Just-in-Time Marketing

Using triggered email to put you in the right place at the right time.

“I recently read an article about how venture capitalists like to think that they are

marketing geniuses. As I see it, it’s not limited to VCs.

The article pointed out that if you sit in on a C-suite meeting, the CEO reports on the

overall health of the company, the CFO gives an update on revenue and expenses,

the CIO reports on the infrastructure. Everyone nods their head in feigned

understanding or sighs with concern.

The CMO stands to give his report and suddenly everyone vies for an opportunity to

pontificate on their opinion.

This reminds me of more than a small number of senior-staff meetings in which I 

have participated, I’ve watched in complete disbelief as the CEO took a slightly

hostile stance concerning the subject lines of emails being sent to promote a new

product.

[Seriously?! The CEO doesn’t have more pressing concerns than the subject line of

an email?]

The article went on to point out that the reason [investors] have such strong opinions

about marketing is that this is an area where they can fake it far more convincingly...

[Here, here.]

— Cyndie Shaffstall, founder, Spider Trainers

Introduction79% of marketing leads

never convert into sales.

Lack of lead nurturing is

the common cause of

this poor performance.

— MarketingSherpa

As marketers, we know the importance of timeliness — being

in front of the client with the right offer at the right time — and,

fortunately, email automation makes this possible. With

triggered campaigns, we are transcending from when-we-can

marketing to just-in-time marketing and it’s making a

difference. Triggered email marketing enables us to reach our

leads and prospects at a time that is most relevant to them

(and not when most convenient for us). These campaigns,

targeted with applications of explicit and implicit data, are

making great strides in:

response rates

cross-sell and up-sell activity

relevance of messages and offers

timeliness of delivery

Nurturing your customersNurturing Campaign.

A series of emails

designed to develop

leads as sales ready.

The process is used to

build relationships and

develop trust with

prospects in a way that

is both consistent and

relevant.

Regular distribution of emails will help with getting your

name out there and building and maintaining your brand.

Emails enable you to be in front of your client when the time

comes for them to make a purchasing decision.

Types of triggers: Transactional, Recurring, Threshold

Key Points: all three types of triggered emails should

focus on information that is relevant to your audience.

Analytics make the difference: Each event should be

designed to disclose as much information as you can

glean

Chapter 1

Choosing a softwarePassive lead,

subscriber, or contact.

A term to identify

members of a contact

list who have neither

unsubscribed nor

clicked on any links.

Active lead,

subscriber, or contact.

A term to Identify

members of a contact

list who have clicked on

a message link that

indicates a level of

interest or engagement.

Automation is important to triggered campaigns. While

nearly any email application can send a series of

emails, triggered campaigns can become

unmanageable if you are required to launch every

event, gather statistics, and segment responses into

buckets manually.

There are a number of applications from which to

choose, including Act-On Software, HubSpot, Eloqua,

Marketo, Pardot, InfusionSoft, Silverpop, ExactTarget,

Genius.com, Vertical Response, and more.

Chapter 2

Planning your event

It’s quite easy for a triggered campaign to become unwieldy and

provide you with more information than is useful to your company.

To rein in the collection of too much data, we recommend that

you map your program using a schematic of some sort.

Define your goal: To keep your campaign on target and establish its

success, you must define a goal and track and measure quantifiable

results.

Buckets: The action of your leads and customers in a triggered

campaign should be used to categorize the recipient’s position in the

purchasing or engagement process.

Chapter 3

Campaign componentsCompanies that try to

contact potential

customers within an

hour of receiving

queries are nearly 7

times as likely to have

meaningful

conversations with key

decision makers as

firms that try to contact

prospects even an hour

later. Yet only 37% of

companies respond to

queries within an hour.

Not every triggered campaign will have all of the possible

components, but understanding the role of each is

important.

Launch email: the initial email used to get your campaign

rolling.

Response email: at least one other email triggered

automatically based upon some action or interaction.

Nurturing emails: a series of emails sent after the initial

launch.

Sign-up form: displayed on a landing page, either at your

website or hosted in your automated email application

Chapter 4

Campaign components [continued]

Form-confirmation landing page: upon successful

submission of a form, display a confirmation in the

same browser window.

Form-confirmation email: a message to confirm to

the visitor that you have received their form

submission.

Targeted landing pages: web pages that provide you

with additional real estate to sell the recipient on the

offer or just provide additional details.

Chapter 4

Campaign components [continued]

One of the most-

challenging aspects of

marketing is making

certain that you are

sending relevant

messages to your

audience. Segmentation

improves your ability to

identify your audience

and create targeted

messages.

Survey or poll: the inclusion of a poll or survey to your

campaign will reduce the number of unsubscribes and

confirm that the people in your list want to be there and

want to hear what you have to say.

Database: the best list is the list you build through

standard business practices such as attending events,

outbound calling, direct mail, partners, and offering

valuable content for download.

Segmentation: will enable you to send targeted

messages to each division.

