Email Segmentation 101 - Things To Segment Your Email Campaigns By
By Christopher Knight

Print | Email This | Bookmark | Subscribe | Comments (0)

Competition for the attention of your email newsletter subscribers or permission-based email marketing campaign members is rising. To increase the relevancy, deliver more value via email, *AND* increase your sales -- now is the perfect time to begin doing more email segmentation campaigns.

Here are (11) ideas for "what" to segment your email list by:

1. Prospects that have become clients:
   

   Once an email list member has become a client, it's time to move them to a different level of list where they receive emails that are designed for clients and not prospects. There is nothing that can create more cognitive dissonance than for an existing client to receive an email marketing to them as if they were a prospect offering them a better deal than they just received.

Product lines purchased:

If your firm has a wide line of distinct product lines, it's best to address your prospects and clients by product line. Give this segment specific offers or content relevant to the product line they are interested in or purchased.

Average ticket price:

Many times a client that gives you a sale in the $1,000+ average ticket price is worth far more than a client that purchased products from you in the less than $100 range.

Major clients:

VIP clients need to be acknowledged, remembered and given better attention, gifts of exclusive information / content and some of your best deals.

Most recent visit:

If you have transactional customers who only purchase your type of product once every 3 years (for example), do you think it would be wise to segment this type of buyer so that the moment you identify their recent visit or click of a specific campaign from your site, that they would be the perfect target for increased attention and offers vs. other times in this type of customer buying cycle?

Demographics:

Demographics might include age, race, gender, education levels, occupation, location of residence, marital status, number of children, income or other socio-economic factors, etc.

This is not to be confused with "Psychographics" or the identification of certain characteristics that your clients have that would influence their buying decisions. These could be factors that include measuring their attitudes, interests, opinions, cultural identity, etc.

Interest-based preferences:

If you've done surveys over the past year, then you know certain email members have different interests that can help you classify their interest levels in various offerings related to your core product or service.

Open rate or CTR action rates:

Simply stated, email list members that open your newsletter or click on something on a frequent basis are clearly more engaged than members who do not click on things... therefore, you can test sending a higher frequency to your most engaged members to increase conversion or response.

Sales Creates Sales: (Follow Up Campaigns)

As soon as you've segmented your clients from your prospects, now its time to automate the sequence of emails that they will receive as a separate email segment based on the types of products they purchased. Your goal is to reinforce the wise decision they made by purchasing from you and help them purchase the next level of product from you.

Acquisition Channels:

Where your email members came from is known as an ‘acquisition channel' and different acquisition channels have different characteristics. Example: Co-registration email list members will always respond or convert differently than organically acquired email members.

Geography:

Your prospects or clients in a foreign country really don't want to hear about your domestic holiday chit chat. Best to segment by the major countries you serve so that you can deliver geo-targeted messages that are more related to your members.

Do you see the email segmentation pattern here?

The objective of segmenting your email list members is to increase the relevancy of your messages so that they add more value to your members - ultimately, so that they buy more from you.

This can be overwhelming if you're just starting out, so I recommend planning on at least segmenting by prospects vs. clients. Start there and as you begin to get improved results (better sales, conversions, etc), then continue narrowing your email segments to improve list member loyalty, confidence and improved purchasing likeliness. You can do it. Get started today!

This Ezine-Tip was submitted By Christopher Knight -- Email List Marketing Expert, author and entrepreneur. Get your weekly dose of Email newsletter publishing, marketing, promotion, management, email-etiquette, email usability and deliverability tips by joining the free Ezine-Tips newsletter: http://www.emailuniverse.com/subscribe/.

Ezine-Tips for December 12, 2005

Additional Ezine-Tips Articles from the Content Category:

