just-in-time marketing
DESCRIPTION
For the full story, go to www.spidertrainers.com and download the eBook. Just-in-Time Marketing As marketers, we know the importance of timeliness — being in front of the client with the right offer at the right time — and, fortunately, email automation makes this possible. With triggered campaigns, we are transcending from when-we-can marketing to just-in-time marketing and it’s making a difference.TRANSCRIPT
Just-in-Time Marketing
Using triggered email to put you in the right place at the right time.
“I recently read an article about how venture capitalists like to think that they are
marketing geniuses. As I see it, it’s not limited to VCs.
The article pointed out that if you sit in on a C-suite meeting, the CEO reports on the
overall health of the company, the CFO gives an update on revenue and expenses,
the CIO reports on the infrastructure. Everyone nods their head in feigned
understanding or sighs with concern.
The CMO stands to give his report and suddenly everyone vies for an opportunity to
pontificate on their opinion.
This reminds me of more than a small number of senior-staff meetings in which I
have participated, I’ve watched in complete disbelief as the CEO took a slightly
hostile stance concerning the subject lines of emails being sent to promote a new
product.
[Seriously?! The CEO doesn’t have more pressing concerns than the subject line of
an email?]
The article went on to point out that the reason [investors] have such strong opinions
about marketing is that this is an area where they can fake it far more convincingly...
[Here, here.]
— Cyndie Shaffstall, founder, Spider Trainers
Introduction79% of marketing leads
never convert into sales.
Lack of lead nurturing is
the common cause of
this poor performance.
— MarketingSherpa
As marketers, we know the importance of timeliness — being
in front of the client with the right offer at the right time — and,
fortunately, email automation makes this possible. With
triggered campaigns, we are transcending from when-we-can
marketing to just-in-time marketing and it’s making a
difference. Triggered email marketing enables us to reach our
leads and prospects at a time that is most relevant to them
(and not when most convenient for us). These campaigns,
targeted with applications of explicit and implicit data, are
making great strides in:
response rates
cross-sell and up-sell activity
relevance of messages and offers
timeliness of delivery
Nurturing your customersNurturing Campaign.
A series of emails
designed to develop
leads as sales ready.
The process is used to
build relationships and
develop trust with
prospects in a way that
is both consistent and
relevant.
Regular distribution of emails will help with getting your
name out there and building and maintaining your brand.
Emails enable you to be in front of your client when the time
comes for them to make a purchasing decision.
Types of triggers: Transactional, Recurring, Threshold
Key Points: all three types of triggered emails should
focus on information that is relevant to your audience.
Analytics make the difference: Each event should be
designed to disclose as much information as you can
glean
Chapter 1
Choosing a softwarePassive lead,
subscriber, or contact.
A term to identify
members of a contact
list who have neither
unsubscribed nor
clicked on any links.
Active lead,
subscriber, or contact.
A term to Identify
members of a contact
list who have clicked on
a message link that
indicates a level of
interest or engagement.
Automation is important to triggered campaigns. While
nearly any email application can send a series of
emails, triggered campaigns can become
unmanageable if you are required to launch every
event, gather statistics, and segment responses into
buckets manually.
There are a number of applications from which to
choose, including Act-On Software, HubSpot, Eloqua,
Marketo, Pardot, InfusionSoft, Silverpop, ExactTarget,
Genius.com, Vertical Response, and more.
Chapter 2
Planning your event
It’s quite easy for a triggered campaign to become unwieldy and
provide you with more information than is useful to your company.
To rein in the collection of too much data, we recommend that
you map your program using a schematic of some sort.
Define your goal: To keep your campaign on target and establish its
success, you must define a goal and track and measure quantifiable
results.
Buckets: The action of your leads and customers in a triggered
campaign should be used to categorize the recipient’s position in the
purchasing or engagement process.
Chapter 3
Campaign componentsCompanies that try to
contact potential
customers within an
hour of receiving
queries are nearly 7
times as likely to have
meaningful
conversations with key
decision makers as
firms that try to contact
prospects even an hour
later. Yet only 37% of
companies respond to
queries within an hour.
Not every triggered campaign will have all of the possible
components, but understanding the role of each is
important.
Launch email: the initial email used to get your campaign
rolling.
Response email: at least one other email triggered
automatically based upon some action or interaction.
Nurturing emails: a series of emails sent after the initial
launch.
Sign-up form: displayed on a landing page, either at your
website or hosted in your automated email application
Chapter 4
Campaign components [continued]
Form-confirmation landing page: upon successful
submission of a form, display a confirmation in the
same browser window.
Form-confirmation email: a message to confirm to
the visitor that you have received their form
submission.
Targeted landing pages: web pages that provide you
with additional real estate to sell the recipient on the
offer or just provide additional details.
Chapter 4
Campaign components [continued]
One of the most-
challenging aspects of
marketing is making
certain that you are
sending relevant
messages to your
audience. Segmentation
improves your ability to
identify your audience
and create targeted
messages.
Survey or poll: the inclusion of a poll or survey to your
campaign will reduce the number of unsubscribes and
confirm that the people in your list want to be there and
want to hear what you have to say.
