Ken Carr's Daily Read

In a recent study examining the email programmes of the Top 100 UK retailers, Silverpop found that whilst many companies have made strides in several important marketing areas, there’s still room to grow. Here’s an illustrated look at some key takeaways from this year’s study—including comparisons to American retailers—plus best practices to consider:

For more findings from the study and related best practice tips, check out Silverpop’s white paper, “2011 Silverpop Study: Email Marketing Trends of the Top 100 UK retailers.”

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Let’s say you put together an amazing event and promote it via pay per click, your website, Facebook and Twitter. Post-event, you check your reporting and discover that you got 300 leads through the event. Pretty cool, but wouldn’t you like to know how many of those leads came from a social source?

If you’re like most marketers, you haven’t been tracking the number of prospects that Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social networks are bringing in. But with social becoming an increasingly important part of the buying cycle, the time is now to start harnessing the power of marketing automation to help you gather this information. You can then use this data to fine-tune future social initiatives and help decide where you should be focusing your valuable resources.

In broad terms, there are two questions you want to answer regarding social media and revenue reporting:

1. How much traffic is social generating?
2. How many new leads are you capturing from social sources?

The first question is easy to answer. Using Web analytics, you can measure the traffic to your offer pages and see what percentage social is driving and how that percentage is trending over time. To achieve the second, you need a marketing automation solution. With Silverpop Engage embedded on your site, for example, you can automatically capture and connect the sources of website visitors to the individuals who become named contacts in your marketing database.

Without the right technology in place, many marketers make the mistake of hard coding the lead source into the offer landing page Web form using a hidden field. For example, they create a PPC ad that points to a specific page, hard code the hidden field on that form to say “PPC,” and then include a “share this” icon on the page. The problem is that when people share the offer and their social followers come and sign up, these prospects will get attributed to the PPC ad as if those leads came via search.

To avoid this pitfall, use URL parameters to dynamically set the source value in the hidden field on your Web form. For example, when you Tweet about an offer, code each tweet by adding language to the end of the URL (e.g. “source=Facebook”) that enables your marketing automation platform to tie each click to eventual revenue. For example, your URL for a corporate Tweet might look like this:

• http://www.companyA.com/offerA.html?source=Twitter

This naming system will work whether you’re sharing on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or another network. And you can even get more specific, identifying a source as coming from a post on the Facebook wall versus somewhere else on Facebook, or using a code such as “source=email-twitter” to identify that a recipient shared an offer they received via email to Twitter, and then someone clicked on the link and came to your landing page to sign up.

Bottom line? There’s no reason to remain in the dark regarding how many leads social drove last month or how many came from Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. With a few simple steps, you can start gaining greater insights into how social is impacting the sales funnel.

More Social and Reporting Resources:
1) Blog: “Hey Marketer, Where’s Your Social Bait?”
2) Blog: “Lead Nurturing the Social Way”
3) Tip Sheet: “From Lead Acquisition to Account Close: 3 Steps for Increased Insights into Your Efforts”

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When it comes to Halloween, the treats always beat the tricks. The same applies to email. Email is a very effective way to share personalized messages with those who have opted in to engage with a company or organization. But just like with any other medium, there are people out there who don’t play by the rules and use email for malicious purposes.

Silverpop’s customers only send permission-based messages designed to educate, inform and share special offers with their audience in order to help their companies grow. But, just like any of us, they can also be the targets of those with detrimental goals. With that in mind, Silverpop recently introduced multifactor authentication to our platform to help marketers keep their data safer and more secure. This feature adds an additional layer of security to your account by requiring users to enter an authentication code before they can access your data.

Of course, even with the best technological safeguards, sometimes bad things happen to good people. That’s why we’re always looking for ways we can help digital marketers help themselves improve data security and keep their companies safe from phishing emails and other harmful communications.

And so, to better enable you to maintain the highest level of security, I wanted to share some of the tips I’ve found to be most helpful.

