inluminent

On January 16th, I attended the Austin AMA High-Tech Breakfast where a panel was discussing the topic “Economical Online Marketing - Utilizing and Maximizing Your Investment”. I promised a write up.

The meeting was held in the Wedgewood Room of the Arboretum Rennaissance Hotel in North Austin (great place to stay if you’re ever in town and want to be in a trendy part of town vs. in downtown).

The discussion was focused on email marketing, but since it was a panel with a Q&A presentation it did drift into some non-email related areas. The panel was composed of Rebecca MacDonald from Cogent Communications, Bill Leake from LCGrowth, Nancy Grimes with LaunchPad Representatives, Adrian Cardwell from SBC, and someone from Dell whose name I didn’t catch (and wasn’t the same person that was listed on the program). (Interesting sidebar: None of the smaller companies listed above have accessible websites. I couldn’t find two of them using Google and the third one gave me a “Couldn’t find DNS entry error”. What does that say about these ‘online marketers’?)

(Click the “More” link to read their AMA provided bios as well as the rest of this long entry.)

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Each panel member gave a quick 5 minute introduction. Rebecca pretty much just went through her bio.

Bill went through a quick Powerpoint with his 4 steps for online marketing:

1. Understand the goal [of your marketing]

   a. Define victory

   b. Find and set benchmarks for comparison

   c. Answer this question: “What are you really trying to accomplish?”

2. Prepare the Path

   a. Make sure that your business is ‘ready for the rain’

   b. Every website needs to be a conversion vehicle. Either provide a way for a customer to place an online order, or transaction, or at the least, turn your website into a lead generation vehicle. You have to get something from the customer every time they come to your website.

   c. Every website has to have an offer of some sort on it. (I think of this as “when was the last time you walked into any retail store and there wasn’t something on sale? Or something to catch your eye that was an offer?) Get them to give you something, and give the consumer something tangible in return.

3. Track & Measure

   You have to track your customers from the first click on a banner or an email link all the way through to their last purchase with you. Know your customers. Know what they’ve bought and what they’re buying next. Otherwise, you’re not going to be as effective as you want to be.

4. Test and Iterate

   If you’re going to market something, make a commitment to doing it more than once. You never learn unless you keep refining your process. Don’t look for a ‘one hit wonder’.

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Nancy gave a quick bio, then started talking about her favorite marketing reminders: BFO’s.

BFO’s are “Blinding Flashes of the Obvious.” (I love that term).

1. Keep your Message Clear: Use Precise Messaging.

2. Give the customer a compelling reason to come to you for your product.

3. Don’t give the potential customer all of the information up front. Make them ask for more.

4. Give consumers an incentive for doing something right now.

Nancy then talked about choosing your marketing tools. There are many many tools out there that can help a business track and correlate their data from marketing initiatives into something they can use (sidebar: I just read an article about Enterprise Software in the latest Business2.0 that problably mentions some great tools). Choose a tool to help you. Don’t try to be an expert in everything — get some help. Measure your results and make future decisions based on those measures.

Nancy’s last tip was to combine online marketing with traditional marketing. Online marketing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. She recommends knowing your ROI, as well as keeping your databases clean (you’d do this in traditional marketing too).

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The lady from Dell (whose name I didn’t catch) spoke next and covered marketing from a small business growing to a large business and gave a few hints of how Dell went from a small direct mail computer maker to a large online custom computer maker. She spoke about Dell’s experiences and told us that their main focus all of these years has been lead generation based marketing and customer life-cycle marketing. She says that Dell maintains a huge independent email marketing division that markets constantly to potential customers and current customers. Dell knows if someone just bought a computer and sends them an email that might say “Buy a digital camera for your new computer” instead of what their potential customer standard messages say: “Buy a computer”. Dell doesn’t always gather customer’s email addresses at the point of purchases, so they employ things like email append vendors and direct mail response vehicles. She also said that it has taken Dell a long time to perfect their current practices and that they still have a long way to go, but that they’ve been successful up to this point (who could disagree?). Oh, and 23% of Dell’s total marketing budget is spent in the online realm. That’s pretty impressive.

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Adrian from SBC spoke last and shared with us some of the challenges his group has faced in the large corporate world. One anecdote was that the SBC CEO doesn’t even have a computer on his desktop at work, so you can imagine how tough it might be to sell the idea of ‘online marketing’ to him. SBC used to have just a simple ‘business card’ website, and embraced the idea of customer interaction management online by building a massive customer support website as well as a product information store online. Lastly they maintain a 7 million email address database.

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After the quick presentations the forum turned into a Q&A session with the panel members taking questions from the audience.

Dell was asked about building good email lists. Dell generally recommends working with good affinity partners (like American Express, Citibank, American Airlines, etc.) and advertising in other emails that have the same demographics that you’re looking for.

