E-mail is enjoying a resurgence in these difficult times. Many bloggers are adding email to their mix of content distribution, and many companies are rediscovering the importance of an ongoing email strategy to enhance their brand, re-connect with customers, and drive leads or sales.

Whether you are using email to prospect for new leads or customers, or as a vehicle to communicate with (and gain incremental revenue from) your current customer base, it would be wise to be sure they are as productive as possible.

Here are a few tricks of the trade:

• Prospecting •

- Be sure you are using outside email lists that are reputable — opted-in, double opted-in. If the price for a list seems too good to be true, it is…. Don’t use it.

- Clearly identify your target — the sweet spot may not be achievable in the data world but start the search there, and then tweak “selects” based on availability.

- Explore pricing models — can you find CPC or CPL deals? More and more email list providers are willing to move to a CPL basis.

• Creative •

- Use a strong subject line — short and addressing a “pain point” will get the best open rates.

- Put a personal note above your banner or header to get recipients reading immediately — either in their mail-reader preview pane or when they open the e-mail.

- Personalize the message (IF your email database is reliable enough and you’re sure that most records have a first or first-and-last name)

- Include a sidebar. Highlight your call to action there with a photo, headline, caption, and action button.

- Pace your copy. Opening paragraph should be the most engaging, but short, 2 or 3 lines at most. The rest of the paragraphs should be no more than three sentences each. Intersperse longer paragraphs with short, snappy one-sentence paragraphs for emphasis. Use bold type and underlining (for links) to guide the eye to your most important points. Use bullets to break up the copy and move the reader along. Every third paragraph should have an action link to your desired call to action. Most click-thrus happen at the very end of the copy, Be sure you end with a link AND include a “P.S.” — that old standard from Direct Marketing 101.

• Landing Page •

- Whole books are written about landing pages, but at the very least include a very strong call to action — hopefully only one.

- Keep it clean and crisp. The creative design should have the same look and feel (and company logo etc) as the email so the reader doesn’t think they have gone to a different website or offer.

• Video? •

- If it’s in the body of the email itself, it may have delivery problems, or be blocked as potential spam attachment. If the video is on the landing page, it will probably get good viewership — but will it distract from the main call to action? Put some brief text and a call-to-action link above the video, or maybe the video can include a constantly visible and even clickable Web-address URL.

• Got Strategy? •

- If you are using email to contact your customer base, it’s best to have a schedule and stick to it.

- Decide on an email frequency — once a week, or once a month may be fine for some companies, too frequent or not enough for others. If you have a large enough mail-list file to test and measure response rates for different frequencies, do so. The last thing you want to do is irritate your own customer. They should perceive your emails as value-added, not intrusive.

- Segment your own email database if it makes sense. For leads, use different offers depending upon how far down the sales funnel the prospect is. For current clients, segment by product category, for example.

- Think BIG. A large-scale email campaign may not always be as efficient per dollar as a timid campaign, but well-crafted email can quickly build up your in-house customer list for further testing or offers. It’s an investment.

- Tracking is critical. Be sure you can measure open rates, click-thru rates, and conversions at least for each blast. And maintain historical reports over time to see both successes and weaknesses in your campaigns.

Need help? Want the best list broker? Thought you’d never ask. Call us.

I keep searching for new/more/different methods of measuring activity in Web social media. I just starting using Bit.ly to shorten all of the links that I include in posts that don’t feed back to Elymedia so I can track results.

Twitter itself now uses bit.ly and it has taken a lead in the url shortening market over Tinyrul and others.  It’s still a bit wonky — some stats are inaccurate, but their blog clearly states that they are hammering out bugs.

The analytics are the fun part — if you put a simple “+” on the end of any bit.ly link, you will see, in real time, the pace at which that link is getting shared and clicked on as it moves around social-media networks.

Bit.ly has growth plans and will provide more features rapidly.  Techcrunch did a great post on the future plans for the company and details the sophistication and intelligence it will bring to the user regarding overall use of links, their popularity, and distribution.

For now, I’m just happy to watch how much traction my links are getting and knowing that people are enjoying my content.  Good stuff.

It’s tempting when shopping for cost-per-lead placements to seek out the lowest-cost leads –- and hope that your sales force (or your website or follow-up materials) have enough salesmanship to convert them. But initial expense is not the only consideration — you will need to take a good look at the quality of each lead. This includes both the conversion rate and the average revenue per sale. For example, it may be that leads generated from one type of media (such as paid search), turn into actual business at a substantially higher rate than other types. Given this fact, you will be willing to pay more per lead for the better ROI….

Examples:

– Campaign “A” cost = $1,500. Revenue = $3,000. The ROI ratio is 2:1.

– Campaign “B” cost = $2,500. Revenue = $7,525. The ROI ratio is 3:1.

The campaign needs to be followed through the complete selling to establish the best leads. How many leads are converting to a sale, and then what is that average sale? The latter two variables are as important a factor as the original cost of the lead.

