VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business

VR University: Live Webinars & Online Demos Available

As easy as we try to make it, you're just too busy to figure out for yourself all of the nifty things you can do with VR and email marketing. Running your business should be more important than sifting through which VR features can benefit you. That's why we're launching VerticalResponse University.

Self-Running On-Demand Demos

We know not everyone wants it "live". You want to listen and learn when it's convenient for you, not us. Now you can choose what part of VerticalResponse you want to learn about, sit back, grab a cup-a-joe and listen to the soothing voices of our talented VR "Instructors" tell you all about our features and benefits.

• VerticalResponse - An Introduction
• Creating a Template Email Campaign
• Creating, Viewing and Analyzing Campaign Reports
• VerticalResponse for the AppExchange

Coming soon:

• How to Upload a List
• Using Custom Fields to Personalize
• Email Deliverability
• And much, much more!

Live Webinars

Sign up for a live demo or presentation. They'll run 30 minutes to an hour depending on the topic. We'll have guest speakers as well. Get your questions answered on the spot!

November's Class Schedule

The Holidays are Here, Don't Let them Pass You By

Instructor: Janine Popick, CEO, VerticalResponse

Professor Popick (I didn't write this paragraph) offers sage advice and helpful hints to help kickstart your holiday marketing efforts. Learn how to effectively drive holiday traffic to your site, your store, your shop, even your restaurant. The holiday season is now here and this session will surely fill up quickly, don’t miss out.
Class Begins: 11/14/06 11:00 AM PT

VerticalResponse for the AppExchange

Instructors: Josh Feinberg, VP Product Management, VerticalResponse,
Alex Scalisi, Sales Executive, VerticalResponse,
Rob Lamb, Partner Relations, Salesforce.com

What do you get when you combine the industry leaders for on-demand CRM and self-service email marketing? One killer app! Join us for an informative webinar.

Upcoming Topics

• Using Advanced HTML
• Email Deliverability
• And much, much more!

So get ready to go, back-to-school that is, with VRU!

We Need You! Vote for VerticalResponse in the ClickZ Marketing Excellence Awards

Last week you nominated us (thank you!) and we made it to the finals! VerticalResponse is up for two awards in the ClickZ Marketing Excellence Awards 2006. The categories are E-Newsletter Product/Service and Business/Marketing Blog. We'd love to get both. Why? Because it's the Viewer's Choice Awards in Marketing!

So please, at the risk of sounding like we're begging, vote! I promise, it will take you less than 5 minutes of your time.

Voting is open now through the close of business, 5 pm EST, on Wednesday, November 8, 2006.

Thank you!!

A Must-Read: A Halloween Holiday Poem

Rhonda Abrams wrote this poem that I think all VerticalResponse users will get a kick out of for the Halloween "holiday season". Check it out if you've got 3 minutes to spare...

7 Tips to Maximize Your Event/Tradeshow Spend

We've had a few tradeshows the past few weeks and boy are we tired. But I was reflecting on how to do things better and it occurred to me that there are some things we could improve on for the tradeshow season next year. If you have a booth at a tradeshow or an event you might get a few ideas here.

Here are 7 tips on how to maximize your time and hopefully your spend.

1)  Email Your Prospects in Advance - If you've got a local show and you know you've collected information from prospects in the area, send them an email marketing campaign inviting them by your booth or table. They may not even know about the tradeshow and why it might benefit them.

2)  Offer Incentives - My team knows I'm not a big fan of giveaways to get anyone to engage and talk to you. (There is one guy who comes to every trade show because he collects "logo'd ball-point pens". Wow.) But if you've identified prospects you want to get to your booth and you email them or call them you might want to offer them an incentive like "Come by booth #123 to pick up your free gift!". Then get some face-to-face with them to talk about your product or service.

3)  Get the Attendee List - Many tradeshows will give or sell you the list of attendees with postal addresses (most won't include email addresses). Why not do a direct mail piece WELL in advance inviting them to your booth? (Don't have it arrive after, sounds simple but I just got a ton of direct mail invitations for last week's tradeshow. Ouch.) If there are phone numbers on the list, give them a call to follow up on the postcard you've sent.

