March 13, 2001
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B2BMarketingBiz From MarketingSherpa.com
*************** March 13, 2001; Vol. 2, Issue 11
Please forward WITHOUT cutting.
Free subscriptions at: http://www.b2bmarketingbiz.com
1) News: How Customer-Focused is Your Company? Test Your Site with
the "We We Monitor"
2) Case Study: Sento Corp Doubles Email Marketing Response Rates by
Switching to a B-to-B Specialty List Broker
3) Practical Know-How: How to Merge/Purge Rented Email Lists (Yes It's Possible!)
4) More Exclusive Headlines
**********
NEWS
**********
* How Customer-Focused is Your Company? Test Your Site with the
"We We" Monitor
Seems like every company in the world claims to be customer-
focused. But are they really? Many marketers don't realize just
how revealing the language they use to describe their company is.
Now there's a new online tool to evaluate that language: Future
Now's Customer Focus Calculator (aka "The We We Monitor.")
This free, easy-to-use, online tool counts the number of times
self-referential words such as "Us", "We" and "Our" are used on a
Web page, compared to customer-focused words such as "You" and
"Your." The editors at B-to-B MarketingBiz tested it on the mission
statement/about us pages of some of the biggest B-to-B s online.
Here's what we found:
Lucent -- Bravo! 6 self-focused words and 10 customer-focused
words.
Staples.com -- Pretty good. 8 self-focused words and 7 customer-
focused words.
Business.com -- OK. 7 Self-focused words and 3 customer-focused
words.
Intuit -- Not Great. 12 Uses of the Company name, 3 self-focused
words and just 1 customer-focused word.
Microsoft -- Ouch! 30 self focused words and only 1, single,
solitary customer-focused word.
True, the Customer Focus Calculator can't tell you how customer
centric your company really is. But it can tell you how well the
copywriting on your site reveals your customer focus. So, why not
test it today for your own site -- and your competitors? Go to:
http://www.futurenowinc.com/wewe.htm
**************************************************************
CASE STUDY: Sento Corp Doubles Email Marketing Response Rates by
Switching to a B-to-B Specialty List Broker
**************************************************************
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CHALLENGE
Sento Corporation has had great success using fax
marketing to generate qualified sales leads for its $3,000-$8,000
IT training courses. So, in Fall 2000 they decided to take their
electronic marketing one step further -- to the Web. Sento's first
step was to hire a Marketing Director, Kevin Graves, who already
had an Internet marketing background.
Graves, together with Technical Writer Mark Pope and Graphic
Designer Meagan Getz, devised an email marketing campaign to drive
traffic to a Web site especially designed to collect sales leads.
They turned to a big famous email list broker for their names.
Graves says, "They had a great marketing campaign, they sold me!"
However Sento's first email campaigns got a less than stellar
response, averaging 3%-5% click throughs. Graves says, "I knew my
creative might need some tweaking, but it was hard for me to
believe that it was that bad."
CAMPAIGN
Graves began investigating the email list rental market
more thoroughly. He discovered that, just as in postal mail, all
brokerage firms have access to the same lists. However, just as in
postal mail, this didn't mean account reps who were used to working
on multi-million piece consumer campaigns could give good advice on
lists for much smaller, niche, B-to-B campaigns. So, Graves switched
from the big, famous, mainly B2C broker to a B-to-B specialist broker.
Instead of recommending the general IT lists he'd been renting
before, the B-to-B broker dug a little harder and came up with highly
specific list ideas, such as TechRepublic opt-ins who'd noted an
interest in specific types of IT training.
Graves was happy enough with results to run a standing order for
several thousand new names per week, which he broke down into
smaller chunks to be mailed over several days. He explains, "We
just have three sales people, so in order to not overload them, we
space it out, doing some on Tuesdays, some on Wednesdays and then
some on Thursdays."
In order to gather the most sales leads from each mailing, Graves
and his team devised a landing page with three different offers,
each designed to appeal to a different personality:
1) Win a free Palm Pilot
2) Q&A Do you consider yourself a geek? Take this MCSE Quiz to
find out
3) Free MeasureUp Practice Exam $99 Value
Despite this plethora of offers, the page was cleanly designed
enough not to be confusing. (You can check it out for yourself at
the link further down.)
