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Just-in-Time Marketing
As marketers, we know the importance of timeliness — being in front of the client with the right offer at the right time — and, fortunately, email automation makes this possible. With triggered campaigns, we are transcending from when-we-can marketing to just-in-time marketing and it’s making a difference.
1. Just-in-Time Marketing
Using triggered email to put you in the right place at the right time.
2. “ recently read an article about how venture capitalists like to think that they are
I
marketing geniuses. As I see it, it’s not limited to VCs.
The article pointed out that if you sit in on a C-suite meeting, the CEO reports on the
overall health of the company, the CFO gives an update on revenue and expenses, the
CIO reports on the infrastructure. Everyone nods their head in feigned understanding or
sighs with concern.
The CMO stands to give his report and suddenly everyone vies for an opportunity to
pontificate on their opinion.
This reminds me of more than a small number of senior-staff meetings in which I have
participated, I’ve watched in complete disbelief as the CEO took a slightly hostile stance
concerning the subject lines of emails being sent to promote a new product.
[Seriously?! The CEO doesn’t have more pressing concerns than the subject line of an
email?]
The article went on to point out that the reason [investors] have such strong opinions
about marketing is that this is an area where they can fake it far more convincingly...
[Here, here.]
— Cyndie Shaffstall, founder, Spider Trainers
3. Introduction
79% of marketing leads As marketers, we know the importance of timeliness — being
never convert into sales. in front of the client with the right offer at the right time —
Lack of lead nurturing is and, fortunately, email automation makes this possible. With
the common cause of
triggered campaigns, we are transcending from when-we-
this poor performance.
can marketing to just-in-time marketing and it’s making a
— MarketingSherpa difference. Triggered email marketing enables us to reach our
leads and prospects at a time that is most relevant to them
(and not when most convenient for us). These
campaigns, targeted with applications of explicit and implicit
data, are making great strides in:
response rates
cross-sell and up-sell activity
relevance of messages and offers
timeliness of delivery
4. Chapter 1
Nurturing your customers
Nurturing Campaign. Regular distribution of emails will help with getting your name
A series of emails out there and building and maintaining your brand. Emails
designed to develop
enable you to be in front of your client when the time comes
leads as sales ready.
The process is used to
for them to make a purchasing decision.
build relationships and Types of triggers: Transactional, Recurring, Threshold
develop trust with
Key Points: all three types of triggered emails should
prospects in a way that
is both consistent and
focus on information that is relevant to your audience.
relevant. Analytics make the difference: Each event should be
designed to disclose as much information as you can
glean
5. Chapter 2
Choosing a software
Passive
Automation is important to triggered campaigns. While
lead, subscriber, or
contact. nearly any email application can send a series of
A term to identify
emails, triggered campaigns can become
members of a contact
list who have neither unmanageable if you are required to launch every
unsubscribed nor
event, gather statistics, and segment responses into
clicked on any links.
buckets manually.
Active
lead, subscriber, or There are a number of applications from which to
contact. choose, including Act-On
A term to Identify
members of a contact Software, HubSpot, Eloqua, Marketo, Pardot, Infusion
list who have clicked on Soft, Silverpop, ExactTarget, Genius.com, Vertical
a message link that
indicates a level of Response, and more.
interest or engagement.
6. Chapter 3
Planning your event
It’s quite easy for a triggered campaign to become unwieldy and
provide you with more information than is useful to your company.
To rein in the collection of too much data, we recommend that
you map your program using a schematic of some sort.
Define your goal: To keep your campaign on target and establish its
success, you must define a goal and track and measure quantifiable
results.
Buckets: The action of your leads and customers in a triggered
campaign should be used to categorize the recipient’s position in the
purchasing or engagement process.
7. Chapter 4
Campaign components
Companies that try to
Not every triggered campaign will have all of the possible
contact potential
customers within an components, but understanding the role of each is
hour of receiving queries
important.
are nearly 7 times as
likely to have meaningful Launch email: the initial email used to get your campaign
conversations with key rolling.
decision makers as
firms that try to contact Response email: at least one other email triggered
prospects even an hour automatically based upon some action or interaction.
later. Yet only 37% of
companies respond to Nurturing emails: a series of emails sent after the initial
queries within an hour. launch.
Sign-up form: displayed on a landing page, either at your
website or hosted in your automated email application
8. Chapter 4
Campaign components [continued]
Form-confirmation landing page: upon successful
submission of a form, display a confirmation in the
same browser window.
Form-confirmation email: a message to confirm to
the visitor that you have received their form
submission.
Targeted landing pages: web pages that provide you
with additional real estate to sell the recipient on the
offer or just provide additional details.
9. Chapter 4
Campaign components [continued]
One of the most-
Survey or poll: the inclusion of a poll or survey to your
challenging aspects of
marketing is making campaign will reduce the number of unsubscribes and
certain that you are
confirm that the people in your list want to be there and
sending relevant
messages to your want to hear what you have to say.
audience. Segmentation
improves your ability to
Database: the best list is the list you build through
identify your audience standard business practices such as attending
and create targeted
messages.
events, outbound calling, direct mail, partners, and
offering valuable content for download.
