you want displayed in the UI (I called it “Newsletter”). You can leave the “Page Tab Edit URL” blank. And boom, that’s it. Give the servers about 10 minutes to load everything up, and there’s just one more step: Plugging the app into your brand page.
8) Here’s where some hacking is required given recent changes to the Facebook Developer site. In the old days, there was a friendly little link on your app’s homepage, but Facebook killed that in early December in an attempt to incent developers to build more fully functional apps. Our goal here is to just smarten up our Facebook page, so here’s how to auto-generate the page you’ll need to add the new app to your brand page. Use this syntax and plug in your own details:
https://www.facebook.com/dialog/pagetab?app_id=[App_ID]&next=[Canvas_URL]
Just paste that URL into your browser, select your brand page from the dropdown, and add the app. Voila! Make sure to give it a good end-to-end test to make sure everything is properly writing to your marketing database.
By Will Schnabel ( @wschnabel), on January 10th, 2012
Kicking off our first “Partner of the Month” blog of 2012, we’re excited to chat with Omer Artun, the founder and CEO of Silverpop partner Agilone. Omer holds a Ph.D. from Brown University, where he studied under Nobel Laureate Physicist Leon Cooper on pattern recognition, data mining and complex systems modeling. We asked him a few questions about marketing analytics and how it can maximize your marketing efforts:
What’s the biggest optimization challenge marketers are faced with today?
 Omer Artun, founder and CEO of Agilone It would be logical to expect the biggest hurdles to marketing optimization in a company today to be the need for advanced mathematical expertise or the need for real-time marketing automation to support millions of decisions found daily in a multibrand, multichannel marketing organization. But long before companies bump into these issues, they need a 360-degree view of the customer (integrated online and offline data), a centralized and consistent way to measure marketing results, and a fair way to attribute program response and revenue across multiple channels. The challenges are made more difficult by the fact that the data and measurement infrastructure are typically supported by multiple vendors, none of them talking to each other.
What is “smart data,” and why is it the key to engaging your customers?
Having all the data together is a very important piece for marketers, but making the data “smart” is equally important. Smart data is derivative data or calculations created by using customer, marketing and financial data but it can also include third-party data. Smart data also includes sophisticated models and analysis whose calculations and algorithms can also be used in making marketing decisions.
What does predictive analytics mean, and how can the concept help marketers?
Predictive modeling is a set of statistical procedures designed to predict a set of outcomes based on measured variables, assumptions and inputs. In a broader sense, it includes product recommendations, but for practical purposes, marketers should think about predictive analytics for four key areas:
- Marketing spend effectiveness (how much to spend)
- Targeting (who to target)
- Promotion differentiation (how to differentiate offers)
- Contact strategy (how to contact customers over time)
What are some best practices for connecting with and/or measuring attribution across multichannel marketing campaigns?
Revenue attribution is the hottest topic these days. Proliferation of online media requires reshuffling marketing spend across many more spend categories. Traditional funnel-engineering-type work is good but static, and it doesn’t address a few key issues. The new marketing spend effectiveness paradigm involves understanding causality of relationship between marketing and sales at a transactional level using statistical methods to fractionally attribute. There are five elements at play:
- Order of events: what sequencing (order) of actions lead to sales transactions
- Combined effects: what is the joint effects of marketing touches
- Frequency: how many touches are required to convert a prospect to a buyer
- Time decay: how the effects of marketing and sales decay with time passed
- Effectiveness: what is the relative efficacy of each vehicle (e.g., a banner view is not the same effectiveness as a 52-page catalog)
Agilone’s next-generation marketing technology turns your raw data into effective marketing programs. The company’s SaaS-based solution fully integrates data management, marketing intelligence, predictive analytics and campaign management applications. By bringing these functions together into a single suite of applications, marketers can spot key trends in their data and act on them faster and easier than ever. For more information about Agilone, please visit www.agilone.com.
Don’t miss Silverpop and Agilone’s upcoming Webinar, “Shazam’s Killer ‘Revenue App’: Combining User Behavior and Email Marketing.”
By Stephen Guerra ( @StephenGuerra), on January 6th, 2012
Have you considered incorporating contact or lead scoring into your marketing program, but been daunted by the effort required to get a fully functioning system in place? If so, you’re not alone. Many marketers tell me they’re interested in contact scoring but don’t know where to start planning a model, much less implementing one.
We’ve found that marketers can be successful in advancing their programs by beginning with simple scoring models, then adding sophistication later as they learn more about the technology and techniques of marketing automation. The Silverpop Strategy Consulting team works with customers to help them come up with their initial scoring models and has developed a quick-start process to get a basic model in place with minimal investment.
This quick-start process is expanded upon in our Contact Scoring Model workshop, a six-hour intensive effort designed to quickly determine what attributes are indicative of lead or customer quality, determine a scoring system for those attributes, and do some scenario-based testing of the model to determine what is working and what needs to be tweaked. Obviously this approach will not produce an elaborate and fully vetted model, but it does give our clients something to start with—and starting often seems to be the biggest hurdle to implementing a scoring process.
If you’d like to try this quick-start approach yourself, follow these steps:
1) Assemble the Team: Bring together a group of individuals who are familiar with your leads and customers and can help you indentify the quality-indicative attributes and how they should be ranked. Generally the team will include representatives from marketing and sales. Keep the group small to remain focused and efficient. I find about three to five people is ideal.
2) Identify Goals: Make sure all participants understand that your goal will be to create a simple, starting scoring model that will be modified and enhanced once it’s in place.
3) Provide Basic Education: Start your scoring model development session with some education on the basics of contact scoring, including its benefits and how it works.
