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Posted on by Louis Gudema

NSFW = Not Safe for Work

If you’re offended by swearing or near nudity, you may want to skip this one.

Some years ago a marketing writer showed me a draft of copy for a client (not my client) which had numerous swear words in it. I said I was kind of surprised, and he said that the client had said it was perfectly fine. But a few weeks later he told me that the client had taken out all of the swearing before the final copy.

These days that might not happen.

Look at the title of this podcast from leading venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz

Podcast title with shit in name

Or this ad copy that mimics the “Frankly, Scarlett, I don’t give a damn” ending of “Gone with the Wind” – – a line that was considered scandalous in its day.

Liquor ad with give a damn headline

Or the name of this company:

Bigass Fans website

This B2B British marketing agency, which counts Salesforce among its clients, seems totally comfortable with swearing.

Blog post about swearing

A hundred years ago a nearly fully clad woman showing a little ankle in an ad might have been thought shocking but, as Cole Porter said, these days anything goes. Today near nudity is common (just as long as a woman’s nipple is ever so slightly covered, which has prompted some women – including women models – to back the Free The Nipple campaign for equality with men’s nipples).

Lee Jeans ad with almost nude woman

Topless beaches have long been more common in Europe, as has nudity in advertising. But a study in three European countries found that women reacted more negatively to female nudity in ads than men did. It didn’t test for how men and women felt about male nudity in ads, although one study found that men and women are less comfortable with male nudity in general. And sexual preference comes into the nudity equation, too. It’s complicated.

As with everything else in marketing, context should be your guide. You might use swearing or near nudity to market to a younger or hipper demographic. Or a more male audience: the suggestiveness of GoDaddy ads never seemed to hurt them, but I assume that they were targeting a predominantly male IT clientele. But neither swearing nor anything suggestive would be a good idea if your audience, for example, has many religiously conservative members.

What is obscene? A college theater professor of mine said that it comes from the Greek for “off stage” – something that should not be shown on the stage. For the Greeks that included violence, too. I do not find that explanation in the dictionary which says it comes from the classical Latin meaning “inauspicious, ill-omened, filthy, disgusting, indecent, lewd”.

Is this ad more obscene than anything above?

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Posted on by Louis Gudema

This is part of chapter 7 of Louis Gudema’s Bullseye Marketing book, which is available on Amazon.

Email is the 800-pound gorilla of Bullseye Marketing.

  • If you build your list from customers and prospects, you should have an excellent list. You are sending messages primarily to people who you have already done business with you or are interested enough in you that they have asked to receive your emails
  • You can segment and personalize so that people are getting the most tailored, valuable messages.
  • Over 99% of the people that you send an email to will receive it.
  • You have the tools and metrics to constantly improve your email campaigns to make them increasingly more effective
  • Good emails get high response rates: not just opens, but clicks, forwards and – most importantly – conversions
  • It is inexpensive. You pay for staff time and creative, of course, but compared to the high cost of physical direct mail and some other channels, an email program is a bargain.

Even Millennials, who are rumored to prefer tools like Snapchat and Instagram, like brands to use emails – and engage with them.[i]

So let’s talk about what goes into making email marketing work for you.

Build your own list

The first rule of 21st century email marketing is to build your own list. As described in the previous chapter, give people who come to your website many opportunities to opt-in to receiving your emails. Offer them 10% off their first purchase, or a free ebook, or a webinar – whatever works for your customers. Have your salespeople collect business cards and systematically enter them into your CRM.

When they are leaving your site, you can give them one more opportunity to sign up to receive your content with an exit-intent pop-up.

But don’t buy lists. If you do buy a list, you are likely to find:

  • Major email platforms won’t even import it because they have algorithms to detect lists with a high percentage of bad email addresses (after all, you aren’t the first person the list has been sold to).
  • If you use one of the email service providers who will work with a bought list, you’ll find that many of the names are bad and get rejected even by them.
  • You’ll want to set up a different web domain for those bought list mailings because you don’t want your real domain getting blacklisted as a source of spam.
  • You’ll get a historically low response rate to what you send.
  • The email list broker will be last seen riding off into the distance, waving your check and laughing maniacally.

If, nonetheless, you decide to go ahead with buying a list, then make sure you do use a different email service provider who will permit its use. And use the email you send to promote a really attractive offer that will entice people to come to your site and use your awesome landing page to opt-in to becoming part of your house list and receiving emails in the future.

Later we’ll talk about a special case in which you didn’t build the list: pre-event lists provided by trade shows and conferences that you’re exhibiting at.

The CAN-SPAM Act

The name of the CAN-SPAM Act was meant to suggest that the law, which took effect in 2003, would “can” (stop) spam. But its regulations are so loose that people immediately started to joke that with it you can spam. Under the law, commercial emails must do the following to avoid being considered spam:

  • have accurate header information, such as the From And Reply-To information
  • use non-deceptive Subject lines
  • identify that the message is an ad
  • include the physical address (in the footer, usually)
  • provide a way for people to unsubscribe, and honor those requests promptly
  • make sure that any company that you hire to do email marketing for you complies with these requirements.

That’s a pretty low bar.

The potential penalties for violating the CAN-SPAM Act are high; each individual email sent is subject to penalties of over $40,000, so you could be in the millions of dollars in penalties for even a single email blast with just a few dozen addresses that are in violation.[ii] And the CAN-SPAM act doesn’t just apply to large/bulk email blasts, it applies to one-to-one “commercial” emails, too, although it seems to be ignored by virtually all companies at that level.

Individuals who receive emails that don’t comply with the requirements cannot sue, and there is a limited right of action by corporations. Most actions are taken by prosecutors or the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against large, bulk spammers.

Segment your lists

As a Bullseye marketer, you know that the most important factor in direct response campaigns is the quality of your list. Email programs, when integrated with your data from your marketing automation program, CRM, and other sources, provide very advanced tools to target the right list.

People in different stages of the buying/customer funnel are just one of the segments that you’ll want to create and develop different content for. These stages include:

  • contacts
  • qualified prospects
  • active leads
  • customers

You may also have separate segments for partners, the press, analysts, and others.

In some B2B companies they suspend sending some or all marketing messages to people that sales is working on trying to close so as not to create too many or conflicting messages. In other companies sales and marketing work together on ways to accelerate deals through the pipeline.

Beyond these high-level segments, you can segment far more based on the nature of what you’re selling, the size of your lists, and what you find to be effective.  Important segments could include:

  • demographics (gender, age, location)
  • business demographics (size of company, industry, title in company)
  • amount and type of interactions with your website, emails and other marketing
  • recency, size or type of previous purchases
  • self-identified interests: ask people on your email sign-up form which subjects they are interested in getting information about, and let them manage those preference in the future

Three types of marketing data [This could be a sidebar]

You can use three types of data to enhance your customer and prospect targeting.

First party data

First party data is your data. It includes previous customer buying history, how a person interacts with your website, emails and other content (what marketing automation vendor Eloqua calls a person’s “digital body language”), their attendance on webinars and physical events, and so on. First party data rules, and it’s inexpensive for you to gather and use. In Phase 1, you can mostly rely on first party data.

Third party data

You buy third party data data vendors,  and it can include more information about the person or account:

  • what they’ve bought from others in the past
  • their behavior on other websites (have they recently started researching and reading articles about your type of products?)
  • what kind of car they drive
  • have they filed any patents

And so on. There are thousands of third party data types you could enrich your data with. Tens of thousands of retailers and publishers are pooling their anonymized data in data co-ops.[iii]

Second party data

Second party data is essentially private third party data. Second party data is created and collected in partnership with another company but not distributed broadly by data merchants.  For example, if you do a campaign jointly with another company, or if you swap data with another company. You’re getting data directly from the source, not through a data merchant, and it may be deeper and tied to particular individuals.

Some companies gather and buy thousands of data points for each contact.  By using first-, second- and third-party data, you can significantly improve the segmentation, targeting, personalization and effectiveness of your email and other marketing.

Personalize

Personalization can dramatically enhance the effectiveness of your emails.

Personalization once meant a personal greeting, like “Hi Louis”, or using the person’s name in the Subject line. How 2007.

Your emails will be many times more effective the more that they speak to the current status, pains and interests of the customer. An email in response to an abandoned ecommerce shopping cart is perhaps the ultimate in timely, personalized communication.

Just as an ecommerce site can send emails promoting the types of products that the person has bought in the past or — based on lessons learned from predictive analytics — are likely to buy in the future, B2B companies should personalize their messages.

Based on a person’s website behavior, companies can remind people of their interest in a product when it goes on sale.

By using PURLs (personalized URLs), you can create landing pages with personal headlines, messages, and offers at scale. Beyond email, you can use the same PURL in your omni channel marketing efforts, such as direct mail and messages from your sales reps.

The ultimate in personalization is when you base your entire email strategy on it. Amazon may have a few high-level segments, such as by country, but after that their emails are almost entirely personalized for each of their several hundred million customers based on the massive amount of data Amazon has collected from their browsing and shopping habits, as well as what they can learn about them from other web activity and third-party data.

Use calls to action

If you’re a consultant or otherwise need to promote your industry knowledge and thought leadership, you may be sending regular emails with just your insights and no strong calls to action, sort of like emailed blog posts.

Most companies, though, will be looking for direct, traceable results from their email campaigns such as downloads, event sign-ups, and sales.

Unless you’re an ecommerce company, generally you should only have one call to action per email. 

Usually you’ll find that the links/offers at the top of the email get the most clicks. I’ve seen it over and over again. We spend all that time crafting our email masterpieces, but most people don’t read to the end. The lower you go in an email (or on a web page), the fewer clicks your links and buttons will usually get.

So if you do have a single call to action, put the link or button for it at the beginning and end of your email.

How often should you send emails?

A few years ago I saw the CMO of Vistaprint talk, and he said that they had done tests and found that their emails produced the most business if they emailed their customers every day. “I know we shouldn’t do it, but that’s what the data show,” he said. Vistaprint sells to very small business; organizations as different as 1-800-Flowers and WGBH also send out emails daily, or almost daily, to people on their lists. Around holidays like Mother’s Day, some send more than once a day.

Inbox showing emails from Edible Arrangements around Mothers Day

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.

The rate of optimal email frequency is going to be different for every company.  Companies send a couple of times a week, once a week, monthly or quarterly.  The only way you’ll know what cadence is best for you is to test. Most important, though, is that once you have established a cadence, stick to it.

Generally, you have to expect that .25% or more of your list will unsubscribe each time you send an email. So over time, your email list will become more focused on people who really do want to hear from you. And you should be making enough valuable offers on your website and elsewhere that you can constantly grow your list even with those unsubscribes.