Chapter 4

Designing content

An inbox is a very noisy place and the importance of

design cannot be understated. Most email applications

offer templates, but templates rarely represent the

uniqueness of your company, brand, product, or services.

For a small investment companies such as Spider

Trainers can create a custom template to visually promote

your brand, matches your website, or is completely new

and unique.

Chapter 5

Designing content [continued]

In a phenomenon known as tunnel vision, users may focus on only that content

that specifically interests them. Unfortunately, this often means that they will

ignore all other content — even if it is important or critical. Good design,

planning, and grouping helps to overcome this narrow view.

Chapter 5

Designing content [continued]

Here the key elements that you should include in most messages, whether you

are B2B or B2C:

CTA: Arguably, the most important content within your triggered campaign

are the calls to action. These little nuggets are the engagement point of your

event — the reason to click.

Testing CTAs: Calls to action are great fodder for A/B and multivariate

testing — as long as you follow the rule of one message, one call to action.

Chapter 5

Designing content [continued]

Personalization: most studies on the effectiveness of

personalization in email indicate that click-thru rates

are higher when the message is personalized, but not

when you personalize the subject line.

Mobile (responsive) designs: the desktop computer

still dominates most email interaction and accounts for

64% of opens overall, the mobile (tablets and

smartphones) makes up the 36% balance. If your

mobile users account for even as few as 10% of your

list, it’s probably time to consider sending mobile-

friendly formats (responsive).

Chapter 5

Writing subject linesSubject lines with 49 or

fewer characters had

open rates 12.5%

higher than for those

with 50 or more. Click-

thru rates for subject

lines with 49 or fewer

characters were 75%

higher than for those

with 50 or more.

— Return Path

Subject lines with five or

six words outperformed

subject lines of any

other length.

It’s well established and common sense that subject-line

content needs to grab your audience’s attention and get

them to continue reading — anything short of that and

you’ve wasted your time — but word length plays an equal

role and has its own list of dos and don’ts.

There was a time when spam filters were set up to filter

out certain words such as FREE, but today emails are

more likely to be filtered out based upon a company’s

reputation. If your reputation is strong, you can try using

some words that may have been considered spam in the

past.

Chapter 6

Writing subject lines [continued]

Convey a sense of

urgency.

Value proposition.

Timeliness.

Calls to action.

Give it a number.

Look for inspiration.

Ask a question.

Be clever, use a pun,

or try risqué.

Use segmentation for a

personal touch.

Keep it short.

Write it last.

Test, track, and tweak.

To create an interesting subject line,

consider these points:

Chapter 6

Testing, tracking, and tweakingA/B test.

Two versions (A and B)

are compared, which

are identical except for

one variation that might

impact a user’s

behavior.

Multivariate testing

(MVT).

Two or more design or

content changes at the

same time.

Testing the effectiveness of your campaign components is

essential to gaining insight into recipients’ behavior so that

conversion rates can be increased. At Spider Trainers, we

divide testing into two categories: pre-open and post-

open. We’ve found that it’s essential that you understand

what about your email you can affect when you implement

testing processes.

Chapter 7

Testing [continued]

Feature testing: In addition to A/B and multivariate testing, your campaign

can be used to test the importance of benefits, features, and site content.

If you are testing a call to action and sending two versions of the email (with the

same subject line) but have an open rate of only 1%, you will not likely have

sufficient data to effectively measure the call-to-action results. A call to action is

a post-open testing point. For this A/B test to be effective, you will need to first

focus on pre-open testing points in order to increase your open rate.

Chapter 7

Lead scoring

Within the scope of triggered marketing, lead scoring is

the process of ranking prospects against a scale that

represents their sales readiness. The resulting score is

used to determine which leads will be further engaged, in

order of priority. For best results, both explicit and implicit

demographics and data should be used to calculate the

score.

Work with sales to agree upon and assign a point

value for each sales milestone as it is reached.

The best type of lead scoring comes from the sum of

both explicit and implicit data.

Chapter 8

Following upThe best lead-to-sales

processes are

established jointly

between marketing and

sales. Be sure to

establish sales follow-up

guidelines.

— MarketingProfs

Remember to follow up on all leads in any format

acceptable to your organization:

Auto responders: Automatically send messages to

the person who has interacted with the campaign.

Traditional follow up: Few types of contact are as

welcomed as handwritten notes.

Personal follow up: You should be working toward

building trust with your recipients so be careful when

you choose the phone as your vehicle for connecting

— it can be disconcerting.

Be polite, be relevant, and say thank you.

Chapter 9

Surveying recipientsLead nurturing emails

have a slightly higher

unsubscribe rate (1%)

than individual email

sends (0.5%), indicating

their effectiveness in

removing unqualified

leads from the sales

funnel.

— HubSpot

Building a solid and trustworthy relationship with your

email recipients involves knowing what kind of information

they wish to receive from you and how often they would

like to receive it. Allowing them to make their own

decisions by providing them with a preference survey will

help you achieve that goal.