Segmentation: will enable you to send targeted
messages to each division.
10. Chapter 5
Designing content
An inbox is a very noisy place and the importance of
design cannot be understated. Most email applications
offer templates, but templates rarely represent the
uniqueness of your company, brand, product, or services.
For a small investment companies such as Spider
Trainers can create a custom template to visually promote
your brand, matches your website, or is completely new
and unique.
11. Chapter 5
Designing content [continued]
In a phenomenon known as tunnel vision, users may focus on only that content
that specifically interests them. Unfortunately, this often means that they will
ignore all other content — even if it is important or critical. Good
design, planning, and grouping helps to overcome this narrow view.
12. Chapter 5
Designing content [continued]
Here the key elements that you should include in most messages, whether you
are B2B or B2C:
CTA: Arguably, the most important content within your triggered campaign
are the calls to action. These little nuggets are the engagement point of your
event — the reason to click.
Testing CTAs: Calls to action are great fodder for A/B and multivariate
testing — as long as you follow the rule of one message, one call to action.
13. Chapter 5
Designing content [continued]
Personalization: most studies on the effectiveness of
personalization in email indicate that click-thru rates
are higher when the message is personalized, but not
when you personalize the subject line.
Mobile (responsive) designs: the desktop computer
still dominates most email interaction and accounts for
64% of opens overall, the mobile (tablets and
smartphones) makes up the 36% balance. If your
mobile users account for even as few as 10% of your
list, it’s probably time to consider sending mobile-
friendly formats (responsive).
14. Chapter 6
Writing subject lines
Subject lines with 49 or
It’s well established and common sense that subject-line
fewer characters had
open rates 12.5% higher content needs to grab your audience’s attention and get
than for those with 50 or
them to continue reading — anything short of that and
more. Click-thru rates
for subject lines with 49 you’ve wasted your time — but word length plays an equal
or fewer characters
role and has its own list of dos and don’ts.
were 75% higher than
for those with 50 or There was a time when spam filters were set up to filter
more.
out certain words such as FREE, but today emails are
— Return Path
more likely to be filtered out based upon a company’s
Subject lines with five or
reputation. If your reputation is strong, you can try using
six words outperformed some words that may have been considered spam in the
subject lines of any
other length.
past.
15. Chapter 6
Writing subject lines [continued]
To create an interesting subject
line, consider these points:
Convey a sense of Be clever, use a pun,
urgency. or try risqué.
Value proposition. Use segmentation for a
Timeliness. personal touch.
Calls to action. Keep it short.
Give it a number. Write it last.
Look for inspiration. Test, track, and tweak.
Ask a question.
16. Chapter 7
Testing, tracking, and tweaking
A/B test.
Testing the effectiveness of your campaign components is
Two versions (A and B)
are compared, which essential to gaining insight into recipients’ behavior so that
are identical except for
conversion rates can be increased. At Spider Trainers, we
one variation that might
impact a user’s divide testing into two categories: pre-open and post-
behavior.
open. We’ve found that it’s essential that you understand
Multivariate testing
what about your email you can affect when you implement
(MVT). testing processes.
Two or more design or
content changes at the
same time.
17. Chapter 7
Testing [continued]
Feature testing: In addition to A/B and multivariate testing, your campaign
can be used to test the importance of benefits, features, and site content.
If you are testing a call to action and sending two versions of the email (with the
same subject line) but have an open rate of only 1%, you will not likely have
sufficient data to effectively measure the call-to-action results. A call to action is
a post-open testing point. For this A/B test to be effective, you will need to first
focus on pre-open testing points in order to increase your open rate.
18. Chapter 8
Lead scoring
Within the scope of triggered marketing, lead scoring is
the process of ranking prospects against a scale that
represents their sales readiness. The resulting score is
used to determine which leads will be further engaged, in
order of priority. For best results, both explicit and implicit
demographics and data should be used to calculate the
score.
Work with sales to agree upon and assign a point
value for each sales milestone as it is reached.
The best type of lead scoring comes from the sum of
both explicit and implicit data.
19. Chapter 9
Following up
The best lead-to-sales
Remember to follow up on all leads in any format
processes are
established jointly acceptable to your organization:
between marketing and
sales. Be sure to
Auto responders: Automatically send messages to
establish sales follow-up the person who has interacted with the campaign.
guidelines.
Traditional follow up: Few types of contact are as
— MarketingProfs
welcomed as handwritten notes.
Personal follow up: You should be working toward
building trust with your recipients so be careful when
you choose the phone as your vehicle for connecting
— it can be disconcerting.
Be polite, be relevant, and say thank you.
