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B2B Lead Generation Articles on email marketing
- Using Audience Targeting to Own the Latent Pipeline
B2B Marketing Confidential | Nov 21, 2010 | Permalink
B2B marketers are intimately familiar with the concept of a funnel or a pipeline. Whichever term you use--you might use both--the ideas are the same from company to company. A lead is entered into a system at some point in time. It might be someone inquiring on the web site, or it might even be a name from a list. From this point onwards, that lead can either move forward, do nothing, or drop out of the system. The resulting graphic looks like a funnel.Having covered that ground, let me state up front that this post is not about pipeline management, acceleration, nurturing, systems, or email marketing. This post is about a fundamental problem with the funnel concept as operationalized at most B2B marketing organizations today, and what I think is a pretty seminal idea on how to fix the ...
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- 10 Tips for Using Twitter And Email Marketing for B2B
Anything Goes Marketing | Nov 21, 2010 | Permalink
I was told that every blog needs a "top 10 post" and I thought today would be a good day to write one on a topic that is growing in popularity. That topic is Twitter and how best to use this tool for your B2B marketing efforts. I thought I would take a stab at providing tips on blending a tried and true tool like email with Twitter. Let me know what you think and if you have additional tips (
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- How to Prevent List Attrition yet Drive Event Attendance
Anything Goes Marketing | Nov 21, 2010 | Permalink
This week's blog post was inspired by an idea by Yaro Starak over at Entrepreneurs-journey.com who suggested to look for blog ideas by scanning Facebook groups. I decided to do a quick scan on Linkedin instead and found a great topic on email marketing. Here is the question that was asked:How does your company email customers about events and web seminars without sending too many emails to the
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- MarketingSherpa's Email Summit
B2B Lead Generation Blog / Brian Carroll | Nov 21, 2010 | Permalink
Here's the summary from MarketingSherpa Email Summit event: Following MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Email Marketing Summit last week, we sat down with copious notes to pick out the most important themes from three days of workshops, panel discussions and presentations. Read on...
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- Email Marketing Gone Wrong - It's not the 1990s Anymore
Anything Goes Marketing | Nov 20, 2010 | Permalink
I've just got off the treadmill and getting ready to turn in and received an email from a Canada's largest retail drug store - Shoppers Drug Mart or "Shoppers" for short. The email broke most of the essential email best practice rules and I want to ensure that you are aware of these and that Shoppers takes these into consideration for future campaigns. This email may have cut it 1999 but will be
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- Email Marketing Metrics You Should be Tracking
Anything Goes Marketing | Nov 20, 2010 | Permalink
If you weren’t aware, Canada (Vancouver specifically) will be hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics. I was inspired to write this post by a group of brave Canadian ski jumpers that are have been denied permission to compete in the upcoming games. You may be saying – wait a minute, ski jumping is an Olympic event so what’s the problem? The “problem” is that these athletes are women and the IOC has not
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- How to Overcome the 3 Biggest Messaging Roadblocks
Hubspot | Nov 17, 2010 | Permalink
This guest post was writen by Stephen Denny (@Note_to_CMO) of Decision Triggers, a marketing consultancy that works with corporate clients to improve their sales and marketing performance by applying the social psychology of influence to critical customer-facing initiatives. Marketers have two choices when they’re standing at their customers’ virtual gates. We can either beat against the door even harder or we can tap the right decision triggers and be invited inside. If you’re like most marketers – and you’re being honest with yourself – you probably fall into this first camp. Beating on the gates takes persistence, money and a thick skin. The by-invitation-only option takes an understanding of the psychology of how we make decisions – specifically, it means we have to learn somethi...
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- 4 Action Items For Email Marketers From Facebook’s New Messaging System
Hubspot | Nov 16, 2010 | Permalink
Today the rumors that Facebook is going to offer a new messaging system turned into reality. Yes, the social networking giant is going to provide the option of @Facebook.com email addresses, but this is only one part of the company’s announcement. Facebook’s new messaging system is not about email; instead it revolves around the idea of unifying and prioritizing messages. Facebook announced that users send more than 4 billion messages per day on the platform. In order to streamline these communication processes, Facebook's messaging system will merge in one place different networking channels: chat, email, text message, Facebook message and mobile push notifications. Additionally, Facebook announced that they were intentionally going to drop threaded messages and instead organize messa...
