Friday, July 13, 2007

Make the Business Case for Email: Three Ways to Talk Your Boss's Language

by Loren McDonald

Email is the most-used tool in the marketer's arsenal—but there's a pretty good chance your CEO just doesn't understand its contribution to the bottom line. Unfortunately, that's because most marketers don't get it either. And, as long as we don't get it, we also won't get the boss's ear long enough to get the resources we need.

Email marketing suffers from what I call the resource-to-ROI imbalance. Poorly done email still delivers pretty good ROI, so it's hard to justify the need for more resources.

But without those resources—namely, dedicated email specialists—you can't implement the best practices that could take your ROI from good enough to great.

Let's say you want to increase your annual email marketing budget from $300,000 to $500,000.

Make the standard plea for that budget increase "because you really need it," and you'll probably get a swift, no-brainer "No." Make the case that you can produce an extra $8 million from that $200,000 spend, and your CEO will probably say, "Make it happen."

Here's a three-step process for talking business with the boss, instead of weighing him or her down with marketese:

  1. Clarify the one strategic thing email does best for your company.

  2. Document why your current approach is leaving money on the table.

  3. Paint a clear and credible picture of what the new resources make possible.

Clarify what email does best

Most CEOs don't understand the "business purpose" email serves, because it's used for everything from marketing campaigns to shipping notifications to saying hi to Bob. This makes it hard to pin down what email is actually worth—until you get crystal clear on the strategic role and function of email in your company.

You start by assessing all the different ways your company distributes email externally. How much email is going out to customers, prospects, and partners? Who's sending those messages—other marketing teams, sales, customer support, IT? Pin down who's doing what, and then ask why.

Now take a step back and ask yourself, from a strategic marketing perspective, what email does best. For ecommerce and retail-oriented companies, this tends to be fairly straightforward. Email increases sales and customer loyalty by regularly driving customers to your Web site and retail locations.

But what if you work for a B2B company? It could be that you use your monthly newsletter and lead follow-up emails as the primary way to move prospects to a "ready-to-buy" stage, thereby increasing the productivity of your sales force.

Come to a consensus with management on the core role of email in your company, such as building brand relationships, retaining customers, driving revenue, generating leads, or a mix thereof.

Now build your entire marketing program around this one core function and directly correlate improvements to your email processes with tangible business benefits.

Demonstrate what's wrong with your current approach

Consider hiring en email-marketing expert to conduct an audit of your program. Outsiders serve as a credible "voice of authority," and they often find opportunities for improvement that you could never have envisioned—such as how to dramatically improve deliverability, increase opt-in conversion rates, or reduce list churn.

The audit should evaluate the "process" metrics that demonstrate how well-executed your email program is. Things like open, click-through, and bounce rates, unsubscribe activity, and spam complaints are indicative of larger issues, like the health of your lists or whether your subject lines are compelling.

But don't make the mistake of forgetting that you are probably the only one concerned with your process metrics. Your CEO could care less.

"Output" metrics are the lifeblood of the boardroom. The boss wants to know how email marketing is moving the company forward. Did it generate more revenue, increase brand awareness by 20 points, or get 10% more prospects to sign up for demos?

If email's one core role, for example, is converting second-tier search-engine-marketing leads into top-tier leads that the sales force can pursue, that's the starting point for your ROI analysis.

Your baseline ROI calculation should spell out how much it currently costs to achieve email's core strategic goal. Don't forget to include the cost of employee time, because unworkable internal processes are an often-overlooked bottleneck on the road to ROI.

Now put your ROI calculations in context by benchmarking your company against industry averages and best practices, which you can find in the trades and analyst reports. Showing how you stack up against competitors, and more importantly the leading practitioners, is the most eloquent argument you could ever give that your results are phenomenal or just ho-hum.

Prove the bottom-line impact of new resources

This third and final step is what turns the incessant marketer's whine for more resources into music to the CEO's ear.

You go beyond the usual plea for another full-time employee and perform a fact-based "gap analysis" of how much it costs to achieve your goals.

