As you are considering doing this, one of the most important factors to email success is using relevant content.  If your messaging isn’t relevant, timely and interesting, your success metrics will suffer.

MarketingProf”s Maciej Ossowski speaks to this point in a recent article.  Ossowski talks about Relevance as part of the several email “trends” from 2011 that will continue to work into 2012.  Using relevant content will help more of your messages survive the ESP’s strict rules and land in the intended user’s Inbox.

“2012 is all about tailor-made offers matching the recipients’ preferences,” Ossowski notes. “If you miss that, you will lose conversions, decrease your sending reputation, and wind up in the junk folder.”

As savvy marketers, you know that paying attention to recipient preferences is important across many different areas.  What a consumer or business prefers to hear about, is interested in, how they want to view the information . . . all of these are important to the success of any direct marketing campaign.

With email, because of the ever-increasing crowding of Inboxes, this is particularly important.  Every piece of the message has to be relevant . . . from the subject line, through to the content of the message, to the links and landing pages.  It has to make sense, be interesting and provide value.  All of these factors equate to relevancy.

With the email channel’s increasing popularity, it is important to use the same sound direct marketing principles with your email campaigns as you’ve always used for other direct marketing campaigns.  And relevancy is definitely a key factor.

Come on . . . let’s look at the email channel for what it really is . . . it’s a direct marketing channel.  It really is no different than direct mail, telemarketing or any other marketing channel.  It is simply another way to reach your customers, as well as those who you’d like to become your customers.

The reality is that you can’t use any one direct marketing channel effectively alone.  Savvy marketers today know that certain segments of their customers and prospects will respond to different channels.  It could be an age thing — or some other characteristic.  It is simply an individual preference, and individuals deserve the right to choose the preferred channel of communication.  Let’s face it . . . if you communicate with them via their preferred channel, they are way more likely to positively respond.

In fact Chief Marketer recently completed a survey of marketers and which channels are preferred for prospecting. Here are some of their findings regarding the email channel:

For most marketers who use it, email’s relatively low cost is its most notable asset as a lead-gen tool (77%), followed somewhat distantly by its trackability (50%) and the chance to customize the marketing message (47%).

To be fair, there are still many folks out there who are afraid of the Spam-trappers, mail box clutter and low open rates.  However, these issues can be very effectively addressed by doing the following things:

1) Ensure that you are using an email data vendor whose main focus is on the quality of the email addresses that they compile — not the quantity.  OMI, for example, re-permissions our entire consumer database each month.  As part of the process, we remove all spam traps, foreign IP, known complainers (those who hit the spam button consistently), system words, and other bad email data, and shift it over to our suppression database (OMI Clean-Send).  By doing this, our Clients are experiencing increased deliverability and open rates.  However, this is an instance of “buyer beware” because there are vendors out there who don’t have this same philosophy on data cleanliness.  Just ask your vendor to explain their updating and cleansing procedures — it’s a very fair question, and an important one to ask before purchasing.

2) Work on your creatives to ensure that they truly set you apart from the clutter.  As usual, I recommend using an analytical approach — testing creatives to see which ones work best for each segment for which you are deploying email campaigns.

3) Work hard to determine who would rather have a direct mail piece as opposed to an email message.  The beauty of direct marketing is that you can measure everything.  Measure who is direct mail responsive and provide them your messaging via this channel.  A good way to determine this quickly is to conduct a profiling exercise that will break out your customer and prospect segments into those who are most direct mail responsive.

The point to this post is that marketing your business to those who are not your customers via the email channel is not only OK — it’s become a necessity.  Again, I would never advise any company to use the email channel alone — but definitely use it where it makes sense and where it is preferred by your customer and prospect segments.

I’d love to hear success stories from those who have used the email channel for prospecting and can share some results.  Just leave a comment.

Well, today ClickZ reports that AMEX has a new partnership with Twitter and as part of this will offer the first 100 SMB’s who sign up on their Open Forum SMB site $100 in Twitter Self-Service Ads.  Nice!  

The idea behind this is to help get SMB’s comfortable on Twitter, just as they have gotten so on Facebook.  The point of the whole thing is to help SMB’s more successfully market themselves.  AMEX does good things for the SMB’s — and creates loyal customers of them while doing so.  You know I love a win-win scenario.

And AMEX is really investing a lot in this program.  According to the article:

The current commitment by Amex and Twitter – $1 million worth of free ads – seemingly dwarfs last year’s Facebook contest.  At the same time, educating SMBs about the possible value of Twitter marketing will once again be key to Amex’s effort. The New York-based credit card firm will lean on its Open Forum microsite to provide how-to information on buying Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts, which will be the ad units sold on Twitter’s self-serve platform next month.

