Peter Lorimer: “Stay Here” Netflix Show is Helping People Get More ROI From Airbnb

Peter Lorimer, co-host with Genevieve Gorder of the Netflix show “Stay Here” which helps people successfully rent their homes on Airbnb. “To succeed in the world of short-term rental you have to offer more than just a comfortable place to sleep,” said Lorimar in a promo for the show.

“Stay Here” co-host Peter Lorimer recently discussed the show in an interview on Fox Business (full interview below):

Helping People Get More ROI From Airbnb

We call it the ‘junk drawer’ kind of philosophy. I think it is changing, the business is evolving now, but it used to be Granny’s old apartment or the garden shed, you just throw a little bed in it and it was full of rotten old furniture and horrid flowery sheets. Too much stuff… and too much old stuff. But now people are looking at it as a business and our show is one of the first out there helping people get more ROI.

People Making Massive Income on Airbnb with Minor Modifications

There are a fraction of people right now that are making a massive income with just minor modifications. The worst thing people can do is leave their Airbnb rental in kind of a soulless vacuum to fend for themselves. If I’m flying into Frankfort, Germany and I want to stay in an Airbnb I want to experience Frankfort through the eyes of a local. I don’t want to roll up with my three screaming kids wondering what the wifi is, no snacks, and the place being a little bit dirty.

Dirty is the Worst

Dirty is the worst. What I try to do with my clients in Los Angeles, and I’ve been doing Airbnb before it was even cool, I say remove your head and pretend this is not your home. Pretend you are walking in for the first time and what you don’t like and then I have to point it out. Too much clutter is number one. Bad taste is number two. There is a little bit of bad taste in L.A. and all over the country. Then number three is to anticipate what the guests want before they want it.

Why Are People Renting on Airbnb?

Some people are getting extra houses and some people are flipping into extra properties. I have a client and a friend who is the marketing director of a big Fortune 500 company and he said, “Pete, I’m taking off to Bangkok, I’m going  to stay there for nine months, can you rent out my place, I’m just going to be on the beach banging away on my laptop and I want to make a profit to cover my travel, all of my expenses, and have my mortgage paid.” And he’s doing it.

Millenials Embracing the Shared Economy

I wanted to forge my own flavor of real estate which was very kind of rock and roll and that seemed to work really well with the newer generation, the Millenials and younger who embraced the shared economy.

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Facebook Showing Huge Monetization Potential for Non-News Feed Apps

According to Rich Greenfield, media and technology analyst at BTIG, Facebooks is starting to show huge monetization potential for apps that are not the news feed. “The reality is that as you look out more broadly over the next few years Facebook has got a lot of different initiatives that are at the very early stages of monetization,” Greenfield said. “They are just scratching the surface of Messenger, WhatsApp, Facebook Watch, and IGTV, which is the Instagram video platform.”

Rich Greenfield, media and technology analyst at BTIG recently talked on Bloomberg about newer monetization opportunities on Facebook that may eventually even surpass the core news feed app:

Facebook is Dominating Mobile Time Spent

I think it’s less about this war between Apple and Facebook or YouTube versus Facebook, the reality is Facebook is one of the dominant companies in terms of mobile time spent. Despite all this fear that people are abandoning Facebook or not using its application, the reality is that there is a billion and a half people using Facebook every single day. Not all the other applications, but Facebook itself.

800 Million People Using Facebook Marketplace

There are 800 million people using Facebook Marketplace. I have never used the Marketplace tab and I don’t know anyone who has used the Marketplace tab, but they’re saying there are 800 million people using that Marketplace tab to transact. They actually highlighted cars as becoming a place of real transfer where people buying and selling cars.

There are just so many things that Facebook is doing that are not always obvious to someone in the US. There are places in the world like Indonesia where Facebook Marketplace is the default way that goods are bought and sold. There are really some big differences globally such as the use of Messenger versus iMessage overseas and not all of that is apparent to a US investor.

Huge Monetization Potential for Non-News Feed Apps

The reality is that as you look out more broadly over the next few years Facebook has got a lot of different initiatives that are at the very early stages of monetization. They are just scratching the surface of Messenger, WhatsApp, Facebook Watch, and IGTV, which is the Instagram video platform. These are at the very early stages. What you do see is tremendous engagement across the family of Facebook apps and that creates a big long-term opportunity.

That’s what the Street is excited about, that they are just beginning to give hint of monetization of these things beyond the core news feed.

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Yum CEO: Driverless Cars, Robots Making Pizzas, This is All In Our Future

Yum Brands which owns Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut and other restaurant brands are at the forefront of technological innovation. Yum also isn’t afraid to experiment with seemingly outlandish ideas either such as their announcement of the Toyota Tundra Pie Pro which makes pizza on the go.

Yum Brands CEO Greg Creed recently discussed Yum’s use of technology:

We Love Our Relationship with Grubhub

“We love our relationship with Grubhub, it’s a great partnership,” says Yum Brands CEO Greg Creed. “By the end of the year in the U.S., we’ll have about 2,000 KFC’s and probably close to 4,000 Taco Bell’s delivering. In the stores that are already delivering we’re getting check increases and incremental sales that are coming from it, so we’re very excited about this partnership. We think it obviously bodes well for the future sales growth for both KFC and for Taco Bell in the U.S.”

Driverless Cars and Robots Making Pizzas is Our Future

Pizza Hut has partnered with Toyota to develop a zero-emission Tundra PIE Pro, a mobile pizza factory with the ability to deliver oven-hot pizza wherever it goes. The full-size pizza-making truck was introduced at Toyota’s 2018 Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) Show presentation.

“I love our partnership with Toyota,” added Creed. “This is really about technology, this is about robotics, this is about what the future is envisioning. Driverless cars, robots making pizzas, this is all in our future. Is it in our future next week? No, but is it in our foreseeable future, absolutely. Everything that we can do to make the brands more relevant, make them easier to access and more distinctive, that’s what will lead to continued success, not just for Pizza Hut but also at KFC and at Taco Bell.”

Pizza Hut Partners with Toyota on the Tundra PIE Pro

Pizza Hut has partnered with Toyota to develop the one-of-a-kind, zero-emission Tundra PIE Pro, a mobile pizza factory with the ability to deliver oven-hot pizza wherever it goes. The full-size pizza-making truck was introduced at Toyota’s 2018 Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) Show presentation.

“Nothing tastes better than a fresh Pizza Hut pizza straight out of the oven,” said Marianne Radley, Chief Brand Officer, Pizza Hut. “The Tundra PIE Pro brings to life our passion for innovation not just on our menu but in digital and delivery in order to provide the best possible customer experience.”

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Tapping into the Ever-Evolving Human Brand with Controversy

By now, you’ve seen the recent Nike ad—and the multitude of derivative pieces that followed. And we all have our opinions on it. Now that the dust has settled, those that burned their Nike trainers are left with a rage-hangover and the realization that they now need to go out and fork out a hundred bucks for a new pair.

