Strategic Guru, Inc. » lead generation

Better Email Marketing Through Reputation Management

Chelsea Junget — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 15:50:37 +0000

To improve the results of your email marketing, it’s important to do everything you can to ensure your company’s reputation is intact. A study by ReturnPath, an email deliverability company, found that 83% of delivery failures are caused by problems with sender reputation.

Here are a few tips to help improve your reputation as a good email citizen:

Set subscriber expectations for the content of the emails and the frequency at which they may expect to be contacted.
Send a welcome message as soon as possible. Express your thanks for subscribing and again reiterate what they can expect to receive and how frequently.
Authenticate your messages through SPF, Sender ID and DK/DKIM.
Use consistent from addresses. Once a recipient has white listed your address, you don’t want to compromise deliverability by changing it.
Use relevant subject lines. You will not build trust by deceiving recipients with bait and switch subject lines.
Use a legitimate physical address in your email to remain CAN-SPAM compliant.
Swiftly honor any unsubscribe requests. You must honor these requests within 10 days; a good email service provider will automate this for you.

Remember, message relevancy builds customer and prospect trust, which in turn delivers greater ROI. You can achieve near-perfect deliverability, but if your message is not relevant to the recipient, engagement will likely be low and not result in conversion.

What does your company do to ensure your reputation is not impacted?

*Image courtesy Flickr user DioMakr

Lead Generation Success Story: Triggered Emails

Chelsea Junget — Mon, 17 May 2010 20:51:20 +0000

Flickr user jbeauchamp

Your email marketing efforts are ticking along at a great pace. You send relevant messages appropriately timed to an opt-in list. Your open rates are good, traffic is delivered to your website and your unsubscribe rates are reasonable. But you are looking for more email marketing strategies for a company to grow.

EmailInsider suggests considering trigger-based messages. They are right-time; right recipient messages that only reach a fraction of your total email list but deliver highly personalized messages. Examples include: welcome emails, cart abandonment, shipping updates and follow ups from customer service. Demographic triggers might include: birthday, wedding anniversary, location and age messages.

While the volume on trigger messages may be low, they are so precisely targeted that they can deliver significant ROI and be considered a true lead generation success story:

A travel site generates 45% of its email profits from triggered messages that make up only 5% of their message volume.
A uniforms seller generates 25 times the revenue as a regular broadcast email from birthday email messages.
An online specialty-products retailer discovered that 40% of their email revenue is attributed to triggered messages, which makes up around 4% of their email volume.

Sound overwhelming? It needn’t be. These messages, once optimized properly, can be automated. Get started by analyzing the data contained in your subscriber list; do you have what you need? If not, consider ways you can fill in the gaps. And, ABT (always be testing). Try a few different things when developing triggered messages. Copy, design and subject lines all play into the effectiveness of all email marketing.

How are you implementing trigger-based or other automated messaging?

Email Marketing Strategies: Writing Great Subject Lines

Chelsea Junget — Thu, 06 May 2010 18:32:14 +0000

MailChimp.com, an email marketing service provider, recently published a great guide to writing effective email subject lines. As most recipients use the subject line to decide whether to open an email or delete, understanding what kinds of subject lines are likely to deliver high open rates is essential to your marketing strategy. Of course, an open rate is affected by several other factors such as your list, your audience and more.

See below for actual statistics and subject lines as well as MailChimp’s take on why they work or don’t. Note: all names have been changed in the subject lines.

