Top 9 Newsletter Tips; IBM's Rich Media Results; Maximize Online PR

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B2BMarketingBiz From MarketingSherpa.com
*************** March 6, 2001; Vol. 2, Issue 10
Please forward WITHOUT cutting.
Free subscriptions at: http://www.b2bmarketingbiz.com

1) News: Maximize Your Online PR Results

2) Case Study: IBM's Rich Media Ad Test Results Are "About Six
Times Better than Traditional Direct Mail"

3) Practical Know-How: Top 9 Tips for Successful Sales Support
Email Newsletters from CareerBuilder, Inc

4) More Exclusive Headlines

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NEWS
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Publisher's Note: We don't go to a lot of trade shows because
we're busy like you are. But there's one this month we're making
room for -- B-to-B BQ in Austin Texas March 22-24. A grand total of
56 B-to-B marketers with hands-on experience in online and integrated
campaigns will be sharing their real-world stories with attendees.
If you're interested, click the link below to learn more. (If
you're already booked, never fear, we will bring you our best-of
notes from the show!)
Click on http://www.b2bbq.com/ms

* Maximize Your Press Release's Impact by Adding Hotlinks to a
Microsite

"In the old days we used to put unique 800 numbers in press
releases, " John Coe, President of Database Marketing Associates
says. Now Coe advises his B-to-B clients add a URL which links to a
special offer page or microsite onto all their press releases.

It used to be that press releases just went to the press. However,
these days all major release distributors, such as PR Newswire and
BusinessWire, automatically include online distribution to the news
areas of sites such as Yahoo, AOL and dozens more. Releases are
also included in electronic newsfeeds that distributors such as
Factiva sell into corporate intranets worldwide. Therefore, many
release readers may be your end-target, business executives. And
as Coe explains, "Press releases are generally looked on as being
more credible than sales materials." This means every single
release you send out could be generating sales prospects for you.

That's why Coe advises against using your standard home page Web
address as the URL in your releases. He says, "You can't measure
response, or collect leads, unless you're able to tie your stimulus
to a response." Coe recommends using a white paper, brochure, tech
report or company newsletter as an offer.

Coe also recommends that business marketers maintain two
relationships to make the most of releases: close communication
ties with the PR, IR and marcom professionals who prepare and send
your company's releases so hopefully you'll hear about releases
before they go out; and an account with an outside firm who can
build a response microsite for you super-quickly during emergencies
when there's no time to wait for your internal Web development
folks to get one up.

Case in point, recently one of Coe's client's PR departments posted
a release to their Web site without telling marketing beforehand.
Luckily Database Marketing Associates already had an account with
TouchScape who were able to whip up a special mini-site for the
release's online click throughs in less than an hour. All the
results flowed from the microsite into the client's database. To
learn more, contact Coe at john.coe@b2bmarketing.com.
http://www.prnewswire.com
http://www.bizwire.com
http://www.touchscape.com

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CASE STUDY: IBM's Rich Media Ad Test Results Are "About Six Times
Better than Traditional Direct Mail"
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CHALLENGE
As we reported in a Case Study dated 11/14/2000 (see
link below) IBM has raised sales by 30% to many of its biggest
customers through its personalized Gold Service program. This
winter, Gold Service Director Dan Flack and Integrated Marketing
Communications Manager Dianne Lucca decided to see if all the media
hype around rich media was true. Could a personalized customer
campaign featuring Flash and audio raise sales even higher?

Until now, most rich media campaigns have been aimed at consumer
audiences. Flack and Lucca had to develop a campaign reflecting
IBM's brand, which targeted Fortune 1000 executives in suits, and
sold products a lot pricier than the average videogame.

CAMPAIGN
Flack and Lucca decided to run two tests to segments of
their Gold Service customer database. They contracted outside
vendor Townsend Agency to power the tests with its T-Card
technology. (Links to both tests are below under Results.)

In both cases, IBM did not send customers a rich media email
directly. Instead, they sent selected customers a personalized,
text-based email or direct mail message that included a link to the
rich media card online. Flack says, "We try to respect our
customers. They don't receive the Flash immediately; they have to
click out to our server to see it. So, they don't have to view it
unless they are interested." IBM also added a link to the rich
media cards on its special sites for Gold Service customers.