First, it’s important to keep in mind that all malicious email attacks rely on tricking the recipient into clicking on a link, opening an attachment or running a program that leads to unauthorized access to your computer. Here are some common characteristics of potentially dangerous emails to keep an eye out for:

• Slightly misspelled URLs (e.g. www.acmemarkting.com or www.acm8marketing.com instead of acmemarketing.com): These may appear in both links within an email and in the “reply to” email address. Official corporate emails will rarely come from other “lookalike” addresses such as “acme-marketing.com” or “acme_marketing.com.”
• Links that don’t match the actual destination: You can check this by hovering over the link. For example, a link might read as “www.acmemarketing.com,” but hovering over it shows “http://ThisIsSpam.com.” 
• Attachments: Including attachments in emails is an inefficient way for a company to collect or disseminate information, and thus attachments are rarely used for this purpose.
  • Think about whether an attachment makes sense. Most of the time, a link would have been more efficient and therefore would have been used instead. 
  • Make sure the extension is logical. If someone sends you an email saying, “Please review the attached spreadsheet,” and the attachment contains a “.pst” extension, something isn’t right.
  • Be careful opening PDF or Flash documents. We know how tempting it can be to open that animation claiming, “You have to watch this! It’s the funniest video ever.” Resist that temptation.  Even if it’s legitimate, it’s probably not that funny.
  • Be wary of overly generic emails or attachment names, especially if they come from someone not personally known to you. If you have any suspicions at all, reply to the sender with, “Can you fill me in about what this is about?” before you open the attachment.

• Unencrypted links: Whenever a site asks you for personal information (social security number, passwords, etc.), take the time to check that the URL it’s sending you is secure. If it’s encrypted, the link will start with “https://” and not “http://”. 
• Clicking on a link flags a security warning: Often this is a false positive, but if clicking on a link prompts a security warning from your browser, you should proceed with caution if at all. 
• Little or no support information and/or generic greeting: Be wary of emails with no customer service contact info or unsubscribe link, poor grammar and/or impersonal greetings.
• Sender appears legitimate: Don’t assume that just because an email comes from a valid address that there’s nothing wrong with it. Sometimes when a computer is infected, it will send a new malicious email to everyone in the victim’s address book. Be vigilant, and if something about an email from a coworker or friend strikes you as odd, don’t trust it.

Last but certainly not least, keep these words of email wisdom in mind:

• You probably haven’t won the lottery.
• There’s no lawyer/barrister/solicitor holding vast sums of money you are due.
• The generous prince isn’t real. Sorry ladies.
• If you deposit that check and send a stranger half, it’s a safe bet you’ll lose everything.
• Random solicitations looking for “a discrete business relationship” at great profit will always result in a net loss for you.
• The lovely lady professing her interest is not interested in the same kind of “relationship” you are.
• Those pills are fake.

If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Let that email go.

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Integrating your email and social media initiatives can boost email revenue by as much as 400 percent according to industry studies, and the latest research continues to show that email and social can work together for the benefit of both.

So if, on average, a Facebook “fan” spends an additional $71.84 compared to a non-fan (Syncapse, “The Value of a Facebook Fan: An Empirical Review”), and a Facebook share equates to $14 in revenue; then how do you start making the two work together more effectively? Here are four ways to do so:

1) Utilise Email to Drive Social Media Footfall
Include “Follow us on …” links in your emails to make recipients aware of your social presence and help direct traffic to them. Additionally, create specific email campaigns to promote social happenings, such as a new Facebook competition or a newly created group on LinkedIn, and use that to drive awareness and boost visits.

If Twitter is a part of your social media strategy, include your “@” or “#” tags as calls to action beneath appropriate content, enabling recipients to add their voice to the online discussion.

2) Leverage Social Media to Extend the Reach and Awareness of Your Emails
When you want the world to be aware of your latest offer, promotion or event, use that as an opportunity to encourage recipients to share that good news to their network by including a social-sharing call to action in your email and making this part of the main content.

Alternatively, use the “like” and “tweet” buttons to encourage recipients to declare their brand affiliation and encourage their friends and followers to follow suit and retweet or “like” the “like.”

3) Use Social Media as Part of an Acquisition Campaign
While email can be used to promote your social media presence, these social properties can, in turn, return the favour and drive the growth of your email database.

Highlighting your newsletters on your Facebook profile and YouTube channel or showing the subscription landing page URL on your Twitter page is an excellent way to direct fans and followers to your opt-in form and grow your database.

Second, leverage your marketing technology platform’s Web forms feature to create and host your opt-in form on Facebook.  Depending on your platform, your database will then be updated in real time every time a form is submitted, enabling you to send a triggered welcome email to engage your new contact immediately.

4) Use Peer Reviews and Content to Influence Purchase Decisions
For retailers, including star ratings and reviews from your website into your emails will help support purchase decisions; if you’re a B2B marketer, consider using case studies, quotes and analyst rankings in the same way.

