Research Outlines Marketing Best Practices Based on Consumption Patterns of Blogs, Video, RSS and Online Networks

The study, The Rise of B2B Applications-Based Media, reveals that the usage of emerging media among IT decision-makers has increased considerably over the past year, with video and blogs experiencing the most increased usage for work-related information. This latest study is part of TechWeb's ongoing Business Technology Media Engagement Research series.

Key study highlights include:

-- Increased Usage of Emerging Media Applications: business technology decision makers are utilizing emerging media applications more frequently to obtain work-related information, as compared to last year.

-- More Growth Expected: business technology decision makers currently using emerging media intend to consume even more in the coming year - even those who are not currently using emerging media applications.

-- Engagement with Emerging Media Leads to Action: when business technology decision makers interact with emerging media, they continue to look for related information.

For more information on this research, email Scott Vaughan.

Answer: Most e-mail newsletters today look pretty much the same, so how can you distinguish yours from your competitors’? By using behavioral targeting to learn more about what customers want and giving it to them. B-to-b e-mailers work with shorter customer lists and often longer sales cycles than their b-to-c counterparts, but that doesn’t mean they should be tempted to oversaturate their most valuable customers with a deluge of nontargeted email. Behaviorally targeted messages provide better response and can even be credited with shortening sales cycles.

The easiest way to obtain behavioral targeting data is through Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

If your e-mail list includes customers and prospects with Yahoo.com addresses, it’s possible they didn’t see messages you sent in February and March. The company, according to a March 11 blog post, made changes to its inbound mail service in an effort to block spam—a move that ended up blocking both spam and legitimate e-mails from bulk senders.
The snafu is a good reminder to marketers that they must constantly monitor their deliverability. Here are some tips that to help boost and maintain deliverability rates: Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Answer: When a marketing program does not work, always go back to the basics of marketing 101: right target, right message, right timing, right channel.
Despite advances in scenario-based Web design created to track customer online behavior and build profiles, or personas, for targeted marketing campaigns, your customers are still bombarded with tons of irrelevant messages—often the result of batch-and-blast campaigns sent by stove-piped e-mail applications and outsourced e-mail service providers—each day.

If you aren’t getting responses, it is quite likely that your customers view your correspondence as spam, rather than relevant or valuable information, regardless of whether or not they have opted to receive your e-mails. Relevance is key in e-mail. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Answer: I am always amazed at the still-prevailing idea that list size trumps list quality. Don’t get me wrong: Volume is good. Every record in your e-mail address list has an inherent value that can be reduced to a dollar amount. This leads us to the idea that your database should be viewed as capital and should be treated just like any other useful marketing asset. So why, then, do so many marketers mix bad data into their lists?

A bad e-mail address can have a dramatic impact on your ability to market with e-mail. Bad e-mails come in the form of addresses from third parties (list renters, etc.), complainers who have not been removed from your list and dormant addresses—e-mail addresses of people who have not opened your e-mail in more than 90 days. ISPs view all with equal disdain. While it is not illegal to send to these “bad” e-mail addresses, doing so is a sure way to increase complaints and damage your sender reputation. It’s also a good way to waste money.

So how do you build your list and maintain quality data? Consider these tips: Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Chief Marketing Officer Council Encourages Adding Customer Affinity Index To The Mix

Customer centric metrics are taking center stage this year as b-to-b marketers pursue new ways to measure customer engagement, satisfaction and, ultimately, loyalty to a brand.

Measuring customer satisfaction is not a new idea, but as technology puts more control in the hands of users, marketers are seeking out the optimal ways to measure how successful they are with their marketing messages, products and services.

Marketers are divided on how best to achieve this. Some are using an array of metrics and other processes to come up with a view of how they're doing with customers, while others are trying to simplify the process by using a single metric, such as the Net Promoter Score.

The NPS, developed by loyalty expert Fred Reichheld, is a score of customer loyalty based on a single question: "How likely are you to recommend our company to colleagues?"

Marketing organizations are also coming up with new metrics to gauge the customer experience.

Last month [December 2007], the Chief Marketing Officer Council released a study on customer measurement... Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Register to download the free Executive Summary or purchase the full report from the CMO Council's Customer Affinity Website.

