Red On Marketing Blog

B2B Email Signatures Gone Wild!

Nobody likes long goodbyes. And a fancy email signature can cause more headaches than it's worth.

Do you know someone who's overloaded their email signature? What's packed into yours? Let’s go through a quick checklist. Count how many of these elements your signature has:

• Several styles and sizes of type
• Special line spacing
• Different formatting (like bold, italics, regular text)
• A company logo
• A picture of you
• Little icons (like tiny phone symbol)
• Special characters (like TM or SM in superscript)
• A call to action or sales message
• A disclaimer
• Links to social media accounts
• A catchy quote or motto

None of those things is so terrible by itself. Heck we've all got some of this stuff. But when you pile them one on top of another, the result can be jarring.

Understated elegance

A client of ours has agreed to be an example in this article. Meet Van Haas, who leads the best cost management company in Sacramento. He likes e-mail signatures with bells and whistles - and this is how his signature looked in the early days of our collaboraton -->

The message and contact info are hiding somewhere in there. But here was my plea to Van:

Imagine you bump into the CEO of a $200M company you want as a client. You follow up with a quick email note. She looks at it on her Palm and forwards it to the VP/Operations. He gets it at his work address but he's telecommuting using his Mac. With corporate firewalls and ISPs and email platforms all processing the info, the stuff that looked cool at the sender's end gets scrambled and whacky and squinty, if not lost. And the VP/Operations parks the email for later, when he has a minute to ask the CEO who the sender was. Great opportunity evaporates.

Van wrote back:

“Ok ok ok. I get it. But, I like fanciness. :-)” And proposed this:

Better!

But we're still in the land of fancy formatting. The simpler and cleaner, the better.

Even Microsoft is realizing this. In June the company announced that it would stop adding lines of promotional text at the end of Hotmail users’ messages. As reported by Todd Bishop of Techflash, Microsoft had been getting a lot of complaints about the taglines creating clutter. So even though the taglines promoting Hotmail generated about 2 million clicks per month, Microsoft realized that the clicks weren’t worth the animosity.

Here's the sparkling clean version Van has today - yeay.

What's in your email signature and why?

Get Higher ROI from a B2B Email Marketing Campaign

Zap weak email content for higher ROI

By Rebekah Donaldson

Email newsletters don’t cost much to create, they give people something to look forward to, and they keep your name top of mind. That’s especially important if you have a long sales cycle.

Like every other aspect of B2B marketing, there are right ways and wrong ways to creating an email newsletter. Keep these tips in mind, and you’ll consistently produce a winner:

Flip It

Traditionally, corporate newsletters are like mini press releases squished together. As in, "here's what we did/ are doing/ will do."

But unless you do really interesting things or you're super cool like Steve Jobs, that's not a great hook for a conversation with clients.

It's better to keep the focus on the client, not on your company. Give them valuable and relevant information that helps them work smarter, stay abreast of latest trends, or justify that they’ve made the right choice by working with you.

What Isn't Boring?

Examples of items that often play well:

• Comparisons of products or services in your space
• Customer stories ("they faced x... they did y... they achieved z")
• Previews or reviews ("X is a useful book/ workshop/ guide because...")
• Human interest stories (especially about executives at the companies you serve)
• Advance notice ("next month this new executive brief will go public; here is a sneak peek...")
• Online resources they can access (on your site and elsewhere)
• Reader responses to surveys or previous newsletter content ("some readers disagreed with our article on blah... they have a point there")

Don't Worry About Filling Up Your Newsletter

If it seems like a lot of work to fill a newsletter, here’s the good news: You don’t have to fill it! Details coming in my next post about email marketing...

2010 Email Marketing and PR - What's Different?

Using 2010 best practices to engage prospects and speed up sales

By Rebekah Donaldson

Hats off to Meg Arnold, Laura Good, and other members of the Sarta team for producing yesterday's seminar 2010 Trends in Marketing and PR. 

