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This list covers the basics – and a few advanced tactics – to make your email the
best it can be.
From Line – How people recognize you. Keep it consistent (usually company name).
Subject Line – Gets your email opened. Keep it 40 characters or less.
Preheader text (Secondary Subject Line) – Great for mobile readers
Image Alt Text – Gets your readers to enable images if they’re turned off.
Balance of Images & Text – 80/20 rule (80% text to 20% images).
Copy –Break up into small chunks (generally 3 lines or less).
CTAs (Calls to Action) – Tell your readers what you want them to do.
Length – Start short and link to website, blog, or landing page with more content.
TOC – Use a Table of Contents to move reader through longer emails and newsletters.
Scanability – Bullets, short chunks of copy, headlines and subheads.
Links – Lead readers to more content, on your website, blog, etc.
Text links vs. Button Links – Test this to see what gets a better click through.
Forward to a Friend Links – Gain new subscribers.
Social Media “Badges” and Links – Grow your subscriber list and engage with your audience in new ways when they connect with you on social media.
Social Sharing – Expand the reach of your messages, grow your list & reach new people.
Facebook Like Button – Allows readers to “Like” your email or your Facebook page.
Check Links – Click on each link to make sure it goes where you want it to.
Proof Read – Remember to spell check, too.
Preview In Multiple Email Readers – View in email clients like Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Outlook, Hotmail, AOL, etc.
by Sam Eidson
It’s budgeting time. Sharp-penciled b2b marketers are sitting down to determine where their organizations will invest. Some are weighting their budgets back toward growth, but across the board CFOs are dictating that the money be smarter than ever. Marketers are being held accountable to results, and their budgets depend on that.
Organizations that have added online lead generation to their marketing mix now have the tools to manage this level of accountability, but the tools are not enough. A results-based approach to budgeting takes measurability to the next phase: intent and predictability.
As a b2b conversion-driven marketing agency, we start by working backwards from quantifiable, desired results to the tactics needed to get there. This starts with the question, “How many leads can our sales force handle each month, with peaks and valleys based on seasonality?”
This process takes it back one more step: “If we need to achieve X dollars in revenue growth within this line of business, how many leads should we plan each month, with lead times built in to allow sales to be closed by the end of the fiscal year?”
Once goals have been quantified, the foundation is there to budget for a program.
There are two cost considerations here. First, the initial investment to create strategy and assets—such as developing an informational offer like a white paper—and the costs of pushing the program’s offers through online ads, search engine marketing, email, social media, etc.
The process can be projected by starting with cost-per-lead numbers, as well as conversion. Projecting impressions-to-click, clicks-to-lead, leads-to-opportunity and opportunities-to-sale allows the marketer to tailor a media budget based on revenue goals. This entails guesswork, but the guesses are educated, starting with industry standards and then adding live results.
A well-managed lead-generation program with documented results enables a team to establish a benchmark “media cost-per-lead” and hold to that standard. Low performers get culled, and standouts get augmented. The program can be continually optimized so even if the cost-per-lead is initially missed, throughout the year the program approaches the goal.
There are other financial considerations also:
• Different tactics require varying levels of management time. This is balanced by the fact that some tactics have no media cost.
• Some tactics necessary for strategic purposes may fall outside of the cost-per-lead standard but still stay in the mix.
• Lead nurturing requires an additional analysis, including the ROI of reducing sales time and increasing conversions.
With strategic thought, an approach like this can yield both a results-based budget and tools to measure the program once it is launched.
By Jim Nichols December 17, 2010
Article Highlights:
The number of social media management tools out there is mushrooming.
One rule of thumb is to use a simple annoyance test — take the platforms you are considering for a test drive.
Something that is annoying to do once is rage-inducing when performed 192 times a day.
There are lots of companies trying to make the process of managing and analyzing social media presences better. As more and more brands recognize the importance of social, most have also concluded that they cannot effectively deliver positive social experiences manually. They need automated tools to make the process easier, more dynamic, and easier to track.
