Email as a Discoverable Medium

I wrote on Tuesday about the difference between messages being "delivered" and messages being "discovered". Today, it's worth looking at that difference in approach via a very tangible marketing example. As one of the most commonly used marketing mediums, email is worth using as an example.

Email can be delivered in a very direct manner – a single email can be delivered to the exact recipient intended, assuming an email address is known and permission is granted – but that does not mean that the message has truly connected. I'm not talking about email deliverability, although that remains an important topic, I'm talking about the ability of a message to be noticed or discovered by its recipient in an overflowing inbox.

We each receive more email on a daily basis than we are able or willing to read. As we look through our inbox, this means that we make very quick decisions on which emails to read and which emails to ignore. This is based on the person or source from whom the email is received, and the subject line of the email. Receiving uninteresting or non-valuable content from a particular source quickly leads to a situation in which we recognize, and reflexively delete or ignore the content. This is known as an “emotional unsubscribe” as we have tuned out of the communication, and although we have not clicked the “unsubscribe” link, we are effectively at that state.

Once an email has been received and opened, most audience are quickly scanning for interesting content. If it is discovered, it might be read, but if it is not quickly seen, the email will be just as quickly deleted. This is why, as marketers, we need to think of email as a "discoverable" marketing medium in the same way that we might think of any topic shared in social media in terms of how likely it is to be "discovered".

Each subject line and each article title within the email is a teaser that should be designed to capture the audience’s attention and compel them to want to read more. Without being misleading or deceitful, the best headlines intrigue readers and leave them wanting more information. Rather than assuming an email will be read, we as marketers can only assume that, at best, it might be browsed quickly.

The onus is upon us to make the content within the email, and the headlines that introduce that content, compelling enough that the reader takes the time to read them and discovers the message within. If they do, we have succeeded in having our information discovered. If they do not, however, we have likely pushed that person one step further away from being open to discovering our next communication.

No such thing as a Neutral Outcome

There is no way to determine with 100% accuracy where an individual buyer is in their buying process. This leads to a difficult marketing conundrum when looking at targeting marketing efforts based on a best possible approximation of where that buyer is likely to be in his or her buying process; in a broad enough population, there will always be some response to a marketing campaign, regardless of what buyer stage it was targeted at.

For example, if an end of quarter campaign is targeted at those almost ready to purchase in order to spur the maximum amount of business for that quarter, it will have its maximum effect in buyers that are found to be nearly ready to purchase, and are in the solution validation phase. However, determining the stage a buyer is in is both inexact, and prone to change rapidly with time. Therefore, there will still be some response in buyers found to be in the earlier vendor discovery phase, and there may even be a small response among buyers who are at the earliest phases of education and awareness.

An argument is often made that this means that the best option is to have as broad a pattern of communication as you can. Even at the top of the funnel, you will be able to drive some revenue, albeit small, but with the cost of an email campaign being almost zero, the return is still there. As long as unsubscribe rates are not high, the downside is minimal, so the campaign is worthwhile.

However, this argument assumes that anyone who does not respond to the offer is essentially a “neutral” outcome. They did not respond in a positive manner and move towards a purchase, they did not respond in a negative manner and unsubscribe, so their outcome must be neutral. This thinking is wrong, and leads to dangerous decision-making.

The outcome of the email campaign may indeed be neutral from the viewpoint of the marketer – no action was detected – but from the viewpoint of the prospect it was far from it. A non-response likely indicates that the prospect found nothing interesting about your message. This is a dangerous step towards that individual emotionally unsubscribing - reflexively ignoring your messages without looking to see if they are of interest.

Chances are, you only have a few opportunities to deliver an irrelevant message to a prospect before they begin to emotionally unsubscribe. Whereas they may not immediately, or ever, click on your unsubscribe link, you have essentially lost your ability to connect with that prospect. In today’s B2B marketing environment, no one can afford to lose the interest of their prospective buyers. The best way to maintain their interest is to ensure your communications are highly relevant to who they are, and more importantly to where they are in their own buying process.