So how often should you email? Most likely it’s far more than you think.

When should you send?

Like the question how often should you send, when you should send can vary significantly depending on who you are marketing to. Generally, email service providers report that open rates are significantly higher on weekdays. Some categories, like emails related to hobbies and ecommerce, perform a bit better on weekends than other categories, but may still not be as good as they are during the week.[i]

Best time of day can vary considerably, too. For example:

  • If you’re marketing to business people, you may find that early morning and late afternoon emails get the best response.
  • If you’re marketing to doctors who do not read their email during the day, then evening emails may work best
  • If you’re marketing to bartenders and others who work at night, then you want to send during the day.
  • If you’re marketing to senior executives, many people have found that messages early on Saturday morning are particularly effective because the weekend is when they catch up with their less urgent reading.

There is no magic day/time for all people.

Email programs also give you the option to customize sends by each recipient’s time zone. After all, 8 am in New York is 5 am in San Francisco and 8 pm in Hong Kong. Staggering sends by time zone is a helpful feature if you’re sending to a national or international list.

Run tests and find out what works best for your customers.

Use UTM tracking codes

UTM tracking codes are a way to measure the effectiveness of almost any online marketing program, including your emails.

Even if you’re not familiar with UTMs (Urchin Tracking Module; Urchin was the company that developed the software that eventually became Google Analytics), you may have noticed them in URLs. They show up after the specific page URL and look something like this:

www.yoursite.com/utm_campaign=email

By creating and using custom UTMs, you can track in Google Analytics which website traffic was generated by your emails, social media posts, ads, and so on.

However, they’re not absolutely reliable because people often copy an entire URL, including the UTM code, and send, re-post or re-use it and it will appear in your reports that the traffic came from the original source, not the new source that the URL with UTM was pasted into.

You can easily create URLs with UTMs using Google’s URL Builder.

Some other tools like Hootsuite also provide UTM builders.

And keep in mind that UTMs are case sensitive, so be consistent and always use lower case.

Email data: Open rates aren’t absolutely reliable

Email programs give you many metrics such as delivery rates, open rates, clicks, forwards, bounces, and unsubscribes. That open rate data is not reliable.

There are too many different email clients, and ways to even define what an open is, for open rates to be absolutely meaningful. If your email program says, for example, that 16.8% of recipients opened an email, that’s probably not accurate. It could be more or less.

However, the data are relatively reliable. By that, I mean that if you see that certain topics have higher open rates over time, then since it’s all in one system with a relatively consistent set of recipients you can probably trust that people are especially interested in those topics. 

Subject Lines

The most important factor in email opens is the reputation of the sender. If people know that you’re sending them valuable information that they requested, they’ll continue to open your emails. If you send them garbage, they won’t.

That said, different email Subject lines definitely can have a significant impact. Political campaigns raise hundreds of millions of dollars by optimizing their emails and Subject lines. Two Subject lines that were especially effective for the 2012 Obama campaign[i] were, “I will be outspent” and “Hey”.

Personalization is good, especially if you’re going past the first name in Subject line bit. “Louis, your test results are ready.”

Urgency, fear of missing out, status and other appeals may be effective, such as “Last chance” or “Only a few left”

How-tos and numbers are usually effective in blog post headlines and tweets and may work for emails, too, such as, “7 ways to improve your email open rates.”

One study[ii] found that adding a special offer to the Subject line — like free shipping or buy one, get one free — actually produced lower open and conversion rates. Too salesy, I guess.

Like all marketing, message fatigue will eventually set in. Whatever is working now will eventually need to be replaced.

And beyond the Subject line, be attentive to what you say with the first 6 or 7 words of your message because many email programs will display them in the preview of an email client. Use those first few words to give the recipient another reason to open your emails.

           

Mobile

Half or more of your emails are being read on smartphones, or will be soon, so make sure they look good and work well on mobile.

Next.

Just some of the ways to use email

Here are just a few of the ways that you Bullseye marketers can use emails to promote and grow your business.

Updates/newsletters

Periodic updates on what you’re doing, including links to recent blog posts and product update information, can be greatly beneficial. Just make sure that you’re writing it from the point of view of the customer. Use “How the Patel family lowered their utility bills with new solar panels” rather than “We installed new solar panels for the Patel family.”

Retail promos

Many online retailers send daily, or near daily, emails with that day’s deals.

Test drive sign-ups, and getting started tips

Of course you’ll be sending emails to people who sign up for free product trials. Then also follow up over the next few days with daily tips on how they can get the most out of their trial, as well as a reminder just a few days before the trial will end. You can personalize these with messages, such as, “I see that you’re using X feature a lot. That’s one of my favorites. Here are some tips on how to get the most from it.”

Downloads

Rather than letting people download infographics, white papers, etc., directly from your website, send them an email with a download link. That assures that they will provide a real email address, rather than a@a.com, and even if they sign up on their phone, they will be able to later download the material on their desktop and/or tablet.

Pre-conference promos

If you’re an exhibitor at a conference or trade show, a few weeks before the event you may be given a list of people who have registered. You can send them information about why they should stop by your booth, including your special trade show offer. This is one of those rare cases where you’ll send emails to people who have not yet opted-in to receive yours.

Promote webinars and events

You’ll want to send at least three emails inviting people to your webinars and other events, as well as a reminder email a day or so before the event. You can send an email with a link to a video of the webinar shortly afterward, too.

Automate these multi-email “drip” or “nurture” campaigns with a marketing automation program. You tee up all of the emails in advance with decision tree-like logic: If they responded to message A, then skip messages B and C; if they did not respond to message A, send message B. If they responded affirmatively to messages A, B or C, then send message D, and so on.

And you can use your email lists to create custom lists to target ads to on social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. Marketing tends to be more effective when customers see your messages in more than one channel, and combining email and targeted ads in this way (with remarketing, which I describe in the next chapter) can be especially inexpensive and effective.

Abandoned shopping carts

This is a no-brainer for any ecommerce company. Send an immediate message to someone who has abandoned their shopping cart with a reminder to finish their purchase. Some companies offer a discount (once) if the person comes back that day to complete the purchase.

Thank yous, rewards to loyal customers

You wouldn’t be there without your customers. Let your most valuable customers know how much you appreciate them with an occasional thank you and reward.

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Posted on by Louis Gudema

This is part of chapter 23 of Louis Gudema’s Bullseye Marketing book, which is available on Amazon. 

There is perhaps no more common saying in business than “our people are what make us great.” That is certainly true when it comes to marketing. No matter how much marketing technology you implement, or data you acquire, the difference between failure, meh, and great success is always going to be who is using them and how.

The quill pen is one of the easiest writing devices to use, but it was how Shakespeare used it that made all the difference.

When I asked CMO Jeanne Hopkins, who was interviewed in chapter 3, “You’ve got all these issues around the search marketing channel, online advertising, social media marketing. And then you’ve got offline things: you’ve got print, and direct mail, and radio, TV, and everything. So where do you start?”

Without hesitation she answered, “So that is a phenomenal question. And I think you have to start with the team.”

So invest the time and effort to hire the right people, and give them the support they need to succeed.

The skills needed

The marketing team today needs a wider range of skills than ever before. Many of the skills are new, but they don’t replace earlier ones. They are additive.

Marketers have always needed to be good at:

  1. Understanding the customer’s motivators and emotions
  2. Planning how to reach customers with messages
  3. Writing and developing creative
  4. Graphic design
  5. Events
  6. Project management
  7. PR and other corporate communications

Expertise might also include marketing channel knowledge, such as how to excel with print, direct mail, or billboards, and how to manage partner and channel marketing and other programs.

A modern marketing team also needs expertise (occasionally or always) in:

  1. Website design and development
  2. Conversion rate optimization
  3. Email marketing
  4. Marketing automation
  5. Remarketing
  6. Account based marketing
  7. Online events
  8. Analytics

And that’s just for the center of the Bullseye!

In the second phase you’ll need to add skill in search advertising and other intent-based programs. And in Phase 3 add skills in social media, deeper content marketing, display ads, other channels and attribution modeling.

Some team members will come to marketing from the traditional creative-first side, whereas others will be much more comfortable and experienced with technology and data. It’s important that you create an environment of mutual respect. Both have much to contribute, and for your marketing programs to succeed people with both backgrounds – and blends of the two – must feel comfortable and respected when contributing.

Staff, agency or consultants?

Unless you, or someone on your team, have very deep, modern marketing experience, it should be clear by now that you shouldn’t attempt to do all this, or even lead all this, on your own. You don’t want to spend months and months trying to learn what others have taken years to learn — and repeating their early mistakes. Either hire a head of marketing or an experienced marketing consultant to get you started.

It’s common now for companies that are just ramping up their marketing programs to use an interim head of marketing for 6-12 months, or longer, to develop and begin to implement their strategy. This may not necessarily even be a full-time person. In a small company, a one-quarter or one-third time person may be able to produce results, build confidence in the program, and help hire a permanent person to head the effort.

Initially, you may not want to add many people to your headcount and so may want to use more part-time consultants. Many experienced consultants are available in most major cities. You also can find experienced people with marketing skills on Upwork.com, Guru.com, and similar sites. Be sure to go with people with excellent reviews by many clients; let others check out the newbies. You can ask people questions before you hire them, and how helpful they are in this stage may predict what they will be like to work with, too.

You may want to keep creative positions, especially writing, in-house so that the people doing them can learn more about your customers and offerings and improve their work over time. As your program scales, you may need full-time employees, contractors or agencies to manage specialized programs such as managing search ads or large scale email programs.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

Management guru Peter Drucker once wrote, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” And it’s true. The best plans will go nowhere if your people aren’t behind them.

You may not be able to change your company culture overnight, but you should be able to help build a great culture in your group. Some of the elements of a great culture include:

Values

The company should have values beyond “make a profit.” Let your people know why you exist and what you plan to achieve. Many people care more about the Why than the What.

For example, Apple is about more than creating computers or electronics. Steve Jobs’ vision included developing tech products that are easier to use and more elegant. Walmart’s Values include:

  • Service to the Customer
  • Respect for the Individual
  • Strive for Excellence
  • Act with Integrity

These values should be incorporated into your marketing narrative, too.

Collaboration and Camaraderie

Hire people who not just can work together, but enjoy working with others. I can remember just one time when I got a bad reference for a potential hire. I asked his former boss, “Would you hire him again?” and, after a pause, she said, “No, no we wouldn’t.” When I asked why, she said, “Because what he really wants to do is sit off by himself and write code all day, and we need people who can work in a team.” So did I; I didn’t hire him.

This camaraderie isn’t simply “let’s play foosball” or “let’s get a drink after work,” although those may have their place. I’m talking about people who respect one another and work together to achieve common goals.

