The Effective Marketer

Selecting the Right Email Marketing Provider

April 6, 2011

You either have or will have to evaluate and select an email marketing software provider at some point in your marketing career. And there’s a good reason most people dread this project, after all with so many ESP (email service providers) out there, is really a daunting task.

That’s why I wrote a comprehensive guide to help you in your email selection process. Published in a 3-part series by Email Vendor Selection website, it shows a proven approach to quantitatively help you narrow down your choices and select the solution that will be the best fit for your organization.

Check out part 1 of the “Taking control of the email vendor selection process” article and let me know what you think!

1 Comment | Email Marketing, Marketing Automation | Tagged: direct marketing, Email Marketing, email selection, email vendor, linkedin, Online Marketing | Permalink
Posted by Daniel Kuperman

Why Sales and Marketing Don’t Get Along

March 24, 2011

Talk to marketing mangers and sales managers about their biggest complaint and you will likely hear “They don’t follow up on leads!” from the marketing guy and “Their leads suck!” from the sales guy. No news there. But why is that this fight on lead quality continues?

According to a recent chart published by MarketingSherpa (below), 80% of marketers don’t spend time qualifying leads before sending them to sales.

What information is required before leads are passed to sales?

It is interesting that back in 2009, MarketingSherpa had published a chart showing the key challenges marketers faced and “generating high quality leads” was the top one. Sales keeps insisting on receiving better leads, marketing knows that is an issue, but still they are not delivering. In their “CMO Perspectives on B2B Marketing Automation” this challenge for high quality leads is shown as having increased from 69% in 2009 to 76% in 2010.

A Gartner Group presentation on allocation of Marketing Budgets for 2011 showed that the top three marketing priorites for this year are:

Acquire new customers
Improve customer retention
Support sales including lead generation programs

If the budget is there, then maybe more companies will be able to finally put some technology in place to help with lead quality, more specifically marketing automation with the goal of improving lead quality. Because the solution to the disconnect facing marketing and sales today is to fix the “lead problem”, once leads are better qualified the two organizations can be friends again.

Leave a Comment » | Lead generation, Marketing Automation, Marketing Budget, Marketing Management | Tagged: lead management, lead quality, Lead Scoring, linkedin, Marketing Automation, Marketing Budget, sales | Permalink
Posted by Daniel Kuperman

How Everybody Wins with HubSpot’s Funding

March 10, 2011

As everyone in the marketing industry surely knows by now, HubSpot raised $32 million in additional funding. This means that is time to update my previous charts on marketing automation funding (see below) and the funding timeline, because HubSpot just surpassed Marketo as the highest funded marketing software vendor to date. (Note: yes, I wouldn’t necessarily say HubSpot is a ‘marketing automation’ vendor per se, but they are moving towards that end).

Click to enlarge

With the new round of financing, HubSpot now leads the pack in terms of VC funding and takes the total amount raised to date by key marketing players to over $220 million.

Click to enlarge

Updated above is the timeline of funding for the key players in the marketing automation space (you may argue HubSpot is not a marketing automation vendor, this is subject for another post).

Everyone Wins

But it also means something else. The money flowing to companies like HubSpot is impressive, and the results of the investment will not only benefit them but also the whole marketing automation and marketing software industry in general. Is almost like a virtuous cycle, where money goes to marketing software vendors, who use it to build better products and educate the market, which then learns about the benefits of such solutions, purchase those solutions, and publicize it themselves and pay those vendors for services.

Industry Impact

Should established marketing automation players be worried about HubSpot’s sudden infusion of capital? After all, now that they have the deep pockets to invest in improving their product, maybe their solution will start looking more like what marketing automation vendors have been selling for some time now. For Eloqua, at least, they say there’s no need to worry since HubSpot is serving a very different market.

Market Segmentation

And here is worth pausing for a moment. We sometimes tend to bundle all of the vendors into one big basket, because a search for marketing software solutions will show more results than you would care to browse and the sales literature of most of them will make you think they all do very similar things. Nothing could be further from the truth, since after taking a few of those solutions out for a spin you will discover there’s much difference under the hood… but that is a topic for another post, since it can take some time to untangle the value propositions and real benefit all the marketing software vendors make.

So HubSpot’s recent capital infusion should be treated as good news by all marketing vendors. It does seem the whole industry is due for a shake-down but until then, the awareness and market education will benefit everyone.