One of the key goals of any marketing automation implementation is to do just that – to understand each individual’s behaviors and interests, and allow that person to be nurtured only with content of relevance to them. This approach tightens your segmentation focus to not just the demographics and firmographics of who the individual and their organization are, but also the psychographics of where they are in their buying process.

Only by eliminating the idea of a non-response being a “neutral” outcome can we understand the true cost of an irrelevant marketing communication.

*This post originally appeared as a guest post on Savvy B2B

The Goals of Lead Nurturing

One of the most common ways to use a marketing automation system is for lead nurturing. Also called “drip marketing”, “nurture marketing” or various other names, this is the art and science of keeping prospects “warm” until such time as they are ready to buy. At that level, there seems to be general agreement that it’s a great process to put in place. Similarly, the results are clearly showing that there is tremendous value in nurturing leads. However, there is often something of a lack of consensus on what the approach should be for nurturing leads.

At a high level, I would describe the goals of lead nurturing as three things, in order:

1) Maintain permission to stay in contact with the prospect: This is by far the most important goal of lead nurturing, and one that is most often overlooked. If a prospect emotionally unsubscribes, you have lost your connection with them, and you may in fact be marked as spam.


2) Establish key ideas, thoughts, or comparison points through education: A prospect you are nurturing may not enter a buying process for many months, if not quarters. However, if you can educate prospects, and by doing so, guide their thinking slightly to incorporate key requirements and ways of analyzing the market, when they do become buyers, you will be much better positioned


3) Watch for signs of progress through the buying cycle: As you nurture prospects, you can watch their digital body language to give you an understanding of when they are moving to a new stage of their buying process

Maintaining permission to stay in contact with the prospect is, as mentioned, the most critical aspect. As we’ve seen, unsubscribe rates, as measured by explicit clicks on your unsubscribe link can be very deceptive. Many recipients will emotionally unsubscribe instead. In order to manage your lead nurturing processes successfully, you need to ensure that you pay close attention to the engagement level of your audience through watching their response activity and manage the frequency with which you communicate with them in the lead nurturing process accordingly.

The need to maintain your audience’s permission to stay in contact with them is the key driver of why high quality, valuable, non-salesy content is crucial to your nurture strategy. However, that content can also guide thought processes and decision criteria. Often, buying decisions are influenced by how buyers think about the market, what “fault lines” they see as crucial in comparing vendors, and what they believe to be possible in the market. Depending on the buying process challenge you face, you can use this content marketing opportunity to educate buyers on what is possible, or on key buying criteria they may not have considered.

If you are successful in the first two goals, you can then begin to look for progress along a buying process through watching your buyers’ digital body language. You can include “teaser” content, such as content from an RSS feed and watch that for signs of interest in a topic that indicates direct buying interest, or can establish interim actions for prospects to take, such as signing up for a webinar or trial, that would indicate a deeper buying interest.

Lead nurturing can be a very powerful way to stay engaged with future potential prospects, and in doing so, successfully establish buyer preference and understand buyer timing. However, it only allows you to accomplish this if you are careful to maintain your audience’s permission to remain in contact with them.

Unsubscribes and Content Relevance in B2B Marketing

Another great chart from MarketingSherpa shows very clearly what we as marketers have long known. Relevance is key. 58% of those who stop reading, disengage, or unsubscribe quote a lack of relevance as a key factor.

Too many people are still looking at unsubscribe rates as a relevant metric to determine whether marketing messages are connecting with an audience. The fact is that only some of your audience will unsubscribe. The rest will tune out, emotionally unsubscribe, or even report your message as spam if it loses relevance.

So what is relevance and what can we do as marketers to better align our communications with what is relevant to the audience. There are four main areas we need to focus on in order to connect with our buying audience:

Relevance to their Business: This is one of the more often focused on aspects of relevance, and in many discussions around segmentation, this is all that is considered. Industry information can tell us whether they are likely to be experiencing pains we can solve, company size will give an indication of the resources they may have to tackle that pain and the size of a challenge it might be for them. Geography can give us an indication of whether the cultural or regulatory environment makes the business pain more (or less) acute. To do this, we first need to get our marketing data cleansed continually so that we can easily define our target segments based on industry or geography.

