How do you reach customers and prospects with the right message, at the right time, and via the right channel? Silverpop spent 2011 helping marketers answer the question that’s on every savvy marketers’ mind, hosting super-cool events like our Agent R.O.I. digital marketing tour, providing industry-leading thought capital and offering up our unique mix of marketing automation, email and social media tools. In celebration of another big year at Silverpop, here’s a numerical look at how we’ve been helping marketers reach their goals and the exciting ways our customers are using Silverpop:

If you’re interested in turning your email programs into marketing automation and social media results, send me an email or contact us.

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Watching the Republican candidates for the U.S. presidential nomination has made me wonder how they’re deploying email in their campaigns.

Are they using email for fund-raising, for organizing local events or as a press-release platform? Do they use generally accepted email marketing best practices, cross the line like so many PAC-funded TV commercials or simply miss the boat?

To find out, I signed up in early January to receive email from all the declared candidates and will track their email efforts until the nomination. I’ve been busy grabbing screenshots of splash pages, sign-up forms, campaign emails and other email features as well as tracking opt-in procedures and analyzing content. (See my Slideshare presentation below critiquing the candidates’ sign-in processes.)

Although the field has thinned since I began my research (Michele Bachmann, Jon Huntsman and Rick Perry have dropped out, with Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and Ron Paul campaigning now before the Florida primary), I’ve already amassed plenty of data.

What have I found so far? Here are a couple of highlights from the opt-in process:

• Four candidates—Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and Rick Santorum (splash page no longer used)—feature splash pages before moving to the regular home page. All except for Rick Perry’s highlight email sign-up. Two—Huntsman and Romney—give visitors the option to provide an email address and zip code.

• All the candidates collect email addresses on their home pages, with six of the seven using a simple email address field (and zip code field in some cases) in the upper-right corner of the home page. Four also included an additional sign-up promotion.

• The Perry campaign’s opt-in form was the least prominent, with its location in a sidebar on the bottom third of the homepage. As it happened, the Perry campaign was the only one that sent no emails before the candidate dropped out of the race.

• The zip code is a logical data point to collect because it allows a campaign to segment and target mailings for appearances and local organizing. Four of the seven candidates asked for zip codes along with email addresses at opt-in, but only Romney and Ron Paul required it to process the subscription.

• Two of the candidates—Santorum and Bachmann—offered social sign-in via Facebook, with the network icon appearing top right on the homepage under the email opt-in field.

• Bachmann was also the only candidate who launched a preference center at opt-in. Most of the candidates’ sites collected detailed financial information for donations, but Bachmann’s opt-in process leads subscribers into an expansive form, collecting detailed contact and interest information.

• Two of the seven candidates used a double opt-in process when collecting email addresses. This is slightly less than one-third of the candidate population. While obviously not a reliable sample size, it’s still considerably higher than marketers in general.

• Surprisingly, only one candidate sent a welcome message after the opt-in: Michele Bachmann, who dropped out of the race just before I began this project.

• Change happens quickly during the campaign. When checking back regularly I’ve found that several candidates have revised confirmation pages, dropped splash pages and made other tweaks.
Republican Candidate Email Marketing Analysis
View more presentations from Silverpop

For future blog posts, I’ll examine a variety of email program aspects in greater detail, including:

• “From” names and subject lines
• Message content
• Design, layout and administrative footers
• Cadence
• Preference centers and opt-out process

In the meantime, here are two teasers of upcoming analysis:

• So far, Rick Santorum is the most active emailer, with 13 email messages sent between Jan. 10 and Jan. 14.

• Many of the candidates use a variety of sender (“From”) names such as the candidate’s own name, a campaign manager (Matt Krull for Gingrich or Mike Biundo for Santorum) or a big-name supporter (ex-Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge for Huntsman). Perhaps the most intriguing “From” name so far? “The Jon2012Girls” for the Huntsman campaign.

Is there anything specific you’d like me to look at in the candidates’ emails or their email strategies? Please post your questions and comments in the comments area below.

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how and why marketing buyers make decisions. It’s probably an oversimplification to say “because of Facebook or Twitter,” but I think that’s an increasingly critical issue—social proof. I was reminded yet again of how things have changed by a spirited discussion kicked off around a Mark Cuban blog post a couple weeks ago. His primary contention was that start-ups in general —and tech start-ups specifically—shouldn’t waste time and money hiring an outside PR firm. His point is that when you’re small and fast, there’s minimal time and money to waste on getting (and keeping) an external resource up to speed on every aspect of your business. You’re likely better doing it yourself.

