Your Marketo Email Marketing application has the power to automatically engage buyers with relevant email conversations automatically and at scale. Move beyond basic batch and blast campaigns to authentic, timely and relevant email communications that drive results. View these slides, as we share best practices and how-to’s from creating email campaigns in Marketo quickly and easily to reporting on results that matter.
3. Who’s on ?
Don Mayberry
8 years with Marketo
Senior Technical Instructor
BS Business, Corporate management
Marketo Certified
Full Specialization
4. Pathway to Email Marketing webinar
This webinar explores email strategies to help ensure that your messages will reach their
intended inboxes by focusing on best practices.
You will learn how to:
• Define a winning email marketing strategy
• Automate and personalize your campaigns
• Leverage A/B testing to drive better results
• Ensure your emails hit the inbox
• Prove the ROI of your email efforts
10. First seek to understand ….with Email Programs
The email program type is used for typical
batch email deployments.
Use criteria: When you are sending out a
single email once to a group of leads at a
specific date and time
Special features:
• Includes visual reporting dashboard
that automatically populates following
the email send
• Has advanced email A/B testing
functionality
• Can be nested within the event or
default program type
11. Put your plan in to action with Engagement Programs
The engagement program type is used to execute lead nurturing
strategy.
Use criteria: When you want to nurture your leads at a set periodic schedule
Special features:
• Includes a visual reporting dashboard
• Allows you to send out content based on priority
and availability
• Transitions people from one content path to
another, or from one engagement program to
another, based on criteria you define
12. Align content to your funnel:
• Top-of-the-Funnel (TOFU) - eBooks,
blog posts, research data, funny
videos, curated lists, infographics
• Middle-of-the-Funnel (MOFU) - buying
guides, RFP templates, ROI
calculators, analyst reports, pricing
• Bottom-of-the-Funnel (BOFU) -
demos, third party reviews, customer
case studies
The Engagement program
21. Deliverability is...
…the measurement of how often or how
likely it is that your emails end up making it
into your target audience’s inboxes.
Only 79% of commercial emails lands in
the inbox. This means for every five emails
sent, one never reaches the intended
recipient (Return Path, “2015 Deliverability
Benchmark Report”).
26. Authentication
Shows recipient mail servers that Marketo is authorized to send mail from your domain
• SPF – Sender Policy Framework
• DKIM – Domain Keys Identified Mail
• DNS – Domain Name System
• DMARC - Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance
• Branded Links
27. Deliverability Is Important Because…
• You want people to read your emails
• You don’t want to be labeled a “spammer”
28. How to Measure
To determine your deliverability, the best place to start is your email performance report.
Metrics to measure:
• # Sent
• # Delivered
• # Hard bounced
• # Soft bounced
• # Opened
• # Clicked
29. Deliverability Dictionary
• Email is still in the process of being deliveredPending
• Number of recipients who clicked a link in the emailClicked Link
• Email was rejected because of a temporary condition, such
as a server being down or a full inboxSoft Bounced
• Email was rejected because of a permanent condition, such
as nonexistent email addressHard Bounced
• Number of email recipients who clicked the unsubscribe link
in the email and filled out the formUnsubscribed
30. Rules for Email Statistics
• Rule 1
Each email activity record is set to one, and only one, of the following: Delivered, Hard
Bounced, Soft Bounced, or Pending.
• Rule 2
If the email record shows Opened, it is counted as Delivered.
• Rule 3
If the email record shows Clicked Email or Unsubscribed, it is counted as Delivered and
Opened.
• Rule 4
If the email is Opened, bounces are ignored. If the email has not been opened, Hard
Bounced takes precedence over Soft Bounced and Delivered.
32. Design for Delivery: Content Design
Content-wise filters evaluate:
• Key words
‒ Repeated use of key words
‒ Capitalization and punctuation
• Spelling errors
• Link reputation
• Image to text ratio
Don’t use URL shorteners!
33. Design for Delivery: Human Eye Spam Filter
Avoid content that would cause your reader to skip or delete without reviewing your
entire email
• This typically is a combination of the sender + subject line
• Pay attention to the perceived trustworthiness of your email
• Consider your reaction if you were to receive the email you are about to deploy:
‒ Would you open this message if it were in your inbox?
