December 12, 2007
SUMMARY: When you outsource marketing to an agency, you expect them to handle most of the work. But that doesn’t let you off the hook in your marketing. Far from it.
You remain a key partner with the agency, which means you have to be a great communicator … and that takes effort. See what the head of one marketing agency says they need from their clients to work effectively. Plus, tips on how to help your marketing by helping your agency.
Communication between your company and your marketing agency is critical. You need to tell them what’s working, what’s not and how your customers react so they can create the best possible marketing plan for you. And you need to heed your agency’s counsel.
You might say: “Why wouldn’t I listen to my agency’s advice? After all, I hired them.” You would think that’s always the case, but ego and stubbornness often interfere.
Rich Carr, Founder and CEO, Carr Knowledge, for instance, has had clients refuse his advice on many occasions. “You know, it’s almost as obvious as you know you have to drive on the right-hand side of the road and when the lights are red you need to stop. They were saying, ‘Well, you don’t necessarily have to drive on the right, and we don’t see lights.’ And it’s like, do you want to be in the car with them? Well, hell no. Go crash.”
To avoid accidents, Carr has 10 strategies and suggestions on how clients can communicate better with their agencies:
Give Your Agency Lots of Information
When you first hire a marketing agency, you must provide a great deal information. The more you provide, the more the agency can help you:
->Tip #1. Have a goal
The first question Carr asks every new client is: “What are we celebrating this time next year?” This goal serves as the focal point around which an agency builds a marketing effort. It could be anything, including:
o Increase sales
o Boost market share
o Sell a certain product
o Sell through a certain channel
o Other
If your goal is one of the above, make sure it’s tied to an exact percentage. Without that benchmark, your goal will be too vague to be targeted and met. “If you have no idea of where you’re going, you’re not going to get there. And if all the people that work for you don’t know what that goal is, then they’re just showing up at work and waiting until 5 o’clock to go home. Everybody has to be working for this goal,” Carr says.
-> Tip #2. Hand over all your sales and marketing information
Before you meet with the agency, have enough information to answer any questions they might have; it needs it to give you a thorough investigation. “To use an analogy, it’s as if you’re a high school athlete and I’m going to give you a physical,” Carr says. “I mean I’m going to know everything about your business.”
This includes:
o Prior marketing efforts, including duration, cost and ROI
o Sales information broken down by source, location and item
o Know what types of marketing work for you and what don’t
“Most businesses have their P&L [profit and loss statement], they live by their P&L,” Carr says. “And we can go through that and ask questions like, ‘What happened when you did this?’ ‘What are your best sales months?’ ‘What do you do during those months?’ ‘What do you say you’re doing during those months?’ I mean literally dissect everything that works.”
When asking these questions, Carr and his clients often stumble into things that work better.
->Tip #3. Leave your ego at home
By hiring an agency, you’ve admitted that your marketing needs help. Keep your ego out of the relationship. Don’t withhold information that makes your earlier marketing look better or stronger. Provide accurate information and numbers. The more honest information you can provide, the more the agency can help.
Offer Feedback
After your marketing plan is up and running, continue to provide feedback. This will help the agency discover new tactics and learn which campaigns are working and which aren’t.
“Generally, they’re just discussions. Think of your doctor. You go in there, ‘How are you feeling.’ ‘Well, everything’s great, except when I do this, it hurts.’ It’s the same thing with marketing. We talk a lot, just like, ‘How are things going? How are you feeling about stuff? How’s this location?’ ” says Carr.
Types of information an agency wants includes:
- Sales
Your sales figures are usually the first numbers most agencies want after your new marketing campaigns begin, Carr says. “We want to see what happens right away with the till, because, again, what we’re here to do is sell more stuff.”
Keep track of your change in sales. Whether the change is positive, negative or flat, provide the information so the agency can adjust your marketing plan accordingly.
- Company and customer buzz
Many agencies involve every type of employee in a marketing campaign. For example, some of Carr’s restaurant clients have their wait staff collecting email addresses from customers. That’s a change in the customers’ and the employees’ experience, and it will cause a reaction.
Whatever the reactions, pass them along to the agency. The information will help it implement future campaigns.
- Ideas
Typically, an agency is not in your office or in your stores, so it’s not in your environment. You have to be the eyes and ears for the agency.
If there’s an event in your area that could be incorporated into marketing, for instance, pass the idea along. Is your competition doing something that you’re interested in? Send a quick email. Tell the agency about any ideas you have.
