4 Tips to Maximize Your PPC Campaign Investment, Post-Click

by redembermarketing on June 3rd, 2009

So you’ve been refining and adjusting your PPC campaigns for a while now.  Cost per clicks are coming down, bid management is under control, you have strong offers and optimized landing pages.  Conversions are up, and leads are coming in.  Sounds like lead gen uptopia, right?

Well, almost.  PPC campaigns are feeding information into the very earliest stage of the sales funnel.  What are you doing with that information to work newly discovered leads down the funnel, identify the hot prospects and close more deals?

Here are 4 tips for maintaining the momentum of the lead gen and sales process once someone has clicked on your ad:

CREATE A SEGMENTATION “LANDING EXPERIENCE”
You’re probably familiar with landing pages, and perhaps you’re even experimenting with optimizing them to maximize conversions.  But do you ever get the sense that not all of your traffic is exactly what you were aiming for?  Perhaps you’re products or services span several verticals or customer demographics and there’s some overlap in your campaign generated traffic.

To help make sure the right visitors get to the right pages and see the intended content, consider directing traffic to a segmentation page that makes it easy for visitors to self-identify themselves.  Two large images with short simple text can help people identify which group they belong in, at which point, they are served the correct information.

This is the start of a “landing experience” – a microsite if you will that visitors interact with before submitting their information or making a purchase.  This can actually help increase conversions since your leads are served more appropriate, targeted information.

SAY THANK YOU, PERSONALLY
Are your leads or new customers being taken care of once they’ve converted on your site?  Conversion might mean submitting a form, watching a video, or making a purchase, but are you taking them to a thank you page after conversion that introduces them to the next step in the conversion funnel?  The landing experience doesn’t have to end once someone has converted on your site.  Put some additional thought into how you say thank you and increase return traffic and repeat customers.

You could provide them with a special offer related to the offer they just took advantage of or the purchase they just made.  Of course, the thank you / follow up email is also a great opportunity to provide the customer with well-targeted offers since you now know more about them.  Test the timing of follow up emails to see when the optimal time is to send those messages.

DEVELOP A PROSPECT PROFILE
Depending on your budget, it may be harder to develop a well defined prospect profile without special software or technology installed on your website to track visitor behavior, notify sales when specific pages are viewed, etc.  But you can still come up with ways to learn more about your prospects.  They’re in your database, so you should know something about them (especially if you’re list is opt-in, right?).  The important thing to identify is what you don’t know about them and come up with ways to fill in the blanks.

Surveys are great for this.  You can develop a customer satisfaction survey, preferences survey, a contest, etc. that blends important and not-so-important questions together so you can extract useful information.  Let’s say you’re a florist – you can have prospects vote on a series of arrangements that will be offered in the store.  The results from the participants are invaluable to you!

Or, perhaps you’re B2B -  a software company – you can create a survey that not only collects information about your prospects so you can market to them better, but the results could be turned into an industry report and picked up by the media.  SEO score!  [Consider having a credible third party assist you with collecting the data / creating the report so it's a bit more objective]

NURTURE LEADS APPROPRIATELY
For some prospects, your special offer on the thank you page won’t prompt additional action, and in many cases your thank you / welcome emails may appear to be falling on deaf ears, but don’t stop nurturing.  No, I didn’t say keep spamming them, nurture them.  Change up the offers that are being presented until something prompts a response (preferably a purchase or a call, not a Spam Report).

By timing nurturing campaigns to spread messages out over days/weeks, you’re less likely to annoy someone and catch them in a different mood/business position.  This takes prep work ahead of time, but it’s worth it when you know that inactive leads or dormant customers are receiving targeted content that you crafted and should work…  Eventually.

How is Social Media Influencing Email Marketing?

by redembermarketing on May 10th, 2009

While there are still many companies that are still working on improving their email marketing processes let alone social media, those that have already augmented their approach with social media are quickly realizing that email still plays an important role.  Personally, I believe that email marketing will remain a relevant and important component of most organizations’ marketing strategies, but without a doubt, the influence of social media will be felt throughout most marketing teams.

