By Jason Stewart - August 6, 2007
I was reminded this weekend of how many times I have sent out a desperate email campaign without really thinking about what I wanted to accomplish with it.
Susan Tatum had a great piece posted to her blog on August 3rd, 10 Questions that Drive Increased B2B Marketing Campaign Results. It reminded me of that old carpenter’s adage, “measure twice, cut once.” Make sure you understand your goals, and what you want to accomplish, before you act. Too often I have received emails or invitations with no clear call to action or incentive for me to act. I bet they didn’t answer any of Susan’s ten questions before they hit “Send.”
Here are her ten, with some comments:
1. Who is the target audience?
Are you really going to just send that email out to everyone in your database? The same email, to everyone, regardless of department or position? Honestly, the COO of the company is not (necessarily) going to be interested in the same things as the Director of Finance or the VP of Sales. Consider sending more frequent, smaller, better targeted campaigns or at least create a few versions of the offer and dictate who in your database gets which one.
2. Where can we find them?
I look at this question in two ways…number one is, of course, where do we find people who might be interested in our goods and/or services that do not exist already in our database? What are they reading? Where do they go on the web? Which events do they go to? Basic marketing…find your audience and get in front of them. But what about the people who are already in your database? Once you figure out the target audience, are you able to easily find that audience in your database?
I would imagine that one thing keeping businesses from controlling the target audience of offers and campaigns is the fact that they have no idea how to pull that audience out of their database. If you are feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of sorting through all those names and titles and finding an easy way to pull all “marketing” or “finance” people out of your database, consider hiring a temp.
Create a new field for department in the contact record, and have a temp pull everyone with the word “sales” in their title and add that word to the new field. Repeat with “marketing,” “finance,” “operations,” etc. It may take a while, but the payoff is huge. Plus, there are likely some pretty great tools out there to help with the job, like the Excel Connector for Salesforce.com which allows you to pull records out in Excel, make changes and then import those changes right back in.
3. What do we want them to do?
4. What can we offer that will be of great enough value to them to do what we want them to do?
Have you ever written copy for an email campaign and then noticed there was no incentive in it for the prospect to do anything? No complimentary white paper, no registration for a webinar, no chance to be included on the distribution list for the results of that fascinating survey. Occasionally it is good to just get something out there, keep the company name in the front of mind.
Some food for thought though…the email lists I unsubscribe from are the ones that offer me no incentive to stay.
5. How many different ways will we make the offer?
6. How many chances will we give the prospects to respond?
I recently worked on a webinar with a third party vendor. They had a policy to send out at least three email invitations to every webinar, and they found that they got the majority of their sign-ups on that last round of email. When done in combination with a targeted telesales campaign to your most prized prospects, you can drive some decent traffic to a webinar – as long as it has a compelling message and is not just a glorified demo of your product.
Also, how many different ways within the email, invitation, etc. can the prospect arrive at the desired result? How many different places can they click to get to that registration page, or to download that white paper? Keep in mind – that button they are supposed to click on is not always as obvious as you think it is. Also provide a nice, obvious text link. Or two. Make sure there is no way they can miss the call to action.
I’m not saying you should send every campaign three times with the offer presented six different ways in every draft, but you may want to consider that sometimes you’re call to action is not as obvious as you think, or that you are getting to the right prospect but at the wrong time. That’s why that publication gets webinar registrations on every pass, and also why that telesales rep gets you to take his call after they have left their third message.
7. What will we do after prospects accept the offer?
They clicked on the link, or attended the webinar – now what?
Think auto-responders that will send an email to everyone who downloads that white paper with a contact name and phone number. Think quick evaluation of leads before they are either distributed to the appropriate salesperson or thrown back in to the “nurture” pile. Think phone calls from the sales reps within 48 hours (maximum) to see where they are in their process. Without good lead management your efforts are wasted.
8. How many different offers will we need to make in order to get an acceptable number of prospects to become qualified leads?
Just how many campaigns do you need to run? Well, if you have a few years worth of data that question gets easier to at least estimate. If we got 10 sales last year out of 300 leads, and we want to get twenty sales this year we should shoot for 600 leads.
Which campaigns drove the most leads last year? Was it telemarketing? Should we hire another inside rep to generate leads? Do we have enough names in our database to support another rep? And so on…
Look at the history, repeat what works and don’t spend money on the campaigns that tank. We all know the sales guys love trade shows…but how many good leads do you really get, and at what cost per lead?
9. When will we know a prospect is ready to be passed to the sales team?
See our lead scoring entry for some tips on this…
10. How many sales-ready prospects do we need to generate to a) justify the campaign, and b) consider it a success.
Before you act, have you even decided what your goals are? How do you know if that event or webinar was successful if you didn’t have any expectations or goals set in advance?
Salespeople have quotas for a reason. You should have clear goals as well.