Relevance to their Role: Now it gets interesting. Knowing what role a buyer plays in the buying process allows you to target your message much more accurately. Are they a technical evaluator? If so, product details, devoid of marketing speak may be best. Are they an economic buyer? Perhaps ROI oriented case studies might be best.

Relevance to their Stage in their Buying Process: We’ve all received marketing communications that were driving towards a deal when we were just educating ourselves on the industry, and vice versa, we’ve received introductory, high level content when we were almost finished a detailed evaluation. The mis-match is painful as the content is not relevant even though we do have a certain amount of interest. Matching stage in a buyer’s buying process is crucial to relevance, and to do this, we need to map the buying process and what aspects of Digital Body Language indicate a buyer is at each stage.

Relevance of Style: Each audience responds to different styles and content. Where should the call to action be? What copy or subject line works best? There is no better answer to this than actual prospect response, and the use of A/B testing is your best option to understand which style is most relevant and effective with your audience.

Keeping unsubscribe rates low is great, but keeping audience engagement high, and emotional unsubscribes low is even better. The only way to accomplish this is through a relentless focus on making your message relevant to your audience across each of the key dimensions.

How much is too much? Frequency management and control

One conversation I end up in a lot with clients is the "how many times can I email a person per month?" conversation. Unfortunately, there is not a magic number, and attempting to govern around one can be damaging.

The reason that there's not a magic number is that email is only useful in the context of building a relationship, and in a relationship communication frequency changes dramatically depending on the type of relationship and where that relationship is at the moment. Think of this question in terms of your communications with your friends and family - how many times per month do you communicate with your spouse? kids? Aunt Hilda? Neighbors? Old friends from school days? The answer is that it depends on the relationship.

It's the same thing in B2B marketing. If you are actively engaging with a prospect, and they are highly interested in what you are offering, they will want, and appreciate, frequent communications. However, if you're only lightly engaged with someone, and they have only displayed minimal interest, you will turn them off with more than a communication per month in many cases.

The answer is that you have to manage this from the bottom up, rather than the top down.

There is not a top-down X emails per month number that you can manage to. Instead, you need to understand your audience in terms of how much you have communicated to them and, more importantly, how engaged they are with you, and use that to guide communication frequency.

Use your understanding of your audience's response to your marketing (their Digital Body Language) to segment them into groups. Use communication frequency and response frequency(email opens, clicks, form submits, web visits, etc) to define three segments:

• High Engagement: you have sent them many communications, and they have shown great inbound interest


• Moderate Engagement: you have sent them some communications, but their inbound activity remains occasional


• Low Engagement: you have communicated with them, but they show little to no inbound activity
  

From here, you can then use these segments to build a bottom-up frequency management structure. Look at your communications and define what category they fall into. If they are a "required" or "all recipients" category, you may not suppress against any of the groups (eg, registration confirmation for events the recipient just registered for, or the quarterly thought leadership newsletter). If the messages are in an "active interest" category, you may suppress Low and Moderate Engagement segments from receiving them (up to the minute news, detailed product information, etc), and if the messages are in a "moderate interest" category you may only suppress the Low Engagement segment.

This gives you a good bottoms up model for structuring your communications strategy to avoid over-communicating with some of your recipients (causing Emotional Unsubscribes: http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2008/12/emotional-unsubscribes.html) without preventing the formation of deeper relationships with those who are showing great interest.

I look forward to your comments or experiences with managing communication frequency.

What I Learned in Kindergarten about B2B Marketing

There's a lot about B2B marketing that can be learned in kindergarten. Like sharing. It's all the same except that the currency has changed from chocolate bars and those little packages of cheese and crackers to information.


As a provider in the space, you (hopefully) have something to share in terms of your insights, ideas, best practices, and advice, and you definitely have something that you want in terms of an opportunity to share your value proposition with the right audience who may eventually become buyers.

