VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business

How to Work a Trade Show

Recently I visited a marketing trade show here in the Bay Area. I always get excited to learn about new marketing technologies that help businesses grow so off the exhibit floor I went. What I found was kind of lame. It seemed like none of the companies exhibiting knew how to market their company and none of the people working at these booths knew the first thing about working a trade show. It's more than wearing a company shirt.

Sometimes I think it's the difference between someone who is working the show who actually wrote the check for it, versus a team of people that are a few steps removed from that person. If you stuck 100 small business OWNERS in these booths or people who were trained really well by the small business owners, they'd have out-worked any of these people.

Get The Business Card - First things first, you've paid to be at a show, you've spent money on your signs or booth (hopefully), the first thing you should do is ask for your visitor's information. In fact you should ask for it before you start to sell them if you can. That's what you went there for right? I visited no less than 25 businesses at this particular show, walked into their booths and took their collateral (if they had any) and not ONE person asked me for my information.

Print Collateral - Printing is expensive and it harms the environment I know. But you've got to give at least one handout about your company so that people remember you after they leave. Make sure it's on recycled paper! There were at least 5 booths I stopped by that didn't have ANY collateral, just goofy giveaways.

Tell People What You Do - If you've got a banner stand or a sign, make sure you tell people what you do on it along with your logo. Don't make people guess. It doesn't have to be too wordy, just get your main points across. About 25% of the booths I walked by just displayed a logo, nothing else. It doesn't necessarily make me want to stop and ask someone what it is they do.

Be Knowledgeable - If you send staff, make sure they are trained know what they're talking about. If they don't know an answer to a question they should not try to make anything up, they should just say "I'm not sure about that, I'll take that question down on your business card and follow up with an answer in an email." Then make sure they write it on the back of the business card. I stopped by one booth and asked the person in it a question about how their technology worked, not only did they not know how it worked, they didn't know who their primary customer was and they negated themselves about 3 times during a 7 minute discussion.

Be Approachable, Do the Approaching - A bunch of people from the same company standing around talking to each other the entire time isn't going to draw in a crowd. Your staff has to approach people and start the conversation. For VR the starter question is something like "Are you sending emails to your customers?" That begins the conversation.

Pet peeve? If you have to make a call and you have other staff in the booth, step away and make the call. People don't want to come up to ask anyone questions if they are on the phone. My favorite? One booth had velvet ropes around the booth so you couldn't walk into it, only the people who worked there could and one person was inside the ropes on the phone!

Another pet peeve is having too much clutter around a booth. Stash your coats and bags under the table or behind the booth. No one wants to do business with a messy company. Maybe it's the Virgo in me.

These companies may be good at providing marketing technologies, but they couldn't bring it back to the basics of good marketing in general. I was walking the show with our head of operations and I said to him "Wow, this is really bad. You can bet that after any trade show we spend money on my first question is: 'How many leads did we get and when are we sending our first email to them?'"

Marketing 101.

Hand Delivery - A Customer Retention Idea

I was sitting in my office when someone from my team brought me a tiny pink bag decorated with festive ribbons, attached to it was very cool highlighter pen and it was filled with a bevy of candy inside. Along with the bag came a business card of a women I had done business with last year during our marketing conference (how did she know I liked Reese's?). She wanted to hand-deliver it to me but I was in a meeting. I thought it was a nice gesture on her part and smart for putting her card in front of me again, not to mention yummy chocolates. She didn't get to see me, but I'm sure she'll follow up with an email campaign knowing her.

I know not all businesses have the capacity to hand-deliver gifts to their customers, however if your customers have spent top dollar with you in the past year it might be a great idea and reason to get in front of them again, especially in this economy.

I think it's especially good if your customers bought big ticket items from you in the past (real estate, large hotel bookings, software, hardware). One more thing, it's really only going to work if your customers work in an office where they may be easily accessed, don't bang on their front door and have them answer it in their slippers, they might think...stalker!

B2B Marketers - Build Your List Using White Papers

If you are marketing to a business, you're always looking for creative ways to build your prospect list. You need to constantly keep feeding the funnel with prospects so you can convert them to your best customers. If you are selling technical products, one way to do this is to develop white papers. When you think of a white paper you might think that big corporations are the only businesses that write them. To the contrary, small businesses can grow enormously using white papers and they're not that difficult to put together.

From Wikipedia: A white paper is an authoritative report. White papers are used to educate customers, collect leads for a company or help people make decisions. 

White papers can be one of the most cost-effective marketing vehicles you have in your arsenal.

So where do you start?

You first need to come up with the subject you want to write about. Is there something hot going on in your industry right now? Become an authority on it. Just remember, you want to temper any sales messages here. You want to be considered an expert on the subject you're writing about not shoving your product down your prospect's throat.