• Email Newsletter Volume and Numbering Schemes - What's The Rule To Follow?
• Ezine Topics- What To Send Your Email Newsletter Audience This and Next Week?
• MailerMailers Email Marketing Metrics Report Recommends Personalized Subject Lines
• Email Reputation More Important Than Content To Improve Email Deliverability Performance
• Email Newsletter Topical Ideas For 2007 - 5 Quick Strategies
• Ezine Publishing: To Include Personal Info or Not?
• Email Newsletter Production - Should You Find Someone Else To Publish Your Ezine?
• The Email Newsletter Publishing Value Perception Paradox
• How To Weave Your Story Into Your Email Newsletter
• Can Ezines Be Over-Produced? What's The Connection Between Ezine Quality vs. Results?
• Ezine Content Idea: What I'm Thinking About Next
• Email Newsletter Archive Organization - 4 Tips and 1 Option To Avoid At All Costs
• Ezine Width - How Wide Should An HTML Email Newsletter Be?
• Steal This Newsletter
• An Easy Way To Choose Newsletter Topics
• Who's on First?
• How The New Email Laws From Michigan and Utah Affect Ezine Publishers
• Top 10 Tips to Give Your Newsletter Impact!
• Ezine Writing Tips: Beyond Once upon a Time
• Ezine Article Ideas - 15 To Spur Your Creative Writing Spark
• Begin The Emotional Connection With Your Welcome Message
• 11 Things You MUST Know Before Hiring a Copywriter!
• The Incredible, Edible Subhead
• Putting the YOU in Your E-zine
• Four Stand-Out Subject Line Strategies
• Four Subject Lines to Avoid
• Nonprofit Ezines: Remember the 'Ask'
• Guest Column: You Talking To Me?
• Ezines for Nonprofits the MPR Way
• Are You Being Served?
• Feedback: Tone-Deaf or Perfect Pitch?
• 'Chatty' or 'Cool:' Finding the Right Tone
• First Responders to War News
• What Makes a Winner?
• Who Is Your E-zine Really FROM?

National Geographic

As a producer of so many media channels, National Geographic is nailing it using email as an engagement catalyst for all. It is one of the largest curators of content from multiple media and creators of new content in a continuous cycle. So what is it doing right? Well, to begin with, the company is asking. Asking for your preferences, your profile, your desire for each email type, and, most importantly, your permission. That last one is the most important of all. National Geographic has set up some great opt-in centers across multiple locations that enable you to really set the level of engagement you desire.

Dropping down to a real web geek level here: National Geographic does a great job of informational architecture, allowing me to quickly understand and find the information that I'm looking for. With a brand that has so much content, being able to quickly do a visual scan of the content and pull the relevant information out in order to make informed decisions is key. On the design geek side, I am always excited to see the brand's emails, as the library of stunning images it uses will always hold my attention for just a little longer than average.

Beatboxing isn't the point. It's TweetMic that's interesting (though I like the beatboxing).

Earlier this week, I attended the Sales 2.0 Boston conference (Twitter: #s20c) — where Silverpop was a Platinum sponsor and exhibitor.  This follows my recent attendance at several other marketing conferences, including the Forrester Marketing Forum 2010 and the SiriusDecisions 2010 Summit, which I have also covered in recent blog posts.

All three events had strong B2B demand generation takeaways, but the focus of each was different.  Forrester was targeted primarily at the enterprise marketer (and had a heavy B2C slant); SiriusDecisions was targeted probably 65%/35%, marketer/sales, and covered best practices for both enterprise and mid-market companies; and Sales 2.0 (as you might imagine by the title) mostly covered the sales team’s point of view in the demand generation equation, albeit with some strong B2B marketing insights, for just about any size organization.

Source: Silverpop

This sales focus was evident via the event’s theme, “Sales Productivity in the Cloud” (although what the event’s organizers meant by ‘the cloud’ — whether that was a SaaS thing, or more holistic — was never fully developed).  And this focus was accompanied by a strong dialogue thread around the ability of B2B marketing and sales technologies to deliver the ‘most important currency’ to your sales organization — i.e., a salesperson’s time — as Polly Sumner, Chief Adoption Officer with Salesforce.com, highlighted in her morning keynote.

Another prevalent dialogue thread was how marketing and sales activities can become more accountable and predictable –at both a process and a technology level.  This was a real emphasis of remarks by event chair, Gerhard Gschwandtner, Founder and CEO of Selling Power, the event’s producer.

One final and predominant dialogue thread was around the whirlwind of change we find ourselves in today as B2B marketing and sales professionals.  There was a real sense that transformation is actively occurring around B2B demand generation practices — especially around marketing and sales roles — with activities increasingly aligning around the buying process.

“The idea behind the Sales 2.0 movement seems to be gaining momentum, especially as companies come out of the recessionary funk of last year,” noted a post on the Business Software Buzz blog that re-capped the event.  “Businesses are looking to have increased growth and optimal sales strategies.”

