Chris Baggott's Email Marketing Best Practices

Email for Lead Management

Let me take my hat off to Kate Maddox from BtoB.   She always seems to see what is really important in our industry.  Read Today's article:

CMO Council report ties missed revenue to mismanagement of new business development activity

Palo Alto, Calif.—A joint report by the CMO Council and the Business Performance Management Forum found that U.S. companies may be experiencing huge losses in potential revenue as a result of mismanaged new business development activity.

The study was based on an online survey of approximately 800 C-level executives in the third quarter.

According to the report, nearly three-quarters of respondents said they could increase revenue by at least 10% with better business development practices; and 37% said they could increase the top line by more than 20%.

The study found that an estimated 80% of leads are typically lost, ignored or discarded.

Also, 73% of respondents said their company has no process for re-qualifying and revisiting business leads.

--Kate Maddox

Lead mis-management is as fact in all companies and could be impacted significatly with trigger based email.   All you need to do is look for the right inflection points in your lead process and imagine how you would talk to these 'leads' like they were human beings.  Set the emails up with lots of personalization...and set your triggers.

Think about how you follow up with webinar attendees....or the people who don't show up for the webinar.  Trade Shows, Whitepaper downloads?

How about leads that get into the system that the reps aren't following up on, or seem to have slipped through the sytem? 

Prospecting Email

Who Doesn’t love The Apprentice?   Other than The Amazing Race it’s my favorite reality show.

This was never truer than this past week when it effectively showed the power of Co-advertising with a recognizable brand to a specifically targeted audience that wants to hear from you via email.

People often ask how to use email for customer acquisition.   This was a great example of some best practices.

The task was to open a bridal shop and sell dresses in one day.  The team that sold the most dresses won.   

All other things being equal: the winning team went to The Knot www.theknot.com and paid them to send a promotional email to a

geo-targeted list for the New York metro area of brides who had registered for specifically these types of promotions.

They didn’t rent the list; The Knot branded and sent the promotion on their behalf.  (key point)

The results?   The team that used email marketing had people lined up around the block when they opened their store.  The competing team had two people waiting outside.  At the end of the day, the winning team had 20x the sales of the losers.

Why is Email Growing?

Why is email growing?

1. Broadband is now installed in 50% of all households (including most of the prosperous ones)
2. Online accounts for 14% of Americans media time.
3. The Big Three Portals attract 70% of online Americans monthly.
4. Internet Advertising is growing 28.8% per year.

What does all this have to do with email?   Plenty.

Companies are going to spend $9.3 Billion this year on ads ($3.9 bb on search) designed to lead you to a website. That is the invitation to begin a relationship…

How do you continue that relationship over time?...

Anyone worried about the future of email as the greatest relationship marketing tool of all time please call me.  :-)

Building your in-house list

Building your in-house list. Beef up the quality and quantity of names on your e-mail list at minimum cost.   This B2B article has some simple tips for building your database... read it here

Bottom line is: 1) Ask at every opportunity 2) Be clear about what you are going to be sending 3) Don't do it without permission

More Pizza Email :-)

How LaRosa Pizza increases number of online orders and average order size

As Cincinnati’s LaRosa Pizza chain uses e-mail marketing to get more customers ordering online, long-time customers are starting to order more than just pizza and increasing average order size, says Pete Buscani, executive vice president of marketing. 

LaRosa, which operates 56 restaurants, uses a single call center to process all telephone orders. But with about 70,000 calls per week, it wanted to move about 10% to online orders, figuring that would let it provide better customer service as it continued to expand the number of orders, Buscani says. (read entire article here)

Angels & Demon Customers

Larry Selden doesn’t know me, but I’m a huge fan.   Larry is the author of: Angel Customers and Demon Customers: Discover which is which and Turbo-Charge Your Stock (here)

Anyone in business should be already aware of the 80/20 rule - 80% of your profits come fr om 20% of your customers.

This book goes that one step further - by some excellent case studies it shows how 150% of your profits come from 20% of your customers - they are the Angels. The Demons are those 20% of your customers who actually lose you money equal to 150% of your profit.

You’ve heard this before from me, but I’ll say it again.  The biggest asset your company has is your portfolio of customers not your products or your physical property.

Mr. Selden has produced research that argues that stock price is tied to a company’s ability to identify and cater to profitable customers better than its rivals do.  At many companies losses are produced by Demon Customers that wipe out profits generated by Angels.

The interesting thing is that he has never had the opportunity to prove his theories at a really large retailer before.   This week in a front page story the Wall Street Journal announced that Best Buy would be fully embracing the identification of Devil Customers. 

As I’ve said before, we have the data and we have the tools…..Congratulations to Best Buy for showing the courage to actually act!

Best Idea of the Week

Nothing to Do with Email really, but this is one of the best ideas I've heard in a long time...

Bombay’s web site takes the surprise out of “assembly required”
One of The Bombay Co.’s goals with its web sites is to create a shopping experience online that consumers can’t get elsewhere. Among the innovations at its redesigned sites, which launched in September, is a feature that lets shoppers view an electronic version of assembly instructions before making a purchase.   read article