I believe the crux of Mark’s argument (which I agree with) is that old-school marketing has been effectively and aggressively disintermediated. In his example, it’s the PR agency. In other examples, it’s digital functions like buying banners (hi AdWords) or building websites (Joomla, Drupal and WordPress are fun). The same is true of building an audience of buyers for your product or service. Gone are the days when you need to be in one of the 30 product categories covered by PC Magazine, and you’d better win the annual roundup to pull units through the retail channel. And your exact position in a quadrant is no longer a guarantee of success—or even survival. The gatekeepers of the past are just that—of the past.

Today, we build market credibility and buyers by reaching out directly to people and companies. Channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. have opened a new dialogue with a much wider audience. And the “informed collective” (as I like to call it) wields an incredible amount of sway over who’s considered when it’s time to buy technology. This has turned many brands of yesterday on their heads such that they simply can’t compete with this new breed of leaner, faster technology company. Look no further than how Salesforce is displacing Siebel in large-scale business. Ten years ago, no single company had a product that could span price points from $35 to $35 million.

So what does this mean for marketers? Clearly, changing the entire marketing approach is not easy stuff. The scale of dealing with 50 publications and 10 analysts to carry your message to market required less effort than having to engage all your social network followers across five to seven disparate networks—all at the same time. And this is the tip-of-the-spear for disintermediation. At this exact point is where scalable technology steps in to save the day.

The marketers best positioned for future success remain grounded in the time-proven tactics, but are quickly integrating a social strategy at the highest levels of their organization. They clearly understand that prospects don’t show up uninformed and ready to buy whatever they’re hawking. Today’s buyers are increasingly more educated on a particular segment’s competitors and products than any normal, human salesperson could ever be.

So how is this achieved? Via professional groups on LinkedIn, at networking events, in Google+ circles—the list is almost infinite. But they all have one thing in common: no brand owns them. You can’t buy a truckload of media and slam your way into consideration or market share. In fact, I’d contend the massive spending habits of the past (think Microsoft’s launch budget for Windows will increasingly be perceived as a sign of social weakness. Super-fans (created through epic brand advocacy or immense peer-driven social draw) do more to convince the world that tools like 37Signals’ Basecamp or Facebook are must-haves in one’s digital life.

The same is true for marketing technology. The rise of Google Analytics opened the eyes of thousands of mid-sized business to the metrics that were possible on the digital platforms. And SaaS-based ecommerce platforms like Storenvy and BigCommerce brought store-building directly to anyone creative or brilliant enough to offer items people want to buy. And yes, these platforms have created social groups who share, enhance and evangelize about the platform they love. And guess what else? The ease-of-use and flexible designs have seen these tools become part of the consideration set for real-deal marketers.

So if you’re a marketer, it’s a double-edged sword. You’ve got to deal with a much wider sphere of interactions, but the super-fans you build will go to the ends of the earth with you. Your marketing technology now requires a different degree of consideration and execution. It simply won’t cut it to add a survey to next month’s newsletter. Step back and think about everything your customer does, and figure out how to elegantly automate behavior-driven messaging in a way that highlights your brand personality. No one wants to buy from a monolith, and you might be surprised by how aggressively your small- to mid-sized company can take customers from your Fortune 500 competitors by being authentically human.

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The start of any good relationship requires listening to, appreciating and acting on the preferences and interests of another person. The start of a successful email marketing relationship isn’t any different.

Preference centres are one of many email marketing topics that draw a wide range of responses from practitioners and pundits alike. Some, like me, find a great deal of value in them, while others feel that while good in theory, they aren’t quite as good in practice.

Here are my thoughts on why preference centres do matter—now more than ever. And below, you’ll find 31 tips for creating a world-class preference centre of your own.

Why build a preference centre? To me, email marketers should employ preference centres to accomplish the following three goals, in order of priority:

• Give more power and control to subscribers.
• Drive higher relevance and greater personalisation.
• Help divert unsubscribes and reduce list churn.

I believe preference centres are particularly essentially today, primarily due to the fact that the variety of channels through which we “touch” our customers and prospects is more diverse than ever. And with that diversity comes a shift in consumers’ desires to have increased control over how they are being marketed to in these channels.

