The Tendo View » relevance

What B2B email marketers can learn from babies

Linda Leung — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 00:44:10 +0000

My colleague has written about four email marketing turn-offs. I’m going to flip that around and tell you why I always—without fail—click on every newsletter that lands in my inbox from Babycenter.com.

Babycenter knows who I am. I have two very small children; one is 2 ½ years old and the other is 4 months old. I originally signed up to receive Babycenter.com newsletters when I was pregnant with my first child. I vaguely remember the personal preferences that I specified when I signed up. I do remember specifying my due date. From that, my monthly Babycenter.com newsletter is full of articles relevant to my particular stage of parenthood.

For instance, my newsletter as a mom of a 2 ½-year-old is about successful discipline, while my newsletter as a mom of a 4-month-old is about knowing when to start feeding solids. I can be sure that future newsletter will relevant as my children progress through preschool, teething, and beyond—and I don’t ever have to update my profile.

There are many lessons from Babycenter.com that can be applied to B2B email marketing.

There are parallels between parenting and buying and maintaining new technology (yes, a bit of a stretch, but bear with me). When I was pregnant, all my time was spent researching—looking into birthing options, the safest car seats, and best practices for nursing. When I visited Babycenter.com, I was enticed to sign up for a montly newsletter that would have information describing my stage of pregnancy.

Likewise, visitors are likely on your website because they’re in the research stage of the buy cycle. You probably have a prominent sign-up widget on your site to sign up for your newsletter. What about tailoring the newsletter content to your subscriber’s stage in the buy cycle? For instance, offer subscribers a choice of newsletters that helps them in the research, decision, or product maintenance stages. The content of each newsletter could look like this:

Research: Articles that educate readers on the product category that they’re researching. For example, if they’re researching cloud computing technologies, your articles should (as much as possible) provide objective guidance on the latest trends, issues, and challenges of cloud computing.
Decision: At this stage, your readers may have already made a decision to purchase your technology/equipment. Articles in this newsletter could address financing options, implementation best practices, and so on.
Maintenance: Now the subscribers are your customers. Articles could address maintenance issues, upcoming versions, and tips on improving product performance.

Of course, you’ll need to know when your subscribers move from one part of the buy cycle to another. That’s where audience development comes in—that’s a topic for another day.

How do you tailor your newsletter content to your subscribers?

Relevance is still the key to relationships

Karla Spormann — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 00:43:41 +0000

Out with the old? Not so fast. This blog entry from February 2006 is a shining example of the adage that the more things change, the more they really do stay the same. Karla Spormann’s five key points about staying relevant ring as true today as they did back then, though the movie reference is certainly past its shelf life.

So what has changed? Well, 2006 was a pre-iPhone world, and the notion of Web content optimized for mobile platforms was still in its infancy. Facebook had not yet overtaken MySpace as the dominant social media community. Twitter was just launching. But relevance was then, and continues to remain, the key to relationships.

There’s a telling scene in Minority Report in which Tom Cruise’s character, John Anderton, walks through a mall filled with interactive advertisements that call his name, pitching him products and services based on his “profile.” The problem is, they’re profiling him based on retinal scans, and John Anderton has someone else’s eyes.

This scene seems especially appropriate today, as marketers are finally developing strategies for direct, ongoing customer engagement in an effort to build deeper customer relationships. Now their challenge is how to deliver a relevant experience.

Why is relevance essential? Consider the environment that the average consumer or business decision maker faces today:

The landscape of communication channels has never been more prolific or fractured.
Consumers and business decision makers have never been more inundated with information.

Though newspaper and magazine circulation rates have declined over the past few years, the dramatic increase of Web content, e-mail, blogs, podcasts, and social networks has attracted audiences with narrow, highly individualized interests and strong preferences for how they wish to consume entertainment and information. Yet the common denominator, regardless of media choice or special interest, is relevance: People choose to invest their time in the content and methods of receiving it that match their lifestyle and align with their personal and professional interests.