A savvy way to raise website footfall and showcase the top-purchased products or most-searched destinations on your website is by including “Our Top 5 Products” or “Your Favourite Destinations” lists within your email. This can noticeably increase traffic to those pages on your site.

Finally, more specific user-generated content, such as pictures, videos and recommendations, can be used with great effect to provide more value to your email content. You’re probably already collecting most of this content via surveys, competitions, reviews or case studies, and your social interactions, so why not use it to raise advocacy levels, increase the value and relevancy of your content and influence purchase decisions?

When integrated in a well-though-out, strategic fashion, email and social can drive the performance of the other, influence key metrics and, most importantly, increase revenue.

So, where are you going to make a start?

More Social Marketing Resources:
1) Tip Sheet: “10 Tips for Using Social and Mobile to Capture, Communicate & Understand”
2) White Paper: “Get Your Mocial Mojo Working: Effectively Integrating Mobile, Social, Local & Email”
3) Blog: “5 Questions: Sara Meaney of Hanson Dodge on Social Media and Email”

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In December of 2010 Canada passed new legislation that governs the use of email for marketing (commercial) purposes. There have been a lot of interesting developments since then, and with the period for public comments on the legislation having ended last month, I thought this would be a good time to talk about how the regulations are shaping up and how they’ll impact digital marketers. Here’s a guide to what you need to know:

CASL: A Recap
Canada’s anti-spam law has not yet come into effect, and it’s uncertain exactly when it will do so, but it’s likely to be in early 2012. When the law was originally passed, it stipulated many requirements for commercial electronic message senders and also established areas to be further defined by regulatory agencies, including:

• The form that consent must take
• Identifying information that must be provided by the sender or someone seeking consent to send
• The form of a Commercial Electronic Message

Silverpop’s Loren McDonald, with Michael Fekete from the firm Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt, explored these initial requirements in our Webinar Why Canada’s New Anti-Spam Law Matters to All Email Marketers.

Since then, Canada has issued proposed regulations and established a period for public comments that ended on Sept. 7, 2011. Industry groups and others have provided considerable feedback, and hopefully some of these regulations will be improved. While there will likely be changes to the proposed regulations, understanding them now can help you prepare for the final form. Here’s a summary of these proposed regulations, along with some of our analysis.

Sender Identification
The proposed regulations are quite detailed here and, much like CAN-SPAM initially tried to do, want all senders clearly identified. Senders may be all of those who have commercial content in the message and those who are responsible for transmission. Information which must be included:

• Name of sender and others on whose behalf the message is sent
• If multiple parties are involved, the role of each (who’s the sender, and who it’s being sent for)
• Business names of senders
• Contact information (physical and mailing address, telephone number, email address, Web address, any other electronic addresses)

This information must be provided within the body of the message if practical or, if not, via a link.

What marketers need to know: These requirements aren’t too onerous but would increase the amount of clutter within the body of messages. In addition, having multiple senders with full contact information listed in a message will likely cause recipients to be confused. The final point seems to be aimed at commercial messages such as text messages that are too short to contain all this information.

Unsubscribe
The proposed regulations briefly cover unsubscribe mechanisms, with only the two requirements below added to the existing law:

• Unsubscribe option must be presented clearly and prominently
• Able to be performed in no more than two clicks or another method of equivalent efficiency

What marketers need to know: The “clearly and prominently” clause isn’t cause for much concern, but the second requirement has questions that need to be resolved. For example, if a message takes a recipient to a preference form with a click on a link, and the recipient must select an “Opt out of all” box and then click a submit button, does this three-click process violate the requirement?

Request for Consent
CASL requires permission (express or implied) in order to send commercial electronic messages. The proposed regulations are:

• Consent must be in writing
• Consent forms must include:
  • Name of person seeking consent and name of person on whose behalf permission is being sought
  • Clear identification of who is who if the two are different
  • Business names
  • Contact Information for both parties:
    • Physical and mailing address
    • Telephone number
    • Email address
    • Web address
    • Any other electronic address
  • Statement that consent can be withdrawn using any of the above contact methods

What marketers need to know: There are two major concerns I have here. First, requiring consent in writing may cause challenges for many valid permission tactics, including obtaining permission through conversations with call center representatives and collection of business cards at trade shows. Second, since the proposed regulations require senders to honor opt-out requests through all these contact methods, marketers will need to establish procedures to monitor these channels for opt-outs and process those requests promptly.

