Crumbs from the Scone
It’s been a long time coming, writes Dylan Boyd at Email Wars, but with “new systems of marketing automation we are finally gaining ground to creating trigger-based campaigns on actions, behavior and timing.” Boyd provides a thorough rundown on various trigger-based campaigns you might employ.
Here are a few highlights to help spur your creativity:
Time-Based Triggers. “When someone comes to your site and does something, you can actually start a clock that sends out emails based upon a ‘day plus X’ factor,” Boyd notes. The idea is to continue the conversation while giving subscribers some breathing room between messages. There isn’t a magic formula, he cautions, and you’ll need to fine-tune your program to see what works best. But Boyd has found success working with multiples of three: “By using a 3 day spread you can move them back and forth allowing the frequency to have enough room so as to not overwhelm your subscribers with so many emails that they unsubscribe.”
Behavior-Based Triggers. “Let’s say you came into an ecommerce site, looked at a shirt and a hat, compared some features, or read some product reviews,” he explains. “Armed with this knowledge, [a marketer] could send [an email that features] that product.”
Transaction-Based Triggers. Frequently, these strengthen your customer relationship by responding to a purchase they made, Boyd notes. The message might contain a special offer on their next visit, a suggestion that they review a product or service, or a survey requesting feedback.
Don’t let that trigger finger get rusty. “These types of emails need to be continuously monitored, measured and changed up,” says Boyd. “If you get into the rut of just letting it go, eventually the impact will wear off.”
Source: The Email Wars.
Crumbs from the Scone
In 2005, the Harvard Business Review published the influential article “Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure.” Its authors—Clayton M. Christensen, Scott Cook and Taddy Hall—argued that we often set ourselves up for failure by focusing on customer types rather than customer needs.
“To develop and promote products that make headway in crowded markets—or even expand markets—companies should focus on the ‘job’ that customers want accomplished,” explains Kathryn Roy at MarketingProfs. “Their article expands on the legendary observation made by Harvard Business School marketing professor Ted Levitt: People don’t want a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”
To illustrate the point, consider what McDonald’s learned when it investigated the “job” performed by a milkshake: A surprisingly large number of shake sales happened during breakfast hours. Why? Customers with long commutes wanted something to occupy their attention during a boring drive and keep them full until lunch. “In other words,” notes Roy, “these customers bought the shakes to perform a specific job: to satisfy their hunger and allay their boredom while being quick and convenient to purchase and easy to consume behind the wheel.”
By slicing and dicing customers into segments, McDonald’s had missed a cluster of customers united by the “job.” And there’s a good chance your company does the same thing.
“It’s scary to narrow your focus to a smaller set of prospects,” notes Roy, “but if you address [a customer’s] needs—the ‘jobs’ they want done—before your competitors do, you can boost wins, revenues, and morale.”
Source: MarketingProfs.
Crumbs from the Scone
The word “viral” has become synonymous with social-media success, writes Ian Greenleigh in a post at ReputationOnline. “It’s even showing up on business cards.” Some of the professional titles Greenleigh has recently seen: Viral Brander, Viral Marketing Planner.
But the companies that assign these titles “don’t understand social media,” Greenleigh asserts. In short, no one “creates” viral content, he says, and “no amount of blood, sweat or tears can make something ‘go viral.'”
In his Anti-Viral Manifesto, Greenleigh lists the assumptions he says need to be shot down regarding viral marketing. Among the myths:
If success is repeatable, there is a formula for creating successful content. No there isn’t, Greenleigh states: “Normally, it doesn’t even matter if the second piece of content bears any resemblance to the [successful] first, [what matters is] that it is marketed to the same network,” he notes.
Content is king. “Not really,” he says. “If whatever you’re sharing is great, it will be shared more. But if it’s not so great, and you have an existing fan base, it will still get traction.” What matters most is the “kingdom” you create with your customers, he says—based on long-term CRM.
Good guys finish last. Wrong again. Service wins over sensational in the long run. People who “work hard to build networks of brand advocates still see ROI from their efforts,” Greenleigh concludes. “They know that all the metrics involved in supposedly calculating viral-ness don’t mean diddly if they can’t point to results that mean something to someone.”
Trusted content beats viral content over time. When you are viewed as a trusted content provider, Greenleigh says, “your network will do the heavy lifting once you give them something to spread.”
Source: ReputationOnline.
Crumbs from the Scone
If a subject line gets truncated on its way to your subscriber’s inbox, cautions Mark Brownlow at Email Marketing Reports, it can do more than cause a “wry smile” or a “little embarrassment.” It can cause outright confusion, or it can tell your customers something you didn’t even mean to say. Horrors!
Here’s his advice for avoiding two major subject-line traps:
Remember that any subject line is subject to truncation—even if you never exceed the recommended 50-character limit. You probably account for this limit by frontloading critical keywords, but you might not realize just how frontloaded those terms need to be. “My Yahoo! Mail inbox,” notes Brownlow, “has just 27 characters displayed.” Consider, for instance, how the 50-character subject line Hit it out of the park with iPad this Father’s Day would look if recipients saw only its first 27 characters: Hit it out of the park with. You’ve just lost your product and your holiday theme in one fell swoop. “Perhaps, then, frontloading should mean what it says,” he advises: Make sure you place your hot words “right at the front, not just close to it.”
Exercise caution when using critical “conditioners” in your subject line. “Conditioners are those little extra words or numbers that change the meaning of the words that precede them,” says Brownlow. “There is an important difference between ‘50% off Ice Age’ and ‘50% off Ice Age 3.'” Likewise, he explains, Make Your Neighbors Green With Envy takes on a thuggish environmental tone if truncated to Make Your Neighbors Green.
Frontload, and watch those conditioners. As you write and test subject lines, don’t forget that a lot can get lost in truncation.
Source: Email Marketing Reports.
Crumbs from the Scone
“Would you ask the best violinist in an orchestra to take over as conductor without any preparation?” asks Michael Leimbach in a Pro article at MarketingProfs. “Probably not. And if you did, you wouldn’t have very high expectations for the orchestra’s performance.”
But that is exactly what you do when you promote top salespeople to management roles without preparing them in the critical areas of coaching, motivating and developing their people. “Ultimately,” notes Leimbach, “well-managed teams will deliver more sales at higher margins than those that are poorly managed or left to their own devices.”
To maximize sales potential—and, thus, fully leverage marketing’s lead-gen efforts—Leimbach says a manager should have ready answers for five important questions her team might ask. Here are a couple:
Where are we going? “If salespeople are not connected to the overall business direction,” he notes, “they feel out of the loop and are less able to carry out their role in achieving the broader business goals. By communicating the company’s vision, strategy, and challenges, and how the sales team fits into the big picture, managers provide their teams with a sense of belonging to a larger whole and ensure their salespeople are able to make a meaningful contribution to the organization’s success.”
Where do we go for help? Due to organizational barriers, a salesperson might feel hampered—for instance, when rounding up needed implementation resources or trying to help a customer with a technical problem. “Successful managers clearly communicate how well the organization is supporting the sales function and can work with other functional leaders to orchestrate the kinds of resources their sales team needs,” he says.
Don’t assume your best salesperson is a natural-born manager—give her the tools and training she needs to lead her team to success.
Source: MarketingProfs.
It’s been a long time coming, writes Dylan Boyd at Email Wars, but with “new systems of marketing automation we are finally gaining ground to creating trigger-based campaigns on actions, behavior and timing.” Boyd provides a thorough rundown on various trigger-based campaigns you might employ.