34. Design for Delivery: Don’t Forget Mobile!
• Avoid using long subject lines, which will push the email content even farther down an
already- small mobile screen.
• Reduce the width of your emails to 640 pixels or less and utilize responsive design
templates (don’t rely on the mobile device to attempt to render the email properly for you)
• Decrease the size of your email files. Some mobile devices will require an additional click for
a user to download the rest of an email when the file is too large. The optimum email size
is less than 20k.
• Mobile-friendly emails mean users
can click through to your website from
a mobile device. When designing
landing pages consider whether they
are mobile friendly too!
35. Design for Delivery: Defining Your Audience
An email that is expected by the recipient will see higher engagement and higher
response
Targeting ideas:
• Industry
• Company size
• Role/title
• Location
• Engagement
36. Design for Delivery: Target the People Interested
Proactively handle inactive leads
• Re-engage inactive leads
• Improve deliverability
• Avoid spam-traps
37. Address Chronic Inactives
• Review at least once per sales cycle
• Review by source
‒ Gated asset
‒ Identify problematic sources
‒ Optimize subscription process
• Re-engagement campaign
‒ Set to Marketing Suspended (if customer)
‒ Set to Blacklist (if prospect)
‒ Delete
38. Ways to Increase Click Rates
• Test, test, test
• Use segmentation
• Be mobile ready!
‒ Strong CTAs
‒ CTAs “above the fold”
and linked ideally 3
times
‒ Big buttons
• Cater to the ego
• Rely on the Email Link
Performance Report
Treatment
Control
39. Design for Delivery: Frequency of Communication
Consider the following:
• How often are you emailing a single
person?
• When should you send email
reminders?
• At what point will your audience route
your emails into SPAM?
40. Engagement Marketing Model
Engagement marketing is a way to have an ongoing conversation with people. It’s
expected, predictable, and relevant to them in some form or fashion. We have found that
this leads to better email metrics because you can:
• Set expectations with people
• Allow them to determine what are they signing up for
• Give them an understanding of how
frequently will they hear from you
41. The Opt In Way
• Per Marketo’s Use Policy, “Marketo has a zero tolerance policy regarding using the
Subscription Services to send Unsolicited Commercial Email ("UCE") or Unsolicited Bulk
Email (“UBE”) (collectively referred to as “spam” or “Unsolicited Email”). Unsolicited Email
is defined as email sent to persons other than (i) persons with whom Customer has an
existing business relationship, OR (ii) persons who have consented to the receipt of such
email, including publishing or providing their email address in a manner from which
consent to receive email of the type transmitted may be reasonably implied. Commercial
advertising and/or emails and other electronic communications may only be sent to
recipients who have opted-in to receive messages from the sender.
• Opt in should be direct to your company; third party data vendors do not count.
42. Gain Recipient Permission and Respect Recipient Preference
• Active recipients
‒ Strengthen the relationship with
active opt-in contacts by
soliciting feedback on the quality
and frequency of your
communications, and their
communication preferences.
Confirm preferences with the
recipient and then comply.
‒ Send only what the subscriber
signed up to receive.
43. Gain Recipient Permission and Respect Recipient Preference
• Inactive recipients
‒ Re-engage inactive contacts by confirming subscription status one or two times per
year.
