Crumbs from the Scone
Your B2B email marketing program might have a good reason for sending a steady stream of one-size-fits-all messages to prospects. “The idea being that by keeping these folks exposed to your company’s name and logo, you’d stay ‘top of mind,'” notes Ardath Albee at Marketing Interactions. “That process is now referred to as ‘spray and pray’ marketing.”
As you might guess, there’s a problem with the “spray and pray” approach: It doesn’t work to gain or maintain customer loyalty.
Why? Because awareness doesn’t promote action, Albee explains. “I’m aware of Anheuser Busch. I love their Clydesdale ads. But I don’t drink beer. I’m also aware of many other beers. If I had to pick one, it would probably boil down to a ‘close my eyes and point’ exercise because I have no expertise in selecting beer.”
What’s a better approach? Albee creates a scenario in which a business needs to choose an email service provider (ESP).
- Vendor A sends the usual offers and testimonials. “They rave about how well their customers are doing by using their superior system,” she says.
- Vendor B, meanwhile, sends educational content that enables prospects to improve their email campaigns—even if they don’t become a customer—and demonstrates how other customers have succeeded.
While Vendor A is less expensive than Vendor B, the customer has gained more confidence in Vendor B. And even though the Vendor A service might equal that of Vendor B, it won’t be the company that gets the call. “[S]taying top of mind wasn’t enough to win [Vendor A] a customer when compared with all that Vendor B did to go beyond just staying top of mind,” Albee concludes.
Give ’em info they can use. It’s not enough to stay at the top of customers’ minds; show them why you deserve to be there.
Source: Marketing Interactions.
Crumbs from the Scone
Whether you’ve run out of inspiration or simply want to refine a good idea, a freewriting session might be the best way to get your best thoughts on the page. “I’ve seen people use it to create a strategic direction for their company, brainstorm ideas for a personal branding campaign, plan a product launch, think through employee engagement problems, rehearse ways of handling a negotiation, write books and blog posts, and more,” says Mark Levy at the Compelling blog.
When you sit down with the sole purpose of writing whatever crosses your mind, you’re able to override the internal editor that keeps you sounding smart, confident and consistent—usually by killing risky, daring, original thoughts before you’ve had the chance to finish a sentence.
To keep your internal editor in check, Levy offers this advice:
Set a time limit. Your freewriting session might last for as few as five minutes, or as long as half an hour. “When the timer starts,” explains Levy, “you start. When it finishes, you finish. By using a timer, you can forget about logistics, and spend your attention and energy on flat-out writing.”
Don’t pause. If your mind goes blank, write about your mind going blank. If you’re frustrated by the choppiness of your thoughts, write about that. “Stopping for more than a second or two gives your internal editor a chance to reengage and disrupt the process,” he notes.
Write at a swift rate. “Your fingers needn’t fly over the keyboard,” he says. “They just need to move at a clip slightly quicker than your norm.” This faster-than-usual pace will help to keep that internal editor at bay.
Use a no-holds-barred freewriting session to get all of your ideas on the page—then decide which ones deserve further consideration.
Source: Compelling.
Crumbs from the Scone
“[O]nce you’ve created a regular email-communications program, or developed your smart auto-responders, are you remembering to strategically use email to strengthen and encourage relationships with your list members in other channels?” Karen Talavera asks in a Pro article at MarketingProfs.
There’s a simple reason why it’s important to facilitate cross-channel interaction with your email subscribers, Talavera says: They are actively hopping, skipping and jumping from one channel to another!
“Conversations started in one channel don’t just stay there,” she notes. “Simply because a customer signed up for your email doesn’t mean that customer is not also following you on Twitter or Facebook and might want to communicate there, too.”
