Email Personalization/Testing

Nice article today from Jeanne Jennings at ClickZ regarding email best practices and testing. She comments on the use of click-stream data and other analytics to personalize and customize email messages.

She talks about the fine line between the importance and effectiveness of personalization and message relevance and 'hyper-personalization', or a 'big brother-ish' feeling one gets from knowing a company may have too much information about the recipient, where they surfed on a website and how that can be a turn-off. Couldn't agree more.

I will say however that striking the right balance between personalization and intrusiveness is a very important element to test and get right. How much likely are you to respond to an email with your name in the subject line, or with an offer or content from someone or something that you know you recently looked at? Can have a huge affect on conversions.

On the topic -- I've recently received an email from a company (that I've opted in to) that nevertheless went directly into my spam folder in Yahoo. Couple things jumped out at me -- it's important to make certain you have some copy at the top of your emails to ask the recipient to either include your address in their address book/list of accepted email senders or to provide them the option to opt out of future messages (in fact a clear and prompt opt-out procedure is a CAN SPAM requirement).

A quick review of the email also pointed out some potential spam folder issues - it had 'FREE' in the subject line and had quite a few images in the email body. These elements might not automatically doom you, but they don't help.

Many ESP's (definition) have built in spam filters that allow you to test and score your emails to see how likely they are to make it through spam filters and become deliverable into in-boxes. If yours doesn't there are many free spam filters available (SpamAssassin and SpamCheck to name but two) for you to use, I heartily recommend.

Top Tips to Increase Marketing ROI from Industry Thought Leaders

I thought this was good post today on Marketo's site Increasing Marketing ROI: The Top 5 Tips from our B2B Thought Leaders on how to increase campaign ROI. It's consistent with what I've been discussing recently about the importance of inbound marketing (being found, creating compelling content), as well as the significance of lead nurturing, testing and integrating all your various channels to make sure they're working in concert.

Essential Elements of World-Class Lead Gen

I've been working on a new presentation that organizes what I see are the critical elements of lead generation and have outlined the four (4) primary areas I feel these elements should be derived from. I thought I'd share those areas and a high-level view of what they represent (future posts will go into detail on the elements themselves)...

Strategy Alignment is both the development and merger of all lead gen goals and strategies (e.g. market sizing, targeting, messaging, lead goals, pipeline goals, sales requirements) now working in concert and comprising a unified road map that provides direction and purpose to your campaigns while...

Process Improvements are the documented steps of identifying, capturing, scoring, nurturing, routing and tracking of leads in a tangible manner that can be improved, fine-tuned and repeated enabling...

Program Excellence, or the focus on the experimentation and testing of your program tactics that's needed to find out what really works which are further validated by...

Measurement and Optimization, which are the critical KPI's, metrics and analytics that let you measure your progress and optimize your results.

I feel that if your program elements and tactics are derived from these four areas there is a strong likelihood that you'll be covering many of the fundamental steps required for lead gen excellence.

Email is Still Relevant

Article today from Jeanne Jennings on ClickZ 'Why Email Matters More Than Ever' has some good points on why email is still relevant as a tactic/communication vehicle especially as marketing budgets are being cut and every tactic is under a microscope.

Jeanne talks about being strategic in your emailing (targeting, creating relevant messages), optimizing your tactical email elements (and testing those elements), insuring deliverability and list testing.

I might add that I feel any touch (email or other) that you make with a prospect should have a purpose and should always be designed with dual goals in mind - providing ongoing value/information to that person as they interact with you while moving her/him thru the funnel and better qualifying their needs. The latter goal is of course critical to your organization - converting them into an opportunity or learning that they will not be a future buyer (or influence the buying decision) of your products or solutions. In my eyes any tactic should have a distinct purpose of a true value exchange - give the target information that makes them smarter while further understanding/qualifying their needs to see if/how/when you can solve a business problem for them with your solutions.

QA

I've been surprised this week at the number of dead links, errors and missing landing pages that a number of co's have in their lead gen programs I've been reviewing. It underscores the importance of testing in a sandbox before your campaigns go live, to put all your assets through quality assurance. It's as critical as the actual campaign itself - if the target can't complete the call to action it doesn't matter how strong the offer is.