A game of numbers - filling the funnel

There are quite a few ways to fill the top of the lead funnel.  Here are some key focuses for now:

• SEO - arguably the most important right now as more and more people are searching online vs. following advertising (paid search on or offline) or word of mouth (although, I believe word of mouth is the most important so this, too, is important to nurture)
• Ease of registration - this is right up there with SEO - after people hit the site, it's imperative to make it easy for people to give up their information.  Typically SFDC needs last name, email, and company to create a lead.  Vendors like DemandBase can back fill information based on shorter modified forms making getting info even easier.  The important things: compelling people to give up their info - why should they care about x offer?  Making registering easy (long forms with weird CAPTCHA and other hurdles are not excellent).  Giving people what you promised - saying they're going to get a download and giving a whitepaper (vs. product) is a flip move and can result in more opt outs.
• List purchases - there are MANY places to purchase email and phone number lists online; a few of the top dawgs include: Harte Hanks, MarketOne, Leadmaster, Catapult, and Target 250 (who focuses on FSI).  These companies price on a handful of models including double opt in email only (can be $1.50 - $3), phone verified (can be $20 on up), and pre-qualified phone prospected (can be $25 on up).
• List crawls - there are a handful of vendors in India and across the US who will manually "crawl" common forums where people have their information (Linkedin, Zoominfo, etc.).  I'm on the fence with list crawls - it feels like a shady way to get leads and find people's information, but today it's legal.
• List trades - depending on a companies privacy policy, companies can trade and share lists.  Typically the privacy policy lets people share lists when the email offer is of interest to someone on that list - this is pretty hard to measure.
• Partner programs - my favorite way to get semi-qualified leads right now is partner programs.  We've done a few recently with other technology partners who have a similar audience but complementary (vs. competing) solution and these have yielded highly qualified sales leads - a few of whom we're now in conversations with working towards a close.

A game of numbers - email marketing

Over the past few months, I've been working a lot on pushing prospects through the sales cycle through more effective emails.  The first step?  Getting people to open emails!  To improve our open rate I've been testing a few things:

• From name: generic (e.g. Product Management); my name; gender neutral name
• Subject lines: I keep all under 40-characters, but the gist varies from opening with an action to opening with a noun
• Splitting lists: I split lists for email tests regardless, but I'm also splitting lists to see if my bounce rate is lower thus increasing the odds of an email making it through when I intend it to
• Varying send times / dates: many of the emails I work on are trigger based, so they drop people into a drip flow after someone performs some action - the timeline post action can vary, though (e.g. sending a follow up email after 4-days or after 7)

What have I been finding?

• From personal names work!  I increased open rates by nearly 10% based on changing from names.
• Action oriented subject lines, drive people to act - AKA, ditch the fluff.
• Still on the fence on splitting lists
• Times depend entirely on what the trigger was - if it was a subscription form, tighter timeline is more effective.

Here are a few resources I like:

• Mail Chimp findings on subject lines
• Marketing Sherpa email studies
• Marketing Charts email open rates

Smarketing: define goals, execute, measure, improve, repeat (or not)

As there are more tools introduce in the marketing world almsot weekly for on and offline marketing, it's important to remember that marketing is not just about execution for execution sake.  Marketing should drive:

• Awareness
• Leads
• Conversions 
• Business strategy 

And these are just the highlights.  To my first point, "marketing" can't just mearly be around executing on campaigns - if this were the case, marketing would be solely on guess, go.

As businesses continue to struggle (but knock on wood we're seeing some light with more VCs backing companies, acquisitions, and consumers in general getting confidence again), it's important to make sure that the time and money investments we're putting into marketing campaigns are well spent.  For example, doing a PPC campaign that yields100 new leads for $100,000, probably not the best use of spend ($1,000 per lead?  Whoa.)  Doing a joint webinar with a partner that yields 500 net new leads could be great.  If 90% of those leads are junk, though, was the webinar the best approach?  In drip campaigns doing drip emails is necessary and hugely effective.  If you notice that one email is yielding more opt outs than any other, might be time to change that email, eh?

I'll talk more about effective marketing programs.  For now, here are the Clif Notes around how to measure, what to measure, and what to do with the data:

Social media for B2B marketing - why do it and how to measure it

As people spend more and more time online writing in 140-character snippits on Twitter, or letting the world know what they're doing on Facebook, job searching or showing off career prowess on Linkedin, or arguing (brainstorming) in any of the countless industry forums, it's becoming increasingly important to incorporate social media into the marketing mix.  Here's the deal, though, marketers can't just "do" social media for the sake of trying to see what sticks.  Each outlet needs a purpose, and most importantly, there need to be methods for measurement in place.

Here's a look at the social media mix for my current company:

Looks like a spaghetti diagram, huh?  These could likely be integrated and managed via a single console (ala using an ESB with a Management Console on the face of it), but let's not dive into the Developer geek think just yet.