Last week, MarketingProfs spoke with IBM’s Sandy Carter, who will be speaking at their upcoming MarketingProfs B2B Forum.  She rightly points out that “the use of Web 2.0 technology should be core to all integrated marketing going forward,” warning that isolating your social media team from the rest of your marketing staff could result in sub-standard results.  When asked about common misconceptions organizations have about social media, her first answer was that many companies believe that social media is a magical elixir, when it’s actually just a new (and important) component in the marketing tool box.  She suggests that we all keep in mind that our objective is to drive business, which can sometimes get lost when an organization or team becomes enamored with the tools themselves.  Amen, Sandy!

Without a doubt, social media is ideal for coordinating and executing public conversations with individuals you might otherwise have never had the chance to reach.  In some cases, like direct messages on Twitter, etc., it can even help facilitate private conversations. The pubic part of these dialogs represent a real pportunity to get your message or at least your perspective out into the open in what many are calling a more “trusted environment.”   Tracking how much each individual effort is impacting the bottom line, however, is another story.  Sandy herself admits that it’s hard to measure the value of the relationships that are formed online, but it doesn’t stop people from trying.  Some companies coordinate coupon codes that are targeted at specific social sites, others do their best to analyze traffic sources and purchasing influences.  According to Sandy, “IBM Research and MIT’s Sloan School of Management found that the average e-mail contact was worth $948 in revenue.”  They did so by tracking the influence of more than 2,600 IBM consultants’ email address books over the course of a year!

So we all know that social media provides a very efficient way to develop inbound traffic, but what companies do with that traffic is key.  Those that capitalize on their social media efforts find ways to continue the dialog with an audience that expects to be part of a conversation.  It’s important to note here that relevance has just become much more important, since mass marketed messages that have historically been the trademark of email marketing will no longer suffice.  Messages now must provide the personal or targeted conversation that audiences are coming to expect.

So what does that mean for email marketers?  Processes must be refined to accomodate more granular segmentation, triggered emails should be designed to efficiently and accurately respond to certain activities, and more specific nurturing campaigns should take historical behavior or prospect profile characteristics into consideration.  All of these steps are intended to increase the relevance and timeliness of your communications.

I think the amaboston.org social site itself is a good example. It’s a social site (albeit, semi-private) but email notifications play an important part in keeping members informed about what’s going on. In many cases, Myles is writing content to us that we’re likely to find highly relevant, and uses the site to promote the AMA chapter’s objectives, deliver value and ultimately increase membership.

Creating or participating in niche communities within larger public social media sites not only helps with SEO (as many SEO and social media advisors have rightly pointed out) but can also assist with outbound communications as well.  Social media is an opportunity for new prospects to learn your company’s style, perspective and (gasp) value proposition- yes, somewhere in between posts about your latest networking event and why your local Starbucks just doesn’t make ‘em like they used to, you can contribute some real content that’s directly tied to what your organization does.

Social media can actually make your email marketing activities much easier: your participation in a social site gives you the opportunity to discover (or create) new content that’s perfect for a campaign that continues, extends or introduces the conversation to someone that was previously unaware via email.  There is so much more relevant information made available by social media, that there are literally unlimited opportunities to create email marketing messages that deliver value, engage an audience and drive action, all through improved relevance.

I certainly don’t think email marketing is going away, but it’s likely to be held to a higher standard as social media continues to become more influential.

Simple Recipes – Email Campaigns and BBQ Sauce

by redembermarketing on March 28th, 2009

SIMPLE HOMEMADE BBQ SAUCE
1/2 Cup Ketchup
1/2 Cup Honey
1/2 Cup Finely chopped vidalia onion
1/4 Cup Cider or red wine vinegar
1/4 Cup Worchestershire sauce
1/4 Cup Prepared mustard

When it comes to recipes for email marketing, it’s helpful to take a cue from what most great chefs will tell you: “Master simple recipes with fresh ingredients first and only then try mixing in more sophisticated twists and turns.”

Before you go and attempt the marketing equivalent of trying to cook something off the menu of the French Laundry or slicing up some blowfish sashimi, why not tackle and master something basic?  Incredible returns can be gained by effectively executing some simple techniques – in the kitchen or at the office.

