Marketing databases allow sales and marketing to reach customers and nurture relationships more effectively (and efficiently). If they are designed properly and used correctly they are the “secret sauce”. Unfortunately, this is often just not the case. So here are some of the most common mistakes that I see made by direct marketers as they build a data-driven marketing engine:
Having no methods or procedures established for monitoring the vitality of the customer base over time. Statistics such as retention, reactivation, conversion and percent new-to-file will allow a direct marketer to more easily determine the success of various marketing strategies.
Lack of standards regarding data hygiene including householding the file prior the delivery of promotions, etc. The result being mailing inefficiencies and potential customer service problems. Scrub that data!
All response models are not created equal. Many managers don’t realize that roughly 75% of the analysts time should be spent becoming intimate with the customer data through data manipulation and massage to ensure it’s predictive power is exploited to it’s fullest potential.
Lack of basic knowledge regarding database architecture, hardware and software. Lacking even a basic knowledge, a marketer is not in the best position to establish marketing specifications for the database that are reasonable and will maximize effectiveness.
Little knowledge of the rules that must be followed when establishing promotional or list tests to ensure results are readable, reliable and projectable and a lack of understanding of how to read test results once final.
Bonus mistake:
6. Purging customer records after 24 months of inactivity (or less). Most marketers don’t understand the implications of doing this. At a minimum, a direct marketer should roll up key data for inactives including all promotional data and make available for future analysis purposes for at least 4 years.
A December article by eMarketer cites two recent studies to show the continuing dominance of email (as opposed to Twitter, Facebook, etc.) as the most popular method used by individuals to share information via the web.
The following study findings are of particular interest:
1) email (as opposed to Twitter, Facebook, etc.) is still the most popular method used by individuals to share content with friends.
2) content shared via email leads to more page views than any other method
3) most significantly, content shared via email is far more likely to lead to a purchase, subscription, etc. – 36.8%, as opposed to just 3.2% for Facebook and 0.4% for Twitter.
There are positives for social media as a means for sharing content – links shared through Twitter, for example, have the highest click-through rate of any sharing method.
That said, it is clear that direct marketers should be aware that the the overwhelming majority of the actual business generated by social sharing of content comes not from the new wave of social media vehicles, but rather from our old friend, email.
With so many disruptive, addictive technologies such as Email, IM, RSS and Cell Phones prospects are distracted like never before—and chances are, so are you!
So what can you do?
Key Tip: If you provide something of value to prospects, they will give you their respect, loyalty, time AND ultimately their business.
Consider the facts. Studies show that execs value Business Briefings (aka White Papers) most—more than case studies, product literature, articles from industry journalists, analyst reports, company websites, webcasts, blogs, online video and podcasts.
One thing is for sure – senior-most executives hate to be sold. They want to be in control and make their own decisions to buy. They view themselves as thought leaders and and love to have a “trusted advisor” (like you)nearby that they can count.So if you give away some of that proprietary, hard-earned insight in the form of a business briefing or ebook, you actually can propel yourself to a position of thought leader/trusted advisor and attract opportunity. This may seem counterintuitive but it works.
Of course there is a right way and a wrong way to do this… What’s the right way? Give your readers plenty of sample content before they are asked to trade their personal contact information for access. So many web sites ask for detailed information and lose valuable leads. Make this an interactive, engaging process that gives more value than you get and they will come in droves.
This idea comes from the video game market. Remember playing video game demos that provided you access to the first two levels? The same strategy can be applied to free business briefings. When your registration form finally appears, this is the prime opportunity to ask readers if they want to join your email opt-in list, in addition to receiving the briefing. Try it and you’ll see.
One of the many healthy side effects of introducing a marketing automation system is the updating of definitions for each stage of the sales/marketing pipeline. This takes place because these systems allow companies to easily communicate with different kinds of potential customers in tailored, appropriate ways, and it is common during implementation of a new system that these definitions are reviewed and discussed.
Many companies find that Sales and Marketing may have developed different definitions over time, and regaining unanimity via a fresh round of discussions can help to align potentially disjointed efforts and make the pipeline more efficient.
One set of definitions might be as follows:
Prospect – an individual who, based on title, company, and/or industry, should be interested in a product/service Lead – has responded to some form of Marketing outreach (downloaded a white paper, took part in a webinar, visited the website, etc.) Opportunity – has been contacted and qualified (via BANT or similar method – budget, authority, need, timeframe)
I get asked, “How do I get my prospects to respond to my campaigns?”
This best way is to look at your best customers, and then target direct marketing efforts at companies with similar profiles.
At True Influence we rank current customers by three criteria:
How much revenue do they represent over time?
How profitable might each customer be?
How well do their needs “fit” what True Influence has to offer?
Then look for similarities among the unique attributes of these top customers. What industries are they in? What is similar about how they use your products? Are they large, medium or small? Where are they located? Who are the key decision-makers and what are their titles?
Targeting is everything. There are few things worse than marketing to uninterested prospects. It’s really important to find fresh, filtered data from a reputable data provider to add to the direct campaign mix. There are a few really good data providers depending on your needs but for most cases Jigsaw is very good. They have a great model to keep B2B data fresh and relevant and our customers have very good results using their data especially for email campaigns.