Thereasa Fullner, a marketing leader with Salary.com and afternoon panelist, highlighted this fact when she commented, “The strongest trait you can have [in demand generation today] is to change and adapt.”

So between the two keynotes and the six panel sessions, what were the major takeaways from Sales 2.0 Boston on Monday?

I’ve gone back through my notes, through my own torrent of Tweets and through others’ blog posts from the event, and here are the five, resultant major points that seemed to emerge:

                               

> Leverage marketing/sales applications to reduce your data points and act, not to complicate things.

Sumner’s keynote about the sales organization’s most important currency were echoed throughout the day.  One panelist in the afternoon noted that in the current environment, there’s ‘too much data out there’ for our sales teams; thus, we need to help them ’sift through that noise’ and free them up to sell.

“Gone are the days where all that’s known is whether the individual or team meets quota,” noted Geoffrey James in his own blog post on the event.  “Companies are now measuring everything from the time that a lead enters the system to the final revenue generated from an account over years.  And companies are adjusting their strategies to adapt to what they learn.”

Yet several speakers and panelists cautioned that attempts at complex analytics and to build KPI dashboards can be overdone.   “When you build your dashboards, don’t build too many,” urged Sumner.  “My recommendation … is keep it simple.  …  Three tabs at the top is all a new sales person can ever handle.”

Trish Bertuzzi, President of The Bridge Group and an afternoon panelist, highlighted a related point — the importance of using data to get your sales team focused on the opportunities that are a best fit for your company.  “Market segmentation is the key to success today.  If you focus you’ll win,” she said.  And this focus is critically-linked to delivering more-qualified leads to your sales organization.  “With quality comes the need for metrics,” noted Fullner.

                             

> Improve sales performance by aligning processes around common expectations and goals, rather than threatening sales teams with a ‘bat.’

Many of the speakers and panelists throughout the day reminded us that despite all of the change that’s going on in B2B demand generation processes and technlologies, what it takes to succeed as a focused, successful business has not changed.  “It’s always about having a plan — a plan to win,” noted Sumner.  And Dave Fitzgerald, Executive Vice President of Brainshark, reiterated this point in his closing keynote:   “Before you get to the people, process, technology, you’ve got to decide what as a business you’re going after.”

This business focus should then form the basis of a common set of expectations and goals for the company and for the joint marketing and sales organization.  “Marketing segmentation is the number one place where you should start with sales and marketing alignment,” reminded Bertuzzi.  And measuring success should be done against your ultimate goal — against results — not against activity.  “If you measure your marketing on hits on your Website or [on raw] leads,” exclaimed Sumner, you’ll never have marketing/sales alignment. 

Revenue-generation activities by sales team members should subsequently cascade from these overall company expectations and goals — ensuring individual team members’ sales (and thus their self interests) are aligned.  “It’s always easier to get things done with a carrot than with a stick,” said Sumner, who noted that ‘the baseball bat’ is the ‘old’ way of motivating a sales team.

A marketing leader with Monster.com additionally noted on an afternoon panel that this goal needs to be supported and backed by senior management:  “We’ve seen a lot of impact when [the company's senior] executives get involved” in demand generation activities.

                           

> Design and orchestrate B2B demand generation programs around the buyer, not anything else.

The strongest opportunity to focus corporate goals and subsequent marketing and sales activities is to align activities with the targeted buyer and his/her buying process.  One afternoon panelist commented, “A good sales process should be aligned in the way your buyers buy.  …  The question you want to answer is, ‘What problem do you solve?’” And he noted this approach will ‘transform’ your sales/marketing processes if you’ve previously been too inwardly or product focused.

One opportunity for technology to assist this focus lies in enabling nurturing continuity between marketing and sales — especially via marketing automation sync-ed to CRM.  The marketing leader from Monster.com noted, “The real challenge for us …” is how to take all of ‘the buyer journey information’ and get it in front of the sales team.

There is increasing evidence, for organizations with a well-defined buyer-cycle focus and the combination of CRM and marketing automation technology, that nature of actual marketing and sales team members’ roles evolve.  In particular, many companies are redefining the scope and charter of individual roles in terms of the value-add provided at each stage of the buying process.  An example is the emergence of live lead qualification teams as upstream, ‘low-pressure’ points of contact between a buyer and a vendor that bridges marketing and sales nurturing.  “Salesforces of the future are going to be stratified,” noted an afternoon panelist.