In a B2B Lead Gen placement, lead expense occurs in 2 areas – the amount of targeting or filtering required, and the amount of data being captured.

The least expensive leads will typically be the least targeted. No filters (or few) will be applied –- this is truly putting an offer out to anyone. And anyone is exactly who will respond. Typically the only data required is a first and last name, and email address. The more targeting a publisher or ad network can provide, the more potentially targeted and hopefully responsive the lead will be.

The data fields being captured will also influence the cost. Standard “business card” fields are frequently used. But it may be important to further refine the leads. Most sales people, if complaining about lead quality, would rather have fewer, but better-qualified, leads. Keep in mind, the more data fields required, the higher the “drop off” rate. People don’t want to take the time to fill out forms, so be careful to balance the amount of data that is truly necessary versus what would be nice to have.

To further qualify the lead, add 2 or 3 questions to the lead-registration page. Frequently, this option is available if the upfront targeting is a bit more specific. Think about what additional information will assist your selling process. Examples would be: when will the purchasing decision be made?; what is the respondent’s decision-making role?

Some tips:

• Know who your target audience is for a given product or offer.
• Ask publishers for filters to reach that target, or as close as they can come.
• Ask how they are ascertaining the data –- is it credible?
• If the lead is based on contextual or behavioral data, be sure to understand completely the publishers’ methodology.
• Publishers/providers should be scrubbing leads for accuracy and hygiene — making sure all data fields are what they are supposed to be.
• Leads should be unique leads — publishers should be eliminating duplicates.
• The IAB has established best practices. Lots of good information here.
• Last thought…. Act on leads quckly. They don’t get better with age.

I know this won’t sound very politically correct, given how Web 2.0-ish we are at Elymedia, but we are seeing that companies are pulling in their marketing horns, getting cautious all around, and looking for safe and reliable methods. Cost-per-lead and cost-per-click programs have become The Little Black Dress of marketing. Good in all kinds of circumstances — product launches, keeping the sales force cranking, keeping the pipeline predictably full, even in trying times.

I don’t think we as a media agency have ever been asked to look farther afield, negotiate harder, or suggest the unthinkable (what? CPA vs. CPM?) to publishing reps. But such is the economy we are in.

So, a few things along the lines of the Little Black Dress/classics to consider with your media mix in the current economy

1. Do you know what you can afford to pay per lead, or per click? The corollary to that is: do you know what your lifetime value, or return on media dollars, or contribution to profit is? Any of those metrics will help you assess what you can truly afford.

2. Be very clear on your objectives for each campaign. Looking for leads? Branding and recognition? Reach? Sales of a particular product? Testing one offer against another? These are all valid, but decide first and publicly. If you can’t define the objective (and by the way, be sure everyone is in agreement — sales team, marketing folks, agencies et al) then how can you figure out if you have been successful or not?

3. After you have decided on the objective, be sure you can measure it. And then do so, and report results to all who need to know. We are frequently stunned by the amount of money and effort spent to construct a campaign, only to see the back-end analytics get garbled or ignored in the race to the next quarter or campaign. Figure all that out before giving the green light.

4. Save some budget for testing. Even a little. If you don’t, you won’t be ready to grow when the economy eases up a bit. And it will. Really.

“It’s the data, stupid”, might well be the mantra of the direct response industry.  Or a corollary “database segmentation and analysis is the key to ROI”.  Much of the analytical methodology and discipline is now popping up with a variety of BT products and solutions.

I spent quite a bit of time talking to a variety of Ad Networks, publishers and other suppliers around what’s new in BT during Ad-Tech in San Francisco in April.  I may sound like a broken record, but I continue to be astounded at how much the methodology behind many of the new targeting solutions are firmly based in direct marketing, data-driven practices now moving in to the online space. Utilizing techniques of working with anticipated click streams to predict future behavior, as opposed to merely measuring past behavior, the level of sophistication is rising.  Good news for the advertiser! 

I met with Don Mathis, president of Epic Advertising (previously known as Azoogle, plus an acquisition or two) to discuss how they have using BT and some upcoming changes.  Epic Advertising now encompasses two main units focused on online consumer traffic acquisition: AzoogleAds and Bazaar Advertising. AzoogleAds continues to provide broad-based traffic acquisition services leveraging the company’s leading performance-based ad network business. Bazaar Advertising continues to provide search engine management and marketing services, specializing in keyword discovery, purchase and optimization of online search campaigns.

While the company had previously offered a robust, classic BT solution to it’s advertisers, just this week, they are announcing the official launch of Performance CPM (pCPM), a patent-pending metric that allows advertisers to track performance-marketing campaigns by measuring “induced visits.” Advertisers can now determine campaign effectiveness utilizing a new, more comprehensive approach and gives a new definition to the concept of “behavioral”. 

