Six steps to marketing success

Transcription

1 Six steps to marketing success 01

2 Executive Summary is proven to be one of the most cost effective ways to reach out to customers and prospects. A well thought out and executed campaign can not only help businesses target customers specific needs but can nurture the relationship between them and help recruit evangelists for your brand, which ultimately, will boost profits. The goal of this White Paper is to provide you with the knowledge to spearhead an marketing campaign in six practical steps that will bring you targeted results. Follow the tips and advice to get your campaign up and running and see a healthy return on investment. Table of Contents Step 1: Creating the subject line Step 2: Write some killer content Step 3: Testing, testing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Step 4: Step 5: Step 6: Building an list Designing an template Metrics and measurements 02

3 Introduction has long been an integral part of the marketer s mix. In fact, marketing guru, Seth Godin said that is the most personal advertising medium in history. Recent research suggests that it has overtaken other methods as one of the most effective ways of increasing return on investment as well as helping to build a better-informed and more fruitful relationship with the customer. According to the MarketingSherpa Marketing Benchmark Report a healthy 67% of companies surveyed planned an increase in their marketing budget, despite overall marketing budgets decreasing. Yet, the figures also reveal that while many marketing managers are happy to use campaigns, they are simply not making the best use of this medium. In short, marketing demands communications that go beyond merely advertising. Here are six practical steps to implement in order to maximise the potential that marketing can offer. Step 1: Creating the subject line The subject line has the potential to either gain or lose the interest of a reader at first glance. As a rule of thumb, include your company s name along with the key point of the in order to increase those all important open rates. Here are six questions to consider when it comes to writing the perfect subject line: Is it deliverable? Will it firstly get past those spam filters, and secondly, get to the recipient without being deleted? To stand a good chance of successfully navigating both these obstacles, avoid words like free and act now as well as omitting excessive punctuation (!) and do not use CAPITALS at all costs! Is it actionable? In other words, does the recipient know what they are meant to do with the ? The correct use of verbs is paramount. Meet/see/view/buy/ etc., will all help the reader understand the call to action. Is it relevant? It s prudent to work from a well-segmented list as this will give you more of an insight to your customers. Your CRM system can add further detail, including the type of contract the reader might be on, recent purchases, activity etc., all of this knowledge will help to create a more personal subject line. Remember, the key here is to drive up the value of the for the reader. For example a publisher might have a segmented list of customers who purchase natural history books. Sending them an with the subject line: Buy the latest Catherine Cookson novel is not going to get a great open rate. Is it short enough? Always use the K.I.S.S rule (keep it simple, Stupid!) and bear in mind the reading pane (particularly with mobiles). 50 characters maximum should do it. Is it clear enough? Don t try to be too clever and funny. By all means use keywords to flag up something to readers, but make sure this is at the beginning of the subject line. Is it consistent? Deliver on your promises. Recipients don t want to go to the trouble of accessing the deal/sale/ discount only to find there are further hurdles to jump and that tantalising offer has some annoying T&Cs attached to it. Research shows that this can lead to lower click-throughs and higher unsubscribe rates. In a nutshell, successful subject lines are brief, branded and truthful to the intention of the , if you stick to this formula, you can t go far wrong. 03

4 Step 2: Write some killer content The saying that content is king couldn t be truer for an marketing campaign but how can you personalise the content of your message? Firstly you need to decide on what it is you want to draw attention to: a discount, new product line, a sale, re-engaging lapsed customers, etc. These are all great starting points. You also need to decide whether you are going to produce rich text and images or whether you are going to create a purely text-based . Keeping images relevant is vital and having consistent visuals is also good practice (your template should take you to similar looking landing page to create a seamless experience for the reader). A great way of coming up with engaging content is to look at examples of s that you have received and liked. Why did you engage with it? Did you end up clicking though and even purchasing something? This is an opportunity to be creative, even innovative so use other campaigns as inspiration for yours. Finally, ensuring that you listen to customer feedback so you know what it is they want is essential. Using their comments/faqs/feedback in addition to topics being discussed through your various social media channels will also help inform and develop content, shape the editorial voice you will use, as well as help feed into the post-campaign metrics. Step 3: Testing, testing...1, 2, 3, 4, 5... Testing and A/B testing might seem arduous but it is a necessary element and there is room for innovation here too. Once you have checked that links work, the content sits nicely in the reading pane and all the images download properly, you need to see if your can navigate its way thorough the various clients (Outlook 2007, Outlook 2003, Outlook 2000, Yahoo! Gmail and Windows Live) and spam filters too. However there is an opportunity to really yield results by testing other less obvious components. While MarketingSherpa s report highlights that subject line still remains the most popular item to test, followed by layout and images, one area that is worth spending time testing is the offer itself. For example, do certain topics appear more popular with your readers? Do they mainly prefer webinars or always head straight for the White Papers? Do they always click on the free trials? Play around with the format and see what gets the best hit rate. Similarly testing elements such as size and length is also worth the effort. Are the quick-click tips yielding the best results, or do the ebooks get the click-throughs? Even thinking about the semantics you use to describe the offer is important: download, ebook or guide? Testing such specifics can really make a difference to the results. The final testing hurdle is ensuring that you are optimising the landing page. If not, all that hard work creating the perfect subject line, content and subsequent testing will be for nought. Try testing how you describe the offer, consider adding testimonials from happy users, think about what images you should use to support the item as well as where to place your form to gather user information and which elements you want to include (company size, salary bracket etc). Even experiment with the look of the download button: Click to download, download now, Read me! etc. Testing offers a golden opportunity to gain insight into your customers wants and likes, and most importantly turn-offs and dislikes! 04

