This post comes to us from one of our friends at ExactTarget, Joel Book.

Having observed how email has become the backbone of successful one-to-one marketing solutions, I have 3 guidelines that will help you use personalization for more effective B-to-B email.

1. Remember that People buy from People.

With all due respect to brand marketers, creative directors, and copywriters, it’s important to remember that nothing is more important in selling than the customer’s relationship with the person with whom she is doing business. That person may be a dealer, an agent, or a field sales representative.

When you send email, send it on behalf of the “relationship owner” and include that person’s photo and contact information so it’s easy for the customer to contact him. This type of personalization dramatically improves email marketing campaign performance.

2. Serve. Don’t Sell.

Customers don’t want to be sold. But they do want to be helped in making their buying decision. That’s why using email to deliver information and offers that aid the customer’s decision-making process is the best way to support – and accelerate – the buying process.

Once a person has been attracted to your web site, use email to engage with and move the prospect through the consideration and evaluation stages . . . all the way to purchase. Serve your subscribers well, and they will reward you with their business. In fact, Forrester Research reports that “those who buy products marketed through email spend 138% more than non-readers of email.”

3. Put the Customer in Control.

One of the smartest things you can do to maximize email marketing performance is to personalize email content to the subscriber’s needs. When a new subscriber opts in to receive email from you, invite her to go to your preference center where she can check off her needs and topics of interest relevant to the products or services you offer. Then, use the Dynamic Content feature in ExactTarget to deliver content that’s relevant and timely. This is the essence of ExactTarget’s Subscribers Rule mantra.

Having trouble seeing the good in your database?  Separating the diamonds from the dirt can be tough and time intensive, but if you map out a plan ahead of time it can save you time and sanity!

• Create a CRM data standard sheet and separate the data elements into three categories:
  • Information that must be there and must be correct for all of your systems to align properly (i.e. key ID’s, emails, etc.)
  • Information that should be correct for rules within your CRM system to work – if you have set up custom validation rules surrounding addresses for instance, outline what those rules are and what format data has to be in to fit within those rules.
  • Information that people have asked for to make marketing, sales, and customer support, etc. work better.
• Determine what data needs to look like within all of the key fields idenitifed above.  (I.E. – State should always be two-letter abbreviation instead of the full name, make a designated location for name pronunciation guides (input by sales) so they don’t clutter the name field, etc.
• Next, do a quick data quality analysis on each data element in these three categories. Score the data quality by answering questions such as:
  • Does this data element have an undisputed owner? Is it updated by a team member as a natural step in a key business process? Or can nearly anyone update it at any time?
  • What percentage of the CRM records has this data element missing, clearly incorrect, or duplicate? Determine the best course of action for filling in the gaps, do you have the resources in house or do you need to find a vendor who can do this?

Based on the results of your scoring (step 3), you’ll have a better idea of who you can assign items to for fixing and where you need to focus your efforts in terms of filling in the gaps.  Assign them out to the people who can fill in the gaps and make sure to supply everyone with the same set of ‘rules’ or standards for what the end result should look like.

Once you’ve got your data cleaned up, make sure your data standards sheet is up-to-date with any changes in process you may have made during the clean up process and then circulate it.  Your teams will be much more likely to keep the data looking the way it needs to if they know what the standards are.

Engagement Systems is one of the newer players in the marketing automation space. We let them “speak for themselves” earlier this week, but I wanted to dive further to check out some of their content.  So far they only have a few whitepapers and case studies, but I have to say I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of their content.  Their whitepaper, Influence the Buying Process with Automated Marketing, is a quick read packed with great tips.  The whitepaper promises 10 tactics for improving revenue and ROI now.  After the explantion of each tactic they offer a take-away (great idea for your next whitepaper or eBook).  Here are the take-aways from the whitepaper:

