Technology Marketing by Tatum MarketingJust another WordPress weblog

Email marketing is one of the fastest growing marketing tactics globally – and in the US – in terms of the number of companies who use it. Not surprising since it’s pretty low cost compared to other tactics and major parts of it can be automated.

But email has its share of challenges. Chief among them is getting through ISP and corporate spam filters and the recipients’ own “why should I care” filter. Over the past few years, response rates were heading downhill like an out of control shopping cart (the offline kind).

Some of that seems to be changing.

According to a recent report from the Direct Marketing Association, email campaigns return an average of $45.06 for every dollar spent. That alone is enough to make you pay attention.

But there’s more. The newly released Epsilon Q1 2009 US Email Trends and Benchmark Study shows an increase in open rates for the 3rd quarter in a row. Business Products and Services in general had opened rates of 29.1% in Q1 — up from 22.9% a year ago.

Click rates increased from 5.4% 6.4% (again in the business-to-business markets) and deliverability was up a little – up to 94.1% from 93.4%

What’s causing the increase in open and click rates? Are recipients becoming more willing to spend more time on email? Are they more willing to weed through the junk to find messages that are interesting to them?

Not likely.

I think email response rates are going up because marketers are getting better at sending relevant messages with a frequency that matches with the customers’ needs. Online marketers are also getting much better at testing to learn which headlines, offers and subject lines work best, and then optimizing messages accordingly.

Unfortunately, what I read of the Epsilon study doesn’t differentiate between prospecting email (messages sent to people who don’t know you) versus lead nurturing type email (messages sent to people who have already had some interchange with your company). I’m sure if we looked at lead generation email alone, the numbers would be much lower.

We’ve found that email is a great way for our clients to stay in touch with and continue to develop prospects and leads. We’re less excited about email sent to a cold list as a lead generation tool. But I’m willing to listen.

If you’d had success with lead generation email, share it with us here.

Technorati Tags: email marketing, lead generation, lead nurturing

“Free” isn’t a selling point. If you want people to give up an hour of their time to come to your webinar, you need to give them real value in return.

I realize you probably think I’m stating the obvious, but I’m doing it for a very good reason. You see, I help businesses by writing e-mail promotions for their online events. I consider it a personal challenge to write content that drives interest and demand for their webinars, and after doing it for more than four years I think I know a thing or two about what works, and what doesn’t. Yet every once in a while, I encounter a webinar presenter who forgets the basic rule of value.

If you really want to kill attendance at your next webinar, here are three tips to do just that

Attendance-Killing Promotional Tactic #1: Emphasize how great you are

Forget about webinar content. Instead promote your vast experience, boast about big-name clients, and talk about how you’ve become independently wealthy with the products and services you sell.

Attendance-Killing Promotional Tactic #2: Reveal nothing.

If you decide to address webinar content, keep the reader in the dark, using vague descriptions, common, everyday language, and meaningless buzzwords to describe what you’ll talk about at the event.

Attendance-Killing Promotional Tactic #3: Throw in some unsubstantiated claims for good measure.

Finally, sprinkle that promotional material with unsubstantiated claims like “breakthrough sales” without providing any meat to back up your claims.

All kidding aside, your experience does have its place in promotions, and an element of mystery does sometimes work.

Don’t give away the farm in your promotion, but do provide enough teaser information to pique your readers’ interest in your event, and do sell them on the webinar content before you start to sell them on the value of YOU.

Then to make your webinar really convincing, offer up tangible proof that what you’ll be talking about works. Tease them with one, two, or three success stories that you’ll cover in-depth during the event, or share statistics that demonstrate success at your own firm.

One company that I think does a fantastic job with webinars is Citrix. Citrix sells a webinar service, but their strategy isn’t to invite people to an online event where they can learn about their product.

Instead, Citrix invites outside experts in to teach attendees webinar best practices, sales techniques, business strategies, etc. This approach is far more helpful, and as a subtle side benefit, attendees get to see how the Citrix webinar product works in practice.

Of course there will always be the odd case where a vague, boastful webinar promotion actually works, but if you want to improve your chances of a great turnout at your next event, strive to deliver great content, and sell the value of your content in the promotion.