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- Celebrating "I Love to Write (Marketing Stuff) Day"
Hubspot | Nov 15, 2010 | Permalink
As a marketing professional, I have to write constantly. And, the type of writing that I do usually consists of email message creation. Emails to current customers, emails to sales prospects, emails to friends of the company...emails, emails, emails. And, all of those messages involve a degree of selling. Only occasionally do I have the opportunity to step outside the world of business writing and when I do, it is uncomfortable. I found "I Love to Write Day" while researching some blog topic ideas for this month. Since the inception of "ILTWD" in 2002, nine states have officially recognized the day and 22,000 schools celebrate it. The 9th annual celebration, according to "I Love to Write Day" founder John Riddle, "is to have people of all ages spend time writing. They can write a...
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- links for 2010-11-10
BeRelevant: Email Marketing Best Practices | Nov 11, 2010 | Permalink
No, social media doesn't mean email marketing's dead -According to the Econsultancy report, How We Shop in 2010: Habits and Motivations of Consumers, email marketing is still the channel of choice... [ click the title or the link below to read the full post ]
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- Main takeaways from the European Email Marketing Conference 2010
BeRelevant: Email Marketing Best Practices | Nov 04, 2010 | Permalink
I attended (and spoke) at the European Email Marketing Conference in London today and yesterday. I am back at my hotel in Amsterdam now and spent some time digging for the best takeaways from the... [ click the title or the link below to read the full post ]
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- How email can help SEO: 10 email marketing tips for SEOs
BeRelevant: Email Marketing Best Practices | Oct 28, 2010 | Permalink
On Tuesday, I gave a presentation about email marketing to an audience of SEO professionals at the Pro SEO seminar in London. They asked me to share 10 tips on how email can help SEO. It was an... [ click the title or the link below to read the full post ]
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- Are you investing enough in Sales Research?
ReadyContacts | Jun 02, 2010 | Permalink
B2B demand generation is getting tougher than ever before. Mass marketing is dead. Direct marketing is ignored. Email marketing has turned into a spray and pray tactic. But sales quotes have remained the same and are growing. In this situation, its imperative for every marketer to think outside the box – I know everyone says [...]
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- Garbage In Garbage Out: Why Focus Is Critical In Marketing Campaigns
ReadyContacts | Jul 09, 2009 | Permalink
Marketing’s objective is to reach out to prospects and nurture them to build a pipeline of warm contacts who can be further developed into opportunities. Outbound marketing including email marketing, direct mail and telemarketing form the foundation of marketing’s reach out program and the urge, rightly so, is to reach out to as many contacts [...]
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- Saying Hello Sets the Stage
Accelerating IT Sales | Jun 10, 2009 | Permalink
Email marketers are constantly working to attract new subscribers, but maintaining lists, developing relationships with new members, and retaining users is equally, if not more important when it comes to creating high-value, sales-ready leads. To determine how companies welcome new members, Return Path, an email services company, signed up for 61 email programs and examined how they were treated once they expressed interest in a company's offerings by handing over their personal information. In their recently published research study, Creating Great Subscriber Experiences: Are Marketers Relationship Worthy?, Return Path analyzed their email subscription experiences, and concluded that most email marketers don't appreciate the timeliness and value of welcoming new members to their site...
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- Using Audience Targeting to Own the Latent Pipeline
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![](http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=http://b2bmarketingconfidential.blogspot.com/2009/12/using-audience-targeting-to-own-latent.html&title=Using-Audience-Targeting-to-Own-the-Latent-Pipeline&bodytext=B2B marketers are intimately familiar with the concept of a<strong> funnel</strong> or a <strong>pipeline</strong>. Whichever term you use--you might use both--the ideas are the same from company to company. A lead is entered into a system at some point in time. It might be someone inquiring on the web site, or it might even be a name from a list. From this point onwards, that lead can either move forward, do nothing, or drop out of the system. The resulting graphic looks like a funnel.<br/><br/>Having covered that ground, let me state up front that this post is not about pipeline management, acceleration, nurturing, systems, or email marketing. This post is about a fundamental problem with the funnel concept as operationalized at most B2B marketing organizations today, and what I think is a pretty seminal idea on how to fix the problem.<br/><br/>The problem with funnels is that they're missing a lot of the folks that are actually going through the purchase process. This is because we as marketers are dependent on our own internal systems to track these folks. Our own websites; our own emails; our own sales reps; you name it. However, we <em>know</em> there are many individuals with needs that are going down an awareness / consideration / trial / purchase process that we are <em>completely oblivious to.</em> I call this the <em>latent pipeline.