‒ Nurture inactive contacts and cut inactive contacts after they fail to re-engage after
a set timeframe
44. Acquire Leads – Opt In Best Practices
• Use custom fields to keep timestamp, IP, and URL of opt-in
• Legal requirements for some countries
• Opt-in form should identify:
‒ Company
‒ Major products, brands and business units
‒ Make unsubscribing clear & easy
48. What you learned
• Define a winning email marketing strategy
• Automate and personalize your campaigns
• Leverage A/B testing to drive better results
• Ensure your emails hit the inbox
• Prove the ROI of your email efforts
49. Marketo University Courses
Admin courses Configuring and Managing Marketo
Analytics & Reporting
courses
• Using Attribution Models
• Using Marketo Analytics
Design Studio courses Customizing Creative Assets
Marketing Activities
courses
• Building Engagement Programs
• Developing Programs and
Campaigns
• Account-Based Marketing
• Optimizing Email Deliverability
• Building Mobile Marketing
Programs
• Driving Buyer Engagement with
Social Marketing
• Creating Event and Webinar
Programs
Web courses Engaging Visitors through Web Personalization
51. Next Steps: Resources and Certification
Resources
• Product Docs
‒ docs.marketo.com
‒ Easy-to-search step-by-step instructions
• Definitive Guides
‒ www.marketo.com/definitive-guides/
‒ In-depth e-books on specific subjects
• Webinars
• www.marketo.com/webinars
• Hosted by Marketo experts and partners
• Support
• www.marketo.com/support
• 24/7 world-wide support (must be logged in to
access)
Resources
• Community
‒ Review recommendations from Marketo
consultants
‒ Post ideas
‒ Participate in discussions
‒ Join a MUG (Marketo User Group)
‒ Network with other professionals
• Events
‒ www.marketo.com/events
‒ View upcoming events
‒ Learn more about Marketing Nation Summit
Certification
• Marketo Certified Expert (MCE)
52. If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear back about it, please use the link below.
https://marketo.co1.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_8vpNgeQUcUmgiu9
Thank you!
Check out more at Marketo University
http://learn.marketo.comhttps://www.marketo.com/university/
Editor's Notes
Please take a few min to review this.
Please note that all training materials and the delivery of training are Marketo’s Intellectual Property. That means you may not copy, record, take screen captures, or reproduce our intellectual property in any fashion. Just a reminder, this session is not recorded and you are not allowed to make a recording. However, you should have a copy of the slide deck and exercise, so I’d recommend taking some notes!
This course explores email deliverability strategies to help ensure your messages will reach their intended inboxes.
<click>Define a winning email marketing strategy:
<click>Automate and personalize your campaigns:
<click>Leverage A/B testing to drive better results:
<click>Ensure your emails hit the inbox:
<click>Prove the ROI of your email efforts:
Why should marketers be concerned about deliverability? You spend time and effort building your email list and creating your emails because email marketing provides the single best return on investment of any marketing channel. If your email doesn’t even make to the inbox, you might as well have not sent it.
So as we get started talking about email strategy. Understand that an engaging email is a strategic email!
Sooo…What exactly do we mean by a winning email strategy?-
We mean a plan of action based on results.
Remember that first date….it was all about how much contact you were able to get away with…..
Successful touches are needed in order to convert a cold prospect …in to a buyer
Your going to want to set the stage for powerful metrics to draw from, to define your winning strategy
Allocate the value of every engagement across all of the Marketing efforts a customer has touched.
Count your successful touches: Review the past, and bring it forward
Start with or review your <click>email programs, It’s the perfect candidate to feel out your prospects to nail down what they like best…. it has A/B testing(but more on that later).
Then with the engagement platform<click> lock in what you gathered and deploy the right content on a regular schedule tailored to win!
Identify how much a touch is worth:
Lock in those scoring campaigns , not sure where to begin? check out our BP scoring campaigns available for import .
Assign value across your successful touches
In a Multi touch attribution scenario our revenue cycle analytics will show you revenue across your marketing programs
Do we even know each other?
A study by Experian found that personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates!
Let’s break this down into numbers we can all understand:
On average email marketing generates $0.11 in revenue per email.
If you send 100,000 emails, you can expect $11,000 in revenue.
But then wait
When your just starting out it’s probably best not to personalize right a way with their first name! whaaaat?
Consider demographics / industry / purchase history… first , gain trust the old fashion way…..eeeeeearn it. Personalization too soon comes off stalker!
(according to Temples school of business – too much personalization sets off cyber security flags)
Email Design
Short subject lines are better according to Adestra 10 characters or less had an open rate of 58%
Night time is the right time….
Really? Yes really according to Experian marketing services 8 to 12 is your best window…..
now ….that was some time ago… but that’s why you always test to check your audience!
Optimal mailing time often depends upon your customers’ behaviors, inbox crowding, and the deployment times of other marketers.
So why not send when everyone is reading right?!
Free Stuff
Yes give something away, market research/whitepapers or best practice
…people love free stuff, this will drive clicks and opens to the moon.
