Checking In...Updates for Sour eMail February 16, 2018

Email Best Practices and More

Sorry for the long hiatus here.  Been busy with some new clients and work and while I continue to focus on email marketing, I've been branching out into other areas in support of my client work.

I've been working for about a year now with a software company that supplies operational software to RV, power sports, marine and auto dealerships.  Small but growing and focus right now is in the RV space, so I've been focusing my publishing efforts there. Here's some recent posts in one of the major online magazines and news engines for that industry which are relevant for Sour eMail.

December 2017 - Email Marketing Best Practices - 10 Tips for Success

February 2018 - Steps to the Sale - Tips to Improve Sales Conversion

I also have an upcoming speaking engagement in San Francisco on Customer Experience Mapping.  I'll post details of what that covers later, but here's details on that event.  

Stay tuned for more insights and information in the email and customer relationship area.

CUSTOMER CENTRICITY - Anatomy of an Email Inbox 8-2-2017

Conference Speaking Gig

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to speak about CRM, email and marketing strategy at the Southeast Building Conference #SEBCVille last week at the beautiful Gaylord Palms Hotel near Disney World. My session was focused on customer centricity and how to be the driver rather than the passenger in the customer conversation.  If you would like a copy of my deck, please contact me.

While there, I was able to attend a couple of other sessions and it was good to hear others having the same conversation, even using similar analogies of cars.  I sat in on the session by Steve Coughran at Coltivar Group and I loved his description of how businesses continue to miss the opportunity to focus on customers. He called it the "Me Car."  In essence what he talked about is that in conversations, sales teams and even in marketing materials we tend to focus on the company rather than trying to listen to and understand the customers needs and presenting compelling content that they care about.  

As someone who started out my career on the market research side of marketing, I have always been a big proponent of using those tools to better understand prospects and customers.  Today we have even more! Here's some things to consider doing if you are not already.

Prospect surveys

Either on line or in person, don't let someone out of your sphere without trying to obtain some level of information and insight from them. People are usually happy to tell you things about themselves. Who doesn't like to talk about themselves?  You could do web based surveys to understand the things people like about your site, test different experiences and more.  See a few of these type tools here. Phone surveys are great for customer service insights.  How many times have you heard the message: "Please take a moment to answer a few questions about the call..?"

While at Centex Homes, I instituted a model center survey program that was part of the sign in process for visitors who came to the model homes.  At my session at SEBC, I talked about the insights we gained from this work.  Within only 18 months, across our Divisions we had over 8,000 completed surveys. We analyzed these to understand our segments needs in a home, their motivations for purchase, what influenced their visit and the features of the homes that were important to them.  These insights about the segments helped inform product design and features, sales team scripts, marketing activities and more.

Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Some think the concept of Net Promoter Score is dead, however, I disagree.  This metric is a good tracking tool over time to understand where you are and to benchmark your performance against industry norms and overall.  It helps you keep a pulse on the sentiment and combined with other survey insights can provide great content.  When I went to the Home Storage company I worked for several years ago, they had great creative and rudimentary understanding of their consumer targets, but hadn't done a deep dive or built a "culture of learning."  I started this CSAT study in my first 30 days and began a process that not only trended the company Net Promoter Score but provided insights that informed product, customer service and much more.  We disseminated the commentary from the surveys to the appropriate departments for continuous improvements in all these areas.  This led to the institution of additional insight collections specific to customer service, our business partner channels and other ad hoc insights that were needed to better understand our customers and prospects.

It was all about being customer centric and understanding the customer and making them core to the way we ran the business. Here's a slide I borrowed for my presentation that I think does a good job of describing at a high level what is needed to be customer centric.

Email Insights

This blog is about email, so I would be remiss in not mentioning how to use email to drive customer centricity.  Email communication should not be one way.  It is a great engagement tool and way to obtain insights in "sound bytes."  This can be helpful to continue learning throughout your relationship.  Also, while at Centex, we implemented a robust CRM communications program that was founded on the customer journey and the understanding that it was a long process.  Central to that was where our prospect was in the process.  We crafted unique communications flows based on this timing presenting content that was relevant for each phase.  We initially asked them where they were in their process and got them to tell us "how long until you plan to make a decision."  We continued to ask this question in every email communication, so if circumstances changed, they could let us know and we could move them to a different communications track.  We also used behavioral triggers to move people into different communications paths.  So for example, if someone asked a very specific question in response to an email, an online consultant was automatically notified and a personal phone call follow up was made.