“For example, Seattle is putting in this new street car, it’s like a trolley. It’s a big deal for Seattle, it’s nice. It ends up, one of our [restaurant] clients happens to be right toward the end of the line of the proposed street car route. He originally pinged us saying, ‘Hey, did you know they’re putting in a street car, and, you know, we should find out some information about it,’ because he’s in touch with that … [Now,] when the street car makes its first run here next week, it does not only end up right in front of his particular business, but he’s advertising in the street car, he’s on the street car maps, which are all over Seattle, and there’s an offer that once they get off the street car and come and eat at his place … they get a free appetizer. It’s little, but it just started with a ‘Hey, did you know.’ ”
Send Ideas & Concerns
To get into quick contact with your agency, the best way is to send an email.
“I would say email is probably our primary communication tool. Clients say ‘Hey, I was thinking about this. … Take a look at this. … I think we should do this.’ ” Get some interchanges going back and forth. Schedule a conference call. If the conference call goes well, schedule a meeting. If the meeting goes well, implement the strategy and make it happen.
“If you’re driving home and you’re stuck in rush-hour traffic, you look at a billboard for root beer — and all of a sudden you’re thinking of a great way to sell. The greatest thing you can do with that little flash is call or email me what just happened and say, ‘You know, is there anything we can do with that?’ ”
Listen to Your Agency
Agencies are hired usually because they know more about marketing than their clients – so, listen to your agency’s advice. Many marketers ignore common sense; they have a hard time letting go of favorite tactics.
With one client, “it was one element of their email marketing campaign, where they wanted emails to go out [in a certain way]. Well, we know how to get an email delivered to an inbox. There are certain things you have to do. There are best practices. … [They started] getting bad flags from IPs because they’re sending out these giant images and PDFs … and their opt-out rates would increase every time an email went out. Eventually, we just said we’re done,” says Carr.
“We found it much easier to, rather than fight with a client like that … just get rid of them and spend that time and resource on somebody who does want to improve.”
Useful links related to this article
Carr Knowledge LLC:
http://www.carrknowledge.com/
From Marketing Sherpa
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.html?ident=30250
Posted by copiasolaris under Interviews | Comments (0)
November 23, 2007
SUMMARY: Wholesalers who supply products to independent retailers still depend on face-to-face meetings as their bread and butter even as ecommerce evolves. But one national wholesaler has embraced the Internet to boost orders for their reps.
See the steps they followed to create an email newsletter program. Retailers who subscribe are ordering 36% more often than those who don’t, plus their orders are 13% larger.
Even as ecommerce evolves, wholesalers for independent retail stores — often known as mom-and-pop stores — still live and die by their sales reps. One wholesale marketer wanted to see what could be done online, particularly with a targeted newsletters, to better connect their 60,000 customers with their field reps while keeping the sales force in the loop.
“The tradition in this industry is for the manufacturers to produce a print catalog, to ship these catalogs to their sales representatives and to ship some samples,” says Suzy Teele, Marketing Strategy Consultant, OneCoast. “The sales representative [then has] to load that into his or her car, drive to a retailer’s store, hope that the retailer … has some time to sit down with us and look through this catalog, usually while the store is open. For about 40 years, this is how the entire industry, not just OneCoast, sold.”
OneCoast helps their retail clients stock their shelves with wares from more than 400 manufacturers in the home decor, gift and collegiate markets. Direct, face-to-face sales make up 80% of their annual revenue. With such a high percentage of sales coming from field salespeople, any online marketing strategy has to include them as a central component.
Teele knew that email marketing could drive more retailers to their regional sales reps, who could then generate more sales, so she and her team developed an email newsletter program that sent tips on better retail management practices and feature manufacturers’ products. The newsletters also prominently displayed their regional sales representatives.
Response from retailers who received OneCoast’s Advisor newsletter has been significant.
- Retailers order 36% more often than those who don’t subscribe to the newsletter.
- Their orders are 13% larger.
- Overall sales to the average retailer are 54% higher with those who receive email than those who don’t, says Jeremy Hirsch, VP Marketing, OneCoast.
Creating a Newsletter - 6 Tips
Here are tips from Hirsch and Teele on how to create an email newsletter that encourages face-to-face sales to retailers:
-> Tip #1. Send targeted emails
If your sales reps are separated by region, target your subscribers by region. If your sales reps are separated by product type, target your retailers in the same way. This focuses on the sales rep that your customer should deal with.
“We don’t drive [our customers] to the Web site. We drive them to their specific sales person,” Hirsch says.