Meanwhile, their heated opinions and social activity on the matter earned Nike more brand exposure than they ever could have hoped for and those that were calling the move “brand suicide” are rapidly pulling down their YouTube videos.

Sales are up, conversation on an important issue they believe in is rampant, and the impact they have made on their audience have turned millions of customers into emotionally loyal advocates.

A Very Public Break-Up

Did they know they would upset many people? Yes. Do they see those people that were upset as their target audience now and in the future? No. This was a very public break-up, and their true audience is far more in love than ever before.

Now I don’t want to get into the politics of this one, not because I don’t want to (I really could), but because I want to talk about a couple of side issues.

While I do think it was a campaign that will be studied for years to come, I’m not writing to simply gush all over Nike. I can’t promise I won’t praise their prowess a little, but there are two topics I want to pull out of this:

• The changing relationships that led to this campaign
• The archetype that drove it

1) The Changing Relationships that Led to This Campaign

20 years ago, brands and consumers had a very different relationship than they do today. The communication was one-way broadcast, and there was no dialogue between brand and customer (certainly not the collective customer).

Fast-forward to today.

Brands and consumers have a relationship that’s is far more human than ever before. The dialogue is two-way, and the once powerless consumer holds all the aces. They now expect their brands to “bend the knee” to this new shift in power and are calling for them to show their hands. In the aftermath of the shift, some brands have taken public floggings while others went on the defensive and scrambled to review their business and ethics policies to avoid similar fates.

The Human Brand Is Evolving Rapidly

The smart brands, on the other hand, have sat down by the campfire with their customers, with their ever-developing human characteristics, and have asked their customers what they want. Nike knows who their customers are now, and who they will be in the future. The Millennial generation and the GenZ’s behind them are a different breed.

What was par for the course in generations gone by is no longer being tolerated by these younger consumers? The environmental and social issues that have been allowed to go unchecked by governments and brands alike are now top of the agenda for the growing voice of the collective.

Brands Need to Go All-In on Being Human

Today, customers want to know what the brands they buy into really stand for. What is their point of view and increasingly, what are they going to do about it? Brands are being pulled into the political arena, and it’s a sign of the future for brands.

If they want to sit at the table of the human persona game, then there are table stakes. Nike is the modern brand shining a light into that future that consumers are pushing them towards. They have listened, but this wasn’t a scattergun decision. They’ve done their homework. They know exactly who their audience is and what type of society they’re headed for. Their customers are young, with a mentality that is demanding change and Nike, in their eyes, is part of the solution.

2) The Archetype that Drove It

I wrote an article some months back on brand archetypes, in which Nike was very much the focal point representing the hero. As brands are developing their human characteristics to adapt to this new two-way dialogue environment, personality has never been more important. Nike uses their hero archetype at every touch point and inspires their audience to become their own hero. Their messages are inspirational, and they evoke the desire for mastery. This desire hits at the heart of who their audience really is, helping Nike to forge emotional connections, loyalty, and advocates.

Traditionally, Nike engages the best athletes in the world to don their gear and reinforce their heroic messages through their heroic performances in whatever arena the produce their greatness. In their recent campaign, however, they went one further. By standing up for what he believed in, Colin Kaepernick went beyond the realm of athletic heroism and became a hero for change, for beliefs, and for loyalty to one’s values. In choosing Kaepernick, Nike too, stood for what they believed, side-by-side with Kaepernick and those in search of that change.

A Swoosh That Represents a Belief

Nike has pointed to athletes that represented the hero to inspire their audience in the past.

On the back of this campaign, many will look to their iconic swoosh as a mark for what they believe. Will it rival Harley Davidson on the popular tattoo charts? No. The hero personality is different from the rebellious outlaw. But the emotion their audience feels towards the swoosh now is stronger than ever before.

In celebrating such a hero on such a topic, Nike has inspired millions to stand for what they believe in, even if it means sacrificing everything. In doing so, Nike has embodied the archetype they have built their brand on, and have become that hero they have always aspired to be.

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Tom Patterson: Tommy John Launched Out of a Problem That I Wanted to Solve

Like many businesses, Tommy John was launched out of a personal need to solve a problem. Tom Patterson, CEO of Tommy John, was inspired to start his now wildly successful clothing company Tommy John because he couldn’t understand why nobody was doing anything to fix the undershirt and underwear problem he was having.

Tom Patterson, CEO & Founder of Tommy John, recently talked with IAB at the Direct Brand Summit (DBS) about why he started the company with his wife Erin Fujimoto, who is Co-Founder & Head of Merchandising at Tommy John:

Launched Out of a Problem That Needed Solving

My background is I’m a former medical device salesman. I was like Will Smith and The Pursuit of Happiness selling medical devices. As my suiting and dress shirting was becoming more fitted and tailored I couldn’t figure out why all the undershirts in the market were designed to be form-fitting for a UPS box. I’d have to tuck them into my underwear, I’d buy a size bigger so they’re longer and they’d bunch up and shrink and stretch out and turn yellow.

I ended up drawing a sketch with my limited art skills which took about an hour. Erin (Erin Fujimoto, co-founder) and I went to the garment district in downtown Los Angeles, bought some fabric, took it to a dry cleaner who had a tailor inside and said could you sew some prototypes together. Ten shirts later I sent them to friends and they loved them. We ended up making 200 shirts and then built a two-page PayPal checkout website in April of 2008 Tommy John was launched, really out of a problem that I had that I wanted to solve and then learned that many men suffer from the same issue.

I Didn’t Want to Be This Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda Guy

Launching Tommy John came from a personal need. I had lawn mowing businesses and snow blowing businesses that I had started before. Then I was watching The Big Idea, a TV  show with Donny Deutsch, it was really Shark Tank before Shark Tank and a lot of entrepreneurs had ideas and I thought what’s my idea? This undershirt was the idea.

Fast forward to Fall of 2008, I was laid off my medical sales job and I read an article that there’s no better time to start a company than during a recession. I didn’t want to be this coulda, woulda, shoulda guy, ten years later having these regrets. What if I would have started this company, I had this idea, I wasn’t married yet, we didn’t have kids, didn’t own a home, and I thought there’s nothing really to lose. I can always go back and get another medical sales job but I didn’t want to have any regrets.

I called a buyer at Neiman Marcus. My background was strategic selling and I was trained on how to get to decision makers, but instead of selling a medical device I was now selling underwear. Obviously, not as scientific and not as life-saving, some argue it maybe is, and we were launched into Neiman Marcus in 2009.

Tommy John’s DNA is All About Comfort

I thought at some point a business idea would come to me and it happened to be when I was at a hospital doing a presentation and everything was tucked in, but my undershirt was up to here like a midriff. Why doesn’t anyone fix the undershirt problem? Then it led to my underwear riding up. Why doesn’t anyone make underwear that stays in place through movement? It really is all rooted in comfort and I think Tommy John’s DNA is all about comfort. I think what you see in the market today with women wearing leggings everywhere and flats taking over high heels people just want to be comfortable.