Focus your marketing with these basic direct marketing strategies and you’ll improve the overall quality of your campaigns. And remember, test everything.
Its a safe bet that many companies have made New Year’s resolutions to increase revenue streams as so many companies, large and small were hard hit in 2009. While becoming leaner and meaner as some companies have done can help reduce expenses, there are other strategies that can be employed. Namely being smarter when it comes to sales.
If you’ve been asking yourself “what can I do to get leads flowing again? Here are five areas where businesses can look to improve their sales potential:
1. Poor Lead Stewardship. The number one reason sales are lost is that they are forgotten. Many companies have poor systems, or no systems in place for tracking leads from the moment they are aware of them to the time a customer deal closes. Take a hard look at the “lead leakage” in your business, adopt or modify your existing process, and you’ll see sales climb quickly.
2. Are you Listening? Any successful salesperson knows that “Sales is a transfer of enthusiasm.” You must be enthusiastic about what you are selling, but you have to also keep your focus on the customer’s needs. Make sure you are asking focused questions about their business process, their sales needs, what’s working, what isn’t and how you can help them achieve their goals. Be relentless, less ”selling” and more listening! IMHO, buyers will choose the company that they feel hears and understands their pain points and has a solution that seems designed just for them! (After all, each of us want to be heard; this simple shift can bring some profoundly positive results.)
3. Lack of Urgency. Hand in hand with the previous point, is how well you are managing urgency. You’ve probably heard many times: The most important question in sales is not “Why should I buy your product or service?” but “Why should I buy your product or service NOW?” Buyers are more cautious than ever, so coming up with compelling reasons why they shouldn’t delay making a commitment to your products/services is very important for success.
4. Craft a new elevator pitch. The beginning of any dialogue often starts with: “So, what is it that you do?” Even experienced, savvy sales people may use a list of bullet points to explain what they do. What they’re not getting is that your prospects don’t care about what you can do. They really only care what you can do for them to solve their problems. Tell them why you are the best one to provide this solution. Its time well spent to understand exactly what your core value is to your customers and develop the strongest focused messaging to communicate this effectively.
5. Pay for Performance Marketing. Shameless plug : True Influence has developed LeadPacs to help companies who don’t have the time, resources or money for in-house multichannel marketing campaigns but need more warm leads for Sales.Pay-for-performance leads mean you getexactly who you want, leads scored on the behavior you specify. Once you provide the content to us, we launch a campaign on your behalf and immediately deliver the results to your Sales Team!
I saw this today and thought it was inspiring for all of us to view as we start a new year.
The concept is that at 211 degrees, water is hot. At 212 degrees, it boils. And with boiling water, comes steam. And steam can power a locomotive. Its that 1 degree that makes the difference in 2010. Kudos to www.simpletruths.com for making this available.
This holiday season is a good opportunity to use Image Personalization to good effect. Perhaps you wish to send out a personalized Gift Coupon/Voucher via email to your customers or prospects? If so, True Influence could help you merge in the name and amount dynamically from the information already stored in its Lead Database.
When implemented correctly (test test!), Personalized Images can do wonders at increasing relevance and conversion with your email campaigns. Please contact us to learn more about this powerful feature and how we could help you enhance the relevance of your specific marketing campaigns.
As a result of last week’s post on this topic, I’ve had some questions from customers and other marketers on best ways to fine tune email frequency. I did some digging around to see what the collective brain had to say. One of the approaches I liked the most proposed doing the following reporting work:
Determine the cost of acquiring email.
Determine the lifetime value of the average recipient on your site.
Monitor the number of unsubscriptions per campaign, and the number of received emails per average user.
Balancing the ratio of acquisitions to unsubscriptions, along with the value of an email (the lifetime spend) allows you to carefully moderate the frequency with which you send emails. (In fact, I’d also err a bit on the side of less mail. I can’t be the only one who has unsubscribed from good content simply because the volume became a turn off.) Keep sending fresh relevant messages to keep them engaged, but remember once a subscriber is gone, it’s very hard to lure them back…
As an accomplished eMarketer, you may already have sophisticated Marketing and SalesForce.com Automation systems in place. You may also be using an analytics module to provide in-depth stats by the minute, as well as a set of Automated Marketing Programs to qualify, score and funnel Leads to your Sales system. With all of this in place, you will have a steady volume of prospects flowing through your system and a lead conversion rate on par with industry average.
However, to add the ‘Customer Driven’ dimension to your automated marketing programs, one must design programs that elicit targeted actionable feedbackfrom your prospects, leads, customers and marketing programs that are ‘Agile’ enough to adapt themselves based on customer feedback.
The key here is to ask the right questions to the right person. If you already have a lead/prospect/customer scoring mechanism built into your marketing programs, you could use the score to determine whom to ask what.
For Example: When you lose a lead after he was assigned to a sales executive, you could send a satisfaction survey email asking to rate the salesperson. This feedback could be used by your agile marketing program to route your hottest (highest scoring) leads to one of your top salespeople in the future.
If one of your existing key customers gives you a very high overall rating, your agile marketing program would take note of this and send out an email asking for references or perhaps send another email to try and crosssell/upsell more products.
When reviewing automated marketing programs make sure you’re also evaluating just how agile and customer driven they truly are.
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