                            

> Embrace quality over quantity.

Focused and efficient organizations that are paying attention to middle-of-the-funnel dynamics, are shifting what they value in B2B demand generation programs, away from quantity of leads, to quality of leads.  Fullner notes that this has been a more-recent focus within her joint marketing/sales team at Salary.com:  “We have over the past year … become much more focused on [lead] quality.”

This focus on quality must be accompanied by nurturing strategies that ensure no lead is wasted and that each buyer is engaged at the right time for his/her organization’s decision-making.  “By focusing on improving productivity and reducing leakage,” commented Sumner, sales will improve.

And this highlights the reality that at the core of a focus on quality are underlying processes — supported by technology — not vice versa.  “You’ve got to [develop and] document the process,” urged Fitzgerald.  “If you automate a bad process, you only get bad results faster.”

                            

> Shift how we evaluate the success or failure of marketing and sales technology away from activity and towards incrementally-improving results.

A final but important point was the fact that as there is an increasingly-established track record of success for organizations that have adopted CRM and marketing automation, attention must shift.  The definition of ’success’ in enterprise software used to be ‘go live,’ commented Sumner.  But she explained that today success lies in (and should be judged by) continuous improvement and in the ultimate delivery of results.  This requires orchestrating improvements in people, process and technology together.   “Don’t settle for CRM being the way you roll up forecasting,” urged Sumner.  Use it for more; use it to act. 

This also requires paying attention to the actual adoption of technology by your team and to their integrating these technologies into how they work.  “Explore tools with an eye for how your team will adapt to it.  How they will use it. How it will change the way they work,” offered Mike Damphousse of Green Leads in his own blog write-up on Sumner’s keynote.

My time at Sales 2.0 was well worth the day out of the office, and it was particularly helpful for me as a B2B marketer to attend an event that provides the sales-team point of view on demand generation activities.

Did you attend Sales 2.0 Boston?  What did you think?  What were your impressions and learnings?  What would you add to some of my observations above?  Would love to see your thoughts.

Do you stay on track with your blog content and business goals, or do you share personal stories and events that are peripheral?

I got an interesting comment on a post I did beginning of June and I can’t stop thinking about it. The post was about staying on target with your business goals when you create content for your blog. Don’t Jerk Readers Around: 5 Tips for Staying on Track.

First Eileen said she didn’t agree with my premise that you might be jerking readers around if you’re not staying on track with your content:

“I’m not sure I agree with this. My blog niche is arts and crafts. Most of my favorite other artsy blogs do this routinely. One day they blog about what happening at home. The next they may share a tutorial or run a contest or review a book.”

Then Keenan said, “I agree with Eileen. Although you don’t want to be completely all over the map, changing up your subject matter is critical.

“Blogs represent people. They create connections to their readers through their personalities. When a blog stays on topic all the time, it begins to feel white-washed like any on or off-line newspaper or magazine.

“Personality plays a huge role in a blog. Blogging about those things that are part of the authors passions, likes, dislikes, opinions etc. allows followers to connect with the blog. It’s what makes blogging different than reading commercial news.

“Fred Wilson at avc.com is a perfect example. He will be all over the board, start-ups, social media, politics, (usually on the left), internet, telephony, etc. OK he doesn’t do food.

“Readers want to connect with blogs. Staying too on “topic” make this hard.

“Ironically, I blogged about this connect just today. It’s a unique part of being part of the blogosphere.”

For example, I’d like a place to rant about the 15-hour power outage I had yesterday that caused me to lose a day’s work. I’d also like to share about the consultant I hired who stood me up for 3 appointments.

But I won’t because it’s unprofessional to just complain, rant or whine without presenting a clear “reason why” these stories benefit you, the readers.

I’m reading 2-3 business books that are terrific, and I saw two really funny movies and a great match at Wimbledon. Our night-time rainy season has started and the hills are alive with greenery…

Do I blog about these events? I suppose I could, especially if there were a tie-in to my business or more importantly, if these stories could benefit you the readers in your efforts to master online content marketing through better blogging and time-saving tools.

I live in a gorgeous part of the world with near perfect weather. There are moments that take my breath away, like coming around a corner to discover a primavera tree  in bloom: the yellow shocks your eyes.