Some highlights around our social media mix:
Every tool has a purpose - here are the top three:

• Facebook: engage in "fun" conversations; post events; post use cases and get use cases
• Twitter: engage in relevant conversations; drive people to your site (in our case, currently we're driving people to our blog); while Twitter has a no follow so can't help you rise the SEO ranks, now that tweets get picked up in Google, posting relevant links with content that people might search on can further help drive people to the site
• Linkedin: prove thought leadership; get in front of targeted audiences by being part of the "club" on Linkedin (join the right groups)

Social media don'ts:

• Post the same content on every (social) site
• Let a group or feed go stale
• Use social media for blamestorming

Social media dos:

• Give content that will help people
• Make it easy for your community to find/follow what they want
• Give people information they can just find in that outlet (goes to the first point)
• Talk like a real person!  People surfing Facebook or browsing Twitter don't want to hear from marketers

Measuring social media coos:
There are tools like socialmention.com (a free one) where you can see how social media is moving the needle for your company from a bird's eye view.  Specific things shown here include:

• Strength: how likely is it that your brand is being discussed in social media?
• Sentiment: are people saying good things or bad things?
• Passion: are people going to talk about your brand, and then do it again?
• Reach: how influential is the social media work?

Here's a chart of other ways to measure, and tools to watch from Altimeter:

And with that, I'm off to tweet!

Recording a podcast in Skype

Podcasts can be very beneficial in business for both internal and external communications.  As with any marketing piece, the content is king with podcasts – people can smell BS a mile away and it’s more hurtful than helpful to do a podcast (or other marketing piece) just to have something on the site.

Here are some tips for creating content – pretty basic stuff:

• Know your audience – if you or your colleagues aren’t the target audience, ask people who are
• Have compelling speakers – it’s great when you can get “experts” on topics to present (such as authors of books on whatever topic you’re presenting on, creators of product, etc.)
• Make sure the content is timely – podcasts are all about what’s new and giving quick updates
• Don’t make things up/don’t BS – podcasts should be short and don’t need to be filled with fluff
• Open with what you’re going to talk about in one sentence or less, and then begin the conversation
• Close with a compelling message – either a call to action (e.g. download software, register for event, sell sell sell! (for internal podcasts) or a request for feedback (e.g. email amber@taylor.com with feedback around what you heard today).

Here are some tips on format:

• Have engaging speakers – this is almost more important than a compelling speaker – no-one wants to listen to a monotone or bored (boring) speaker
• Have two or more speakers – podcasts are like mini talk radio segments (and are often mini talk radio segments as podcasts are a medium – it’s more interesting to listen to a conversation than to listen to a monologue

Lightweight recording and editing:
You can record and edit podcasts in many ways.  My personal favorite is recording via Skype and then editing in Soundforge.  Why Skype?  When I’m pulling in the most compelling speakers I’m typically working with developers whose travel schedules are tight and who could be anywhere in the world.  Skype allows me to easily record from anywhere and have guests who are in various locations.  Skype is also free (vs. recording over the phone) and is easy to use.

Three easy steps to create a podcast using Skype:

• Con-call my presenters over Skype
• I make sure they’re on good Skype headsets (if the recording were over the phone I’d do landline only vs. headset or speaker). 
• Record
• I use a free tool called Extralabs – there are others
• Edit
• I save the file as a WAV, import into Soundforge and edit
• I cut out all the “ums,” “ahs,” any cuss words, long pauses, and any repeats

To post a podcast:

• Upload the audio to a server
• Add an RSS feed to your podcast
• Submit podcast
• I submit our podcasts to iTunes to syndicate through iTunes, there are also 3rd party sites like Podfeed that maintain libraries of podcasts for listeners to go through

The basics: Promotion and Placement (after the Product and Price are locked)

Getting inside the consumers’ mind is one of the most important as well as one of the hardest things to do. There are a few key things to consider here:

• Who is the target customer
• Where are they looking for information
• When is the right time to target them
  

I work in open source software and primarily market to Developers, Architects, and System Admins. In order to create compelling campaigns around our products, I need to first learn how these functions like to consume information. Through user groups, interviews, and other research I’ve learned that Developers spend a lot of time in different online publications when trying to evaluate products – now, I post ads and content in these different publications around product evaluation and entry level information. I post up-selling ads and content in more of the denser content – up-selling on external publications when someone is just doing research would miss the mark completely.

In order to revamp our community website, I recently led a "usability study" to learn how developers (the target audience for that site) found the site, where they went on the site, and the things that were compelling them to click. My objectives with the site are to drive downloads, enable faster on-boarding getting people up and running with our products, and drive people to register (so I can then "drip" them ... much nicer term for "spam). During the study I saw people doing a lot of searching on "our product vs. xyz." Once on the site I noticed they were going to the "free" docs first, then the projects, then the download. This study helped vastly with the site update. More on usability studies later.

In a business to consumer setting, this could be seen in something as simple as shopping. When I go to the grocery store, I expect to see ads and banners around good healthy food and easy meals to make for my family. I do not expect to see restaurant ads cross-selling their meal delivery nor would I expect to see ads for clothing – these would totally miss the mark in this setting – my mindset is not on meal delivery and it’s certainly not on clothes when I’m shopping at a grocery store.