5 Step 4: Building an list Having a healthy list is imperative. Keep yours ship shape by following a few key pointers: Make sure your recipients are always expecting your messages and that you send them at a predictable rate. Always make unsubscribing easy, keep your unsubscribe list reliable and nurture your list so it grows organically. Consider offering incentives such as discounts for signing up and always make the opt-in form in an easy-toaccess place, on each page of your website, as well as on all your social media channels. This includes adding forward to a friend options and making sure any literature produced for the company includes a short specific link for newsletter opt-ins. You should always have an unsubscribe list and ensure it is married up with your list your CRM software should do this as standard. And before adding an to the list, ask yourself whether the recipient has had contact from you within 12 months - if not, then miss them out. Step 5: Designing an template A good template will mean all you need to do is drop in some copy, images and links and away you go. But there are certainly a few pointers worth noting. Keep it clean and simple too much going on might mean the won t read properly but worse still, it can trigger spam filters. Check your coding software and make sure it displays correctly during testing. By law you must include an unsubscribe link as well as your company s postal address and full name add to the template so it s automatically included every time. Use JPEG and other image formats, but avoid PNGs which never render correctly in . Avoid video as the majority of clients don t render it effectively. A screen-grab and link to your website is much more user-friendly. Be link-friendly use shortened links (ow.ly and bit.ly are ideal and are free). All your text, images and links should clearly show why your contacts should read your and what they should do as a result, so make sure all the links are easy to access. Finally, add a plain-text option for those readers who can t render their s in HTML. 05

6 Step 6: Metrics and measurements When it comes to marketing, it s all about open rates and more importantly, conversion rates. The goal of your campaign should be to entice customers and prospects to go from their inbox to your website. Carefully studying the metrics of your campaign will help you see what you are doing right, and wrong. Your client will be tracking exactly what takes place in the campaign, knowing who opens, clicks, and forwards your . With this information, you can know who to follow up with a sales call, which customers need more gentle nurturing, and who you might need to try a lot harder with! The metrics worth your attention include: Spam percentage, open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, complaints and unsubscribe rates. Armed with this information, your sales team can determine the most qualified leads with which to build a call list. The three things you need to do with your metrics include: Segment your lists make sure you use even the smallest nugget of information to qualify your customers. You ll quickly learn your readers purchasing and viewing behaviours as you refine your testing components. Seldom does a marketing campaign hit all the right notes at once. Increase brand trust maintain relevance with your customers by producing innovative and interesting content so they are pleased to see an from you in their inbox. Merge your social media with marketing the explosion in social networking means that there will be an everincreasing importance put on friends activities and recommendations. Make sure your current service provider is keeping up with this trend, or you might get left behind. And let s not forget the other tools at your disposal. If you choose an marketing solution that tightly integrates with your CRM system, this too can feed into the metrics and add even more value after all, the message can only be as good as the data allows it to be. In other words, get your list right, know your readers, understand them with accurate data-input and the rest should just flow naturally. By implementing a good company-wide CRM system, which not only sales and marketing, but also accounts and management are accessing, will effectively mean you have a living, breathing organism, and richer data which is constantly changing and evolving. In essence, using this type of system to measure and inform your campaigns will make them more successful. As data drives the marketing activities, so too will it change the ways in which your campaigns run. 06

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