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Apple: The Biggest Change to iPad Since iPad (Watch New Commercial)

Apple introduced the new iPad Pro today at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Howard Gilman Opera House. Apple says it is the “Biggest change to iPad since iPad”. It includes an all-screen design with Liquid Retina display, Face ID, A12X Bionic chip, USB-C, Smart Keyboard Folio, and a redesigned Apple Pencil. Check out their new iPad Pro commercial below.

Here’s how Apple describes the New iPad Pro, Pencil and Keyboard:

It’s all new, all screen, and all-powerful. Completely redesigned and packed with our most advanced technology, it will make you rethink what iPad is capable of. And what a computer is capable of.

The new all-screen design means iPad Pro is a magical piece of glass that does everything you need, any way you hold it.

With new, intuitive gestures, getting around is simple. Just swipe up to go Home.

The new Liquid Retina display goes from edge to edge. True-to-life color and ProMotion technology make everything look gorgeous and feel responsive. You’ve got to see it — and touch it — to believe it.

Face ID comes to iPad. It’s engineered for secure unlocking and works seamlessly whether you hold it in portrait or landscape. It’s the world’s most secure facial authentication in a tablet. And in a computer.

Use Face ID to unlock your iPad Pro, log in to apps, and pay with a glance. It’s one password you can’t forget.

A12X Bionic is the smartest, most powerful chip we’ve ever made. It has the Neural Engine, which runs five trillion operations per second and enables advanced machine learning. Translation: It’s faster than most PC laptops.

Put all that power to work by multitasking with just a few swipes. Work on a creative project, message with a friend, search the web for inspiration and make a FaceTime call. All at the same time.

A12X Bionic delivers 2x faster graphics.2 Which makes iPad Pro the perfect machine for augmented reality and a great way to play immersive games. Reality just got really fun.

Introducing the New Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard

Apple Pencil now responds to your touch. With a double tap, you can quickly change brushes or switch to the eraser, without interrupting your flow.

And it attaches magnetically to pair and charge. In other words, it’s a snap.

And There’s More…

The all-new Smart Keyboard Folio provides a great typing experience and elegant front and back protection. We think it’s just your type. (Sorry, we had to.)

USB-C gives you a high-performance connection to accessories like an external display or camera. You can even charge your phone with it.

iPad Pro has two great cameras equipped with Smart HDR. A 12MP camera great for stunning photos, 4K video, document scanning, and AR experiences. And a TrueDepth camera perfect for Portrait selfies, FaceTime, Animoji, and Memoji.

At just over a pound, it’s more portable than ever. Connect on the go with fast Wi-Fi and Gigabit-class LTE. And with up to 10 hours of battery life.

That’s a look at the new iPad Pro. It’s the biggest change to iPad since iPad.

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Chipotle CEO Going Digital to Create a ‘Frictionless Experience’

Chipotle is moving in a digital direction, with their digital business up 48 percent over last year. The company has introduced a new app, digital lines, digital pickup shelves, and a mobile pickup window in an effort to create a “frictionless experience” for its customers, according to Chipotle CEO Brian Niccol.

Brian Niccol, Chipotle Mexican Grill CEO, discussed their digital strategy this morning on CNBC:

Chipotle App Creating a Frictionless Digital Experience

What we’re trying to do is remove any friction and get people more access and we’re having a lot of success with that. Our digital business is now up to 11 percent, which is up 48 percent over last year. What’s really exciting is we’re seeing people continue to adopt the utilization of the app and then all the new access channels that we’re creating, whether it’s these digital pick-up-shelves or delivery, we’re just getting a tremendous response from our customers.

Introducing Digital Lines and Shelves

One of the things that are really powerful for our company is we’ve got what we call a Digital Make Line and it is completely separate from the Customer Facing Line. When you come into the restaurant and you go down that Customer Facing Line if you’ve placed a digital order it doesn’t get in the way of that experience. We’re also putting in place these Digital Pickup Shelves so that when you order ahead, you literally can walk in grab your food and go, a completely frictionless experience.

Our digital line requires fewer people to run it versus the front line. The thing that’s great is what we’ve seen is this digital business is highly incremental, so the additional labor necessary to support the incremental sales it works really well for us.

Testing a New Mobile Pickup Window

We’ve got the new mobile pickup window in four restaurants right now. The way it works is you order ahead and you pick your time and then you know you literally come right by the restaurant, we’ve got a window, your food comes out the window and off you go. We’re seeing tremendous response to that and it’s in a market in Ohio and a market in Texas. We’re gonna start adding more restaurants in 2019, so you’re gonna see us building more restaurants that have the ability for that mobile pickup.

Second Lines in All 2,500 Stores in 2019

The thing that is happening right now on a broad scale basis are these second lines. We’ve digitized them, we’re in about 750 restaurants we’ll have all 2,500 restaurants done by the end of 2019. To accompany that we’re putting in these digital shelves so that literally you can skip the whole process.

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Why Organic Marketing Is Here to Stay and How to Add It to Your Strategy

Organic this? Organic that? What’s the big deal with organic? You can have your own opinion about food products, but in marketing, the answer is pretty clear. Organic marketing is the way. But what is organic marketing and how does it differ from paid social marketing?

In this blog, we’ll explore what organic marketing is, what it isn’t, and how you can use it to drive your business.

What Is Organic Social Media Marketing?

Organic social media is the use of the free services and tools that each social media platform provides to its users. The purpose of organic social media is to build a community of loyal followers and customers by posting relevant content and interacting with those who communicate with your brand. Organic social media marketing is the best way to show customers your true values and culture, while also learning about the values of your customers. By utilizing funnel optimization to convert organic traffic into purchases.

Organic social media marketing has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than paid marketing. This is because brands and customers are given the opportunity to learn about one another simultaneously as they interact on social media platforms.

This is done with organic efforts such as answering questions, providing or responding to feedback, or simply starting a conversation about your brand.

What Is Paid Social Media Marketing?

Paid social, meanwhile, is identified as paying for social media platforms to display advertisements or sponsored messages to users of the social network based on user profiles and traits. Each of these sponsored messages/ads is run it incurs a specified cost per trigger or campaign. For example, pay-per-click (PPC) ads incur a cost each time your ad is clicked by a user, while Facebook uses scheduled blast posts.

From this simplistic breakdown, we can begin to see that organic marketing, while requiring time, can lead to more sales and longer lasting customer engagement on social media platforms.

Here are some tried and true methods still relevant today outside of traditional organic social media marketing:

Use Targeting to Attain the Maximum Organic Potential

Within social media, there are a lot of various ways to optimize your targeting organically. While paying for social media marketing can be effective, adjusting the targeting on your posts can boost your organic reach. Within Facebook and Twitter, you can adjust for your posts to target the following criteria: gender, relationship, status, education level, age, location, language, interests, and post end date. With these targeting attributes available, you can better target your audience so the right people can see your content.

Optimize SEO Titles

According to Moz, having a strong SEO title is one of the most important on-page SEO element. Also, it is important to note that title tags should only be around 50-60 characters long and be very relevant to the content on the page.