Mobile
Make sure your email are responsive and or have been designed with mobile in mind…..
that call to action….make sure the button is near the thumb where most people touch
Re-engage
Ok so you’ve got a big list of prospects in some research 64% of list are inactive
Consider your inactives but be careful….make sure to weed out any bounces first!
Segmentation
If you segment your lists, you get better open rates, revenue, leads, transactions and more customers.
Common ones to consider:
Industry
Size of Company
Sales cycle
In general, you want to engage based on buying stage, since it is critical to think about where the lead is in his/her buying journey.
As buying behavior is shown, transitions to different content should be made.
Streams are your stages, Just plug in the winning content
Trigger campaigns
Transitions
cadence
So as we get started talking about email strategy. Understand that an engaging email is a strategic email!
A/B testing is for one-time emails where a small part of the audience will get a test and the resulting winning email goes to the rest of the audience.
Champion challenger is used for ongoing emails in triggered smart campaigns or engagement programs.
It will introduce variations to an ongoing percentage of recipients.
Four steps
Test Settings has two sections. Variations and Distribution
Subject line Select Subject Line:
Holly wants to Test Subject Line. You only need the one email for this test.
She can add up to 10 subject lines
She’ll add a few lines highlighting specific features in the newsletter and one line that uses a Marketo token. The token will automatically add the recipients first name in the subject line. For example, if she sent it to herself it would say “Holly, your Human Health Newsletter is here”
A: Key Tips For Healthy Living
B: Top Surgeon Joins Human Health
C: Free Health Fair Saturday
D: {{lead.First Name:default=Sir/Madam}}, your Human Health Newsletter is here
Whole Emails - Select Whole Emails:
This will test the overall performance of the entire emails you select. You could use this to test the position of a button, different images or any changes in content within the email
You need at least two emails to use this option
You can add up to 10 emails to test
From address/From Name- Select From Address:
This is a popular testing method to see how the sender effects the open rate. For example how would recipients respond to marketing@humanhealth.com versus holly@humanhealth.com. You may find that you get a higher open rate when people feel like the email is coming from a person instead of a department.
You need at least two addresses to test
You can add up to 10 address variants
Date/Time Select Date/Time
This tests what time of day or day of week are best to send emails. Are you marketing to 9-5 workers at their job? Saturday afternoon probably won’t do much for you. However, maybe you are marketing to people at home who usually check email after 5. This test will help you determine which time and day is most effective for your audience.
Name your test times something easy to remember like “Monday Morning” or “Weekend” then just choose your date and time
You can test up to 10 date/time variants
Next determine the Test Sample size.
The green area is the percentage of people in the audience that receive the test.
Once a winner is determined the percentage of people in the white area receive that email.
It’s easy to adjust just drag the purple bar to the where you need it.
Winner criteria can be determined by opens, clicks, click to open ratio or your own custom conversion!
Open: How many opens
Clicks: How many clicks
Click to Open Ration: How many opens then clicked
Choose Custom Conversion and Edit to launch window
If you choose Custom Conversion you’ll have access to tons of different Marketo triggers which allow you ultimate control over how you define success!
Holly just needs to test Opens for now.
---------------
Next we need to determine how a winner is declared.
Choosing Automatic means that the winning email automatically goes out on the day you choose.
Choosing Manual means you will receive a report on the day you choose.
If you want to send the email you’ll do that after you get your report.
Holly knows she wants the winner to go out to the larger percentage of people so she’ll choose Automatic.
First she chooses the day to send the test out.
Then the day to send the winner.
She wants to give the test a week to process before determining a winner. You must give at least four hours for the test to process. Keep in mind longer test times will give you better results since there is more time for people to open the email.
Notice the Test Duration days change to let you know how many days are being chosen.
Then she enters in her own email address so she can receive a notification when the email goes out.
If she would have chosen Manual instead of Automatic in the Winner Criteria she would receive a report instead of a notification.
Remember, the winning email is not automatically sent out when you choose Manual.
You receive a report.
So as we get started talking about email strategy. Understand that an engaging email is a strategic email!