2010 email trends we discussed

• Prospects have control - adapt to succeed
• Email is competing with social media for attention
• Is email obsolete because of social media? (no)
• Far and away email is most popular for sharing
• Email marketing budgets are up
  

Top 4 tips to improve email results

• Use transactional emails
• Build permission
• Mix and test content
• Get Sherpa’s latest email guide

2010 PR trends we discussed

• Adapt to succeed
• Microphone vs interactive PR
• Is PR obsolete because of social media? (no)
• PR is social
• " Someone always pays"
• "'Solution’ is not the solution"

Top 4 tips for improving PR results

• Steadily produce good content
• Know your top 10 keywords
• Write optimized press releases
• Point to helpful landing pages

Get my slide deck.

(I also posted it using LinkedIn's presentation sharing app, here.)

 

Audience questions

 

My co-presenters Donna Chabrier and Ryan McCann were great. Authentic, insightful, and quick on their feet.

Being quick on one's feet was important because the audience was not taking our advice lying down! There were great questions during the session, and lots of post-seminar dialogue. I hope we can continue the Q&A in the comments section.

Special thanks

Laura Good did a great job pulling the event together. She has created a Twitter list of tweeters who came. Thanks Donna and Josh Morgan for recommending me as a speaker. Thanks to my colleague Robert Celaschi - though thousands of miles away yesterday, he was very helpful. And thanks Todd Lebo for access to the MarketingSherpa 2010 Email Benchmark Report.

B2B Email: Your subject line can kill your pitch (or, Hi, I want to talk to you about … uh, stuff)

By Robert Celaschi

Something strange happens to people when they send marketing email. They’ll take a powerful, persuasive marketing message, and torpedo the whole thing by slapping a lousy subject line on it.

What makes it really strange is that the email might contain a press release or other message with a really great headline. The sender could have cut and pasted it. But no, instead they type a vague or garbled mess of words that makes me shrug and move on.

I’ll confess I’m sometimes guilty of sloppy subject lines. I’ve struggled and sweated to craft the right message. I’ve set the right tone. I’ve targeted the right people. I’m ready to press the “send” button and then — oh, yeah, gotta put some kind of subject line on this puppy. Zip-zip-zip, done. Instead, I should take even more care with those precious few words that may determine whether the email even gets opened.

Let’s look at a half-dozen real subject lines that real marketing people emailed to me in the past month.

Subj: New Dilemma For Small Business Car Leases After Unemployment

Huh? Let’s see: I gather that there’s a new dilemma of some sort. For whom? Small Business Car Leases After Unemployment. Uhhhhhhh, sorry, does not compute. This one would work better with a simple colon after “Business.” Not great, but better. The story is about businesses transferring the leases on company cars, because they’ve laid off so many of the workers who used to drive them.

Subj: Non-Profit

That’s it, just “Non-Profit.” There are a lot of nonprofits out there. They do a lot of different things. I had to dig way, way down to discover that this nonprofit is a foundation that helps children. They are holding a fund-raiser this month in Miami. If I hadn’t picked this as an example for the blog post, I wouldn’t have bothered to find out any of that.

Subj: Survey: A Quarter of Firms Scaling Back Training

A direct hit. Tells me everything I need to get started. Now I’ll open the email and find out the details. Whoops — turns out that while 26 percent are cutting back their training programs, 28 percent have expanded. But, hey, they got me to read it.

Subj: Boston – Social Media Capital?

I don’t like questions for subject lines. Why are you asking me? Don’t you already know? If not, go do some more research and get back to me.

Subj: Time for Change in Credit Card Game

Maybe it is indeed time for a change in the credit card game, but since I have no idea what this means, it’s hard to say. The easy fix here would have been to condense the first line of the enclosed press release: Consumers now can say “no” to credit card interest rate hikes.

Subj: July home sales increased 12 percent; median home price declined 19.6 percent

This one delivers. I feel like a double winner, because I learn about sales volume and about price. This is about the California housing market, by the way. Bad news if you are a seller with a fat mortgage.

Your turn!

OK, you get the idea. Now take a look at the email you’ve sent in the past month. If someone didn’t already know your message, would they get the right idea from the subject line?

Robert has been a business journalist for 22 years, both as a reporter and an editor. He joined Business Communications Group in 2005.

Get help to make marketing materials that encourage prospects to take the next step.

B2B lead generation: Bye bye, list biz?

When a local list broker asked me for career advice last month, I realized that a human element is often missing from discussions about marketing trends and forecasting.