Subject Lines With Top Open Rates
Subject Line	Open Rate	Comment
Preliminary Floor Plans for Southern Village Neighborhood Circle Members	93%	Timely information. Implied benefit for quick action. Over 50 characters in length
Your April Website Stats	92.6%	Timely and useful information
Idlewild Camp – Important Travel Information	90.1%	Information I need now
Invitation for Murdoch, Brown, Rove & Johnson’s Snow Ball	89.7	Party invitation. Personal and timely
MotorCycling Magazine Reader Survey	88.1%	High affinity to activity/experience
Announcing Paige Elizabeth Sullivan	82.6%	Birth Announcement: Personal and useful information
Ship’s Log #5: Parus Arrives in Phuket	82.1%	Personal and timely
Nautica in Rutland Opens Soon!	79.9%	New condos – valuable information to be first in line
Updated Time Zones & Log On Information	79.1%	Required information

Inside Football: Summer Training Camp Preview Issue	74.3%	Timely and useful information

Subject Lines With Low Open Rates
Subject Line	Open Rate	Comment
Final reminder for complimentary entry to attend the West Freelands BCI Cluster Conference 2006	0.5%	Reminder and subject is too long
Tempting August NUSA Specials!	0.9%	Special, exclamation mark
SALE ends soon – up to 50% off all bras at Kara!	1.9%	Percent Off
Help Baylor create the ideal college experience	2.5%	Help – means ignore
Printers World Offers 100% Commission Up Front	7.5%	Too good to be true
3% Commission For You, $10,000 in Upgrades For Your Client	7.8%	Bait & Switch
Help Spread The News !	10.8%	Help
Don’t Let 2006 Slip Away Without a Tax Deductible Donation To the Children & Families of Omire	11.6%	Donation and too long

A couple of take-aways: It appears that long subject lines deliver low open rates – but long subject lines when they have an implied benefit work.

Percentage off, discount and other number figures listed in email subject lines may deliver lower open rates. It may be better to focus on the value of the offer enclosed in the email rather than the deal.

Of course, test, test and test again. What works in your industry and among your recipients is what truly matters. If you have not already, take a look at your email marketing statistics over the past 9-12 months and compare subject lines and open/click rates. A pattern may emerge that will help you refine your email marketing strategy for even better results.

Read the full post.

Email Leads in Lead Generation and Conversion

Chelsea Junget — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 21:26:17 +0000

Despite the growth of Twitter and Facebook as places where users connect with their social circle, a recent study from e-mail service provider StrongMail shows that e-mail sharing drives conversions best as compared to Facebook and Twitter.

A few interesting statistics:

86% of sharing activity related to social programs run on StrongMail in Q3 2009 was done via email.
Content was shared via Facebook only 6% of the time
About 4% of sharing was via Twitter
Although content shared on Twitter received more clicks, content shared by email was most likely to lead to purchases and other conversions.

The takeaway here is that email is a powerful lead generation tactic. Think of email as a kind of referral marketing. Make it easy for your recipients to share and give them relevant, timely content.

Here is an action step to take today: be sure your email campaigns have a “forward to a friend” feature installed (many email marketing programs provide this –check it’s enabled).

Click for more posts on lead generation.

*Image courtesy of Flickr user ryancr

My Sales Pipeline is Constipated!

Chelsea Junget — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 18:10:57 +0000

This post from LinkedIn resonated with us, wanted to share some thoughts on keeping the sales pipeline moving…

The analysts are, in increasing numbers, starting to tout the end of the recession, but for most of us, it still seems quite slow out there. Even if you’re the most talented salesperson, you probably have noticed that an annoying number of your prospects are stuck in your pipeline. Ok, it’s not the most polite way to phrase this, but you could be suffering from a case of sales constipation. No, a swig of milk of magnesia isn’t going to do the job here, but there are strategies to get you moving along again. Here’s how:

Keep Filling and Replenishing Your Pipeline

You want to make sure that your pipeline is continuously being filled and replenished with qualified prospects. By always having individuals at different stages of the sales process, you’ll consistently have some that are coming through as new business.

Stay On Their Grid

The sales cycle has become much longer for almost everyone. It can be easy to drop off of a prospect’s radar if you’re not diligent about your touch-point management. Fine-tune a program that utilizes phone, email, snail mail, as well as the three I’s – invitations, introductions, and information.

Don’t Give Up

Patience is needed more than ever right now. Yes, you might feel like throwing in the towel with a prospect who seems to relish sitting on the fence and stringing you along. You might even feel like expressing your personal opinion to them about their inability to make a decision. However, keep this in mind. You will never reclaim any of your return on time if you give up. So, hang in there. You’ll be glad that you did.