Here’s a few possible interview question:

  • Describe a scenario where schedules shift and the applicant won’t be able to meet all of their deadlines; then ask them what they would do in that situation. Don’t accept “I’d work harder”; it’s not going to be possible to get everything done. The answer that you’re looking for is something like, “I’d go to my boss, explain the situation, and ask how they want to prioritize the work.” That’s the answer of a team player.
  • Ask who was the best boss they ever had and why. Their answer to the “why” may tell you if they are going to work well with their boss at your company.
  • Ask about the best workplace teamwork that they ever experienced, and what made that team successful.

Learning

All companies need people who are committed to life-long learning, and that’s especially important in marketing. In your job interview, you could ask what they are studying and how they go about keeping up with advances in their field. Develop a culture in your team in which failure is not only accepted but expected – zero failures means that you’re not trying anything new. But people need to learn from their failures; what isn’t accepted is failing in the same way twice. Your company should also support learning with stipends to take courses or attend conferences.

Responsibility

You want people who take initiative and responsibility.

Here’s a possible interview question related to responsibility: Ask the person to describe something that they did – in or out of work – that they’re especially proud of. Then ask them to describe something they did that failed and why it failed. (Don’t accept, “I can’t think of a failure that I’ve had.”) In their answer, they should describe, without you prompting it, what they did wrong to contribute to or produce that failure. If instead, they blame the failure on co-workers and clients, that’s a bad sign.

Your company may have other values than these. Make sure that your policies and incentives align with your values, and that you look for people for your team that appreciate and support those values, too.

How Jeff Bezos changed the culture of The Washington Post

In October 2013, Jeff Bezos bought the unprofitable Washington Post.

Within three years its Web traffic had doubled, subscriptions were way up, and their smaller staff was posting far more online content than The New York Times and even BuzzFeed. And they were profitable. Licensing their new, speedy content management system to other newspapers was being considered as an auxiliary source of revenue, similar to how Amazon Web Services (AWS) produces revenue for Amazon.

Central to this turnaround was a change in the culture of The Post. It’s very hard to change a culture.

CIO Shailesh Prakash and Director of Product Joey Marburger offer many insights into how the company changed in a Columbia Journalism Review interview

Culture: (Marburger) It’s been three years since Jeff bought us. I’d say we’d probably be where we are maybe five to seven years from now. And who knows if we would’ve done half of what we’ve gotten done. But Jeff didn’t just reach down to the newsroom and say here’s a brand-new culture, here’s a bunch of things you should do, here’s what Amazon does, so you should copy it. The sheer thought of him spread throughout the company. Overnight, we thought there wasn’t much we couldn’t do

Compensation: (Prakash) The number one criteria that grows our compensation used to be operating income. Did you or did you not hit the operating income target that was agreed upon at the beginning of the year? It was crystal clear whether you got your bonus or not. We were all in it together. When revenue was slowing and operating income is the target, then what do you do? You cut costs. There’s no other way out.

When Jeff bought us, within about six months, he threw that out. Now there are three other criteria. It’s basically: How fast do you move? It’s very subjective. The second one is that there are no sacred cows, to push experimentation. The third thing is debate, but commit. So you can argue all you want, but once we agree, then there’s no undermining. Those are the three things that now very subjectively drive the compensation.

Technology: (Prakash) It’s been proven over and over again that speed matters. In some industries, the correlation is more direct, like in retail. You have a site and you change nothing except it becomes much faster, you see the sales change.

If you’re used to a lot of other slow mobile sites out there, specifically news, and you come to us and it’s significantly faster, you may be more likely to come to us on a regular basis. And you’re more likely—which we see already in the data—to consume more content, hit the subscription meter faster, consume more ads, you name it.

User Experience: (Prakash) It was Bezos who brought this up. He said that when Amazon made the Kindle, they didn’t think, ‘Let’s get rid of the book and come up with a new way to read books.’ Their whole approach was, ‘How can we keep everything that’s fantastic about a book and also add in the gifts of digital?’

Market focus: (Prakash) We had for a very long time a tagline that said ‘For and About Washington.’ One of the big changes and explicit changes in strategy has been to go after a national and international audience. One of the things we’ve tried to do is to look at platforms we might be able to over-index on to get there faster. Take Facebook. One in seven humans visits Facebook every day. It’s not possible to grow nationally and internationally if you say, ‘I will send them 10 articles.’ If we want to grow nationally and internationally it is really not an option to just ignore that platform.

Build a diverse team

I already mentioned the diverse skill set needed on a modern marketing team. You should also strive to have a team that’s diverse in other ways. If you’re not fully taking advantage of the skills and potential contributions of women, people of color and older workers, you’re missing out on well over half of the labor force. That’s tying more than one arm behind your back.

When “blind” auditions were introduced for orchestras, where the performer sits behind a screen so their gender, race, and appearance are hidden, the number of women winning competitions for open seats dramatically increased.In a study of thousands of companies, those with a significant number of women in top management tended to be much more profitable.

Diversity is likely to bring in knowledge and positive attitudes that a homogeneous culture doesn’t, and is more likely to make a company better able to take advantage of what everyone can offer. A diverse workforce will have greater insights into the increasingly diverse customer base, too.

I once heard a simple formula for hiring. When you’re hiring there are only three questions that you really need to answer:

  • Can the person do the job? (Do they have the skills, experience, etc.?)
  • Do they want to do the job? (Are they enthusiastic about this job and your company, or are they just looking for a paycheck?)
  • Will they fit in?

And of the three, the last question is the most important.

The last question is the most important when it comes to diversity, too, because having a narrow definition of “fitting in” is the difference between a homogeneous and a diverse workforce.

If you consciously or unconsciously define “fitting in” as people of the same gender, race, class, and age – and similar non-work interests (Go Cubs!) — you will be severely limited in your hiring options. But if you define it as people who share your team’s values and goals and skills, then the future is yours.

As a six-foot, five-inch tall friend of mine says, the fact that tall people make more money than short people shows how far we still are from being a true meritocracy.[iv]

Hire slow, fire fast.

At my marketing agency, I started out hiring fast and firing slowly. Over the dozen years that I ran it I learned to reverse that. Many business leaders believe in “hire slow, fire fast,” too.

So take your time in hiring. Do multiple interviews including several people on your team. Check their references. Give them tests, if appropriate. Be thorough. Get it right. And admit your mistakes quickly when you get it wrong, terminate the person and get the right person in.

That doesn’t mean that if the new hire makes one mistake they’re out the door — unless it’s a really bad mistake. You can give them two or three strikes before they’re out. But explain to them if they do mess up how you do things at your company and what your expectations are. Also, praise what they’re doing well. Famed UCLA basketball coach John Wooden said, “I can’t begin to coach until the player does something right.”

But if it’s clear that they’re not right for your company, then act fast. You don’t have time for underperformers, and your team will appreciate it. A players want to work with other A players,

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Posted on by Louis Gudema

This is part of chapter 6 of Louis Gudema’s Bullseye Marketing book, which is available on Amazon.

Conversion rate optimization is one of the most important elements of a Bullseye marketing program. Starting serious marketing efforts without first optimizing your website for conversions is like turning on a spigot and trying to fill a bucket that’s full of holes.

You should always have an objective for people coming to your website. At a minimum, you want to get their contact information and permission to send them updates (aka market to them). Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the practice of constantly improving the rate of people completing your desired actions, whether it’s making a purchase, downloading an ebook, signing up for a webinar, or something else.

The logic of conversion rate optimization is simple: it’s much easier, faster, and cheaper to get twice as many of the people who are already coming to a website to do something than it is to double the number of people coming to the site.

As you’ll see, doubling your conversion rate is not as hard as you might think. And when you do double it, you’ve also cut in half the cost of those web leads or sales. Do I have your attention now?

For example, ecommerce companies know that the vast majority of people who come to their site won’t actually buy something on their first visit, but their lifetime value as a customer will be several times higher if they can get that site visitor’s email address and market to them. So right on their home page many ecommerce sites will interrupt the first time visitor’s buying experience and give them an incentive to provide their email address or text information.

Staples home page

Of course, it’s even better if the site visitors also buy. So ecommerce sites run countless tests regarding pricing, images, colors, layout, and so forth, to encourage that, too. Those all are part of conversion rate optimization.

Direct Marketing Success Factors

Many digital marketing programs are forms of direct marketing. And, in order, the three most important components contributing to the success of direct marketing campaigns are:

  1. List or audience
  2. Offer
  3. Creative

Before going deeper into CRO and other marketing tactics, let’s consider each for a moment because they will impact much of what we do.

List: A direct marketing list is traditionally just that: a list of thousands or millions of people and their addresses and other information. In large-scale consumer direct marketing programs, marketers enrich those lists with such additional information as the consumer’s approximate income, credit rating, type of car that they drive, magazines that they subscribe to, and so on. In a B2B campaign, additional data may include the size and location of the prospect’s company, company’s industry, previous business relationship with the company, title of the person, and much, much more. Some direct marketers add thousands of data points to each profile and use advanced analytics to target their messages.

I’m generally using the term “list” more broadly. I consider a list to be that traditional kind, such as for email marketing and direct mail, but also more broadly your audience. You need to get in front of the right people and get them your website to have Bullseye marketing success.

It’s not always easy. You need to know which industry sites, social media channels, conferences, blogs, magazines, and other communication channels that your customers use. With today’s fractured media landscape, that can be difficult to find out. When interviewing customers about where they get their professional information I’ve had more than one answer, “Google” or “Twitter” – not real helpful.

Offer: Once you’ve found your audience, you need to get them to act. To get people to give up something you value (their money, or their contact information), you need to give them something that they value. That may simply be your product or service, but often it is a discount, information, entertainment – value comes in many forms. You need to understand your customers to know what will move them to act. You then use calls to action — such as “Click here to do X” or “Take advantage of our 10% discount; offer good today only” — to get them act on your offer

Creative: Direct markers have always tested different creative: messages, colors, photos, layouts, and so on.

Just changing the color of a button, or changing the button text from “Submit” to “Download your free ebook” or adding the word “free” to a headline, or redesigning your landing page can make a significant difference. Superior creative can double your conversion rates, or more.

Your landing page copy can make a big difference. Some tried and true techniques are:

  • bandwagon effect (“Being used by 150,000 people!”)
  • halo effect (“Brought to you by the people who made [last year’s great product, movie, etc.]”)
  • scarcity (“Only X left!”, “Offer good today only!”)
  • social proof, such as reviews and testimonials
  • use the word “you” in your copy
  • describe benefits not features
  • use the word “because” – studies have shown that providing even the feeblest reason increases cooperation
  • include emotional trigger words

Doubling your conversion rates with better creative is huge, of course. But getting in front of the right audience with a superior offer can produce conversion rate improvements of several hundred percent.

