The SENSIBLE MARKETING Blog for Startups & Small Business

There are many ways to measure the success of an e-mail marketing campaign. But getting your customers to open your message is perhaps the most important. E-mail marketers can track e-mails that get opened and the percentage that do is called the “open rate.”

There’s a lot of emphasis placed on the “open rate” in e-mail marketing. But equally important is the “click-through rate,” which is when a reader clicks on a link in the message to take action.

In this step we’ll explore key strategies and tactics for increasing your open and click-through rates, and how to test and tweak messages to improve your results.

Many factors can influence whether a message gets opened or not-and some of the reasons are well beyond your control. Here are four things you can do:

• Create your own marketing list. The best prospects for new products or special offers are your satisfied customers and people who already know you. With an in-house database, you can identify repeat or premium customers and target them with customized offers. Contact Manager, which is included with Microsoft Office Live Small Business, provides an easy way to organize all of your business and personal contacts in one online location.

• Test, test, test. Before investing in an e-mail campaign that may end up alienating prospects, test your message. First send it to yourself as a test to ensure everything works. Then send it to a test sample of customers. For example, if your list is 5,000 names, send to every 500th name; if 100, send to every 10th name. Not only will this get you feedback on content and offers, but you’ll also learn how well your messages fare on different operating systems, different e-mail clients and different spam filters.

• Customize your ‘From’ field. Take advantage of customizable “From” fields in most e-mail delivery systems. For example, if your company is called Contoso, then use a branded e-mail alias like as the “From” address. Recipients and their e-mail filters will begin to recognize the name, increasing the odds it will be maintained in their inbox-instead of sent off to the junk folder-and get opened. Be consistent and keep the “From” field the same over time.

• Segment your e-mail. If you have more than one e-mail address for your business, (like an alias in the above example) use them to identify which e-mail lists work better. For example, you can use one alias for e-mail messages that go to your customer database and another for messages to third-party rented lists. You can check whether your messages are effective by monitoring whether they are driving visits to your Web site

How to Create Irresistible Subject Lines!

As a critical factor for achieving good open rates, “subject lines” is a subject that deserves a dedicated discussion. Writing effective subject lines is both a creative exercise and a study in human behavior.

When writing subject lines, the greatest danger may be falling prey to your own ideas. If you catch yourself saying things like, “I think that’s funny, I’d open it” or “Let’s just go with Newsletter, May 2008” then you are headed down the wrong path.

Tips for Writing Strong Subject Lines

To keep you on the right path, consider these tips when creating your subject lines:

Shorter is sweeter. Especially in terms of open rates. Subject lines of 35 characters or less had a 24% open rate, while longer ones averaged only a 17% open rate. When you’re succinct, recipients respond better.

Make it personal. Try to connect with the recipient personally. General statements have less success. If you know the first name of your recipients, try to use it in the subject line. For example, “Rich, here’s your monthly StartupNation eNewsletter.”

Make it enticing. The subject line is really an invitation to open the message because what’s inside can’t be missed! Lose that tone and you’ll get lower open rates.

Add urgency. People don’t want to feel like they’re missing out on something. Therefore subject lines that are time sensitive perform better. You can add urgency by using words like, “last day,” “now,” and “ends Friday.” At the same time, don’t sound too “salesy.”

Get creative. Find innovative ways to cut through the clutter and stand out-without ending up in the spam filter. With so many companies turning to e-mail, this can be a challenge. Sign up for a bunch of online newsletters and see what kind of subject lines others are using.

Test for success. We mentioned testing message content above; here we’re specifically referring to subject line testing. Send messages to an A group and B group using different subject lines for each. Compare open rates.

Never use the word “FREE.” This is a sure-fire way to get caught in the jaws of spam filters. Note the word “free” is used with great success in other marketing materials, but not in subject lines.

Be aware of CAN-SPAM compliance. Learn what the restrictions are and follow them, otherwise you won’t make it into the inbox at all. Check the FCC Web site for requirements for commercial e-mailers.

Filed under: B2B Marketing Blogs, B2B Marketing Ideas, Email Marketing, business-to-business Lead Generation, digital marketing, double opt-in, email marketing best practices, email marketing mistakes, email marketing services, email marketing software, internet marketing guides, michael e. williams, online marketing, web marketing | No Comments

Writing effective e-mail copy isn’t as easy as you think. Like poor message design, poor copywriting that has grammatical errors, misspellings, or the wrong tone can kill your e-mail marketing campaign before it has a chance to get off the ground.

Five key tips to writing effective e-mail copy

• Hook ‘em. Your first couple sentences should contain your main message and “hook” the recipient’s attention so they want to keep on reading. If you sell women’s accessories, for instance, you might lead with: “Is your purse so cluttered that it takes 10 minutes to find the pen at the bottom? Then you’ll want to check out our new lineup of spacious handbags.”

• Back it up. Once the hook is set, spend the rest of the e-mail backing up that message. Don’t wander off in new directions and introduce new messages. The middle and end should reiterate and support the main message and tell people why they should act (click).