Posting Evergreen Content

Whether it may be on social media or your blog, it’s important to publish evergreen posts that do not contain an expiration date. These posts should be engaging and stand out for your readers to stay intrigued. If you’re having trouble thinking about what to post, consider content that is educational and fun. Statistics show that users tend to share more positive posts than negative ones.

Use Emojis to Boost Engagement

Emojis have become an accepted part of our online vocabulary and are a good way to spice up your social copy. Emojis are a way to humanize your brand as well as express complex ideas in fewer characters so you can engage more on platforms such as Twitter. They help you capture more attention by conveying the general emotion and ideas around a post even before a person has had a chance to read it.

Choose the Most Engaging  #Hashtags

According to data from Buffer, Hashtags affect engagement differently depending on the social network:

• Twitter posts with one hashtag generate 21% more engagements than tweets with three or more.
• Instagram posts, on the other hand, see the most engagement when using 11+ hashtags.
• Facebook posts do better without hashtags.

If you know of a high-profile event coming up, you can prepare in advance to make sure you’re ready to get in on the action. The more targeted, the better. If you’re a fashion brand, for example, consider live-tweeting or covering high profile events and commenting on what celebrities are wearing.

Most events are accompanied by hashtags that you can hop on. But the key to hijacking a hashtag is not to hijack it at all. Instead, you should aim to contribute to the conversation in a meaningful, natural way.

Get Your Meme On

Memes have taken over social media. In addition, you can get a degree these days in “memeology” as it relates to the human psyche.

Memes are cultural behaviors that spread from person to person through imitation. That gives them a natural virality that businesses can use. By playing on nostalgia, humor, and imitation it allows for organic growth through the spread of various iterations of the same meme. This most recently seen in the Nike meme spread throughout all of Facebook after the Colin Kaepernick pickup as an endorsement deal.

Run a Contest/Giveaway

Contests and giveaways tend to produce significant engagement because they ask your audience to do relatively little for the opportunity to reap some reward.

The more compelling your prize, the more hoops people will jump through for the chance to come out on top. These contests can be run directly on social media or facilitated with a tool.

Organic Marketing & the Marketer

In today’s age of competition, dollar bills, and robotic engagement, organic marketing is becoming more and more critical to help you stand out amongst the rest of the competition. By creating an experience for the user, you have a much higher chance to draw in new customers and produce more sales because the rapport has been built in a non-invasive manner. Coupling these activities with paid efforts will lead to more word of mouth organic growth as your paid advertisements are talked about by new customers to already engaged users. These users with positive experiences will relay them and continue this process.

Are there any organic marketing opportunities that have been successful for you? I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

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James Patterson Says He is Releasing New Book ‘The Chef’ on Facebook Messenger

James Patterson is releasing his next book “The Chef” on Facebook Messenger. It will be a hybrid combining the written word with video and photography in an attempt to appeal to the millions of millennials that are on Facebook and tend not to read literature.

James Patterson, author of “The Chef” discussed this novel marketing strategy of releasing a hybrid book with video in an interview on CNBC:

It’s About Drawing Attention to Books

This is about just drawing attention to publishing to books. Books don’t get as much so we’re trying new things. What this is and what’s exciting about it to me is you read the book and then it goes to film and you read the book and it goes to film and you read the book and it goes to film. It’s kind of like a bookie, a book meets a movie, and it’s free on Facebook Messenger.

Why did I do that? Why would I give away a book for free? It just draws more attention to books which I think publishers need to do more of that. It’s a good story and you’ve never ever seen anything like it. It’s just so different.

Combining Film, Photography, Books, and Text

I think that a lot of people go out to Messenger and it’s about a three-hour experience, the whole thing, and that’ll be a success. We’re gonna put it out in book form in February and it will be longer and available at a regular price.

Literally, you’re reading text and then all of a sudden you see film of what you were reading about. Then it’ll come back and then it might go to photography the next thing and then it might go to newspaper headlines, so it’s just different. This just goes on for about three hours and you can watch it on your phone obviously or on your computer.

I love that idea of combining film, photography, books, and text. We went to Facebook and they said, yeah we’re in. They thought it was an exciting thing to do and different and they need content obviously. Well, I shouldn’t say what they need, that’s for Mark and Sheryl and I don’t know, but I think they need content, so here we are.

We Need Publishers That Are Willing to Experiment

I think it’s a mixed bag. I think independent bookstores are doing better. The whole retail business is in flux, obviously, because so much is done online. So hopefully, Barnes & Noble will rebound and I think they will. We miss Borders.

Maybe 20 years from now, who knows, maybe it’ll all be done online, but for the moment in this country we really need literature and that can’t be done online right now. We need good publishers that are willing to experiment and do things that are unusual.

Amazon Has Lightened Up Which is Great

I think Amazon has lightened up which I think is great. They’re in a position to do a lot of good. Initially, the sort of back and forth between them and publishers I didn’t think was healthy. I do think we need strong publishers and I think we need bookstores out in the world right now. As they say, that may change.

I’ve changed my tune a little bit. I think they’re doing a better job now, there isn’t that back and forth thing that they were having with publishers. I like that Jeff is giving away a lot of money, I think that’s good.

Facebook Messenger… Yay.

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Nick Tzitzon of SAP on the Changing Role of the CIO

Nick Tzitzon, EVP of Marketing and Communications for SAP, recently was interviewed on CXOTalk where he talked about the changing role of the CIO:

Every CXO Became a Technology Buyer

If you think about how enterprise technology has evolved… if you think 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you had the Chief Information Officer which was the single dominant point of contact inside most businesses for how a business uses technology. And then what happened? Every CXO became a technology buyer and the CXO technology buyer was interested in very specific business outcomes.

If you’re a Chief Human Resources Officer you buy human capital management software because you want to inspire and retain and train your workforce. If you’re a Chief Marketing or Sales Officer you want to grow your business, you want to attract customers, you want to deliver new customer experiences.

The CIO and CXO Conversations Must Be the Same

The CIO in many cases, because of their long-term relationships was stuck in one conversation while the CXOs went into a different conversation. We want to push them together because that’s where they belong. The CIO is an incredible resource in companies to be able to tell you here’s a business problem and a technology that can help. As technology is maturing so quickly with AI and all the other breakthroughs you need the CIO to be a leader in these companies. But the CIO conversation and the CXO conversation have got to be the same conversation.

What opportunity are we trying to seize? What problem are we trying to solve? It can’t be technology for technology sake because if it’s that then a technology vendor like SAP is not relevant. What are we trying to do for the business? That’s the question and a conversation that we need to be part of and that our peers want to be part of as well.

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How to Know If It’s Time to Switch Your Engagement Platform

Writing this article has me thinking of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. You’ve got Goldilocks looking for the right home to crash. Ultimately, she has to make a critical life decision between the temperature quality of hot, cold, and ‘just right’ porridge. Identifying the right engagement platform can feel very similar. If you’ve been using one for a while, it might be time to re-evaluate the temperature of your results.

This blog reviews three key considerations for determining that it is time to invest in a more appropriate system.

