Archive for the ‘List Management’ Category

How can you get a better response to your email marketing?

Friday, April 30th, 2010

Most marketers ask, “How can I get a better response to my email marketing?

First, determine who your best prospects are, then target your marketing efforts at companies who are similar.  Seems simple but often overlooked. You can start by ranking your current customers by these three criteria:

  • How much revenue do they represent over time?
  • How profitable might each customer might be?
  • How well do their needs “fit” what you have to offer?

Second,  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?

Then buy some outside lists (contact us for information about this) of companies and contacts that match and add them to your email campaign.  Focus your marketing with these  marketing strategies and you’ll improve the overall quality of your campaigns. And remember, test everything!

Posted in Email Marketing, Email marketing best practices, List Management, List Segmentation | No Comments »

The Top 5 (ok 6) Data Mistakes that Marketers Make

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

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 not the case. Here are some of the most common mistakes made by direct marketers as they build a data-driven marketing engine:

  1. No method 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.
  2. Lack of standards or process in place regarding data hygiene including householding the file prior the delivery of promotions, etc. The result being mailing inefficiencies and potential customer service problems. Avoid this and scrub that data!
  3. All response models are not created equal. Many managers don’t realize that roughly 75% of analysts’ time should be spent becoming intimate with the customer data through data manipulation and review to ensure it’s predictive power is exploited to its fullest potential.
  4. Lack of basic knowledge regarding database architecture, hardware and software. Without some basic database knowledge, a marketer is not well suited to establish marketing specifications for good database development which are reasonable and will maximize effectiveness.
  5. Little knowledge of the rules that must be followed when establishing promotional or list tests to ensure results are readable, reliable and projectable and/or 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.

Bottom line, sometimes what you don’t know can hurt you more than you think.

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Posted in Campaign Planning, Data Management, Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, List Management, List Segmentation, Measurement & Reporting, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

How Can You Get a Better Response?

Sunday, January 10th, 2010

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:

  1. How much revenue do they represent over time?
  2. How profitable might each customer be?
  3. 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.

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Posted in Campaign Management, Data Acquisition, Data Management, List Management, List Segmentation, customer driven marketing campaigns | No Comments »

Rendering Personalized Images Improves Conversion

Monday, December 21st, 2009

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.

gift voucher

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.

Cheers and Happy Holidays!

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Posted in Email Marketing, Image Personalization, Improved Email Conversion, List Management, True Influence | 1 Comment »

Tweaking frequency of email marketing

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

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…

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Posted in Email Marketing, Email marketing best practices, List Management, Measurement & Reporting | 3 Comments »

How to determine Email Frequency?

Saturday, December 5th, 2009

Every email marketer wants to know: “How often should I e-mail my list?”

Most common answers I hear include:

  • Test your list.
  • Review your spam complaint numbers for insights.
  • Never send more than once a week.

But why sending weekly email works for one marketer, for another, that’s too often or not enough.

A better question to ask, is “What do I have to say that my subscribers will want to hear?” This question really helps focus marketers and it should be where they are spending more of their energy. Focus on relevancy, from there it will become clearer what the optimal frequency should be for each type of message.

Posted in Campaign Planning, Email Marketing, Email marketing best practices, List Management | 4 Comments »