The first test, which featured a Flash video of a server, was sent
in November 2000 to a selected group of Gold Service customers
who'd previously expressed a strong interest in servers. You
wouldn't think a Flash video of a server could be remotely
interesting (after all, it's basically just a box) but this card
really is a lot of fun while looking classy enough to impress a
business audience.

We're most impressed with the fact that the clean design featured
almost no copy, just a sense of excitement and not one, not two,
but three hotlinks to click through to the response form. The top
one and middle links both read, "Continue", while the bottom one
read "Next" just in case people didn't already get the point. The
offer at top read: "To open the box and receive a complimentary
leather writing portfolio, click continue"

Next click throughs landed on a one-page response form with a
paragraph of sales copy about IBM servers and about 10 required
questions, such as "What's your level of involvement in IT purchase
decisions?", designed to winnow out the best sales prospects. To
encourage response, the very top right corner of the response form
featured a hotlink entitled "Your Privacy." Privacy information
was also detailed at the bottom of the form.

The second campaign, entitled "happy holidays," went out in
December to a test cell of Gold Service customers who'd expressed
an interest in servers, printers and storage products. Recipients
were told to go to a special Web page to view a holiday greeting.
This Flash video was much more like a little movie, showing a "Big
Bossman" snowman sternly lecturing a stressed IT guy snowman about
all the stuff he has to get done. (Both are wearing ties,
naturally.) IT guy snowman gets a pained expression and starts
melting. The next screen says, "This holiday don't have an
ebusiness meltdown" and then viewers are presented with three
options: play the video again, send it to a colleague or take
advantage of special holiday offers on servers, printers and
storage products.

RESULTS
Overall, the rich media cards have produced a response
rate that's six-times higher than IBM Gold Service's average direct
mail response rate. The server campaign got a 12% click through
rate, and of those who opened it, 85% clicked through to the
response form with 65% of these filling out the form completely and
submitting it.

Proving that all rich media campaigns are not alike, the holiday
card got an initial 25% click through rate. In this case 10% of
these folks then clicked again to get to the special sale response
form; 63% of whom then filled it out completely and submitted it.
An additional 5% of card viewers chose to forward the rich media
video to at least one colleague. Lucca notes, "There was no
incentive here, no premium. It's a testimonial to the relevancy
and the creative."

Of IBM's Gold Service customers who clicked on links to the rich
media cards while visiting the Gold Service site, about 80% clicked
all the way through to the response form and more than 65% of them
then filled it out completely and submitted it.

Flack noted that these various response metrics made it obvious
that the most critical challenge is, as always, to get recipients
to click through to the response form. From that point on response
rates are more uniformly high.

IBM routinely does post-testing when sending out messages. In the
cases of these two campaigns, recipients had an astonishing 95%
recall rate. However, Flack and Lucca do not expect any of these
outstanding metrics to remain quite as high over the long haul;
and, they both warn of the dangers that come with overusing new
interactive ad technologies. Flack says, "Just like direct mail,
email has the potential to be very inundating to customers so you
have to be judicious about what you send and how often you send it.
You also have to make it compelling for them to read." Lucca
adds, "First and foremost, make sure the offer is something they're
interested in!"

LINKS: These links are not guaranteed to be good forever, so you
may want to try them out pretty soon....

Link to @Server Flash Campaign:
http://www.etownsend.com/ibm-demo/flash_detected.htm

Link to 11/14/2000 Case Study on IBM eMarketing:
"How IBM Grows Sales 30% a Year"
http://www.b2bmarketingbiz.com/sample.cfm?contentID=1118

Sample of the Holiday Text Email With Link to Card:
Subject: IBM wishes Dan Flack happy holidays

Dear Dan Flack:

IBM has sent you a special holiday greeting. So take a break and
check it out. To view your holiday e-card, just go to
http://greetings.townagcy.com/ta_retrieve.php?MessageID=2127909511
right now.

