Today's Cool Links - Mar 11, 2009

In the article Tips to Beat the Odds for Address-Book Addition on ClickZ today, Stefan Pollard talks about how to boost your chances for getting your emails past the spam filters and into the in-boxes of your intended targets. He cited some interesting data points including:

• 53 percent of consumer e-mail recipients have added at least one permission-e-mail sender to their address books
• On average, only 25 percent, or one in four companies, gets whitelisted
• 75 percent said they unsubscribed due to message irrelevance, while 73 percent opted out because of high frequency

He states that keys to getting your emails whitelisted are:

• Asking your front-line customer-service people what the number one issue your customers contact you about is and insure your messages reflect that
• Insure that your landing page and e-mail opt-in process support your highest traffic-generating search terms. Someone who queries a search engine is actually asking a question. Does your landing page answer those questions or direct visitors to the answers?
• Use survey data to improve relevance. Include quick polls or questions in your regular messages, or send standalone surveys, then store the responses in the respondent's profile. Use it to improve segmentation or to create dynamic content for future e-mail
• Create messages triggered by page visits and time on site. This obviously is possible only with marketing automation and tracking s/ware, but the rich information provided when a prospect comes to your site is very valuable and insures highly relevant messages

Email Benchmarks

Epsilon (the marketing services firm) just released their Q3/2008 Email Trend Results (link to the report is in the press release) which provides some very good statistics and benchmarks on email performance. Their reports are usually chock full of excellent email data (and it's a quick read, 4 pages total). Some highlights:

• Open rates seem to have remained consistent over the past year ranging between 19-21%.
• Click rates rose 0.5% from last quarter.
• Business Publishing/Media, Consumer Publishing/Media, Retail General and Travel Services saw an increase in all three major metrics – deliverability, opens and clicks – compared to last quarter. There were no industries that saw a decline in each of those same three metrics.

Good read, check it out...

Overthinking The Offer

I've been chatting recently with a few clients and prospective clients regarding offers for their marketing programs. Those who read this blog know I'm a HUGE believer in building a number of relevant, informative, high value offers that speak to each member of the decision chain as s/he progresses through the marketing funnel. The eye chart below is an example of a generic offer mapping tool I've created that helps scope offers through the AIDA model.



That being said, I also think it's important that you don't let an offer mapping exercise intimidate you and prevent you from starting the process with at least ONE solid, relevant offer. The best place to start is always at the beginning. Get that first offer built, worry less about it's appeal to a single target and more about something that speaks generally to the entire decision chain. This first offer is usually an awareness/top of the funnel asset, so it should be able to speak to both the upper and lower decision chain members - meaning it will be less specific and more general in nature. Once that first offer is built, then think about what the 2nd, 3rd, 4th offers should be, and create a strategy that begins to craft offers that are designed to speak directly to targets and accelerate individual prospects through the funnel.

Digital Body Language

Steve Woods, one of the co-founders of Eloqua the marketing automation company, has written an interesting book (and writes a great blog with Paul Teshima here), on what he terms digital body language. This idea is a very interesting examination of the concepts of self-paced information gathering, needs evaluation, lead qualification/scoring and profile development and suggests that there is a definite digital footprint a prospect creates that provides detailed data on a his/her buying intentions and motivations.

Rather than 'read the room' like in the old days, marketers and sales people now need to decode a person's digital body language to better understand their roles, their information needs and what they find relevant, what their buying process is like, where they are in the funnel and the cadence of how to best communicate with them. As more and more of the relationships between marketers and their targets move online, the value exchanges that take place create a rich profile of the target and this new body language provides critical data and hints as to how you can best anticipate and meet their needs.

Optimizing Your Web Site Links

HubSpot today talks about ways in which you can bring more attention to and optimize your web site links with the goal of increasing clicks on those links that are calls to action, driving people to your landing pages and ultimately improving your organic page ranks in search engines. Many of the tips are basic (use descriptive link text, make links bold/different color/underlined, keep CTA's above the fold, etc.) but are still good reminders of best practices.

Inbound Marketing Lessons

Another good interview today from HubSpots Internet Marketing Blog. They talk with Brad Blake, Director of Interactive Media for the State of Massachusetts, on how the governor's office is using the web and inbound strategies to communicate with constituents. Some really great points that help validate the power of inbound marketing, across all kinds of industries and organizations.

De-dupe Software for Salesforce.com

Found a great s/ware (hat tip to Tim ;^) that can be used with Salesforce.com that provides data de-duplification and management for your SFDC data. Very easy to use, not too klugey and reasonably priced. Company is called RingLead, click here for more info..