After my last blog post, “Why Did My Email Campaign Fail,” I began considering what can prevent “failures” on the front end and how can that be brought across marketing activities universally?

As we are all aware, email marketing is no longer the single staple in an effective marketing initiative as it was often viewed the past decade. These days, campaigns are developed to reach into every channel and medium available to customers: email, print, PPC, retargeting, social, web, SMS, and everything in-between.

Huge corporations often utilize their marketing budget to do focus groups and consumer surveys to test their tactics and see how the public, or end user, reacts. However for smaller organizations when it comes to content and you’re tight on budget, here are a few keys tips to help you as you’re enrolled in Iteration Intelligence 101.

1. Who is your pilot?

For most organizations, so many resources are dedicated in the development of the latest PPC campaign or Direct Mail initiative that once it’s complete, they’re ready to launch big. This seems like a pretty risky move to just assume that you got it right your first try without getting any feedback from your customers.

I recently heard someone say if you have a $10,000 budget for a marketing campaign, spend $4,000 on the initial project and save the rest for edits, revisions, and a broader rollout. Doing a pilot is basically like doing a test run. You don’t need a billion dollar marketing budget to find your own small “focus” group to test your campaigns and get feedback. See what results you get from your subset and then act accordingly to make it better.

2. Duplicate and Test

This method is a staple of most iteration intelligence. The good old-fashioned A/B testing. Whenever you’re developing a marketing activity, find a few key elements that could be changed to test user engagement. It doesn’t have to be major but elements that would make a difference. Change imagery, subject lines, call to action messaging. Say “Click Here” on one PPC campaign and “Download Now” on another. Make one email subject “Are You Making Your Collaboration Methods Most Successful?” and the other “Collaboration Efficiencies Can Increase Productivity by 15%.” This is an easy way to just let the numbers speak for themselves. See which version gets the most positive results.

3. Never Stop Iterating

Iterating and refining marketing activities shouldn’t stop once you’ve done a pilot rollout and some A/B testing. A great marketer is constantly flexible with the directions needed for the success of their activities. The great thing about marketing content is that the longer it has been published or promoted, the more information and statistics you have about what is working or what isn’t. Always listen to your customers and the numbers you’re seeing. Be willing to make changes 12 months into a campaign. If something isn’t performing as you’d like it to, don’t mark it up as a loss and move on, figure out what ways you can turn it around.

No one expects even the best copywriters, creative directors, and marketing strategists to be able to compile a campaign and roll out it out universally with a 100% success rate. Be prepared to take some measures on the front end to align yourself for a successful launch.

Make adjustments and edits along the way as you begin getting data and feedback to support changes. Remember, being flexible to help achieve the best outcome is key to graduating top of class from Iteration Intelligence 101.

What are your thoughts? Any tips or tricks?

The post Marketing Iteration Intelligence: If At First You Don’t Succeed appeared first on Zift Solutions.

This doesn’t take away from the inevitable morning ritual of grabbing your coffee (or tea – although I still don’t understand the fulfillment) and sitting down to “check your email.”

Now keep in mind your morning process, and then apply it to your customer. They are just as busy and underwater in a constant barrage of emails that for you to make your message heard – you have to standout and adjust expectations.

It’s typical that we hear the question: Why did my email campaign fail? To that, here are a few simple thoughts…

1. Does your content match your audience?

Knowing that your content is good, engaging information with a clear message and call-to-action is important. However, making sure that you’re sending this campaign to the correct contacts is even more important. Do an audit of your database. Are you sending out emails to the entire list? Work on segmenting your lists by levels of engagement, areas of interest, those that are prospects vs those that need to be nurtured.

Pull your last three campaign statistics and take the top 10% engaged. Change your messaging for these individuals, do some a/b testing. You’ve got to know what makes them take action and stay engaged. Most of the time it is different methods and messages for different users. Even if you start on a small scale – understand your audience.

For more on list segmentation, check out our previous blog One Size Does NOT Fit All: The Vital Importance of Email List Segmentation.