And that translates into dropping the cost per lead by 75% or more.

Now let’s look at a few specific CRO opportunities.

Website conversion rate optimization

You need to get the most from the people who are visiting your website. That’s a core principle in Phase 1 of Bullseye Marketing.

But most people who visit your website will come and go without leaving a trace. It’s not unusual for only one percent or fewer of site visitors to do something. We want to significantly improve on that.

Most people will start on your home page or a page that’s especially well optimized for search. In my experience, the three most popular pages for a corporate site are

  • home page
  • top product/service pages
  • the careers page.

Since we’re concerned with marketing and revenue, we’re not going to worry about the careers page. But if someone has enough interest in you to come to your site and go to one of your product/service pages, it’s a good idea to do what you can to get them to start interacting with you.

To do that, you need to spread offers and calls to action all over your site.

Here are a few companies that demonstrate how.

Jeff Bezos knows more about Internet business than anyone. When he bought The Washington Post it was losing money, partly because it was giving its great writing away for free. So he put up a paywall. This is what the home page looks like now if you’re not a paying subscriber.

Washington Post website home page with 20% off offers

Conversion optimization is not subtle, although it is not always as in-your-face as this.

But it worked: within a couple of years The Post was once again profitable.

For a company like Slack that delivers its software via the Internet, it’s a no-brainer: let people buy your software, or at least sign up for the free version of your software, right on your home page.

SaaS software companies are one of the few types of firms that can use their home page as a prime, CRO landing page.

Dell EMC sells high-end computer memory and other systems; a single deal can be worth tens of millions of dollars. They think that getting people to their conference is so significant that they will sometimes devote their entire home page to promoting it.

Dell EMC home page promoting its conference

A primary marketing goal for many medical institutions is to get more appointments scheduled with new patients. So Cleveland Clinic, a premier institution, on most website pages provides multiple ways for people to move the conversation forward:

  • A phone number
  • That orange appointments button
  • Live chat
  • Email
Cleveland Clinic web page with contact options

Even subtle changes to a regular web page – like an orange button versus a grey one — can make a big difference. Or the location of the Contact Us button: make sure that there’s one at the top of your page, it will produce far better results than one in the footer.

The key point is to make it as easy as possible for people to connect with you in whatever way they prefer.

Chat pop-ups are proving to be a very effective way for companies to start to engage one-to-one with people visiting their websites, especially with those people on pages that suggest stronger buying intent like a pricing page.

And some companies are automating at least part of these conversations with chatbots. The chatbots can be programmed with branching conversations to qualify a visitor and move the appropriate ones on to a live salesperson, or save the salesperson’s time and get the visitor the information that they need instead. Or direct them to support if that’s what they need. These chatbots only cost a few hundred dollars a month, making them far less expensive than a person, can be trained quickly and don’t mind working 24/7.

Many companies use pop-ups to promote their next event or latest offering. Gartner is a leading tech analyst firm; it serves many large companies who buy its reports for thousands of dollars apiece, or pay tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for a subscription. Here it uses a home page pop-up to promote an upcoming conference.

Often pop-ups are launched when a person is about to leave your site. These can be triggered by the cursor moving toward the URL address box (presumably to type in a different site) or, if they just arrived, to the Back button. These “exit intent pop-ups” display a “Wait! Don’t go yet!” offer such as this one:

While you may not use these devices on every page of your site – you might exempt your career pages, for example — they can significantly increase business from people who are showing real interest in the products and services that you’re offering.


Landing Pages

Landing pages are a special kind of website page. They are the pages with forms that you direct people to from your website buttons, ads, social media posts, direct mail, and other calls to action.

When people come to your landing pages, often at considerable expense to you, you want them to fill in the form with accurate information, immediately do business with you, or give you permission to market to them. That is the sole purpose of a landing page.

Several guidelines for the creation of effective landing pages are:

  • The landing page should make it easy for the person to take advantage of the offer that the person clicked on to get to the page (they may have also come from a direct mail piece and typed in a URL, and possibly even a personalized URL or PURL).
  • Usually, the landing page will have a prominent headline with explanatory text on one side and the form on the other side; pages with the text on the top and the form below tend not to perform as well.
  • Only one subject and offer per landing page. Don’t try to do too much. You can experiment with secondary offers far down at the bottom of the page, but don’t make them so prominent that they’re competing with your primary offer and goal.
  • You should not have the website navigation on the landing page. Various studies have shown that you’ll get a higher conversion rate without navigation giving the person an easy way to move on to other parts of the site. Only the company logo should be on the top and clickable to get to the full website.[i]
  • You can test such creative options as:
    • including a phone number
    • different wording, images, and colors
    • different call-to-action button colors, designs, and text (for example, Get your free ebook” instead of “Download”).

This basic landing page checks the boxes.

 

These days some marketers get quite cute – even taunting — with their button text, such as this on a form offering a free industry report:

Landing page buttons

I also recommend that you ask people to provide an email address and then send them a download link or other information, rather than giving them all the information online after filling out the form. First, for you that guarantees that they’ll put in a valid email address, not something like a@a.com; and for them they’ll have a link that they can use to download the materials to their desktop and mobile devices – wherever they want to read them – and even do so more than once.

Test, test, test. You may be surprised at what can make a difference – digital marketers usually are!

You’ll also want to test to make sure that your landing pages look good and work well on smartphones. Since the mobile screen is so much smaller, you have far fewer options. The first absolute rule is that you need a mobile-ready website, typically a responsive site. The mobile landing page text and form fields should be large enough that they’re easily read and completed.

On the left is what an Oracle form looked like on its site before it was responsive, and on the right is the mobile-friendly version of the same form. The latter is far easier to deal with on a small, smartphone screen.

Oracle original and responsive website forms

And one part of the tips I outlined above may be changing: increasingly sites use an initial page with the information, offer and a big yes button (of some sort) which then takes the person to the page with just the form. Shouldn’t that cut responses in half? Maybe not: it’s often intended to create a superior mobile experience and eliminate the need for the person to scroll down to a form on their phone. The extra click is easier.

A rough rule of thumb is that landing pages usually have a conversion rate of only about 3%, but if the creative design, wording, etc., are optimized you can double that to perhaps 6%. Right there you’ve doubled your leads while cutting your cost per lead in half.

However, a superior offer can dramatically improve on that with some companies reporting 50% or higher landing page form completions with great offers.

 

How much information should you ask for?

If you’re asking people to fill out a form, how much information can you ask for?  At what point will you drive them away?

It depends on the value of your offer. If people think of it as a very valuable offer, they may be willing to provide quite a lot of information. This form by tech analyst firm Gartner requires a dozen pieces of information to get their report.

Gartner landing page with many fields

I once worked with a company that needed a lot of information for the first sales call. I wondered if we couldn’t pre-qualify prospects, and speed up the work of the salespeople by asking prospects those questions in advance of a call. So I created a form with over 20 fields to it. These were detailed questions about what they wanted to do, how soon they needed it, etc. etc. It would take a person at least 5-10 minutes to fill out the whole thing.

And many people did. Just in case someone didn’t want to bother, we gave them an out at the very top: we told them that they could call us (phone number provided) or use a link to go to a much shorter form and fill that out — but few people did. We got four times more qualified leads from that very long form than from the short one.

Why?

I think a major reason was that we called it a “fee request form.” Many people probably thought that if they filled it out, they would get a proposal or information on our fees; that was our offer. And they may have thought that they would not need to talk with a salesperson; lots of people don’t want to talk with a salesperson.

From a sales point of view, we knew that if someone was going to take the time to fill out our very long form they were probably fairly serious.

So my recommendation, based on industry data and my experience, is to go to the extremes. Either use a very short form – possibly only initially asking for just their email address — to get lots of signups to build your database, or use a very long form that by its very nature will put you in touch with only the most serious prospects.

A third option is to use progressive profiling. With progressive profiling, you start with one or a few questions and each time the person requests something else from your site you ask just a few more questions. Over time you build up a rich profile of the person. Many marketing automation programs provide progressive profiling.


Marketing apps

Interactive marketing apps are an advanced form of conversion optimization. They are based on the idea that people may value an experience with your company that is more enjoyable than filling out a form. You only have to look at how many people take and share Buzzfeed quizzes to realize how much people like interactive content.

Marketing apps bring a kind of gamified experience to marketing and can include quizzes, assessments, configurators, ROI calculators, games, interactive infographics, graders, and more.

When WordStream was sold, founder Larry Kim wrote on LinkedIn, “My most spectacular growth hack is the AdWords Grader. We showcase the product by grading AdWords account performance.”  People used the HubSpot Website Grader over four million times,making it one of their strongest lead generation tools.

 

Thank You pages

Once the person has filled out a form and submitted it you’re done with them for now, right? Wrong! You’ve got a very interested person in front of you. Offer them even more.

The Thank You page is a great opportunity to say more than “Thank you, the webinar registration information has been emailed to you.” You now can give them more information, show a couple more offers, even provide a “Would you like to talk to a rep right now?” button.

Thank You page with new offers

You can also include social sharing buttons: make it easy for people to tell their friends about the valuable offer that they were smart enough to take advantage of.

Call tracking

So far I’ve focused primarily on the digital conversion experience, but of course there are other options such as business reply mail envelopes, postcards, and a telephone number.

When a prospect calls your company, they are likely to be more highly motivated than if they filled out a form. Call tracking is a way for you to improve the call experience over time and to understand which of your campaigns are generating leads.

With call tracking your company gets a pool of unique phone numbers. You then use different ones throughout your campaigns: one for mail, one for billboards, one on your website, and so on. You can even dynamically include unique numbers on different AdWords ads and track responses at the keyword and ad level. The numbers all forward to your regular sales or customer support lines, but you have reports on which channel they came from.

That’s the campaign analytics part. The conversion optimization part is that you can record the calls (“this call may be monitored or recorded for quality assurance purposes”). You then can use the recordings to review how your business development reps — the people who answered the calls — did, and to train them to improve in the future.

 

Now that you know some of the most effective ways to improve your conversion rates, you’re probably going to be looking at website, offers, landing pages and even business phone calls differently than before. Great! There’s a lot to gain by being critical and running many tests to see what actually works for your company.

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Posted on by Louis Gudema

This is part of chapter 5 of Louis Gudema’s Bullseye Marketing book, which is available on Amazon.