1. Don’t let prospects fall through the cracks. Protect your marketing investment and maximize resources through better lead qualification and lead nurturing.
2. Unify sales and marketing in the pursuit of common goals.
3. Continue generating leads, but put greater emphasis on nurturing activities as well as retention and winback strategies to maximize customer lifetime revenue.
4. Make sure that you have all the materials in place to be the resource for information to support your buyer.
5. Map out the buying process and help prospects and customers navigate their way to a buying decision.
6. Automate the sales and marketing process by setting event and behavior triggers that utilize intelligent marketing automation to autoexecute marketing touches.
7. Deploy one-to-one communications for more meaningful dialogue with prospects and customers to shorten the buying process.
8. Commit to an ongoing learning process; employ a valuable exchange of information to align your product and service offerings with the changing needs and interests of each individual buyer.
9. Deploy multiple means of outreach to ensure that your message is received, and to move the customer towards a purchase position relative to their individual needs and interests.
10. Establish ongoing contact with customers to preserve satisfaction, increase up-selling and cross-selling, and decrease customer defections.

Be sure to read the entire whitepaper for the full story.  It is definitely worth the read.

Do you know who your customers are?  Not just by name, but do you know what they actually do, why your product is a good fit for them?  Better yet, do you know what makes some of your customers less than a good fit?  Here at ReachForce we try to take a holistic approach to analyzing our customers both those who we do regular business with and those that we may not have continued business with (I know it’s not a pretty subject but everyone’s got them).

In looking at what these customers do, what their price point is and the rates that they convert (from trial to subscription or bookings to revenue) we can get a much better picture as to what types of customers we do well with and where we should focus future data discovery. It’s a simple enough exercise, but take a look at your top 10-15 customers (those who spend the most with you) and your worst customers (those who may have done business with you once and then never again), see what parallels you can draw between the customers within each group.  For us we’ve learned that customers with a higher price point, a tech focused business and those who market to more than one vertical seem to have a greater need for what we do an a tolerance for our price point.

Once you’ve gotten a clearer picture of what your good customers look like and what the less than successful customers look like, you can better focus your marketing efforts (and for you sales folk out there, your follow up and prospecting efforts).  Now that you have a profile of your best customer, be sure to do continued contact discovery to find more buyers that are similar to your best customers.

Does your sales team understand the metrics you’re measuring?  Think about it this way, your sales team is focused on numbers, hitting the right number of activities each day/week, turning out the right amount of proposals to get good closed deals, and of course, the all important quota figure!

So when asked, you tell the sales team you measure click-throughs, website visits, opens, but it doesn’t mean anything to them….why you ask? Because just like all of the rest of us, they only care about what directly impacts them, yes you can make a case for the activity you’re measuring to impact them but it’s a story, it’s not a direct correlation.

What directly correlates to daily life of a sales person?  The number of leads you’re putting in the top of the funnel.  Let’s be more specific though, not just leads, QUALITY leads.  First you’ve got to have a unified definition of a quality lead (is it someone who has shown interest through opening your emails, checking out your site or is it someone who has downloaded a few resources, attended some webinars and who fits a great profile of your ideal buyer?), get on the same page with sales – decide what that perfectly qualified and quality lead is because not everyone who fills out a web form or downloads a white paper fits that mold.

The important thing is to directly correlate what you’re doing with what your sales team is doing – how many leads did you fill the pipe with this week and then track them through the pipeline.  How many of those leads generated the right kind of activity to create a closed deal?  Bring this full circle for a minute, if you can track how many leads you put in the pipeline that generate activity during each phase of the pipe and then close, pretty impressive stuff to the C-level folks!

Now for tracking this stuff:

1. In your CRM, use a lead source field – map it to the contact through the process (for all of your salesforce.com users, we’ll have some instructions soon).
2. Keep tabs on where these leads came, from…not just that marketing delivered them but that you purchased them from ReachForce, got them from an event/trade show, they were a web form, etc.  That way you can see what sources generate the most successful leads and  you can replicate that success.
3. Don’t just look at this information once and then toss it – keep track of it historically, the more information you’re armed with the better off you’ll be.