2. Your customers are receiving a lot of emails

This is a simple fact. Mashable released an article with some interesting email stats. The most shocking, “144.8 billion emails are sent worldwide every day.” Now take into account these stats were released a few years ago meaning the numbers have only increased since then. The average worker spends about 28% of their week reading/responding to emails. This means that there is a high chance that your email got lost in translation. Whether it was time of day, workload, any other outside reasoning, it just may be that your customer overlooked your email this time. Don’t take it personally.

3. Your customers are receiving a lot of emails…part 2.

Please, please, please…keep your emails short and sweet. This is one of those “marketing best practices” that cannot get said enough and people still don’t listen. If your email should come with a kindle version, it’s too long. If your email should have a table of contents, it’s too long. I’m joking but in all reality – you have seconds to keep your customers attention. There is no need for a huge fluffy introduction. Give them the information – short and sweet. If it’s on your iPhone, it shouldn’t be more than a scroll or two in length.

As brilliantly stated in this Forbes article, “If Lincoln was able to eloquently tell a divided nation about the importance of humanity and equality in 271 words (The Gettysburg Address), I think we should be able to send work-related emails that are even shorter.”

4. What was your measure of success?

So often it is easy to review opens/click rates/form submissions and decide whether or not a campaign failed based on the numbers. In all actuality, there are so many other ways to view the information. Your customer is seeing your name, gaining awareness about your organization; they are being nurtured.

Just because you didn’t get 30% of your contact list to open the email – maybe the 5% that did are your actual target audience. Nurture those individuals throughout the buying process. Tweak your messaging, and resend to the others. Try to view campaigns as a larger picture and not just by the percentages. Maybe, just maybe, your campaign didn’t “fail” after all.

The post Why Did My Email Campaign Fail? appeared first on Zift Solutions.

Working in project management, I’ve had the opportunity to see dozens of campaigns created from clients in the technology industry, to security, software, telecommunications and Fortune 500. I’ve worked on a single send email, to an entire annual marketing initiative, and yet the struggle that often remains is the ability for companies to lose the “self” marketing mindset.

With through partner marketing, although the promotional aspects are of course related to the “Supplier’s” corporate products or services, the larger picture is to focus the messaging, offers and branding around the partner. At the end of the day, the success of the partner, means the success of the supplier.

To keep the focus “partner-centric” there are a few things to keep in mind when developing the next set of marketing initiatives.

This Email is Not about You

Time and time again, when campaign planning moves into the production phase, there is the first instance where the content is read and reviewed. The most important thing to remember is that this email is going to a contact list within the partner’s database. An email saying “Supplier company is the leading provider of XYZ product in the industry” or “Read the latest from supplier company” is not relevant to the partner. The end user, with potentially no relationship to the supplier, can be confused. Remember, they opted-in for communications from the partner, not from the corporate entity.

Share the Website Traffic

One of the easiest things to fix in the through partner marketing world, is the website that users are directed to. Remember, the goal of the initiative is to drive traffic for the partner. Have the URLs always link back to content on the partner’s website. Let the contact information, address, phone numbers, signatures, everything be about the partner. There is no reason that an email Call-To-Action (CTA) should ever click to a corporate page. Remember, the whole reason to engage in channel marketing is to provide promotional opportunities for the partner.

The Partner’s Greatest Asset

When possible, allow the partners to take claim to the offers available in the campaigns. If there is an email with a whitepaper, allow the opportunity for the partner to add their logo and contact information to it. Co-branding print media is an easy way to boost partner credibility, while maintaining “supplier” promotion. Direct mail pieces, data sheets, infographics, brochures, and eBooks all have potential to become partner facing. Think about it, doesn’t it seem a little random to receive an email from a partner with an eBook written by a company that isn’t even sending the email? If you have a video or SlideShare on your website that is valuable content, don’t link to it, instead allow the core files to be embedded within the syndicated landing page. Never drive traffic away from the partner.