Nancy was asked how to do email marketing on a small budget. She said that the SUBJECT line is critical in her experience. Use a clean HTML formatted email with a text-only backup. Make them want to ask for more information.

Bill was asked about tracking email response. He recommended the use of cookies, specific URLs for each email (maybe even new domains) as well as the use of PROMO codes on offers to track response.

SBC was asked about effective surveys online. Adrian recommended offering small incentives for people’s time. Ask just a few questions. The survey shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes to answer. You can always ask for more information later. Dell commented that they get the same response rates for online and offline surveys with about the same results (and if I might add online surveys are cheaper probably).

Dell then spoke about using editorially relevant emails as advertising platforms. Make sure that those emails have good open rates and ask for the average reponse rate before committing your dollars. If the publisher can’t give them to you, find another publisher (there are plenty of them). Use a microsite as the click-thru for emails that just asks people to sign up for a relevant email list, or asks the consumer to send them more information that’s relevant to them… don’t go for the sale on the initial click-thru… go for the information.

SBC was asked about email appending. Adrian answered with an explanation of what email appending is, and how to use it. Email appending is where the business works with an append broker that matches names with email addresses. He said that they then send an email on behalf of the business asking people to opt-out of further email marketing messages. Then the appending company sells a list of subscribers to the business. This helps with ‘current customer’ retention and further aquisition of more services in SBC’s case.

Someone else asked about marketing to high-level executives via email, when there is likely a gate keeper checking that person’s work email and the general consensus from the panel was that it’s hard to do, but if you can, get the executive’s home email address. Explain why the offer is relevant and why you want that home address, then be careful and thoughtful with emailing to their home address. Make sure that you treat those recipients better than everyone else you email. (I think of this as the 80/20 rule. 80% of your sales come from the top 20% of your clients).

The meeting was very informative and quite useful. I’ll be attending another soon I’m sure.

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bios:

Rebecca MacDonald, from Cogent Communications, served as the Moderator.

Rebecca has over 12 years of experience in high-tech marketing. Most recently she was Director of Marketing Communications at Motive, one of Austin’s fastest growing and most successful software companies. While at Motive, Rebecca was responsible for developing the company’s core positioning and brand identity, and for executing those messages through a wide range of sales tools, direct marketing programs, advertising and events. A significant part of that strategy included highly targeted e-marketing campaigns that leveraged tools such as the motive.com Web site, virtual product tours, Webinars, online advertising, and e-mail marketing. Prior to Motive, Rebecca worked in marketing management and consulting roles for several technology companies such as voice application provider Artisoft; Clarify, Inc., a leading CRM software company; Datasweep, a collaborative manufacturing software provider; and Octane Software (now e.Piphany) an eCRM application provider. Currently, Rebecca a works with clients in Austin and Silicon Valley through her marketing writing and consulting business, Cogent Communications.

William Leake, Managing Principal of LCGrowth

William is managing principal of LCGrowth, a firm focused on helping its customers profitably grow revenues by providing them with quality leads and tactical marketing assistance. LCGrowth is Leake’s fourth private-equity backed venture. Before LCGrowth, Leake, was VP of Marketing and then President at Journyx, a profitable software company in Austin, where he grew the company from 5 to 50 people, largely through online marketing efforts. Before Journyx, Leake worked at McKinsey & Co., and held leadership positions at Dell Computer and Power Computing. Leake has an MBA with honors from UT Austin, and did his undergraduate work at Yale University.

Nancy Grimes, V.P. Operations of LaunchPad Representatives

Nancy is currently the VP of Operations and partner with LaunchPad Representatives-a consulting firm specializing in marketing and technology efforts in the promotional products industry. Websites, web stores, online incentive programs and email campaigns are the primary focus of LaunchPad’s business along with making sure their clients are utilizing available marketing tools effectively. Prior to working with LaunchPad Representatives consulting, Nancy was Director of Distributor Operations with promoOrder-a technology company providing webstores to distributors and clients in the promotional industry. Nancy has also owned her own business, Zeal Marketing, which catered to Austin businesses for marketing, collateral, and promotional items.

Adrian Cardwell, Associate Director, eChannel Strategy of SBC Communications, Inc.

Adrian Cardwell currently serves as Associate Director of eChannel Strategy for SBC Communications, Inc., a Fortune 30 company, and one of the world’s leading data, voice and Internet services providers. With over 8 years of marketing experience at SBC, Adrian has worked in a variety of positions within the company, including retail sales & marketing, wholesale marketing, finance and most recently, online marketing. After joining SBC’s fledgling permission marketing team in November 2001, Adrian directed a variety of multi-media acquisition efforts to grow SBC’s opt-in email marketing base from 1 million to almost 7 million in less than a year’s time, with one of the lowest acquisition costs in the industry.