I realized too that inbound marketers can learn from the performance of companies like Harte Hanks - a company that essentially wholesales data to channel partners like list brokers (in addition to selling directly to its client base).

"Should I retrain?"

Last month a list broker wrote to me asking,

"Are email and postal direct marketing to prospect lists truly going to become less effective in the next decade? If so, would you recommend a transition to social marketing, mobile marketing...? Maybe I need to institute some changes right now..."

He'd been reading my stuff about the future of B2B marketing, and where the numbers point. And how it's clear that one of the most effective communication tools over the next decade will be each company's own online presence.

That means hard working Web sites, of course, that ensure prospects find you.

And, on the flip side, it means less print advertising and purchased lists.

That's an ominous prospect for list brokers - professionals who sell lists for purposes of direct mail, email, and telemarketing.

The macro marketing environment

Let's get clear about terms here. Very roughly speaking, list brokers retail wholesale data collected by companies like . No brokers I know collect data themselves - they do, though, analyze and interpret data, create direct marketing campaigns, and sometimes manage campaigns.

Here is a chart showing the performance of Harte Hanks stock from May 2005 to May 2009:

Credit: www.tradingmarkets.com

The Harte Hanks CEO says in a May 5th 2009 press release that,

“There continues to be economic uncertainty that makes it difficult to predict when conditions will improve. While we face challenges, we have a terrific client list and our businesses deliver products, services and marketing solutions that are even more necessary in this environment.”

If I go along with him, I have to infer that his clients don’t get the HH value proposition. If they got it, they’d buy. But who could be better at conveying value through marketing communications than a Harte Hanks? There must be something else going on.

Truth be told, Harte Hanks has, itself, moved into the website building business (see paragraphs under “Selected Highlights” near the bottom of this release).

Bye bye, list biz?

So yes, colleagues in the list biz, I’d recommend changing your focus. And I don’t take the issue lightly. It’s your career and livelihood we’re discussing.

A September 2008 post here called Is B2B marketing going obsolete? said 

“The marketplace has experienced a significant shift in power. No longer are just vendors hunting prospects. Prospects, now, are experienced marksmen too. So… what now? What does this mean for B2B marketers? Should we change professions? Retool our company’s marketing? Wait and see?”

More recently, ”The State Of Retailing Online 2009: Marketing Report,” the 12th annual study conducted for Shop.org by Forrester Research Inc., showed that 88 percent of retailers surveyed said email is a high priority for the coming year, largely to retain customers.

Notice those last three words. These are emails to people who already have a relationshipwith the retailers. Not to prospects from purchased lists.

In fact, the study said 71 percent of retailers plan to send segmented emails to customers based on stated preferences or purchase data.

Challenges of being in the school of push communications

In What won’t fly in that 2009 marketing plan I suggested that B2B marketers consider skipping traditional marketing techniques in their 2009 marketing plans.

The reason: Purchased lists, whether they involve emailing, snail-mailing or telemarketing, belong to the school of ‘push’ communications.

Core skills of a successful list broker

So where does that leave list brokers? Many have been very, very successful for a long, long time with lists.

I’d venture that the best list brokers are particularly savvy about:

• Client relationship management
• Audience segmentation, including
  • Behavioral targeting
  • Psychographics
• A/B testing 
• Quantifying ROI

What are some other strengths of a well-trained list broker? How can they apply their skills to newer marketing methods?

Resources — please add

I’ll start us off with a suggested resource — an article in the Hubspot blog. Please add your ideas.

1. Ten Tips for Marketing Job-Seekers in the Class of 2009

From the Shocking Marketing No Nos Department

A high profile marketing automation company assuming permission — in an email with subject line “B2B marketing best practices”? Sounds too ironic to be true.

Last week I noticed a nice clean online ad by Marketo for a whitepaper. I clicked it and saw a landing page that made it easy to get what the ad had offered. I requested the whitepaper. The confirmation page that popped up invited me to engage with Marketo in other ways — right when they had my attention.

Here’s a shot of the confirmation page — good stuff. Bravo!

The next day, this email arrived:

If my image is too hard to read, it says:

“When you recently visited Marketo.com, you requested information from us via email. I think you will be interested in other B2B marketing best practices, so I will send you an email every two weeks for the next few months…”

My emotional response: “You bastards! You will do no such thing!”