Sue Anderson
Marketing Lure, Inc. 

One of my clients recently nominated his software for an award hoping to gain a little PR out of it. They didn’t achieve finalist status, but they did gain some extremely valuable (and surprising) feedback about their online demo.

Calling the demo boring, my client took the judges’ feedback to mean he needed to jazz up his presentation with a more sales-y approach and better delivery.

Yikes! What person wants an in-your-face sales pitch when they’re viewing an online demo, I asked? Instead, I suggested he use the demo to give prospects a real life look into how they would use his product.

In his case, he’s selling a presentation software to a non-technical audience. His software offers much more than PowerPoint, giving users the ability to incorporate audio, video, scanned documents, etc. into a presentation.

Their software isn’t the first on the market, but their competitors have a long-standing reputation for being difficult to use. That’s where my client stands out.

Yet calling my client’s product “easy to use” will only trigger doubt in most people’s minds, because let’s be honest, ease-of-use is one of those fluffy, non-tangible, over-used claims in the software industry. If your product really is that easy to use, I said, then prove it by taking your viewers on a journey through the demo.

I suggested he create a scenario where his viewers are in the driver’s seat, under a time crunch where they have just a few minutes to pull together an important presentation. Fortunately, everything they need is already on their laptop: video clip, audio recording, two before/after pictures, a few scanned PDFs, and a slide deck.

Through the demo, I said, show the viewer how they can literally create a presentation portfolio in under one minute. Then walk them through the presentation itself, showing them how they can quickly flip between video, pictures, PDFs, and slides; display before/after pictures side by side; and mark up the PDFs to emphasize points.

By adding a story line to a demo, you effectively accomplish three things:

1. You turn passive viewers into active participants,
2. You add perspective and context, letting viewers see firsthand what it would be like to use your tool on a daily basis, and
3. You create a more memorable demo experience that will likely “stick” in your prospect’s minds.

He’s working on revamping his demo now. I’ll keep you posted on what impact the story line has on his sales funnel.

Sue Anderson
Marketing Lure, Inc.

Here’s the final 3 “How to Invoke Response” tips from the blog entry I started on April 21st.

How to Invoke Response Tip #7: Don’t expect miracles with one message.
Say it in different ways, and say it multiple times.

As kids we knew this well. When we were really little, we’d break our parents down by continually asking them for that candy in the store. As we grew older, our techniques became more clever. If, for example, we needed their permission to go out Saturday night, we waited until the “right” moment when we thought our parents would be most receptive to our request.

Bear in mind, I’m not suggesting that we try to “break” our readers by bombarding them with messages. Quite the opposite, this is a sure way to lose subscribers!

What I am suggesting however, is that prospects, like parents, will have moments when they’ll be more receptive to your message. If your message happens to arrive on an especially chaotic day in the office, they’ll probably ignore you, but if you send the exact same message on a less-stressful day, say three or five days later, they might actually “hear” you.

Some marketers already do this (I see this all the time with webinar announcements), but if you really want to boost response, don’t just parrot the same message. Mix it up a bit, using different arguments, analogies, and language to convince and compel readers to action. The different messages will catch a different group of prospects each time around.

How to Invoke Response Tip #8: Give them a reason to act NOW.
I’m amazed at the number of promotions I receive that don’t have a clear call to action. Maybe there are a lot of marketers sitting on a big wad of cash to burn, but if that’s not you, then I recommend you make it very clear in your promotions what action you want readers to take.

Setting a deadline works to move procrastinators and fence-sitters, but be careful not to set the limit too far out into the future because their enthusiasm for your product or offer will wane over time. I like to set deadlines that are at most one or two weeks out. When I give prospects more time (e.g. 30 days), I lose a portion of the initially-interested audience.

How to Invoke Response Tip #9: Give them something for free.
Last but not least, take a cue from all those infomercials that promote freebies with their offer. What do they know that we don’t? People love getting something for free. If you don’t believe me, watch how people behave at a trade show. Grown men go absolutely crazy for light-up toys, whirly-gigs, and stress-release balls.

Again I’m not suggesting you give away Ginsu knifes or a toy to boost response. Give instead, an e-book, one-page excerpt from a research report, or handy checklist that will whet the prospect’s appetite, while at the same time helping to establish you as a credible resource.