20. Chapter 10
Surveying recipients
Lead nurturing emails
Building a solid and trustworthy relationship with your
have a slightly higher
unsubscribe rate (1%) email recipients involves knowing what kind of information
than individual email
they wish to receive from you and how often they would
sends (0.5%), indicating
their effectiveness in like to receive it. Allowing them to make their own
removing unqualified
decisions by providing them with a preference survey will
leads from the sales
funnel. help you achieve that goal.
— HubSpot
Preference surveys are easy and depending upon the
questions can be serviced automatically using a triggered
marketing campaign for each type of response.
21. Chapter 11
Retiring names
The average email list
The value of keeping your mailing lists updated and
depreciates by 25%
annually. current must not be underestimated. Neglecting your
— MarketingSherpa databases can have a negative impact on your
campaigns and, therefore, take a toll on your
outcomes.
By removing stagnant leads, duplicates, those who
have unsubscribed and opted out, and just plain old
contacts, you are building upon your email campaign’s
effectiveness, which will automatically boost your
success rate.
22. Chapter 12
Social sharing
Social sharing.
There are several approaches to integrating social
Buttons or links within
your email that enable networks in your email campaigns, some are embedded in
the recipient to share
the email itself while others are best left to the landing
the message contents
within their social page (they require JavaScript which is often marked as
network. Forward to a
spam content when embedded in an email).
friend falls in to this
category as well. Your email should have a single call to action. When
you add social sharing, social following, and other links
Social following.
Buttons or links within to the email, you distract from the call to action.
your email that enable
the recipient to connect For some emails, you’re hoping for sharing and
with you within your
social networks.
forwarding and in this case, links are appropriate and
encouraged.
23. Chapter 13
Learning from your campaign
• Email analytics: Post-send analytics are the cream of
your nurturing email crop. In order to understand and
improve upon results, you need an application that will
provide you with ample visibility into the metrics —
from send to purchase, and all the steps in between.
• Site analytics: Our first rule of thumb for any
campaign launch is that the client must have the site
depth to support the campaign. That means that there
must be several pages at your website that will further
the message of the campaign. Make sure you have
enough information at your site to convince them of the
validity and your trustworthiness.
24. Chapter 14
Budgeting
Marketing is like sex.
We’ve found that — like all things marketing — the best
Everyone thinks they’re
good at it. Everybody approach is test, track, and tweak. Your budget will
thinks they’re a
depend upon several considerations.
marketing expert. Your
boss, the CEO, the IT Spending your budget: Triggered campaigns can be
guy — I bet half the
people in your company
designed to last for two weeks, two years, ten years, or
think they know more anything in between. The amount of time will depend
about what customers
want than the customers
upon many factors, but be careful about trying to get
do. Everybody’s a focus too much bang for your buck.
group of one.
— CBSNEWS.com
25. Chapter 14
Budgeting [continued]
In-house development: If you’re considering in-house
production, here are points to ponder:
Cost: your internal team represents substantial overhead and
considering their existing workload, may not be able to take on a
project of this size.
Exposure to advancements: Your internal team is rarely as motivated
as an external agency to stay on top of technological advancements
and industry trends.
Objective third party: Internal teams tend to give far too much time
and credence to what their competitors .
Extensive specialties: Spider Trainers, as an example, is a network
of more than 80 industry contractors marshaled by a team of six
company principals.
26. Chapter 15
Conclusion
Spider Trainers has sent millions of emails on behalf of
our clients and the only steadfast rule that we’ve found
that applies to every client is that with
testing, tracking, and tweaking your campaigns will
improve and you will gather the knowledge required to
achieve true ROI; and for many companies that’s the true
definition of conversion.
27. Chapter 15
Conclusion [continued]
Triggered campaigns have far more moving parts than traditional email sends.
This is because of all these moving parts — now automated — that the results
are so impressive. Even though the automation makes the process user-
friendly, it can seem overwhelming. We believe that Act-On Software is the best
option because it is easy to use and enables our clients the opportunity and
ability to participate in their programs.
28. Chapter 15
Conclusion [continued]
Spider Trainers provides multi-touch online and offline marketing and web
development to make your brand more visible, elevate search-engine
rankings, attract appropriate visitors, and enable educated purchasing
decisions.
Spider Trainers has decades of experience in print, web development, go-to-
market initiatives, and sustainable, behavior-based online and offline, traditional
and emerging marketing strategies.
29. Chapter 15
Conclusion [continued]
Most companies approach marketing and web-development in the same manner — build
it and they will come. As hundreds of site owners the world over have come to know, this
is rarely the case. If you want to sell online, you must market online. You must
announce, contribute, promote, link, analyze, test, modify, analyze again, and so much
more. If you build a social recognition throughout the web, then they will come. It can be
build it and they will come, but somewhere along the way someone told someone about a
baseball diamond in the middle of an Iowa cornfield.
Rely on Spider Trainers to tell someone about yours.
30. Contact Spider Trainers
Phone: 651 702 3793
Email: spidertrainer@spidertrainers.com
Website: http://www.spidertrainers.com
Address: PO Box 280487
Lakewood, CO 80228 United States