After figuring out what customers want, when, and where, it’s important to stay in touch with customers – check in to see how the product is doing and how they want to receive information. This will help continue to be a vendor to that customer. As the customer base grows so does information about your audience – this is when it’s hugely important to get a good CRM in place (examples are Salesforce or Sugar). These tools help track what you’ve done with customers or prospects so you can “ping” (or reach out to) them again.

Marketers need to know what’s going on in the minds of the prospect and customers, but they also need to know what’s going on in the external environment – environment will effect peoples’ buying behaviors and need to effect marketing planning.

Marketing Automation: Science meets Art

Marketing automation is a science and an art. The art is the given – who are you pinging, when, why, and how. The science is a bit trickier – what are you integrating with, how do you manage gated resources, how do landing pages play into SEO strategy, how do you manage spam submissions and legal acceptance, and how do the forms tie to drip campaigns. Brain spinning yet? No? Good.

Here’s our use case and some learnings from our 3-month bake off between 12 (yes, 12) marketing automation vendors – I hope it helps you.

Let’s talk about the science – our environment was/is pretty standard:
• CRM: Salesforce.com
• CMS: Drupal

We have added complexity because we have a .org site for our open source projects that’s backed by Crowd + Xircles to enable single sign on (SSO). The site has 1 reg form which needed to integrate with whatever new marketing automation tool we went with.

Now that you have the “lay of the land” here’s a look at the key requirements:

Overarching requirements:
• 100% up server time
• 100k contacts with room to grow – tiered pricing models
• Migration support
• Ongoing support
• Drag/drop of nurture flows
• Fine-grained user rights management
• Partnership with Litmus
• Partnership with ReturnPath (I don’t want other companies’ spam lowing the ISP score of the automation tool sending emails for me)

Email requirements:
• Support 1 contact view (even if the contact has multiple email addresses)
• WYSIWYG editor
o Ability to anchor links
• In-line CSS support
o To globally update links
• Ability to host images for emails
• Ability to check against different browsers
• Create hosted email
• Ability to attach files to campaigns
• Image hosting
• “view as webpage” hosting
• Off-the-shelf, tested, email templates (1-column, 2-column, etc.)

Form requirement:
• Ability to clone forms
• Hosted (dynamic) forms
• Need captcha

List requirements:
• Create compound lists – ability to create (and send campaigns to) a list that is composed of different lists (e.g. pulled from different forms)
• List “types,” or ability to exclude lists from being added to Global list
• Bi-directional sync with Salesforce.com
• Ability to pull list based on time (e.g., all leads from this form from 9/1/09-9/30/09)
• Segment by region
• Segment by role
• Segment by lead score
• Bundle lists (i.e. send an email to all prospects who fall within a certain campaign in SFDC)

Reporting:
• Time-series web and lead analytics (e.g., weekly PageViews plotted over time)
• Content-based web analytics (view analytics for specific URL or domain)
• Lead watches for larger numbers of leads
• Reporting based on total number of page views

Upon first talking to the marketing automation vendors, overwhelmingly all of them said “yes, we can do that.” I hate that answer – to me that screams sales person who, once the ink dries on a contact, will push the direct marketer off to support to figure it all out. This is where the reference checks and free product trials was paramount.

When doing reference checks I called on references put forth by the marketing automation vendors as well as backline references. On the calls, I dug into what other marketers were actually doing with their respective tool – not just what they liked. What I found was that people were doing limited to no drip campaigns and limited segmentation. There were definitely some inspiring marketers who shared best practices and successful tips on marketing automation, though, don’t get me wrong. I also asked “what’s the biggest problem you’ve encountered” – problems happen, that’s software for you, but I was and am more interested in how the support team managed the issue(s). Don’t get me wrong, server down time makes me cringe when I have emails that need to go out. But problems happen – it’s how they’re dealt with.

After getting through the initial requirements check list with vendors and going through long rounds of reference checks, I was down to 3 vendors. I have to say, I’m lucky in that I work for a brilliant Sr. Director of Marketing and a seasoned insightful CEO. They helped with the final decision between the three vendors – the final call came down to what we could/couldn’t do through the trials, pricing (of course – but in a market as saturated as the marketing automation tool market pricing is quite flexible), and company viability. I’m all for getting my thoughts/needs on a company’s roadmap, but I don’t want to shape that roadmap nor do I want to get in deep with a vendor who gets bought out or goes out of business in a few years. Getting a marketing automation tool set up and flows in place is no cake walk – I did not, and do not, want to start down the path with one vendor only to have to find another solution in another year or so.

So what about the art? We send drip emails based on activity – this can include online (filling out forms, even visiting certain web pages) and offline (attending events is the biggie). Each email within a drip gives something (an asset, advice, links to documentation) and drives the recipient to do something (download product, contact support, give us more information). User activity also gets a score and certain things get tagged with “interesting moments” to help sales. Sure, I want to keep leads “warm” but the real way to help sales is to give them insight into what’s happening with their prospects. Activity also feeds into reporting that we have defined in SFDC (I can pull more detailed reports in the tool itself but really, management doesn’t have time to go from tool to tool so having 1 stop reporting (SFDC) is great). I don’t want to show all my cards here … go to our site, fill out a few forms, and find out the response for yourself!