I know, I know, “Web 2.0” sounds sooooo cliché but the so-called Web 2.0 world has really changed everything when it comes to marketing including those traditional activities like Webinar marketing, email campaigns, and direct marketing. Now, Jeff Pulver posts some wonderful advice on avoiding email marketing mistakes in Marketing 103: e-mail Marketing Mistakes to Avoid in a Web 2.0 World.

I encourage you to forgive him his “web 2.0 world” reference (we’ve all made them) and read this great post. Most of his advice is focused on formatting the email to look as if it is personalized. But he does offer a few tips that many marketers may not have considered such as:

” – Be ONLINE and AVAILABLE.
The sender of the email marketing campaign should be plan to be online and responding to messages as they are received from people asking questions from the email they just received. The more available the sender is, the higher the probability the success rate will be higher. Avoid going dark if you can avoid it.

– KNOW the DEVICE and Platform being used by the recipient to read their messages. This continues to be the BEST way to increase the chances your message will be seen in a way you intended it to be seen. The information about the default device/platform used to read e-mail can have a tremendous impact on the future effectiveness of future e-mail marketing campaigns.”

By following Jeff’s advice and investing in a great database and email automation tools, you can make your email marketing campaigns less of an intrusion and see an increase in click throughs and conversion rates. However, I recommend you take Web 2.0 a step further and offer up a number of options for communicating with your customers. Make sure you give them the choice of receiving an email, RSS feed, or Twitter updates. You can increase the frequency of your outreach to customers and reduce the investment you sink into building an email marketing campaign by leveraging these social media tools to build a network of followers. At BreakingPoint, we’ve built a rapidly growing following on Twitter that is paying off in terms of web visitors, leads, and loyal followers who help us spread word of mouth about our products. Curious about how we did it? Follow our corporate feed at www.twitter.com/breakingpoint. Or, if you want to get updates on The B2B Lead stories follow the bloggers at www.twitter.com/poneal, www.twitter.com/lawallace and www.twitter.com/ahawthorne.

The talk of high gas prices today – it’s on everyone’s mind and we can’t get away from it.

Cost of lead generation – it’s on every smart marketer’s mind and we can’t get away from it.

There seems to be an interesting parallel between the two. With higher gas prices, also come new alternative ways to travel, for example, carpooling, hybrids and fuel efficient cars. If you have high quality fuel to put into your marketing programs, it’s even more important to determine which vehicle(s) will most effectively accelerate sales conversions.

Test your options and see how your prospects respond and engage. Build your programs based on results.

• Do they prefer to attend live webinars or watch recorded webcasts to get information?
• Or do they prefer white papers because they can read it on their own time?
• Or do they prefer white papers because they can read it on their own time?
• Do they participate in surveys? Or take free online demos?
• Do they subscribe to a specific set of industry newsletters?
• Do industry analysts play a role in their buying decisions?
• Do they go to the blogosphere for their ‘real’ information?
• Are they in communities you possibly haven’t discovered?

The goal of testing here is to better understand your prospects and the way they consume information for making buying decisions. Once you’ve determined the most effective vehicles, consider your marketing mix.

Marketing Mix

• Make sure you always have a goal in mind. How are you gauging success?
• Include different vehicles in your marketing mix to ensure your prospective buyers are receiving your message in the method they best respond to.
• Be sure not to exclude suspects by being exclusive with your offers. You don’t want to miss opportunities.
• Consider adding new media outlets to the mix and you may discover new ways to reach your target audience.

The most important message here is that you use your fuel as effectively as possible and find the vehicle that best reaches your buyers and accelerates your lead generation conversions.

In the first chapter of The New Rules of Marketing and PR, David Meerman Scott really lays the framework for the old school way of running marketing and PR. In case you have not yet received your book or didn’t get a chance to start reading, here are the old rules given by Scott:

The Old Rules of Marketing

• Marketing simply meant advertising (and branding).
• Advertising needed to appeal to the masses.
• Advertising relied on interrupting people to get them to pay attention to a message.
• Advertising was one-way: company-to-consumer.
• Advertising was exclusively about selling products.
• Advertising was based on campaigns that had a limited life.
• Creativity was deemed the most important component to advertising.
• It was more important for the ad agency to win advertising awards than for the client to win new customers.
• Advertising and PR were separate disciplines run by different people with separate goals, strategies and measurement criteria.

The Old Rules of PR

• The only way to get ink was through the media
• Companies communicated to journalists via press releases.
• Nobody saw the actual press releases except for a handful of reporters and editors.
• Companies had to have significant news before they were allowed to write a press release.
• Jargon was okay because the journalists all understood it.
• You weren’t supposed to send a release unless it included quotes from third parties, such as customers, analysts, and experts.
• The only way buyers would learn about the press release’s content was if the media wrote a story about it.
• The only way to measure the effectiveness of press releases was through “clip books,” which noted each time the media deigned to pick up a company’s release.
• PR and Marketing were separate disciplines run by different people with separate goals, strategies, and measurement techniques.