-> Tip #2. Advertise your vendors’/manufacturers’ products
Don’t rent out advertising space in your email to third parties. Instead, use the space to sell your manufacturers’ products. One way is to promote their discount offers and promotions for holiday items.
-> Tip #3. Send timely information
“Our industry tends to be four to six months ahead of when you see [seasonal products] in stores,” Teele says. This means retailers start thinking about Christmas in July. Your email newsletter should reflect that thinking.
-> Tip #4. Include useful, specific and concise information
Retailers are busy. Many are on the sales floor by day and manage their business by night. They don’t have time to read long-winded or irrelevant information. The content in your newsletters must be to the point and useful.
-> Tip #5. Create an attractive email
Your email newsletter should look as good as it is functional when it’s marketing to retailers. It is a sales tool, after all. “This industry is very fashion-oriented, so the email can’t be just functional. It has to be pretty flashy,” says Teele.
Consider going outside for help from an agency specializing in enewsletters if you don’t have a creative department.
-> Tip #6. Keep sales reps in the loop
When your business depends on your sales representatives, it’s important to make them feel comfortable. You don’t want them to think you’re pushing them aside for a Web site.
“Many sales people, whether it’s this industry or other industries, are afraid of the Internet because they think it’s going to replace them. We would never expect that to happen in our industry, because at the end of the day, it’s all about human relationships, and we look at the Internet as augmenting that human relationship,” Teele said.
6 Strategies for Sales Reps
Here are six strategies to ensure that your online effort includes and promotes your sales reps:
-> Strategy #1. Compensate sales reps fairly
OneCoast sells products through four different channels:
o Web
o Phone
o In-person
o Product shows
Their reps are compensated equally across all channels for any sales coming from their active accounts. “If [the rep has] sold to that customer once in two years, that’s an active account. If it’s a new customer, then [the rep] won’t get it the first time, but if they go to visit that customer, then it becomes an active account, and they’ll get [a commission] from that point on,” says Teele.
This policy is important because it helps your sales reps feel supported by your company, and makes them want to evangelize your company’s Web site.
-> Strategy #2. Notify reps of new customers in their region
OneCoast’s Web site is a big driver of new sales leads. A third of their online orders come from first-time purchasers, who are then contacted to sale reps.
Make sure you alert sales reps to new buyers in their territory so they can follow up and make it an active account. This earns them commissions, and helps them sell more products.
-> Strategy #3. Communicate regularly with sales reps
Always let your salespeople know when their retailers are being contacted. This will help them coordinate their sales approach and keep them from sounding “out of the loop” when talking to their clients.
-> Strategy #4. Mention your rep as part of any communication with a retailer
Your sales reps should be a part of any message mailed, phoned or emailed to retailers. Messages should be sent on behalf of your sales reps. This will help coax retailers to contact the sales reps and not just place orders.
-> Strategy #5. Add a sales representative locator to your Web site
Your Web site is a customer resource. If a Web-savvy retailer has a question about your company, they’re likely to check your homepage before making a call.
Include a tool on the site that locates a sales rep in a retailer’s area. It will expedite the sales process and avoid frustrating potential buyers. This can be done with a simple tool, like OneCoast’s Find Your Rep; it accepts a ZIP Code and returns a list of sales reps for the area.
-> Strategy #6. Provide online tools to the sales rep
OneCoast offers the Web service My OneCoast to its sales people. The service lists new orders and new Web site registrations that have come from the rep’s territory. It’s another way for the reps to generate leads from the Web site and view it as a benefit to their jobs and the company.
Useful links related to this article
Creative samples from OneCoast’s email program:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/cs/onecoast/study.html
Past Sherpa articles -
Eretailer Tripled Conversions with Internal Search Changes:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=29965
How Eretailer Doubled Conversions With Better Web Analytics - 5 Real-Life Tactics:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=29862
OneCoast:
http://onecoast.com/
From Marketing Sherpa
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.html?ident=30209
Posted by copiasolaris under Interviews | Comments (0)
July 27, 2007
SUMMARY: Marketers have so many fancy online options at their fingertips, they forget how useful (and successful) telemarketing can be for lead generation. So many don’t follow the right rules or give up too soon.
We have exclusive new data and strategies to help you to make the right calls in your next campaign. Includes:
-> How many attempts it takes to complete a conversation with a C-level executive
-> Nurturing a lead through the entire process
-> A sample voicemail message
Business-to-business telemarketing has survived every technology that’s come along in recent years. Even with the development of the Web, email and now Web 2.0 as marketing tools, the telephone still remains a crucial piece of a B-to-B lead generation strategy.