Let’s start with the kitchen and take BBQ sauce as an example (finally, some food-appropriate analogies for the blog!)  I often make my own, but depending on how much time I have, I use very different recipes (I have one recipe that has 25 ingredients on it!).

My son, happens to love dipping his chicken/pork/sweet potato fries/… okay he loves to dip everything, including his fingers and apparently, asparagus, in a little dish of sauce.  But he doesn’t need much to be happy.  When I make sauce for him, it consists of some ketchup, brown sugar, a little cider vinegar, liquid smoke, and a little onion powder.  Just 5 ingredients and you have something that rivals the corn syrup concoction that we all have in a plastic bottle on the door of our fridge.  It can be whipped together in 45 seconds, and based on the “mmm’s” and “wow’s” I get when he sees and tastes it, I’d say it’s mission accomplished.  Sometimes, the simpler, the better.

The same thing goes for your email campaigns.  Looking for an email marketing recipe that you can whip together fast with great results?  Segmentation is a simple ingredient you can focus on first and get some serious improvements in performance.  Could it be the Béchamel sauce of email?  Perhaps, but we’re talking BBQ here, right?  Let’s see, maybe it’s the vinegar, since most BBQ sauces usually use vinegar of one sort of another.  Ok, analogy-out-of-control.

It probably won’t take a long look at your inbox before you’ll agree that most emails out there are designed for the masses, but I bet you have some data that can be used to segment your database.  How about: Gender, purchasing history, purchasing frequency, industry, location, interests, etc.  At the very least, you should have some activity history from previous email campaigns.

Think historical email data is just for evaluating campaign performance? Get this: By segmenting their database based on email activity (active, passive, or inactive), AARP was able to re-engage passive or inactive subscribers and increase their active subscribers by 59% by targeting the right messaging to the right people.

So maybe you’re a BBQ purist and getting ready to write a comment explaining to me that real BBQ is the mustard or vinegar variety that are more common down south… well, I enjoy a Carolina pulled pork sandwich as much as the next guy, so I promise to post some simple recipes for those sauces next!

Image credits: MegaBBQ.com

Email marketing to mobile devices

by redembermarketing on March 5th, 2009

One of the more common follow up questions after last week’s MeetUp presentation was how to optimize emails for delivery to mobile devices.  (Victor even posted it on their discussion board)  There are several issues to consider if you think that a large number of your subscribers/contacts are reading their emails on a mobile device.  [And let's face it, they are!]

First, do you know how many or which contacts actually ARE reading your content on a mobile device? That makes a great piece of data to collect from your subscribers since it serves as a good segmentation field. Send mobile-device optimized content to that group, HTML emails to the rest, or perhaps there’s another subgroup that just prefers the plain text email. It’s a simple radio button or check-box option on your sign up form, but could have a huge impact on the effectiveness of your campaigns. Imagine that – asking your customers how they want to receive communications… and then actually listening to them!

Of course, the trade off is that once you move away from HTML emails, you start to lose some analytics resolution your open rates are tied to a tiny image being rendered in the email client. Hence, the discussion that is in progress over at the Email Experience Council who is trying to standardize metric terminology by shifting from “Open Rates” to “Render Rates.” PDF: The Render Rate Call for Action (by the way, can someone tell them to remove the spaces from their document file names?)  You might even choose to forgo your tracking links, since they tend to be long, clogging up valuable space on the mobile device’s small screen with meaningless characters when you really want them to be reading your content or visiting your site.

Hmm, is email marketing starting to sound more complicated than it should? Well, yes and no.

I believe that in many ways, effective email design can be more challenging than general website design nowadays.  With well established standards being adhered to across the 3 or 4 major browsers (browser statistics and browser market share), website development has come a long way over the past 10 years.  Email clients on the other hand, are much more numerous and their ability to render HTML, CSS and other design elements are all over the map (email client statistics).  And now we have mobile devices to deal with!  Email testing services like ReturnPath and LitmusApp are offering ever-better mobile device rendering, but themes, screen sizes, fonts, and preferences can vary widely.