My actual email reply: “Shame on you for assuming permission. You know better than that — c’mon guys.”

My blogger brain’s snarky thought process: “Another lovely No-No for my bloopers folder! Thank you marketing companies who make ironic blunders, may I have another?”

What do you think?

What won’t fly in that 2009 marketing plan

Everyone is supposed to be nailing down their plans for 2009 marketing efforts. What should go in yours?

Let’s start with tactics to be wary of: Today executives resist cold-calls. People are using their Flash-challenged Blackberries to look at websites. And does anyone open promotional snail mail anymore? (Here come the angry emails from direct marketers…)

Other questions you may be pondering this season, and my ideas on finding answers:

Question: should we sponsor conferences?

… Should we fork over thousands to sponsor conferences? Should we pay $30,000 for space at that trade show? Or will we get through to people more often and for less money, if we focus on calling prospects directly? Should our CEO start a blog, or is that a fad that’s already fading?

Suggestion

1. Check out this blog’s Archive.

2. MarketingSherpa publishes a B2B Lead Generation Guide ($697 – sold out as of 9/16/08) that has data and guidelines that will help you make a good call on these questions. It’s got step-by-step instructions from beginning to end of lead generation campaigns; 150 case studies, tactics, and how-tos; 60 stats, data charts and eyetracking heatmaps; and 158 creative samples.
Study: B2B ad context matters.”

Question: is PPC a good marketing strategy?

… Should we take the plunge into pay per click ad programs or banner advertising? Can that really fill our lead pipeline and drive growth?

Suggestion

1. Check out this recent blog post, “

2. If you know you’re ready to add this tactic, you can find such answers in MarketingSherpa’s 2008 Online Advertising Handbook + Benchmarks ($397). It has objective data and samples that shows what works and what’s a waste of time.

Question: is email marketing effective?

… Should we switch to RSS because so much email is blocked now by corporate firewalls? Or does it still have the great bang for the buck qualities that it used to?

Suggestion

1. First check your email efforts agains the free checklist I’ve published, “Top 10 Email Marketing Mistakes“

2. Stay tuned for a new resource out next month, the 2009 Email Marketing Benchmark Guide.

 (price not yet available – probably around $400). 

Question: why no leads from our website?

… Should we pay for updates to our website? Why does our website get a lot of traffic, but no one ever responds to us through our site?

Suggestion

1. Try to identify problems and fix them using the free checklist I’ve published, “Better website ROI: a 12-point checklist.”

2. Read the MarketingSherpa Landing Page Handbook ($497) for help rectifying any problems.

Question: scrap our website, or upgrade it?

… Should we start over to rebuild our website, in order to start showing up on Google results when clients look for us online?

Suggestion

1. Read the free article I’ve published on this, Effective Search Engine Optimization for how to tell when you’ve got a site that convinces human visitors and search engines that you’re the real deal.

2. Get ahold of MarketingSherpa’s new Search Marketing Benchmark Guide ($397) if you can (it’s a bestseller). It tells you what will work and what’s a waste of time, based on extensive research and with tons of examples you can copy.

Question: should we do webinars?

… Should we keep working on webinar registrations? Or are CIOs sick and tired of getting invitations to online seminars?

Suggestion

1. Assess how many new valuable contacts you gained last year as a result of doing webinars, and multiply that by the average value of such a contact.

2. Get a leg up with the MarketingSherpa Business Technology Benchmark Guide. It tells you what over 10,000 business technology buyers said and what 934 marketing professionals said, through 216 charts, tables, and eyetracking heatmaps.

I offer alot of free advice on this site… in past blog posts and the B2B Central area. But you may need more. The sort of information you’ll get in Sherpa guides can save you a whole lot of wasted money, effort, and credibility.

Fortune: execs dive deeper into Sunday emails

There is a thought provoking sidebar in the latest print issue of Fortune magazine (Sept 15th 2008 issue, page 22). It’s about executives doing business email on Sundays.

The original article is not yet at Fortune’s site. (Does Time Warne delay e-posting of Fortune magazine content on purpose? If so, what a shame.)

Fortunately some of the upshots are summarized in Christopher Null’s post “Sunday becomes ‘catch up on email’ day.” 