Why? Telemarketing works. Business prospects surveyed by MarketingSherpa earlier this year were surprisingly positive about the telemarketing experience:
o 53% said they added a technology vendor to their database for consideration after receiving a cold call
o 40% said they invited vendors to provide additional information by phone or electronically
It’s clear that prospects respond to a well-conducted telemarketing effort. But with so much pressure to try sexy new lead generation tools, some marketers might not be paying enough attention to this old-school tactic. “People are using telemarketing, so how can you make sure you’re doing it right?” asks Kathy Rizzo, VP Marketing, TeleNet Marketing Solutions. “What are some things you need to look at to make sure you’re not becoming complacent?”
To answer these questions, Rizzo and her team conducted a survey of 205 B-to-B marketers in Q4 2006-Q1 2007 and analyzed thousands of telemarketing campaign records in their database. Based on some key findings of this research, we have identified five tips to help you tweak your own telemarketing campaigns for maximum effectiveness:
-> Tip #1. More calls to fewer, more targeted contacts
Conventional wisdom in the telemarketing industry says that failing to connect with a prospect within three or four calls means it’s time to move on. But Rizzo says marketers who give up after three calls are missing out on prime opportunities.
Analyzing their database of completed telemarketing records, Rizzo’s team found:
- The average number of telemarketing attempts required to complete a conversation is 3.68.
- For C-level executives, it takes roughly seven calls to connect.
What’s more, the rate at which return on investment starts to diminish for call attempts (and getting completed interviews) is higher than most people expect:
- The average number of telemarketing attempts for the daily call returns to start dropping is 5.76.
- For C-level executives, it’s not until 12 call attempts that daily call returns start dropping.
This means that it takes an average of four calls to connect for most contacts. Yet, many marketers still start with a large list and try to touch every name on it — often by limiting the number of attempts per name to only two or three calls.
Instead, given tight marketing budgets, Rizzo suggests that marketers spend more up-front time analyzing their list of names to find the best prospects, then making a minimum of four calls. “It’s the difference between taking a shotgun approach — calling all names one or two times — and being really more strategic about your contact list.”
-> Tip #2. Develop a voicemail strategy
Further analyzing their call records, Rizzo’s team found that nearly 75% of all calls reach a prospect’s voicemail. Yet, there is surprisingly little focus among marketers on improving their voicemail messages.
Most marketers spend a great deal of time — as they should — on telemarketing scripts that guide phone reps through key questions and outline offers of significant value for prospects. But when it comes to voicemail messages, most take a generic approach, such as, “Hi. I’m calling on behalf of Company X, and we saw that you downloaded a recent white paper on X topic. I’m calling to follow up and see if you have any additional questions I can answer for you.”
Messages like this don’t give prospects a compelling reason to call back. “People download a lot of white papers,” Rizzo says, “and they don’t tend to follow up on a telemarketing call 24 hours later, let alone weeks or months later.” Instead, she recommends creating a Critical Business Issue message that truly captures a prospect’s attention.
The good news is that the focus of this voicemail is probably the same industry pain point or value proposition contained in your telemarketing script.
-> Tip #3. What’s in a Critical Business Issue voicemail
Specifically, a CBI voice mail message should:
- Be no longer than 45 seconds long.
- Mention an industry pain point or issue that the prospect is likely to have.
- Describe a solution your company offers that can address that issue and offer additional resources, such as a case study relevant to their industry, another white paper or webinar or a product demonstration.
- Mention the prospect’s name twice, at the beginning of the call and at the end.
- Offer a callback number twice, also at the beginning and end of the message.
A sample CBI voicemail could sound something like this approach, which Rizzo might use to contact prospects for their lead nurturing service:
“Hello, John. This is Kathy with TeleNet Marketing Solutions. My phone number is X. The reason for my call is that we’re experiencing a dramatic growth in the area of lead nurturing because a primary challenge among marketing managers is seeing their leads fall into a black hole when they’re passed along to sales staff too early. If you share that challenge, I’d like to pass along our methodology to you. Please feel free to contact me at X phone number. Thank you, John.”
“Ideally, you want them to call you back. But even if they don’t call you back, next time you contact them they may remember who you are because your voicemail caught their attention,” Rizzo says.