Gotta say, when Amy asked if I’d read this whitepaper from Silverpop I was instantly intrigued. Maybe it’s the fact that sitting as the Sales/Marketing Ops person I have sat directly under that bus a few times (as we all have regardless of which side you come from), or maybe it’s the tongue in cheek humor scattered throughout the copy but for once I was entertained and informed by a whitepaper!

While the whitepaper is peppered with humor it also touches on a few key items that cause the friction between marketing and some steps for resolving those items.

• Problem: Sales is frustrated when marketing hands off weak leads.
• Solution: The key to this isn’t exactly what it sounds like, instead of placing blame, get on the same page about what constitutes a lead, get sales and marketing on the same page so that everyone knows what a lead is and execute on passing leads over accordingly. Unfortunately, if we’re all speaking different languages in terms of what a lead (contact, prospect, etc.) is then it’s just a distraction.
• Problem: Marketing sees Sales as only griping about Marketing (therefore causing the split between them)
• Solution: Sales needs to talk to marketing – if the leads being sent over are good 1/3 of the time, tell marketing what was wrong with the other 2/3’s. Don’t keep marketing in the dark, let them know how leads are progressing through the pipeline and what leads progress better (therefore better helping to define what kind of leads Marketing should focus on getting to Sales). Don’t take all the credit – yes you guys close the sale but materials, programs, webinars, the website, events all of those things were put together by marketing to help you close that deal – give them a little credit too!

These are just a few of the items mentioned by Silverpop, but they are enough to get the wheels turning for you. I highly recommend taking a little time to read the entire whitepaper, it’s insightful and truly reaches the heart of the problem, aligning Marketing and Sales is all about communication.
I’ll close with my favorite quote from the whitepaper:

Sales asks: How many marketers does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Sales answers: 15.

One to ignore the request from sales for more light,
One to develop a creative brief on why light is important,
Seven to shoot the YouTube video about screwing in light bulbs,
One to evaluate the amount of light offered by competitors and draft a competitive analysis,
Two to create the product slick,
One to determine competitive pricing for the service and set the cost well above that,
One to buy a 150-watt bulb for a 60-watt lamp,
And one to put just the right “spin” on the process.

Sorry – gotta love a whitepaper with a personality

1. Creative Commons search

2. Yahoo Creative Commons search

3. Flickr Creative Commons search

Free stock and public domain images

Much like with Creative Commons images, many just require attribution be given to the original creator. If an image is in the public domain, it is completely free for you to use for any purpose, altered or not, without credit required.

5. Stock.XCHNG

7. Everystockphoto

8. PDphoto

WikiMedia Commons

Aggregating all of the associated media from the various Wikimedia Foundation projects, the WikiMedia Commons is a large database that includes primarily freely reusable images, audio and video broken down into their various license categories. Be sure to note which type of license the image you want to use is under and follow the reuse guidelines for that particular license. Some useful collections include:

12. Public domain

13. Creative Commons

14. Sound

15. Video

Free audio sources

16. opsound

19. Internet archive open source audio

Free video sources

20. Internet Archive Moving Images Collection

21. Open Source Cinema

Further resources

25. TeacherLibrarianWiki’s list of copyright-friendly image sources

26. NASA

I recommend digging a little to find an image that is not too overused.  It is possible to find stock photography that doesn’t look glaringly like stock photography. Trust me, you will feel like you have been sucker punched when you are driving down the freeway and see the same image you used for your entire fall campaign on a billboard for a used car dealership.

Also, before you use any image, audio or video, double check the license agreement for allowed uses and attribution requirements.

For Barb’s full list, be sure to check out the complete article.

Our customers, prospects and B2B Lead followers often ask us about marketing automation.  Since ReachForce targeted role-based leads are fed into many of these solutions we decided to give each of them an opportunity to explain their key benefits and features in their own words. Thanks to Kevin Joyce (@nivenor1) at Market2Lead for this post.

What is Market2Lead?