Preference surveys are easy and depending upon the

questions can be serviced automatically using a triggered

marketing campaign for each type of response.

Chapter 10

Retiring namesThe average email list

depreciates by 25%

annually.

— MarketingSherpa

The value of keeping your mailing lists updated and

current must not be underestimated. Neglecting your

databases can have a negative impact on your

campaigns and, therefore, take a toll on your

outcomes.

By removing stagnant leads, duplicates, those who

have unsubscribed and opted out, and just plain old

contacts, you are building upon your email campaign’s

effectiveness, which will automatically boost your

success rate.

Chapter 11

Social sharingSocial sharing.

Buttons or links within

your email that enable

the recipient to share

the message contents

within their social

network. Forward to a

friend falls in to this

category as well.

Social following.

Buttons or links within

your email that enable

the recipient to connect

with you within your

social networks.

There are several approaches to integrating social

networks in your email campaigns, some are embedded in

the email itself while others are best left to the landing

page (they require JavaScript which is often marked as

spam content when embedded in an email).

Your email should have a single call to action. When

you add social sharing, social following, and other links

to the email, you distract from the call to action.

For some emails, you’re hoping for sharing and

forwarding and in this case, links are appropriate and

encouraged.

Chapter 12

Learning from your campaign

• Email analytics: Post-send analytics are the cream of

your nurturing email crop. In order to understand and

improve upon results, you need an application that will

provide you with ample visibility into the metrics —

from send to purchase, and all the steps in between.

• Site analytics: Our first rule of thumb for any

campaign launch is that the client must have the site

depth to support the campaign. That means that there

must be several pages at your website that will further

the message of the campaign. Make sure you have

enough information at your site to convince them of the

validity and your trustworthiness.

Chapter 13

Budgeting

We’ve found that — like all things marketing — the best

approach is test, track, and tweak. Your budget will

depend upon several considerations.

Spending your budget: Triggered campaigns can be

designed to last for two weeks, two years, ten years, or

anything in between. The amount of time will depend

upon many factors, but be careful about trying to get

too much bang for your buck.

Chapter 14

Marketing is like sex.

Everyone thinks they’re

good at it. Everybody

thinks they’re a

marketing expert. Your

boss, the CEO, the IT

guy — I bet half the

people in your company

think they know more

about what customers

want than the

customers do.

Everybody’s a focus

group of one.

— CBSNEWS.com

Budgeting [continued]

In-house development: If you’re considering in-house

production, here are points to ponder: Cost: your internal team represents substantial overhead and

considering their existing workload, may not be able to take on a

project of this size.

Exposure to advancements: Your internal team is rarely as

motivated as an external agency to stay on top of technological

advancements and industry trends.

Objective third party: Internal teams tend to give far too much time

and credence to what their competitors .

Extensive specialties: Spider Trainers, as an example, is a network

of more than 80 industry contractors marshaled by a team of six

company principals.

Chapter 14

Conclusion

Spider Trainers has sent millions of emails on behalf of

our clients and the only steadfast rule that we’ve found

that applies to every client is that with testing, tracking,

and tweaking your campaigns will improve and you will

gather the knowledge required to achieve true ROI; and

for many companies that’s the true definition of

conversion.

Chapter 15

As a business

professional, I get a kick

out of internet people

talking about my ROI.

Most of them have no

idea whatsoever what an

ROI is, much less how to

improve mine.

What has been so

impressive about Spider

Trainers is that they really

take time to understand

what I think about my

current spending, my

current measurables, and

current ROI; and then we

agree on the

improvement metrics

that are needed.

Conclusion [continued]

Triggered campaigns have far more moving parts than traditional email sends.

This is because of all these moving parts — now automated — that the results

are so impressive. Even though the automation makes the process user-

friendly, it can seem overwhelming. We believe that Act-On Software is the best

option because it is easy to use and enables our clients the opportunity and

ability to participate in their programs.

Chapter 15

Conclusion [continued]

Spider Trainers provides multi-touch online and offline marketing and web

development to make your brand more visible, elevate search-engine rankings,

attract appropriate visitors, and enable educated purchasing decisions.

Spider Trainers has decades of experience in print, web development, go-to-

market initiatives, and sustainable, behavior-based online and offline, traditional

and emerging marketing strategies.

Chapter 15

Conclusion [continued]

Most companies approach marketing and web-development in the same manner — build

it and they will come. As hundreds of site owners the world over have come to know, this

is rarely the case. If you want to sell online, you must market online. You must announce,

contribute, promote, link, analyze, test, modify, analyze again, and so much more. If you

build a social recognition throughout the web, then they will come. It can be build it and

they will come, but somewhere along the way someone told someone about a baseball

diamond in the middle of an Iowa cornfield.

Rely on Spider Trainers to tell someone about yours.

Chapter 15

Contact Spider Trainers

Phone: 651 702 3793

Email: spidertrainer@spidertrainers.com

Website: http://www.spidertrainers.com

Address: PO Box 280487

Lakewood, CO 80228 United States