• Keep it short. People are easily overwhelmed by too many words-and they already sift through so many e-mails. The key is to give the reader all the details using as few words as possible. Be succinct, choose your words carefully, and don’t just fill up empty space.

• Use normal language. Sometimes when people write they come across as formal and impersonal. Before you write the e-mail, imagine you’re having a conversation with someone about the topic. Then try and write it like you’d say it. Stay away from buzzwords or clichés.

• Show who you are. In an e-mail message, it’s entirely appropriate to let your personality come out. Customers are coming to you because you have something to offer. By letting your personality come through, you are able to create a more human, less corporate message- something readers don’t get from the “big guys.”

Quick Do’s and Don’ts

Keep this list handy when working on your e-mail campaigns.

Do:

• Personalize. If you have the recipient’s first name, you can use software to add it to the top of the newsletter, i.e., “Hi Chris! Here’s your monthly newsletter.

• Create a clear CTA. As discussed above, make it benefit-driven, and easy to find.

• Experiment with link placement. Monthly e-mails are a great way to test the effectiveness of links and content.

• Make it easy to make subscription changes. Provide links in your newsletter for recipients to change their e-mail address and even unsubscribe.

• Use sweepstakes to increase subscribers. You can run an online sweepstakes and require those entering provide an e-mail address and get automatically enrolled in your newsletter program.

• Make HTML and text e-mail content the same. You don’t want to tell one group of subscribers one thing, and another something else.

• Use blogs and social networks (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn) to attract subscribers. Include your newsletter sign up on social networking pages you own.

• Provide a newsletter sign up box on your Web site. Place sign up links in several prominent places on your site.

Don’t:

• Use $$ and !! signs in your subject line. These are red flags for spam filters.

• Use ‘FREE’ in subject lines or copy. Spam, gotcha.

• Send unsolicited messages. Always give people an opportunity to opt-in. Don’t be a spammer.

Filed under: B2B Marketing Blogs, B2B Marketing Ideas, Email Marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, digital marketing, email marketing best practices, email marketing mistakes, email marketing services, email marketing software, michael e. williams, web marketing | No Comments

Yesterday morning I was talking to a marketing leader about his strategy and he brought up some concerns he had about the economy and its potential impact on him and others. Can you blame him?

In years past, marketing has been favorite target for cuts by CFOs and CEOs as they look to conserve cash and reinforce their balance sheets for tough times. Trust me, I’ve experienced this first hand a couple of years back while working for a publicly traded telecom company who’s every move was motivated by their stock price.  One day the stock was up and I had 5 new colleages, the next day the stock was down..and we were all out on the curb! (Note: that company, Verso Technologies (Nasdaq: VRSO), finally went bankrupt. I could only wonder if their stock-price driven marketing contributed?)

Nowadays, I’m less concerned about budget cuts and more interested in opportunities for B2B marketers who choose to bring focus to their marketing efforts. We have to remember that regardless of the economy, sales people are still expected to perform. I seldom find sales quotas are lowered to fit the news headlines or a stock price!

If you want to flourish regardless of the economic conditions, you need to look for ways to help your sales team execute and improve performance.

I’m convinced that one of the best ways to do that is to focus on lead generation. I recently read a Kate Maddox’s article in BtoB Magazine, “IDC: Tougher times for tech marketing,” which supports that other B2B marketers are doing just that.

Much like a savvy investor who buys when the market is down, smart marketers can capitalize on this opportunity (and beat competitors), by bringing focus and attention to their lead generation efforts.

Maddox’s article highlights IDC’s recent tech marketing barometer research. IDC showed that fewer tech marketers are increasing their budgets this year compared to last year. But I think the bigger story is how those dollars are being allocated. Maddox writes, “According to the [IDC] report. Lead generation is the top marketing priority for tech marketers this year…”

According to studies, the single biggest issue for contemporary business-to-business marketers is effective lead generation.  Conversely, it has been pointed out that 80% of marketing expenditures on lead generation and collateral are wasted because the leads are ignored by sales people. This was the case with Verso Technologie, not just because of the bad management, but because of a very unfriendly CRM system that was a royal pain in the a$$–but that’s another whole topic to begin with!

In short, marketers should direct their budgets away from traditional awareness building campaigns that quickly eat up budget and instead expand and optimize lead generation programs that bring measurable results. Finding better tools and processes for managing the leads or inquires that they already have is also a good investment in a turbulent economy.

You will optimize lead generation immediately if you can honestly answer “yes” to all of the following questions:

• Do sales and marketing agree on what the word “lead” means?
• Are you tracking the conversion rates of leads to sales opportunities?
• Can you/Do you close-the-loop on all leads that are being passed to sales?
• Does your sales team pass back early stage leads for lead nurturing?

I am working on an upcoming post dealing with how you can build a lead-nurturing/lead gen ecosystem within your small business…one that’s easy to use, easy to extract data and one that incorporates e-marketing—all using low cost and open-source, off-the-shelf solutions.  Stay tuned for that!

Filed under: Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring, Marketing budgeting, lead acquisition, marketing, marketing budget, small business management tips | No Comments