The gap analysis is where you turn pesky process metrics into a business case. If you're only getting 75% deliverability in the inbox, you need people with the right skill sets to redo your permission, opt-in, and authentication processes to reach a goal of 95%. If you close that 20% gap, how much would those additional opens, clicks, and conversions move you closer to your strategic goal?

This process also empowers you to justify shifts in marketing strategy. For example, your thought-leadership newsletter may prompt prospects to sign up for five demos per month—but your strategic goal is 25 demos. Closing that 20-demo gap may require a different approach, increased frequency, or an entirely new lifecycle-oriented email vehicle, so you present the costs and benefits associated with these changes to your program.

You should, of course, make sure your budgeting requests are in alignment with your company's "resources culture." For example, if your CEO prefers outsourcing, then recommend increased usage of an email marketing agency, your ESP, or freelancers.

Putting it all together results in a compelling business case:

  • You present the current state of affairs: You currently spend $300,000 on email software providers, staffing, and designers, and you generate $6 million in revenue.

  • You explain what's possible: If we invest $500,000, we can generate $14 million in revenue.

  • You explain how you'll close the gap—that tighter list segmentation, higher deliverability, and reduced list churn affects your strategic goals by X percent or Y dollars. This forces you to be conservative with your forecasts, and convinces the CEO that you have the ability to accurately measure the improvements and hold yourself accountable.

Conclusion

Speaking the language of business, the only language your boss understands, is the key to getting the email-marketing resources you need. The best time to do your business-case analysis is right now, one tiny task at a time, in the summer months, when things are slow.

The week before budgets are due is not the time to start your analysis from scratch. Budget time is when you put the research pieces together to make sound recommendations about money and headcount.

Loren McDonald is chief marketing officer of J.L. Halsey (www.jlhalsey.com), a marketing technology and services company. Reach him at loren.mcdonald@jlhalsey.com.

Published on June 5, 2007

The 'Secret Recipe' for PR Success

by Gail Z. Martin

Successful public relations (PR) isn't really free. Although businesses don't pay for PR the same way they pay for advertising space, to get results PR requires time, expertise, and effort.

PR success isn't mysterious. It comes down to a mix of old-fashioned research, savvy trend-watching and good people skills. It is the age-old talent of telling a good story. That's really the essential difference between PR and advertising.

Advertising is about selling. PR is about storytelling. People don't like to be sold to; they're suspicious of salesmen. But human beings have been passing along their most precious stories since before recorded history. We hand down our most essential information—about our families, our beliefs and our history—through stories.

Here's the "secret recipe" for telling your business story through public relations.

Start with good research

Do your homework. Before you're ready to pitch, you need to know which media reaches your decision-makers and gatekeepers and whether they prefer online or traditional formats.

To find this out, think about your ultimate consumers' age, education, economic background, ethnicity, professional and social interests, self-image, and worldview. Then find the media outlets that match and deliver an audience similar to your ultimate consumer.

It's also important to know whether your target consumer gets information online or via TV, radio, or newspapers/magazines.

Tell a compelling story

Get to the heart and passion of why your company exists: Did the owner start the company because of a personal connection to the need that the product/service meets? Did the business overcome great adversity to get started or grow? Is there an interesting story about how the product came to be created? Does your company have a mission to change the world? Can you tell a memorable story about how you saved your clients?

Once you identify the Real Story of your business, you have a unique marketing tool no one else can copy.

Match the story to the reporter

Reporters cover certain subjects. They absolutely hate to be bombarded with pitches that have nothing to do with what they or their magazine/newspaper/show cover.

So don't send business news to the lifestyle editor. Don't send lifestyle news to the banking editor. Don't send anything to the editor-in-chief if you can possibly help it. Show them you've done your homework.

And while you're at it—read, watch, or listen to the reporter's column or show before you pitch and make a reference in your pitch to what you've seen/heard.

Follow up persistently

Reporters are busy. Silence is not the same as "no." Silence may mean that the pitch never reached them or that the first copy was discarded. It may mean that they're too busy to get back to you even if they're interested. It may mean that they've been reassigned and someone else is now covering that topic. Maybe the email address didn't work.