Here are five reasons why preference centres matter now more than ever:

• With email, social, mobile, your website and more, there are more channels available to your customers than in the past.
• Increasing engagement and interaction with messages now has the potential to improve delivery and inbox placement. Relevant messages, tuned to the preferences of the recipient, have a higher likelihood of achieving this level of engagement.
• Consumers expect greater control over their relationship with your brand and the marketing messages they receive.
• Having a central facility to manage all touch points with the customer helps improve cross-channel marketing efforts and improves the likelihood that you’ll deliver the right message to the right channel.
• By providing alternatives to unsubscribing such as snoozing or changing mailing frequency, and by providing improved change-of-address facilities, you can reduce overall list churn.

Interested in learning more about the specific tactics that go into building a world-class preference centre? Have a look at this presentation, which highlights 31 tips for doing just that—through the lens of real-world email marketing examples.

Where do you stand on the topic of preference centres? Let me know in the comments below.

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We at Silverpop are big on birthday emails, and not just because we enjoy receiving them on our special days.

A well-designed birthday email program has the potential to generate high ROI on a relatively low level of effort. Birthday emails also give you another opportunity to reach out to your customers with a highly relevant message.

Despite these benefits, Silverpop found in a recent study that seven in 10 email marketers don’t send birthday emails. On top of that, three out of the four email marketers who don’t send birthday emails say they don’t intend to start.

We put these findings and much more in a report, “Birthday Blueprint: How to Build a Top-Tier Birthday Email Program,” which looks at the state of birthday email marketing and addresses the reasons why some marketers don’t do birthday emails.

Blueprint for Building Your Birthday Email Program
The report also includes our seven-step Birthday Blueprint and loads of examples and illustrations. Here’s a condensed version. I invite you to check it out and then download the complete report.

Step 1: Set your birthday program goals.
Your birthday email program can serve one or both of these basic goals:

• Build branding and customer engagement: You send an attractively designed message that doesn’t include a purchase incentive with the “Happy Birthday” greeting. This approach dings your marketing budget the least, and you might even realize some incremental revenue.

• Drive online or offline visits and revenue: Using a purchase incentive such as a discount, upgraded service or no-strings freebie generates measurable results but can also affect your margins or marketing budget.

Step 2: Determine a delivery schedule.
Generally speaking, the more effort a recipient has to expend to benefit from your message, the farther in advance you should send it.

If you don’t use incentives, you can send the message on or near the recipient’s birthday. At the other extreme, a travel company sends its birthday emails six weeks early to give recipients time to plan a trip.

Step 3: Collect the data.
Decide where and how to collect your data, whether to require birth date and how much data to collect. Your delivery schedule and the number of other required fields drive some of your decisions.

Requiring day/month/year data will give you the richest amount of data but can reduce form completions. A/B split tests on your registration form might show you how much data your customers are willing to provide.

Step 4: Greeting or incentives?
If using incentives is a common part of your email approach, then incorporating them in your birthday messages should be a no-brainer. More than half the marketers in Silverpop’s benchmark study provide some incentive.

Without an incentive, your email content must be strong and creative to make an impression.

If you’re unsure, or you need to sell management on the benefits, test both approaches side by side for a few months.

Step 5: Single or multiple emails?
Sending a single birthday wish is the most common and easiest strategy. However, sending multiple emails can motivate your subscribers to redeem an incentive before it expires.

Step 6: Design your message.
Because birthdays are usually fun days for subscribers, your creative approach should reflect this. Push your designer to create something fun and engaging that’s distinctive from your other messages while still following your graphic standards and email design best practices.

Copy styles can take many forms. Be sure the copy drives the action you want, is simple and straightforward and meshes with your brand or corporate image.

Step 7: Test and optimize.
Although listed last, testing and optimization should be part of every step in your pilot program as well as after as you refine it.

Here are some facets to test:

• Data capture: Try different form layouts and data-field locations to see which ones deliver the most completions.
• Incentives: Try at least two to see which drives the best combination of conversions and margin impact.
• Subject lines: Consider whether tactics such as first-name personalization or listing the incentive in the subject line affect conversions or opens.

Ready to Dive In?
You’ll find the complete blueprint and more examples in Silverpop’s report, “Birthday Blueprint: How to Build a Top-Tier Birthday Email Program,” which you can download with our compliments.