</em> For analytics geeks, this should be a comfortable term. It is the implicit pipeline that we don't have information about but that we <em>know</em> exists.<br/><br/>I'd argue that the latent pipeline can be broken into two parts. The first part is the upstream part of the funnel that could be defined as "pre-company web site". This is when <em>latent prospects</em> are starting to think about their needs and what they're going to go do. Today, this is going to be largely addressed via search, assuming that we can intersect people when they type in search terms. There is no question that this is a powerful tool for intercepting prospects, but I'd argue that there's an even more powerful way to target them. More on that later.<br/><br/>The second part are the folks that are going through our stages, as defined via our systems, that we don't know about. So, when we have 10 leads that are "qualified", there are another 50 leads out there that are being qualified by other companies. We don't know about them, so chances are, we'll never get to pitch to them. Ouch! That's pretty harsh.<br/><br/>So, we've defined a pipeline that has an explicit and a latent component, that will look something like this:<br/><a href='http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_30veOO2AATQ/SykLkQ_j19I/AAAAAAAAAGg/nRUzyUxD2u0/s1600-h/B2BFunnel.png'><img src='http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_30veOO2AATQ/SykLkQ_j19I/AAAAAAAAAGg/nRUzyUxD2u0/s400/B2BFunnel.png' id='BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5415872744554485714' border='0' alt='' style='width: 416px; height: 357px; cursor: hand;'/></a><br/>This fundamentally changes the concepts of B2B marketing, when you think about it.<br/><ul><li>Acquisition marketing really becomes about understanding the top of the <em>latent funnel</em></li><li>The scope of CRM can be expanded to include not just leads / opportunities in <em>our</em> CRM system, but to leads / opportunities in <em>other company's</em> CRM systems</li></ul><p>I'm not suggesting that we all go do industrial espionage and steal other firm's CRM data. I'm suggesting that through online audience ownership, we can extend the CRM layer from the explicit to the latent, via display advertising. I already posted on this once, so <a href='http://b2bmarketingconfidential.blogspot.com/2009/10/verticalizing-intenet-marketing.html'>read that one.</a> Basically, I'm arguing that we need to take a few steps to own the latent pipeline:</p><ol><li>Understand our audiences</li><li>Map their typical B2B Internet behavior and map their pre-buying cues</li><li>Build analytical models to tag them</li><li>Target them via display advertising before they ever come to our site</li><li>Keep doing search marketing</li></ol><p>In other words, create a rich, targeted online tapestry that is always on, and no longer shackled to company web sites and email. B2C marketers are ahead on this, but B2B has so much more potential.</p><p>I know this needs more detail. Next post will be on how one might do the steps above and make it work.</p><div class='blogger-post-footer'><img src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/36395142-1612949307234063484?l=b2bmarketingconfidential.blogspot.com' height='1' alt='' width='1'/></div>
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, Return Path found that 60% of the companies they tested failed to send a welcome message, and 30% failed to send new members any messages within the first 30 days of the subscriber's registration. </p>
<p>By ignoring these new members, companies lose the opportunity to engage prospects early in their buying process, and immediately after expressing interest in the company. The fact that someone has taken the time to register for an email program is indicative of a high level of interest, and suggests that they would be receptive to starting a dialog or relationship. Ideally, you want to strike while the iron is hot and send a confirmation/welcome message to new subscribers within the first 24-hours of receiving their data. </p>
<p>Sending welcome messages so quickly benefits both parties too. New members will know that their information was properly submitted and received, will have their subscription data (or a link to their subscription data) for future reference, and will know that their interest in your company has not gone unnoticed. At the same time, email marketers benefit by confirming that their new users have entered deliverable email addresses, by increasing their brand awareness with a branded email message, and by giving the new member an opportunity to immediately engage with additional marketing materials. </p>
<p>According to the Return Path study however, it took an average of 9 days for companies to send their first messages after obtaining new subscribers. Once a new member has hit the "submit" button on your site, you have basically been invited to send them a message and welcome them to your site. When you overlook this crucial step, you lose out on quickly segmenting, qualifying and engaging some of the most interested prospects on your email lists. You also fall behind in keeping your brand first-and-foremost in front of these already-engaged eyes, and could lose the lead altogether if they're more effectively courted by your competition.</p>
<p>So the time is now to put in place an automated email message welcoming all new members to your site. <br/>
To learn more about crafting effective email marketing welcome messages, check out this compilation of articles and best practice guides from <a href='http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/copywriting/list-messages/'>Email Marketing Reports</a>. While implementing a process to welcome new members may seem simple, remember that the first message most of your users receive may be the only one they ever read. </p><img src='http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~r/AcceleratingItSales/~4/zyfH1Fqgwrc' height='1' width='1'/>)