I've been told by hosts and reporters that it can take six follow-ups to get a story. Be polite but be persistent. And if the answer is "no," ask why. Was it wrong for them or their paper/show? Off season? Similar to something they've recently done?

You can learn a lot by asking why and listening. (Hint: Never call to follow up late in the afternoon, when reporters are usually on deadline.)

Match your pitch to what's in the news

Has there been a flood? If you sell disaster recovery services for small businesses, pitch stories about clients who have bounced back—with your help—after a flood. Is it spring? Now is a good time to pitch a story about professional organizing services or mobile shredding to help with office "Spring cleaning."

For best results, be at least a month or more in advance of predictable seasons and holidays. For breaking news tie-ins, try to be within 24 hours, or it may be old news. The 24/7 news cycle means there is a lot of time and space to fill—reporters are always looking for hot related items.

Answer, show up, deliver

Woody Allen said, "Half of life is showing up." Showing up is 100% of dealing with the media. Never cancel an interview unless you're in the hospital.

If you're booked to be on radio or TV, get there early. Be ready to deliver a personal, entertaining, reader-valuable, and benefit-rich story. Remember that the media isn't there to give you free publicity. The media exists—and gets to remain in business—only when they entertain and inform their listeners.

If you don't present information that entertains or that can be used immediately by listeners to solve a problem that matters to them, readers or listeners will walk away—and might not come back. Entertain and inform, and you'll be asked to return.

Build relationships

It's not over when the interview ends. Reporters are always looking for good information and good sources. You can become a subject-matter expert by letting reporters know you are available any time they need an expert opinion on your area of specialty.

When you come upon a good story idea, an interesting fact or a connection you can make for the reporter with another person, offer to help. You'll become a reliable source, and see yourself quoted again and again.

* * *

Combine the above elements, and let it simmer. You'll see your PR success begin to rise in no time.

Gail Z. Martin owns DreamSpinner Communications (www.DreamSpinnerCommunications.com) and has over 20 years of corporate and nonprofit experience at senior-exec levels. Reach her via "gail at dreamspinnercommunications dot com."

How (and Why) to Centralize Your Email Marketing

by Loren McDonald

Picture three email campaigns. The first is poorly written, with broken links. The second has a fancy design, but it renders so badly that half the recipients can't see the offer. The third has great content and great design—but gets not-so-great results.

Our third entrant—by all accounts the creative "winner"—in fact loses, because all three emails came from the same company and hit the inbox on the same day.

There's a message here.

According to JupiterResearch, a mere 38% of companies have a single department handling email communication—while a whopping 24% have six or more.

With silo marketing teams running the show and a chronic resource-to-ROI imbalance forcing marketers to juggle email and two dozen marketing duties, it's no wonder that different business units produce dramatically different results.

Marketers in one group may teach themselves how to test, optimize, and segment email; their counterparts in another group may blast away with little concern for what isn't working.

This is why centralized email marketing is emerging as a best practice. Centralization is about putting a core team of email-marketing experts in place to handle the complicated and mundane tasks most marketers aren't equipped to handle.

There are two broad approaches:

  1. Creating a completely centralized group that acts as an internal agency and handles every aspect of every group's email marketing program.

  2. Tasking a central team with email oversight. Business units still produce their own emails, but the centralized function offers advice and oversees execution.

No matter which path you take, you need dedicated gurus who live and breathe email, understand the challenges, apply best practices, and focus strategically on how to use email to drive business results.

What Tasks You Should Centralize

The goal of centralization is to free marketers to focus on campaign strategy: better messaging, segmentation approaches, stronger offers, the most effective use of the email channel.

The centralized team should take on those tasks that require email-specific expertise:

  • Sharing of best practices, with the centralized team cross-training internal staff, from brand managers to designers to writers to Web site programmers.

  • Overseeing permission and privacy policies that ensure compliance with CAN-SPAM, as well as all applicable international, federal, and state regulations.

  • Controlling quality—and therefore brand perception—by enforcing email design, messaging, and programming best practices. All business units use complementary templates, along with From and Subject lines that make sense. The central team catches brand-damaging mistakes, such as broken images, expired offers, and incorrect links.