The relevance factor poses both a key challenge and a major opportunity for marketers. Driven by the fragmentation of traditional media choices and the self-selecting power of the Web and other new media, marketers are constantly challenged to capture mindshare from their increasingly elusive customers and prospects. Whatever the specific catalyst, the notion of cultivating a direct connection with the customer has finally come home to roost with marketers of all stripes. So how can marketers capitalize on relevance?

The basic rules for maintaining relevance are simple—yet marketers seem to struggle with executing them successfully. Let’s review a few of them:

Know your customer. Many marketers make assumptions without doing their homework. Take the time to learn the psychographic and demographic profiles of your target audience. Understand their media preferences, track their points of interaction with your company, and learn how they use your website and other communications. Find out how and when they spend their money and what drives their purchase behavior.
Be consistent. Consistency pays off. Consistent messaging, frequency, voice, and tone help you build credibility, brand recognition, loyalty, and ultimately, long-lasting relationships. Just ask Apple.
Deliver unique value. How much spam did you get in your inbox this morning? It’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, but deliver something your customer finds useful or unique—perspective, vision, information, opinion—and make it consistent with your brand position, and they’ll spin your wheat into gold.
Build communities. In 2002, The Tipping Point highlighted the power “connectors” that can influence behavioral changes. Four years later, marketers are waking up to the fact that creating communities—connecting like-minded individuals—can help them push their agendas.
Match your message to your media. Relevance is all about reaching the right person with the right message at the right time. Savvy marketers know that choosing the right method to deliver their message is the key to success.

Following these simple principles will help you achieve relevance in your communications, and that’s the best way to forge a lasting and profitable relationship with your customer.

Going under the hood with viral marketing

David Vespremi — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 22:17:59 +0000

A bit like the Supreme Court’s definition of pornography, viral marketing is something you know when you see it, although it’s hard to define outright. All viral marketing campaigns share one element in common–an unstated agenda.

When used effectively, virals can and do perform in ways that traditional PR and advertising simply can’t. But how do you separate an excellent viral campaign from a dud? With five key criteria in mind, let’s rate one of the more recent viral splashes: Jared Holstein’s “fake Shooting Brake” Porsche promotion for TopGear.com America:

Eyeballs

The more people see and share a viral, the higher the mission-critical eyeball count. After a false start or three, The Shooting Brake viral sputtered to life and managed to pick up enough of an audience to achieve liftoff. We’ll give it a C+ for taking the time to analyze initial seeding attempts and be willing to try again in less-than-obvious places.

Engagement

If YouTube videos “A” and “B” each have 100,000 views, but “A” has 1,000 comments whereas “B” has 10, viral “A” will have proven to carry a higher level of engagement. Here, ‘brake did really well. The ratio of user involvement in the dialog was extraordinary as viewers of both the video and still images felt compelled to toss their $0.02 in on the debate and repost for others to weigh in. A+

Longevity

Short lived but highly engaging virals that capture a lot of attention often have superior recall rates to those that stay at a slow simmer and net a greater number of views over time. The chatter surrounding the Shooting Brake viral began to diminish around the one-month mark, around the time the instigators revealed all. We’ll give this a B for performing above what one might have expected through the clever use of three separate permutations of the ‘brake.

Brand Relevance

Every viral walks the line between being so tenuously connected to its parent brand as to have no meaningful impact and being so closely connected as to not have any hopes of ever succeeding as a viral. Mr. Holstein and crew get a solid A here. TopGear is, and always has been, cheeky, irreverent, subversive, and often sarcastic. In this case, TopGear wanted web traffic to support TopGear.com and new awareness of its original content. Job done.

Reach

A viral that transcends and rises above topical environments, and is just as big of a hit among Scrabble enthusiasts as it is among Labrador aficionados, is more relevant than one that fails to break out of its defined silo. The ‘brake transitioned from automotive to gamers, back to automotive, into mainstream press, and now, by virtue of this write-up, into the industry press for marketers. That’s another A+ for bridging the gap and capturing our collective imaginations.