4) Discuss Attributes: Have the team brainstorm the different factors that can be indicative of lead or customer quality. Don’t worry too much about specific values for the factors yet. Just get the major categories listed. For B2B one of these attributes might be company size, while for B2C you might use yearly income.
5) Prioritize Attributes: List the attributes in general order of importance. For example, a B2B company might prioritize industry type over company size.
6) Select a Score Range: Determine what your minimum and maximum scores will be. The exact range isn’t critical, but make sure to give yourself enough slack in your range to allow for a wide variety of scores. For example, if you have a scoring system that goes from 1 to 100, it may be difficult to show the diversity of lead quality within such a narrow range. A range of 1 to 500, on the other hand, will give you ample room for a variety of scores.
7) Define Possible Attribute Values: List each value that you’ll use for scoring each attribute. For example, you might want to divide company size into three ranges: less than 100 employees, 100 to 500 employees, and more than 500 employees.
8) Assign Scores to Each Attribute/Value Pair: Referencing the priority list you created in step 5, assign scores for each possible value of each attribute. You’ll want to put some thought into these scores and consider how the scores you’re assigning relate to the scores assigned for other items, but you don’t need to get these exactly correct just yet.
9) Bench Test the Model: Run some real-life examples of leads or customers through the model you’ve created to see how they score. You can do this manually or, as we do in our workshop, use a spreadsheet to model your score. After you run a few test cases through the model, you’ll likely find there are some adjustments you’ll need to make.
10) Implement the Model: Once you’re satisfied with the model, put it in place and begin observing how it functions. You may want to keep the model under observation for awhile to see how it’s working before you use it to make process decisions on lead or customer handling, or you may want to allow the model to influence your process in a low-risk manner. For example, you could start out using your model to provide alerts to your sales team for hot leads but avoid implementing a detailed lead-routing component.
Once you have a basic model in place, you’ll become more comfortable with the technology and techniques. To continue to advance, simply observe, measure and modify.
If you’ve thought about putting a scoring model in place, consider this quick-start method to try it out. If you’d like additional help in getting a model in place, contact us at SilverpopStrategyConsulting@silverpop.com. And remember, have fun and keep learning.
Related Resources:
1) Blog: “5 Prospect Behaviors You Should Be Incorporating into Your Lead Scoring Model”
2) FAQ: “What criteria should you consider when creating a lead-scoring system?“
3) Tip Sheet: “9 Tactics for Updating Your Scoring Model and Nurturing More Strategically”
By Arthur Hughes ( @Silverpop), on January 5th, 2012
Despite the attention many marketers pay to open rates, the only real proof that your email is getting your subscribers’ attention is when they click on a link within the email after opening it. Clicks are the true measure of whether anyone is actually reading your emails and thinking about what you’re trying to say to them — they’re the opening step in the sales process. This graph, taken from my new book Strategic Database Marketing 4th Edition (McGraw-Hill 2012), shows the percentage of those who have opened their emails who have clicked on a link.
As you can see, the average click rate is about 25 percent, which means that, on average, only about 3.75 percent of all regular commercial emails are clicked on (15 percent average open rate times 25 percent). This is nothing to worry about since emails are very inexpensive to send (roughly $4 per thousand or $0.004 each) compared to about $0.50 per direct mail letter. But while you don’t need to worry about the emails that don’t get opened or clicked on from a cost standpoint, you do need to worry about where your emails stand on this graph.
I worked recently with a well-known and highly successful company that had several hundred thousand email subscribers. Their open rate was greater than 20 percent, but their click rate per opened email was about 7 percent — near the bottom of the graph. What was wrong? The emails were obviously not interesting enough to subscribers to get them to read them. This meant, of course, that their emails were not getting thousands of their subscribers to buy what they were selling.
This graph is a wake-up call: Increase the click rate, and you stop leaving money on the table. But how can you boost click rates? There are many ways, but they can all be summarized in one phrase from Gary Stein, iCrossing’s SVP of strategy and planning: “Every click is a wish” — a wish for something interesting, new or exciting to happen.
To make that happen, you have to get into the brains of your subscribers and figure out what will turn them on. You can find this out by testing, or you can do what customer experience management consultant Shaun Smith said: “Customers want to be surprised and delighted. And to surprise and delight someone, you don’t ask them, ‘What can we do to surprise and delight you?’” You have to be creative. I have several suggestions:
1) Use video in your emails. A 2011 Forrester report indicated that video can double or triple email marketing click-through rates. To do this, use an enticing visual from the video prompting your readers to click and view. Keep in mind that thumbnail images are usually clicked on more often than a text link. (Download our Webinar on best practices for incorporating video into email.)
2) Use personalization. Emails that use the sender’s name and relevant data will improve click rates. Such emails seem like a personal letter to the reader. Ideally, the “letter writer” should personally “sign” the email and — if possible— provide a photo. Really good personalized content will send click rates through the roof.
3) Use creative flash. If you have something interesting to say, make it clear to the reader by a creative flash message that can’t be ignored.
4) Use extensive A/B Testing. Piccadilly tested two email creative possibilities for its Easter campaign and discovered that its second image/call to action option yielded an 8 times higher conversion rate.
5) Start sentences, but don’t finish them. Accommodate a recipient’s predilection for scanning by creating teaser paragraphs and provide a link to the rest of information.
6) Add a question mark? Marketing blogger Justin Brooke suggests that adding a question mark to a link can double the click rate. It forces the brain to read the statement as though it were a question.
Think and experiment. You have to be constantly at it, but whatever your click rate is now, it can be improved. Your job? Get busy.
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