SMB Marketing Blog

Last week at the Salesforce Dreamforce conference, ActiveConversion was invited to be part of a panel on email marketing. The panel covered some basics on email marketing along with specific applications on campaigning within Salesforce, lead nurturing and the impact that social media has on email marketing.

An interesting observation I took away was that many B2B Marketers are not using email marketing on a regular basis.  I feel like this is something which we take for granted, because we have been using email marketing for so long.  I thought it would be valuable to cover the 5 tips for email marketing which were covered in the presentation:

1. Targeted Lists – Ensure you spend the time when building your lists to segment them.  This allows you to send out more targeted messages and offers, which will help give you a higher response rate and better return on your efforts.  Fields to segment on include: Country, City, Zip, Phone, Company size, Job title/level, past purchases, Age, Gender, etc
2. Targeted, Relevant & Fresh Content – Build messages which are relevant to those groups which you’ll be targeting in your offer. Use fresh content and offers to encourage the desired outcome of your email (ex. New whitepaper, limited time discount, new product announcement, etc)
3. Tracking and Reporting – To improve the quality of your email marketing be sure to use the built-in tools for tracking or reporting of your marketing campaigns.  Some of the metrics you may choose to measure success on include: Unique open rates, Unique click-through rates, Delivery success rate, Conversions and Unsubscribes, and Post click-through activity scoring.
4. Go Viral – Email is a great means to get your marketing messages out because they are easily forwarded and shared with others.  Make it easy for your emails to be forwarded or shared by your recipients
5. Permission is everything – Allow prospects to opt-in to receive your marketing messages and respect their privacy and requests if they choose to unsubscribe. When you are requesting information from your prospects, ensure you make it clear that their information will not be sold or rented to any third parties and it is being collected to be able to provide information on your company’s products and services

You can view the recording of this presentation and panel discussion here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eAkoptsBG0

Our man at DreamForce is Paul Uppal and he’s tweeting live from the floor.

Feel free to ask him questions.

Our man at Dreamforce alerted us to SFDC’s big announcement regarding the launch of Chatter.  Read the skinny on it from from ZDNet: SalesForce.com kicks off Dreamforce, announces Chatter.

“The company, in a statement, says Chatter will “revolutionize the workplace” by leveraging social networking models that have become popular among the mainstream, notably Facebook, and bringing them to a secure and private cloud where people, content and applications will have profiles feeds and groups.”

At the end of October Google released the latest PageRank (PR) updates. Has your Google PR gone up or down on your website? One of our brand new product websites, ActiveProspects, has gone from PR0 to PR5 in just two months and we are excited about it.

In an earlier post, I described how Google PageRank is based on a link analysis algorithm that is similar to a ballot system. When one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important that page is assumed to be. It is also calculated on the quality of those links. A handful of links from authoritative, trustworthy, relevant pages far outweigh hundreds of links from so-so sites.

Here are my tips on improving your Google PageRank:

1) Create professional and useful content on your website. When people find your content valuable, they will likely link and reference to your web content.

2) Provide client testimonials to your vendors. They will be happy to post your testimonial on their website and link to your website to show that its legitimate and credible (format the testimonial with a link).

3) Post insightful comments on blogs related to your industry (like this one!).  Avoid simply commenting with just “good post” etc. You’ll have to show that you understand the post; in your comment demonstrate a  shared experience or even challenge their idea with relevant sources.  Make sure in your profile your name links back to your website.

4) Your partners and clients are also good sources of relevant inbound links. Work hard at getting links from them.

5) Does your business have other websites. Make sure you create links to your website from your other web properties (but make sure these are not mirror sites).

There are many more ways to get credible inbound links, including outsourcing a link building campaign. Building up Googe PageRank through a link building campaign requires creativity and hard work. The upside is once you’ve earned a good Google PageRank for your website, the payoff is long term.

In October ActiveConversion co-hosted with VerticalResponse a webinar called “Boosting Sales with Continuous & Qualified Leads“. Due to popular demand, we’re providing a recorded version of this webinar for those who couldn’t make it.  The webinar covered:

• Overview of Email Marketing Best Practices
• Post-Campaign Marketing Campaign Tracking With ActiveConversion
• Re-engaging Prospects with Nurturing Campaigns

This webinar had a great turn-out and the Q&A afterwards was lively; SMBs are hungry for email marketing best practices.  Feel free to pass the link to this webinar around, the more the merrier.