Kudos to American Express for continuing to expand their investment in this fast-growing business sector.  As it has been widely reported,  SMB’s are helping to fuel our country’s economic recovery.  So by making them more successful from a marketing perspective will help fuel that recovery more quickly — a good thing for all of us.

Have a great President’s Day Weekend!

Our world has certainly changed in the past 10 years  . . . I remember when Amazon first came into the marketplace and there was all of this hub-bub about how you couldn’t trust online shopping sites because your credit card info wasn’t protected and there were a lot of “pirates” in cyberspace, etc.  That noise was quickly silenced by shoppers virtually running to their computers and ordering as fast as their fingers could point and click.

Today, online-only merchants have become more profitable than those merchants (Barnes and Noble for example) who have both an online presence and a traditional storefront — and by big numbers!

In today’s Internet Retailer, Mark Brohan reports on preliminary research that suggests that web-only merchants have the early sales lead over other retailers.  Check out this excerpt from Brohan’s article:

The combined sales for the 94 merchants that have so far reported annual web sales increased 37.1% to $67.23 billion in 2011 from $49.04 billion in 2010. And web-only merchants make up the fastest-growing Top 500 merchant category so far with collective sales that increased year over year 38.8% to $56.01 billion in 2011 from $40.36 billion in the prior year. The results for the web-only merchants include Amazon.com, whose sales grew nearly 41% last year to $48.08 billion from $34.20 billion in the prior year. But even without Amazon, No. 1 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, sales for the remaining online-only retailers grew year over year 28.7% to $7.93 billion from $6.16 billion.

Based upon what we have experienced over the past few years, a 28.7% growth rate is quite remarkable — in fact it’s unbelievable! I think that this significant growth continues to point to the fact that the economy is still healing, and starting to recover more quickly.  And I say — finally — we are moving in the right direction!

We’ve seen an increase in our retail clients need for email data (along with other data elements that we compile– like purchase transactions data) that will help them more effectively hone in on the more exact attributes of their customers.  This helps them create more relevant messaging that will get customers to click on those links and make more online purchases.  The other thing that we’ve seen is an increase in the use of email cleansing tools — like our Suppression Database — that allows these e-tailers to clean and update their databases to ensure that their consumer email data is as clean and updated as possible, thereby actually reaching  the intended recipients Inboxes.  Plus, by using only the cleanest data, these Clients are doing everything that they can to help protect their very important sender reputations.  And this will allow them to continue to email — in a respectful way — all of those customers who already love purchasing from them.  It’s all good!

I love seeing this type of economic growth because it means more projects for all of us.  And I have to say, from the economic reports that I’ve seen thus far this year, I think we’re all in for a very successful 2012.  Let’s keep our fingers crossed that this trend continues!

In 2011, B2B marketers experienced severe declines in the tactical effectiveness for many of their
marketing channels, when compared to the previous year. Multiple tactics declined by 50 percent or more.
Times are tough and it is becoming more critical than ever for marketers to improve results. And it is
becoming hauntingly evident that it’s time for change.

Too true!  It’s time to get creative and figure out how to make your marketing campaigns more effective to achieve the higher results metrics.  One of the ideas given in the report  is to institute a way to increase lead conversion as part of your marketing strategy. An effective lead conversion strategy, in my opinion,  has marketing working hand-in-hand with sales, helping to identify those attributes that will help leads move through the sales cycle and convert to a new customer.

I realize that this is easier said than done.  Traditionally, sales and marketing have had a bit of a communication gap (read: BIG) and not the best history in terms of working together.  However, I have seen that when these organizations are able to work together . . . great things can happen.

Question: Who knows more about the customer than the sales person?  Answer: Nobody.  Sales’ work is all about crafting the relationship with the customer, qualifying them based upon their specific needs, and trust me, sales definitely knows what makes for a profitable customer.  It impacts their pay — and so they are therefore quite motivated to clearly understand the make-up of a profitable customer versus a less-profitable one.

Marketing can glean intelligence from sales to help them identify those sales leads that will have a higher propensity to convert to a profitable sales by looking at current profitable customers .  . . as opposed to spending a great deal of time on leads that have a low propensity to become a new customer.  If marketing can work with sales to analytically figure out how to do this by looking at various attributes that make a prospect look like an existing profitable customer, they can become superheroes to sales. And, lead conversion rates will, indeed, increase.  I agree with Marketing Sherpa that this is a critical area that B2B marketers need to focus on in 2012.   I highly recommend downloading and purchasing the report.  It is filled with great advice and ideas that can help any marketer quickly tweak their strategy for greater success this year.