At other times, the quirks of the Mexican culture are sweet, and sometimes annoying. I don’t blog about this and maybe I should.

Anyway, I thought I’d ask what you think the right mix is. My current philosophy is if you can tie it into a tip or make it relevant to readers, then it’s okay. If not, don’t take up time. But maybe I’m being too business-focused. Maybe I need to lighten up and add some personal stories.

What do you think? What have been your experiences? Personality counts for sure, how much is the question.

•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
• http://writingontheweb.com/2010/07/02/blog-content-personal-or-all-business/ (sent via shareaholic)%0D%0A%0D%0A----%0D%0A Do%20you%20stay%20on%20track%20with%20your%20blog%20content%20and%20business%20goals%2C%20or%20do%20you%20share%20personal%20stories%20and%20events%20that%20are%20peripheral%3F%0D%0A%0D%0AI%20got%20an%20interesting%20comment%20on%20a%20post%20I%20did%20beginning%20of%20June%20and%20I%20can%27t%20stop%20thinking%20about%20it.%20The%20post%20was%20about%20staying%20on%20target%20with%20your%20business%20goals%20when%20yo" title="Email this via Gmail" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> 
•  
•  
•  
• http://writingontheweb.com/2010/07/02/blog-content-personal-or-all-business/ (sent via shareaholic)%0D%0A%0D%0A----%0D%0A Do%20you%20stay%20on%20track%20with%20your%20blog%20content%20and%20business%20goals%2C%20or%20do%20you%20share%20personal%20stories%20and%20events%20that%20are%20peripheral%3F%0D%0A%0D%0AI%20got%20an%20interesting%20comment%20on%20a%20post%20I%20did%20beginning%20of%20June%20and%20I%20can%27t%20stop%20thinking%20about%20it.%20The%20post%20was%20about%20staying%20on%20target%20with%20your%20business%20goals%20when%20yo" title="Email this via Hotmail" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> 
•  
• http://writingontheweb.com/2010/07/02/blog-content-personal-or-all-business/ (sent via shareaholic)%0D%0A%0D%0A----%0D%0A Do%20you%20stay%20on%20track%20with%20your%20blog%20content%20and%20business%20goals%2C%20or%20do%20you%20share%20personal%20stories%20and%20events%20that%20are%20peripheral%3F%0D%0A%0D%0AI%20got%20an%20interesting%20comment%20on%20a%20post%20I%20did%20beginning%20of%20June%20and%20I%20can%27t%20stop%20thinking%20about%20it.%20The%20post%20was%20about%20staying%20on%20target%20with%20your%20business%20goals%20when%20yo" title="Email this to a friend?" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> 
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
• http://writingontheweb.com/2010/07/02/blog-content-personal-or-all-business/&qualifier=shares" title="Share this on Plurk" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> 
•  
•  
•  
•  
• http://writingontheweb.com/2010/07/02/blog-content-personal-or-all-business/" title="Add to a lense on Squidoo" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> 
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
• http://writingontheweb.com/2010/07/02/blog-content-personal-or-all-business/ (sent via shareaholic)%0D%0A%0D%0A----%0D%0A Do%20you%20stay%20on%20track%20with%20your%20blog%20content%20and%20business%20goals%2C%20or%20do%20you%20share%20personal%20stories%20and%20events%20that%20are%20peripheral%3F%0D%0A%0D%0AI%20got%20an%20interesting%20comment%20on%20a%20post%20I%20did%20beginning%20of%20June%20and%20I%20can%27t%20stop%20thinking%20about%20it.%20The%20post%20was%20about%20staying%20on%20target%20with%20your%20business%20goals%20when%20yo" title="Email this via Yahoo! Mail" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> 

Related posts:

1. Better Business Blogging: Get a personal trainer and buff up your blog
2. Putting the YOU in Business Blogging: 5 tips for getting personal
3. Personal Stories on Your Business Blogs: the fine line
4. 7 Keys to Content Marketing on a Business Blog:
   Why a blog is not a newsletter
5. Your Business and the Web: Getting Better?

The majority of e-mail dollars—70%—are spent on retention efforts, according to a Forrester Research forecast released last June, “U.S. Email Marketing Forecast, 2009 to 2014.” Acquisition via e-mail, said David Daniels, the firm's VP and principal analyst, is much more difficult in today's business climate. Still, when done right, e-mail marketing can become a strong tool for lead generation. The key, Daniels said, is to handle lead-generation e-mails as you would in-person sales calls; it might be the electronic equivalent of a cold call, but there should be nothing cold about it.