Tangible items (things the prospect can feel and touch) work best, and never forget to assign an actual dollar value to your bonus item. The value will reinforce in the reader’s mind that what they’re getting for free is something other people will pay for.

If you decide to test out one or more of these tips in your next campaign, I’d love to hear back from you how they worked. You can reach me at: sanderson@evoicecommunications.com. 

Have a great Memorial Day!

Sue Anderson
Marketing Lure, Inc.

Continuing with the blog entry I started on April 21st, here are  3 more “How to Invoke Response” tips.

How to Invoke Response Tip #4: Include a P.S.
Believe it or not, studies have shown that the P.S. portion of a message is the most read and recalled.

I understand this can be an especially hard concept to grasp, but here’s a case where I suggest you abandon what you “think you know,” relying instead on the marketing experts who have proven out this theory time and again.

To maximize response, use the P.S. in your promotional copy to reiterate the primary action you want the reader to take.

How to Invoke Response Tip #5: One call to action, please.
We all like options because it allows us to pick what’s “just right” for our situation, but sometimes when we give the reader too many choices, they don’t know which way to turn.
 
When we try to promote too many items within one single message, each item essentially competes for mindshare with the audience. As they dive deeper into their choices, they tend to forget earlier options.

Of course that’s not to say you should never promote more than one item in a message, but in these cases, make sure the list of items share a common thread, e.g. a holiday theme, special discounts for sales/marketing CDs, membership drive, etc.

A second, less obvious problem, can occur even when you’re promoting a single item. In this particular case, we give the reader too many choices (e.g. download this brochure, view this video, try our ROI calculator) that we distract the reader from the real action we want them to take.

Before creating promotional material, ask yourself, ‘What single goal do I want the reader to take?’ If the goal is to get them to “buy now,” everything in your promotional message should drive the reader to that one specific action.

How to Invoke Response Tip #6: Eliminate distractions.
This advice is a slight twist to tip #5.

Let’s say, for example, you’re tasked with promoting a webinar with a featured guest presenter. Your ultimate goal is to get the person to sign up for your event, but in order to do so, you need to sell the reader on the worth of this speaker. Redirecting readers to the presenter’s website might be easy, but what you’re doing is leading people away from your message.

Not the best idea. I prefer to use the copy within my own promotional message to sell the value of the speaker, highlighting what makes this person “the one expert” readers should listen to, and backing up my claims with a list of prior clients and/or a few testimonials. Sometimes I’ll link to a website page which lists testimonials, but more often than not I prefer to embed the testimonials in my own copy.

Sue Anderson
Marketing Lure, Inc.

Getting people to respond to online and offline promotional campaigns can be an exercise in frustration. With prospects constantly bombarded with marketing material, it’s tough to craft a unique message that captures attention and nudges prospects off the fence.

Effective messages are clearly written from the reader’s perspective, but there are a few proven techniques one can employ to help boost response.

Here are  a handful of techniques I personally use to keep the reader engaged and focused on what I want them to do. I’ll cover the first three tips this week. The remaining tips will be covered in upcoming blog entries.

How to Invoke Response Tip #1: Keep it conversational friendly.
This is a hard one for many people because it seems they’re afraid to loosen the reins on their corporate image.

In no way am I suggesting that you let go of common sense, but it wouldn’t hurt to undo the first button on your white shirt.

Try to establish a rapport with your reader with a personal message from you to them. Start with a personalized salutation (Dear <firstname>), use lots of “you” in the body, and finish with electronic signature.

If you’re unsure whether this will work for your audience, use an A/B test to measure results.

How to Invoke Response Tip #2: Draw parallels to your readers’ peers.
Like group counseling, sometimes it helps to know you’re not the only one with a particular problem or need.

When you shine the spotlight on the reader’s peers, it makes them stop and think whether they have the same problem and don’t even realize it.

Here are just a few ways to get your reader to reflect:

• “when I speak with business owners like yourself, they tell me…”
• “80% admit…”
• “ISVs like you secretly wish”

But please, don’t go crazy sprinkling this technique throughout your copy. One mention in the introductory portion of your message is all that’s necessary.