Best wishes for a great weekend — and more marketing success next week!

● If you properly limit the volume of emails sent out to each ISP (consumer campaigns)

● If you actively maintain your email permission policy

● If you monitor and address SPAM complaints to keep your email reputation intact

● If the content of your email lowers your chances of going straight to the SPAM folder

● If you have a bounce back policy

● If you routinely remove invalid email addresses from your list

● If you check how your email appears on various email clients and adjust the design if necessary to ensure the best possible representation of your brand

● If you can check your landing pages to make sure that they are aligned with emails and if they are readable on various devices

This is all great advice — and great advice to consider whether you are marketing to businesses or consumers.  One other tool that you can use to ensure that your email marketing messages get through to the Inbox — and that you protect your sender reputation — is to license a suppression file of known bad email data.

We have the largest cleansing tool of this type in the industry (sorry about the shameless plug — but we really don’t know of any other database that is as robust as ours).  OMI has collaborated with other quality email vendor partners to create the largest suppression file of this type of ISP email data — OMI Clean-Send.  It contains spam traps, known complainers, opt-outs, foreign IPs, and other types of negative email data.

The reason I bring this up in this particular blog post is that this data — if not cleaned out of your email database — can cause ISP’s to block you, thus hurting your sender reputation and making it harder for you to get your messages through to the ISP’s in the future.  If the ISP’s block you — your messages won’t get to your intended recipients.  Additionally, if you have these records in your database, you are wasting money, time and resources by emailing to them because they are not “good” email addresses.  When you combine that with the first fact — that you can get blocked by the ISP’s for your intended recipients — this can add up to horrible results from your email campaigns.  Not a good thing.

So, as you consider your email campaigns, if you have not checked your email database for cleanliness quite recently, you may want to consider using an email cleansing service such as our Clean-Send service.  When you start with clean data and use the suggestions as outlined above, you can email with both beauty (clean data) and brains (well-thought-out strategy).  And this results in more successful campaigns with higher ROI for your business.

So, what have we seen so far as the state of B2B email marketing?  Well, the news is definitely good.  2012 has already seen an uptick in marketing spending with more companies investing in both B2B marketing data and marketing automation tools.  It seems as though we are all finally getting back to the work of acquiring new customers and continuing to build relationships with our existing ones.

Thus far, the B2B email marketing trends that we are seeing at OMI are as follows:

1)  Huge interest in marketing to the SMB sector.  More of our Clients — across industries — are focusing in on the Small-to-Medium-sized Business sector.  While this segment was definitely top-of-mind over the past couple of years, we’ve seen an added sense of urgency of large B2B marketers vying for the SMB sectors’ business.  Clients from telecommunications, financial services, automotive and healthcare are all laser-focused on reaching these business executives and claiming victory in the SMB marketplace.  Email marketing is of particular interest for this market segment as many recent studies have shown that busy SMB execs prefer to be communicated with via the email channel.  This way, they can review and act on marketing messages when it is convenient for them to do so.  Additionally, research has shown that SMB’s have been found to be a bit resistant to both direct mail and telemarketing.  They tend to be extremely responsive to the email channel and interested in following businesses that they support via social media communities.

2) More interest in using multi-channel marketing via an integrated approach.  We have had much interest in our Integrated Channel Approach white paper as our Clients are interested in figuring out the right timing for campaigns and which channels to use for the best results.  A few of our Clients are really honing in on the right equation for using email with telemarketing follow up for better conversion rates.  For example, we’ve seen successful campaign strategies such as this one:

• Send B2B email message 1 announcing the new product on Day 1
• Follow up on all click-throughs with a phone call on Day 2
• Re-send Message 1 to all non-openers on Day 5
• Follow up on all click-throughs with a phone call on Day 6
• Send 2nd email Message on Day 7 — with a slightly different message with higher urgency
• Follow up via telephone on all click-throughs . . .

You get the idea.  The point is that when using direct marketing channels in tandem with each other in an intelligent (and respectful) way, you can really lift response and conversion rates.  We’ve seen clients increase conversions by 3-5% by using multiple channels and a similar formula to the one outlined above.

