• Be sure of your target demographic. Selling to the right person will inevitably increase the chances of a future conversion.
• Think of creative ways to engage with your audience. Consider a unique contest or promotion to grab the attention of your prospect.
• Don’t ignore your other marketing channels. Make sure to include your messaging in all of your other initiatives that are focused on generating inbound leads. For example, your ads should be in sync with what you are doing now.
• Have fun! Your audience knows when you are not being sincere. Provide them with something of interest. Make it happen!

Consider expanding your current marketing strategy to include permission-based email marketing because it is simply more targeted and cost-effective.

Happy Marketing!

• 52% are looking to increase customer loyalty
• 51% want to drive incremental revenue
• 84% plan to integrate social media
• 37% see deliverability and inbox clutter as a big challenge
• 38% plan to integrate SMS

How are your 2010 goals shaping up?  What were you looking to do last year but didn’t have the budget or resources to accomplish?  Could you achieve them if you were able to automate the grunt work behind developing solid email-based campaigns?  Or are you hindered by the lengthy manual work that’s involved with deploying new campaigns?  Click here to find out more about automating your email marketing.

9. If you’re not home on Halloween, you’re automatically revisited 24 hours later.

8. Before saying “Trick or Treat!” kids ask if you’d like to take a survey at the conclusion of their visit.

7. Houses with really long driveways/walkways are skipped due to poor ROI.

6. You find your house is ranked and scored based on your candy budget.

5. Kids wearing bizarre combinations of face masks, capes, pants, and tops indicates that multivariate testing is being used to find the best costume.

4. You find a sign on your lawn that says “Johnny and 23 other kids liked the candy at this house”.

3. An inflatable fail whale is left at houses that don’t give out candy.

2. Kids use a fishbowl to collect candy.

And the #1 sign marketing is running Halloween:

1. You discover your house has its own hashtag on Twitter.

In the spirit of improving your marketing, here are some tips that our team thought were quite interesting.  As we kick off the last quarter of 2009, I hope you find these useful:

• Make sure your marketing doesn’t suck
  Avinash Kaushik’s keynote speech was universally enjoyed and provided an often amusing look at how online marketing can sometimes suck and what to do about it.  Avinash talked about usability, navigation, and pay-per-click that actually works!  Make sure you’re tackling the fundamentals before going too deep.  Even the big companies fail in this.  More information on Avinash’s blog at http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/
• Which way works best?  Form a hypothesis!
  This was touched on several times by various presenters including Avinash Kaushik and Widerfunnel.  Sometimes it’s the least obvious solutions that work the best.  Form a hypothesis stating how a change you want to make will result in an improvement, then run tests to see if you’re right.
• Leverage social media
  Focus on providing value to your audience.  By helping others succeed first, the relationships that you build today will yield results for you tomorrow.  This is an obvious extension of the adage “you reap what you sow”, but is often overlooked by many people jumping into social media.  When you leverage social media, make sure you do it in a way that embraces the community you participate in.  Antarctica has a free guide on engaging via social media: http://bit.ly/1wjVWv
• Marketing to women
  When interacting with women through your website, in social media, or through other marketing, make sure you incorporate female communication style.  While both genders have many commonalities, it’s the subtle differences that can have a profound impact on effectiveness.  More information on Holly Buchanan’s blog: http://marketingtowomenonline.typepad.com/
• Real-time search: it’s here to stay
  Your current SEO tactics aren’t going away, but you’ll need to adjust those tactics to also include more places users will find you and the topics you market.  What’s your Twitter search strategy?  How often do you appear for a given hashtag?  Is it too much or too little?  More information at: http://bit.ly/F7ej1
• Friends & followers?  That’s not relevant anymore
  Today, the measure of authority in social media isn’t how many people read what you write, but how often what you write gets shared.  Deliver value first and foremost and others will retweet, reshare, and repost your content.  How’s your influence?  http://www.viralogy.com/
• Watch TED videos!
  Many commented how they love watching these videos for inspiration.  TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design… but it has expanded beyond these roots and introduces interesting topics from the thinkers and doers in the world.  I’m sure you’ll be inspired too: http://www.ted.com/
• Plan your campaign execution
  Nothing derails a great online campaign like poor planning and execution.  Make sure your online campaigns include engaging elements designed to bring people back, refer their friends, and meets the organization’s objectives.  As Avinash might say… make sure your campaigns don’t suck!

Did you learn any other valuable tidbits you’d like to share?  Leave a comment below!  We’ve also posted some pictures of the event on our Facebook page.  All the best in your marketing efforts!

So if you have a slide that talks about how much money your product will make or save your prospective client, don’t show them an already-made slide with that information pre-populated.  Rather, work out the numbers with them right in front of their eyes.  Then when you’re done presenting, instead of leaving behind a boring pre-printed presentation, you can leave behind the workbook.  Having worked over the numbers with you and having seen you (and them) write in the workbook, it transforms from being a sales brochure into a snapshot of their personal experience.