There are countless types of websites:

  • corporate (IBM, GM)
  • social media (Facebook, Pinterest, TripAdvisor)
  • ecommerce (Amazon, Walmart, Wayfair)
  • SaaS software (Slack, Trello, Optimizely)
  • non-profit (Red Cross, Partners in Health, Human Rights Watch)
  • schools and colleges
  • entertainment
  • games
  • blogs, personal expression
  •  

So there’s no way that in just a few pages I could successfully describe how to create any type of website. That said, here are 10 tips that should help.

1.     Establish goals

What do you want to achieve with your website? Generate leads? Sell products? Build your personal brand? Attract donations? Volunteers? Provide a platform for social connections? For personal expression?

You need to define your goals before you put much effort into the messaging, information architecture, technology, and so forth.

2.     Speak to the customer

The home page is the most-visited page on most websites, and most website visitors are first-time visitors, so make sure that you have a single, compelling, customer-centric message on your home page that quickly communicates who you are and why visitors should care.

Having a single, compelling message means that you should not use a carousel — those slide shows of several images and messages that change every few seconds. Instead of conveying several messages – the hope of people using carousels — carousels dilute all of your messages and frustrate your visitors. In 2013 the shouldiuseacarousel.com website was created, and it well communicates the case against carousels.

Here is the before and after of a website home page for a client of mine that prints custom labels for food companies. Their customers include major brands like Whole Foods, Williams-Sonoma, Wegmans, and Dunkin’ Donuts, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at their original website, which was very cluttered.

former home page with poor design and no calls to action

After the redesign, they presented a strong message around their core service, and their website was full of conversion opportunities that made it easy for companies to order from them. Their new website is also mobile-ready, unlike their old one.

3. Information architecture and navigation

The information architecture (IA) of a site is how it is organized. The navigation is the on-screen menus and similar devices that people use to move through the content.

When developing your IA keep in mind what your visitor is coming to the site to do, and make it easy for them to do it. Also remember that many of your visitors – maybe a majority — are looking at your site on a phone, and you need an experience that will work for them. Because of its small screen, developing for mobile is more challenging and less forgiving. Start with the mobile experience and work out from there to small tablets and then desktops –what website designers call “mobile first.” 

My philosophy of navigation is to keep it simple and to use Web-standard conventions like having the main desktop navigation across the top of the page. Maybe a game site could create a different navigation experience, but for 99.9% of sites, you’ll want to make it as fast and easy as possible for people to do what they want to do and get to your content. Cars can be as different as a Hummer, a Ferrari and a Smart Car, but they all have the steering wheel in the front seat. Save your creativity for your content.

In your navigation, avoid drop-down and fly-out menus: they clutter up the screen and get in the way of other content. And they aren’t easy for search engines to analyze.

4. Chunk your content

You should break up your content between pages, and within pages.

One contemporary website design trend is long, multi-topic scrolling pages. The only problem is people don’t like to scroll down long, multi-topic pages. Heat maps show that on almost any web page the farther down content is, the less it is read. That’s why when Google is indexing a page it weights the content at the top of the page more heavily than that farther down.

For one client I re-engineered their website from long, scrolling pages into many shorter, single-topic pages with a traditional navigation at the top. The average time-on-site for a visit immediately jumped up 50 percent.

So if you have content that you don’t care if people read, feel free to put it at the bottom of a long, multi-topic page. But if you think that all of your content is important, break it up into shorter pages and make it easy for people to navigate to them.

There’s nothing wrong with having long, single-topic pages of content; some studies have shown that blog posts with 2,500-3,000 words get higher readership and sharing than shorter pieces. But make it easy for people to scan and take in what you are saying by chunking your content.

  • Break your content up into short sections with headlines and subheads to guide the reader and enable them to scan a page to see if they’re interested.
  • Use numbered and bulleted lists.
  • Use images to emphasize important points.

5. Segment and personalize content

In 1998 Jeff Bezos said, “If we have 4.5 million customers, we shouldn’t have one store. We should have 4.5 million stores.”[i]

That vision was way ahead of its time, but it has come to pass. Today Amazon has hundreds of millions of customers and hundreds of millions of home pages. They personalize based on previous purchases, browsing, and other factors.

You don’t need to have an ecommerce site to create a personalized website. Leading marketing automation and experience management platforms, and even lighter solutions aimed at smaller sites, let you personalize content based on such factors as which pages the person has previously visited, their geolocation, how often they visit, their relationship to you (customer, partner, etc.), what other site they were referred from, their corporate domain, and others. You could personalize the home page message for each known visitor.

Home page personalized by company of visitor

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.

Optimizely customized their home page experience for 16 market segments, including key accounts that they were targeting with an account based marketing program. With targeted home page messages they caught the attention of visitors and achieved significantly greater engagement.

6. Provide calls to action

Your website should have many calls to action (CTAs) throughout it encouraging site visitors to do what you want them to (those goals you started with).  You can offer visitors the opportunity to sign up for upcoming physical and digital events, register for a free trial, access content, make a purchase, make a donation, join, volunteer, and much more.

Pay special attention to the next chapter on conversion rate optimization for all sorts of tips on using CTAs and increasing conversions.


7. Include social media buttons

Of course, you want social media and email buttons on your website. But what do you want them to do?

Buttons for Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites

On many corporate sites the social media buttons are low on the page – maybe even in the footer – and take you to that company’s Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts with the hope that you’ll then follow them.

On news and ecommerce sites the social media and email buttons are often high on the page – sometimes at the very top – to encourage people to share that page’s content with their social media followers.

Which purpose is more important for your company?


8. Make your site accessible

Companies need to make their websites accessible to the visually impaired. Over three million Americans are blind and many use screen reading software to access the Internet. Other people are color blind: think of reading a subway map with color-coded lines when you can’t distinguish between colors. Companies may need to provide text explanations for critical color-based information.

Some of the things you need to do to create an accessible website include:

  • Structure menus and pages so screen readers can navigate and read them
  • Use descriptive alt tags on all images (alt tags are read by the screen readers to explain what the image is/says)
  • Provide transcripts for your videos and podcasts

If you don’t want to make your website accessible to help the two-to-three percent of people who are visually impaired do business with you, or to be nice, you need to do it the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires it.

Enter the attorneys.

Hundreds of class action lawsuits have been filed to require organizations to make their websites accessible. For now, these usually target larger companies with deep pockets: retailers have faced the most suits, as have restaurant chains, universities, banks, and other industries.

These suits charge that not only do the inaccessible websites stop the plaintiffs from doing business with the organization, they also make it impossible for them to apply for jobs. Most defendants settle.

Better get on it.


9. Optimize for Search Engines

Of course, you want your website content to be read by as many people as possible, and so you need to optimize your site and content for high rankings on Google and Bing. Be sure to read the search engine optimization chapter in Phase 3 and apply its recommendations to your site.


10. Use the right technology

You should plan to update your site regularly, if for no other reason than that Google likes sites with fresh content. And you don’t want your IT department to be a bottleneck. So you will need a content management system (CMS) to empower many people to make website changes. Some vendors these days call their CMS an “experience manager.”

There are hundreds of content management systems available. Some are tailored for particular uses such as community sites or ecommerce sites or educational institutions.

If many of the people in your organization who will be posting content to the site don’t have deep tech experience, then you need a CMS that’s easy to use.  When considering a new CMS don’t just watch demos, but have the end users in your organization try the contenders out for themselves.

The CMS should also have a permissions structure that enables you to say which parts of the website each person can edit, and what their level of privileges are. For example, some people may be able to create and edit, but not publish without it first being approved by another person.

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Posted on by Louis Gudema

This is chapter 24 of Louis Gudema’s Bullseye Marketing book, which is available on Amazon. 

Omni-channel marketing – being present on all of the channels where your customers are hanging out– is critical today. In just the simplest example, product research often starts on mobile and then moves to desktop; people may move back and forth between mobile, desktop, tablets and in-person for some time. Or consider the retailer who has a customer in the store ready to buy, but that customer is going to do further research on their mobile phone before making that in-store purchase. Or the customer who is “showrooming” – looking at the item in the store before buying it online.

In more complex business purchases the customer may consume information on the vendor’s website, social media, review sites, blogs, YouTube, trade shows, podcasts and other sources before making the purchase – a decision made in concert with several other people who are also consuming many pieces of information.

The omni-channel approach that the Bullseye will lead you to ultimately provides for consistent experiences and messages across all channels and interactions with the customer. They can interact with the company in the way that is most convenient for them and know that what they do on one device will be reflected if they switch to another.

One version of the Domino’s pizza home page lists many of the ways that you can order from them:

Domino's Pizza homepage

Consider all of the potential media interactions that an airline could have with customers:

  • TV ads to build brand awareness
  • search ads when people are searching for airfares to/from cities that the airline flies to
  • reservations website
  • third-party reservation sites
  • email and app reminders for an upcoming flight reservation
  • digital check-in a day or two before the flight
  • text notifications of flight delays or other significant news
  • Eticket on app or phone
  • in-flight entertainment and Wi-Fi
  • in-flight magazine with articles promoting other locations that the airline flies to
  • posting of the experience with the airline to social media, and how the airline responds to that.

The full omni-channel customer experience with the airline goes far beyond those media interactions to include

  • ticket/bag check kiosks and people
  • boarding process at the gate
  • flight attendants and how they handle the boarding and safety talk (Southwest uses humor)
  • the in-flight drink and meal service
  • on-time arrivals
  • deplaning and getting bags (for those who checked them) at the destination
  • how passengers are rebooked if a flight is canceled

Each of these is a customer touchpoint: a moment of interactions between the customer and the airline when the customer has an expectation and will come away from the touchpoint feeling delighted, satisfied, or annoyed. Some of these touchpoints are more critical than others and can make or break the relationship.


Over time you can build a rich omni-channel program that not only gets the right message to the right person at the right time, but also provides them with an excellent experience on all of their interactions with your company.

Nothing that I’ve written in this book should be taken to denigrate the third phase programs. It’s not that advertising or inbound or social media or content marketing are always ineffective; in the long run they may be tremendously valuable. Rather, the Bullseye approach outlines a way to prioritize the least expensive, fastest programs for a company to start with, to get quick wins, build support, and then move on to longer range programs.      

Ultimately do everything that works for your business.

Bullseye with many darts
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Yesterday I wrote about direct mail Christmas catalogs. Today’s marketing tip about the use of direct mail in political campaigns – ‘tis the season.

Direct mail has not declined in politics in the way that it has in the catalog business; in fact, some estimates say that its use continues to increase. Obama and Romney spent over $200 million on direct mail and printing in 2012. Continue reading →

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This is part of chapter 24 of Louis Gudema’s Bullseye Marketing book, which is available on Amazon.