3)  Using Data with Analytics for more intelligent marketing.  Many of our Clients are using analytics to better understand who their existing customers are, then building a look-alike model to find those prospects who closely resemble their best customers.  For any of you that have followed by blogs over the last 8 years . . . you know that I am a big fan of this approach.  It makes so much more sense to select marketing data — for whatever direct marketing channel you decide to use — based upon the science and math of statistical modeling.  You can determine who will respond, convert, remain loyal, etc., just by integrating an analytical approach into your marketing strategy.  And now, many companies (ours included) offer some sort of an introductory customer profile analysis at little or no cost to you.  At this point it makes absolutely no sense not to do this work up front for better overall results.

We will keep our eye out for upcoming trends as 2012 progresses — but for now, these are the top three that I’ve seen that are kick-starting the year for the B2B marketers that we support.

Thanks to Rebecca Croucher for the suggestion of this topic!  I love to hear from my blog followers on what they’d like to see discussed here.  Keep the comments and suggestions coming!

TGIF — and Happy Superbowl to all!

1) You’ll eventually be seen as an expert in your field

2) You will help to establish your brand

3)  Companies will seek you out to help them be more successful — buying products and services from you.

In today’s Marketing Pilgrim post, author Frank Reed comments on the decline in blogging, noting that many companies are opting for the “quick bursts” messaging of Facebook and Twitter instead of putting the time, thought and effort into developing a blog post.  Here is the chart that he posts on the very interesting trending:

As Reed points out, it is easy to see the two categories with the upward growth over the past few years — it’s Twitter and Facebook.  In 2011, blogging shrunk significantly (this chart depicts within the Inc. 500 — but it also shrunk in the Fortune 500).

So what does this mean to those of us who do blog?  Well, as one of the commenters  to the post (Stephanie) pointed out — “This is a great opportunity for the little guy…the business owner that outworks and out hustles the big corporation! I get excited when I see studies like this.”

I agree with Stephanie.  If you are working to put out relevant, topical and interesting content, you will continue to drive people to your business.  I think, however, you can also use the other social media channels for the greatest effectiveness.  For example, I post a link to all of my blog posts to our Facebook, Twitter, Linked In and Google + pages to get the widest reach.  So, you get the “burst” of info via those sites and can click on the link and read the article in its entirety if you choose to do so.  This helps me to drive traffic to all of the sites — so it’s a win-win.

The point is that if you have a blog and contribute to it often, it can help you reach a wider audience and adds credibility to your brand and company.  We may be fewer than we once were but that just clears the way for our blogs to be read by more as long as we keep writing excellent content!

Today, we’re closing the book on that chapter by stating that Experian CheetahMail believes that opt-out email appending is no longer an acceptable practice, and that marketers should no longer use this practice to acquire customer email addresses.

Isaacson, who is obviously passionate about the email marketing industry, has stated that CheetahMail believes that marketers should not take part in email appending and then performing an opt-out permission pass because of four distinct reasons:

1)  He believes that consumers have ample opportunities to opt-in to receive a specific marketer’s message if they choose to do so via company websites, social media, etc.  Additionally, Isaacson believes that if a consumer takes the action of opting- in to receive third-party messages that they may not be intentionally meaning to do so.

2)  As part of (and the first member of) the “Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG),” Isaacson believes that CheetahMail should follow the best practices as identified by this extremely conservative (email marketing-wise) organization.  You can view MAAWG’s best practices here.

3)  Isaacson is worried that with the impending Canadian Anti-Spam Law coming into force in a few months, email marketers will unknowingly email ex-US consumers who have moved to Canada and get into hot water with this law — when it actually becomes law.

4)  Email address use consistently turns over and some inactive addresses are being set up as spam traps.  This could cause email marketers to email to invalid recipients — hurting their sender reputation, lowering deliverability rates, etc.

Again, Isaacson is definitely bullish on ensuring that his company does the best job that they can in following consumer preferences and not abusing consumers by sending marketing messages that are potentially unwanted to consumer inboxes.  This is definitely the right thing to do — we just think you can take a different approach to get the same results, while not taking out an entire direct marketing channel. So, while Isaacson brings up some good points, we respectfully– and wholeheartedly — disagree with Isaacson and CheetahMail’s stance in this regard.

To begin with, appending email addresses to a company’s customer base has been the operating standard for years.  In order to stay top-of-mind with your customer base, you must respectfully communicate with them via a myriad of DM other channels.  Customers must always have the ability to opt-out if they prefer not to receive your messages via the email channel.