-> Tip #4. Assign different telemarketing teams to different tasks
Companies can use telemarketing to support a range of projects, including registering people for an event, following up on prospects who downloaded a white paper or viewed a webinar and setting appointments for salespeople. But assigning this workload to one group of phone agents won’t yield the best results.
In fact, Rizzo’s survey of technology marketers found a trend among companies to assign specialized tasks to different telemarketing teams. Nearly 30% of companies currently using telemarketing said they planned to evaluate telemarketing vendors within the next 12 months.
Of that group, 55% primarily used an in-house team, but were looking to external sources for specialized activities:
- 25% of the companies said they were evaluating vendors to help an internal telesales team that is handling “too much,” and needed to become more focused by offloading specialized projects.
- 29% of companies said they were evaluating vendors to supplement internal teams during the volume peaks that come with special projects.
Whether you choose to employ an internal team, an external team or both, it makes sense to assign teams different tasks depending on the skill set that is needed for the conversation. For example, a high skill level may be needed for lead nurturing projects, which form long-term relationships with prospects to check in on current needs and provide appropriate marketing information over time. The type of conversation required when following up on a response to a white paper might call for a less skilled phone agent.
The key is to make sure there is good communication between the teams and a way to integrate different databases, so prospects can be passed along to different teams or to the sales group without losing data. “You want different teams doing different tasks, but you don’t want to silo information,” Rizzo says.
-> Tip #5. Follow-up tactics and the big picture
A telemarketing mistake Rizzo often sees is teams that are too focused on an immediate goal and not on the long-term marketing potential of a telephone conversation. “There is so much time and attention spent on locating the ‘hot’ lead or appointment among your prospects, that it’s easy to bypass having quality conversations with qualified prospects who are not ready to buy.”
Indeed, when MarketingSherpa recently asked technology decision makers about their key concerns with telemarketing calls, the second-most important factor (after respecting the prospect’s time) was that callers listen to what they say and follow up with relevant information.
To encourage teams to stay focused on opportunities that deliver relevant follow-up information to prospects who aren’t sales-ready, Rizzo recommends developing a prospect profile. The prospect profile is developed by telesales reps asking key questions and should be broken down by two types of information.
Details that you need to know to determine qualification:
o Is the person a decision maker
o In the right industry
o From the right size organization
o In the market for a new product or service
o Ready to buy, with a timeline and budget in place
Details that are nice to know:
o What vendor/solution are they currently using
o What business factors would make them seek a new vendor
o What are the most important industry challenges they face
o What kind of information is most useful to them when making a buying decision
You don’t have to capture all this data on the first call. If a prospect isn’t a hot lead, a good conversation that delivers some of the need to know/nice to know information will create openings for additional contacts or nurturing over time.
If you know what business factors or industry issues are most influential to a prospect’s buying decision, you can offer to send additional white papers or invite them to a webinar on relevant topics. If you know what vendor a prospect is currently using, you can target the person with a competitive marketing campaign that offers case studies or product information that outlines the advantages of your company.
“The data captured in the profile will prepare you to deploy nurturing strategies and can provide key market intelligence to aid your next marketing campaign,” Rizzo says.
Useful links related to this article
TeleNet Marketing Solutions:
http://www.telenetmarketing.com
From Marketing Sherpa
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.html?ident=30060
Posted by copiasolaris under Interviews | Comments (0)
April 14, 2007
SUMMARY: If you think the world is oversaturated with newsletters on every subject imaginable, think again. Endless niches exist that publishers aren’t taking advantage of, says an exec who has helped develop newsletters for two organizations with millions of subscribers.
Why not? Although there are barriers to overcome, the results are worth it. Includes tips on building your list, advertising and content, analysis and segmentation and costs involved.
Rather than use an email newsletter as a marketing tool or as an add-on for existing customers and subscribers, a small group of publishers has made the newsletter itself the primary business and, as a result, turned it into a massive, ad-supported revenue machine. The idea seems simple: you build a huge list of opt-in email addresses, deliver relevant daily content and then offer ad space.
Some of the most successful companies in this market include BeliefNet, with 12.57 million subscribers, and LifeScript, with 6 million+. With the potential for each name to return double or quadruple the amount spent to acquire it, these businesses can have a quick path to profitability, says Sujay Jhaveri, CEO Flatiron Media, who spent time at Beliefnet and iVillage.
In fact, Jhaveri says the business model will become more compelling as the costs of other traffic-generating techniques, such as paid search, continue to increase. “Compare the two models. You just spent 50 cents to get someone to click on a search ad. Unless you do something with that person on the first visit, they’re gone and there’s no way of reaching out to them again. In the case of a newsletter, you’ve spent 50 cents to acquire a name with permission to send them content on a regular basis and drive them to your site. It’s a much more cost-effective model.”
