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

Traditionally, email marketing is something which is owned and operated by the Marketing Department.  Marketing professionals would market newsletters, event & webinar invites, press releases, etc. to leads in the marketing database.  If those in Sales were lucky, they were able to see reports from those email marketing campaigns (ex. click throughs, opens, forwards, etc.).  An overlooked application of email marketing has been the ability to allow sales professionals to ‘nurture’ their sales leads using email marketing tools as well.

Realistically sales professionals are doing this regardless, often in ways that are not “best practices” in an age where ISPs aggressively filter spam.  We have even seen some instances where sales professionals, sending their own marketing messages out of their desktop email account, have shut down their companies internal web servers or gotten their domain ‘blacklisted’ as a spam domain, something which is surprisingly easy to do.

There are tools that like the CRM SalesForce.com which allow sales professionals to send out email marketing messages to their leads or customers, but these are often limited by a maximum number of messages they can send out per day.  This is  far from ideal for professionals that cover a large territory, or have a large database of contacts they need to reach out to.

Sales professionals need to be able to easily reach out to their contacts with timely offers, to nurture them through long sales cycles, and most critically, to be notified when this strategy has worked and a contact has re-engaged. Today’s marketing automation tools like ActiveConversion partner with Email Service Providors (ESPs; the only viable way to email large lists and avoid being blacklisted as a spammer) and allow Sales professionals to do just that with a minimum of effort.  Typically there are a predefined or templated set of messages that are sent to an individual engaged in an evaluation of your solution (ex. whitepapers, spec sheets, etc), and a different set for those in long term nurture campaigns.  With tools like ActiveConversion|SalesView, salespeople can decide with the click of a mouse which messages they want their prospects to receive and how frequently they are touched.  This helps sales to ensure no opportunities are lost and no prospects are forgotten about.

If you would like to learn more about lead nurturing, download this free whitepaper here.

Lately I’ve received many non opt-in emails from companies that I have never heard of. I deleted most of these emails as soon as I get them. At the same time, I opened and looked at a few of them.  The ones that get my attention usually have good email subject lines. Some even got me to click on the link in the emails just to see what they’re about.

The email subject line is one of the most important elements of your email campaign. It can make or break your campaign. If you don’t have a compelling subject line, the chance of your email even getting opened is slim.

Take a look of the email subject lines that are in my Deleted mail folder. Do you see a pattern below on why they got deleted (company names are changed)?

• Free Evaluation of ABC Encrypted Portable Drive
• Data Company Adds Cascaded Replication to DR Infrastructure
• EFG Company: Request for Meeting
• Meeting Request: Introducing our new product
• XYZ data centers: High density collocation & Managed Server / Storage Solutions

Marketers have to realize the importance of email subject line. To give you an idea on how you should write your subject lines so that more recipients will open your emails, let’s take a look at the elements that make most of us open and read the emails.

Personalization
If you have details about your recipients then use them in your subject line to get their attention. If you see your company name or even your first name in the subject line, you’ll likely feel that the email is specifically sent to you. There is a good chance that you’ll open and read the email.

Relevancy
Similarly people will open the email if the subject line contains the topic of their interests. By using relevant events in an organization, you can create a subject line that can relate to what’s going on in that business and provide solutions to the challenges they are having.

Curiosity
When the email subject contain relevant interest, adding curiosity wording can entice people to open and read the contents of your email. Many times it will also improve your click through and conversion rates.

Non spammy words
Certain words in the subject lines would be flagged as spam by spam filter or even the recipient. Try to avoid words like “free”, “offer”, “cheap”, “stock”, “earn”, “$$$”, etc. As soon as I see email subject containing these words (if they bypass my auto spam filter), I usually move to the delete button.

The email subject line is one of the most important elements of your email campaign. It can make or break your campaign. If you don’t have a compelling subject line, the chance of your email even getting opened is slim.

My colleagues and I are immersed in the world of web marketing and take a lot of our skill sets for granted. One such skill is email marketing, the sending of an email to a list. While it is simple to do, and something we do at least every other day, 4 out of 5 companies I talk to are not doing it, and a good percentage of those who are doing it are doing it wrong, harmfully wrong. So here in four easy steps, is how to do email marketing.

Step 1: Gather your list.
Seems commonsensical, but most companies struggle when asked to produce a basic “house list”, let alone lists delineated by variables such as how old the contact information is, how it was received, if a product or service was bought by the contact, and so on. Short of setting up a Contact Relationship Management (CRM) system, put out an “all points bulletin” to your company and collect all the names into a spread sheet. Simple as that, put them into an excel spreadsheet, have a company name, contact name, mailing address, phone number, and of course, an email address. You need more than just the email address, spammers have just an email address, legitimate emailers have contact information.

Step 2: Join an Email Service Provider (ESP).
ESPs are different from Internet Service Providers (ISPs); ESPs are a new element in the ever evolving arms race against spammers. If you are going to send an email to a list, you want to send that email through an ESP or you are likely going to end up in a spam filter (they are free to join, and they charge about a penny an email). Invariably receivers of emails sent to a list will click the spam button, and the ISP will ask “who sent this?” If no one replies the ISP black lists the Internet Protocol (IP) address, automatically getting your emails dumped into spam folders. When you use an ESP they reply to the ISP; “We sent that, we have full contact information including name, address, phone number, this is not spam,” and the ISP relents. There are many ESPs to choose from, I’ll make it simple and suggest this one: VerticalResponse.

Step 3: Email your list with valuable content.
Arguably this is the easiest to state, but the hardest to do. Pick an interval, say once a month, and send a meaningful email that contains something of value. This is where you either win or lose; send nothing of value and you are spamming, send something of value and you are building your tribe. If you are having trouble coming up with something of value you can send in an email, email me and after I find out what your company does I’ll let you know what others in your industry are offering.

Step 4: Keep building your list, keep emailing your list.
Create a quota for everyone in your company; each needs to contribute three new contacts to the list each month. Start keeping segmented lists; in addition to the master “house list”, build lists that are finer grained. Stick to your emailing schedule, it must be a high priority. Keep sending emails that contain something of value.

There are steps beyond these, such as adding Marketing Automation to the mix, but email marketing is so simple, and virtually free, that if your company is not doing it, you are missing out on a powerful tool.

Craig Rosenberg - The Funnelholic

Craig Rosenberg is  ‘The Funnelholic’ and writes a blog ” for those of us who live and work at the top end of the b2b funnel: Demand Generation, Lead Generation, Online Media, B2B Sales and Marketing, Marketing Automation, DRIP, Lead Nurturing, and Fun.”

Craig has been conducting a series of ‘Thought Leadership Interviews’ and recently sat down with our own Fred Yee, CEO and Founder @ ActiveConversion,  and conducted the next interview in the series, #17 to be exact.  The interview covers the impact of today’s tough economic times for SMB’s, through Web 2.0 considerations for today’s Marketer.

You can read the entire interview here @ The Funnelholic.

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.