In this book, I’ve outlined a whole new approach to marketing that wouldn’t have made sense in the past when the Big Idea and big campaigns dominated marketing. Today we are much more focused on creating hundreds of small pieces of content – personalized emails, videos, blog posts, tweets, infographics, case studies, ROI calculators, website updates, and on and on. Then we need to continuously monitor this content and optimize these programs based on customer reactions, and be aware of – and possibly respond to — the moves that competitors are making. Often opportunities arise that we only have a few days or weeks to take advantage of.

We can’t afford to take weeks to create a master plan and months to execute it. We need to be more agile.

In 2012, taking inspiration from the agile software development movement, a group of marketers led by John Cass and Jim Ewel (who is interviewed below) came together for what they called SprintZero and created the Agile Marketing Manifesto[i]. It read:

  1. Validated learning over opinions and conventions
  2. Customer focused collaboration over silos and hierarchy
  3. Adaptive and iterative campaigns over Big-Bang campaigns
  4. The process of customer discovery over static prediction
  5. Flexible vs. rigid planning
  6. Responding to change over following a plan
  7. Many small experiments over a few large bets

It’s worth stopping for a few minutes and reading each of those seven points again. Then read them again and take some time to consider how each can impact how you do marketing.

It’s a manifesto that focuses on the customer– and feedback from them – at the center of marketing, data over opinion, a responsive and flexible attitude and practice, and experimentation.

Agile intends to lower the risk in projects by increasing the ability of the team to respond to changes in the market and project requirements, and by being closer to the customer.

Many marketing teams who adopt agile marketing report being more productive: they increase throughput, get campaigns to market faster, and improve their business results. Employees also report improved job satisfaction with the agile method. It’s perfectly suited for the Bullseye approach.

Agile marketing is a philosophy. Agile marketing practitioners have tended to adopt one of two methodologies for implementing it: Scrum or Kanban. Each method has certain practices and tools that I’ll describe below – the sprint, daily team stand-up meeting, and Kanban boards – but all of those are mutable. Or can be combined in unique ways. Just as all companies are different, each needs to find or develop the form of agile that works best for it.

Scrum

Agile software development inspired the agile marketing movement, and Scrum has been adopted from the software world, as well. Some product development teams were using Scrum in the mid-1980s. (The term “scrum” comes from rugby; it is a means of restarting play in which a large number of players join closely together to try to move the ball.)

A key organizing unit for Scrum is a series of 2-4 week sprints in which the team works to achieve specific goals and tasks by the end of the sprint. The length of the sprint cannot be changed once it starts, nor can tasks be added to the sprint.

At the start of the sprint, the team holds a sprint planning meeting to determine the goals and the tasks for each team member for that sprint and to get buy-in from the team.

The team usually chooses the tasks from a product backlog of user stories. A product owner creates these user stories for the team; Scrum teams typically have one product owner, and this role is not combined with the Scrum master (below).

These user stories are customer-centric and include the Actor, Action and Achievement, such as:

  • As a [particular persona] I want to be able to [learn specific information] to [understand product differentiators].
  • As a potential end-user, I want to see a software product demo to understand how the user interface compares to other software.
  • As a car buyer interested in sustainability I want to learn the carbon footprint of this automobile.
  • As a person planning a trip to Croatia, I want to find the best seafood restaurants

User stories also include context for the request and acceptance criteria for the task. Some criteria are objective – this landing page will increase leads by X%, or this blog post will get Y shares. Some criteria are more subjective.

The sprint planning meeting, and the entire sprint, is facilitated by a Scrum master. Unlike a traditional manager, though, the Scrum master is not ultimately responsible for the outcome of the sprint, the team is.

The Scrum master helps the team decide which product backlog items to undertake for the upcoming sprint and identify what tasks are necessary to complete them.

During the sprint, Scrum teams often start the day with 15-minute standing meetings. The three questions that each person answers in the daily standup are:

  1. What did I do yesterday?
  2. What will I do today?
  3. Do I need help with anything that’s blocking me from accomplishing today’s tasks?

This keeps the team members focused on their goals for this sprint, and collaborating on how to achieve them.

At the end of each sprint, the team holds two meetings: the sprint review and retrospective.

In the sprint review, the completed work is presented to stakeholders, and the team and stakeholders review what they accomplished and discuss what should be worked on next.

In the sprint retrospective, the Scrum master and team review the last sprint and discuss how to improve their process going forward, and any changes in the process needed for the next sprint.

Wash, rinse and repeat.

Kanban

Kanban, which comes from the Japanese for “sign,” originated in manufacturing at Toyota in the late 1940s and has been applied to many other industries since then.

Right from the get-go, Kanban is different from Scrum in that it does not have the start-stop rhythm of 2-4 week sprints. Kanban is a continuous flow process, and when one item is completed the team member goes on to the next. Consequently, it also doesn’t have the sprint planning, review, and retrospective meetings that are central to Scrum.

As in Scrum, Kanban tasks can be created as user stories which are then put into the backlog on a Kanban board. Kanban boards are central to the method and are also used by some Scrum teams. (There are physical and software Kanban boards.)

The simplest Kanban board has three columns or lists:

  • To do
  • Doing
  • Done

More complex boards may have far more lists representing the stages of a process, such as this one for blog posts:

  • Conceive
  • Research
  • Write
  • Edit
  • Design
  • Post, amplify and promote

Cards aren’t moved forward until they are considered as good as possible or, as would be said in manufacturing, error-free. In the blog post example, a writer would not move a post into editing unless they felt it was correct regarding content, spelling, and grammar – ready for publication.

And each list has a defined limit. For example, the editing list may only be able to accommodate four pieces at a time. If the list is already full, but another post is ready, it is not moved onto the edit list until one of those four already there is completed and moved on to design.

So Kanban is much less structured than Scrum, with fewer new roles and meetings. It is a process of continuous delivery, and the continuous improvement of an existing process. It may not be as radical of a change as Scrum is for most organizations.

 

These are short descriptions of two complex methodologies. Entire books have been written about each.

And teams don’t necessarily need to choose between Scrum and Kanban. They can choose the aspects of each that work best for them. The important thing is to create a process that adheres to those agile principles that works for you.

Agile isn’t necessarily applicable to everything. If you have a big product launch or website redesign, those may need more traditional “waterfall” or other planning approaches.

While agile may seem like a relatively simple process to implement with a small team, it actually affects relations throughout the company — such as with product managers and sales — who need to be involved in creating new user stories and reviewing marketing’s work product. There may be some hiccups in transition, as there are with any change, but in the long run agile can help create smoother, more productive and successful working relationships.

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This is part of chapter 4 of Louis Gudema’s Bullseye Marketing book which is available on Amazon. 

Why focus on current customers

Your best Bullseye opportunity is to sell more to your current customers.

Many companies focus too much on closing new accounts. But it is far less expensive to sell more to existing customers than to land a new customer, whether you’re selling to consumers or other companies. Depending on the company and industry, estimates are that landing new customers costs five to 25 times more than growing an existing one. Since these new sales are so much easier and less expensive to close, they have a much higher profit, too. A study by the inventor of the Net Promoter Score showed that increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25-95%

In higher education they understand that retaining students is as important as landing new ones: after all, what’s the point if every time the admission office lets a new student in the front door two are walking out the back? So they stay close to their customers (students and parents) and are constantly looking at programs to improve their retention rates. They call this “enrollment management.”

In some companies, such as SaaS (Software as a Service) companies, retaining customers is a KPI (key performance indicator). The loss of customers is called churn. The best SaaS companies lose less than five percent of customers annually.

For some B2B companies just a few, large customers account for a disproportionate share of their sales and profits. Perhaps just 20 percent of customers provide 80 percent of profits (and therefore the “80-20 Rule”, also called the Pareto Rule). In higher ed fundraising, which definitely requires marketing support, the proportions can be even more extreme: sometimes 95% of money raised comes from just five percent of donors. Those few, vital accounts demand special attention and programs.

If you’re retaining and growing current accounts at a high rate, you then want to turn those customers into advocates, because people today believe recommendations from friends and professional colleagues – and even strangers on social media — more than they believe your marketing. And recommendations are free; you’ll never do marketing cheaper than free.

So for all of these reasons, increasing customer satisfaction and retention and selling more to existing customers are key parts of your Phase 1 Bullseye activities. Let’s get to it!

The one question to ask

In 2003, Bain business strategist Fred Reichheld wrote an article for The Harvard Business Review entitled “The One Number You Need to Grow”[iii]. Expanding on some original insights from Enterprise Rent-A-Car, he had researched customer loyalty – a particular passion of his. In the article and blog post, he outlined what would become known as the Net Promoter Score® (NPS ®).[iv]

With NPS you ask customers one question: “How likely is it that you would recommend [company X] to a friend or colleague?” They are asked to respond on a 0-10 scale.  A rating of 9 or 10 is considered a promoter, 7-8 is neutral, and 6 or below is a detractor. To find the Net Promoter Score, you subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. According to Reichheld, companies with a high NPS grow the fastest and those with a low NPS have slow or no growth, or may even be in decline. You want to have a positive NPS, and the best companies have an NPS of 60-80, or better.

This question is often followed up with a second, open-ended question: What is the reason for your answer?

The NPS can provide a valuable baseline for companies and a way to measure improvement. And that second, open-ended question can be invaluable research, too, because you find out what are the most important issues affecting your customers. The NPS answers can provide important information to salespeople for follow-ups since the respondent should not be anonymous, but asked to identify themselves.

Reichfeld developed the NPS when social media was still pretty young. Companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, and Pinterest didn’t even exist; LinkedIn was only a year old. While it has its critics (or detractors 😉 the Net Promotor Score is more important today than ever with the ability of a positive recommendation or negative comment on social media to be seen by so many people almost instantly, and for the insights it gives into your customers.

Create a great customer experience

To sell more to current customers, they have to like what you’re providing — and maybe even be delighted by it. You’re selling an experience that starts with the very first marketing or sales interaction that they have with you and hopefully will continue for years.

A common framework used to understand the customer experience is the 5Es:

Entice: How do customers first hear of you? How are they lured into possibly doing business with you?

Enter: What’s their initial experience with us?

Engage: How do we interact with them as they do business with us?

Exit: What is the end of their experience like?

Extend: How do we encourage repeat business?

Consider the 5Es as they apply to the in-restaurant customer experience for a pizza shop.

Entice

  • Their storefront, signage, website, listing on Yelp, Facebook page

Enter

  • How the store looks (Its design: Is it clean? Pleasant? Comfortable?)
  • Are customers acknowledged or greeted when they first arrive?