Every touch point with your prospects and customers should be a learning opportunity.  Being open to the voice of the customer and building tools and processes to learn from those interactions will help you drive a business that matters and is responsive to the needs of your customers which naturally leads to profitability and success.

Your CRM then becomes the repository of this learning so that you maintain the "one truth" of the customer that provides you the insights and tools you need to grow a profitable business.

So, as I said in my presentation, here's the things that you need to drive the customer relationship and build your business:

- Customer focused leadership is key

- Build a learning culture and systems

- Focus on the entire journey, not just the end

- Tell stories and make emotional connections

- Measure and always be improving

Your Journey with the Customer Never Ends!

BUYERS JOURNEY CONTENT - Anatomy of an Email Inbox 7-5-2017

Happy 4th of July. Hope you all enjoyed this mid week holiday to celebrate our independence and what it means for all of us.

I enjoyed it with family and neighbors, but am now back to work and thinking about email content as it relates to the buyer journey.

I think about and spend a lot of time writing about experiential and lifestyle selling and how to better connect with consumers and use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and email specifically to maintain and develop those relationships over time.

Over the years, I have been involved with database marketing and have oftentimes had large databases to tap into to activate and drive incremental business. 

Customer Journey - Awareness and Consideration

Email is certainly a relationship tool, but I think many of us miss the mark in using it for awareness and consideration.  What do I mean by that?  Well, a negative example is a good way to start.  I like to pick on the home building industry for "sour" behaviors because they are an easy target!  They are a very sales and end of funnel focused and if you review just the subject lines of their emails, you can see that.  Here's a snapshot of several weeks of emails from one home builder.  As you can see, they are very focused on SELLING and not so much on understanding where a prospect is in their journey and what kind of things they might want to know.

Customer Journey - Early Funnel Content

I shared some thoughts a few posts ago about customer journey mapping and how this can help you understand the journey, but what I'd like to focus on today is how you discover and develop content specifically focused on the very earliest phases of the journey.

As part of the mapping process, it is important to ask yourself what kind of questions will people ask in the early phases of discovery and consideration.

Some questions that are relevant in this stage need to take you away from the sales process and this makes it hard to get to the right questions.  I've had many conversations with people about what content at this level means and often the responses I receive are still too focused lower in the funnel.

So let's look at some examples.

Home Building 

If I'm not really even thinking about buying a home, how might a builder get some consideration going?  

First, think about people and their homes.  Everyone lives in a home and at times may think about how that home might be better, more livable or something they don't like about it.  What kind of compelling content could help them?

Here's some topic ideas:

-  Top things I would change about my home if I could

-  How to get more out of less space

-  Popular colors for this season

Each of these has nothing to do with a specific builder or the later stages of the sales process.  However, if you had the opportunity to share this kind of content with a broader audience, either in your email database or not, would it be beneficial?  Would it help start the consideration process?  Would it make people more likely to contact you when they are further into the process?

I'd say yes, if done well.

Clothes and Fashions

This is a much shorter cycle time so the content can drive to purchase much faster.  Concepts are still the same however.  What things can get you into their consideration?  So perhaps content like:

-  Best summer swim suits

-  Summer colors that dazzle

-  Summer dress styles for every budget

Again, there is no "promotion" or offer to come in or visit a website and buy it now, but just something to put people into the thinking process of clothing and fashions for summer that could ultimately lead to a purchase from you!

You can come up with these kind of early funnel examples for virtually any industry and product.  The point is to sell but not sell, tap into an emotion and lifestyle and provide content that is of interest and useful.

And don't forget to ask them to raise their hand once they do engage with the content.  Even though people don't like pop-up windows, they do work to get people to sign up for more content like what you provided (and oh, by the way, maybe a special offer!).  It's all about the sale, its just how you get there and when that matters.  Early funnel content does matter.

Happy 4th and happy early funnel content development.