Here is the story behind marketing automation, and Market2Lead:

Sales folks spend most of their time in proposal and negotiation stages. For the most part, they do not like cold-calling or prospecting. Also, a day of a sales person’s time can be quite expensive. To make sales folks more effective, we look for ways to give them only marketing-qualified, sales-ready leads. And if we do that by having marketing people do tele-prospecting on the phone, we would spend almost as much as using the sales folks. So we need automation to make it cost-effective. The further back you go in the sales cycle (left in the graphic below) the less expensive the touch has to be! The majority of CRMs simply don’t have the depth of functionality to take on this marketing role of nurturing. So we look for marketing automation to help us nurture and develop relationships with prospects, gathering more information about their needs and offering them relevant educational materials that support the value proposition. Then, at the right time, we hand the prospects off to Sales. Market2Lead excels at doing this.

Market2Lead offers marketing automation software and services that provide the automation and analytical insight to move more prospect relationships into customer relationships. The Market2Lead software assures that marketing programs are more effective in producing sales-ready leads, and that marketing investments have a measurably better ROI.

A marketing automation system must provide these benefits to be of value to Marketing:

• Increased Marketing effectiveness
• Deliver more sales ready-leads to sales teams
• Nurture prospects so they move through the funnel faster
• Measure the marketing influence on opportunities in the funnel
• Provide marketing accountability and ROI
• Ensure that Marketing only adds validated, standardized data into the CRM

The success of any marketing campaign is dependent first and foremost on the target list, then the quality of the offer and finally on the presentation of the offer. This is why at Market2Lead, we have a strong focus on helping organizations execute campaigns that are measurable, leverage cleaner, richer data and produce predictably great results. The goals for marketing organizations everywhere are to produce more sales-ready leads and to contribute in a measurable way to increasing revenues and profitability of their firms. This requires greater marketing effectiveness and accountability.

A New Level of Marketing Measurability
Marketing automation not only brings efficiencies through automation and effectiveness through better execution, it also brings to marketing a new level of measurability. Market2Lead brings the unprecedented ability to define business rules to connect marketing campaigns and programs to sales opportunities, so the precise impact of marketing on the business results can be measured. With the costs entered into the campaign definition, we can even show you your ROI and cost per lead. Market2Lead has full marketing data warehouse capability, in addition to operational reporting, so that custom dashboards can save you the time you’d otherwise spend to aggregate and present data.

Capture More Leads
Market2Lead’s sophisticated response management captures more leads in less time. Our web forms can be configured and deployed by marketing managers (rather than involving IT staff), and are dynamic, allowing you to do progressive profiling of prospects. Our forms also have field validation and standardization, so you can ensure a richer and cleaner marketing database. And since only a fraction of the marketing leads come through a company’s website, we offer sophisticated contact data integration capabilities to enable pooling of all offline and online data. These include a web services API, scheduled FTP imports, and an elegant import wizard that helps ensure the data integrity and completeness of your database.

Nurture Smarter
The best nurture campaigns take into account the entire behavioral history of each person and go about presenting the best possible next offer that is appropriate for that person. The Market2Lead system has the unique ability to automate arbitration of the most relevant offer for each individual.

The 5 Core Areas of Functionality in Marketing Automation
There are five areas of functionality that are essential in any good marketing automation system. All five are listed below, along with information on how Market2Lead excels at them all.

Contact Data Integration
CDI centralizes all of your online and offline marketing data in one database. Market2Lead provides:

• Dynamic integration with the SFA system
• Scheduled FTP and API for data integration

Response Management
The capture of validated, standardized data is key to effective campaigns. Market2Lead provides:

• Dynamic forms with progressive profiling
• Data format validation and address validation
• Personalized microsites and PURLs

Lead Management
New leads and responses must be scored, sent to the appropriate queues and in some cases routed to the appropriate channel. Market2Lead provides:

• Sophisticated scoring based on all prospect behavior, association with opportunities or accounts, and demographic data
• Notifications that can be initiated to Sales, Marketing, and others based on new responses
• Support of multiple queues, including SFA, tele-qualification, partners and reseller queues

Campaign Automation
Market2lead provides campaign automation that measurably increases the productivity of marketing:

• System-arbitrated adaptive campaigns that determine the best next offer for each individual
• Ability to copy all assets and deep copy of programs that include all program attributes
• Sophisticated list segmentation that includes: opportunity, account data, and time-based selection

Marketing Business Intelligence
Market2lead provides a business intelligence platform that includes:

• A historical data warehouse with custom reporting and dashboards
• Reporting on Marketing’s influence on the sales pipeline
• Web analytics and tracking of unknown visitors

Why Market2Lead?
What makes Market2Lead the best solution for so many firms?