If you haven't yet, think of each of your marketing interactions in terms of a your-chocolate-bar-for-my-cheese&crackers metaphor, and you might come up with some easy wins to better engage your audience.

Top 6 B2B Marketing mistakes of sharing we all should have learned in kindergarten:

1. Asking for their entire lunch: one of the things that you can ask your audience for, and most B2B marketers do, is their contact information. This is a significant ask, and many potential buyers are hesitant to give it for good reason. But as a marketer, ask for just a little bit (name, email, that's it) at first, and make sure you are offering something good in exchange. Don't ask for 15 fields of information because you "might" need it. Every field makes the hurdle higher.


2. Trying to trade away the black jelly-beans: We all love our own products. That's healthy. But don't fall into the trap of thinking that "10 reasons you need my product" is rich, value-add content. It's a sales pitch. Even if you get away with it once, you won't get away with it twice.


3. Going hungry - not asking for anything in return: A contentious point, I know. But, we're all under pressure to build our businesses, and if you don't ask for information, you won't get it. Be respectful, don't ask for too much, but if you continually provide great content, you can ask for a small amount of information in return.


4. Stealing lunches: It's bad, don't do it. Ever. Kindergarten, or now. Every time you ask a person to pay attention to your message, you are requesting something from them. You'd better provide something in return. If you're emailing them, it is NOT free, it's an "ask", you're asking for their attention. If you don't provide quality content, you've given nothing in return, so pay attention to content quality or you'll lose people's interest quickly.


5. Taking something you already have in your lunch bag: You don't gain anything, and they feel taken advantage of. If you've already asked them for their industry, title, company size, etc, don't ask again. Put the effort in to make sure you know that you've already got the information, and don't ask for it again. If your content is rich enough, ask something new that you don't already have.


6. Mistaking your carrots for a chocolate bar: The concept of "valuable content" is thrown around very loosely in some marketing circles. You're not the judge of that, your audience is. Don't let your standards slip until you think you're trading away carrots and convincing yourself they're a chocolate bar. Things like a 1hr webinar with rich, non-salesy content from an independant market expert are good; Things like Top 10 reasons to buy your product are not good.

We at Eloqua have called it "Equitable Exchange of Information", but at the end of the day, it's really about sharing, and the same principles apply to information as to chocolate bars. Create great content, share generously, ask for only a little in return, and you're off to the races.

Emotional Unsubscribes

I get asked a lot about unsubscribe rates as an indication of buyers losing interest. I always caution people not to look to hard at that number. If you think of your own behaviour when you lose interest in a particular sender, you'll see why (most of you). You just ignore them. That's it, no unsubscribe, nothing. I heard someone at Eloqua call this an "emotional unsubscribe" and I like that term for it.

The trouble is, this is much harder to detect and react to. You might even see a little bit of email open behaviour from these recipients if they are using preview panes in their email client.

If you look at your world this way, the question is, how do you react. The first step is understanding who has emotionally unsubscribed, the second step is re-engaging with them, and the third step is dropping them out (or nearly out) of your communications if you can't re-engage.

Identifying them is a bit more of an art form than looking at explicit unsubscribes, but still very possible. What we generally do is look at people who have been communicated with (over a period of 6 months or more), but have a minimal amount of open activity, and no clicks. The people who meet that criteria are close to being emotionally unsubscribed.

Next is re-engaging. There are a few techniques here, depending on how far gone you suspect your emotionally unsubscribed audience is. Sometimes, tweaks in subject line, email copy or offer can do it. Focus heavily on the first 2 seconds of viewing your message - these are, after all, not avid readers - so subject line and the first few words of content are, at best, all that will be read. Some of our clients in financial services have successfully used free, unique research offerings to spur activity in low-activity recipients.

Don't try to hard though - the folks at Marketing Sherpa did some interesting research that showed that over 40% of people count an email as spam even if they once subscribed, but now have lost interest or receive too many communications from you. Be dilligent about cleaning out your database of those who have lost interest.