Realize That It Might Not Be the Economy

The recession has become a great excuse for prospects who just don’t want to tell you that they didn’t see value in what you were offering. Find out if this is what’s causing the stall. If it is a cash flow issue, you might need to hang on a little longer. If it’s really a problem with how you presented your product or service, you might need to refine your own strategies and techniques.

Don’t fall into the trap of blaming everything on the economy. There are salespeople who are successfully acquiring new business each and every day. By following these four steps, you’ll help jumpstart your pipeline to get you back on track as the recession subsides.

Used courtesy of Adrian Miller, Sales trainer & consultant; NYC-based, nationwide clients across every industry.

Image credit: Flickr user mandolin davis

Looking for Marketing that Works?

Chelsea Junget — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 20:32:54 +0000

Inbound marketing are the tactics to help web searchers find your site, engage with content and generate leads. Gone are the days that a static website operates as a digital company brochure – your website can be a lead generation machine!

Here are a few tips to keep in mind:

Because your homepage likely receives the most traffic of any page of your site, it is very important to have a compelling call to action that will attract the attention of visitors. To entice these folks to convert, invite the visitor access a white paper, sign up for a webinar, or similar. Put the offer behind a simple request form and deliver the content automatically and immediately. Voila! New, hot leads!
However, this content needs to be compelling. Remember, visitors are smart and keenly aware that giving up their contact information is likely going to land them on an email or call list. But you can overcome this hesitation by offering them something really interesting. How-to guides, survey results, “kits”, checklists and other materials can be easy to create at a low cost. Keep your target market in mind throughout. It’s not about what you have to say, it’s about what your audience wants to know.
Your company should have a presence somewhere in the social media world. And let your website visitors decide how they want to connect with you there – whether it is on Twitter, LinkedIn or elsewhere. Growing your social following also helps improve rank in some search results. And a loyal band of followers will help you spread the above-mentioned content around the web and continue the lead generation gravy train!

Get more help with your social media marketing strategy with our whitepaper, The Truth About Social Media Marketing

Gingerbread LittleVersity postcard

admin — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 21:27:57 +0000

Phase3 Communications holiday purl campaign

admin — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 22:26:31 +0000

Just Push Print holiday purl campaign

admin — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 22:26:11 +0000

Lead Generation Tactic – Webinars!

Chelsea Junget — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 16:59:44 +0000

A webinar is an interactive web-based seminar used to give, receive and discuss information. They are an excellent way to convey information to a broad and diverse geographical area at a low cost and can be a useful tactic to generate leads. According to Henry DeVries, marketing coach and writer specializing in lead generation, the #1 lead generation tactic is seminars/webinars!

The execution of a webinar requires planning, preparation and organization. WorkSmart runs a number of webinars for various organizations and businesses and recently discussed the 10 Best Practices for How to Organize a Webinar on their blog.

Pick a topic that will resonate in your industry or among current clients. Have there been any changes to the industry? New legislation? Industry trends? The best webinars are informative, lively and will be perceived as valuable to the target audience. Here at Strategic Guru, our webinars on the nuts and bolts of social media have been well-received in the past.

We couldn’t agree more that practice, practice, practice is extremely important. This is a good way to work out all the kinks and become more comfortable with what you’re speaking about. Be sure to test your platform multiple times to be sure technical difficulties are avoided. Holding a mock webinar and presenting to a colleague using all your tools is essential.

Another good tip is to be confident. Yes, rehearsing your talk helps with confidence, but you need to believe in what you’re speaking about and sell it to your audience.

As the linked blog post above notes, engaging your participants is crucial. Keep the participants interested by asking questions and lead them to pursue further information. Webinars are a great way to engage potential customers, rather than just blasting your message out. Remember, social media is a two-way street.

For more information on planning and executing a great webinar, check this out: 10 Steps to Running a Knockout Webinar!