Stay Tuned
None of these regulations are final, and many of the concerns raised here were discussed by those who provided comments on the proposed regulations. It’s important to be aware of both the nature of the regulations in general (Canada is willing to take a fairly tough stance) and the compliance ramifications of the proposed regulations as they currently stand.

Silverpop does not provide legal guidance and presents this information as a discussion of general legislation issues and not as legal advice.  Please consult your attorney for legislation compliance guidance.

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Silverpop occupies a unique position in the marketing landscape with our deep expertise in both email marketing and marketing automation. So, as a result, we work with a lot of digital marketers—from high-tech companies trying to help large sales forces be successful to retailers sending coupons to customers who abandon their virtual shopping carts.

A lot of people will point out how different these worlds can be. And the fact is, there are a lot of differences. But having a few years under my belt serving both kinds of marketers, I can tell you that their similarities far outweigh their differences. And even where they differ today in terms of techniques and approaches, I’ve found those differences to be artificial and unnecessary.

For example, most B2B marketing automation vendors offer scoring functionality. This is an awesome concept that, for the most part, doesn’t exist in the B2C world. Every retail marketer I’ve talked to about scoring thinks it’s an amazing idea, and they can’t wait to use it. And what about dynamic content? This is a staple in the B2C email marketing world that most B2B marketers still aren’t taking advantage of. So, is there something unique to B2B marketing that would make personalized content somehow useless? Of course not.

B2B and B2C marketing have grown up separately in their own silos, but there’s no reason for this to persist. Imagine what will happen when we remove these artificial silos. I’m here to tell you it’s all about to change—the barriers are about to come crashing down. There are some key truths that all marketers have in common—most notably, the need to remember that within their very different target audiences (consumers shopping for holiday gifts or IT departments looking to sign six-figure, five-year contracts) the actual decision maker for each is a human being with unique characteristics that should be marketed to as an individual.

Personally, I believe the worlds of B2C and B2B marketing have evolved so separately because most marketers have grown up thinking of their customers as big audiences. Each individual customer has been drowned out amidst giant campaigns built around what marketers want to say and when they want to say it. Maybe it’s our DNA as an industry. After all, we tend to use terms like Target, Segment, and Audience instead of Dialogue, Listen and Individual. Who can we blame? No one but ourselves.

So, here’s my suggestion. Let’s tear down the artificial barriers and educate marketers about the tools that will help them be most effective, most efficient and most successful by taking advantage of the best of what each type of marketing can offer. More importantly, let’s stop thinking about audiences and start thinking about individuals—the actual human beings we’re talking with. Let’s start looking beyond high-level reporting and start creating campaigns that allow us to dialogue with each and every customer one-at-a-time—on their terms and their timing. Maybe, just maybe, we can grow beyond audience-like thinking and embrace real 1:1 dialogues with our individual customers. Going forward, I’m going to call this Bto1. You heard it here first.

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I’m very excited to have Sara Meaney from Hanson Dodge appear on our “5 Questions” blog this month.  Sara is Hanson Dodge’s VP and partner, social media and PR.  Hanson Dodge is an interactive agency based in Milwaukee, Wis., focused largely on the active lifestyle consumer.

I was first introduced to Sara a few months ago when she presented to fellow clients at the Chicago, Ill., and Madison, Wis., user meetings as well as Silverpop’s Agent ROI Digital Marketing event.  Sara is an expert in the area of social media and presented on the topic of “Digital Chocolate + Peanut Butter: How Social Media and Email Complement Each Other for Better Marketing Outcomes.”  View her full presentation here.

Social Media Expert Sara Meaney of Hanson Dodge

In this month’s blog, we focus on social media and how it interplays with email.

1) Tell us a bit about yourself. How did you get so immersed in social media?

My background is a mixture of client-side and agency marketing communications experience. Social media became a major part of how we connected with our potential clients when we first set out as a startup in early 2009. Not only did we find it cost-effective, but it was highly effective in terms of the results we saw in response to how we utilized the various platforms available to us. We were blogging regularly, we hosted a weekly BlogTalkRadio show where we hosted thought leaders in the marketing and communications world, we were creating multimedia content for channels including Vimeo and YouTube, Slideshare and Flickr and people were finding us online as a result.

We had a lot of fun and learned a lot by using the channels directly but we applied traditional best practices of strategic communications to build our business and service our clients. Social media channels happened to be something we leveraged very well and we quickly became known for that aspect of our work. Social media quickly became a major focus of our offering and ultimately led to our organization’s growth and eventual business merger with Hanson Dodge Creative, a well-established agency with nearly 30 years in the industry.

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