Simplicity Without Sophistication (System Is Too Simple)

When initially building a company or trying marketing automation tools for the first time, a company might select a solution that is just “good enough” and not too complex for their team. This can be motivated by a number of factors. Typically, it is the result of having a marketing team that is just beginning to implement digital engagement strategies.

With so many new concepts presented within digital marketing, many marketing managers determine that it is safer to go with a system that appears ‘easy’ during their evaluation.

The challenge for many teams that are new to digital engagement is that most platforms look easy at the beginning. But they quickly become limiting to the long-term capabilities that marketers really need. Once the first four to six months of a digital marketing strategy are launched, marketers find themselves boxed in by a lack of sophistication. And now, they’re forced to look for more without a system that can deliver on more mature objectives.

Getting Started with Digital Marketing Strategy

Let’s take a look at a few introductory campaigns that marketers start with when they initiate their digital marketing strategy. Some examples of early marketing campaigns include:

• Simple lead follow-up workflows and sales notifications
• Basic drip email campaigns based on a single indicator of interest
• One-time email sends
• Newsletters that require manual creation of content and uploading of contacts
• Single occurrence events or tradeshows that happen infrequently
• Generic emails that contain little-to-no contact-level personalization
• Generic landing pages that contact little-to-no contact-level personalization

The commonality between these items is that they target a single objective at a single point in time, often leveraging generic messaging. To many that are new to engagement marketing, getting these initial campaigns started may appear confusing or time-consuming. However, it is typical for marketing teams to mature past these initial campaigns within the first two to three months of using a marketing platform.

In contrast, more sophisticated digital marketing campaigns listen to interests, learns preferences, and adapts engagement over time. More advanced marketing programs are non-linear and able to adjust the focus of communication to match the behaviors of target audiences in real-time, keeping the pulse on the most relevant touches for each individual.

Deeper Strategy = Deeper Needs

As digital marketing campaigns become established, the typical company wants to begin personalized messaging, timing, and follow-up to match the preferences and interests of their target audiences. To accomplish this level of personalization while maintaining efficient marketing operations, it is important to have a solution that is designed to deliver results at scale.

The challenge that simple systems have is that by the time marketers get used to their basic functions, they leave little additional functionality to create more sophisticated campaigns with the same level of ease. Ultimately, they either lack functionality, lack a connected contact history, make it challenging or impossible to configure multi-dimensional campaigns or make it overly complex to deliver multi-touch, multi-channel, multifaceted campaigns. In contrast, the right marketing engagement platform delivers simplicity and sophistication that you can rely on as you grow your digital marketing strategy year-over-year.

Answer:  Look for simplicity and sophistication. Work with your marketing engagement evaluation experts to example more sophisticated workflows (use cases) that look toward the future of your initiatives.

Limited by Your Systems (Data Extensibility)

Another key indicator that motivates marketers to switch marketing platforms is that it is very difficult to incorporate the desired events, history, or data from other systems into the definition of their target audience. This can be the result of many limitations, though there is a number worth noting:

• Disconnected systems
• Lack of access to constraints
• Lack of variety in constraints
• No ability to filter by the absence of history

When marketing automation platforms were initially introduced, they were largely designed to ingest the implicit data supplied by other systems. Then, they would query that data to assign audiences. More modern platforms improved a bit on this logic, extending connected event data to time-based constraints and basic conditional formatting within audience definitions.

The Ability to Drive Results

Current-day leading engagement platforms have taken data-extensibility to an entirely new level and automatically multiply the value of connected history simply by connecting them to their centralized audience hub.

For example, rather than simply ingesting a contact activity, the leading automation platforms translate the touchpoint into the following formats (at a minimum):

• Real-time interactions
• Updates to real-time interactions
• Historic interactions
• Historic updates to interactions
• Anti-interactions (or absence of activity)
• Lack of updates to interactions

For custom objects and custom activities, this multiplication of marketable information may be even more extensive.

Additionally, light-weight automation platforms may have access to the basics of an activity or record from another system. Yet, they will lack access to the customized records, fields, or settings within external databases. Sophisticated engagement platforms are able to connect the full extent of records (native and custom) within your other platforms, along with native and custom fields that have been added to those records. With this connection comes the reliability that the marketing team will be able to articulate all of the campaigns and personalization requested by the business and required by the target audience.

Look at the Long Term

Similar to the first reason described for making a switch, over time, access to the right marketing events and history becomes more important to articulating a personalized and engaging audience experience. Many marketers start out feeling as though the basic data points will be enough. But, in four to six months they have hit a wall in terms of data capabilities and are back evaluating marketing automation systems.

Answer: Ask your marketing engagement vendor to provide an explanation of their data model and test audience and communication scenarios within those systems that match both the short-term and long-term objectives of your marketing approach. Make sure that the platform selected is not too lightweight. Ensure it will support your goals over the next one to two years.

Exhausted by Execution (System Is Too Complex)

The last consideration when planning for long-term marketing automation success is the ability for your system to scale operations so that marketers do not have to build any portion of a campaign twice.

Let’s face it. Much of the structure of a marketing campaign boils down to a core, repeatable approach. The purchase of a marketing automation platform is typically to reduce the strain of digital engagement on the overall organization. The right platform should remove the activities and steps. It should not create a whole new series of work on top of the already busy schedules of your marketing team.

This topic relates back to the first reason for considering a switch. Many of the initial campaigns that companies want to articulate have a singular or linear focus. Campaigns quickly become multi-dimensional to deliver the right level of engagement in support of identified audiences and personal interests.

Bringing this back to the core development of a digital marketing campaign, let’s review the standard steps needed to build out an event campaign with appropriate communication.

A) Invitation

B) Registration

C) Tracking attendance

D) Following-up based on attendance.

Many companies have even more steps than these within their event programs. Let’s start with the basics.

Marketers should look for the following core components for each stage within the overall campaign:

• Define the communication audience
• Create appropriate:
  • Emails
  • Text messages
  • Landing pages
  • Forms
• Track responses
• Connect:
  • Attribution & build reports
  • Audiences to appropriate communication by stage & response

Find a Solution for More Than Just the Basics

These are just the essential steps needed to support the creation of a net-new marketing event campaign. I am exhausted just thinking about them. Basic automation platforms require the marketer to manually create each of these items (in-whole or in-part) each time a new event is  supported. While some systems may look simple on the surface, a hidden issue is that they do not scale well. This requires the marketer to build things from scratch each and every time a new campaign is delivered.

In contrast, sophisticated marketing engagement platforms reduce the total number of times that a campaign is created from scratch, enabling whole campaigns & multi-step flows to be cloned with the single click of a button. Additionally, leading platforms make it simple to update assets across the cloned campaign all at once through reference values that can be changed in a single location. For example, marketers may want to swap in a new banner or event date-time for all emails, landing pages, and content within the campaign.

Move to Sophistication

Sophisticated marketing engagement platforms greatly reduce the time it takes to launch new campaigns. They allow marketers to reference a shared program/campaign library. These systems enable your team to share best practices, improve reliability, and work from demonstrated results without having to recreate the structure and content from scratch.