CONTENT FOR THE JOURNEY - Anatomy of an Email Inbox 6-12-17

Content is King (or Queen)

I've been errant in getting my posts out consistently the past few weeks.  I have a good excuse however, as I've been making some transitional moves to fully set up my winter and summer homes. I'm a little backwards this year spending the summer in Florida instead of Michigan.  Some of us relaxed on the 1,200 mile drive!  Needed to do that to buy and sell properties here in Florida however.  Getting to spend some time in the home I brought my daughter up in before selling it and moving to the coast, so that has been a trip down memory lane.

I digress, however.  I have also been working on some speaking presentations and as part of that I realized I haven't said much in these posts about content for the journey.

Content for the Journey

Last month I talked about CJM (Customer Journey Mapping) and laid out the high level thoughts and steps on how to go about this process.  Of course, if you need help doing this, contact me.

What I have found, just like in writing this blog and throughout my years as a marketing leader is that creating the content is the hardest part of implementing your customer communications strategy.

You can do a great job of creating your CJM, setting in place the tools needed to executed (automation, databases, KPIs, etc.), but if you don't build your content engine, you will fail.

Content  Gap Analysis

When I did a CJM years ago while working at Sears Home Services, one of the steps and "aha moments" was after creating the map and the content plan was the work we did as our next step which was to create a content gap analysis.

We took an inventory of all the content we had and then compared it to the content we needed. The "aha moment" was in understanding where our gaps were.  Invariably, there and in other industries that I work in one of several outcomes are observed:

• There is just minimal content - so a BIG gap
• There is great content across the journey phases - so MINIMAL gap (you don't see that too often)
• There is a gap in one or more phases of the journey - most common

At Sears, we found that we were missing content early in the funnel.  I have often found that to be true.  Most selling organizations where the sales function is a strong driver at the leadership level tend to err in this space.  They focus their content on end of funnel conversions and the consideration phase of the decision.

Metrics Focus

One of the reasons a lot of organizations don't develop compelling content for early in the journey can be laid at the feet of the metrics.  It is hard to justify early funnel content when leadership is focused on short term, immediate results. In my last role in the home storage products industry, I had countless conversations about widening the conversion funnel at the top versus the bottom and minimizing the "leakage" through the process. Business leaders want to see immediate results of your efforts and unfortunately content, especially that designed to build awareness and consideration does not typically drive immediate results. Instead, it drives a wider funnel that provides more conversions as you put more people into the funnel.  The important element is setting the right metrics for this type of content.  So, it is not about getting the sale, but getting the prospect to engage and take the next step (impressions, clicks, shares, read rates, etc).

Content Generation

So once you have identified your customer journey, your content needs and your gap, you can begin to develop a content plan.

If you want to learn a lot more about the importance of content to business success, I recommend attending the Content Marketing World conference held in Cleveland.  This year it is Sept 5-8, so well before the snows start falling and a very pretty time of year in the mid-west.  There are great sessions on all things content and they will provide you many ideas on where and how to create content and also how to elevate this important function within your organization to the place it belongs.

At a high level, here's some ways to begin to build the great content library you need to drive the customer journey to your benefit:

• Build it yourself
• Partner with media outlets who deliver similar content
• Re purpose historical content (repetition is important and different people show up at different times, so don't be afraid to reuse good content and use in multiple places)
• Share other's content that is relevant (with permission and proper authorization of course)
• Hire external content providers (make versus buy decision - topic for a future blog post)

Here's a great infographic on 22 tips for creating content from copyblogger.  

It's easier than you think.  You just need to focus and build an organization that can deliver.  Most importantly, you need to understand the customer journey so you can curate the right content.

Happy content development!

CJM AND EMAIL - Anatomy of an Email Inbox 5-5-17

Happy May Day.  It is a beautiful time of year in Michigan when all the trees and flowers are in bloom. This weekend starts the annual Tulip Time festival in Holland.  I missed it last year, so am looking forward to attending this year.  I never knew the variety and colors of tulips until I experienced this when I first arrived in Michigan three years ago.