Database: the best list is the list you build through
standard business practices such as attending events,
outbound calling, direct mail, partners, and offering
valuable content for download.
Segmentation: will enable you to send targeted
messages to each division.
Chapter 4
Designing content
An inbox is a very noisy place and the importance of
design cannot be understated. Most email applications
offer templates, but templates rarely represent the
uniqueness of your company, brand, product, or services.
For a small investment companies such as Spider
Trainers can create a custom template to visually promote
your brand, matches your website, or is completely new
and unique.
Chapter 5
Designing content [continued]
In a phenomenon known as tunnel vision, users may focus on only that content
that specifically interests them. Unfortunately, this often means that they will
ignore all other content — even if it is important or critical. Good design,
planning, and grouping helps to overcome this narrow view.
Chapter 5
Designing content [continued]
Here the key elements that you should include in most messages, whether you
are B2B or B2C:
CTA: Arguably, the most important content within your triggered campaign
are the calls to action. These little nuggets are the engagement point of your
event — the reason to click.
Testing CTAs: Calls to action are great fodder for A/B and multivariate
testing — as long as you follow the rule of one message, one call to action.
Chapter 5
Designing content [continued]
Personalization: most studies on the effectiveness of
personalization in email indicate that click-thru rates
are higher when the message is personalized, but not
when you personalize the subject line.
Mobile (responsive) designs: the desktop computer
still dominates most email interaction and accounts for
64% of opens overall, the mobile (tablets and
smartphones) makes up the 36% balance. If your
mobile users account for even as few as 10% of your
list, it’s probably time to consider sending mobile-
friendly formats (responsive).
Chapter 5
Writing subject linesSubject lines with 49 or
fewer characters had
open rates 12.5%
higher than for those
with 50 or more. Click-
thru rates for subject
lines with 49 or fewer
characters were 75%
higher than for those
with 50 or more.
— Return Path
Subject lines with five or
six words outperformed
subject lines of any
other length.
It’s well established and common sense that subject-line
content needs to grab your audience’s attention and get
them to continue reading — anything short of that and
you’ve wasted your time — but word length plays an equal
role and has its own list of dos and don’ts.
There was a time when spam filters were set up to filter
out certain words such as FREE, but today emails are
more likely to be filtered out based upon a company’s
reputation. If your reputation is strong, you can try using
some words that may have been considered spam in the
past.
Chapter 6
Writing subject lines [continued]
Convey a sense of
urgency.
Value proposition.
Timeliness.
Calls to action.
Give it a number.
Look for inspiration.
Ask a question.
Be clever, use a pun,
or try risqué.
Use segmentation for a
personal touch.
Keep it short.
Write it last.
Test, track, and tweak.
To create an interesting subject line,
consider these points:
Chapter 6
Testing, tracking, and tweakingA/B test.
Two versions (A and B)
are compared, which
are identical except for
one variation that might
impact a user’s
behavior.
Multivariate testing
(MVT).
Two or more design or
content changes at the
same time.
Testing the effectiveness of your campaign components is
essential to gaining insight into recipients’ behavior so that
conversion rates can be increased. At Spider Trainers, we
divide testing into two categories: pre-open and post-
open. We’ve found that it’s essential that you understand
what about your email you can affect when you implement
testing processes.
Chapter 7
Testing [continued]
Feature testing: In addition to A/B and multivariate testing, your campaign
can be used to test the importance of benefits, features, and site content.
If you are testing a call to action and sending two versions of the email (with the
same subject line) but have an open rate of only 1%, you will not likely have
sufficient data to effectively measure the call-to-action results. A call to action is
a post-open testing point. For this A/B test to be effective, you will need to first
focus on pre-open testing points in order to increase your open rate.
Chapter 7
Lead scoring
Within the scope of triggered marketing, lead scoring is
the process of ranking prospects against a scale that
represents their sales readiness. The resulting score is
used to determine which leads will be further engaged, in
order of priority. For best results, both explicit and implicit
demographics and data should be used to calculate the
score.
Work with sales to agree upon and assign a point
value for each sales milestone as it is reached.
The best type of lead scoring comes from the sum of
both explicit and implicit data.
Chapter 8
Following upThe best lead-to-sales
processes are
established jointly
between marketing and
sales. Be sure to
establish sales follow-up
guidelines.
— MarketingProfs
Remember to follow up on all leads in any format
acceptable to your organization:
Auto responders: Automatically send messages to
the person who has interacted with the campaign.
Traditional follow up: Few types of contact are as
welcomed as handwritten notes.
Personal follow up: You should be working toward
building trust with your recipients so be careful when
you choose the phone as your vehicle for connecting
— it can be disconcerting.
Be polite, be relevant, and say thank you.
Chapter 9
Surveying recipientsLead nurturing emails
have a slightly higher
unsubscribe rate (1%)
than individual email
sends (0.5%), indicating
their effectiveness in
removing unqualified
leads from the sales
funnel.
— HubSpot
Building a solid and trustworthy relationship with your
email recipients involves knowing what kind of information
they wish to receive from you and how often they would
like to receive it. Allowing them to make their own
decisions by providing them with a preference survey will
help you achieve that goal.