For instance, on my BlackBerry Pearl, I can only see about 9 characters in the “From” name in the email list view, maybe 12 if there are a lot of skinny letters in the name.  But maybe that number increases to 14 or 15 on another device or with another setting.  Then there’s the subject line and the email body to consider.  Some general rules of thumb I’ve found indicate that most text messages display 60 to 80 characters per line (if your email service provider doesn’t already provide a guide to see where those limits are, try using a sticky note on your screen as an easy alternative).  Mobile platforms display somewhere beterrn 20 to 40 characters in 12 to 15 lines per screen (again, this varies based on the device, resolution, themes and selected text styles).   Keep these numbers in mind when you’re composing “chunks” of content to make them easier to read.

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MOBILE DEVICE EMAIL IDEAS
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Tastefully using patterns of characters to identify sections of your text version of your email is certainly one tactic to help users view your emails on mobile devices.  Didn’t that section header catch your attention? Use a typographic device such as repeating characters, but keep in mind that it would be wise to keep them significantly less than the character widths described above to avoid unnecessary breaks, which would pretty much undermine your whole reason for putting them there in the first place.

Why not take the extra step of creating a simple HTML (limit tag usage to paragraph, and font styles) and put a link to that “mobile version” of your email at the top of the message? Simple text like “Mobile Version: URL” would work well.  Most mobile devices’ browsers will display simply-coded content fairly well, and your message will look better than it would in the plain text displayed on the default email client on the device.

Put a short table of contents at the top of the email to provide an incentive for readers to scroll down to that important information you’re sending them.  This might be especially important if your email is on the long side, since long messages tend to get truncated, and readers may need an incentive to wait for the device to download more content.

What do you think?  Have you tried some new ways to help get your message out to mobile devices?

MeetUp presentation on email marketing – 1 week later

by redembermarketing on March 4th, 2009

Last week, I had the opportunity to give my first presentation as Red Ember Marketing titled, Email Marketing, What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You.  It was for the The Boston Area Internet Marketing and Advertising Group last week. I would have posted this earlier, but the blog didn’t even exist yet.  Presenting at this event was actually the stimulus I needed to get moving on launching MarketingBBQ.  I wanted to be conscious of avoiding fear-mongering, I just wanted to open people’s minds to some of the lesser-known nuances that can inhibit the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns.  Based on the questions and comments afterward, people were paying attention and found the information useful (always a good thing!).

Victor, the group organizer, does a great job getting people together, but he’s been stuck in the Tavern in the Square for a while, and from a presenter perspective, it’s not a great venue.  The walls consist of super-high bench-seats, a giant mirror, the front windows, and a wall of black tiles.  There was nowhere to point a projector! Plus, since the staff kept the music on, it was nearly impossible to hear the introductions as we went around the room.  Some friends suggested we check out the Precinct in Somerville, since they have a back room, and based on their music schedule, it looks like Tuesday nights are open.  If anyone has been there and has a comment, let me know.  Another MeetUp Group I attended was the Cambridge SEO Group. This was a VERY well organized group, and I highly recommend checking them out. They meet at the Robbins Library in Arlington, so it’s easy to hear everyone, and they even got a group member to sponsor some food and drink at their last meeting. Everyone headed over to Not Your Average Joe’s after the meeting to continue our conversations. Great group.

It also seems like lots of other smaller marketing firms are now getting into the MeetUp scene.  Although it’s been around for a long time, I only attended my first MeetUp last December.  Within the last 2 months though, two new marketing MeetUps have been started by some local firms:  Brick Marketing and Agency3 are now hosting their own MeetUp Group Meetings. (Agency3’s MeetUp Group) (Brick Marketing’s MeetUp Group)  Personally, I think they should band together and just have one Boston-area Marketing MeetUp.  The messages are all about the same, the consultant/vendor presence is about the same, but if we were doing it as a group effort, we could share the responsibilities of organizing an event each month, increase average attendance and potentially get better sponsorships.  (note to self: contact these guys about the idea).

Anyway, here are the slides I presented on Feb 24th.  Before you criticize me for busy slides, I wanted to make sure they had some on-going value without audio.  There were hard copies handed out at the event, and I wanted them to be a real resource afterward.  I was glad that people were asking for more of them during the event, and none were left behind (cool).