Answer:  How often do you find yourself configuring the same campaign settings over-and-over? If you are having to repeat tasks more than once or twice, there is likely a better way. Reach out to top-rated marketing automation providers and ask them to share benchmark data around the efficiency of using their platform. Also, ask your vendors to compare the steps for creating multi-step campaigns to that of other solutions within their space.

Time to Make a Switch?

Is it time for a switch? Maybe you’ve been delaying a switch to a better marketing engagement platform. This could be for a number of reasons.

Sophisticated marketing engagement platforms have a plan and a path for helping you migrate to greener fields. The same capabilities that you may be looking for to help drive broader marketing accomplishments allow more sophisticated platform experts to quickly move you onto the newest system.

Balancing out the needs of today and the needs of tomorrow can be a complex task.  When reviewing your current capabilities, does your team consistently bring up the shortcomings of your automation systems? If so, it could be time to re-evaluate your solution and work with a more sophisticated platform.

As always, I enjoy hearing from other marketers and I’d love to hear stories about when you finally made the decision to adjust your solution set. What benefits did it bring to your team? Additionally, what made you land on that decision? Let’s keep the conversation going in the comments.

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Building a Business Around Your Website: Managing People Through the Build Process

If you’re anything like me, there’s always a certain amount of anxiety around product releases. Mainly because so much can go wrong or block the tracks. The truth is that managing through a project is more about people than processes. People are doing the work, people are giving you feedback, and people are presenting new work that can impact timelines. The processes for product and project management should already be in place—which means the success of the project depends on our ability as product owners to manage people.

As part of our series on building a business around your website, I will help guide you through the problems people can present in a project and how to manage each situation. To make it easy to remember, I will break it into four categories: scope, stakeholders, executives, and plan. 

Scope

Scope Creep

This happens when the scope of work (SOW) isn’t clear. Remember: stakeholders are busy. No matter what you do, you’ll rarely ever have their full attention, and the more stakeholders think, the more they want to change.

To avoid scope creep, use the right documents for collaboration, so it’s clear what was and was not in the original scope. Remember that every goal has a timeline and the project has a time-based ROI. When any new request is made you have to leverage the time-based ROI as the deciding factor. If they want a change, they have to change the timeline. Remember that project-based ROI was discussed in our first piece on this topic.

Change Requests

(or if you’re using an agency—the dreaded change order)

This refers to things that were not in the original SOW.

Change requests are the result of people adding to the scope of a project. That’s the “oh, by the way, I would also like this page to have six sections instead of two.” or “I didn’t really notice until now, but I really need a lead gen form on that page.”

I handle scope challenges with three questions:

1. What impact will this have on ROI?
2. How much time will it take to add?
3. How does this impact our projected timeline?

If the stakeholder can’t answer number one, it doesn’t move forward.

If there’s a strong ROI case, then you can look at adding it into the project plan. Remember you have that 20%. I save new requests for the final third of the project. If there is room to add this request without impacting hard timelines to start UAT and QA, then you can add the new functionality.

Remember, there are always ways to improve the user experience. The important thing is managing in short sprints and keeping everyone on the same page. I always refer back to the importance of learning from the data. This keeps people focused on getting priority 1 items done and allows for continuous testing of new concepts in the following sprints.

Stakeholders

Stakeholder management throughout the process can be challenging. You need their time and attention to make sure content and functionality are approved. They tend to swing like a pendulum between unresponsive and over-communicative.

Here is how to handle both scenarios:

Unresponsive Stakeholders

My approach is polite persistence with clear cut-off dates. One of my tactics is, “if I don’t get your approval by the end of day Tuesday, I will be going with option B.” You are making it clear that the project will not be held up because they aren’t responding. They may not love the approach, but it’s your job to keep things on time, and no individual stakeholder has the right to impact company-wide timelines. Everyone is busy.

Over-Communicative Stakeholders

When they do check in, it’s like a firehose with holes on the sides. Water is coming in from everywhere, and it’s coming in fast—all of the changes and updates. And, oh, by the way, it all needs to be in place and changed by tomorrow.

My approach here is to delay requests that aren’t critical. Design, development, marketing, support, research, finance, legal…all of these people have worked their tails off to get this product and project plan approved, funded, and moving forward. It’s not the most pleasant part of being a product owner, but it’s your job to remind everyone on the team that they are—a part of a team and that they’re responsible for keeping the train moving. If they make last-minute requests, those requests will be addressed in the next sprint.

Executives

Let’s give them both names for a frame of reference:

The Last Minute:

This is the executive that knows about a need and delivers it to you on a Saturday at 10:00 am with a Monday afternoon go live.

The Helicopter:

This next type of executive is a tough one. I refer to them as the helicopter. They swoop in, blow everything all over the place, and then fly back out. Sometimes this is how they have to do things and while there is always time for one minute of context. That context won’t change the impact of this approach.

If the CEO or division GM makes a request, you can’t flat out say no. Many times, you don’t have and won’t have the context. It could be a big partnership or another announcement that requires immediate attention. You can and should push back if the request is not critical and has an impact on project timelines.

These requests are one of the main reasons I budget in an extra 20%. You can get the percentage of each sprint that the C-suite requests represent in JIRA. By estimating time per ticket and making sure each request is properly tagged and estimated, the report will give a precise allocation of time by project and company division.

Here is the approach that I take when managing up:

First, I provide an alternative approach to the current process for communication.

1. I suggest that the team can be more thoughtful and productive with their requests if we have a little time before we have to work. Clear examples are presented of how we can improve outcomes by going through a one or two-day maximum internal review—including getting feedback from key company stakeholders.
2. I present the things that won’t get done if we make this change and ask them to choose which they’d like to push. Present this politely: “Sure, I can do that. How would you like me to change prioritization on these other items?” What this does is highlight the impact their last-minute requests have on the rest of the business.

These approaches work best as they present the value in a different approach versus a debate over them breaking the process. If you make it a sword fight you will lose – their sword (title) is bigger than yours. Guide them to the best path through a value exchange approach.

Second, if this fails and they are approachable, I communicate the damage that their approach is having on the teams’ morale and productivity. The negative impact of the team not knowing when things will change is huge. And if your team thinks their work may be thrown out, they won’t be as motivated. If there’s no trust in follow-through from the executives—there will be no commitment to meeting timelines from the rest of the team. Our job as Product Owner (PO) or Project Manager (PM) is to do what’s best for the company, and sometimes that means communicating these challenges to our managers. While this doesn’t always work, a good executive will appreciate your commitment to the team and the company objectives.

The third and final approach, when you realize nothing you say or try to do is working is to let them fail.

1. Let them change directions on a weekly basis
2. Communicate with other stakeholders why their projects are delayed
3. Let the stakeholders present the business impacts directly to the executive

Plan

You created a solid plan, now stick to it.

Projects that are too big tend to fail. The bigger they are, the easier it is for a distraction or change in the company to push the big project back because there’s no clear near-term ROI.