1 Comment | Marketing Automation, Marketing Management | Tagged: eloqua, hubspot, linkedin, Marketing Automation, Marketing Software, marketo | Permalink
Posted by Daniel Kuperman

Marketing Automation Catching On Fire

February 16, 2011

According to the recent report by Marketing Sherpa, “CMO Perspectives on B2B Marketing Automation” (offered for FREE by Marketo until March 1st), “the majority of CMOs have either implemented, are in the process of implementation, or are at least considering implementation of marketing automation software“.

34%: Our marketing automation software is partially implemented

19%: Our marketing automation software is fully implemented

17%: We have not began implementation but plan to

30%: We have not began implementation and don’t plan to

This is probably good news for the vendors, which are competing in an increasingly crowded market. Some have even suggested that marketing automation market is floundering, but it is such a new market and offering that is innevitable to have doubts, especially with these many vendors in the space. With time, a shake out is likely (in fact, the recent acquisition of Unica and Aprimo may point to consolidation) and the evolution of solutions will ensure marketing automation has a place in most marketing organizations, much like CRM is now standard for sales departments.

A Marketing Automation Timeline

So let’s take a look at the marketing automation companies in play today (mostly US based in this case) and when they were founded. Interesting to note that the majority of the players only came to existence not even 5 years ago. This nascent industry still has lots of growth to do.

You may spot some companies that were not considered to be “marketing automation” players just a year or so ago. That points to the evolving nature of the market, and the key functions of lead nurturing, scoring, and automated triggers becoming part of email marketing and other marketing solutions. Marketing Automation Software Guide published a B2B Marketing Automation market map that shows a few other players I ignored for the timeline above, like SAP and Oracle because although they do have marketing automation capabilities it is not their core business (and I don’t agree with tagging Salesforce.com as a marketing automation solution).

Investment in Marketing Automation

Another interesting factor to consider in the marketing automation industry and why it seems to be catching on fire is the money that is flowing towards some of the key players. Just a few marketing automation companies have already raised over $170 million dollars combined. Whether they will all be around a couple years from now is still to be seen, but it does make for a highly competitive environment. With cash to burn, these companies are focusing on growing the customer base first, with hopes that revenue will follow.

The marketing automation infographic above (click to enlarge) shows the top players in the MA space that have raised over $1 million dollars. Also interesting to note that if you break down the fundraising of each of the above vendors into a timeline (like I did below), most of the investment has been made in the past couple years.

You may have to click to enlarge the funding timeline infographic above.

Note: I used publicly available data and wasn’t able to find Eloqua’s Series A, so I deducted based on valuation of their second round.

The Marketing Automation Market

The Marketing Automation market is at an interesting stage. Companies are fighting for customers, trying to educate the market, and we may be seeing the beginnings of consolidation. Based on the investment figures above it seems is catching on fire, but at the same time there’s fierce rivalry and still a lot of room to improve… what will happen? I don’t know but it promises to be really interesting!

What do you think ?

P.S. Let me know if I missed any MA company in the graphics above or if I got incorrect data. I’d be happy to fix the infographics for benefit of everyone.

7 Comments | Email Marketing, Marketing Automation, Marketing Management, Marketing Planning, Marketing Strategy, Online Marketing, Uncategorized | Tagged: infographic, Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring, linkedin, Marketing Automation, Marketing Software, Marketing Vendors | Permalink
Posted by Daniel Kuperman

The Science of Email Marketing

February 10, 2011

I just attended “The Science of Email Marketing” online webinar, hosted by HubSpot and presented by social media scientist Dan Zarrella.

Slides should be available for download soon here.

Key takeaways:

Businesses are consumers (the boundaries between B2C and B2B are blurred when it comes to reading email)
Try sending emails on weekends
Send very early in the morning
Optimize for mobile
Use lots of links
Include reference information in your emails
Serialize and label your emails
Give your subscribers special access
Send email from someone they’ve heard of
Don’t be afraid to send too much email
Your newest subscribers are your best
Make them want to get your emails
Ask people to follow you

The presentation was based on data collected via focus groups and from MailChimp’s email database of over 9.5 billion emails sent.

I like Dan’s presentation for its brevity and focus on key action items based on solid data. What I wish he had shared is how the data from focus groups and MailChimp is broken down. How many B2B vs. B2C companies, industries, and even job titles. It’s easy to say that B2B and B2C email patterns are similar, but without seeing the data underlying that assumption I’m very skeptic. Also, MailChimp is now known to be used by large corporations (they focus on SMB market) therefore the data may not take into account larger organizations.

As with all analysis and reports out there, you have to take all of the recommendations with a grain of salt. Test them, see if they work, then be the judge. No one knows your industry and customers better than you.