Preference surveys are easy and depending upon the
questions can be serviced automatically using a triggered
marketing campaign for each type of response.
Chapter 10
Retiring namesThe average email list
depreciates by 25%
annually.
— MarketingSherpa
The value of keeping your mailing lists updated and
current must not be underestimated. Neglecting your
databases can have a negative impact on your
campaigns and, therefore, take a toll on your
outcomes.
By removing stagnant leads, duplicates, those who
have unsubscribed and opted out, and just plain old
contacts, you are building upon your email campaign’s
effectiveness, which will automatically boost your
success rate.
Chapter 11
Social sharingSocial sharing.
Buttons or links within
your email that enable
the recipient to share
the message contents
within their social
network. Forward to a
friend falls in to this
category as well.
Social following.
Buttons or links within
your email that enable
the recipient to connect
with you within your
social networks.
There are several approaches to integrating social
networks in your email campaigns, some are embedded in
the email itself while others are best left to the landing
page (they require JavaScript which is often marked as
spam content when embedded in an email).
Your email should have a single call to action. When
you add social sharing, social following, and other links
to the email, you distract from the call to action.
For some emails, you’re hoping for sharing and
forwarding and in this case, links are appropriate and
encouraged.
Chapter 12
Learning from your campaign
• Email analytics: Post-send analytics are the cream of
your nurturing email crop. In order to understand and
improve upon results, you need an application that will
provide you with ample visibility into the metrics —
from send to purchase, and all the steps in between.
• Site analytics: Our first rule of thumb for any
campaign launch is that the client must have the site
depth to support the campaign. That means that there
must be several pages at your website that will further
the message of the campaign. Make sure you have
enough information at your site to convince them of the
validity and your trustworthiness.
Chapter 13
Budgeting
We’ve found that — like all things marketing — the best
approach is test, track, and tweak. Your budget will
depend upon several considerations.
Spending your budget: Triggered campaigns can be
designed to last for two weeks, two years, ten years, or
anything in between. The amount of time will depend
upon many factors, but be careful about trying to get
too much bang for your buck.
Chapter 14
Marketing is like sex.
Everyone thinks they’re
good at it. Everybody
thinks they’re a
marketing expert. Your
boss, the CEO, the IT
guy — I bet half the
people in your company
think they know more
about what customers
want than the
customers do.
Everybody’s a focus
group of one.
— CBSNEWS.com
Budgeting [continued]
In-house development: If you’re considering in-house
production, here are points to ponder: Cost: your internal team represents substantial overhead and
considering their existing workload, may not be able to take on a
project of this size.
Exposure to advancements: Your internal team is rarely as
motivated as an external agency to stay on top of technological
advancements and industry trends.
Objective third party: Internal teams tend to give far too much time
and credence to what their competitors .
Extensive specialties: Spider Trainers, as an example, is a network
of more than 80 industry contractors marshaled by a team of six
company principals.
Chapter 14
Conclusion
Spider Trainers has sent millions of emails on behalf of
our clients and the only steadfast rule that we’ve found
that applies to every client is that with testing, tracking,
and tweaking your campaigns will improve and you will
gather the knowledge required to achieve true ROI; and
for many companies that’s the true definition of
conversion.
Chapter 15
As a business
professional, I get a kick
out of internet people
talking about my ROI.
Most of them have no
idea whatsoever what an
ROI is, much less how to
improve mine.
What has been so
impressive about Spider
Trainers is that they really
take time to understand
what I think about my
current spending, my
current measurables, and
current ROI; and then we
agree on the
improvement metrics
that are needed.
Conclusion [continued]
Triggered campaigns have far more moving parts than traditional email sends.
This is because of all these moving parts — now automated — that the results
are so impressive. Even though the automation makes the process user-
friendly, it can seem overwhelming. We believe that Act-On Software is the best
option because it is easy to use and enables our clients the opportunity and
ability to participate in their programs.
Chapter 15
Conclusion [continued]
Spider Trainers provides multi-touch online and offline marketing and web
development to make your brand more visible, elevate search-engine rankings,
attract appropriate visitors, and enable educated purchasing decisions.
Spider Trainers has decades of experience in print, web development, go-to-
market initiatives, and sustainable, behavior-based online and offline, traditional
and emerging marketing strategies.
Chapter 15
Conclusion [continued]
Most companies approach marketing and web-development in the same manner — build
it and they will come. As hundreds of site owners the world over have come to know, this
is rarely the case. If you want to sell online, you must market online. You must announce,
contribute, promote, link, analyze, test, modify, analyze again, and so much more. If you
build a social recognition throughout the web, then they will come. It can be build it and
they will come, but somewhere along the way someone told someone about a baseball
diamond in the middle of an Iowa cornfield.
Rely on Spider Trainers to tell someone about yours.
Chapter 15
Contact Spider Trainers
Phone: 651 702 3793
Email: [email protected]
Website: http://www.spidertrainers.com
Address: PO Box 280487
Lakewood, CO 80228 United States