Next time you’re presenting to a single person or a very small group, give it a try.  Then let me know how it went for you.

The same is true when you’re nurturing your prospects through email.  The email you send out to the CEO of an automotive company should be different than one you send out to the Sales Manager at a technology company.  They are in different industries and have different roles, and you need to align your communications to their way of thinking.  Similarly, if a prospect has never been on your website, target them with a different message than a prospect who has been on your website a dozen times last week.  Take a longer-term nurture approach with the former and ensure the prospects who frequent your site receive content relevant to them.

Automating a nurture program is the first step toward putting your marketing on intelligent autopilot.  To take it to the next level, customize the message so that the content and timing of your communications is personal and relevant to them.

Many companies will use tools like Google Analytics togather aggregate traffic numbers, which certainly have value in optimizing the website. However, this falls short of what needs to be tracked in order to have actionable reporting on PPC campaigns.

Simply measuring which keywords or ads drive more traffic to a website only gives you part of the picture. The most popular ones could generate a significant amount of traffic, but no new customers. Less popular keywords may bring less traffic, but perhaps better quality leads that actually convert. The only way to know is to measure individual prospects from search keyword through to closed sale.

Here are some tips on getting started with this approach.

1. Identify which keywords or ads brought visitors to your website. This can be done by adding tracking tags in the link or creating a separate landing page for each.
2. Follow individual user behaviour through your site, while still retaining which advertisement or keyword brought them there.
3. As visitors to your website convert into customers you should review the PPC performance to see which keywords or ads are providing the most business.
4. For website visitors that don’t convert, behavioural tracking will indicate which users show buying signals based on what they do on your site. This will allow you to pass hot leads to Sales and allow Marketing to specifically nurture the rest.

This kind of solution has been a hot item lately, especially for B2B marketing and B2C with larger ticket items such as real estate or travel. After working with clients in various industries to implement click-to-close tracking, I’m convinced more than ever that it’s time for companies to evolve beyond standard analytics and take the next step in better informing Marketing and Sales of measurable and proven revenue drivers.

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Chris O’Neill is the Business Development Manager at antarctica|DIGITAL. He works with marketers and agencies to develop successful B2B and B2C campaigns that engage people online. You can contact Chris by clicking here.

It’s a guide to help your planning efforts in developing integrated, multi-channel campaigns.  Use it to plan offline to online traffic drivers, sketch out online engagement flows, plan community participation, and drive sales.  Over the next several months, we will continue to refine it and develop it further.  It’s completely free to download and share with your colleagues.

• Download the Engagement Marketing Cheat Sheet today.

Once you’ve had a chance to review it, please let us know what you think.  We’re looking to continuously improve the guide, so comments are welcomed on how it could be made more useful, what else you would like to see included, or if you have suggestions on an entirely different way of looking at a campaign.

If you have an upcoming project you’re considering, we’d love to work with you to develop a really engaging campaign for your brands and customers. Tell us more about your project.

To be fair, it wasn’t entirely the salesperson’s fault.  But allow me to go into a bit more detail, and you can decide for yourself.  It started when one of our agency clients brought the project to us and asked what it would take to make it happen.

Our developers looked at the technical aspects and scoped everything out, from the interactive Flash game with high-score table, to serving up dozens of video files promoting Microsoft’s new operating system, and putting it all together in a slick, unified site.  We gave our client a budget, which was met with approval and the project was underway.  But something was left out.

Did anyone figure out how much bandwidth would be required?  A closer look at the (now signed) contract showed that the fixed price we gave included hosting.  Ouch.  This wasn’t a small brand hoping to get a few thousand visitors to the site.  This was Microsoft, launching its next big evolution of its flagship operating system.

“How much traffic do you think this could get?” we asked the account director and nervously waited for the reply.  The answer came back all too quickly.  “You’re familiar with Burger King’s subservient chicken site?”  Faces went pale as we recalled how insanely viral that site went.

And did I mention that the entire site was essentially one big video file, where each thing you clicked on played a different video?  We were screwed.  Sure, we had load balanced servers with redundant hardware and a 100Mbps upstream to multiple tier 1 providers.  You’d be crazy not to have at least that.  But this could have easily saturated even that level of network bandwidth and caused the servers to buckle under the load.

Come to think of it, overwhelming the servers would make the site unavailable and thus reduce our bandwidth bill.  But it would also effectively shut down the sites of all our other clients as well.  Besides, that’s not the way we do business.  We have an obligation to not only deliver a great site but to keep all our client sites running smoothly without interruption.