Next Graves decided to see if he could improve landing page
conversion rates even higher by adding a live online chat option.
Again he was careful not to overload the sales team. He says, "We
only link 500 of the emails each day to chat." Graves knew
nothing's more frustrating than promising something that doesn't
work, so he only had the chat offer come up during the hours of the
day when his sales team could answer it. He says, "Beyond that
time frame, visitors wouldn't see it. They didn't know the
difference."
RESULTS
Graves says the first week he switched list brokers, the
results from the more highly targeted lists "blew away" his former
response rates. His campaigns now generally average 10-12% click
through rates. Almost 10% of these visitors then convert to
becoming serious sales leads. Graves says, "They say, ok let me
look into it, let me see if I can get the money. They move toward
becoming a sale."
Graves has noticed a "slight increase" in the conversion rate of
click through to warm sales lead for the names receiving the link
to the live chat. However he believes he could improve this with
more sales training. He says, "Selling on chat is different than
selling on the phone. You don't have as much verbiage to do it
with, you have to be much more to the point. As soon as you see
the prospect drifting off subject, you have to grab the reins right
away and bring them back."
Sento's sales cycle is at least two-to-three months long, so Graves
doesn't have enough closure data to give definitive metrics yet.
However he does say, "My goal is to close at least 2% of all leads
generated and I definitely expect we'll do better than that."
NOTES: The name of the B-to-B broker Graves is so happy with? B-to-B
Works.
Graves' advice for B-to-B marketers testing email, "You've got to try
experimenting with a lot of lists and keep tweaking your campaign.
Don't get discouraged if the first one or two, or even the ninth,
bomb. Make sure you use your broker for advice too. I bounce
things off my rep constantly!"
A landing page for a Sento campaign:
http://www.mcsetraining.com
Sento Corporation Home Page
http://www.sento.com
B2B Works
http://www.b2bworks.net
*******************************************************************
PRACTICAL KNOW-HOW: Myth Exploded -- Yes You Can Merge/Purge Rented Email Lists!
*******************************************************************
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Guess what? Anybody who tells you that you can't merge/purge
rented email lists is wrong. In fact it's one of the biggest myths
in B-to-B online marketing today.
Merge/purge, the art of checking lists against each other to
eliminate duplicate names, is critical in email marketing because
so many businesspeople are on more than one mailing list. The more
targeted your audience, the more likely they'll be on more than one
of the lists you rent. If you don't purge duplicates, the more
likely you'll annoy your best prospects by jamming their in-boxes
with identical messages!
Currently many B-to-B list owners and brokers say the only merge/purge
they can do is between a single rental list and your house file;
and, that de-duping multiple rental files against each other is
supposedly impossible. However, according to Jay Schwedelson,
Corp. VP Worldata/WebConnect, who heads the Association for
Interactive Media's Council for Responsible Email, this is
incorrect.
He says, "Last week for a mailing, we were able to merge/purge
rental lists from 15 different sources. All the major list
providers including Netcreations and YesMail are willing to
participate. In fact email lists are easier to merge/purge than
postal lists because it's just one field."
Why then, are some list owners resisting merge/purge? Schwedelson
says there are two reasons. One is that merge/purge is extra work
for not much compensation. He says, "If I want to do a merge/purge
on 5,000 names they may laugh at me." However, he notes B-to-B
mailers can get around this by renting their lists through brokers
who do enough volume on behalf of other clients that they can
"leverage that relationship." Failing that, you could always offer
to pay a bit more.
Schwedelson notes security fears are also a major factor when list
owners say no to merge/purge. He says, "People are very insecure
about sending email databases from one place to another. It's
understandable because it's not very hard to abuse an email list."
However there is a fairly simple solution: instead of sending
complete email addresses to be merge/purged, owners can send
addresses with every other character removed. For example, instead
of sending "editor@b2bmarketingbiz.com" you could send
"e i o @ 2 m r e i g i . o "
Every other character is enough information to get rid of any
duplicates, while not risking the chance that someone could steal
your list. Schwedelson says, "This solution is completely privacy-
compliant. It makes everybody happy."
To learn more about the Council for Responsible Email
http://www.interactivehq.org/html/cre.htm
Worldata/WebConnect
http://www.worldata.com
***********************************
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(c) Copyright 2001, MarketingSherpa, Inc.
