This year will be another year of key strategic and tactical decisions for marketers. With flat or reduced budgets, marketers will once again have to determine where to invest for the best return.
So if you want to get the most juice for the squeeze for your marketing dollar in 2010, here are five things you must do:
1. Invest in Digital Media That Optimize Customer Engagement
Use search to attract customers to your website
The No. 1 tactic for attracting prospective customers to your website is search. Using pay-per-click (PPC), or paid search, in combination with search-engine optimization (SEO), or natural search, to attract visitors to your website or landing page is vital if you want to make your site a magnet for potential customers.
To maximize search return on investment, test various keywords and phrases with paid search to determine which drive the most traffic. Then, incorporate those keywords and phrases into your website and blog content. The result will be higher rankings for your site in search results.
Design your website to engage visitors
Research has found that 9 out of 10 website visitors leave without ever identifying themselves. That's because the majority of websites are not designed to serve the visitor and invite that visitor to become an email subscriber.
Let's face it. The website is where consumers and business professionals begin the product-research and information-gathering process. Take a good look at your site. If it's boring, difficult to navigate, and does not give visitors a good reason to identify themselves, it's time for an overhaul.
Use email, mobile, and social media as your triangle offense
A recent survey of more than 1,000 marketers conducted by ExactTarget and eConsultancy found that 28% of marketers are shifting more dollars to digital media.
Moreover, 54% plan to increase budgets for email marketing, 66% plan to increase investments in social media, and 56% plan to increase budgets for mobile marketing.
Clearly, there is a trend toward using digital media that mesh well with one another to enable marketers to engage customers in conversation and keep them connected to the brand.
2. Make Service the Cornerstone of Your Marketing Strategy
Treat subscribers with respect
In his newest book, Flip the Funnel: How to Use Existing Customers to Gain New Ones, Joseph Jaffe says service has become "the new currency" of customer retention and email has become the most-effective tool for serving customers.
To put it simply: If you show email subscribers you care about them by providing relevant and timely information that aids their buying process and enhances their product-usage experience, they will reward you with repeat business.
Take time to understand the customer's needs
One of the smartest—and easiest—things you can do to serve email subscribers is to let them tell you how they want to be served.
To do that, set up a Subscriber Preference Center; then, when you send your welcome email, invite new subscribers to click through to the Preference Center, where they can identify their needs and preferences.
Deliver relevant information, offers, and invitations
Effective email marketing "serves" the subscriber by delivering information and offers that are relevant to the subscriber's needs and interests. And the key technology for personalizing email content is dynamic content.
Dynamic-content technology enables you to use subscriber data such as purchase history, event attendance, and profile attributes to dynamically personalize email content.
And if you sell through sales agents or dealers, one of the smartest things you can do is to personalize the email by sending it "on behalf of" the customer's sales representative or account manager. Putting the agent's picture and contact information in the email will boost response rates 15%-20%.
3. Leverage Social Media to Attract New Customers
Embrace social media—but use it intelligently
Businesses are realizing that social-networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are invaluable for serving current customers and attracting new ones.
Savvy marketers use their pages on those sites to provide access to information, invitations, and offers that respond to consumers' or business professionals' needs and interests.
Moreover, marketers can invite people to subscribe to the company's email newsletter so those subscribers can begin receiving useful information and exclusive offers to events.
Use Social Forward to enable content sharing
According to Tim Schigel, founder and CEO of ShareThis, email is responsible for 50% of all content that is shared on the Internet.
That represents a huge opportunity for marketers to expand the distribution of their emails to potential customers. And the most effective tool to promote content sharing is Social Forward.
Social Forward is "new-age word-of-mouth marketing." By embedding social-media icons—for top social-networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn—in the content of their email, marketers make it easy for subscribers to share an article or offer with friends and colleagues with whom they are connected.
Research has found that shared email has consistently high open rates because it is coming from a known source.
Establish your own social-networking site
As social networking continues to emerge as a powerful tool for engaging customers and prospects, many brands are beginning to add value to their customer relationships by creating private social networks that they control and use to provide access to product information, case studies, instructional videos, and other resources that address the needs of current or prospective customers.
4. Keep a Close Eye on Your Email-Sender Reputation
Understand the penalty for sending boring emails
Engagement is now a critical factor in email deliverability. If subscribers are bored with your emails and are no longer opening them, Internet service providers (ISPs) take notice and will interpret the lack of interest as meaning that the unopened email is spam.
Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, and AOL now monitor subscriber engagement as part of their ongoing email-filtering process. Your best defense against being labeled a spammer— and lowering your Sender Reputation Score—is to deliver content that is what subscribers want.
Pay attention to your spam-complaint rate
Subscribers can now easily file a complaint about an email message they don't feel is useful: All then have to do is click the "Report as Spam" button found in most email-client applications.
The spam-complaint rate is one of the most important metrics ISPs use to measure subscriber engagement. If subscribers view your emails as irrelevant or interruptive to their lives, they are more likely to report your email messages as spam.
Another useful technique to reduce your spam-complaint rate is to reduce your sending frequency. A recent test conducted by ExactTarget found that four times the number of subscribers were likely to re-engage when the email frequency went from weekly to monthly.
5. Use Testing and Tools to Optimize Email Performance
Become a relentless tester
The inbox remains one of the most hotly contested pieces of digital real estate on the Internet. If you are not regularly testing your email and landing pages to ensure they are driving the maximum response, you are putting your email program at risk.
There are three tests you should be doing regularly: Design Testing (email and landing page), From-Address Testing, and Subject-Line Testing.
For each test, use A/B testing to test 2-3 different versions and determine which performs best. Use that data to ensure all components of your email program are optimized.
Don't assume that all emails render the same
Not everyone uses the same email software to receive and read email. Although many of us use Microsoft Outlook, many also use Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL, and Hotmail.
What should you do? You can easily find various design tools and guidelines online that enable you to verify that your links and images work, that your code is valid, and that your email appears the same, regardless of the email client your subscriber uses to read it.
Get inspired by case studies, which are a great way to see how other companies handle the same challenges you face. Our case study collection Twitter Success Stories shows you how 11 companies are achieving their marketing objectives via Twitter campaigns. Social media such as Twitter are a must if you want to improve your marketing strategy and boost revenue