Deliverability is
<CLICK> the measurement of how often or how likely it is that your emails end up making it into your target audience’s inboxes
<CLICK> Only 79% of commercial emails lands in the inbox. This means for every five emails sent, one never reaches the intended recipient
2015 Deliverability Benchmark Report (Rep.). (2015). Retrieved September 29, 2016, from https://returnpath.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-Deliverability-Benchmark-Report.pdf
One in five messages now fails to reach the inbox. That’s a big number, especially if you are relying heavily on email marketing! So what can you do about this? Well, in this course, and specifically this section, we’ll discuss why this is happening, what you can to do prevent it from happening, and how to fix a problem if one should arise for your org.
For some additional reading, check out this blog post and infographic from our Marketo blog: (paste URL in chat window)
http://blog.marketo.com/2011/05/the-evolution-of-spam-an-email-marketing-infographic.html?fullsize=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.marketo.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2011%2F05%2FThe-Evolution-of-Spam-an-Email-Marketing-Infographic.png
Getting your email delivered is tougher- MUCH tougher- than its ever been. Five years ago, getting your email delivered was a matter of having the right email address and little details like ensuring that the email was not super obvious spam. By that, I mean your email didn’t say FREE in all caps 50 times.
But in today’s world, avoiding spammy words isn’t enough to hit the inbox. Big internet service providers have followed Gmail’s push towards an engagement model. What does that mean? Let’s take a look at how things have changed for the major providers.
Gmail started with their Priority Inbox (also for Google Apps). When utilized, email is still delivered, but not always marked as “priority”. Gmail has recently updated their foldering – they now have a Promotions folder. Some Marketers are scared by this, others think it’s a positive step.
You may have noticed that Gmail now also has tabs: one for primary email, another for social, and a third for promotions. Hitting that primary inbox is increasingly difficult because now Gmail looks at several things, such as:
Continuously opened emails
Unique clicks as well as multiple clicks
Scrolling
Frequency of engagements (does the recipient open emails and engage with them regularly)
Microsoft is promoting their new rebrand of Hotmail, Outlook.com, as a tool to manage your email and clean out the clutter. Their features called Sweep and Schedule Clean Up allow their users to delete email by sender.
<CLICK> You can filter by your contacts
<CLICK> It also categorizes email automatically based on content type, Newsletters, Social Updates, Everything Else.
Even Yahoo is changing the inbox as we use to know it!
<CLICK> Yahoo Mail allows you to set up folders to store and manage your messages. Several folders exist automatically at the left of the home screen - Inbox, Drafts, Sent, Spam, Trash, Contacts and All Feeds. Making it harder to hit the inbox.
<CLICK> As well as giving real time updated in the homepage.
The first step in preventing problems is ensuring you have the proper authentication methods configured. You can improve your email delivery rates by configuring SPF, or the Sender Policy Framework, and DKIM, or domain keys identified mail, into your DNS settings, known as domain name system. Let’s talk about each of these acronyms in a little greater detail.
<CLICK> - You want people to read your emails. Derivability determines whether your message gets a chance at getting read by your audience
<CLICK> You don’t want to be labeled a “spammer”. if you are a spammer, the scope of your reach and readership will be limited
According to Google, spam is either a canned meat product made mainly from ham or irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent on the Internet to a large number of recipients. Either way, it’s not something I want to see on my computer in the morning. And since I don’t think I’m in the minority on this one, it’s probably not something that should be a part of your email marketing.
“Spam is in the eye of the beholder”, because a marketer might send out what they believe to be the best piece of marketing every created, but the recipient, or the recipients enterprise emailing software sees it as spam! But what can we do to change this?
Well lets address why spam is bad…
An increasing number of spammers, such as Quantum Communications, will send most or all of their mail through innocent intermediate systems to avoid being blocked, considering many systems have already placed blockers against mail coming directly from the spammers' systems.
This sneaky method of sending email fills the recipients system networks with unwanted spam messages, which takes up their email system administrators time dealing with all the undeliverable spam messages, and subjects admins to complaints from recipients who conclude that since the intermediate system delivered the mail, they must be in cahoots with the spammers.