So, why isn’t everyone pumping out mass-market newsletters?
For starters, a handful of significant (but surmountable) barriers exist — from staffing and infrastructure requirements to a savvy approach to analyzing email metrics. No worry, in our exclusive interview, Jhaveri offers tips to handle seven of the most critical issues in the newsletter business:
Tip #1. Steady supply of names
If you’re trying to create a standalone newsletter, you’ll need 500,000 to 1 million subscribers to attract attention from advertisers, Jhaveri says. The only way to get there is to work with consumer lead generation sites to collect opt-in names.
Working with companies such as Q Interactive, CoregMedia and Webclients, you can put a checkbox on a suite of websites where consumers can opt in to receive your content. Starting from zero seems daunting, but assuming that you have high-interest content with a broad target market, you can collect 1 million to 2 million names a month through such channels, he says.
But be prepared to pay for those names: each opt-in can cost between 40 cents to $1.00. Still, each dollar spent can return $2 to $4 in advertising revenue, says Jhaveri, and you can recoup your investment in as little as eight weeks.
Name acquisition remains a perpetual task to grow the business and replace lost names due to unsubscribes or hard bounces. Although Jhaveri says the rate of name attrition varies widely depending on the product, MarketingSherpa data has found that large lists experience 38% annual attrition.
To counter-act this, you must develop a consistent marketing plan to add new names based on those attrition rates and on the performance of different lists from different sources (more on this later). “You don’t want to add 5 million names this month and nothing next month.”
Tip #2. Appealing content
Obviously, the content has to be appealing to get people to opt in and open your newsletters. Fortunately, Jhaveri says it’s not hard to find a category or subject to tackle. Here are his suggestions on content development:
o Subjects with high interest to a large swath of consumers. Many successful newsletters tackle topics such as health, family, entertainment, food, fashion or beauty.
o Frequent delivery. A daily newsletter is the best model because it gives advertisers the most opportunities to put their offers in front of readers.
o Short, valuable content. Delivering something daily means you want to give subscribers small bites of information that they’re likely to open. Jhaveri suggests no more than 300 to 500 words. Those bites have to be appealing, though, so the most successful models usually employ a service or entertainment model (e.g., a health tip of the day, a daily recipe or a famous quotation).
Tip #3. Ad sales strategy
Once you have a list and a product, you need to attract advertisers to begin making money. Here are a few strategies for designing your advertising model:
- Balance the amount of content and advertising. There’s no formula for the right number of ads in a newsletter, so you’ll need to test a range of different sizes and placements. BeliefNet offers five ad sizes in four positions, for example.
Jhaveri says the 300 x 250 has been the best performing size for newsletters, but, depending on design, the addition of 728 x 90 banners and other smaller ads makes sense, too. You can also offer text ads to increase revenue without cluttering the page.
- Either build your own sales staff to sell ads or turn to an outside rep firm to handle sales for you. Startups likely will have to use an outside firm to sell ads while building their business, which means your margins will be lower.
But Jhaveri cautions that you need to have revenue in the millions of dollars annually, as well as the internal ability to support a sales organization, which not only requires a staff but management and other operational support.
- For companies with existing websites or other ad-supported products, newsletter ads can be sold separately or bundled with other placements. The right approach depends on the size and demographics of the newsletter audience and whether it offers different characteristics from your other products that would appeal to different advertisers.
Tip #4. Staff to prepare the newsletter
There is a host of ways to generate content, depending on the nature of the company developing the newsletter:
- Publishers with existing content on a website or in a print publication can repurpose it and push it out to a new list of subscribers in a newsletter.
- Companies without existing content can hire staff or freelancers to write newsletters.
- For health newsletters and other specialized subjects, publishers should license content from reputable sources.
- Free content is available for repurposing, too, such as books in the public domain or the Bible.
The cost of content development will vary depending on the model you choose, but Jhaveri says paying writers or licensing content won’t be a significant expense compared to other needs, such as name acquisition or infrastructure.
Still, this doesn’t mean you can just slap anything into a newsletter and expect the model to work. “Users can tell if they’re dealing with cookie-cutter content or something with unique value.”