The need for powerful and efficient management tools is there whether you have one presence or hundreds, whether you’re only on Facebook or have outposts on 50 different platforms. Since we’ve helped a number of companies with social media program management, I thought it might be useful to share some of what we learned with a larger audience. So here’s a summary of some of the most important features to look for as you choose a social media management platform to deploy across your clients or company.
1. Content management system features
We often think of a "CMS" in the context of a major corporate site, but it’s just as important in a social media management platform — perhaps even more important — because the need for constant updating is so acute in social. Here are some features to look for as you weigh alternatives.
- Ability to deliver content to lots of social platforms: As with anything else, you are going to want to work with a versatile platform. Because social is so dominated by Facebook and Twitter, it may be OK to work with a Facebook- and Twitter-only tool now, but make sure the tool is planning to cover more platforms in the future. If there is one certainty in social network history, it’s that market hegemony isn’t forever. Ask Compuserve, AOL, Napster, Friendster, and MySpace. Further, you should be able to choose social media destinations for each piece of content because what you send to Digg should be very different than what you send to Facebook. The easier it is to decide where a particular piece of content goes, the happier you’ll be in the end.
- Ease of content creation: Some platforms allow you to create content right in the platform. Is the process easy, or is it complex? Intuitive, or convoluted? Easy is going to be important to any social manager, but for people managing multiple brands, or multiple presences for a single brand, it’s going to be critical. The number of steps required for content creation is important because social managers are going to spend only a small portion of their time creating content. Most of their time should be spent listening and responding.
- Page aesthetics tools or helpers: Some social media presences open themselves to more custom tailoring of page appearance. Having ways to quickly and easily alter the aesthetics of a page can help brands reinforce messaging with their proprietary look and feel. Some services offer easy-to-use tools, others don’t. If you don’t have designers on staff, easy-to-use tools can be a blessing and a curse. A blessing in that you won’t have to involve a designer every time you make a small change. A curse because most non-designers have a knack for shocking colors and turning on the wet floor, shadow, outline, and ripple effect simultaneously. Ask our team what it’s like to deal with two color-blind partners. LOL.
- Post aesthetics and content helpers: There’s probably a cooler name for this, but what I am talking about is the ability to post content and ensure that a screen shot or key image is posted, not just a link. And the ability to change the text of a post is also useful. Similarly, an automatic URL shortening tool helps immeasurably. Instead of making trip after trip to Bit.ly, you can just have the platform do it. Some solutions also let you customize the shortened URLs to give you an additional level of brand impact.
- Collaboration: Two things to look for here. The first is the ability to create, edit, and manage content across people within an organization. Ideally, a platform lets content developers input their work, and then manages the flow of edits, updates, and approvals across an organization. Permissions capabilities are going to be important here for many companies, especially those to the left of the "risk-o-meter." Obviously, the need for fail-safe procedures and processes varies somewhat depending on the size and type of organization. For example, a large company in a highly regulated category like pharma would probably want features that prevented posting of content without prior approval from legal, etc.
- Multimedia capabilities: You’ll want to be able to post a variety of file types. Text is so cheestastik. Actually, that’s not true. But brands cannot build by text alone.
- Prefab applications: Every social program I have worked on benefitted from interactivities that tackled the challenge of making passive likers into brand participants. A platform can make that much easier by offering built-in applications that work on at least some social media sites. A drag and drop poll. Virtual gifts. E-cards. People are far more likely to respond to "apptivities" than to make freehand comments or take it upon themselves to spread your message virally. Most of the current social service offerings provide these features primarily for Facebook.
- Provisions for scheduling of posts: I’ve seen a lot of data on the relative effectiveness of pre-scheduled posts, by which I mean the use of a platform that allows you to specify the date and time of future posts. From the anecdotal info I have seen, it appears that for many brands, advanced scheduling can be just as effective as managing everything in real-time. Of course there are exceptions. If you are BP trying to message during the worst ecological disaster in North America, you aren’t going to want to "set it and forget it." But if you are in a fairly sleepy category and realistically don’t have a plethora of posts to make every day, scheduling tools can reduce the time commitment necessary to operate an effective social media program.