The sixth, unspoken variable is one that will warm every marketer’s heart–-solid ROI. Here, Holstein leveraged the sizable coffers of Microsoft Game Studios in its promotion of Forza 3 to achieve great effect with his own viral promotion. There is nothing like riding the slipstream of someone else’s online spending spree to capture value far beyond one’s own investment in a project. A+ to team TopGear on this note as well.

Narrowcasting: Give Customers What They Want

Selena Welz — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 19:04:50 +0000

When I was a child, I shared a bedroom with my brother, who’s about two years older than I am. It worked fine when we were little, but eventually our interests diverged. I wanted yellow curtains; he wanted forest green ones. I wanted to read and go to sleep early; he wanted to stay up late watching TV. It became clear that we needed our own space. Sharing one room just wasn’t working anymore. In the same vein, perhaps it’s time to give your audience segments their own rooms, too.

Today’s Web users have more freedom than ever to choose what content they’ll consume, and the one-room, broadcast approach will not serve everyone’s needs. If your website isn’t delivering an experience that is relevant and customized to your audiences’ needs, they’ll quickly move on.

Most companies have more than one audience segment that they’re trying to reach and they spend lots of time and money identifying and researching these various segments. But that’s just the first step. Here are some tips to keep in mind when differentiating your messaging for your audience segments:

Limit your scope

Let’s start with a basic reality check: You just won’t be able to talk to your entire audience all at once. Even if you’ve identified all your business’s audience segments and sub-segments and their differences, trying to reach all of these segments isn’t practical or cost effective. Pare your selections down to a few main audiences and commit to these as your priorities.

Be specific

Delivering relevance is all about specificity, and that extends in both directions. You need to know your own audience segments and be able to describe them in detail, but you also need to be specific with your messaging. Explain exactly what you have to offer. Avoid using vague marketing jargon like “value-add” or “powerful.” Instead, explain exactly what value is being added or why something is powerful.

Use familiar language

By the time you get around to differentiating your content for each segment, you should know your audiences well enough to have a grasp of which words are most meaningful to them. Your audiences will respond more positively to language that is familiar. In addition, you need to use appropriate keywords to ensure your audience can find you. The majority of Web users today land on sites tangentially, through search. Make sure your keywords and meta tags are just as relevant as your overall messaging.

Keep track of voice and tone

Voice and tone are vital to communicating a company’s brand identity. Used consistently, voice and tone bring a brand to life, and can serve to differentiate your product, as well as your audience segments. Voice and tone work in concert, but can be identified separately:

Voice communicates your company and site personality; it’s who visitors “hear” when they read site copy.
Tone communicates a company’s attitude toward the audience and subject matter.

Your brand voice should be consistent across your entire website, but tone can help to match your content segments to your audience segments. For example, a relaxed tone may be appropriate for your 25-35 urban professional audience, while a more formal tone may resonate with 65+ retirees.

Audience-specific “sitelets”—If you have only a handful of easily distinguishable audience segments, dedicate sections of your website to each one. Make sure that each section is self-contained and includes everything that the audience may need, without having to wander outside of that section. Differentiate each section with color palates, keywords, or tone.
Email newsletter templates—Email newsletters are a great way to deliver relevant content directly to users. Are you delivering the same content to your entire mailing list? Or are there ways to segment your list? Does it make sense to create a different newsletter for each audience segment? This may only require a small tweak, like a different introduction.
Premium content—Designating a subscription-only portion of your site can help your more committed, long-term customers differentiate themselves, while also feeling like they’re getting something extra for their commitment to your brand.
Tiered content—Offer subscription services or products at many levels. Packaging products or services into progressively larger bundles offers a lower commitment level that may encourage first-time visitors or customers, while allowing repeat visitors and customers to gradually increase their commitment level. Organizing your offerings in this way also segments customers by interest level or budget.

Create content channels

Using smaller communication platforms that are customized to each audience segment is the best way to keep your messages relevant and meaningful. Identifying the best platform will depend on your particular audience needs. Here are a few options for creating content channels:

Don’t let careful research like focus groups and reader surveys go to waste by failing to connect with your audience. Follow the guidelines above and keep your content narrow, specific, and customized to each of your audience segments.