Overall, we disagree with CheetahMail’s stance because the email channel is one of the most effective channels to utilize in direct marketing.  It is immediately measurable, cost-efficient and easily integrated into multi-channel marketing efforts.  In fact, most people I know would rather receive an email marketing message than a direct mail piece or phone call.  Email is less intrusive than the other direct marketing channels, affording consumers and businesses the ability to “deal” with the marketing message when and how they wish to do so.

That said, Isaacson’s concerns are very valid.  Email marketers do need to ensure that they are doing the best job that they can in honoring consumer preferences and using the cleanest data possible to ensure that deliverability rates remain high. However, we  believe that you can use email marketing best practices with email appending or acquisition marketing by ensuring that you are working with a quality email data firm that includes these best practices:

1)  Compiles email data that is opted-in to receiving third-party messages, and has an opt-in time and date stamp and URL where the consumer opted-in associated with each and every record in their database.  This way, marketers can point the consumer to the place and time that they did opt-in to receive marketing messages.

2) Performs an opt-out permission pass prior to sending the marketing message so that consumers do have the opportunity to opt-out if they wish to do so.  At OMI, we fully permission our entire 140 million consumer record database every month.  This allows us to remove any consumer who no longer wishes to receive marketing messages — thus ensuring that we are being respectful to their preferences.

3)  Uses a comprehensive suppression process against their active consumer database to ensure that as much bad email data as possible is removed.  At OMI, we belong to a data consortium that hosts a 280 million suppression database (between 8 and 15 million records are added to this database each month).  This database consists of spam traps, know complainers, foreign IP addresses, inactive consumer email addresses that may be used as spam traps, and several other categories of negative email data.  We compare our active consumer email database against this suppression database every month and remove any consumer record that matches to it.  This keeps our database pristine for use by our customers.  We also license this suppression database to our large consumer email marketing clients so that they can protect their sender reputations and email as responsibly as possible.

At OMI, we want to allow marketers to use the email channel in the most responsible way possible.  We believe that you can use email responsibly if you ensure that the data that you are using to fuel your campaigns has gone through the processes outlined above.  Human beings are inherently intelligent.  They will tell marketers if they don’t wish to receive messages from them.  As long as we honor consumer preferences, we can market effectively using all direct marketing channels.

If you have questions about this or are unsure of how you should be using the email channel in your consumer programs, please call us and let’s talk about it.

Have a great weekend!

Yes, social media purists . . . it is also to build relationships with customers and to get them to become loyal to your business by including them as part of your overall  business community. I get that.

However, if all of the campaigns that you create, materials that you so carefully craft, and the products and services that make your business stand out in the crowd don’t enable your sales people to close more sales, bad things will happen to your budget.

Today, in BtoB Online, author Rich Vancil discusses how B2B marketers need to keep sales enablement at the top of their list of things to do for 2012.  Vancil (from IDC) defines good sales enablement as:

Getting the right information into the hands of the right sellers at the right time and place, and in the right format, to move a sales opportunity forward.

Any of us who have worked in large organizations have seen a broken (or at least injured) sales process.  It is extremely difficult to get right and I’ve seen lots of really smart business leaders struggle with getting the hard work of marketing into the heads of their stellar sales folks.  Sometimes, the problem is that there are so many different versions of products and services that marketing churns out, sales can’t see clear to presenting the right versions for the right situation.  Never mind understand them all or be able to craft a solution for a customer-specific challenge.

Worse still, customers can identify that there is an issue as their salesperson valiantly tries to present — and then implement — the right solutions that solve their business challenges.  Vancil notes that there are two things that organizations can do to solve this problem — one that is easy and one that is more difficult.

The easy one: Perfom a major marketing asset audit with the goal of literally “getting stuff off the table.” The sheer volume of marketing assets in an organization that has perhaps dozens of product lines is overwhelming to sellers. There is no way the sellers can successfully sort through and find and deploy the “right content at the right time and place” in an efficient way. So what happens? They leave the office “disabled” versus “enabled” and the buyer sentiment reflected earlier goes into effect.

The harder one: There is a fundamental organizational dynamic that can lead to poor sales enablement and then to frustrated buyers.

Regardless of how hard or easy the problem is to solve, marketing has got to try to help B2B sales people sell the products and services that they build.  I’ve always thought that a bridge group that could span the gap between the two groups and (A) get them to understand each other’s language and (B) help them really accept feedback from each other so that both groups could be more successful would really be a great use of resources.  I know that there are marketing consultants out there that specialize in this area and work to help resolve these issues for businesses.

The bottom line is no matter how you do it . . . sales and marketing need to work together for a business to be successful and to create satisfied and loyal customers.