The Whitelist

Step right up, all the leading-edge content you can consume…  Howdy y’all (loving Atlanta).  Wow, been drinking from the firehose today, what an amazing calibre and quantity of information to digest.  Fortunately (thankfully), I’ve had help from my bloggingpartner-in-crime Chrissy in getting double the coverage of sessions than I could have done on my own.  She was in John Coe’s session early this afternoon on Data-Driven Creative (B2B) and did a great job picking up what he was laying down.  Here’s the rub: data and creative are not connected (by the vast majority of marketers – even the good ones), even though we KNOW that ‘the higher the relevancy of the offer and the message, the higher the engagement will be of the recipient’.  To get thru the clutter (and noise in the inbox), data and creative HAVE to be connected.

Okay John.  How?  Campaign plan comes first (driven by database), creative comes second.  The campaign plan needs to have 3 levels – 1st being based on demographic data, and the creative should be ‘soft and relevant’ to a specific demographic.  2nd level is set around behavioral data (search inquiries, whitepaper downloads etc) and the creative needs to reference the behavior that triggered the message being sent – with a goal of getting recipient’s commitment to next buying step.  3rd level is then driven by relationship data (lead scoring, sales/site visits, high value customer…) and now the creative is functional, direct and a hard sell “we know you’re about ready” with a message goal of commitment to final steps in buying process.  Key point – the creative must involve 3 critical things – messaging, offer, and media (email vs postal).

Big-game marketing tools

You buying?  I’m selling.  Love this stuff, high calibre ammo to go big-game hunting.  Yeah baby yeah.

Gotta go get my Easy-on.  The 20′s themed SpeakEasy party started half an hour ago, I’m late.  More (much more) later.

If the depressed economy, next week’s ominous tax day, or a poorly performing email campaign has you down, Mark Brownlow will lift you up! And give us all a much-needed wake up call at the same time!

The publisher of Email Marketing Reports, Mark has put out another brilliant email marketing video. This time he takes on B2B marketing emails. He pretends to be one, an email newsletter, as he talks “at” you, the viewer/reader. With humor that’s painfully on target, he talks through the major sins B2B email marketing commits on a daily, if not hourly, basis:
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At one point in time you knew your target customer. But times change, temporarily and permanently. It might be time to take another look and make sure your email marketing campaigns are still relevant to your  audience. This applies to consumers and to business-to-business email marketing.

If your customers’ pain points and concerns have changed, your email marketing must change too, otherwise it will be irrelevant and therefore ineffective. Think about where your audience’s head might be at these days, depending on whether they’re B2C or B2B:

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