But, that's not our topic today.  What I would like to cover today is CJM or Customer Journey Mapping and how it can inform your email strategy and campaigns.  In some ways I've been doing this for years through my segmentation and customer analytics work.  We just now call it something specific and have a practice and discipline around it. The whole concept is to understand the decision funnel or journey and the content needed during that journey by the prospect with the goal of:

-  Providing the right content at the right time
-  Moving people faster along the journey
-  Getting more people to take the next steps in the journey (with you!)

There has been a lot written about this and the process and there are plenty of examples and options on how to do it, but the most important elements in my mind are:

- Think about it from the customers perspective, not what you want
- Understand that the journey starts well before they know about you
- Leverage research and analytics to understand what the customers content needs really are and what is appropriate at each stage
- Develop compelling content and deliver it in a variety of ways (including email)
- Insure your KPIs are in place and aligned to the experience and phases
- Create separate journey maps if needed for different segments and target populations (where the content needs may be vastly different)

Email, then can become an important and engaging element along this journey and a great way for you to deliver and reinforce this content to the prospect.

Below is a Journey Map I created for my RV industry clients.  As you can see this maps out the phases and marketing steps and where email fits into the journey.  This can be relatively similar for other businesses and industries although the marketing tactics may be different.

The point is:  EMAIL can be leveraged along most of the journey.

The next phase then of the journey mapping process is to think about your content and what aligns to the phases and how you get it in front of people.  For example, in the early funnel phases, general White Papers or articles related to your topic may start consumers down the path.  So in our RV example, an article on the "TOP 10 National Parks to See This Summer" might be early funnel content.  A comparison and evaluation of RV brands and types would be later funnel content.

Sending that later funnel content to someone who hasn't even considered RVing would not be appropriate or productive.

TOP Tips for CJM and Email

-  Build segment specific Customer Journey Maps
-  Create compelling content for each phase of the journey
-  Complete a content audit to find the gaps you have in needed content
-  Develop compelling content and types (video, audio, imagery, copy)
-  USE EMAIL to reinforce and deliver on this content
-  TEST and MEASURE along the way

Need help with your CJM?  Contact CRM Concepts to get started today.

COMMUNICATION TIMELINES - Anatomy of an Email Inbox - 3/6/17

How long should we communicate with our prospects?

I had the opportunity to speak at a Women in Consulting event in San Francisco last week. Our topic was Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and the customer journey, but of course email marketing came up as a part of the discussion.

We talked about what kind of emails these business consultants were deploying for their prospects and customers and what they should be doing in the context of building a strong customer relationship and improving conversion rates throughout the decision funnel.

The specific question that came up was how long should they continue the conversation.  

If you put yourself in the shoes of your customers, think about why they signed up in the first place and what you had to say that meant something to them.  Couch this in the context of their journey in a relationship with you and what information is relevant at what point in that journey.

Also important in the process is determining what you want to get out of the relationship. For it to be successful, there needs to be value on both sides of the equation.  Consider these business goals:

-  To make a connection with your prospects and build a long term relationship
-  To provide the right content at the right point in the customer journey
-  To stay top of mind
-  To improve conversions through the journey (and improve ROI and the bottom line for your business).

So, back to the question of how long to communicate.  As a marketer, we build brand and awareness, drive consideration and conversion.  These are the classic decision funnel steps.  We invest sometimes millions of dollars to do this and our goal should be to give the target customers compelling reasons to "raise their hand" as early in this decision process as possible.  This is important because it allows you to:

- Take prospects out of the market
-  Influence the conversation at an early stage
-  Become a trusted expert and partner in the decision
-  Improve conversions over both the short and long term.

Depending on your product, the buying cycle could be long or short and even if it is a short cycle commodity or necessity product, you still want them to come back for repeat purchases.

If you are not top of mind and there when that trigger point happens that pushes them to the next phase in their decision process or even circles them back to an earlier stage, you will miss the opportunity for the continued conversation and conversion.

Over the past 20 years, I have mostly worked with long decision cycle consumer products.  The businesses spent millions of dollars to build large databases of prospects and often only 1-2% actually purchased in any one period.  Does that mean there is no hope for conversion over the short term? Certainly if you stop communicating, your chances for making this happen are less likely, but what if you maintain a relevant conversation over a long time?