4)  Visit Your Neighbors - More often than you think your neighbors could be your best customers or partners. Take advantage of any lulls in traffic at a show and visit them. Why stand around a booth talking to your colleague? Time is of the essence. Take it to the streets and deploy people to do this if you can. We could certainly focus on this a bit more.

5)  Visit a Session - If there is a session you can go to that has anything to do with what you offer, go to it. Listen, learn, and potentially get prospects that are sitting right around you to visit you at the booth.

6)  Wear Your Colors - Make sure you represent your business. Wear a visibly identifiable logo'd shirt. Someone could easily stop you to ask you what you do while you are away from your booth.

7)  Invest in the Lead Retrieval - I've learned a lesson or two from being too cheap. It's a good idea to rent one of the lead scanners if the show offers one. A few hundy sounds expensive, but think of the revenue you may lose by the one prospect you could have captured and converted. You'll get a pipeline of people you can communicate with when you scan their badges. Plus, if they don't have any business cards for them it's easier too.

Our tradeshow season is over for now, we'll work on deploying this stuff for next year. All in all team VR did a fantastic job and we did have a few great shows. There's always room for improvement for anyone, right?

Oh, check out WorkZ, there are a bunch of other articles on Tradeshows mostly by Susan A. Friedmann, CSP, The Tradeshow Coach author: “Meeting & Event Planning for Dummies”.

Any more ideas on how to work a tradeshow? Let's hear them!

Case Study: Response/RSVP Rates for an Event Invite

VerticalResponse hosted a free local event where the venue held 130 people (30 of whom were VR employees). Our mission? Fill the venue the best we could to be able to project for food and beverage bills (be on the lookout, VR may be coming to your area!). This was a challenge for Alf and Oranuj, the VR marketing team that had to fill the event.

FIRST MAILING

We targeted our email marketing list with the people most likely to come, those in a 25 mile radius. I used Melissa Data to get those zip codes then I sorted by zip code in Excel. I then picked out email addresses with the matching zip codes and Oranuj uploaded the list.

Sent: 219 people
Opens: 125 (nice rate!)
Clicks: 41
RSVPs: 26
RSVP rate: 11.8%

SECOND MAILING

We targeted the people most likely to come but half of those people never opened the email. The other half may have been on the fence. So we waited a week, and mailed all of those people again with a bold RSVP by: Date of 4 days from the mailing. We then widened the list a bit to include more zip codes.

Sent: 435 people
Opens: 200 (keeping it up there!)
Clicks: 82
RSVPs: 50
RSVP rate: 11.4%

THIRD MAILING

We still didn't have the number of people we wanted (knowing there will always be no-shows, additional show ups and stragglers at the last moment) so Oranuj did a third mailing. This one was a bit different because we re-mailed our customers with a message of urgency,  we told them we only had room for the first 150. We also widened out our target a bit more.

Sent: 518 people
Opens: 218
Clicks: 41
RSVPs: 54
RSVP rate: 10.4%

At this point we had 130 people RSVP'd to the event.

REMINDER MAILING

We then had to remind our guests of the party a few days before it happens. So Oranuj sent out a reminder on the Friday before the party with directions to remind everyone about the event on Monday.

THE EVENT

All in all a success!

Total RSVPs: 130
Total Show up: 71
Attendees brought guests: 20
Total attendees: 91
Projected: 100...

Close enough, great job to Alf and Oranuj!

LESSONS LEARNED

1. Business happens, people are busy - People probably RSVP'd "just in case" they could make it.
2. Our tests gave us a starting point - We now know for future events that a good rule of thumb for our customers is roughly 11% RSVP rate and 50% show up rate of the RSVPs. This way we have a starting point for future events.
3. Scaling up is important - As far as mailing list size with each mailing slowly widening the list gives us more control over the the number of attendees.
4. Urgency works - The urgency part of the message seemed to work, especially when we asked our attendees.

Do you have event invite stories you'd like to share? Chime in we'd love to hear them.

A Business Development Suicide Story

VR has a sister site called WorkZ. Writers submit articles and we take some good content and publish it. It's important for our small businesses to get resources and knowledge about how to grow their businesses.