[Note: CMP was an underwriter for this CMO Council study.]

Wouldn’t it be great if you could figure out today what your marketing plan should look like in six months? Crystal balls don’t exactly grow on trees, so we’ve asked two industry experts—Jordan Ayan, president of SubscriberMail, and Joel Book, director of eMarketing Education at ExactTarget—to weigh in on what’s coming in 2008. Here’s what they said.

1) More CRM integration, especially with software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings.
2) Increased use of automated tools.
3) Closer alignment of marketing elements.
4) Using rich video with e-mail marketing.

Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

The customer is very much on the minds of leading marketing executives these days. Across numerous research initiatives undertaken by the CMO Council, marketers collectively indicate they are spending more time and resources than ever before on understanding and engaging with their customers, including increased investments in customer communities, CRM systems and processes, and customer intelligence and analytics. The CMO Council has been a champion of these efforts, advocating a more disciplined, measurable and integrated approach to marketing, anchored by greater knowledge and more meaningful interaction with customers and customer markets. Now we believe it is time for a new measure of marketing performance – called customer affinity – that looks beyond old brand metrics to support marketing in its critical role of building customer-centric businesses. Register to download the free Executive Summary or purchase the full report from the CMO Council's Customer Affinity Website.

[Note: CMP was an underwriter for this CMO Council study.]

Question: What is the best way to optimize search marketing for international markets?

Answer: As the evolution of the Internet continues, b-to-b marketers are reaching a crossroads in determining what tactics have worked in the past to attract traffic to their sites versus what approaches will work in the future. According to Internet World Stats, two-thirds of global Internet users are non-English speakers. This growing volume of search activity means that marketing opportunities will continue to evolve on both regional and global levels.

So how can b-to-b marketers capitalize on this trend? Is the answer as simple as translating all Web pages to the targeted country's language?

Translation is one component of optimizing for international markets, but it's in no way the end-all answer. A word-for-word translation of a Web site is ambiguous. Instead, Web sites should be translated according to concepts. A simple translation does not take into account cultures, customs and preferences specific to various countries. Additionally, a simple translation loses targeted keywords. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Many companies aren’t coordinating their various departments’ e-mail marketing efforts, according to a Jupiter Research report released last month, “Maturation of E-mail: Controlling Messaging Chaos Through Centralization.”

Some 24% of executives surveyed said six or more departments manage their e-mail messaging activities separately. Almost half the executives questioned (44%) said they believed their e-mail would be more effective if it were managed from a central platform. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

The numbers are nearly parallel: About 53% of marketing executives responding to a recent survey said they have experienced a business crisis resulting in negative news coverage, declining sales or reduced profitability. But just about the same number (57%) said their company does not have a crisis response plan currently in place.

The online survey, which was conducted in mid-September by BtoB and Eric Mower and Associates, group b2b, took the pulse of 251 marketing executives about their crisis preparedness.

Among the 43% of companies that do have a crisis plan in place, 10.1% worry about their ability to implement it, and only half have trained spokespersons. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

he importance of a highly responsive mailing list in determining the success of a direct mail campaign cannot be overestimated. Before choosing a list for your campaign, it is important to understand industry basics as well as the distinct roles of list managers and brokers.

List managers represent the actual owner of a mailing list that you might consider renting. List brokers are consultants who can help you find lists of mail responders (people who have responded to some type of mailing and have asked to receive information) who match your target profile. List selects cost more, but they enable you to target demographic, geographic and psychographic information to create a mailing list that will garner an even higher response rate.

Remember that lists are rented—normally for one-time use only. Each time you wish to send out a mailing, you must rent those names anew. Discounts for multiple uses are standard industry practice.

As e-mail marketing has taken hold in recent years, list selection has become even more critical. Permission-based e-mail marketing—communications sent only to those who have specifically requested to receive marketing messages for products and services like yours—is critical, as even one misstep can result in e-mail distributors blacklisting you for future efforts.

Sending an offer to a list that has not specifically opted to receive e-mail about your product or service, or using a list gleaned from membership directories, for example, could have negative consequences.

List selection is an ongoing process in an ever-changing market. But by testing... Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.