Keep an eye out daily for delays that fit into any of the following buckets:

Expected

Murphy’s law: there’s a reason it is always brought up. Plan for things you can’t foresee happening, and you will meet every timeline without 70-hour work weeks.

Vacations, Business Travel: This doesn’t just refer to your team—but the stakeholders involved in the process. Don’t wait until the Thursday before they leave for two weeks on business or vacation to follow up on or make a new request.

Unexpected

Illness, Accidents, Mergers, Acquisitions, Joint Ventures. There are things you don’t know that you can’t see coming but—you should know that they happen. With the buffer in the project plan, you can keep things on track.

Real-Time Communications

When a project is in full swing one of the biggest ways the train comes off the track is in the daily changes from design or content. This is where communications and information funnels are critical. Be sure to enforce your dos and don’ts from the project plan.

Managing People Through Processes

People will always add an unexpected element to your process. In planning for the unexpected, you can drive your team (and the rest of the company) through success. In our next blog in this series, we’ll talk about how to structure your sprints post-launch.

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In the Relationship Era, No One Should Be Marketing to Strangers

“Don’t talk to strangers.”

Whether or not this is good life advice that people should follow, it’s a saying that most are familiar with.

Even though this suggests we might have difficulty engaging with strangers, marketers have no problem selling to strangers. We spam unsegmented email lists and display annoying pop-ups on websites. We spend exorbitant amounts of money on digital advertising—without even taking the time to learn about our audiences.

Unsurprisingly, these efforts often lead to unexceptional results.

So, is there actually any value in trying to go beyond one-size-fits-all marketing? Is there any value in bothering to determine how to segment prospects and what kind of segments we should use? Is there any value in getting to know our prospects and customers even though we don’t know for sure if they’ll convert, or if they’ll stay long-term?

In this early stage of the Relationship Era, the answer is almost certainly yes. Yes, there is.

Marketing in the Relationship Era

To put it simply, the Relationship Era describes businesses’ gradual shift to long-lasting relationships with prospects and customers.

It encompasses everything from new marketing processes and sales mentalities to unlocking potential for marketers and sales teams (whose jobs should be easier now that companies are capable of gaining so much more information about everyone they come in contact with).

In the last few years, “relationship marketing” has been commonly used to refer to “marketing to customers” as opposed to marketing to prospects. But as we enter the Relationship Era, it would be strange to not include prospects in “relationship marketing” too. With rapidly evolving technology, marketers absolutely have the means to nurture relationships with prospects. With chatbots, automated (but customized) email drips, and robust CRM tools that house conversations and files, the potential is unlimited.

The End of the “Not Enough Information” Problem

Even telemarketers practice a basic form of personalized marketing. They have people’s area codes and possibly addresses—from which they can infer socioeconomic status and household income, giving them an idea of what products this family might be interested in, and so on.

But why isn’t this good enough? Why bother taking personalized marketing to the next level?

Well, for one, consumers love it.

In Epsilon’s survey of consumers aged 18-64, 80% of respondents said that they’re more likely to do business with a company if it offers personalized experiences. In other words, personalization isn’t just some fad or a young person’s game. The Harvard Business Review found that a personalized marketing experience can deliver “five to eight times the ROI on marketing spend, and can lift sales by 10% or more.”

When people love your marketing, they’re more likely to form a relationship with you—and ultimately, to buy from you. But you already knew that.

What you may not know is just how few companies are personalizing their marketing—and how much of an advantage you can gain from doing it.

Generally, it’s not particularly difficult to personalize email content, yet research on the state of personalization in email has found that 75% of consumers in North America felt that email content was not customized for them. And it’s not as if companies are trying very hard either. Only 17% of companies worldwide reported having personalization as a core part of their business strategies.

Not every business has caught on to the Relationship Era yet, which, for companies that are adapting quickly, is good news.

When Prospects Are No Longer Strangers

Traditionally, businesses may have thought of prospects as strangers, but no longer. Thanks to readily accessible information from sources like LinkedIn profiles and self-segmenting email subscribers, marketing and sales teams have an unprecedented amount of information on their leads even though they’re not (yet) customers. Information that, if used correctly, can help build pre-purchase and pre-subscription relationships.

The trick is to organize all of this lead data into something that’s searchable and usable.

While it’s impossible to do this manually given the sheer volume of information, industrious marketers are using specialized tools to gain the upper hand on their competition. From customizing landing page copy to matching Google ad headlines to sending curated Twitter posts to followers with specific interests, the possibilities for marketing to prospects are—without any hyperbole or exaggeration—endless. Instead of hoping that a prospect will fill out a form with 22 required fields, it’s now possible to ask three or four questions. Then, you can gather the rest of the information later.

Marketers are also beginning to venture beyond their traditional tech stack as they discover the efficiencies of tools like customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, which are typically used by sales teams. Today, modern CRM systems are designed for the benefit of both marketing and sales teams, giving marketers newfound visibility into the prospects that sales teams are interacting with on a daily basis.

Why is this important? Altify’s Business Performance Benchmark Study reported that organizations with aligned sales and marketing teams had 26% higher win rates and 18% shorter sales cycles. If anyone’s looking to help sales and marketing teams collaborate better, this could be the solution that gets everyone onto the same page. Or as we like to call it, a win-win situation.

Relationship-making: The New Marketing

In the Relationship Era, there’s no longer an excuse for generic marketing campaigns, hard sells, and one-size-fits-all messaging. Consumers have shown that they’re receptive to marketing if it takes into account what they need and what they’re shopping for.

This gives brands a huge opportunity to build meaningful relationships with customers and prospects that last for a long time. And more importantly, create relationships that can weather hiccups in customer service, product satisfaction, and bad press.

These are all new and exciting possibilities, but they exist because of the long-established power of relationships—which marketers are only just beginning to capitalize on.

Most businesses will probably take the easy route and continue pushing out general marketing campaigns without putting in the work to understand prospects. But if this early stage of the Relationship Era is any indication, maybe—just maybe—marketing will finally stop talking to strangers.

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My Simple Secret for Maintaining a Healthy Database

Traditional database maintenance usually involves some combination of list vendors, professional database cleansing services, email scraping, and good old-fashioned personal outreach. There’s no perfect process. And with B2B data decaying at such a rapid rate—about 70% annually—for many businesses, even employing every strategy doesn’t quite cut it. It’s a daunting task that never goes away.

But just because it never goes away doesn’t mean it can be swept under the rug. Bad data is a BIG problem that companies can’t afford to ignore. Literally. ZoomInfo research has found that as many as 40% of business objectives fail due to bad data, costing US businesses more than $611 billion annually. To combat data decay, businesses spend as much as 50% of IT budgets on data rehabilitation.

That’s a lot of time, money, and resources spent on database health.

I have a far better solution. A continuous database cleansing strategy that uses the absolute freshest data source possible: your own leads. Best of all, if automated it’s also incredibly simple—and you can start using it today.

Interested? The solution is sitting right in your inbox!

The Secret Is in Your Reply Emails

Every time you send an email campaign, replies are inevitable. Out-of-office, left-the-company, manual unsubscribe requests, and human replies. Many companies do a quick scan for the human replies and mass-delete the rest—either because they don’t have the resources to review each reply, or they aren’t aware of how valuable they are.