We gladly accept great articles written by businesses. By the way, if you've got an article you want to submit, it's free, just email it to Alf. He's managing that site.

Anyhoo, I've been publishing articles by this one writer for years, literally. They're good articles too. So one day, I get an article emailed to me, using one of our formidable competitors. Wow. Now I've got to get them. I intro myself, tell them that we also have been publishing their articles on WorkZ forever (i.e. I established we already have a great business relationship, let's grow it), told this person that we have a tool comparable to what they're using. I asked to give us a shot. A tiny shot.

Do know this person totally shut me down? Then when I tried to reel them in, they got a bit nasty. For no reason. I would have been ok with "I tested you out, and you don't have feature a, b, and c" or whatever reason. But nowhere in the conversation did they do that. Not even a test after years of working with us in a capacity.

That's business development suicide in my opinion. And the irony? This person gives advice on sales!

If you've got great business relationships, do everything you can to keep them. They can be hard to come by.

VerticalResponse #37 Fastest Growing Co. In Bay Area

Just a quick shout out to the team and our customers. Last night VR was named by the San Francisco Business Times as one of the Bay Area's Fastest Growing Companies second year in a row. We were #37 with a pretty amazing growth number. I want to take a moment to thank the team here at VR for making this happen. I also want to thank you our customers. None of us would be here without ya!

Kudos to a few of our customers who made the list too, Visual Resource, CoolEatz, Kimpton Hotels, and our PR Agency Atomic PR.
 

Let me know if you made the list!

My Dreamforce Wrap Up - Published by MarketingSherpa

Last week was the Dreamforce show. For those of you who don't use Salesforce, it's the annual user conference and this post may not appeal to you whatsoever. Worry not, I've got some cool posts coming up. Anyhoo, MarketingSherpa, an amazing site for all things online marketing-related, asked for a show wrap up, so here it is as published on their site:
   
SUMMARY

Do you know what marketing ideas your sales reps are being exposed to? Last week, 4,250 sales execs attended salesforce.com's annual user get-together, the dreamforce expo, where they discussed far more about marketing than you might expect. Here's MarketingSherpa's behind-the-scenes show report from one of the 750 marketers who also attended:

By MarketingSherpa Reader Janine Popick, President & CEO VerticalResponse

Last week I attended (and spoke at) Dreamforce Expo, Salesforce.com's annual user conference in San Francisco. 

It's turning into one of the most influential shows in business-to-business sales and marketing. Yet, only about 15% of attendees this year were from the marketing department. Here are my show notes from a marketing perspective for my fellow MarketingSherpa readers who couldn’t make it:

Quick Show Outline:

In his keynote, salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff asked how many attendees were existing salesforce.com customers, and it seemed like 85% of the 5,000 people in the audience raised their hands.

Attendees broke into three groups:

• Sales managers wanting to learn how to better use CRM to convert leads
• Administrators of the salesforce.com platform
• Small business owners
• Marketers responsible for filling the lead pipeline

There were also about 160 partners exhibiting on the show floor.

Marketing Buzz Around the Show: 3 Points

#1. Marketing automation.
Although a hot topic, marketers don’t want to pay big bucks for it. They want drip campaigns and they want it integrated into their CRM system. Any CRM system that doesn't integrate with email is on its way out.

#2. Landing page integration.
This seemed to be hot when integrated with a CRM solution, so companies can track exactly where visitors go from their campaigns. The data needs to be is updated right into your CRM system. It solves problems because SMBs don’t have the resources to hire creatives and enterprise customers are fighting in-house for them.

#3. Marketers want to learn from marketers.
In general, marketers attended the sessions! Somewhat of a surprise, since at some other shows people aren’t so crazy about attending sessions (instead, networking in hallways and on the floor). At dreamforce, there seemed to be a general “want” to learn more about how to improve CRM.
Note to other vendors -- use more client-presented case studies at your user conference instead of endless pitches from your own management and sales team.

The addition of the Appy Awards (celebrating new salesforce applications) was a brilliant idea, rewarding mostly customers who do some great implementations and great customizations and a few partners doing some great things with the API.