I’ll admit, I am really too young to remember the days of the old rules. Do any of you out there who have been doing this a while really think that your organization functioned like this? To me, smaller companies have always had to be renegade and with the advent of the web now really have the venue they have been waiting for.

Here are what Scott outlines as the new rules:

The New Rules of Marketing and PR

• Marketing is more than just advertising
• PR is for more than just a mainstream media audience.
• You are what you publish
• People want authenticity, not spin.
• People want participation, not propaganda
• Instead of causing one-way interruption, marketing is about delivering content at just the precise moment your audience needs it.
• Marketers must shift their thinking from main-stream marketing to the masses to a strategy of reaching vast numbers of underserved audiences via the Web.
• PR is not about your boss seeing your company on TV. It’s about your buyers seeing your company on the web.
• Marketing is not about your agency winning awards. It’s about your organization winning business.
• The internet has made public relations public again, after years of almost exclusive focus on media.
• Companies must drive people into the purchasing process with great online content.
• Blogs, podcasts, e-books, news releases, and other forms of online content let organizations communicate directly with buyers in a from they appreciate.
• On the Web, the lines between maketing and PR have blurred.

Although I would say I am far from old school, I can’t say I am still completely hip to all of the new rules. I hope that as a group we can learn from David Meerman Scott and from each other. Since the publishing of this book there have been even more advances and new technologies via the web which I hope we can help teach each other about. What do you hope to learn from reading this book and participating in the book club?

Dirty data—whether purchased, gathered via download offers or aged and stored in your internal database—costs companies billions every year in wasted resources and lost productivity.

Today’s mobile workforce is changing jobs faster than ever before. According to Gartner, 30 million of the 138 million workers in the US will switch jobs in the next 12 months. Now add that to the number of businesses that move or get acquired every month. It’s easy to see how they dirty data piles up and piles up fast.

Feeding dirty contact data into a marketing automation or CRM system has a multiplier effect that can derail success by:

• Delivering the wrong message to the wrong person
• Annoying customers and prospects with redundant messages
• Losing credibility due to botched attempts at personalized communications
• Failing to leverage multi-modal marketing capabilities
• Misinterpreting campaign success metrics
• Creating more Sales inefficiencies

Even with so much at stake, tackling data cleanup issues is a daunting proposition. Most Marketers are overwhelmed by a customer or prospect database with hundreds of thousands of duplicate entries, old data, inaccurate contact details and countless records in myriad states of completeness. This existing data has likely been gathered by many different individuals over multiple years. It is often too difficult to know where to begin.

Before you undertake any data cleaning, segmentation, or augmentation initiative, be sure to map out your plan. Here’s an outline to get you started.

Targeting the Right Companies–
Use what you already have access to first – your CRM data and your web site visitor logs

• CRM data
  • Profile your top performing market segments – where are you winning?
  • Identify your best target markets – what kinds of deals close the fastest?
  • Determine key qualifying company characteristics and buyer roles.
• Website visitor logs/Unknown visitor logs
  • Look for visitor patterns – ex. are there lots of healthcare companies visiting you that you haven’t directly targeted?
  • Are companies visiting already currently in your database, if so, are you recording these page visits?
  • Your online marketing and PPC advertising is driving lookers, just because they don’t announce themselves doesn’t mean they aren’t potential leads.

This analysis will help you determine where to find your target market “sweet spot”.

Once you’ve built a profile of common denominators or qualifying criteria for your target market “sweet spot,” now you’re ready to identify your decision making unit. The decision making consists of everyone involved in the buying decision of your product or service.

Start with a decision making unit profile to identify the types of buyers involved in the buying process and the roles of these buyers both in the buying cycle and their role within the organization. It is vital to understand the responsibilities for each of your buyers. With this information, you will be able to refine your data augmentation program and standardize data collection requirements for more targeted marketing programs.

Now that you have your buying unit profiled, pull a list of pre-existing contacts that correspond to your Target Accounts so you can begin the process of de-duping, identifying missing fields such as addresses or contact details, and identifying gaps such as key buyers, roles and other relevant details.

After your de-duping process, you now know what you have and what you need to fill in. When filling in the gaps, remember to look for role-based contact resources, like ReachForce. Shameless promotion I know…but remember the title-based lists we’re all used to using are still delivering a less than 3% response rate. Isn’t it worth the risk of trying something new?