 The premise of pCPM is rooted in induced visits, or visits to an advertiser’s site tracked beyond direct clicks.  A visit to an advertiser’s site is “induced” if it results in any way from an ad, even if there is no immediate response or direct click path from ad to site.  This metric goes beyond traditional campaign measurement tactics by employing scientific techniques to discern the broadest types of cause and effect, excluding things like “accidental clicks.” I was intrigued with Bill’s further explanation of “induced visit”:An “induced visit” from an ad is any visit that can be statistically linked to viewing the ad.  Because it is statistical, you can’t just have one induced visit; you have to look at lots of ad-views, and lots of site visits, and then do some careful correlations to discover how many more site visits you got with the ads – than you would have had without them. The math behind the metric is just subtle enough that others aren’t doing it, but it’s actually fairly simple, and has been used in signal processing and neurobiology for decades.  Along with measuring induced visits, the metric encompasses elements from traditional tracking methods – CPC, CPM and CPA – as well as inherent branding impacts to offer a more holistic view of an online advertising campaign’s success.  Because pCPM involves only statistics, it avoids any retention of Personally Identifiable Information (PII).    The ability of the advertiser to use these new metrics to increase performance of their BT campaigns will only increase their effectiveness in optimization. Don stated, “This method lets our advertisers do two new things:  they can see the impact of an ad beyond direct clicks, and they can put a solid measure of user-impact on their traditional brand-oriented CPM campaigns. We believe our method, marrying marketing and technology, is the next step in online marketing campaign tracking and will serve as a model for the industry. ” It all started to sound like smoke and mirrors until I spent additional time talking to Bill Softky, their “Chief Algorithm Officer”.  His academic background is in brain science and pattern recognition, and his mathematical work on neural irregularity and correlations is intimately related to the statistics of online advertising traffic. 

 Another company that offers a very sophisticated behind the scenes approach to BT (they refer to it as “dynamic” marketing) is Collarity which is actually a behavioral platform that optimizes content and ad targeting and is utilized by major publishers on the back end.   I spent some time talking to Deborah Richman, SVP Marketing and Business Development:

“We’re undergoing a revolution in behavioral targeting because it won’t take so much work to target anymore.  Publishers and advertisers spend a lot of time categorizing and defining content.  With behavioral platforms like Collarity, all people visiting a site can dynamically and effortlessly define what’s interesting instead.  This drives far better targeting from the existing ad inventories.  In fact, this will be necessary if ad targeting is to work and effectively monetize social and multimedia content today.” 

Current behavioral ad targeting is based on pre-set categories or segments, whether demographics, interests or site subject matter.  Targeting occurs when sites/destinations identify content based on what is mapped to these attributes.  Targeting also occurs when people are directly identified or tagged based on where they have visited.  One of the down sides is that some portion of visitors are targeted while others are not  

Current contextual ad targeting can vary based on the content on each page, as well as categories set by publishers.  Visitors will see the different ads on different content pages.  The ads are shown based on words on the pages.  Multimedia content and ads are depending on keywords tagged to them  

Several problems that Collarity’s behavioral platform addresses are that it applies to every visitor anonymously, without tagging them.  It dynamically targets ads, based on evolving content and interests.  Each visitor sees different ads as they click around and are “joined to” communities of interest. Much higher consumption and satisfaction for visitors, with ads that seem more relevant.

While this is once again in danger of falling into the smoke and mirrors genre, it really does not, once you look behind the scenes.  Publishers using Collarity harness 100% of all visitor click streams, anonymously.  These include content and ad consumption of all types – which is a significant statement given the explosion of social networks and CGM based sites now.  Community segments form based on intensity (rather than popularity) of interests.  Based on these dynamic segments, both content and ads are show to visitors 

A bit more detail: They optimize text, banner and video ads, relying on ad inventories and feeds used by a publisher.  They can deliver the most relevant ads, which typically doubles consumption of ads.  Ad buyers can see these dynamic profiles from publishersGenerally, they experience far better results from dynamic targeting and the Publishers end up selling more impressions and later higher CPMs;   

The common theme between the two companies is the ability to tap into the nuances of intuited or induced behavior to predict future performance. As we as an industry become more expert and rigorous in our technological capabilities, we all will benefit with far more relevant ads, less ad budget waste and happier end users.  What’s not to like?

The biggest issue that I’m hearing about regarding Web 2.0 is the lack of metrics. How do you measure, what do you measure, and what tools assist you in defining success? MarketingProfs just conducted a great online virtual trade show called B2B 2.0 Expo. It was very well done — lots of content, the right vendors present, and it seemed to be well attended, judging from the sessions I listened in on.

It’s hard enough just making a case to upper management for budget for blogs, podcasts, wikis etc. They all take time, resources and research. But justifying that time and those resources on an ROI basis is the real challenge. Some of the sources that were referenced for Web 2.0 metrics were Technorati (no surprise), Radian6.com (which is new to me), and a book by K.D. Paine: Measuring Public Relations.  In fact, K.D. has a very cool blog, with much more detail on the ins and outs of measuring Social Media.  I’ll be spending more time reading there, in my frantic attempt to keep up with this subject.