Tip #5. Own your email infrastructure
Here’s where some of the bigger challenges arise. While it’s easy to create content and gather names, pumping out millions of emails a day is a different story. With the growing complexity of spamming regulations and individual ISPs’ anti-spam measures, you need an infrastructure and in-house, technical know-how to handle issues, such as throttling rules (how many messages can be sent per IP address in a given period of time).
For the most part, email service providers can’t handle the task — or can’t handle it affordably when you factor in the cost to send millions of messages. “Every ESP says they can offer a better deal, but, ultimately, you don’t want to have a significant piece of your cost structure in email delivery. You want to spend your money on your marketing expenses.”
This means you need to buy your own hardware and software, including:
- Mail transfer agent servers. These are used to send the emails, staggering mailings to handle issues such as ISP throttling rules and handling multiple sending IP addresses. Each unit, which costs $10,000-$40,000, can typically handle 500,000 to 1 million messages an hour. Vendors include StrongMail and IronPort.
- Campaign management software. This is the intelligence behind the system. It segments the database based on any number of factors, picks the right lists and right IP addresses, inserts the right creative and handles all the tracking and reporting tools.
Unfortunately, Jhaveri says, no off-the-shelf product does the job properly, which means custom development. “The more sophisticated you get, the more likely you’re going to have to build you own code.”
Tip #6. Deep analysis of email metrics
Owning a powerful database and tracking tools plays into what is perhaps the most important aspect of running a successful newsletter business: the ability to track data and analyze metrics.
Some of the analysis is fairly straightforward. You need to track basic metrics, such as deliverability rates, opens, clickthroughs, etc. The analysis gets trickier in relation to your marketing efforts.
One of the most important tasks is analyzing the quality of the names you’re acquiring so you can determine which co-registration sources are giving you the best results and which ones you should stop using. The idea is to keep track of how much you’re spending on names from different sources and then see how those names perform over a period of three to six months.
Here, you must be able to segment your list by acquisition source and the date you acquired the names to track and compare factors, such as:
o Open rates
o Clickthroughs
o Unsubscribe rates
o Ad revenue per list
o Payback rate
o Lifetime value
Tip #7. Manage offers
Besides helping determine sources of quality names, this kind of tracking also helps manage your offers to existing subscribers to maximize revenue potential or minimize list churn. “Ultimately, it’s about yield management. You’re trying to maximize the performance of every source you have rather than bundling all your names into one list.”
Here are a few examples of how to do that:
- For subscribers with low open rates, you might offer a weekly digest form instead of a daily email.
- Loyal openers and clickers might be a target audience for cross-selling opportunities, such as offers to subscribe to another newsletter or other promotions.
- If you learn that new names perform best in the first month, you can establish an automated, timed series of offers to go out to take advantage of the honeymoon period.
Useful links related to this article
Case Study on DailyCandy’s newsletters:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.html?ident=23379
Special Report: Renting Email Lists – Costs, Deliverability & Targeting:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.html?ident=29930
CoregMedia:
http://www.coregmedia.com/coregistration.php
IronPort:
http://www.ironport.com/
Q Interactive:
http://www.qinteractive.com/
StrongMail:
http://www.strongmail.com/
Webclients:
http://www.webclients.net/
Beliefnet:
http://www.beliefnet.com/
Flatiron Media:
http://www.flatironmedia.com/
LifeScript:
http://www.lifescript.com/
From Marketing Sherpa
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.html?ident=29934
Posted by copiasolaris under Interviews | Comments (0)
March 29, 2007
SUMMARY: We’ve been tracking Travelocity’s email programs for quite some time. For years, they’ve been known as a company that really does best practices in email.
Which is why we touched base to see what’s working for them now … because if Travelocity’s doing it now, you can bet that others will be following suit a year from now. Includes segmentation, a subject line test and creative samples.
Segmenting files and sending to fewer people — it’s a trend we’re seeing many marketers do these days, and we heard numerous Case Studies on the subject at MarketingSherpa’s Email Summit earlier this month. And they’re segmenting for good reason. Every year, without fail, the most highly rated tactic for email marketing is segmentation.
In the last 4 1/2 years, Paul Briggs, Director, Customer Loyalty and Marketing, Travelocity, has overseen the evolution of his daily email program go from cross-file blasts of 2 million-3 million to highly segmented messages. In fact, one email program now goes to only 50,000-60,000 names.
For the past 18 months, Briggs has been all about taking his customer/subscriber email to the next level. “We had to work on deal-finding strategies for our customers. What drops in price warrant an email message? Twenty dollars on a domestic trip might be interesting to some, but it’s not going to be if you are traveling to London.”