Many other spammers use “hit and run" spamming in which they get a trial dial-up account at an Internet provider for a few days, send tens of thousands of messages, then abandon the account (unless the provider notices what they're doing and cancels it first), leaving the unsuspecting provider to clean up the mess. Many spammers have done this tens or dozens of times, forcing the providers to waste staff time both on the cleanup and on monitoring their trial accounts for abuse. Spammers are stealing valuable resources and money is spent to deal with the headaches email system admins deal with.
When determining your deliverability, its important to understand what metrics to look at and where to find them. It’s also helpful to understand what the metrics are actually indicating.
Pending
Email is still in the process of being delivered
Clicked Link
Number of recipients who clicked a link in the email
Soft Bounced
Email was rejected because of a temporary condition, such as a server being down or a full inbox
Hard Bounced
Email was rejected because of a permanent condition, such as nonexistent email address
Unsubscribed
Number of email recipients who clicked the unsubscribe link in the email and filled out the form
Here’s a helpful chart for us to use to define the key metrics we refer to in our Email Performance report. It’s important to keep a holistic eye on our emails and look at all of these metrics, not just narrow in on one.
But first, let’s understand how Marketo calculates these numbers in the report.
In general, at Marketo, we try to use common sense to record these statistics. For example, if someone clicked a link in an email, they obviously opened it first. We follow these specific rules for the Email Performance Report:
You are able to review these items on an email by email basis or in an aggregate view with the Email performance report.
Note
An email performance report includes leads that have been deleted since the email was sent.
To filter deleted leads out of your report, use the Smart List tab with the Email Address filter set to: is not empty.
Email spam filters out there are likely watching out for certain keywords, spelling errors, the reputation of your links out on the internet, and your image to text ratio. Therefore, you want to develop a good strategy to navigate various filters in the world wide web.
Usually one of the hottest questions that comes up from every email marketer is “Where can I find a list of words that I shouldn’t use in my email?” Well, keyword filtering isn’t as large a part of the picture, but it can impact some marketers delivery success - especially when sending to smaller email networks.
You don’t necessarily have to worry about using the word “Free” in an email, or even a subject line. However, repeated use of these words through out the Subject Line and content can become a problem. Also, writing the Subject Line in ALL CAPS may be a great way to make your Subject Line pop in the inbox, but there are some filters out there that are looking for this technique. Some filters are looking at the balance of letters to punctuation in a subject line so you may also want to avoid too many $ signs or ! points.
Filters are also looking for spelling errors. Think of the spam in your junk folder, and how senders are trying every which way to trick the filters with misspellings but still trying to convey the original product. Filters are sensitive to these misspellings.
HTML to text ratio is also something that comes up quite a bit but is fairly easy to manage with the Marketo application. Filters like to see a balance of text and html or images in the content. Image spam and spam that follows the pattern of a few lines of text with a link or two are still popular formats, so be sure to create a balance with your own content to avoid looking like a spammer. Marketo enables you to create a text version of your email once the graphical, html version has been built. Be sure to look at this text version and make sure it is well formatted and ready for publication because a solid text version will help create that balanced message that the filters won’t immediately correlate with spam.
Normally we would never call out a particular vendor or business in a negative way. But bit.ly, as the most popular link shortener in the market, has become a target for spammers who are attempting to obscure their own links. This shortener is listed on many email blacklists and using a bit.ly link can cause delivery issues.
After you have taken steps to ensure your email won’t get caught in the filters you also want to make sure it doesn’t get caught in the Human Spam Filter. The innate Spam Filter we have all developed. For example, many of us are trained to avoid messages from sender we don’t know with the word FREE in the subject line. But you might have good intentions! If so, be sure to BRAND your From Address. Avoid common spam signals that will make your recipient suspicious.
An email that is expected by the recipient will see higher engagement and higher response. This is why opt-in permission is so important with email marketing.
One of the ways of making that email an expected email is to tailor the content as specifically as you can to the recipient. Do you know the industry, their role in the company, where they are located, have they downloaded a whitepaper or have they opened the last 3 emails you have sent? Are they a decision maker?
Utilize Marketo’s Engagement/Nurture Program. Dialoguing with individuals and setting up ‘tracks’ can build is what build engagement with your emails and this engagement will drive optimal deliverability. Add a touch or personalization with tokens, as well.