How to Invoke Response Tip #3: Don’t preach.
People don’t respond well to unsolicited advice. Promotional copy that sounds like you’re preaching, or telling them what they should do, is a huge turn-off.

Instead, lead them towards the answer by focusing on their immediate pains, talk about the long-term repercussions of status quo, oroffer up alternate points of view.

All three help your readers draw their own conclusions and drive them to want to take action.

Sue Anderson
Marketing Lure, Inc.

With every business scrambling today to do more with less, it surprises me how many are missing the very best way to increase leads or sales with existing resources.

Marketers call it conversion optimization, which borders dangerously on being jargon but I haven’t thought of anything better to call it yet. What we’re talking about is paying attention to the points in your marketing process where you want your prospects to take action and tweaking those points to get a greater percentage of visitors to do that.

Sales people do this all the time. They are regularly judged on how well they turn qualified opportunities into sales (the closing ratio). But marketing people for some reason have stayed away from creating a better process instead focusing solely on driving more website traffic or generating more leads.

This is expensive – especially if you are driving leads into an inefficient marketing system.

If you think about your prospects’ buying process there are likely to be several points at which the prospects decide to keep moving forward toward a purchase – or not.

Here are a few common examples:

• Your homepage.
• Newsletter and other subscriptions
• Product demos
• Free trials
• Trial-to-customer conversions
• Landing pages
• Contact Us forms
• Download whitepapers or reports
• Event registrations
• Any link you want your visitors to click on

Get more from what you already have.

Increasing the number of people who take any one of these actions ultimately increases your sales or sales opportunities. Over time, even the slightest increases compound into big numbers. It’s the same “power of compounding interest” argument the Motley Fools and other investment advisors use to convince us to invest early and often.

Let’s look at product demos as an example.

Suppose that currently 50% of prospects who experience your product demo become customers and suppose that each new customer is worth $2500 a year. Here’s what happens if you increase the demo-to-customer ratio just 5% a month.

Imagine how much your revenue can grow if you optimize multiple conversion points. It’s surprisingly easy and immensely rewarding. And the best part may be that you can get more leads without spending more money on lead generation.

If you’re new to conversion optimization, you’re not alone; and if you act fast you can get a real jump on your competition – especially those who are cutting back on spending and watching their pipelines deteriorate.

Tatum Marketing runs conversion optimization programs for all kinds of clients. Contact Us if you want some help.

** Inspiration for the above chart comes from a Future Now video.

Technorati Tags: conversion optimization, conversion rate, leads, traffic, sales, prospects

At first glance, the title of this article might seem ludicrous. What growing business doesn’t need more leads? The key to the title question is the word “generate”.

In my experience, both business owners and marketers tend to focus marketing efforts almost exclusively on lead – or traffic – generation. No doubt this is an important part of the process. You’ve got to have a good level of website traffic or inbound inquiries to fill the marketing funnel.

But the generation part is just the beginning. Next, you have to convert the barely-interested, just-looking visitors into people who want to do business with your company. And this is where a lot of marketing programs can use some improvement.

For every two companies I talk with that really need to generate more traffic before doing anything else, a third company can get more results-per-dollar by focusing on conversion.

Confused?

Since most if not all new business prospects will wind up on your website at one point or another, let’s take a closer look at what happens when your lead generation efforts drive traffic to your website.

A large portion of your traffic will arrive as new or first-time visitors. This is good. It means your search marketing, SEO and/or online advertising efforts are working. People are finding you.

But mere visitors are not good enough.

Your marketing efforts must convert website visitors into interested, engaged prospects and eventually into sales-ready leads or customers. This is usually a multi-step process, and it pays to ask yourself whether or not your marketing efforts are doing a good enough job at converting these visitors.

The first challenge you face after driving traffic to your website is actually getting visitors to stay there. A disturbing number of websites today do a lousy job of this. You can see how well your website performs this responsibility by checking your bounce rate. People who bounce immediately from your site are sending you a message.  They are not going to become customers – you’ve lost them.

Once you get visitors to stick to your site your next challenge is to get them to do something. The actions they take differ from company to company depending on the buyers’ decision-making process.