Now it's time to begin writing. There are many templates I found online but this template seemed to be the most pervasive.

Introduction - Here you'd want to briefly write about your subject of choice.

Problem - Here get to the heart of the matter. If it's a technical issue for your prospects that your company solves, write about the problems you know they face.

Solution - Start writing about the overall solution to your prospect's problem. How does your product or service (or your competitor's) address the problem? If you do mention your product or service again, don't be salesy, it won't lend to your credibility and it might even take some away.

Benefits - Once your prospect's problem has been addressed, now write about how easy their day will be or how much more money they'll make. Whatever the benefit, you need to scream it from the hilltops.

Summary - Sum it up for them and end with a bang.

On every page of your white paper you need to have your company name or logo, your web site address and your phone number at the very least. If you can fit your physical location somewhere on it, even better.

Just like when you create your email marketing campaigns you should make sure not to heavy up on too much text or too many graphics. Your prospects want your white paper for information, so make sure you use a healthy mix of both. You'll also want to avoid those long paragraphs, so make sure you consolidate your thoughts in smaller, easy to read paragraphs. Then you'll have a better shot at keeping your prospect's attention.

Promote it!

Now it's time to get the word out. Remember, since this is a prospecting tool you'll want to make sure you put a form on a page of your site to capture your prospect's information along with a snippet or some bullet points about the great information your white paper will give them. You can use a VerticalResponse opt-in form for this if you'd like, then after they've filled out their information you can direct them to the page where they can download the white paper. Here is a checklist of where you might want to promote it:

1. Send an email campaign to your prospects
2. Announce it in your newsletter
3. Put it on your homepage and on every page of your site
4. Set up a Google Adwords campaign
5. Put it as a link to download in all of your employee's email signatures
6. Blog about it
7. Put it on your Facebook Group and Fan pages
8. Tweet about it
9. Put it on a CD or a thumb drive and give it out at tradeshows

Now it's time to follow up on those leads that will be flying in the door! Now it's time to read 5 Ideas for Cultivating Leads.

Business to Business Marketing – 5 Ideas for Cultivating Leads

If you’re selling to businesses it can be quite a challenge not only getting leads in the door, but what you do with those leads once they’re in.  After all, many businesses have a longer lead time to getting a sale than others. And within that lead time, the last thing you want your leads to do is “cool down”.  Here are 5 things you might do to get leads and keep them HOT.

Get Your Leads

How do you get leads? "Anyway you possibly can" should be your answer. If you’ve met someone at a tradeshow or a networking event or if they sign up for something on your website, consider them a lead. If you want to get people signing up on your site, the first thing you want to do is offer them something of value, whether it be more information, a download, or even an offer for a live call or meeting. Make sure your site has a lead form for this. You can use a free form from VerticalResponse or your CRM provider like Salesforce.

Put Your Leads in a “Bucket”

Once you have a lead you need to identify what type of lead they are. Many businesses identify leads as hot, warm or cool depending on what the sales cycle is. Some businesses identify leads based on when they think they’ll be making their purchase of a product or service; 1-3 months, hot, 3-6 months, warm, or 6-9 months, cool.

Another way would be to ask what their budgets are or when they'll be making their purchasing decision. It could even be that a lead isn’t going to buy for 5 months but they’re ready to spend 4x what someone who is going to buy sooner would spend.

It's up to you and your business how you'd like to identify you leads but make sure you do it!

Create Your Email Pipeline

Once you’ve identified your buckets, now start your plan on how you’re going to communicate to them. If it’s a hot lead you're marketing to, you may want to start with an email asking for an appointment and let your recipient know in the email you’ll be calling. It gives you a reason to make the call. Then you can call your lead to set up the appointment. It also shows you’re aware of the value of your lead’s time, which you may also want to include in your email content.

For your warm and cool leads you may want to set up bi-weekly emails. The emails may talk about your product or service and you could even prompt them to download a whitepaper. Making them take an action is a way of making your lead even warmer, and it’s more of an information soft sell approach.

Either way, get your leads on your regular email newsletter list. As long as you’re providing valuable information, they’ll want to keep getting it. And if they don’t, they’ll unsubscribe.

Get Face-to-Face if You Can

Events are a great way to cultivate leads whether it’s one you host, one you sponsor or one you attend. And if you know someone at your company will be at an event, why not send them an email to let them know? If you’re going to have someone that can be face to face with your prospect, it’s always better than an e-relationship, especially if you have that luxury.  If you can’t set up an appointment, at least identify your booth number or where you’ll be sponsoring or attending. Make sure whoever is attending is easily identifiable if possible with some company garb.

Give Your Prospect Props!