Poll: How many times have you signed up for emails from a company, forgotten (or wished you hadn’t!), gotten the emails you requested, then unsubscribed because they felt like spam?
We say “proactively” here because languishing, inactive leads can lead to delivery issues. By removing non-responders, a whole host of delivery issues can be avoided. Don’t continue to send the same old emails. Someone might have abandoned their email account. A chronic non-responsive email address could potentially be turned into a spam trap. Email providers sometimes repurpose abandoned email addresses and full domains as spam trap networks designed to catch spammers.
While it can be valuable to attempt to re-engage with a targeted campaign, sometimes it is best to just set the lead as marketing suspended.
When considering your chronic inactive, here’s a few best practices to keep in mind. First, its always a good idea to review this list at least once per sales cycle. Take a look at the emails on there and consider if any stand out or if you see any trends. It’s also a good idea to develop a flow action process. Consider building out some data management campaigns that can automatically set these leads to at least marketing suspended, so that you no longer are attempting to market to them.
When evaluating your list, be sure to review by source. If someone at one point in time engaged with a gated asset, what was it, and why haven’t they engaged since then? Was the piece of content an outlier to your normal content, something that maybe was truly indicative to buying intent? Are there problematic sources providing names to your database? Consider optimizing your subscription process as well, to see if there is a reason that names are opting-in and then not engaging or consuming your content.
Where it makes sense, you can also consider a re-engagement campaign for in-actives. Then if they still choose not to engage, either set to Marketing Suspended (if customer) or set to Blacklist (if prospect).
Finally, consider an appropriate timeframe that you might consider deleting the lead all together from your database.
While click rates haven’t been an item we’ve mentioned much yet, they play an important part in the way that many of the freemium email providers gauge engagement and therefore likelihood of a sender being a spammer. So one way to help shore up your reputation, and to stay relevant with your audience, is by finding ways to increase your click rate. This can be done by testing of course. But also be mobile ready! Be sure your Call to Action (CTA) is above the fold and linked to at least 3 times, preferably twice in the first paragraph. Cater to the person you are speaking to- an individual will be opening and reading this! Don’t be afraid to use “my,” “mine” or “me.” And for help in understanding what your leads have been clicking on, check out the email link performance report. This report shows you a break down of the links that are receiving clicks in your email, how many times they are being clicked, and by how many leads. Very helpful information!
<CLICK> As you focus on targeting and understanding your audience, you should also simply think about how often you are emailing them. If a business doesn’t engage with me relatively quickly I will forget I subscribed. On the flip side, if you go too long between emailing me, I will forget that I was previously engaged and think that you are spamming me!
<CLICK> For infrequent emailers I encourage businesses to send at least one email quarterly. This keeps your audience engaged and likely to recognize and expect the mail the next time it’s in the inbox.
<CLICK> Are you really a daily emailer? There aren’t too many business models out there that can sustain a daily email without drowning their audience. As an email consumer, I would want to stop that steady stream and hit SPAM to end it all. Do you even know if you are a daily emailer? Do departments in your company share a database? This can lead to “lead exhaustion” as recipients receive email from multiple senders within one organization.
Marketo’s Engagement program will also enable you to set limits to the number of emails your leads receive, reducing the chance of different departments overzealously sharing a lead database.
Let customers know what they are signing up for. Are the leads signing up for newsletters? Event invitations? Alerts? Industry announcements? If so, you will be sending multiple distinct types of mail and should consider setting up multiple mailing lists. Also, be consistent and timely with your messaging. If they signed up for the monthly newsletter, you should be sending it out on a monthly basis. Don’t leave them wondering why they haven’t heard from you.
Marketo prohibits sending unsolicited email. Bottom line! If a recipient does not wish to get marketing messages from your company they wont, but keep in mind that there are regular email you can configure and send in Marketo, and are those you can set as operational. When you sent an email as operational, what happens? Right, that email will bypass the settings of those leads who are marked as unsubscribe and Marketing Suspend in your database.
That is why it is best practice to configure a Marketo form that will allow prospective leads and customers to opt-in to email messages that are of interest to them. Opt-in options should go directly to your company not third part vendors. Try to avoid depending on someone else to manage the emailing desires of your prospective leads and customers.