Let’s take a look at a very standard and unassuming out-of-office reply:

Now if we’re JUST talking database health here:

1. You just validated Mark’s email address and know he’s still at the same account.
2. You just learned Mark’s cell phone number (pure gold to your sales team if you only had an email before).
3. You just learned (or confirmed) Mark’s title, which will allow you to segment him to the right list and personalize future content.

As an added bonus, you also gained two net new contacts: Stephanie and Bruce. And Mark is giving you permission to contact them in his absence—take advantage of it! Reach out with your original message but add a few personalized lines to the top. Let them know how you got their contact info, introduce yourself, ask them to opt-in, and map them to your account. Are they buyers, decision makers, or influencers? With today’s B2B buying decisions now taking an average of seven people according to Gartner, every new contact you add gets you closer to sealing the deal.

Go a step further and boost your connect rates—yes, increase connect rates with out-of-office replies. You can do this by noting the date Mark is back in the office and scheduling a personal outreach.

Mining Emails Continuously Cleanses Your Database

Just looking at the potential of one OOO reply is exciting. Imagine scaling this process to impact your entire database. I’ve found that the average reply rate of a typical email campaign is 2-3% (holidays are higher), and of those replies, about 87% are out-of-office auto-responses. Consider the size of your own database and do some quick math to see how many out-of-office replies you could start mining after your next campaign.

And that’s after EVERY campaign. Every time you send an email campaign, you are sitting on data that can be used to update your database. All day, every day. It’s not a one-time or scheduled database maintenance “project;” the data is a natural product of something you’re already doing: sending emails.

Mining reply emails allows you to:

Cleanse Existing Records

Changes to titles, email addresses, and phone numbers are commonplace among B2B employees. An out-of-office, left-the-company, or even an auto-response alerting senders to an employee’s change in role, all contain valuable nuggets of information that can be used to update existing contact records and eliminate contacts that have moved on.

Enrich Existing Records

As we saw in the earlier example, replies often contain cell phone numbers, titles, and other information that can be used to enrich existing contacts. The more you know about leads, the more effectively you can engage them with direct contact and personalized, relevant content.

Add Net New Contacts

A big part of database health is continually growing your database to reach more prospects and ultimately increase pipeline and sales velocity. More than half of out-of-office emails contain other contacts as we saw in the earlier example. These new contacts could be just what you need put a deal over the finish line! Likewise, most left-the-company auto-responses contain a replacement contact. Get in front of these new contacts as quickly as possible to gain a favorable position over competitors, or to secure renewals if the account is already a customer.

Maintain Compliance with Email Spam Laws

Failing to remove people from your email lists upon request can result in hefty fines for noncompliance with email spam laws like CAN-SPAM, CASL, and GDPR. While you undoubtedly already have an automated solution for unsubscribing, the truth is some people simply can’t be bothered and will manually reply and ask to be removed instead. By mining replies you can catch these unsubscribes in a timely manner. This allows you to remove them from your list and stay on the right side of the law.

The beauty of mining emails to improve the health of your database is that you’re leveraging data from something you’re already doing. And it requires absolutely no changes to your existing email campaigns and schedule. Now if only there were a way to automate it…

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How to Read Digital Body Language for Email Marketers

The best salespeople pay attention to buying cues from their customers. If there are no buying signals, they move on to a better lead. They are persistent when they sense a deal can be closed quickly but recognize that sometimes timing issues are at play.

By giving their prospect space and following up a little later down the road, they build trust, rapport and when the time comes, they close the deal. To summarize, good salespeople know how to how to read customers/prospects and use timing to their advantage.

Email marketers? Not so much. Despite having increasingly complex data on their subscribers, many marketers continue to treat all their subscribers the same.

Don’t talk your customers to sleep! If a person seemed bored, do you keep talking until they fall asleep? No? Well, that’s exactly what many email marketers do.

Now in the past, this was forgivable. Marketers didn’t always have a way to tell how people were responding to their advertising. Campaigns were formulated over whiskey and cocktails by “Mad Men” in smoke-filled rooms over Madison Avenue. Back then, a marketer could SELL a campaign that mattered.

Things are different now. For the digital marketer in 2018 and beyond, email open/click and read time data are available on an individual level, and smart marketers are using this data to make their email programs responsive.

Email Deliverability Basics

Salespeople who are particularly obnoxious eventually have a hard time booking appointments. Email marketers who send emails to people daily who never open/click may start to see their emails delivered to subscribers spam folders even for people that engage often.

Many marketers assume that if their open rate is 20%, that means subscribers are on average opening every fifth email. It’s more likely that a small fraction of their subscriber-base opens all of their emails, a more substantial chunk opens an occasional email, and then another subset has completely fallen asleep and has not engaged in months. Eventually, those disengaged people will take a toll on your “sender reputation.”

What can you do to avoid this? Learn to read digital body language.

Build a Responsive Email Marketing Program

All the data you need is already being captured by your marketing automation platform. You just need to put it to work. So let’s get started.

The first step to a responsive email program is to divide your audience into segments based on the engagement level. There are many ways to do this, including using specialized software to predict customers’ engagement level, but let’s look at how you can do it manually.

Step 1: First, figure out how many emails your subscribers typically receive per month. That should include all your channels, blog notifications, etc. For this example, let’s say you send 10 emails per month, or two to three per week.

Step 2: Pull a list of all your subscribers that have not opened any of your past 60 emails (or about six month’s worth). We’ll call these subscribers “disengaged.”

Step 3: Pull another list, this time for subscribers who haven’t opened an email in four months, but have opened one the last half year. We’ll call this segment “low engagement.”

Step 4: Now create a list of subscribers that have opened emails within four months, but not in the last 15 emails, or month and a half. This is your “moderate engagement” segment.

Step 5: Last, create a segment for “highly engaged” subscribers who have opened an email in the last month and a half.

If your emails tend to be link- or CTA-heavy and you want to be even more aggressive, you can use clicks instead of opens.

Customize Engagement Levels

Now that you have broken your audience down by their digital body language, you can engage with each type of subscriber differently.

Assuming your disengaged email addresses are people that have previously engaged, you could simply lower your email cadence, or run a re-engagement campaign. You could also try changing up their send time, or send their emails when they have historically engaged with your emails in the past to increase your chances of them opening/clicking.

For your low engagement subscribers, consider bumping their email frequency down to once or twice a month. For your moderate engagement subscribers, you could cut their frequency down to weekly, etc., and for high, you can keep email frequency the same as before. There are no strict rules here, and your strategy should be guided by your brand’s goals and A/B testing.

Despite sending dramatically less email, you will likely find that your total clicks/opens will fall very little and over time, will actually increase. Remember, most of the people who are receiving less email weren’t opening very many in the first place! Your customers will be thankful for you listening to their digital body language, and your email deliverability will improve as your overall engagement rates rise.

The post How to Read Digital Body Language for Email Marketers appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

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