Engage

  • Offerings:
    • the types of pizzas and toppings they offer
    • the drinks, salads, desserts, and other foods offered besides the pizza
    • their prices
  • How customers order:
    • How the staff interacts with customers. Are they friendly? Curt?
    • How long do customers have to wait?
    • Which methods can customers pay with?
  • How they serve the food:
    • Are the pizzas properly prepared? How quickly are they ready?
    • Are they served on a flat sheet? On some nice stand? What kind of plates and utensils do they use?
    • What is the quality of the pizzas?
    • How are complaints handled?

Exit

  • What do customers do with their refuse when they’re done at the restaurant?
  • Any “thanks” or other message as customers leave?

Extend

  • A loyalty program. Email or text communication with program members.
  •  

For a take-out customer, there would be additional/different elements to the experience.

And that’s all just for buying a pizza!

Imagine how complex the customer experience is for a hospital, or an airport, an online retailer, or a B2B company selling and servicing multi-million dollar equipment, or providing a complex service (like managing marketing campaigns) over a period of years.

All of these categories of interactions are called touchpoints, and you use them to analyze and design an ideal customer experience (CX).

Note a few key things to keep in mind about customer CX touchpoints:

  • Each touchpoint includes a customer expectation, experience, and
  • Touchpoints should be viewed from the customer point of view, not from the company orientation of “sales,” “marketing,” “operations,” and “customer service.”

You have two groups of people who need to be involved in creating a great customer experience: customers and employees.

Designing a great CX begins with… customer research. (By now you should expect that, right? We’re not flying by the seat of our pants here, people.) In the previous chapter, I presented ideas about how to research your customers. Here are a few that are important for CX research:

  • Talk to customers.
  • Conduct usability and customer satisfaction studies of your products and services.
  • Look at the usability of your website.
    • Can people achieve what they want to?
    • Where are they leaving when you would expect them to stay? (For example, ecommerce companies have learned that they need to offer “free shipping” because otherwise many people abandoned the purchase when faced with that additional cost near the end of checkout.)
  • What are customers saying online – about you and your competitors?
  • What insights do you get when you simulate the customer experience by using “secret shoppers”?

Employees are the front-line representatives of your organization. Not only do they have the most direct experience with customers but, unless your operation is completely automated, they can also have the greatest impact on the customer experience. Companies need to engage employees from the start in understanding the customer experience and empower them to improve it. The best companies create groups of employees to study and improve the customer experience.

You need to remember that you have more than one CX; even the pizza shop has people who eat in the store and do take-out. For larger companies, there are far more interactions and touchpoints. And in many B2B situations, the users of your products and services may not be the people who authorize the purchase or pay for it. Your CX studies and improvements need to account for all of your stakeholders.

This customer experience work is not something that should be left to a few senior executives to try to do on their own in one or two meetings. An initial customer experience program can take months to show results in the form of greater customer success, reduced complaints, and improved customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Scores. In the best organizations, it is a never-ending mission.

Creating customer journey maps

To create an effective presence in the mind of your customers, you first need to understand where they are – online and offline – and what they want to do at each point of their journey. Obviously, the buyer of an industrial pump has a very different customer journey than the buyer of a pizza. And even within a company, you will have potentially many different journey maps for different personas and products. Customer journey maps can be a central tool for understanding and improving the customer experience, and creating a successful marketing program.

The map will vary depending on how you sell and service your products. The customer experience is very different depending on whether you sell directly, online, through retailers, dealers, or distributors, and how you handle return and service in each of those channels.

Plus there may be multiple stakeholders behind a single customer or persona. The person who experiences the tech product failure may not be the person who calls support (in the company or a family). Both companies and consumers may have buying teams.

Organizations use customer journey maps to understand their many customer touchpoints which can include store visits, visits to the website, use of an app, interaction with a social media account, viewing of ads, interactions with salespeople, experience with the product return process and so on. (Note that your touchpoints aren’t places, they are experiences that the customer has.) There is no single way to create a journey map – if you search Google for them you’ll find a tremendous variety of customer journey maps– and they can be quite complex. They can also be a very important tool in understanding and improving the customer experience and creating an omni-channel marketing program.

Customer journey maps describe the customer experience from their points of view, not the point of view of your internal processes. For example, if a customer needs to return a product their experience starts with the decision to return it and finding out how to do that, which is before their first interaction with your team. Later you may connect your internal marketing and sales processes with the touchpoints.

Journey maps can contain descriptive and prescriptive information. In fact, you could have an entire journey map – or “experience map” – that only describes the current state of the customer experience, and a separate one describing an ideal future state. Or you could combine that descriptive and prescriptive information into the same journey map.

Below is a customer journey map (used with permission of Kerry Bodine & Co.) which shows the good, neutral and bad of the current touchpoints that a customer has when interacting with a company. Note how the customers’ emotions are shown at each touchpoint. Those touchpoints with negative or neutral emotions are ideal to target for improvement, as well as especially important touchpoints (not all touchpoints are created equal).

Customer Experience Journey Map

In the bottom section of this journey map, the needs and expectations of the customer at each touchpoint are described.

Other journey maps may plot what the company will do to enhance their customer experience, including the content that they’ll provide at the touchpoint

Your maps should also note places in the journey where the customer is anonymous and when they’re known. For example, your website may deliver different content – or an entirely different experience – to a known prospect than to an anonymous website visitor.

Customer journey maps can require months of time and lots of research. The best are based on customer input, such as interviews, surveys, and analytics. And you can also look at the data that you have about how you’re interacting with customers before and after the sale. There is no one way to do journey maps. Do them so that they’re useful for you.

And if a competitor provides some part of an experience that’s better than yours, don’t be afraid to copy them until you can improve on it. I’m always amazed, for example, when I go to a retail website that is clearly inferior to Amazon; the experience delivered by the market leader is out there for everyone to see—and copy.

Improving the customer’s experience is an effort that involves all parts of the company. With attention to this over time employees should become more and more customer focused and empathetic.

A Bullseye approach to customer journey maps

In Forrester’s 2015 report, “Mapping the Customer Journey”[i] Tony Costa and Joana van den Brink-Quintanilha describe four approaches companies use to successfully create journey maps:

  • Hypothesis-first: a 1-2 day workshop potentially followed by validation research
  • Research-first: 3-8 weeks of customer research and analysis, followed by journey map development
  • Co-creation: a one-day workshop with customers as participants
  • Quick-fire: a 60-90 minute small internal group workshop to work on deepening customer empathy and improving one key touchpoint

While the first two approaches require weeks of research and analysis, the Co-creation and Quick-fire approaches achieve significant results in a single day. For example, an airline might use a Co-creation workshop to improve their customer experience when rebooking flights, or a retailer might use a Quick-fire session to improve its product return experience.

The Co-creation and Quick-fire approaches are designed to create quick wins, customer empathy, buy-in and momentum behind idea of using customer journey maps. That sounds like a perfect place to start with journey maps when implementing the Bullseye approach. You could create some in Phase One, have successes, and build the internal support for deeper customer research and involvement in later journey map creation using the Hypothesis-first or Research-first approaches that require more time and resources.

Examples of great customer experience

Many industries have produced examples of great customer experience enabled by digital and mobile.

  • Uber transformed the experience of taxi riders at virtually every touchpoint, and gained a valuation of tens of billions of dollars in just a few years as a result:
    • You can hail a cab with a mobile app.
    • In advance, you can see who the driver will be, their rating from other passengers, and their type of vehicle.
    • While you wait, you can see where the car is and when it will arrive.
    • The cars are typically well cared for, and the drivers pleasant and polite, because they know that they will be rated.
    • Payment is pre-authorized to your credit card, so you always have the money to pay, and the tip is included.
    • Of course, Uber transformed the experience for drivers, too.
  • Customers can deposit checks and perform many other banking functions via mobile apps.
  • For builders who order concrete, it’s just as bad if it arrives early as if it arrives late. Industrial concrete provider Cemex developed a mobile app to let customers see the status and delivery date of their order.[ii]
  • Many companies, like UPS and FedEx, let consumers track the status of their orders.
  • On the Zappos Twitter feed, they describe themselves as “a service company that happens to sell shoes, clothes, & more!” A founding principle of Zappos was that customers could return a purchase for any reason, no questions asked. Early on Zappos learned that people who returned their first purchase became their most loyal and valuable customers because they had tested the Zappos customer promise and found it was true.
  • Twenty years ago I did a video for IBM about how Shell Chemicals changed its relationship with customers from order-to-order to something more like a utility. Shell began to monitor the customers’ chemical inventories for them and assured them that they would never run out. (Today it might be part of a Chemicals as a Service offering.[iii]) It’s much harder for a competitor to dislodge a vendor who has established a subscription relationship.

Those examples demonstrate that you don’t need to have a digital product to take advantage of digital and mobile.

People love positive interactions with other people — and improving those interactions, rather than automating or eliminating them – may produce your greatest leaps in customer experience. [These aren’t really bullet points; do you have a better idea on how to format them?]

  • Online pharmacy PillPack learned that while getting their prescriptions reliably pre-packaged was important, what its elderly customers most value is being able to talk to a person when they have a question. So PillPack provides 24/7 customer service by phone.
  • HubSpot provides a three-month onboarding service for new customers. It’s mandatory, and customers pay for it, but HubSpot – like many other software companies – has learned that providing enhanced training, support, and tips in the first few weeks is critical to customer success.
  • McKinsey tells the story of a little girl visiting a Disney theme park who threw her doll into a construction site.[iv] The Disney employees could have ignored it, but instead staff retrieved the doll, cleaned and restyled her hair, made her a new dress in the wardrobe department, and even had the doll’s picture taken at a party with other Disney princesses. That’s what empowered employees can do.
  • In his 1990 book Customers for Life, Texas car dealer Carl Sewell describes how he develops long-term relationships with customers. One of his tenets is to never charge a customer for something that you would do for a friend for free. Today they are still selling services, instead of cars, and their websites prominently use the line, “I drive a Sewell.”

Sewell AdWords ad
  • In the documentary “Springsteen & I,” a couple describes how they arrived at a Bruce Springsteen concert where they had the cheapest balcony seats farthest from the stage. A representative of Springsteen then approached them and exchanged their tickets for seats in the front row – they were Springsteen’s kind of people.

In marketing, we strive for the right message, to the right person at the right time. And with customer experience it’s similar. If digital offers the fastest and best customer experience, use it. But when in-person is required, provide that.

The economic value of a great customer experience

Every year corporate research and advisory firm Forrester surveys tens of thousands of consumers and publishes its Customer Experience Index. USAA is often at the top, with companies such as Southwest Airlines, Amazon, Zappos, Kaiser Permanente and others moving in and out of the top tier, too.