Leave a Comment » | Email Marketing, Lead generation, Marketing Training, Online Marketing | Tagged: Email Marketing, linkedin, Online Marketing | Permalink
Posted by Daniel Kuperman

Making the Most of Your Webinars

February 7, 2011

A recent report from On24, “Webcast Benchmarks and Best Practices for Lead Generation“, has some interesting numbers when it comes to how webinars are being used and their effectiveness at lead generation. Take for instance the following:

The average webcasts captures 441 registrants
Attendee participation is usually 50-60% of registrations
15-30% of registrants are sales-qualified opportunities

The numbers above should be enough for you to go back to your own metrics and see how you compare. Sure, depending on your industry the numbers might be skewed but at least you have a benchmark and something to show (or not!) senior management when your results are being questioned.

The report goes a bit further and also tells us that 52% of all registrations occur within 10 days before a scheduled webinar and 15% registering on the day of the webcast. In my experience this is accurate, and sometimes during the day (or the day before) of the event tends to bring an increasing number of new registrations. We are all procrastinators it seems when it comes to registering for online events.

What’s the ROI of webcasting?

According to the survey webcasts have a $22.60 cost per registrant for those with an average of 441 registrants and $39 per participant if the average is 256 participants. I personally think these numbers are high, but it depends heavily on the webinar platform you’re using. On24 is not the lowest priced one on the market (Adobe Connect, WebEx, and GoToWebinar all charge less for webinars), but this should be easy enough for you to calculate for your specific situation. Oh, but note that the cost involves “audience generation programs, to produce and promote a webcast”, so you have to add your email marketing costs (again, different platforms will charge differently) and any additional method you typically use to get people to register and attend.

I encourage you to download the FREE report from On24 and check out some additional nuggets that can help you evaluation your own webcasting program.

Leave a Comment » | Online Marketing, Webinars | Tagged: Lead generation, linkedin, Online Marketing, Webinar | Permalink
Posted by Daniel Kuperman

Upcoming Marketing Conferences

February 3, 2011

It’s February already and you keep thinking “what the heck happened to January”? You’re note alone. A few good events have come and gone, like the Digital Marketing Forum, MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing Summit, and the Email Evolution Conference and I completely missed them.

Sure, budget is short and you can’t attend every single event, but is good to know what’s coming up so that you can prepare yourself and pick the ones you should go. Also, the earlier you register usually the better deal you can get. So here you go, this is the list of marketing events and marketing conferences coming up (US only) for the first half of 2011. Check them out, pick a couple and start planning!

Upcoming marketing conferences

==February==

Online Marketing Summit
February 7-11
San Diego, CA
Link: http://www.onlinemarketingsummit.com/

Social Media Strategies Summit
February 8-10San Francisco, CA
Link: http://socialmediastrategiessummit.com/

Frost & Sullivan Marketing World
February 8-11
New Orleans, LA
Link: http://www.frost.com/prod/servlet/summits-details.pag?eventid=200426011

Social Media Camp
February 9New York, NY
Link: http://socialmediacampny.com/

Social Media Masters
February 11San Diego, CA
Link: http://socialmediamasters.com/

Content Marketing Strategies Conference
February 16-17
Berkeley, CA
Link: http://contentmarketingstrategies-mashable.eventbrite.com/

Social Fresh Tampa
February 21-22
Tampa, FL
Link: http://socialfresh.com/tampa/

DMA Mobile Marketing Day
February 22
New York, NY
Link: http://www.the-dma.org/councilevents/mobileday/

==March==

Marketing Research Executive Forum
March 6-8
Atlanta, GA
Link: http://www.marketingpower.com/Calendar/Pages/default.aspx

Search Marketing Expo
March 8-10
San Jose, CA
Link: http://searchmarketingexpo.com/

Conversion Conference
March 14-15
San Francisco, CA
Link: http://conversionconference.com/west/home.html

Search Engine Strategies
March 21-15
New York, NY
Link: http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/newyork/

==April==

Forrester Marketing Forum
April 5-6
San Francisco, CA
Link: http://www.forrester.com/events/eventdetail/0,9179,2511,00.html

AdTech
April 11-13
San Francisco, CA
Link: http://www.ad-tech.com/sf/adtech_san_francisco.aspx

The Power of eMarketing Conference
April 19-20
San Francisco, CA
Link: http://www.emarketingassociation.com/2011/SF/index.html

Mobile Marketing Strategies Summit
April 26-28San Francisco, CA
Link: http://mobilemarketingstrategiessummit.com/

==May==

Marketing Innovation Summit
May 2-5
Boston, MA
Link: http://www.mis2011.com/Boston/Home

Sirius Decisions Summit
May 4-6
Scottsdale, AZ
Link: http://www.siriusdecisions.com/live/home/document.php?dA=ConfAnnSummit2011

Event Marketing Summit
May 16-18
Chicago, IL
Link: http://emsummit.eventmarketer.com/

==June==

International BMA Conference
June 1-3
Chicago, IL
Link: http://www.marketing.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=5288

MarketingProfs B2B Forum
June 13-15
Boston, MA
Link: TBD

And the following are some of the marketing conferences I’ll keep watch and decide as we get closer.

MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit Boston
09/26-27
Boston, MA

MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit SF
10/24-25
San Francisco, CA

Dreamforce 2011
August 30-Sept 2
San Francisco, CA

BlogWorld Expo
October 14-16
Las Vegas, NV

Conferences abound, but they are a great way to learn new things, network, and more importantly get out of the office and focus for a couple days.

P.S.: I’ll be presenting at the upcoming The Power of eMarketing Conference, so if you plan on going to that one let me know so we can meetup.

Did I forget a conference? Let me know and I’ll update the list.

5 Comments | Email Marketing, Marketing Training, Online Marketing, Social Media | Tagged: conferences, Email Marketing, events, internet marketing, linkedin, Social Media, training | Permalink
Posted by Daniel Kuperman

Aberdeen Shows How to Do Email Marketing Right

January 13, 2011

The new research report from Aberdeen Group “Email Marketing: Customers Take it Personally” has some very interesting insights. They talk about how the increase in the number of available marketing channels coupled with the resource constraints of most marketing organizations is the toughest challenge for marketers to overcome. If you have just started your 2011 campaigns after battling the budget process, I bet you can definitely see some relation to your own company.

So with all these new channels available, why does email marketing continue to be a top choice for marketers everywhere? According to the research “email marketing’s ability to provide a high quantity of leads combined with direct revenue gains” is what makes it still an attractive channel. Even when compared with social media, the research states:

“83% of all companies surveyed indicate they will leverage email as a core tool in the marketing mix and at a rate 54% more than social media despite that channel’s growth and popularity”

This is definitely contrary to a lot of the predictions of email marketing’s death and the rise of social media as the main communications channel for marketing that we heard throughout 2010.

In their research they also classify companies according to their results in email marketing usage. The leaders of the pack, called Best-in-Class companies, follow some best practices you can also adopt at your own organization:

Remove opt-out members from database
Remove hard and soft bounce recipients from the database through email authentication
Deliver special offers to high value customers
Integrate nurturing of existing leads with campaign results
Have an organization structure that supports data capture and sharing
Measure the impact of email marketing optimization practices and changes
Share the activity history of an existing or net-new lead with sales team

And, they add that the real key critical factor is the personalization of content in your emails. They say that “companies that marry high value customers with personalized, specialized offers in their email campaigns produce far greater results on every tangible measure of effectiveness”. Content personalization is not an easy task but according to the research it will likely give you a 38% better open rate and 86% greater click-through rate than non-personalized email messages.

The lesson? Work your way through the list above and start playing with content personalization, even if only for a small segment of your database. It will likely pay off handsomely.

The report has more interesting stuff and I suggest you spend a few minutes reading it. You can get it for free for a limited time here:

http://bit.ly/fxiUoz

Leave a Comment » | Email Marketing | Tagged: Email Marketing, linkedin, Market Research, Marketing Planning, Social Media | Permalink
Posted by Daniel Kuperman

What Makes a Great Creative Brief?

January 7, 2011

A similar question was posted on Quora and elicited a number of different but very interesting responses. It just goes to show that there is still a lot of controversy when it comes to creative briefs in marketing. If you come from the agency side, you are used to a certain format. Big companies and small companies have different needs, and so their briefs are also formatted differently.

From the discussion thread I liked two presentations that were shared, posted below. The first is an interesting research done by Jasmin Cheng (from Twist Image) about creative briefs in the industry, and the second is a presentation by Nick Emmel on how to properly write a creative brief. While they don’t settle the discussion, are good sources for inspiration nonetheless.

And, if you’re interested in looking at some different formats for creative briefs, check out this blog post on creative brief template review.

Leave a Comment » | Content Marketing, Marketing Planning | Tagged: Communication, linkedin, marketing campaigns, Marketing Planning | Permalink
Posted by Daniel Kuperman

The Effective Marketer

Selecting the Right Email Marketing Provider

Why Sales and Marketing Don’t Get Along