You can warm your prospecting efforts by doing something you should already be doing with your retention e-mail marketing database: creating narrow segments whenever possible. This strategy, often called “microtargeting,” enables you to reach out to customers and better match where they are in the buying cycle, said Heather Blank, director of strategic services with e-mail service provider (ESP) Responsys. “Our clients who have been more successful [with lead generation] are the ones creating dynamically generated content by bringing in either Web or profile data,” she said, “and sending content that matches someone's profile very closely.”

You can see this play out when you compare results of purchasing a list to renting space in a publisher's e-newsletter, said Matt Wise, president of online marketing services provider Q Interactive. “If you're a technology marketer, for instance, and you're reaching out to a list where someone has signed up to receive an e-mail from CNET about technology, you're going to get better results than if you bought a list where you don't know where the names came from or how long it's been sitting around,” he said.

Companies can also run into trouble committing one of the most obvious mistakes—the hard sell—jumping right into an offer without creating a relationship. But even those marketers willing to take it slow often commit marketing faux pas. Brand inconsistency, for example, can turn prospects off immediately, said Jamie Schissler, strategy director of interactive agency Razorfish. “This still goes on where you've got multiple groups responsible for a brand,” he said. “If you're sending e-mails divorced from the core marketing team, the message isn't going to be on mark all of the time.” If customers are aware of your brand but then receive a message that seems very different than what they already know about it, they may become confused and look elsewhere, he said.

Marketers also miss out on an opportunity when they don't mention how they got the recipient's e-mail, said Sara Ezrin, ESP Experian CheetahMail's senior strategy consultant. Unless you're buying a list, the people in your lead database have raised their hands somehow—at an event, on your website or by clicking through on a banner ad. Mentioning that source will help you get a better start on your relationship, she said.

“Unless you indicate the source of that e-mail acquisition and personalize it—'It was great to meet you at our most recent event'—you're missing out on one of the most important, relevant pieces of messaging.” Of course, Ezrin said, you have to be sure someone on your team actually met that person. If the address came from someone dropping their card into a big fishbowl, you'll need to couch your greeting to reflect that, too.

It's also important to tailor the message to new recipients; they should get a completely different sales message than someone who has been doing business with your company for years. However, e-mail marketers often lump new prospects into their more mature database, Ezrin said, sending newly opted-in prospects their regular stream of e-mails. “We're always pushing for nurturing, but we're not tailoring different messaging based on relationship,” she said. “And sometimes we add people to a new leads database, send them an introduction to the company—but they've been a customer for a while. They're just buying a new product. That's exactly what you don't want to do: Say "Welcome' to someone who is already a customer.”

Segmenting doesn't just stop once you've got new prospects in a single database and are using microtargeting practices, said Kara Trivunovic, senior director of strategic services at StrongMail. “Consider classifying prospects even more so you have two subgroups of leads: qualified leads and those people likely seeking education,” she said. “Then you're going to market to them differently.”

Otherwise, messaging should as always be highly focused on the prospect's business problem, and marketers may best achieve that goal by using customer testimonials in their e-mail copy, said Forrester Research's Daniels. “Those people who are doing this are getting the highest conversion rate,” he said.

StrongMail's Trivunovic said one of her customers—a human resources software vendor—created a strong “onboarding” program by introducing testimonials sequentially. The first e-mail or two had written commentary included, while subsequent messages included links to video testimonials. “The videos were so [that] people could see existing customers talk about how the organization helped them. The company felt it humanized them. They were doing more than marketing; they were showing that they understood their customers' needs,” she said.

And if you do everything right and your prospects haven't opted out but aren't opening your e-mails? Don't keep them in your prospects database. Instead, move them to a separate list whether you intend on remarketing to them again or not. Unopened e-mails are causing some marketers to have issues with e-mail deliverability, said Q Interactive's Wise, who also sits on the board of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. “If you send your e-mail out and no one engages with it, you're risking that the ISPs and corporations, which use ISP black lists, are going to stop delivering your messages,” he said.

Craig Rosenberg, @thefunnelholic, in preparation for the Focus Virtual Summit on Mastering Lead Management, Tuesday, June 29th, asked Focus Expert speakers and sponsors to supply him with 4-6 tips on Lead Management for an article on his blog titled: Lead Management: 67 Tips From The Biggest Experts In The Field.