Think Like a Partner

Perhaps the largest area of disconnect in the channel marketing environment is one that would assume to be elementary: provide content that is relevant to the partner. Although there may be an industry buzz around one topic, put yourself in your partner’s shoes and make sure it is something they would be interested in. Often times thousands of dollars are spent developing a marketing campaign that unfortunately flops. The lack of partner adoption can usually be summed up easily, “I don’t feel like that is content my customer’s would be interested in.”

Don’t Ask Your Team, Ask Their Team

Lastly, so often in launch calls and strategy planning meetings, organizations ask their team about what marketing campaigns they think they should create for the partners. It is at this moment that a clear answer seems to hang in space, “Ask the partner!” As discussed in a previous post you cannot have high levels of adoption without relationships with your partners. This is another great opportunity to reach out to them and let them know that syndicated content and materials are being developed and then ask them, “If you were to launch a new marketing initiative to your customers tomorrow, what would you want it to entail?” and then sit and listen.

Remember, there is no point in engaging in channel marketing if you aren’t going to set up your partner’s for success. Provide them the tools they need to launch to their customers and if you’re not sure exactly what that includes, ask them.

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With this change, organizations have begun to be separated based on the two lines we often hear when inquiring about campaign components:

1. “We’ll have to look at getting something created. I can’t think of anything right now.”
2. “Oh, well we have plenty of content. What do you need?”

Group A falls into the easily preached solution, “Content is King” which is a topic that has been discussed for years. However, it is the new group that I want to focus on in this post – Group B – those that boast an infinite resource library. This is always a welcome relief… kind of. There is a big difference between having content, and having content someone cares about – or even more so, content that someone would be willing to give their email address for to gain access.

If in one instance, someone can search the topic of your content and find 50 whitepapers on the first five pages of Google, how do you make sure that your organization’s resources aren’t lost in the influx?

Below are three key tips that will help make your content stand out in the marketing noise:

1) What

The fact of the matter is people click on something that catches their eye. A blog or whitepaper could be packed full of top notch industry knowledge, however no one is going to take the time to read it if the headline doesn’t grab their attention originally. A great trend that has been happening is the numeric title. This is something internally we use as a best practice when creating content:

1. “3 Steps to Successful Channel Partner Marketing”
2. “4 Simple Steps to Drive Channel Sales with Rules-Based Lead Distribution”
3. “7 Secrets of Lead Nurturing Success”

With users consistently flooded with data, this is a simple method to keep their attention while allowing them to scroll through content and grab the applicable knowledge. If you’re not going to go the numeric approach, think of something that will grab their attention. A good way to judge this is to drop your headline/title into google and see how many similar results appear. If the first 10 results are all for a “Database Storage Solutions for Your Business” whitepaper, consider brainstorming something more unique.

2) Where

Knowing where your content will be used is the “Target Audience” of the 21st century. We aren’t looking for SMB CFOs between the ages of 35-55 – this is more elementary than that. This is about recognizing where the prospect is within the buying cycle. Content that is used in social media, blogs, PPC campaigns, or email campaigns often requires very different messaging. You wouldn’t necessarily promote an industry analyst report in an introductory email, however by the third touch in a nurture campaign it is a valuable asset to those engaged. On the flipside, you wouldn’t promote your CEO’s latest blog post with a PPC campaign; however it is the perfect content for LinkedIn.

3) When

A great way to make your content automatically relevant is to be one of the first to speak up on a topic. Browse industry trends and blogs. Do a Google search and set the custom timeline to the last few weeks. What is the buzz in LinkedIn groups? See if you can establish a problem discussed in the industry and give your views on the issue. Being one of the first to pipe in with your “thought leader” view – is an easy way to get readers engaged. Additionally, you’re creating a credibility level that will later reflect with prospects trusting your product and services.

Regardless of whether your organization falls into Group A of needed content creation or Group B of content influx, it is important to remember that the market is heavily competitive in today’s digital marketing world. Although content may be king, quality is the new ace that will help your company win this round against your competitors.

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