For several years Jon Picoult at Watermark Consulting has taken the results of Forrester’s survey and correlated them with shareholder value.He has found that the stock of public companies that rank high for customer experience significantly outperform both companies with poor CX and the market in general, and typically the companies that provide poor customer experience underperform the market. (graphic used with permission of Watermark Consulting)

Give customers what they want, and they’ll give you what you want.

Ways to sell more to current customers

Here are some ways you can market and sell more to your current customers.

Salespeople

Many companies split sales responsibilities between “hunters,” whose job is to close new accounts, and “farmers,” who are responsible for growing existing accounts.

The two roles typically represent two different sales personalities.

The farmers are concerned with long-term relationships. Farmers build on the initial customer relationship to learn more about what the customer needs, and how the vendor can provide it. Farmers know that the relationships that they’re building may take months or years to produce results. Many hunters would not accept sales timeframes of that length.

Farmers want to take care of “their” customers, and they want the internal resources to provide solutions to do that.

Of course, people are not so easily split into two types. Hunters often need a bit of farmer in them to truly understand prospects. And farmers need a bit of hunter in them to build on the initial engagement and expand into other parts of the company.

Call them what you will, the important thing is that you have people in your organization who have an explicit responsibility to grow current accounts, and that they have the tools to do so.

Website

Your website is a great way not just to gather insight into what customers want but also to engage with them, support and upsell them.

Using a marketing automation program, you can track what customers are looking at down to the individual. Analyzing these interactions across all of your contacts in an account may give the “farmers” in your company insight into what an organization is looking for now (see more on the role of sales in account based marketing below).

If you have a customers-only section to your website, requiring registration and login, you can provide custom content there. You could even have private, branded portals for your most important customers. Many companies crowdsource their support function to an online community of customers answering questions for one another in a knowledgebase; the company may even give an annual award to the customer who provides the most frequent/best advice.

FAQs are exactly what they say they are: answers to your most frequently asked questions. Use FAQs to answer the questions that you hear over and over from customers.

And once people have visited customer-only pages, you could target them with remarketing ads about customer-only events and offers.

Email

Just as email is a powerful channel for customer acquisition, it can also be central to customer satisfaction, retention, and growth.

The first step in using email to sell more to existing customers is to create segments in your lists for them. You need, at a minimum, several email segments such as Contacts, Active Prospects, and Customers, but you may also want even more granular segments based on other customer characteristics such as what or how much they’ve bought in the past, geography, or whatever other factors are important in your company.

Ecommerce companies with large lists create RFM cells based on Recency (how recently a person bought), Frequency (how often they buy) and Monetization (their average purchase). Using a 1-5 scale for each of the three factors, with 5 being the best, they can create 125 or more cells of current customers and test frequency of emails and different offers with each cell to maximize profits.

Create unique content for your customers. Customers need a different webinar than your prospects. If I’m a long-time customer, I don’t want to get the email offering 25% off the first year to new customers. Why, I might wonder, are your newest customers getting this, but not your most loyal ones?

So you need to segment and understand what messages and content will be most meaningful for existing customers.

Newsletters are just a special type of email, and they can be valuable for increasing sales to current customers. The mistake that many companies make is using the newsletter to talk about themselves (We have a new logo! We have a new customer!). Fill your newsletter full of information that adds value for your customer; sometimes that’s as easy as refocusing an article from “this is what we did for a customer” to “this is what this company achieved (with our help)”. Make the customer the hero of your stories.

Social Media

As I’ll discuss in chapter 16 on social media, social media is not a great customer acquisition channel for most companies – at least not as good as email and many other programs.

Social media can play a significant role in growing existing accounts, though.

First, even without a significant following, you can listen to the conversation about your company and your competitors on social media to understand what customers like and dislike about you and them, and then react to those insights and individual comments.

Social media properties, especially on Facebook and Twitter, can be central to a company’s customer support. Some companies have social media “support” accounts separate from their main accounts. Two keys to successful social media customer support are (1) quickly respond to customers who post there, and (2) immediately take the issue offline. You don’t want a long, potentially embarrassing exchange to live forever on social media.

And you can use YouTube for customer support by posting videos demonstrating how to use and fix your products.

Events

In-person events are one of the strongest brand building activities, and B2C companies may even sell a significant amount of products at one. In our increasingly digital world, the personal touch means even more.

Whether B2C or B2B, many companies have held successful events such as:

  • grand opening of a new facility
  • notable anniversary of being in a location
  • participating in a local community festival/event
  • annual users conferences, especially for B2B and tech companies
  • hosting local events for affiliate groups, such as:
    • a bike shop hosting weekly rides and free repair clinics
    • bookstores hosting authors’ readings
    • tech companies hosting meetings for startups.

Every element of an event is part of the customer experience including the invitations, venue, decorations, music, food, activities, Wi-Fi and follow-up. Make it memorable, and on brand.

You can also provide online and virtual events, of course, such as webinars. And combine the physical and digital with augmented reality.

Loyalty Marketing

You don’t need to be an airline (miles) or credit card company (points) to reward your customers with a loyalty program.

Dry cleaners provide discount coupon books to their best customers.

Bookstores and pizza shops provide loyalty cards so that after 8 or 10 purchases the next one is free.

CVS uses data to personalize the discount offered to each customer on the checkout receipt. If a customer’s average purchase is, for example, $20, CVS may offer a discount if they spend $30 or $40. If their average purchase is $40, though, the starting point for the discount may be higher.

Bertucci’s offered diners contest cards that could only be redeemed on a future visit.

You can use email and text messages to alert customers to these special offers.

Text messages

Text messaging lets you take advantage of the platform in your customer’s pocket and purse: their smartphone. Over 95% of texts are read. Can you claim that for your other marketing channels? (Text messaging is also called SMS, which means “Short Message Service”.)

I could have put text messaging in another chapter, or made it an entirely separate chapter, but it makes the most sense to use texts to reach existing customers who already trust you and are willing to give you their mobile phone information. Of course, the very first thing you need is permission from people to text them. Legally you need to get people to opt-in to text messages before sending them.

Text messages may be especially effective for retailers and other B2C companies. They may boost sales with timely texts such as “Show this message to get 20% off today on… [how should this be formatted?]

snow shovels before the storm hits

or

fall fashions that have just arrived

or

food on your way home from work

You also can use texts to improve your customers’ experience and bind them closer to you. For example, you can use text messages to let customers know the status of their order, and to confirm an appointment.

Use common sense, of course. Don’t send texts in the middle of the night (be especially careful about this if the people you’re texting aren’t all local). Too many of us sleep with our phone near our bed and don’t want to get woken at 3 am with a commercial message.

If you’re new to text messaging, it may seem uncomfortable or intrusive when you first do it. But if your customers have given you permission, go for it.

Account based marketing

Account based marketing (ABM) is basically a new name for a B2B strategy that has been around forever under such names as key, strategic, or target account marketing. Rather than casting a wide net for new customers, as is done with much marketing, ABM is sometimes referred to as “spear fishing” – focusing personalized marketing on perhaps just a few dozen especially large, important accounts. While it can be used to land new accounts, ABM is especially effective for growing your most important existing accounts.

ABM requires deep cooperation between sales and marketing in terms of:

  • identifying the most important accounts and most important people on their buying teams
  • understanding the personas
  • developing personalized content that speaks to that particular company’s issues
  • getting it to people at the right time.

Helpful content created by marketing is valuable in educating the people at the target company and creating at least interest if not preference for the vendor. And with ABM you direct the content toward those individuals rather than waiting for them to find it. Late in the selling process sales reps may need to tell marketing to take an individual out of the marketing program altogether so they don’t get inappropriate messages that don’t really apply to where that person is now.

A major role of marketing in ABM is the development of the personalized content, which may take considerable effort for each company. If it’s possible in the vendor’s business, an effective tactic can be to send the prospect a one or two-page benchmark summary of their company’s performance, or some other highly personalized content, and suggest a competitive analysis as a foot-in-the-door next step. It’s hard for companies to ignore competitive information. Some vendors use expensive and creative dimensional mailers to gain the attention of people in target accounts, or one-to-one personalized events. Companies may need a drip program of several pieces of personalized content to get the desired meetings.

For example, voice recognition leader Nuance wanted to open C-suite doors for its sales reps to sell their documentation artificial intelligence solutions into new hospitals and other healthcare organizations. Their agency, King Fish Media, created this very cool 3D interactive mailer that included a role-specific brochure (for chief financial officers, chief information officers, and chief medical information officers – three different personas), an interactive book with video clips… and a drone! The personalized letter included a link to an account-specific URL. This package successfully opened a lot of doors for sales people.

Photo of Nuance drone package

You only do something like this for large, valuable accounts.  Examples of other dimensional mailers – many more affordable than this – are provided in chapter 20.

While a single piece of ABM content, or an event for a specific account, may cost hundreds of dollars, the potential gain is so large that it’s worth it.

You also can customize your messages with personalized landing pages, remarketing ads, display ads, emails, LinkedIn ads, and so forth. Some tools let you target ads to particular individuals or companies. These are perfect for ABM.

ABM speaks the language of sales, which is usually more interested in closing and growing accounts than with individual leads. In some companies the ABM team pairs with an Account Based Sales counterpart. As ABM matures in a company, it may involve other areas beyond sales and marketing, too, such as customer service, support, and even product development – in short, the entire customer experience.

ABM is not a short-term marketing program; it is an approach that will reap rewards over months and years. Farmers welcome.

Since the accounts are already known before the ABM program begins, and the contacts are known or identified early on, ABM has squishier metrics than other marketing programs. You may measure+:e

  • how many of the buying team members you are interacting with
  • how much time they are spending with your company online and offline, in any form
  • acceleration and growth of deals and improving close rates.

ITSMA claims that ABM “has the highest Return on Investment of any B2B marketing strategy or tactic. Period.”[i] Perhaps that is achieved because it isn’t just a marketing campaign;  ABM is a program that involves the entire company up to the highest executives. And it helps close and grow the accounts that have the highest lifetime value.

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Posted on by Louis Gudema

This is from chapter 26 of Louis Gudema’s Bullseye Marketing book, which is available on Amazon. 

“Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” – Thomas Edison

It’s one thing to create a marketing strategy based on an understanding of your customer personas and touchpoints, an informed media mix, and constant optimization based on feedback and data. It’s another thing entirely to execute on that.

Many marketing teams start off with the best of intentions but get distracted along the way by shiny objects, competitor efforts — or a simple lack of discipline.

It’s easy to be creative and have new ideas, especially when we see so much inspiring creative around us every day. It’s much harder to do the day-in-day-out work to stay focused and make a marketing program successful.

When marketing programs fail, most often it is due to a lack of consistent, day-to-day execution.

So do your homework, plan, be creative, and then stick to it.

Execute.