She suggests several ways to use email to build relationships online and offline. Here are two:
Make it fun to channel-hop with you. You’ve undoubtedly invited email subscribers to join you at social-media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. But have you given them a compelling reason to do so? “Contests and sweepstakes can work well in building social-media fan/follower bases rapidly,” Talavera suggests, “but don’t overlook couponing and the promise of exclusive treatment, content or access for your social-network community members only.”
Drive traffic to your brick-and-mortar locations with special sales and events. Try an email campaign that promotes an in-store-only offer—one that cannot be redeemed online. “Store openings, clearances, benefits, or community events are also great ways to draw your target market into your … place of business,” she notes.
“Your prospects and customers are more likely to learn and retain information when it’s presented in multiple modes, and your content will get more attention if you offer people multiple formats by which they can consume it,” Talavera concludes.
It’s time to open things up. These days, you’re most likely to make your messages memorable when you communicate with subscribers through a variety of channels.
Source: MarketingProfs.
Crumbs from the Scone
As your email-marketing program develops and expands—and your in-house technology struggles to keep up—you might decide to outsource tech tasks that no longer make for the best use of your team’s creative time or your budget.
According to Josh Gordon, writing at The Lunchpail, the single-minded efforts of an email service provider (ESP) can make it the perfect partner for an overloaded marketing team.
“Outside email marketing vendors have tremendous incentive to build, adapt, and refine their software solutions to meet the ever-changing demands of the consumer,” he reports. “It is not simply a ‘need-to’ for vendors, it is crucial to their growth and survival in an increasingly competitive space.”
Here are some reasons why hiring an ESP might be a good move:
It can help you consolidate your efforts. “The key is finding the right vendor that facilitates consolidation by centralizing all useful marketing data in the same software platform that delivers the emails,” notes Gordon.
It can offer cutting-edge technology managed by experts. Fact: The more complex or outmoded your in-house system becomes, the more likely it is to distract your team from the email-marketing task at hand. And that’s a time- and money-waster.
Outsourcing is likely cheaper than building and maintaining an in-house solution. Gordon explains why: “It’s not just [an] investment in the technology infrastructure, it [also fulfills] the need to constantly upgrade combined with the very real need [to] lean on professional services for the latest and greatest in design and campaign execution.”
Outsourcing could boost output. Consider letting someone else worry about the tech side of your email-marketing efforts. In the process, you’ll free up your team to focus on what really matters: your messaging and your ongoing strategy.
Source: The Lunchpail.
Crumbs from the Scone
If you’re like most small businesses, you don’t spend much time on internal seek-and-destroy missions that identify and kill unproductive elements. That, says Auren Hoffman at the Summation blog, is a mistake. “While it does not come [naturally] for a company (or any organization) to toss things out,” he writes, “every so often you need to look at everything and focus on getting rid of things that are no longer needed, important, or helping the company grow.”
Hoffman lists categories that deserve your critical attention, including these:
Products. For various reasons, you might cling to a product or project that drains resources without producing ROI. Hoffman’s advice: Kill it.
Features. “Your products may have features once thought to be important, but are no longer necessary or demanded by customers,” he says. “Slay them.”
People. Especially in a small company, each team member must remain in top form. With regular assessments, you can more easily identify bad hires or address dipping performance levels before they get out of hand. “Never settle for ‘average’ people,” argues Hoffman. “As Reed Hastings is famous for saying: adequate performance deserves a nice severance package.”
Investors. As your company grows, he contends, some of your early investors may no longer add value. “Buy these investors out—many of them will be happy to give up their stock for a decent return.”
“Being able to kill things early is essential to the long-term growth and success of any company,” notes Hoffman. “But recognizing that you should be searching for things to kill is the first step to building a better company.”
Source: Summation.
Your B2B email marketing program might have a good reason for sending a steady stream of one-size-fits-all messages to prospects. “The idea being that by keeping these folks exposed to your company’s name and logo, you’d stay ‘top of mind,'” notes Ardath Albee at Marketing Interactions. “That process is now referred to as ‘spray and pray’ marketing.”
