Better response for marketing campaigns!

Often the greatest divides result from the simplest of things. 1 chromosome in your DNA, the continuous flow of a river or whether your prospects enable images in their emails.

Whether you are marketing B2B or B2C this problem is the same, but the solution is very simple.

Send email messages in the right format to everyone on your list.

Personalized marketing is not just about putting the first name, company name, etc in your marketing message. It is also about catering to preferences. Test your response to image-heavy HTML emails, HTML emails using background colors for the design and a simple email text message.

Track who responds to each type and remember those settings for future messages. If you like, have a link in each email message that allows your prospects to specify their preference.

Here’s this email divide in action:

Email: Text Version

Email: HTML

If you asked me which format is better for your messages? I wouldn’t know. (It’s not called the great email divide for nothing. )

But if you know which customer segments are more visual, how they have been responding to your image-laden html messages or if you just asked them. The choice is clear for you.

Every message you send out, you’ll be sending email messages that give you a better response.

Will some people still label you a spammer? Probably.

Will you get better response with targeted email structure and design styles? Definitely.

Related posts:

Marketing Sherpa’s 2009 Email benchmarking guide:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/exs/Email09Excerpt.pdf

Converting email with images blocked:
http://www.betterresponseblog.com/index.php/marketing/converting-email-with-blocked-images/

L2 has one of the most popular whitepapers

According to the DMA, L2 has the second most popular whitepaper on the DMA’s website.

L2’s whitepaper, ‘8 Tips for Selling a Direct Marketing Campaign‘ is even more relevant today then it was when it was written a year ago.

The 8 tips were written to help marketers and marketing service providers sell that initial direct marketing campaign and convince colleagues/ bosses/ or sometimes themselves of the effectiveness of direct marketing campaigns.

If you have yet to adopt 1to1, personalized and targeted marketing campaigns, then these 8 tips are for you.

Tip 1: Help them understand the motivation for direct marketing campaigns
Tip 2: Help align their expectations
Tip 3: Sell the approach of work less, earn more
Tip 4: No, or little, software to learn
Tip 5: Work with their existing media
Tip 6: Use past success stories to help them visualize their own success
Tip 7: Give them the tools to help sell their customers
Tip 8: Don’t stop at the ’sale’

Download the whitepaper: “8 Tips for Selling a Direct Marketing Campaign“

Catch Wrich at On-demand!

Wrich Printz, CEO of L2, Inc. will be presenting “Climbing the Multi-Channel Mountain Without Falling Off: Insights From Industry Experts” at On-demand 2009.

• How to prepare and test personalized multi-channel campaigns.
• How to leverage CRM information to drive campaigns.
• Tips to create a marketing system that includes sales.
• How to profit from personalized digital communication.
• Current practices in cross-channel marketing.

Join us at the “Becoming a Marketing Provider Track” on Tuesday 31st of March (3:30pm) at room 203A or leave us a comment if you’ll like to meet with L2 at the conference.

Recently, we had someone comment that some of the forms on our web landing page was requesting for too much information, dissuading people from completing them. This is a little like what National Instruments went through in their Case study:  How National Instruments doubled response rates for web forms. What’s different is that our form only had about 8 fields, much less than what they had.

In a business like ours, there is a line between making a form easy to fill up and using it as a way of qualifying prospects we get from the web. The beauty about calls to action on web landing pages, is that they are quite easy to tweak to find the best balance between the two.

With that in mind, we included short forms with very simple information and flexibility in either including a Phone number or an Email address on our web landing page. With this simple information, we make it easier to initiate contact with prospective leads, finding out more about them in the subsequent follow-up and increase our response and conversion rates along the way.

While we have only recently made this small change, we are already seeing response rates to the forms increase. The beauty of our system is that once we get this simple information, we could use it to create a Personalized landing page for our prospect that tracks and collects more information that goes into our data system.

Already we are seeing more than double increase in responses, lets hope it keeps up.

Someone’s going to get fired, and well they should.  Perhaps several ’someones’. Today AOL published ‘for academic research’ the records of 657,426 users who used their search engine over the last several months.  For privacy reasons, they replaced the screen name with a numeric code.  The download of 487 Megabytes of compressed data was taken down pretty quickly, but already it’s been posted on numerous mirror sites and archived. 

Lesson #1 - It’s nigh impossible to put the genie back in the bottle on the internet… so never say anything on the internet you wouldn’t say to your mom or in the court of law.

The search patterns of various users are sometimes easily tracked to a very finite group of people.  In one thread on this subject, some people are already using easy search tools to build profiles of interesting or amusing (and often disturbing) search profiles.  Of course, it would be impossible to PROVE that a certain individual searched for a specific thing without the screen name (and even then, it would only prove that someone with access to that account did the search), however, it’s certainly enough information that some people are going to be confronted with some very unconfortable information very soon given the propensity for some users to search on their own or their subject’s full name and address.  Also, several incidents of people searching for their own credit card # or email address is a sure way of causing some potentially embarrassing moments.

[More]

A case study in today’s MarketingSherpa provides some great content tips for your newsletter based on the experiences of the National Association of Realtors.

The first and most important tip is to make your content all about the the reader - solve their problems or make them money. When time and attention are limited, your newsletter should offer obvious benefits right up front.

[More]