  • Production, with a dedicated team refining the process of execution and so achieving greater efficiency to accommodate tight or unexpected deadlines.

  • Data management that encompasses the inputs (list rental, email addresses, and demographics) as well as the outputs (reporting and metrics), because collecting the right data points up front is the only way to segment and personalize down the road.

  • Reporting ROI and communicating the value of email marketing to management and across departments—in the language the boss understands.

  • Conducting market research, such as customer-satisfaction surveys, that give all departments the customer feedback they need to better understand the user and accordingly improve offers.

  • Managing vendors, agencies, and technology. As part of the centralization process, many companies discover to their chagrin that they are under contract to multiple email service providers, and are working with multiple agencies or freelancers with varying degrees of expertise.

How Other Companies Have Centralized

Here's how two real-life companies benefited from centralizing email marketing:

  1. An online financial services company with mortgage, home equity, and auto loan business units was deluging customers and prospects with email. Each business unit was independently extracting lists from the company's database and launching email campaigns, and the Web site itself was spitting out a high volume of transactional email.

    The company put a centralized team in place to discover exactly how much email was going out and from whom. It developed unified branding for all the company's emails. Most importantly, the centralized team authorized only a handful of people to send messages, essentially shutting off the email-marketing valve. This put the company in charge of the user experience.

  2. A major technology publisher that delivers nearly 200 newsletters each week to millions of subscribers has 16 distinct brands, each run by a separate business unit. The parent company established a centralized team of five operational staff and seven engineers to handle newsletter delivery and back-end processes.

    This approach empowered each business unit to control the strategy, messaging, and content for its newsletters—but eliminated a great deal of redundancy. Many of the business units had come into the fold via acquisition, bringing their own email service providers, IT staff, and email-marketing processes with them.

    Over a five-year period, the centralized team standardized the entire company on one ESP, brought software tools in-house, and built a sophisticated database with a common methodology for managing subscriptions.

    The email operations team is now known not only for its reliability but also for its sophisticated reporting and best practices. The group routinely recommends one business unit's innovative approaches to the other brands, assuring that success in one business unit gets replicated across the entire company.

Four Steps to Centralized Email Marketing

To move your company toward a more centralized approach:

  1. Do detective work to reveal how much mail is going out and who runs which programs. Your companywide email inventory should include your sales organization's messages from the CRM system, various marketing teams' campaigns, and your Web site's transactional engine.

  2. Get buy-in from the bottom up and from the top down that your current email-marketing processes aren't nearly as effective as they could be. Marketers must agree that it's important to protect customer assets and brand reputation. Management must step in and say, "Here's how we're going to run email marketing."

  3. Appoint an "email czar"—usually a director or manager of email marketing. Pedigree matters. The email czar needs to be the in-house employee that the other email marketers look up to or a respected outsider who brings instant credibility to the role. A junior marketer just won't cut it, because the email czar must champion the user experience—with the power to enforce guidelines on how often subscribers can be contacted and what kind of messaging they receive, and the authority to direct IT and creative services resources as appropriate.

  4. Establish a companywide email-marketing calendar, an ironclad system for deciding who sends what and when. Owned by your email czar, it predetermines which departments or types of emails get higher priority. It sets frequency caps that limit how many company emails an individual may receive per week or per month. All affected departments have a say in setting the calendar, and all must abide by it.

Conclusion

Establishing a core team of email-marketing gurus to service various business units helps you avoid the inevitable erosion of quality that comes from silo email marketing.

You solve today's issues, such as deliverability and rendering, with a team of experts who champion best practices. You also prepare for tomorrow—a dynamic-content future characterized by personalized subject lines, offers, articles, and products.

Your future success depends on having in-house know-it-alls with deep email-marketing expertise.

Loren McDonald is chief marketing officer of J.L. Halsey (www.jlhalsey.com), a marketing technology and services company. Reach him at loren.mcdonald@jlhalsey.com.

