My presentation for an immersive in content and email marketing, delivered to the Fall 2015 cohort of Boston's Startup Institute. I cover the basics of both content marketing and email marketing as well as the tools and techniques you can use to succeed in both.

1. Content & Email Marketing
Lena Prickett
lena.prickett@gmail.com | @lenagainstme
December 4, 2015

2. Hi!
This is me, with a puppy, in Laos.

3. How did I get here?

4. Making stuff.

5. “Isn’t all marketing content marketing?”

6. Making people want stuff

7. Making stuff people want

8. “Content Marketing is
all the marketing
that’s left.”
– Seth Godin

9. Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach
focused on creating and distributing valuable,
relevant, and consistent content to attract and
retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately,
to drive profitable customer action.
- Content Marketing Institute

10. The “What”
• Valuable
• Relevant
• Consistent

11. The “Why”
• Attract
• Retain
• Drive Profitable Action

15. Kristina Halvorson

16. "Content strategy guides the creation, delivery,
and governance of useful, usable content.”
- Kristina Halvorson

18. Content can be a tactic to meet a goal, but
without a strategy, you’re just standing there
with your mouth open.

19. Strategy
1. What problems am I solving? The answer = topics & purpose
2. Formats and production workflow documented
3. Channel distribution method
4. Content management plan & system
5. Editorial guidelines and calendar

20. 5 Steps to Great Content
1. Goals 2. Audience 3. Production 4. Promotion
5.
Measurement

21. Goals

22. CMI & MarketingProfs
2016 B2B Content
Marketing Research
Great Goals:
• Are documented
• Represent organizational
buy-in and agreement
• Can be translated into
measureable KPIs

23. Some Example KPIs
• Social shares
• Views from partner sites (referral traffic)
• Web visits
• % returning readers
• Total time spent on site
• Conversion rates on call-to-actions
• Leads generated
• Landing page conversion rates
• Lead-to-customer conversion rate
• Time to close for new customers
• Retention rate
• Revenue from upsell
Pick one
and plan
around it

24. Audience

25. Persona Patricia
Job Title
Demographics
• Age range
• Location
• Marital status
• Education
Responsibilities
Goals
Values & Fears
Challenges
Objections
Messaging
Elevator Pitch“Use a real quote from your
research about this persona’s
pain and how you help.”

26. Source: HubSpot

27. Production

28. Source: HubSpot

29. Questions for the
Production Process
• What formats does this persona prefer?
• What buyer stage am I targeting?
• How can I design this to optimize for repurposing?
• What creation resources do I have? People + tools
• How much time can I invest in creating this?
• What experts can I reach out to for inclusion?

30. Promotion

31. Source: Chad Pollitt

32. Spend as much time
promoting your content as
you did creating it.

33. Measurement

34. Plan for measurement.
Align measurement to your goals, and make sure it’s something
your boss actually cares about.

35. TOOLS

36. • Canva
• Snappa and stocksnap.io
• Haiku Deck
• Infogram
• HubSpot templates
• Visme
Research & Creation
• BuzzSumo
• Feed readers
• Pixelmator
• Storify
• Google trends
• Google public data

37. Promotion
• Hootsuite, Sprout Social etc.
• Inbound.org
• HackerNews
• GrowthHackers
• Reddit
• BuzzSumo
• Traackr
• StumbleUpon Paid Discovery
• Reddit Ads
• Outbrain
• Taboola
• Promoted Tweets
• LinkedIn Ads
• Targeted Facebook Ads
• Retargeting

38. Measurement
• Google Analytics
• Bit.ly and other link shorteners
• Hootsuite, Sprout Social etc
• Twitter/Facebook analytics
• Marketing automation
• MailChimp
• CRM (Salesforce.com)

39. Email Marketing

40. Important Email Stats
• Email is ranked as the #1 preferred communication channel by
consumers for initial introduction to a product/service, learning
about a product/service, and post-purchase follow-up about a
product/service. (The Economist Intelligence Unit)
• Email is 40x more effective at acquiring customers than
Facebook and Twitter combined. (McKinsey & Company)
• 88% of B2B buyers use email to share content. LinkedIn is 2nd
(43%) and Twitter is 3rd (35%). (DemandGen)
• Personalized emails generate up to 6 times higher revenue per
email than do non-personalized emails. (Experian Marketing
Services)

41. BUT:
Email only works if you have permission.

42. Email Compliance
• Users must have opted in to receive emails from you
• Opt-in is explicit – double opt-in recommended
• Remind users that they opted-in to email
• Opt-out must be easily available on your email
• 3rd party lists not accepted in MailChimp
Remember: You’re building trust. Don’t break it.

43. Newsletters, Auto-Responders, &
Drip Campaigns

44. Newsletters
• Consistent
• Valuable
• Relevant
• “Stay in touch”
• Low-commitment conversion point

46. AutoResponders
• Relevant follow-up to a download or trigger event
• One-to-one interaction at scale
• Tell a story
• Don’t get too flashy
• “Forward to a Friend”

47. Personalized Include the link again
A second call to action
Face behind the email Social sharing

48. Drip Campaigns
• Extended-interaction content experience
• “Take our 5 week crash course”
• Mini-newsletter
• Targeted to their interest
• End with a request for feedback

49. First email
Snacks keep comin’!

50. Segmentation

51. 96% of B2B marketers say
segmentation is the most valuable
method for improving conversion
rates.
Econsultancy

52. How to Segment
• By persona
• By industry
• By company size or type
• By title
• By past behavior
• By buying stage
• By expressed interest
• By relationship

54. Subject Lines

55. Subject Line Stats
• 33% of email recipients open email based on subject line alone. (Convince & Convert)
• Subject lines fewer than 10 characters long had an open rate of 58%. (Adestra)
• Personalized subject lines are 22.2% more likely to be opened. (Adestra)
• For B2B companies, subject lines that contained “money,” “revenue,” and “profit”
performed the best. (Adestra)
• 64% of people say they open an email because of the subject line. (Chadwick Martin
Bailey)

56. What gets you to open an
email?

57. Best Practices
• Keep it under 50 characters
• Don’t forget preview text!
• Use CAPS sparingly
• Use you/your in the subject line
• Send it from a person, not a company
• Write at least 10 and choose the best
• Attempt alliteration
• TEST

59. Optimization & Testing

60. What to test
• Subject lines
• Calls-to-action
• Offer/subject line agreement
• Personalization
• Images
• Plaintext vs rich text
• Messaging by segment
• Body copy
• Signature
• Layout
• The offer itself
• Testimonials
• Tone of voice

61. Evaluate a test
• Open rate
• Click through rate
• Conversion after click through
• Performance by segment

62. IMPORTANT:
Only test one variable at a time.

63. Assignment

64. Select a brand, product, or service you are familiar with
that you will use for the purpose of this exercise.
1. Define a user persona you will focus on.
2. Define a place in the sales funnel that your user is in (i.e., awareness,
interest, etc.)
3. Go to www.mailchimp.com. Create an account, and begin setting up an
email campaign per your responses to #1 and #2 above. Refer here as
needed: http://mailchimp.com/resources/guides/getting-started-with-
mailchimp/html/.
4. Use what you learned in the immersive about content and email subject
lines to craft an email campaign. Send yourself a test email when you are
finished to make sure it looks the way you'd want it to.
5. Send your campaign to the Marketing Track email address so that your
fellow classmates can view it.
6. Prior to the debrief session, check MailChimp to see how many opens and
clicks (if applicable) that your email campaign received.

65. Questions?