• The strongest response management capability
• The best data integration capabilities
• A strong focus on data quality and metrics
• The best marketing business intelligence capabilities in the industry
• The most powerful automated campaigns
• Ability to support the needs of large corporations in many countries

It’s Show Time!

Welcome back from summer vacation!  The economy seems to be picking up, it’s event season and B2B marketers are being tasked with their biggest jobs yet – driving enough leads to make up for a slow first half of the year.  With the help of a marketing automation tool, your job gets a lot easier.  As marketing automation becomes more of a necessity to get the job done, B2B marketing teams are forced to evaluate their needs and choose a solution that best fits.

Over the last couple of weeks we have been highlighting our marketing automation partners and friends on The B2B Lead.  In addition to a post each of them contributed describing their solution, we also featured some their best practices.  If you haven’t visited us lately, here’s a snapshot of what you’ve missed:

What is Eloqua?
Power Marketing Automation with Targeted Leads
The Profile of the New Buyer – Digital Body Language

What is Genius.com?
Sales 2.0 for Dummies

What is Marketbright?
Tips to Improve Your Lead Management Strategy

What is Marketo?
Marketo’s Secret Sauce for Demand Generation

What is Manticore?
23 Questions Demand Generation Companies May Not Want You to Ask

What is Loopfuse?

What is Pardot?
Web Marketing Automation Buyer’s Guide

Remember your marketing automation system is a powerful engine but you need the right fuel to get the results you really want.   Be sure you are capturing the right roles at your events, cleaning up those PPC leads and identifying everyone in the decision making unit before you launch your next program.

Thanks again to our partners and friends for contributing!  We look forward to working with you again soon.

We all work long and hard on our email marketing.  Crafting the perfect attention getting subject line, choosing just the right images, editing and re-editing concise and relevant content.  After all that hard work, no one wants their email to get caught up in a SPAM filter or relegated to the Junk folder.  Many of our recipients are using Microsoft Outlook.  In case you haven’t checked it out before, here is what Micosoft says about the filter that pushes your email to the cyber graveyard known as the Junk folder.

The Junk Content filter works by looking for key words. This file is a description of exactly which words the filter looks for and where the filter looks for them:

First 8 characters of From are digits
Subject contains “advertisement”
Body contains “money back ”
Body contains “cards accepted”
Body contains “removal instructions”
Body contains “extra income”
Subject contains “!” AND Subject contains “$”
Subject contains “!” AND Subject contains “free”
Body contains “,000″ AND Body contains “!!” AND Body contains “$”
Body contains “Dear friend”
Body contains “for free?”
Body contains “for free!”
Body contains “Guarantee” AND (Body contains “satisfaction” OR Body contains “absolute”)
Body contains “more info ” AND Body contains “visit ” AND Body contains “$”
Body contains “SPECIAL PROMOTION”
Body contains “one-time mail”
Subject contains “$$”
Body contains ”
Body contains “order today”
Body contains “order now!”
Body contains “money-back guarantee”
Body contains “100% satisfied”
To contains “friend@”
To contains “public@”
To contains “success@”
From contains “sales@”
From contains “success.”
From contains “success@”
From contains “mail@”
From contains “@public”
From contains “@savvy”
From contains “profits@”
From contains “hello@”
Body contains ” mlm”
Body contains “@mlm”
Body contains “///////////////”
Body contains “check or money order”

Be sure to check out this list before you hit send on your next campaign.