2. Listening, response, and analytics tools
Listening to fans, followers, and likers — really, really listening — should be the primary task brands assign to social managers. We all talk about the 20/80 rule — the principle that a small number of users purchase the lion’s share of your product. So, if you accept that your social media "fans" are in the 20 percent, then shouldn’t you take loads of time to listen and understand what folks are saying in the aggregate? In my view, there are two kinds of listening that are critical.
- Identification and escalation of "acute" response needs: For this challenge, you are going to want a service that makes it easy and fast to review site posts and comments. From policing profanity and personal attacks, to responding to questions and requests for information, to quickly identifying and escalating complaints or other acute problem posts.
- Aggregated insights into all of the commentary: Simply responding to issues and problems only scratches the surface of the value you can glean from social media fans. By pairing the richness of being able to see real commentary with the ability to use quantitative analysis to assess the overall tenor of discussion and topics, brands can get ideas and feedback that can fuel a host of marketing initiatives.
As you evaluate platforms, consider whether or not the alternatives offer the following:
- Automatic escalation of posts and comments containing profanity, or posts and commentary that have been flagged for review. Keeping a "clean" group generally helps grow brand connection and group participation.
- Console showing all recent commentary from users so the social manager can scan posts for items needing immediate follow up. Obviously a service that includes these follow-up needs within its CMS would make things easier for all parties.
- Platforms that flag competitor names and keywords to make it easier for the social manager to spot and address the comments, or escalate them to appropriate team members.
- Ways to respond to the comments from the CMS rather than having to manually find the comments within the social media presences.
- Tools that provide insights into all of the commentary on a group. Measures like sentiment, KW analysis, themes, etc., can help a brand gain insight into what consumers are really saying and needing.
Many of you might find this last point a bit of overkill, especially if you are already monitoring social through a listening or analytics platform. But remember that some of the most popular social platforms, including Facebook, are very challenging for social listening tools to monitor.
3. Metrics considerations
While most brands still find it difficult to track social media activity back to sales, we can do better at using surrogate indicators and other admittedly "softer" metrics to assess impact. Many of the platforms available today are quite effective at providing this sort of information. I suggest you look to ensure that the platform you select is able to track the following:
- Clicks on posts
- "Likes"
- Clicks on links
- Plays of multimedia content
- Responses to interactivities
- Shares and retweets
- Time spent
Further, the ability to get reporting on these measures in real time or near real time will help you make timely decisions on how to alter or augment your social activity with regard to a piece of content. For example, you might post a video to one Facebook presence and see that it gathers significant views and shares quickly. This could help you decide whether to expand the reach of that content across more sites and presences.
4. Price and value concerns
Social media management tools can have wildly different pricing. Cost of services broadly relates to the extent to which they make tasks easier and more intuitive, as well as the availability of "drag ‘n drop" apps. In working with clients on this challenge, I have found it helpful to do some simple calculations to identify money versus time tradeoffs. Social media management has both direct and opportunity costs, and it’s relatively simple to compare the cost-per-year of one service versus another if you have taken both for a test drive.
Final thoughts
The number of social media management tools out there is mushrooming. One rule of thumb I suggest people use is a simple annoyance test. Take the platforms you are considering for a test drive. If you find some aspect of it unintuitive, talk to the seller about how you can address it. But do talk to them, because something that is annoying to do once is rage-inducing when performed 192 times a day.
There are certainly very good platforms that don’t do every single thing I have mentioned above. I suggest you work closely with your marketing and social media teams to identify the features that are going to be most important to your business. This is definitely not a decision to make in an afternoon because the effectiveness and efficiency of what might well become your most frequent consumer connection is at stake. What’s also at stake is the sanity of your social media manager. Choose wisely.
Build a fan page
Facebook allows your brand to interact with fans through fan pages. These pages can be used by your business as a blog, a research tool or as a communication device to post messages, respond to issues and solve customer problems. Fan pages also provide your brand with the opportunity to stream live events, post videos and pictures, offer coupons, and run polls and competitions. If your brand is not doing any of these things, you are under-performing on Facebook.
Who likes your brand?
Facebook has introduced a Like button that lets users share pages from a site to their Facebook profile with one click. You should implement ‘Like’ on key pages of your website. Doing this allows people to tag your website with a ‘Like’ which then shows up on their wall. Friends can see that link, click on it and be led directly to your page. This should be a priority for your brand, as it’s simple to apply and allows customers to promote your brand for you.