Once you’ve got your lead in the door, try to find out as much as possible about that company, or your specific prospect. If they’ve recently won an award or got kudos in a review from the press, make sure you send them an email to congratulate them. It gives you another reason to make the contact. Then, send them a gift for their achievement. You can use Google Alerts to track down the stories.

These are just a few ways you can cultivate your leads. If you've got any ideas you'd like to share about how you cultivate your own leads, let's hear them!

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.

VerticalResponse Releases Q1 Email Trends Report

Here at VerticalResponse, we’re always trying to help make sense of the email marketing world. It’s a rapidly changing landscape, to be sure, which is why we’re introducing a new quarterly feature – the VerticalResponse Email Marketing Trends Report. The first installment of this series, now available in the Resources section of our website, examines open, click-through, bounce and unsubscribe rates for the first quarter of 2006.

While a number of studies track average response rates on a per-industry basis, we thought it would be useful to provide a little extra context and report on industry results according to list size as well. The end product is a report that offers data for companies in 30 different industries, segmented according to mailing campaign sizes ranging from 100 members to 1 million recipients. What’s more, we roped in our creative team to translate all those cold, hard numbers into attractive, easily digestible graphs that make processing the information a snap. To see their good work, check out the VerticalResponse Q1 2006 Email Marketing Trends Watch.

Marketing to Businesses

At VerticalResponse, our biggest challenge is to convert a business user to a free trial of our product. We thought it might be time to give some tips on how we do it here at VR.

B2B communication is a much different type of marketing than Business-to-Consumer (B2C), so it's important to understand the nuances when creating marketing campaigns.

Target Audience       

Knowing what "types" of people you're marketing to and the language to use when addressing them is crucial for effective B2B marketing. Who in the company is responsible for the purchasing decision? Is it a two-step sale?

For instance, if you're selling a technical product to a company but your target audience is the Marketing Department, you might want soften the feature set you're selling and focus on the benefits and cost savings.

Writing B2B Copy       

When marketing to businesses, concise but detailed copy always works the best. Avoid the "fluff" and make sure that you provide enough information to keep your readers interested. Keep your copy direct, informative and professional.

The best thing you can do is to easily convey how your products or solutions can reduce costs or increase productivity. it's the best way to win new business.    

The offer   

The two-step approach is extremely popular in B2B marketing. Offering something of value for free is common. You are trying to gain the trust of the businesses you're emailing with - now make them an offer they can't refuse!

What is the two step approach?

Step 1: Marketing to your prospect to get their interest and their name and permission for future marketing.

Step 2: Marketing to them to close the deal.

For example here at VerticalResponse , we put our money where our mouth is, we allow anyone to take a "free test drive" of our product, which gives them all the functionality of our service, but without any financial commitments. RISK FREE is still a great tool for converting customers since they are able to "try before they buy" and ask questions to make sure our service is a good fit for their needs.

Many of our customers have told us that this was the #1 reason they signed on with us since they were able evaluate our product on their own terms. Once they registered and became subscribers to our service, we were then able to send them follow up marketing campaigns to keep them interested and educated about what we had to offer.

Forget the free pen it's not going to distinguish your company from the masses so it's not only important to target your marketing campaigns intelligently, but also make sure that any add-ons are appropriate for the audience that you’re dealing with.

The Landing Page: "The Closer"       

Once the recipient clicks through to your website, you'll want to have a "trackable" landing page for them to hit so you can evaluate the behaviors of your new prospects. The landing page should PAYOFF the features and benefits of your products or services. It should be presented as a quick summary or "overview" rather than a long and detailed description.

Try using a graphic or picture, and some highlights from your email content on the landing page to carry over the theme from the initial email message. You also might want to "test" different versions of your email campaign with different landing pages to see which links or which pages seem to yield the best conversion rate.      

Timing is Everything      

The timing of your marketing campaign is crucial. From the hour of the day (time zone differences) to the day of the month and even the day of the year (holidays, etc) there are always certain factors that can affect your campaign performance.

You might find Monday mornings might not work best because your recipient's in-boxes will be too full from mail received over the weekend, you don't want your offer lost in the mix. You might find mid-week campaigns to perform well, so mail Tuesday through Thursday morning, staying clear of the weekends. There is no universal rule in terms of the perfect time to mail because it all depends on your business and when you think your recipients are most likely to be at their computers.

Case Studies Work!

One of the most common questions we hear from prospective customers is: "Who else does VerticalResponse do business with?" Customer testimonials and case studies are powerful resources when trying to sign a new client. Make sure they are posted on your site. VerticalResponse posts them all over, even on the home page VerticalResponse. Positive comments from a client who is in a similar industry as your prospect can influence their decision to work with your company as well.        

If you are currently providing a valuable service to an organization that has similar needs, then you'll surely want to make your prospective client aware of this during the sales process.