Marketing Ideas!

By now, you should know my stance on buying email lists: don’t do it. Once my client understands why this tenent is such an important foundation to a healthy email marketing practice, they are typically very ready to start building their own in-house list. But there are potential pitfalls to avoid down this path as well. Here are 5 things you should think about before you start to build your email list that will help you avoid these obstacles and build a healthy in-house list:

1. Who should be on your list?
Step one of any list-building exercise should be focused directly on who you want to add to your list. If you are building a list of prospects–people you hope to later sell your products or services–think about who you need to talk to: what’s the persons role, title, industry, need, issue, budget, etc. If you’re a non-profit, think about why you need to add people to your list. Ask such questions as what you will need these new contacts to do on your behalf later (e.g., volunteer, donate, activism, etc.). The better you can qualify the people you want to add to your list before they end up on your list, the more productive your list will be.

2. What are you going to say?
The rule of thumb for basic database marketing is that success is roughly based 40% on your list, 40% on your content, and 20% on creative elements. So, after taking care of the first 40% (who will be on your list), consider what are appropriate messages for that audience. This will effectively cover almost 80% of your overall success criteria. Here are some questions to consider: Are you trying to educate them about the nature of your offerings, are you trying to network and begin other conversations, or are you sharing other information with them? Will you need to send them a series of emails to effectively provide all the information they need, or will the message be contained in one-time emails that will be delivered on a regular schedule?

3. How can you further qualify your contacts?
With the message (i.e., item #2 above) in mind, you can begin constructing a series of emails designed to help them through the entire process, perhaps qualifiying your list at each pass. For example, you could start out by asking for only a little bit of information (such as just their name and email address) in order to send them a white paper. Then, with your follow up email, offer them a podcast, in exchange for a little more info (such as their company name and their title). Finally, you might invite them to a webinar, and here you might ask for a phone number. Knowing what your entire message system might look like will not only help you bring your audience through your processes nicely, it will also help you understand what if needed on your end to make it happen.

4. How soon (and how often) will you send an email?
Once someone joins your list, when will you send the first email? When will you send follow up emails? In virtually all cases, there should be some sort of “welcome” email … something that will help confirm that they did indeed submit their email address to some system, perhaps shows them the ropes of your organization, sets some level of expectations on the nature and frequency of emails you will be sending, etc.

5. How will you measure success?
This should really be one of your first steps, because by knowing how you will be measuring your own success, you can better build systems that fit your needs and help you achieve your goals.

Frequently people ask me how to help them with their open rates. While there are some obvious areas to address (such as the From and Subject lines of the email), there is another area that most organizations need to address, but would prefer not to: their list.

Your success in email marketing can be articulated as such: 40% is based on your list, 40% is based on your content, and 20% is based on your creative (design, etc.). If you really want to get better open rates (and even more importantly improve your conversion rates), you’ll want to spend some time growing a high-quality email list.

There are 5 specific things you should consider while building your list:

1. Fresh contacts
Statistics suggest that most lists will see about 30% of their email addresses evaporate. People will opt-out, the address is no longer valid, etc. Make sure you have a good source of contacts to replace those that disappear.

2. Organically grown
Buying lists are technically illegal. Renting lists is a bit of grey area, and don’t tend to produce great results. If you want a really great email marketing list, then grow it organically: get people to opt-in to your message because they care about what you have to offer. Use SEM, social media marketing, etc. to point people to your web site where they can opt-in.

3. Targeted audience for targeted messages
Before you send an email to your list, ask yourself “who on the list should NOT receive this email?” In virtually all cases, you should be able to think of at least a few contacts that should not receive it. So don’t.

4. Only ask for the information you absolutely need
Segmentation is one of the most overlooked aspects of email marketing. You create segments by creating audience groups based on similar data (e.g., geographic information). But be judicious in what you ask for. If you don’t need the information for segmenting purposes, don’t ask for it.

5. Constant nurturing, pruning
Your email list is a lot like a garden. Give it the proper attention and nutrition, and it will reward you. Ignore it, and it will soon be overgrown with weeds and will no longer be useful. The attention and nutrition is the content you feed it. Send out good information, and your list will reward you. Also, do a re-engagement campaign every six months or so to get rid of the “weeds” or contacts that may have gone stale (or never should have signed up for your list in the first place).

We have all heard the saying “knowledge is power.” It just happens this cliche is very close to articulating our mission at Aperio Marketing. Our mission is to help our clients learn more about how marketing can help their businesses. The more you know about marketing, the more you know about your customers, and the more power you will have to drive better results.

Therefore, to give you better results (via more power and knowledge) we are working hard on putting together a series of educational events through recorded and live training sessions, plus the ability to do on-site training for those organizations that desire it. And, in the true spirit of marketing, we want to learn more about what you need.

However, to ensure that we are putting the most useful program together, we would love your input as to what is truly important. In other words, what do you want to learn?

To help, simply take this very short survey (2 questions). Of course, comments on the blog are always welcome as well.

In the next day or so, the Marketing Ideas! e-newsletter will be published with the full interview of Kyle Flaherty, Director of Marketing for BreakingPoint Systems. While the newsletter will (of course) only go out to those that subscribe, there was so much good content, I wanted to share some “extra footage” with everyone.

So here you go … some great content from Kyle that didn’t make it into the newsletter (and if you want to see the full interview, all you have to do is join here or sign up with the form on the left sidebar of this blog – Kyle’s interview goes out at 8 a.m. CDT on Wednesday, June 17).

You are a fairly well-known for your use of social media. Is social media a solution that every business should be looking at?

“Looking at”…yes. Participating in…no. There is no reason for a business to not at least be listening to the conversations happening out there on different social media networks. It would actually be irresponsible to not at least be listening to what your customers, prospects, partners and competitors are saying. Now in terms of participating that is a much longer answer, but the short one is that you should listen for at least 30 days before acting and when you do be sure your strategic and tactical plan is in place.

When evaluating a marketing opportunity and idea, how do you evaluate which platform (or media) to use?

Go where your community already is hanging out. We figure this out conventionally through listening to conversations, but also with periodic surveys of our customers, partners and employees. Focus on where folks are already, otherwise it’s a waste of resources.

How do you delineate between marketing, sales, and advertising?

The connection between marketing and sales is obviously very strong, particularly in the B2B realm. We help sales communicate with prospects through our own activity and helping them with good collateral, event planning and more. We have created a sophisticated workflow for handing off opportunities to sales of course, starting with inside sales and moving through the funnel. Ultimately the line between the two should be connected strongly and sales should be requesting things from marketing on a daily basis and marketing should be asking sales what they need at the same time.