The thing that got me excited about the mini-sidebar is the distinction made in it between quality and quantity…

Fortune reports that, according to ExactTarget, open rates may be much lower on Sundays but that time spent with the issue is much higher.

 

Christopher Null suggests that,

“…for now it’s probably bad etiquette to start hassling your employees or pestering clients on their day off. But for more thoughtful issues like posing brainstorming questions or positing questions for extended mulling, Sunday may just be the best time to engage your colleagues since they aren’t overloaded with the daily pressures of work.”

Stepping back a moment, I have to admit that part of what got me excited is the fact that Fortune picked up this story. The insight itself is exactly the sort of thing MarketingSherpa brings customers in each year’s Email Marketing Benchmark Guide. 

The sixth annual edition of MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing Benchmark Guide will be completed by October 2008.

But for now – since it IS Saturday afternoon – I’m raising a glass to a great little sidebar in Fortune.

If you someday spot the original article at their site, please post a link below.

Top B2B marketing advice: MarketingSherpa cool-aid proves nutritious

I think I bought my first MarketingSherpa handbook in 2004. I bet customer records at Sherpa show exactly when it was. But whatever the date, I recall being floored. I used up a sticky pad entering placeholders, and used up a highlighter marking key points. And when I'd absorbed it's content, I started viewing some of my pre-Sherpa work with chagrin.

Why Marketing Sherpa for b2b marketing advice

Since those earlier days, I’ve frequently referred to — and at least tried to apply — Sherpa advice in the context of every marketing campaign. I’ve used the Landing Page Handbook practically every week since I laid hands on it. I steer each team member to relevant Sherpa guidance during campaigns and projects. And I often ask clients to review specific pages of Sherpa content before I come onsite to guide them through marketing planning. 

In 2007, my team started preparing for a 2008 relaunch of the Business Communications Group website. This wasn’t just a refresh. We were moving to a new domain, www.b2bcommunications.com, new site architecture, new keywords, new design, and new search-optimized content.

Throughout the project team members traded references to sections of the Search Marketing Benchmark Guide and Business Technology Marketing Benchmark Guide, in an effort to avoid any blunders called out in those pages. 

Those were not our only sources of advice on what works – there were many others. Planet Ocean was another big one. But Sherpa was a major resource – a major influence. 

Our site relaunched in Feb 2008. And, while it’s far from perfect (oh let me count the flaws and loose ends…), it’s risen in organic Google rankings (the free ones on the left of the results) to top 5 ranking for our top keywords. Today (8/29/08) we are #1 out of 290,000 sites for ”B2B marketing consulting company”. On 7/18/08, for the phrase “B2B marketing communications” we were sandwiched among some of my heros: Dianna Huff, BtoB magazine, and Mac MacIntosh. We were ranked #5 out of over 3 million. 

But what about really moving the needle? We’ve seen 500% growth in warm unsolicited inbound qualified leads. And those leads are converting more quickly to sales than before the site relaunch. In one case, we got a project request call from a big 5 consulting firm after they googled the phrase “B2B marcom firms,” followed our link, and were engaged by our site. 

If I consider just what we’ve invested in Sherpa benchmark guides, handbooks, and the value of business won since June ‘08 from web-generated leads, I’d say we have 9800 % ROI.

Project MVPs

Special thanks to Cris Rominger for applying to the project her bleeding-edge expertise on today’s best practices in B2B website architecture, usability, optimization, content management, and submission to key engines. Thanks to Chris Roebuck Lee for generating excellent design comps and patiently adapting and tweaking until we arrived at the winner. Thanks to Robert Celaschi for supplying what I view as perhaps the crispest marketing communications copy on the planet. Thanks to Min Davis for supplying a dynamite new business identity system earlier this year, including the logo you see on our site and coordinated suite of materials. There will be more of his work going up on the site soon.

To do: clean grill, write will

I received this email from LegalZoom this afternoon and can't get over it the wry humor of the copywriter.

I'm posting without any sermonizing... just make sure you scroll down to the casual mention in the final bullet.

As my colleague Fiona said just now, "hey, I know how hard it is to align your story to a good trend angle."

But here comes a bolt of lightning now - nice knowing you.