Your desired conversion steps may look like this:

Download a whitepaper → take a product preview tour → attend a webinar → contact a sales person.

Or maybe more like this:

View an online demo → sign up for a free trial → become a paying customer.

Or

Visit key website pages → subscribe to a newsletter → sign up for a free consultation.

You may have multiple conversion paths and your paths may consist of some or all of these action steps or others I haven’t mentioned. The point is, you must get your visitors from point A (semi-interested visitor) to point whatever (customer or qualified lead) or your lead generation efforts are pretty useless.

Fortunately, improving conversion effectiveness is doable for any company that takes the time to following a few basic steps.

1. Identify your most important conversion (take action) points.
2. Measure the percentage of visitors who take the desired actions.
3. Brainstorm ideas for how you can get more people to take action. This can be affected by anything from your offer to the images and the persuasiveness of the copywriting to the color of your Contact Us button – and everything in between.
4. Try some of your ideas. Test, test and test some more. Google Website Optimizer is a free application that puts some sophisticated testing techniques well within the reach of small to mid-sized marketers. (More on this in another article).

The point is, you can generate new leads and traffic over and over and over again; but if you don’t turn those visitors into people who want to do business with your company then you’re just wasting money.  The best marketing program is a well-balanced one: lead or traffic generation followed by capturing interest and getting them to take action.

To ignore your conversion effectiveness renders lead generation activities about as useful as pouring good wine into a glass with a hole in the bottom.  What a waste.

Technorati Tags: lead generation, generate traffic, conversion optimization, conversion rate, website, bounce rate

If time is money and cash is king, then where does that leave Twitter?

The media tells us social media sites are where we need to be, but does all the time and effort you spend translate into new business or higher customer retention?

If you’re a high-tech firm that has derived tangible business benefits from your Twitter investment, I want to hear from you!

Share with me how you’ve worked Twitter into your marketing plan *plus* the specific, measurable results you’ve achieved since its introduction… and in return your company could earn a prominent spot in an upcoming Twitter story I’m writing.

But please, no pie-in-the-sky…. Don’t tell me how Twitter helps you create “brand awareness,” or how you’ve built up a following of thousands. None of that matters if you can’t tell me how you’ve turned that into money for your firm. I need real data, practical examples, and concrete tips to make this story truly valuable and entirely different from all the other puff pieces out there.

Help out your fellow cynics. Summarize your real-life Twitter experience in a short e-mail sent to sue-at-marketinglure.com, and don’t forget to tell me how I can reach you for a follow-up interview.

Thanks in advance for your help and insight!

Sue Anderson
Marketing Lure, Inc.

P.S. Deadline for submissions is March 31st.

I’m fortunate because as I writer I learn so much from the people I interview. A few weeks back I had the pleasure of speaking with an incredibly down-to-earth CEO for a SoftwareCEO exclusive that’s in the works. Clate Mask runs Infusionsoft, a company that helps small businesses increase sales through automated follow up.

During our interview Clate told me one of his biggest mistakes was not recognizing the value of a good website. Using the Wayback Machine one can follow his company’s evolution from a custom development shop to a software firm who first targeted the mortgage industry before realizing they could go horizontal with their offering.

Clate said he didn’t really understand how much a website said about his company so he didn’t really invest in his site for the first five years.

Many companies, I believe, still think like Clate did, but here’s a few statistics that might make you re-think your strategy:

• A joint study conducted by Enquiro Research and MarketingSherpa revealed that 63.9% of B2B buyers start their search online with general-purpose engines like Google or targeted B2B engines.
• A Forrester Research excerpt published during 2007 reported that 78% of CIOs and IT decision makers rely on websites when making product decisions.

Clate’s website isn’t pretty, but it doesn’t have to be.  What makes his website effective  is content. It’s a leadgen machine that reads like you’re talking to Clate — so much so — that by the time him and I met via phone, I felt like I already knew him.

Online prospects get to know you long before you get to know them, so put your best foot forward. Create content that shows your personality and starts a conversation.

Many B2B sellers tell me their goal is to get prospects to call, but if all you have to offer is another “me too” website filled with marketing buzzwords, what reason have you given them to pick up the phone?

Sue Anderson
Marketing Lure, Inc.