A few extra data hygiene tips from our Marketing Ops Guru, Lauren, here at ReachForce –

• Mark all records that are included in your current target market, you don’t necessarily want to delete the data you aren’t using but you want to be able to pull your new target market data easily. You’ll be thankful you did this, I promise.
• Add a ‘born on’ date field to the record and once you’ve refreshed it, add the date, everyone touching the record will be happy you did this.
• As you are filling in gaps and building out contact data for new roles, consider other segmenting options. While you’re updating you should go ahead and do this too. This will enable you to laser target your message at these prospects.

I saw something recently that said it was ok to use the word free in an email subject line? So I went looking for other information to support that. We all know that spam filters love the word free. I’m guessing we can thank the B2C marketers for that…

I ran across a MarketingProfs newsletter article, , titled Email Marketing – Top 10 Language Pitfalls and Top 10 Power Words. Although some of these are obvious, I thought it was worth passing on as it can’t hurt to be reminded of what we should and should not say when writing our email copy.

Here’s the Top Ten Language Pitfalls in Email Marketing Messages:

10. Typos and misspellings due to poor editing
Wow. With spell check, this really happens? Surely every email automation vendor out there offers spell check, right? Slow down and take the time to make sure your spelling and grammar are correct. You don’t want to say from when you mean form.

9. Subject lines in ALL CAPS
All caps in email is equivalent to shouting. You would never shout at your customers or prospects in person, would you?

8. Use of punctuation marks and numbers within the subject line
When I find myself needing punctuation in a subject line, I instantly think it’s too long and I’m trying to say too much. I think Eloqua says best practice is 6 words or less in a subject line.

7. ALL CAPS within the message body
Remember, no need to shout. Use other creative means such as color, different font, or buttons/banners/backgrounds for emphasis if there is an explanation, offer, or condition not to be missed.

I agree again on the shouting. I tend to bold important phrases or link them to our call to action.

6. Excessive or unnecessary Power Word repetition; especially of power word #1
See below.

Hint – power word #1 is FREE

5. Copy written in passive rather than active voice
We need to get to the point quickly in email. Front-load sentences and paragraphs with action verbs and eye-catching benefits.

Don’t forget people also read emails in a preview pane. Make sure you are getting their attention immediately. I try to include a call-to-action link in the first 2 lines too.

4. False or inflated sense of urgency
The very nature of email implies expediency, immediacy. Your audience is already in a mindset to quickly access and process email messages. Nudge, don’t shove. In our B2B communications, what is really all that urgent anyway?

3. Vague calls-to-action
“Click here” or “visit our Web site” are too general; they don’t reinforce the subject of your message or your offer. Nor do they instill confidence in where a responder will land. Be specific, such as “download your free white paper” or “see the movie preview” instead.

This is also why I use key messages as links. It stands out and reinforces my offer.

2. Exaggerated Modifiers
Like “Amazing,” “Revolutionary,” “Great,” “All New,” (when just “new” would suffice) and even “Special” and “Important,” especially when used in the subject line, can land your email in the junk folder. Hype is a hallmark of spam and is unnecessary when your messages are targeted and relevant.

Fluff. That’s what these words are. Everyone looks past them so I think you’re wasting your time and valuable real estate if you’re opening with these words.

And the number-one pitfall:

1. Including the word “spam” in your message (such as “this is not spam”)
The very existence of written justification that your email is ethical calls its legitimacy into question. I can’t think of a more self-defeating proposition than stating your message is NOT what you fear it will be.

Really? Surely this is a B2C thing, right?

Top Ten Power Words

Here are the top ten power words for your email advertising and communications:

10. New – Appeals to our basic human curiosity to seek novelty.
9. Save – We all love a bargain.
8. Safety – Connotes reliability; appeals to basic human needs.
7. Proven – Justifies your claim, removes fear of the unknown.
6. Love – An all-time favorite.
5. Guarantee - If you have one, state it. It iron-clads your offer.
4. Immediate (Now, or Instant) – Instant gratification is the expectation online. If it can’t be found, completed, or received almost immediately, you’re offer is in the wrong channel.
3. Results – Provides rationalization for instant conversion.
2. You – Remember WIIFM? Your audience wants to hear about what’s in it for them, not you. Articulate your benefits in personal, conversational terms.
And the number one Power Word:
1. Free – Surprised? Probably not. Because this is the time-honored, most potent motivator in direct response, be particularly vigilant of overuse. Just a dash’ll do. Strive to optimize placement, and test if necessary. So Free is back in. And not just back in but listed as the #1 Power Word.
Are you using it? Have any metrics to prove it’s ok and working?

***These great tips were contributed by Karen Talavera, president and founder, of Synchronicity Marketing