SMB Marketing Blog

Does a Monthly Email Newsletter work? Working with a company that had a half-million customers I noticed that there was always a general increase in sales after sending out the newsletter, even if there was no particular marketing promotion.  I also noticed that during an ongoing promotion or launch of a new product, the greatest bump in sales for that product was usually around the time a newsletter was published.

The effectiveness of their Email Newsletter varied according to the editorial staff assigned to it.  During one particularly effective (read high ROI) period I noticed that the articles that appeared in the newsletter were relevant and interesting to customers without being directly related to the company’s products.   So make your newsletter something your customers will actually read and establishing a ‘thought leadership’ position with your target audience.    Bottom line, if they know that your newsletter is a thinly-disguised excuse for an ad, they will stop opening it.

When a new product was being promoted it was generally one article of five or six in that issue.  And there was usually an embedded hyperlink to the relevant page of the company’s website.  However like most companies then, it did not employ marketing automation so it did not identify leads and score and nurture them for the company’s sales staff.

The company didn’t always have a Monthly Email Newsletter so each time it was cranked up there was a significant resource applied to maintaining the database by deleting bounces, opt-outs and so forth.  If the company had applied continuing resources to maintaining the database their overall ROI likely would have been better.  In the end they had a smaller list of interested readers instead of a larger list of email addresses.

The company’s products were actually services that were generally renewed annually so it was a no-brainer to have a Monthly Email Newsletter.  If your business involves collecting an annuity from your customers I highly recommend that you publish one.  And if you have a direct sales force, I highly recommend that you consider a marketing automation solution to assist in tracking and measuring effectiveness of your newsletter along with your other marketing initiatives.

In companies of every size,  sales are down and quotas are not being met. “The Meeting” has occurred, the one where sales and marketing heads have asked for ideas on how to increase sales. “Well, we could do more with our website”, is what emerges because everyone in the room knows just how much they themselves use Google to find the products and services they buy. This is where I come in, as they’ve contacted my company. I let them know that the bad news is this is step 1 of 6, but that the good news is the six steps are relatively cheap and easy to implement. Most importantly, for the same cash asked for by traditional advertising, these steps deliver HUGE return on investment and over many years.

1. Update and refurbish the website. Read Seth Godin’s book “The Big Red Fez” and read the previous blog posting.
2. Get search engine optimization (SEO); it’s cheap and easy. You need to get found by Google – 90% of B2B transaction start with a search engine. Focus in on a geographic area, win that and then expand from there.
3. Start online marketing; it’s cheap and easy. Google adwords, link building campaigns, banner ads and Facebook are great places to start.
4. Start email campaigning; it’s cheap and easy. Use Email Service Providors (ESPs) like VerticalResponse, Constant Contact, MailChimp. ESPs will help keep your messages out of spam filters, and keep you from getting labeled as a spammer. Start with the list your company already has, supplement it with data from Jigsaw.
5. Auto-nurture leads generated by your website; it’s a cheap and an easy competitive advantage. Get Marketing Automation software like ActiveConversion so that when your website does generate a lead you can auto deliver more touches to each and everyone one of them.
6. Track desirable activities on your website; it is a cheap and easy competitive advantage. Again, use Marketing Automation software to know which companies or contacts are visiting your site, how they got to your site, which pages they are visiting, if they come back for a second visit, and if they are achieving goal pages or goal clicks.

Do these things because:

The entry price is low – these eMarketing solutions cost a relatively little and very quickly let SMBs punch well above their weight.
Low change risk – these activities don’t replace the relationship selling that SMBs know – it just lets them eliminate the cold calling that uses their time inefficiently.
Low surprise risk – budgets for these activities are fixed, and the ROI feedback is exceptional.
Low time risk – these solutions don’t require a new hire, don’t require information technology infrastructure, don’t require new expertise, and implement in days.
Many others using it – must be the right (safe) choice.
Competitive advantage – the six steps will either give you a competitive advantage over your competitor, or you’ll need them to level the playing field with your competitor

I was once asked by a B2B customer that didn’t get many leads from their website even though they got a lot of relevant traffic. A quick investigation led us to the answer — they didn’t have a single form on the website! While they displayed the phone number and email addresses on the contact page, visitors didn’t want to pick up the phone or look for email addresses to contact them. As soon as we setup a proper inquiry form on their website, their online conversion increased more than ten fold.

However, not all online forms are created equal. Here are some tips from our experience that will help you get better success with your online forms to get better conversion to leads.

Make your web forms easy to access
Make the link to your forms very obvious. For instance, put a “Get a Quote” button on key pages to take visitors to the page where they can submit a form for a quote of your service or product.

Only ask for necessary info
How motivated are you completing a form when it feels like filing a tax return?  The less information people have to provide, the more comfortable they will be with completing the form. For example, if you’re promoting an e-newsletter subscription, you probably need only email address and the name on the form.

Limit the mandatory fields
Mandatory fields help to get fully complete registration forms, but too many mandatory fields can frustrate the user. Ask yourself what information is truly essential.

Validate the key fields and provide help
Generally you should ensure the email addresses are in a valid format. If a user has an error, let them know which one it is. It’s frustrating to guess what the error is.

