I’m at the SiriusDecisions Summit this week and feeling really energized about all of the great ideas I’m planning to implement when I get back home. Of all of the great presentations today, Tony Jaros (of SiriusDecisions) presentation, ‘The Demand Ecosystem: Progress and Problems’ really stood out, so I thought I’d share. These ideas could have stood out to me because they really reinforced our beliefs at ReachForce. It was nice to hear someone else validate what we’ve been saying all along. If you’re not a ReachForce customer, feel free to call us after reading below. We can help.

• “The Power of your database is what you OWN, not what you RENT.” We at ReachForce couldn’t agree more. We believe B2B marketers are tired of the poor results rented lists deliver. Where did all of these names come from anyway? And how long ago were they collected? ReachForce contact databases are built custom for your business and are yours to keep for continued marketing.
• “Targeting is a function of probability, not possibility.” If we do our homework on the front end by identifying the right companies and the right buying roles within these companies we are increasing the response probability. By not targeting, we are only able to say there is a possibility we may get some responses. I don’t know about you but I wouldn’t bet my job on possibilities.
• If you are marketing to the CXOs, you are more than likely not targeting the right people. “Typically CXOs enter the buying process at the end of the sales process.” Everyone knows that the possibility of getting a CXO to actually respond to a marketing program or pick up the phone to talk to sales guy (they’ve never heard of) is very slim, right?

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I was just reading my ‘daily dose’ of eMarketer and saw these statistics and thought it would be useful to share them with the readers of our Blog.

The interesting view here is personalization. Now here are a few questions to ponder,

1. Are these “spray and pray” e-mail campaigns or targeted?
2. What would these metrics look like if they were targeted to the right person?
3. What happens as the economy continues to drift and budget cuts come after marketing dollars, what stays, what goes?
4. Is lead generation mission critical to your business? If not, why not?

What rates are you seeing out there?

I just spoke with Amy Hawthorne, our Lead Generation Guru and she said her campaign this week had a 10% click through rate and 30% open rate. WOW!

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As some of you may have noticed, we at ReachForce were founded on the principals that B2B direct marketing was failing due to the poor quality of lists – it was and is egregious that we get less than 1% response rate from e-mail campaigns and that the list industry had not changed in 100 years and I quote are like “dinosaurs in a marketing 2.0 world”. Then, this week I see a picture of a dinosaur on the cover of the BtoB magazine and it alludes to the “L-word”.

The article titled “The List World - List managers unable to adapt and create new products and services that dig deeper into data are in danger of extinction” is a very interesting piece. Carol Krol, great job on this article, you absolutely GET IT!

Here are some of the points covered in the article:

1. The “List industry” is undergoing dramatic change and consolidation is underway – the OLD way of list marketing is dying
2. Database marketing is emerging (my view is that isn’t that what we all learned anyway?)
3. Data now constitutes 2 dimensions: Analytics and the leads databases (not lists)
4. Custom database development is what people want with more precision
5. E-mail marketing emerging as the # 1 way to target 1:1 messages to the right people
6. Nurturing contacts using e-mail marketing is also a driver to this trend
7. Database analytics and segmentation is becoming a natural extension in marketing departments

As I say every day, fellow B2B Marketers, let’s get together on a crusade to put an end to the 90+% waste in marketing spend - stopping the bleeding on lists is a good start, let’s think about targeted databases built on analytics and focused messages to the right person at the right target company.

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MarketingSherpa just posted the results of ad:tech’s Fifth Annual survey of ad:tech attendees. They surveyed 421 Internet marketers on the online Marketing tactics that worked and those that didn’t work over the past 12 months.

Good news for ReachForce Customers: ad:tech found that “House lists top paid search: More marketers reported success with house email lists than paid search ads — a reversal from a year earlier.” That’s a good indicator that B2B Marketers should keep their house database clean and continue to invest in demand generation programs targeting those lists.

Other important findings include:

• SEO is generating high ROI
• Paid search continues to perform, but is down steeply from 2006 possibly due to intense PPC competition.
• Viral marketing is still popular as 93% of marketers said agencies recommend either an increase in spending or begin spending on viral video.
• 87% plan to increase viral marketing on social networking sites.

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It is interesting that we continue to see a proliferation of “marketing automation tools and technologies” emerge every month. Marketers have their choice from Eloqua, Aprimo, Marketo, Vtrenz, Market2Lead, Manticore and the open source option, Loopfuse. And while each has great benefits, I can’t help but think that no matter how much the engine (Marketing Automation System) is perfected, it will not run well if the fuel (the DATA) is sewage.