You will need Macromedia Flash Player installed. To download it,
please visit:

http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?
P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash

If you decide you no longer wish to receive e-mail messages from
IBM, please let us know by sending a note to netreply@us.ibm.com
and include "e-mail privacy - 100ARE19" in the subject line.

The Townsend Agency: http://www.townagcy.com/

**************************************************************
PRACTICAL KNOW-HOW: Top 9 Tips for Successful Sales Support
Email Newsletters from CareerBuilder, Inc
**************************************************************

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It's the fastest growing category of content online -- almost every
business in North America has started publishing, or is planning to
publish, an email newsletter for customers and key prospects.

Dave Olson, Marketing Director at CareerBuilder, Inc. has been
sending a highly successful newsletter to 50,000 HR executives in
order to support his company's direct sales team for about a year
now. We contacted him to find out what his (relatively) time-
tested, best practices tips are for marketing communicators who
also support a sales team:

1) Create different newsletters for different audiences.

CareerBuilder divides its customers into three distinct audiences:
job seekers, companies recruiting employees and agencies
specializing in recruitment advertising. The Company sends a
different newsletter to each of these very different audiences.
Olson is in charge of the newsletter for companies recruiting
employees.

2) Don't overwhelm your lists with too much email. Less frequent
is better than too frequent.

Currently Olson sends his newsletter on a monthly basis. He'd like
to change the frequency to twice-monthly, but his primary concern
is keeping the quality of the content very high, and this takes a
lot of work!

3) Focus on articles that appeals to your audience -- that make
their jobs easier, save them money, or help them to be heroes in
their organizations -- instead of simply sales copy for your
products.

Typical headlines from CareerBuilder's business customer newsletter
include: "Ten Steps to Hiring Success" and "The Executive Talent
Crunch." The newsletter also includes corporate news, such as
"What's going on at CareerBuilder" but these items only appear
lower down in the newsletter, after the purely "useful" articles.

4) Constantly track which articles get the highest readership, so
you can continue to bring readers compelling and engaging content.
Otherwise they'll stop opening your newsletter and just click
"delete" whenever they see it next.

Olson's newsletter features a short summary of two-three new
articles that readers can click through to read entirely at the
CareerBuilder Web site. He generally gets a click through rate in
the "mid-teens" which includes viral clicks from some pass-along
readers.

5) Vary your house ads and marketing offers contained in the
newsletter and track their results as well. Olson says, "It's
critical to measure every possible thing you can measure."

Olson has learned a great deal by tracking results from his house
ads, including the fact that sometimes an 800 telephone number can
win out over a hotlink to a Web offer. He's also learned that for
his particular audience hard offers and savings offers don't do as
well as promotions that offer something that can help recipients in
their day-to-day job.

6) Don't make it too intense or too intense-looking. Your
newsletter must be an obviously quick, easy read. Olson recommends
keeping it short -- his newsletter is shorter than two complete
pages. Most business executives are too busy these days to spend
time reading a longer marketing message; no matter how useful.

7) Yes, you can use HTML to make your newsletter look cleaner and
more appealing (and to include your brand's logo) but don't overuse
it. If there are too many graphics, your newsletter might download
too slowly to please readers. Plus, really big files will bounce
off of overloaded corporate email boxes so you'll have a lower
delivery rate.

Olson recommends keeping a clean, sharp look with an emphasis on
white space and readability over graphics.

Always offer a text-only version to customers who can't receive
HTML or who prefer not to.

8) Include links to your "Best Of" older articles from prior
issues. Remember, not all of your readers may have received (or
perhaps opened) prior issues. Olson reports that he definitely
gets click throughs to the older article links he places at the
bottom of each issue. "People are obviously reading it."

9) Don't expect to make sales directly from your company's email
newsletter. This may be possible in some industries, but in most a
newsletter is best used as a branding device, to keep your name
"top of mind" in your target audience.

Olson notes that CareerBuilder is a "very sales driven company."
His newsletter often feeds leads to the sales team, but its primary
purpose is to help keep leads and customers warm while the sales
team moves them through the initial sales and later upselling
process.

To see a sample of Olson's email newsletter, go to:
http://www.careerbuilder.com/cbnetworknews/networknews.html

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