So we took the plunge and re-implemented the site on top of a distributed content delivery network which served up the video from a network spanning across multiple continents.  Our developers worked feverishly to accommodate the necessary changes in time for the deadline and we were able to test and deliver the finished site on schedule.  The site performed extremely well, and both our client and Microsoft were pleased with how snappy the video loaded.  Then came the acid test.

The site went live and the visitors poured in.  It continued to perform admirably, thanks to our investment in the network.  And we sat there nervously, refreshing the bandwidth stats watching the gigabytes – and our cost – move steadily upwards.

Fortunately for us the site ended up being somewhat of a niche Microsoft site and didn’t turn viral, so the bandwidth bill didn’t entirely bury us.  But the lessons learned here paved the way for our approach to high volume sites that we continue practicing today.

In addition to continually improving our own cluster of web and database servers, we still deploy static content to our content delivery network.  Spanning multiple continents and multiple data centers, we can serve over 1Gbps of sustained throughput effortlessly.  Besides, by offloading the static content it keeps the core servers responsive, ensuring a positive site experience for visitors.  Finally, we monitor every site 24/7 to make certain they continue to operate at peak efficiency.

Our clients sleep better at night knowing we can handle anything they throw our way.  And we don’t let the salespeople throw in unlimited hosting any more.

At the time, everybody’s junk email folders were filled with offers for knock-offs of various watches.  So when we had the chance to help Rolex promote the real product to their customers you can probably understand our hesitation.  Would we take on the client?

It wasn’t an issue of budget.  Our rates are quite competitive and this particular client would have no trouble paying.  It certainly wasn’t due to the size of their list as our platform routinely sends out millions of emails a day.  The real reason was that we ran the risk of losing all of our other clients.  Let me explain.

When enough people report an email as spam, the IP address your email is sent from gets blacklisted.  If you’re on a platform where everybody shares IP addresses, spam from one company could render your emails useless.  This wasn’t a problem in our case as every one of our clients has their own dedicated IP address for sending email.  However, some blacklists will ban the entire IP address range if the volume of complaints is too high.  Consumers, weary of the growing plague of spam, could inadvertently affect our entire customer base.  The decision we made ended up changing our business forever.

It would have been really easy to turn away the business.  At the time, we had just expanded our services to include online contests and sweepstakes, coupons, surveys, and a number of other solutions.  After all, this was just email.  Still, we’re not accustomed to giving up on challenges.

So, with resolve, we jumped in headfirst and the whole company brainstormed the best approach.  In reality, giving Rolex its own dedicated IP address was just the tip of the iceberg.  We setup additional policies to ensure that we’re not only protecting them and enhancing their reputation, but we’re protecting our system as a whole:

1. Make sure they have proper SPF records, DomainKeys, and have both forward and reverse DNS setup for their IP address.
2. Monitor volume levels to major domains to ensure deliverability issues aren’t triggered.
3. Help them become fully compliant with CAN-SPAM and other legislation.
4. Automatically unsubscribe bounces and spam complaints – if the address is invalid or the subscriber complains for whatever reason, we don’t want to send them email.
5. Constant bounce monitoring – if a campaign’s bounce rate exceeds a preset threshold, we immediately investigate why and take corrective action.
6. Monitor all major blacklists to ensure all our IP addresses are clean.
7. Ensure emails render correctly in more than a dozen email clients, both desktop and web-based, by implementing compliant HTML design… before the email is sent out.
8. Check whether it gets through nine different server-side spam filters and whether it gets marked as junk mail by desktop spam filters.
9. Review subject lines and make recommendations on improvements for better clarity.
10. Have established relationships with all major ISPs where we are notified immediately any time someone reports any single email as spam – and unsubscribe the complainers.
11. Ensure automatic subscriber management –subscription changes don’t take days, they happen instantly.

Did it work?  Yes, beautifully.  Rolex’s emails were delivered problem-free and were well received by their customers.  To be fair, all of the effort we went to worked because they started with a permission-based list.  We don’t work with clients who harvest email addresses or use shady tactics.  In addition, because of all the proactive measures, our other clients also noticed their delivery rates improving as well.

Since then the agency representing the client has moved on to other projects, but we’re extremely grateful for the chance this brought us.  We now have a checklist with dozens of action items that must be taken, both when accepting a new client as well as before each campaign goes out.  And our constant monitoring and attention to the entire platform’s delivery stats keeps us trusted with ISPs.  However, it didn’t end there.

Strengthened by the success this produced for email, we’ve applied the same analytical approach to all of our services.  For example, when it comes to online contests and sweepstakes, we ensure entries aren’t spoiled by building in numerous security features including CAPTCHA forms, IP address limiting, entry restrictions, and have detailed checklists on everything from rules and regulations to handling of prize winners.

I look forward to tackling more projects that give us pause and challenge us to improve our business.

The next time a client approaches you with an opportunity you almost want to turn down, think about how overcoming the obstacles will strengthen your company.  We’ve certainly benefitted from it, and I think you will too.