Obviously, price plays a big part in his team’s actions, “but in the end, we also had to do a better job of [using email] to deliver both prices and a customer experience that will create loyalty.”
They learned years ago not to overmail and damage lifetime value of members. The prevailing strategy behind two of their highest ROI-performing email programs was to let current and new shoppers dictate what type of messaging they would receive in terms of information on flights, hotels and car rentals. Here’s what they’ve learned:
-> Program #1. “Low Fare Alert”
In a pilot program, they discovered the name they preferred — Good Day to Buy — didn’t resonate with consumers, so they externally marketed the emails as “Low Fare Alerts.” After signing up on the home page, customers receive flight offers from top destinations when they fall 20% below the recent 30-day average.
Such triggers occur after the system pulls the prices from 30,000 origin and destination markets and puts them into a data warehouse, which also includes information on customers.
Then, the following customer activities are cross-referenced in the program’s rules:
- if they fly weekly/monthly/quarterly
- if they fly international/domestic/both
- if they buy travel packages, including hotels and car rentals
Briggs’ goal is to marry pricing, timing, relevancy and activity to create a winning hybrid. Each day, they send about 50,000-60,000 Low Fare Alerts. “We thought the emails would be compelling because of the low prices and they would be relevant because the person had shopped from that origin.”
Without question, the customer-controlled email programs is allowing Briggs and his team to better target their audience. The initiative has consistently converted sales anywhere from eight to 12 times higher than less-relevant offers.
“As we’ve expanded our efforts to tell customers that it’s not only relevant to you, but also a better price today than yesterday, we’ve seen conversions go up,” he says. “We threw it out the door — so to speak — without much A/B blind testing, but its performance has been great.”
-> Program #2. FareWatcher
Since airlines change their fares as much as twice a day, Briggs is continually tweaking their FareWatcher alert, which sends an email whenever a fare to a certain destination changes by an amount that the member specified. Example: a New Yorker wanting to travel to Chicago would receive an email only if the fare drops by $25 or to $200 total.
FareWatcher tracks up to five origin-destination combinations. The prompts could be received via RSS feeds or a downloadable desktop toolbar. The system also recognizes the user’s IP address and accordingly serves deals to repeat visitors in a labeled FareWatcher box on the home page.
Email messages address recipients by name, informing them, “The price has changed for 1 of the FareWatcher routes you asked us to track. We recommend that you check availability now, as low fares like these tend to change quickly and sell out fast.” A box appears in the middle of the email, deducting the old price from the new one while showing the savings.
“And we put in contact rules that say you cannot get email for seven to 14 days, depending on the situation,” Briggs says. “We don’t want our customers getting email every day.”
Because they started experiencing complaints due to inventory evaporating as fast as the offers went out, Briggs set both the FareWatcher and Low Fare Alerts systems so any flight ticket over 60% off would be pulled to alleviate customer disappointment.
“Those price points are not viable for us to offer in an emailed message,” he says. “We’re also validating that the offer is in the market by regular checks with the airlines.”
FareWatcher isn’t far behind the Low Fare Alerts program in performance. If anything, its role on the home page has made it extremely important to the Travelocity brand. People are very receptive to finding the messages in their in-box.
“We have seen open rates north of 40%,” Briggs says. “And that’s not taken from the best two days — that’s a good hard average. Conversions are high, too.”
The price-validation system they added has definitely eased customer complaints about being teased with incredibly low offers.
-> Subject line test
Four years ago, Briggs told us that he was turned off by the words ‘Hot Deals, ‘Free’ or ‘Special.’ Testing and focus group studies had shown it was best to keep subject lines honest. That’s why they focus on price so much (it helps open rates), but they wondered: might other words help? So, they tested adding the word ‘Exclusive’ immediately in front of the dollar amount.
The result? “We found that where you put the terms of the offer affects open rates,” Briggs says. “While pricing in subject lines sells, the word ‘Exclusive’ was powerful when placed before the price.”
Useful links related to this article
Creative samples from Travelocity’s Email Alerts
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/cs/travelocity/study.htm
Two-part Sherpa interview with Travelocity’s Paul Briggs:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=23031
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=23040
Premiere Global Services Inc. - helps Travelocity manage their email
campaigns:
http://www.premiereglobal.com/
Teradata - takes care of data warehousing for the travel site:
http://www.teradata.com
Travelocity:
http://www.travelocity.com
From Marketing Sherpa
https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.html?ident=29912
Posted by copiasolaris under Interviews | Comments (0)