Chris Baggott's Email Marketing Best Practices

Acquisition vs. Retention

Acquisition vs. Retention?

The question is: What are you trying to retain?

Answer: Permission to continue a relationship.

Let me explain. Traditionally acquisition meant get a customer. Retention meant keep a customer.

Fine.

But what about that vast middle ground? That territory is typically called Leads.

Leads are sometimes confused with prospects; but there is a big difference between a lead and a prospect. The difference is Permission.

Lets illustrate with a simple example: How about Trade Shows?

Prior to the show there are attendees. Those attendees look good to you because they seem to share some of the basic attributes that you look for in a customer. That is why you are investing in this trade event in the first place.

Those attendees are prospects not leads.

Your job at the trade show is to get as many people as possible to move to the next step. That is…get permission to convert them from prospects to leads.

(I won’t go into the tactics of this conversion in this article…. Although my neighbor has been very successful with Mongolian contortionists)

Now your mindset needs to change dramatically. This is no longer about acquisition. Your activities need to support retention of those leads.

Think about how you do this currently. Even the best marketers typically focus retention on existing customers. That is why 80% of all trade show leads disappear according to Julia O'Connor, author of The Trade Show Reader and President of Trade Show Training Inc.

Think about how you can use dynamic content in your emails to continue earning permission and grow that relationship.

The longer you can stay engaged, the more likely that you will eventually get married.

Congratulations To Marketing Sherpa

I wanted to give a shout out to Anne Holland and the great organization she founded...Marketing Sherpa.

As you know I attend a lot of meetings. This one was great because it was completly focused on one critical subject: Leads. How to get them and more importantly...how to manage them. The presenters were all about tactics. Things that you can run home and actually implement.

If you missed the east coast version, you can catch it out in San Francisco in Mid-November. Check it out here...

Are you still Segmenting?

I saw the best slide the other day from Forrester Research. You can see it here.

In one easy graph is the validation of what I’ve been pounding the table about for 5 years (really 20)

The problem with Database Marketing is not the Data. The problem is executing on the data. From Dry-cleaners to Fortune 100 companies, they all have the same problem…they have invested in data that they can’t use.

I had a client who spent millions with E.piphany who is still doing segments (batch & blast) with their email. “Oh” I said “how many segments do you use?” Answer: “We use five”……

“Wait!” “You mean to tell me you spent millions on a data system and you use the same level of personalization as my Pizza shop does with an Excel Spreadsheet??”

Of course this was a really fun conversation for me.

ExactTarget is Hiring

Not exactly a best practice for a blog, so please forgive me.

We are doing a lot of hiring and was hoping that you might be able to steer some candidates our way.

You can view our openings here....

Email for the Quick Win

When you are trying to sell something new into your company the best method is almost always to focus on the “Quick Win”.

Most organizations are afraid of decisions and like to postpone and stall for as long as possible doing anything new. (Why else is Dilbert so popular?)

The great thing about email is that it’s often easy to scope a project and show some results in an short period of time without spending a lot of money.

Think about your own business. Rather than bite off the entire thing, isn’t there something that can be done that can show the rest of the organization that this is something to get behind?

I’ve seen success with isolating regions or districts; picking one product, or one segment of customer. One of our clients with a chain of florists has done a great job with picking some of the early adopters (sneezers) from among the chains many branches rather than try and force the entire chain to adopt. Once the Sneezers demonstrate success the rest is easy.

Look at your world. Pick a simple goal and see if there is a Quick Win.

Dynamic Content Webinar

A lot of people have been asking for the link to the ExactTarget/Jupiter Webinar on Dynamic Content from two weeks ago.

Here it is. If the link doesn't work, you can copy and paste into your browser.

http://www.jupiterwebevents.com/_archives/2004/webevent_9-30-04/20040930web/Launch_Presentation.htm

You will need to allow pop-ups to view it. Let me know if you have any questions.

Response to Rarebird

I appreciate the comments from Jim at Rarebird. This is a great firm and they do wonderful work with email and other interactive tools. The thought in his comment is that email is abused because it is too easy.

I’ll argue that it is abused because it is too hard.

The problem I’m describing is when Good Marketers blast, don’t segment, don’t use dynamic content….in general they don’t make their messages relevant to the individual recipient.

I'm not necessarily talking about the SPAMMER, or the local dry-cleaner (although they at least have great data)

This is a problem of ease of use. If your tools are not easy enough…if there is too much pain and friction associated with good marketing, you are not going to do it.

Think about the process you need to go through to integrate your data, build content rules….in general ‘execute’ on a really good campaign. This has historically required input from no only creative, but also IT and programmers. What happens when you want to change a rule? Back to IT. Lost time, money....and momentum.

However, if it is easy you are more inclined to push the envelope, test, experiment and focus on what really works to accomplish your goals.

I’ll let out a little chunk of information that we will be reporting from one of our major retail clients. (As I mentioned in my posting over the weekend, this subject will be explored in detail in an upcoming whitepaper)

Of the things influencing the success of their emails they ranked four in the following order:

#1 Recency. How recent was their last interaction drives future interaction.
#1 Relevancy. This is what one to one marketing is all about.
#3 Frequency. Response is influenced by how frequently you email
#4 Creative/Offer.

Of the things that influence success, the most important have to do with talking to people like you know them. What stand between you and your customers? It’s not desire….it’s Technology.

Marketing as Technology

I just finished the best book since “The Innovators Solution”. It’s called “Running Money” by Andy Kessler.

Although billed as more of a financial story, it is really the story of technology and a funny; albeit cynical look at the period we just came through in the past 6 years or so.

Two things I loved about this book, aside from Andy’s writing style, was the education about the industry we are in and more importantly what this means to all of our lives. Technology has always been about freeing peoples minds to focus on more creative and intellectual pursuits. 350 years ago when all we could do was focus on getting food and shelter civilization didn’t move too far forward. Add some technology (steam engine) and look at the amazing progress in just the past 100 years.

What doe this have to do with Email Marketing? Everything.

To date we have all been bad marketers because of obstacles standing in our way. Those obstacles were the many steps and people necessary to get marketing done. All of our energy was spent on Marketing Execution. Since Marketing Execution was so hard, time consuming and expensive….we just didn’t have the brain time necessary to be good marketers.

With tools like Email Marketing, the most important criteria is now ease of use. If you can get sophisticated (automated) tools into the hands of the end user you eliminate the pain associated with Marketing Execution and focus on the actual Marketing.

That facilitates a ton of change. Marketing is now faster, more relevant, less expensive and by definition more valuable.

I’m working on a whitepaper on this topic where I’ll explore this in a lot more detail. I welcome your thoughts in the meantime.