Feeling on the Show Floor: Salesforce Community Feels Like Apple Users

At first, I didn’t know how to feel about the layout of the show floor, which broke partners out by “Sales,” “Marketing,” “Financial Services” and “Business Productivity.” But in reality, it saved attendees a lot of time. It was like a grocery store, with the aisles clearly marked. People were checking off their partner grocery list.

The floor setup also established the very middle as the salesforce “campground.” The interesting thing was that immediately after demos if someone were interested in a specific feature, they sent them directly to the appropriate partner. (That's a clever layout other user conferences should steal.)

Contrary to other shows we attend, people come to Dreamforce with a mission. They do their homework with questions to ask partners to solve real problems. You can be three deep at your booth at times instead of having to drag people in with hokey giveaways.

Some said it was good that there were more salesforce customers than prospects because customers understand the need to plug in more functionality, while prospects don’t necessarily understand the need until they have already deployed and used salesforce for a while.

Chris Hoffman from Triple Tree told me that this was their fourth Dreamforce (ours, too) and that while the early days had a lot of solutions looking for a problem, now it’s real problems looking for great solutions.

All in all, the show is a lovefest. It is extremely energetic. You’re constantly moving and talking, whether your customer is a salesforce user or a partner. There are many deals done among partners as well. The zealotry of the Salesforce community feels like that of Apple users.

"Limited Supplies, Hurry Now, This Won't Last!" - The Woot.com Story

Does anyone know about Woot? I'm ADDICTED! In fact, there is a good chance that especially today, there has been a tiny loss in productivity here at VerticalResponse because of Woot.

Why? I'll Tell You.

Woot.com, one deal, one day. When supplies run out, there just ain't no more. You can get everything from a watch, to a computer, to what they call, a "bag o' crap". You don't know what you're gonna get and for $5 it sells out.  Whatever it is, you don't know until you get it! And on top of it all, to make matters worse for me, they've made an Apple Widget, so all I have to do is hit F12 and one click takes me to an order page.

Today is Different

Today they have a Woot Off. It's when they have a real limited supply of a bunch of items and they rotate all of these products in, till they're gone. They even have a bar going across the page with a siren light flashing when they are almost out of the product! Talk about success with "limited supplies". This is why there is a loss of VR productivity, even I'm hitting F12 every hour.

Why Does it Work?

• Supplies Seem Truly Limited! - They keep their promise, when they're out, they're out!
• Community - Anyone can chime in on the boards about what they know about the product and where it might be cheaper/more expensive, what's good/bad about it.
• Podcast - Very fun clips of music and chat about the product.
• Blog - Talking about the product and directing people to the boards to comment.

It's brilliant. They also have a  Wine Woot as well you must check out.

Has anyone ever been? What do you think? Maybe you have some limitied supply of a product or limited number of spaces at an event. Make sure you get the momentum going...

Email Marketing to Convert a Lead - The Corporate Sale

In light of this week being the Salesforce.com annual Dreamforce show (VerticalResponse will be there, stop by and say hi!), I thought I'd write a bit to those who might be selling large-ticket products or services in a multi-step fashion.

The first thing you'll need to do is attempt to define what's going to be successful for you. Defining metrics for success of a campaign doesn't have to be daunting and your metric doesn’t necessarily have to be about how much you “profit” from your email, ironically it could be how much you “learn” from your results. 

In general it’s a good idea for you to decide what your definition of success is up front, then compare your results to your metrics after you’ve mailed. Keep this in the forefront of your mind: it’s really about continual measurement and refinement to hit success.

The Corporate Sale

If you are selling your product into a large corporation and you have a longer multi-step sales process, your email marketing metric for success may depend on what lead conversion means to you.  One way to do this is to “back into it” from the total number you need to convert.

If this is the first time you’ve emailed this campaign, your “unknown” is going to be your conversion rate, meaning "what percent of your recipients are going to do what you want them to?" So your best bet might be to test before you roll-out to gauge where your conversion rate might fall. If you know you know you need to drive 500 conversions and your test shows that your conversion rate is 1.25%, then you’re going to have to email to 40,000 addresses to reach your goal.

Finally, you’ll have to assess how much you’ve sold to see if your revenue equaled, made more than, or made less than what you spent on the entire campaign.