The 411 on Email Campaign Metrics

You've created a great email campaign and can't wait to see the results. Since most email service providers allow you to track each campaign's metrics, you can get an early glimpse of the its effectiveness. Jeff Horsager of the blog AdGeek explains what you'll see:

Deliverability rate. By subtracting the number of bounced messages from the total mailing list, you can determine the deliverability rate. Bounced emails are classified as hard or soft. Hard bounces weren't delivered because the email address doesn't exist. For soft bounces the email address was valid but a temporary issue like a server being down prevented delivery.

Open rate. By inserting a small graphic, sometimes called a Web beacon, it's possible to measure the number of opened emails. This isn’t a full-proof method: It works only for HTML—not text—messages, and can be hampered by email programs that automatically block graphics unless the recipient chooses to see them.

Click-through rate. This is the percentage of recipients who navigate to your site through the email campaign. It is measured in the same way as banner or text ads.

Unsubscribe rate. Though a businessperson’s least favorite metric, the percentage of recipients who ask to be removed from the mailing list can help you refine the content of future campaigns.

The Po!nt: Using the tools at your disposal, you can learn from each campaign and improve the next.

For more on email marketing campaign metrics, read the blog AdGeek.

What's It Mean to Be a Marketer?

Hello, I’m Valeria Maltoni, and I’m a marketer. What exactly does that mean these days? That is aside from the obvious laundry list of tactics that are associated with the “marketing” brand. Yes, dear colleagues, let’s admit it -- by and large, we’re still seen as order takers.

It’s also our fault. Before you move onto the next post, let’s agree on the qualities that make a good marketer today. We need to be good at (the highlights):


DailyFixLadder.gif

How many of you have put these skills to use in the course of your daily work? There is a reason why the list is ordered that way. Many of us climb the first couple of rungs of that ladder really well, yet we rarely get to the others. Why?

The problem, as I see it, is that we don’t do a good job at selling ourselves. Ladies and gentlemen, what people often see is the end result, the campaign, the ads, the program. So they come to the obvious conclusion that that’s where marketing resides. Marketing = tactics.

You’re not convinced yet. You’re thinking that rookies make that mistake; they are too inexperienced to articulate the value of what they do to senior management. Consultants do a better job at this. Their clients hire them on the strength of their being able to articulate what they bring to the table.

What if I told you a brief story that illustrates how a top-notch marketer made the classic advertising rookie mistake? The following story is extracted with slight edits for length from the book Rebuilding Brand America by Dick Martin, former VP Public Affairs at AT&T.

After 9/11, the President decided that we needed to do a better job telling the Brand America story. So who did he turn to? Charlotte Beers, the first woman to rise to the top of two agencies, Ogilvy & Mather and J. Walter Thompson –- making her the most prominent woman in advertising.

Secretary Colin Powell turned to “the Queen of branding,” “the Queen of advertising,” or “the Queen of schmoozing,” as people called her. His idea was that we needed to sell democracy, the product of a free enterprise system –- the American value system.

Beers went at it in earnest, doing her research, meeting with people, and working around the clock to come up with the “Shared Values” campaign, a $15MM effort. The response was good, but the campaign didn’t work. Why?

Ms. Beers gave her client what he wanted rather than what he needed. Two major forces where against her:

1. She was not familiar with the intricacies and bureaucracies of reconciling the mandate from Secretary Powell and the complex web of communication offices at the State Department and across the administration. Her sense of urgency blinded her to the fact that she needed to research and understand the dynamics of this organization.

The lesson: know the environment in which you move really well, do your due diligence, speak with key stakeholders, and find the gatekeepers and the internal network’s nodes.

2. She jumped on a running train. She sat in on conference calls where the president’s communications director, Karen Hughes, was already leading State and Defense Departments staffers in writing the message of the day and plotting political strategy.

What happens when you’re put in charge of getting a message out and someone else is already doing it? The due diligence would have uncovered that many of these decisions had already been made. How about going back to the people who put you in charge and request that the business support you as the new lead?

The lesson: your first priority should be to set strategic direction. Find those people within your organization who set the tone from the operational side and partner with them.

You may also find, as Ms. Beers did, that there aren’t enough staff and resources allocated to your department. That will need to wait for another conversation.

Repeat after me, next time someone comes to you requesting a brochure, or a web site, or an ad, what do you say?

Let’s climb that ladder, shall we?