Help users with the answers
Try to pre-fill or pre-select the data for the users. Some browser toolbars like the Google toolbar can also help pre-fill the form fields when using standard fields. You should also use drop-down boxes with pre-defined answers to help users choose.

Display your privacy policy
Many people are concerned about who will have access to their information and how it will be used. Make sure you have a privacy statement available on the online form to reassure the prospect that you will not abuse their information.

Make use of the Thank You page
Consider doing more than just a “Thank you for inquiring” message. Make it feel personal by displaying their first names. Provide links to key information to get them back to your website. Maybe even provide a special offer for users who submit the form.

Online forms are key to lead generation for B2B. The less barriers there are between the user and the form, the more  likely they will complete the forms.

I’m going to go off the normal track today and point the readership to a review of ActiveConversion by Zaki Usman of Target Info Labs.

ActiveConversion Dashboard

ActiveConversion is one of the most comprehensive sales intelligence and marketing SaaS applications I’ve seen on the market these days.

Anytime you get a 3rd party review/evaluation of your product offering, it’s a great way to see whether your views of the product features, benefits and values are the same as those of a user.  What are the attributes they value, the functionality and features that they take away as decision criteria for bringing the solution into their company.

Zaki’s review nailed it, or I guess we did based on the review.  The review hit on the key attributes that we strive for in our product offering for the B2B SMB market.  Our product goals are to provide a comprehensive Marketing Automation solution for our target SMB market, with intelligence and sophistication that we make transparent to the user through ‘auto-pilot’ functionality.  It’s got to be intuitive and easy to use and deliver value – as is the case with most things we value and use today.

One of the most advanced sales intelligence tools I’ve seen in the market as of today. It combines sales intelligence with marketing tools to give a complete platform for your team.

ActiveConversion has some very exciting product announcements in the coming months … stay tuned!

Full disclosure, I work at ActiveConversion

Last week Lynn commented on the strategic merits of interoperability allowing for best-of-breed integration for your Marketing Automation solution, with a notion of ‘why fix what isn’t broken’.   The latter eluding to the point that if you’re already direct marketing through an Email Service Provider (ESP) and you want to move to include Marketing Automation, you can continue to work with your ESP.  As an SMB business you’re probably already taking advantage of one of the many ESP solutions for direct marketing in an effort to attract new customers, or simply to stay in touch with existing customers.  So when should you move to a Marketing Automation solution.

First, ESP’s provide the very basics of analytics with a direct email campaign; bounces, opens, and click-throughs.

Bounces – Hard bounces vs Soft bounces.  Always something you need to pay attention to with your house list.  This probably signals a change/ who is the new person assuming the role of your previous contact? Is the new person someone that is interested in additional services or product from you? Has a previous customer moved onto a similar role in a new company presenting the opportunity for the addition of a new customer?  Change presents opportunity for the sales person.

Opens – An open with your ESP is triggered by the ‘downloading’ of an image.  If you’re working with a marketing automation solution, the open is the point at which you establish a digital connection to the lead.  From this point on any time the lead visits your website you will have the ability to monitor the digital track they follow on your site.

Click through – Significant?  Possibly.  Did they do more than hit the landing page?  Did they navigate your site, did they convey any ‘buy signals’ through their navigation? Having visited the site, did they come back again the same day, a day later, or even weeks later?  Only with a post-click management solution are you able to determine the answers to these questions.  Questions that most would argue are key in prioritizing your lead, and ensuring your sales team are focused where the conversion to ‘qualified’ is the highest.

With post-click management you are able to evolve your ESP direct emailing campaign to the next level and gain more intelligence on your leads and understand in greater detail which of your campaigns are truly providing a return on your investment.

Recently I was mildly surprised to learn that Email Service Providers (ESPs) such as Vertical Response, Constant Contact, Campaigner, Jangomail, Streamsend, Exact Target, Bronto and MailChimp are 10 years old or close to it.  There are many others like iContact that are recent additions to the market.  And when you examine their respective feature sets you’ll find check-offs for over 50 different features.  Clearly these are sophisticated systems that have been developed and improved over a number of years.

In the SaaS (Software as a Service) business, churn can be defined as the number of customers in any given month who do not continue with a particular service.  In their 2007 IPO Prospectus, Constant Contact stated their churn rate as 2.6 percent.  This compares favorably with the likes of ISPs and very favorably when compared with Cable companies and Wireless providers.  It also reinforces the notion that as a marketing automation vendor you might consider interoperating with ESPs instead of displacing them with your own version of the same, which may or may not be as refined.

To be fair there are some advantages to the monolithic approach.  Just ask Apple Mac customers.  But even there, Mac’s success has been enhanced by moving toward working with PCs. However, to fit this type, you’d have be like the woman in the TV commercial who says, “I always like to pay full price and sometimes, a little more.”

But if you are in the majority (Apple has had low single-digit market share for decades) you likely agree with the notion that interoperability allows best-of-breed to emerge while maximizing ROI for the user.  As importantly, ‘why fix what isn’t broke’ and have to re-train users or face unforeseen technical risks. SMBs are notorious for being value driven and wanting results fast, so a strategy of interoperability both makes sense and allows today’s ESP users to easily evolve into a fully integrated marketing automation solution.