How To Be Successful At Marketing

Transcription

1 How to Acquire Contacts and Keep Them Enabling Technology Partnerships

2 Marketing Overview marketing is an exciting element of your marketing strategy that can be a huge contributor to website traffic, lead acquisition and sales opportunities. However, there are misconceptions concerning marketing that remain challenging for all marketers young or old, new or experienced that require attention. Address Age Most nations are mobile and most of us have lived at several different physical addresses over the years. This becomes apparent when you retrieve mail from your mailbox and find that some marketing mail has a previous owner s name. This highlights a key difference between traditional snail mail marketing and marketing that is often overlooked. Unlike your home address, your address is always a rental. The overwhelming majority of the time that rent is free as many providers will give you an address as long as you are a member (e.g. an employee of a company or a customer of a service). You may be asking yourself: I get it. I don t own my , but what does that have to do with address age? Since we have established that you rent your address, let s review address age. Once a user has relinquished their desire to use an address (e.g. the user has found another service or the employee finds another job) then the server takes that address back and turns it off or repurposes it for other things. That is drastically different than traditional snail mail arriving at your home as it remains the primary responsibility of the previous and new owner (you) to alert others of the change in residence and marketing communications can continue until the sender is notified to stop sending mail. In marketing, it is the responsibility of the sender to know when the change in residence occurs and to end communications to that address. If you send an to an expired, unrepurposed address then the owner of the address (the contact server) will reply letting you know the address is not found and to not send another . This is known as a hard bounce and limiting hard bounces remains the largest influencer of your reputation, which requires your management.

3 Reputation So what? I hard bounce addresses all the time! They go to my suppression list and I move on with my life. Why should I care? When you engage in marketing, you have a reputation, which is tied directly to deliverability of your s to inboxes. Reputation is hard to earn and easy to lose. Your bounces are reviewed as a percentage of your s sent. For example, if you bounce 1 out of 100 s you will have a 1% bounce rate. A bounce rate over 1% will affect your deliverability. Also, your bounce rate is cumulative. A high-bounce campaign will affect all subsequent campaigns (reputation). Only sustained low-bounce campaigns will improve a damaged reputation thus improving deliverability of your s. Your reputation dictates the success or failure of your s reaching your contacts inboxes. If you have high reputation then you have high deliverability to inboxes. If you have low reputation then you have lower deliverability to inboxes and a higher opportunity for your s to be redirected to quarantine zones like junk folders. Chronic low reputation can lead to servers banning all your communications before the filtering and quarantine process. Given enough time and abuse, your low reputation will require intervention by ISPs (Internet Service Providers) who maintain blacklists that will stop your marketing from being delivered to anyone, anywhere. Learn from others past mistakes and protect your reputation by only ing contacts that you have acquired through best practices offered in this document. Suggested Mind Set marketing is like dating and your contacts should be handled using common dating courtesies. For the purposes of this analogy you should: Stop courting any contacts that you have not cultivated through your own explicit opt-in strategies (no blind dates allowed). Do not contacts that you have not ed in the past six months (you have stopped dating). Create re-engagement campaigns with contacts that have not responded to your marketing attempts in the past six months (rekindle the relationship). addresses are fleeting with undefined expiration dates and your reputation depends on your attention to this fact. The world of marketing is inherently a trust relationship and as an marketing provider, we trust that you will provide targeted, deliverable, opt-in contact lists. We can determine the accuracy of your contact list(s) only after you send it

4 through our tool and we analyze the results. Your reputation, cultivated from these campaigns, dictates your monthly capacity. You can learn more about our Campaign Agreement in your Partner Console under Help > Campaign Agreement. Best Practices Acquiring addresses for your marketing campaigns are an important process for successful marketing. Please review the following best practices to develop and maintain your contact lists: Housekeeping 1. Only contacts that have opted-in (provided their address to you with the explicit purpose of receiving your marketing communications). 2. Send us a suppression list if you are importing contact lists from another marketing tool or use our suppression tool found in your marketing tool under the Contacts > Suppression List tab. 3. Look for addresses with misspellings such as "gmil.com" and update to "gmail.com". 4. Remove "role-based" addresses such as webmaster@, sales@, support@, admin@, etc. as these are commonly used in server countermeasures against spam. 5. If re-engagement campaigns are unsuccessful, think about eliminating non-engaged contacts from your mailing lists. Non-engaged contacts can lead to undeliverable addresses, spam reports or worse, which will affect the deliverability of your s to engaged contacts. DO NOT let the non-engaged influence the engaged.

5 Do Not 1. Do not guess addresses - inferring an address based on a name and domain will not help you achieve your marketing goals. It will guarantee a higher bounce rate, attract countermeasures, and increase the likelihood of lower deliverability. 2. Do not old contact that you have not ed in the past six months. 3. Do not a contact if the time between address acquisition and marketing message is greater than six months. 4. Do not harm your brand by using misleading tactics to acquire contacts. Do 1. If you have high spam complaints (greater than 1 complaint per 1,000 s sent), low click-through, low opens, and high bounce rates (greater than 1%), your deliverability will be affected. Minimize each of these to improve deliverability. 2. Only use opt-in lists if you are purchasing a list, leasing a list and/or subscribing to third party services. 3. Offer a sign-up form in a highly visible, high traffic location on your website with a welcome message explaining the intent of the form, your privacy statement, benefits of registering and a sample communication. Also, offer it at seducible moments like a sales transaction. 4. Only ask for registration information that you need. Too many questions in a registration form feel like an interrogation and will reduce the number of completed registrations. 5. PUSH your registration process. Trade shows, live events, webinars, s, sales transactions - wherever you are registration efforts should follow. 6. Use a double opt-in standard: confirmation after registration. 7. Create re-engagement campaigns and focus on those contacts that are not engaged in your marketing efforts. This helps you gauge whether you continue your marketing courtship with these contacts. 8. Provide incentives for your contacts like a registration or re-engagement prize to keep your marketing efforts attractive. 9. Offer great content in your marketing - review marketing that you subscribe to that gets you excited and emulate it.

6 10. Offer new ways to connect if doesn t appeal to your contact (drive them to your Facebook account or LinkedIn group). 11. Empower your team to acquire contacts with incentives and quotas. 12. Train your sales team to provide a quick pitch explaining the value of registering and send the contact to register at your website. The motivation exhibited by self-registering contacts will encourage more leads and more sales while weeding out the non-engaged. 13. Time the Welcome effectively deliver a Welcome as quickly as possible to a new contact. Seconds after registration is exceptional if you can automate it, however within twenty-four hours is expected. Questions? Please reach out to our support team at ibm@sharedvue.net