For more information, please be sure to read the Marketo Use Policy found here (paste in chat window) http://legal.marketo.com/use-policy/
Having a recipient opt in is the best way to make sure an email address is valid. There are double opt-ins, active opt-ins and passive opt-ins. The safest method is the double opt-in, in which the recipient receives a confirmation message with an embedded link that must be clicked to validate the address and confirm the desire to receive emails.
For active opt-ins, the recipient enters an email address and clicks a box in order to receive mailings. This type of opt-in works best when recipients are instructed to enter the address two times; this reduces “fat finger” mistakes. You end up with more accurate addresses, and recipients are less likely to mark your email as “abuse” or “spam” since they actively signed up for the mailing in the first place!
Passive opt-ins are those in which the box is already checked when someone visits a Web page or makes a purchase. This is by far the least reliable opt-in method. It generates bad addresses and you will receive high abuse rate responses from recipients.
From a deliverability standpoint, the double opt-in is your best bet, as it validates addresses, reduces abuse complaints and gets mail delivered to recipients that want your email. Avoid other methods like only offering recipients the option to opt-out when they didn’t even know they were being added or appending the leads email address to other marketing initiatives just because they might have purchased one product from you in the past. Some companies will even rent or purchase lists of email address to try and acquire new leads, but we do not suggest it because you may not be able to utilizes Marketo’s lead database features and nurturing features to control how and when to communicate with your contacts
Due to laws like CAN-Spam in the US as well as other laws globally, it is important to mention that some countries are requiring the audit of logs for data about when and how an email recipient chose to opt-in to marketing material. To gather this data, configure your form include a timestamp, customer IP address, and URL of the opt-in point.
Ensure that both your company and major products, brands, or business units are identifiable by recipients of your email communication. If they know who you are, there is less of a chance to end up in the spam folder.
It may sound counterintuitive to your goals but the easier you make it for your user to find the unsubscribe link the less likely they will report you as spam instead of unsubscribing.
Unsubscribe links should never be “hidden”. Not only does it increase the chances someone reports you as spam, it also is a bad business practice. It's questionable at best in terms of CAN-SPAM compliance.
Employing a preference center that allows users to “opt-down” from subscriptions (both in terms of frequency of emails and types of communication) increases the chances you will keep a subscriber.
For more considerations, check out this blog post (past link in chat window) http://blog.marketo.com/2013/08/the-problem-with-implicit-opt-in-for-email-marketing.html
In three steps one way to nail this down is to utilize the opportunity influence analyzer to tell Marketing’s story on impact on revenue
Step 1:
Count All the Successful Touches
In an omni-channel scenario,
successful touches can happen
across numerous channels. Perhaps
the customer’s last touch point was
your website, but prior to hitting
“buy,” he spent time in an email, on
your Facebook page, and on your
Twitter feed. He may have even gone
into a brick-and-mortar store before
committing to the purchase online (or
vice versa). When collecting all your
touches, be sure to only count those
that occurred before the action was
taken — those that led to the action.
Step 2:
Assign Value to the Final Action
You might use your e-commerce
platform, transactional system, or
CRM as the system of record for how
much the action is worth. A
marketing automation tool can make
this easy for you.
Step 3:
Distribute That Value across Your
Successful Touches
In a multi-touch attribution scenario,
you assign a value to each successful
touch. Often, this is best done with
simple distribution: if a consumer
touched five marketing programs,
each touch point gets 1/5th of the
credit for the ultimate value.
As simple as that seems, it’s often
easier said than done, because most
ESPs don’t support such sophisticated
analysis. But modern marketing
automation solutions can do this right
out of the box.
Hopefully this course has helped you feel more confident in analyzing how effective your organization is at getting emails into your audience’s inbox. As we come to an end, here’s what we covered in today’s course.
<Talk about the current offerings>
Take advantage of our additional resources in the Marketo community, take additional on-demand Marketo webinars, and check out our Email deliverability tool.
Next steps would be to take advantage of more learning and practice opportunities with some of our more advanced adoption courses, resources and Certification.
Paste the link to the survey in the chat window: https://marketo.co1.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_8vpNgeQUcUmgiu9