The list of experts included some of the most well respected people in the industry, (some I knew and others I didn’t), including David Raab, Raab Guide to Demand Generation Systems, Howard Sewell, Spear Marketing, Maria Pergolino, Marketo, Ardath Albee, Marketing Interactions, Carlos Hidalgo, Annuitas Group, Brian Solis, Future-works,  Mac McIntosh, Sales Lead Experts, Mike Damphousse, Green Leads, Anthony Carraturo, Merit Direct, Adam Needles, Silverpop, Mark Feldman, Netprospex, Craig Stouffer, Pinpointe On-Demand, and Parker Trewin, Genius.

I thought I would join in the fun and continue his list of 67 lead management tips with six more.

Six Lead Management Tips

1. Be extremely careful that your automated lead nurturing messages are for *someone* not *everyone* – (it’s not one size fits all – use your buyer personas and give your messages a personal tone).
2. Just because you are saving time with marketing automation, doesn’t mean the human beings you are sending the messages to can’t tell the messages are automated. Make your content helpful and useful or risk the dreaded unsubscribe and or even worse – a failed relationship.
3. Be sure your messages are timeless. Mistakes like this are dead giveaways that a machine emailed your content and not a person.
4. Don’t believe that your lead management process and marketing automation system will accelerate / hasten your buyers to move faster through the buying process. Only your remarkable content is capable of that.
5. Listen. Listen to your buyers, listen to your metrics, and listen to your sales team. Don’t forget the important role listening plays in improving processes, communications, and relationships.
6. Today’s B2B buyers are busy. Your marketing and products are not the center of their universe. Keep your messages concise, meaningful, and addressed at their needs not yours.

I urge you to read the first 67 lead management tips as the experts provide really good food for thought on lead management, marketing automation, and building relationships with today’s B2B buyers.

To close I’ll quote Craig,

The main thing is that lead management is absolutely essential to ROI-conscious marketing departments.  If you don’t have a lead management process, get one.  If you do have a lead management process, you should always be optimizing.

Visit Craig’s blog, The Funnelholic, (and read it regularly) to stay informed on B2B demand generation, lead management, and online media. He is a B2Bblogger shaping the future of B2B marketing and one that you should be paying attention to, I am.

What are your tips for lead management? Can we get to 100 tips? As B2B marketers, we can use all the lead management tips we can get, no?

You might also like:

Beyond the Basics of Lead Scoring

Web Analytics & Marketing Automation: Why Businesses Need ...

#B2Bchat – Lead Scoring Best Practices [Transcript]

Upcoming Event: How To Build A Demand Generation Machine ...

How to Produce and Promote Webinars Successfully [#B2Bchat ...

LinkWithin

Your Awesome Responsibility Recently I had a disagreement with my insurance company about how a claim was being handled. I felt the woman I was talking to might be seeing my side of things, almost agreeing with me, but she seemed to be in a quandary about what to do. She was concerned about "company policy." As a result, she was a bit confrontational. Finally, I said, "You have an awesome responsibility." She asked, "What do you mean?" Frankly, at the time I wasn't even sure what I meant? But it just came out. I said, "Right now, you are representing your company. In my mind, you, just you, are the company.

You are probably the person who will determine whether I continue to do business with your company or decide to take my insurance somewhere else. When someone asks me why I do or don't do business with you, it will be because of you. I will say something like, 'They take care of me' or 'they wouldn't take care of me.' And, you know what? I will actually be referring to you. You are the company."

She said, "Wow, I never thought of it that way." I actually think she understood me. She told me to hold while she consulted with a supervisor. She came back on the phone a few minutes later and asked if she could call me back. An hour later our issue was resolved to my satisfaction. Why? My customer service rep had become empowered. The sad thing was that I, as the customer, had to do it.

Lesson: It is important for every employee who has any contact with a customer to realize that at any given time, they represent the company. They are the brand, the image - they are everything about the company. While they may not be in a position to make the next sale, they are very capable of losing it. Every dollar the company spends on marketing, advertising and PR is potentially resting on one person's shoulders. A building and a sign do not make a company.

People make a company.

And, they can make a business successful - or in some unfortunate instances, very unsuccessful. Accept the responsibility.