Are we still, in 2008, renting “sewage lists” and them pumping them though these marketing automation processes? Most list vendors sell or rent title-based B2B contact lists. The problem is that a person’s title is only an appellation of rank, it has very little to do with the person’s roles and responsibilities in an organization. Say the buyer of your product is typically a Director of IT. Someone comes to your site and accurately fills out a form that they are the Director of IT. Hooray, you got ‘em. But wait, at IBM there could be 150 directors of IT; how do you know this is the one responsible for network security and has budget authority?

Just yesterday, I was on a call with the VP of Marketing who had been at a few of the Marketing Automation vendors and she could not believe what ReachForce is doing. At several past positions she set up her own inside telemarketing team to do contact discovery because she knew that title-based lists produces abysmal response rates. While this tactic had success, it was cost prohibitive to scale, manage and build. In her case, she thought that there was no option but to do that as she did not want to use the sewage and be in 99% inaccuracy land.

Marketing Automation is a necessary tool for all marketers, but any one of these tools is only as good as the data put into it.

My point is that marketing automation is important but getting quality data or fuel to put into it is PRICELESS!!

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Just read that a study by John Coe and the Sales & Marketing Institute showed that “70.8% of business people changed one or more elements on their business cards each year.” According to a new study conducted by research firm NFO WorldGroup, “31% of email addresses change annually.”

If you are buying a list from a trade publication and basing your direct marketing on that list, you are in effect paying good money for old business cards and then basing your expensive campaigns on those cards. Ouch. What a waste of money and time. And, imagine what your campaign results will be!

Perhaps it’s time to take a different approach to database marketing?

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I recently received an invite to a conference via email, quite common these days. The problem was, wait no, I should say the problems were:

1. It was addressed to someone who has not worked for my company for over a year
2. It was sent to sales@reachforce.com
3. It was addressed to the former CTO

This is an announcement to all sales people: if you want me to spend money with you, know that the person you are selling to still works there. A quick trip to our website would solve that. And do you really think that the CTO receives anything from sales@blank.com? Never send a marketing message to sales@blank.com or jobs@blank.com or contactus@blank.com, it will be deleted immediately.

Find the right decision maker to sell/market to and deliver you message directly to them. Sending your message to sales@blank.com just shows me you are lazy, and I will never buy from someone who is lazy.

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In the world of lead generation, we as marketers are constantly measuring open and conversion rates for our latest email campaigns. Here is a summary of MailerMailer’s latest Email Marketing Metrics Report from E-consultancy. See how your results compare and gain tips for subject lines and best times to send campaigns.

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Be Compliant

• Make sure your entire physical address is at the bottom of your marketing emails
• Make sure you offer your recipients a way to unsubscribe from your mailing list
• Ensure HTML content complies with standards

Preserve your Reputation

• Stagger your mailings
• Choose subject lines carefully
• Carefully track unsubscribes, bouncebacks and opt-ins
• Make it easy for the recipient to get in touch with you
• Use email service provider for more automation

Be Careful when Creating Content

• Make sure your not using a spam buzz word – check here
• Use capitalization sparingly
• Minimize use of “click here” or “click below”
• Watch your punctuation
• Use simple HTML, No Javascript
• Use web-safe colors only
• Reduce use of large fonts and characters
• Avoid “remove” in unsubscribe language
• Keep file size under 70K

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B2B Marketing Campaign Watch – ReachForce Customer Shares Lessons Learned in B2B Viral Marketing

ReachForce customer, NetQoS, was recently honored by Marketing Sherpa for an innovative B2B Viral Marketing program that continues to generate a steady stream of B2B leads for the company. Read about it in the Marketing Sherpa Hall of Fame. The campaign involved a blend of new media, traditional public relations, blogger relations, demand generation, and an elaborate seeding campaign. NetQoS placed the video on YouTube and Google Video, as well as on more targeted sites such as Digg, Techmeme, Brightcove, Grouper, Motionbox, DailyMotion, GoFish and Veoh. At that point, the viral effect took over netting 66,000+ views on YouTube, numerous press mentions, pickup by the popular TechCrunch tech blog, and more than 1,800 downloads, some of which have already turned into sales meetings. O’Neal will speak about how the leads from the Viral campaign compared to traditional Marketing Campaign leads and how she is leveraging Deliberate Marketing techniques to increase the value of those leads at the upcoming Marketing Sherpa B-to-B Demand Generation Summit this fall. More details coming soon on The B2B Lead blog.

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