Facebook Recommends
Your brand should consider implementing The Recommendations plugin, as this offers users personalised suggestions for products or pages on your site they might like. This button also enables your customers to publicly endorse your product or service on Facebook and share this with all their friends. Customer recommendations are often a key marketing and sales tool for businesses, so ensure your brand is taking advantage of this.
Has your brand logged into Facebook?
Facebook Login shows profile pictures of user’s friends who have signed up for your site. This tool will become increasingly popular, (especially with ecommerce websites) as more people login to Facebook through websites, and could be a powerful aid for your brand in spreading awareness and driving sales.
Make sure your brand is in credit
Facebook Credits are a virtual currency users can employ to buy virtual goods on the Facebook platform. This provides the opportunity for your brand to sell products using Facebook Credits, turning your Facebook page into a revenue generator. Taking a step further, you could even offer deals unique to Facebook, such as special offers and promotions. Credits opens up new ways for customers to engage with your brand on social networks, and you should be looking to take advantage of this.
It is evident Facebook provides your brand with many new and innovative ways to engage with customers, drive awareness and implement revenue streams. Because of this, your brand should no longer dismiss Facebook as just being a social community, but instead, look to embrace the tangible benefits it can provide. Otherwise your brand may find itself in the very real danger of being defriended by your customers.
Engaging customers and prospects with relevant communications is essential to marketing success. By combining marketing automation technologies often used by business-to-consumer marketers with sophisticated email tactics, b2b marketers can better establish a rich dialogue with individual prospects and customers.
Here are three b-to-c tactics that b2b marketers can incorporate into their programs to more strongly engage with contacts and drive revenue:
Use segmentation techniques. Consumer marketers have long used advanced segmentation techniques to improve relevancy. Simply segmenting your list will put you ahead of other b2b marketers, especially since only one-third say they are “very likely” to use email list segmentation to target a prospect’s stage in the sales cycle, according to MarketingSherpa’s “2010 Email Marketing Benchmark” report, which surveyed 1,493 email marketers.
Another smart move is to segment email campaigns by user behavior. Because actions speak louder than words, segment a list by separating those people who, for example, downloaded a white paper from those who did not. With this knowledge, you might then want to send the first group a message for a related webinar. For those who opened your initial email but didn’t click, send a survey requesting more information about their interests so you can improve relevancy going forward.
Follow deliverability best practices. A well-crafted email message is only valuable if it lands in the recipient’s inbox. All email marketers are faced with the challenge of getting through the spam filters of major Internet service providers (ISPs), but b2b marketers have the added task of getting through corporate email filters, their anti-spam firewalls and email blacklists.
You can improve deliverability by employing some simple tools. For example, by using inbox preview, you can see how messages will render when viewed in leading email clients, helping prevent broken messages and formatting errors. Also, you can use the SpamAssassin free spam-filtering program to examine and score a message for spam violations before it is sent. Then, you can edit accordingly to help ensure the messages aren’t wrongly flagged as spam.
Also consider inbox monitoring to determine if your message is getting to an inbox or being redirected to the junk or bulk box. And don’t forget to obtain a dedicated IP address, one used only by yourself and your company for sending email. The alternative, a shared IP address, can negatively affect your delivery rates, since inappropriate sending by one company can reflect poorly on all others using that shared address.
Test for content optimization. No matter how well you think you know your prospects, you can never be sure how they’re going to respond to your emails unless you test. But despite these benefits, b2b marketers lag behind b-to-c marketers when it comes to testing subject lines, offers or other calls to action, and the effectiveness of creative copy and layouts. The good news is that marketing automation technology enables you to do more testing than ever more easily than ever.
Given the challenging marketplace, b2b marketers need to employ all the sophisticated tools and tactics available to them. And that means employing the techniques that consumer marketers are successfully using.
By using advanced segmentation techniques, following deliverability best practices and testing for content optimization, marketers can help cut through the clutter that is overwhelming buyers and engage with them in a way that will drive new levels of loyalty and revenue
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