In working with sales teams, they often focus on immediate prospects and complete their follow up over weeks or perhaps sometimes months if they are good.  Still many of those prospects don't convert.  The sales person goes on to richer opportunities and the prospect languishes in the database. Oftentimes they are still actively or passively in the market, but just not yet ready to take the next step.  With CRM and marketing automation systems, we as marketers can impact what happens.  

I have built and replicated tests in multiple industries where simply by developing an ongoing long term communications strategy, I have consistently seen 20-25% improvements in sales from these prospect databases.  Consider a known prospect akin to a nugget of gold.  Would you throw that away and ignore it?  Would it lose value to you?  Obviously, the answer is "no." 

The answer to our question then at the start this post is simple.  I often told my teams: continue to communicate with a prospect until they buy, die or unsubscribe!  And even when they buy, you continue to communicate since then you have the strongest relationship and should endeavor to continue it. Certainly, there is a lot more to how this happens and when, but some simple best practices can get you started.

Best Practices for Long Term Communications

-  Know as much as you can about your prospects and use it
-  Always personalize your communications
-  Create a two-way conversation that helps you learn more
-  Use behavioral data to further understand your prospects
-  Create simple segments, learn from them and build them over time
-  Build a customer journey map and content needs at each stage to drive the conversation
-  Don't quit communicating unless you are asked to do so
-  Treat every known prospect as the valuable gold nugget that it is and be sure you realize the value from the investment you made in it!

If you follow these best practices for customer communication, you will not be a SOUR emailer!

PERSONALIZATION - Anatomy of an Email Inbox - Dec 5, 2016

Today is my birthday.  Birthdays are personalizations that are the easiest things to know about someone and use to delight your email members.  As part of my topic today, I thought I would do an inventory of my inbox to see who is not being SOUR and using this information about me to catch my attention.

Now granted, it is only a little after noon as I am starting this, so some companies may still reach out to me, but the sad truth is that I haven't seen too many messages recognizing my birthday.  Compare this to my Facebook friends who have been pinging me all day; 75+ and counting.  If companies want to have a relationship with me, shouldn't they act more like friends?

So who did treat me like a friend?

Overstock.com - said happy birthday and offered me 10% savings.  They even used my name in the subject line and in the body copy and thanked me for the relationship.

Southwest Airlines - also used my name in the subject and I liked the engagement - subject line was intriguing:  "we brought the party to your inbox."  It made me want to know what they meant, so I opened it, then it had a birthday theme and invited me to "take a swing at the pinata for some birthday fun."  Again, highly engaging and made me want to click (which I did) to see what I would get.  So I actually got a pinata which I could swing at with my cursor.  I did and broke it open after several hits for a happy birthday song (in audio - the swinging and hitting of the pinata had audio effects too).  I could do it again for more birthday wishes.  Only did it twice, but looked like I could go on for a while if I wanted lots more birthday wishes.  GREAT JOB delighting me Southwest on my birthday.  Now that is a true friend!

UPDATE:  A few late arrivals came from Macy's and Best Buy - thanks for thinking of me!

Not so good:

Hilton Honors - offered me a "gift" so made me think it might be about me, but was really just a regular seasonal email related to the holidays.

Starbucks offered me 1/2 off a Frappucino but it had nothing to do with me, my birthday or if I ever bought a Frap from them.  I haven't recently, so clearly they aren't using much personalization to talk to me.

And that's it.  Everyone else was into their normal "spray and pray" routine - thinking about holidays and how to drive business in this most important retail season.  Given that my inbox contained over 100 emails, the fact that only 2 companies took the time to recognize this simple fact about me is just plain SOUR.

What gets me most is that the tools we have available allow us to delight daily with simple and sophisticated marketing communications that show we know and care about our prospects and customers, but as email marketers we fail to do so in a big way.  So many of us are so far from being great email marketers, it just makes me sad and SOUR.  We can do so much better.

Start today, ask yourself:

-  Am I using the persons first name in every correspondence?
-  What little things can I do to know my prospects and customers better and use this to show I care? Like Southwests birthday Pinata game or just by simply recognizing what you know about your members?
-  How can you use behaviors and engagement to send more relevant emails?
-  How can you build and leverage your systems to empower your email marketing and customer relationship management systems to help you have a real relationship founded on familiarity and connections.

Let's be better!