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Can you make money with social media in B2B marketing? In last week’s post I talked about creating a ”social mosh pit” and serving up “content snacks” at our Agent ROI events—and how 583 tweets from the Atlanta event turned into 861,620 social impressions engaging 109,752 followers. This week, it’s all about the money.

There’s a general belief that social media is purely influential and that buzz is simply buzz and not revenue. Although that may sometimes be the case, there are many exceptions. At Silverpop, we’re generating revenue and new customers from social media with increasing frequency.

The most important step in turning social media into revenue—and one that’s regularly overlooked—is tracking it. Of course your buzz is simply buzz if you don’t track it. It doesn’t matter if you use Radian6, Silverpop Engage or simply ask your new customers about how they came to know you—if you don’t track it, you won’t be able to attribute revenue to your social media tactics. At Silverpop, we track it six ways to Sunday, and we’re finding new ways all the time to improve our tracking and sharing.

Here’s a great story of a new customer. At our May 2011 customer conference, we featured a number of amazing speakers, including Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee). A fan of Gary’s was watching his Twitter feed, and when Gary tweeted that he would be in Atlanta at Silverpop’s customer conference, this fan figured out how to attend. His purpose was clear—to hear Mr. Vaynerchuk’s interesting stories and marketing wisdom. But while this fan was there, he was exposed to Silverpop’s technology, teams and other customers, and within weeks his company had purchased Silverpop Engage.

As is typical in the modern marketplace, there were multiple channels and touch points involved in moving this event attendee from prospect to customer. In this case we relied not just on social media but also securing relevant content/speaking talent, creating an event experience that showcased Silverpop, our customer base’s enthusiasm and more. But without social media, Silverpop would have one less customer.

This is one of many stories of social marketing driving our business every day. If you’re interested in turning your email programs into marketing automation and social media results, send me an email or contact us.

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At the recent MarketingSherpa B2B Summit, I was honored to be named Lead Gen Apprentice for my innovative solutions to three common business problems. In a three-part series, I will elaborate on each problem and my proposed solution. While the dollar amounts and company details may not exactly match your specific scenario, the strategies and tactics outlined here should prove useful for addressing these common challenges.

The business problem: A mid-size technology and consulting firm has a Webinar in two weeks. Registrations are low, and the firm needs at least 100 attendees to make it worthwhile. The company is a distant fourth in market share, and its top-of-mind awareness is low outside of current customers and its email list. Budget: $2,000.

Using PPC ads to promote your webinar will drive traffic—and registrations—to your Webinar. Also, use the company blog to highlight what differentiates your organization from your competitors, being sure to optimize the post so it’s a top search result in Google. For people searching for your competitors, be bold and reference them by name—and even link to their sites. Your goal is to show up in their conversations and conversations you would otherwise miss out on. Draw attention to your differentiation and value and position strengths that your competitors do not.

Finally, implement an aggressive guerilla marketing technique. Stand outside someone else’s event, whether it’s complementary or competitive, and do something to get noticed. Use signage to advertise a compelling related offer to event attendees. Let people opt in or sign up for the Webinar via SMS on their mobile devices as they walk by.

Some people can be turned off by long registration forms, so even if potential Webinar attendees are drawn in through a PPC ad, they might abandon it if your form is too daunting. Implementing a social sign-in option can eliminate this, sometimes driving 10 percent to 50 percent more people to provide their information.

Once an individual is registered, place them in a nurture program. Use tactic #4 to get them to become a social promoter of your event. You can also place registrants in different programs based on their actions and interests. Use automation to facilitate registration confirmation, the day-of reminder and post-event follow-up. Automation can significantly boost attendance and decrease no-show and drop-out rates.

Place social-sharing links in emails. If recipients share the Webinar information on their personal networks, their friends and followers could register as well. It also doesn’t hurt to add a little incentive. Perhaps offer a fun gadget or gift card if recipients share the Webinar information on their own networks. Don’t limit social-sharing links to just emails, however. If you include additional collateral like a white paper or tip sheet in the email, include sharing options within those PDFs as well. Social sharing can dramatically increase visibility, driving event registrations.

What I love most about these tactics is that any marketer can execute them regardless of budget. In fact, lack of budget can be a great instigator of ingenuity. Creative thinking, compelling content and social conversation may be all you need to increase your marketing results. Once you get it right on a small scale, it gets easier to ask for additional budget—CFOs like to invest in things that have been proven to work!

I’d love to hear about the tactics you’ve used to juice Webinar registration—please share them in the Comments section.

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