Product Documents

this is an example doc used in [this post] that shows how to create successful nurture programs LNA: Install Snippet Email (EXAMPLE) Overview An email educating and encouraging new leads to install the snippet in the Optimizely product. Hypothesis By sending an email with a humorous subject line about installing the snippet, users will be more likely to open the email than if they are sent a serious subject line. Baseline Conversion Out of all leads that were delivered our "Snippet Install Email" (5,000), 35% of them opened the email (1750). Goal Increase create account conversion by 7% Baseline conversion = 4,900 leads per variation Audience New leads that created a self-serve Optimizely account Content Cadence: 1x week to new leads Notes

Note: This post was originally written by Danny Essner, who oversees Demand Generation and Marketing Operations at MediaMathhttp://launchpoint.marketo.com/mediamath/1553-terminalone-marketing-operating-system/. This post is the first in a series dedicated to exploring how B2B marketers can use programmatic technology to effectively reach their target buyer personas, and move them down the path to purchase. For the past five years B2B marketers have been obsessed with marketing automation. More specifically, B2B marketers have relied heavily on email lead nurturing to help them address their key challenges, including an increasingly complex sales cycle, sophisticated buyers who complete 60% or more of their research and purchase decisions before reaching out to a sales person, and the need to deliver both a higher quantity as well as better quality of qualified leads to its sales team. Marketing automation platforms are great, but the term “marketing automation” is a misnomer. Many of the so-called marketing automation platforms are, in reality, email automation platforms. Marketing automation implies a cross-channel solution that automates and optimizes across the multiple key channels marketers use to find and engage prospects and customers. And while email is important, it is not the only channel B2B marketers should use to engage new and existing customers through their buyers’ journeys. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am a huge fan of these automation platforms.   I believe in their power and have been using them for the past eight years. My concern is that marketers who have invested in these platforms have become overly reliant on email as the one channel they use to nurture leads and engage existing customers. According to eMarketer, B2B email performance is quite poor, averaging ~20% open rates and ~1.5% click through rates. Research shows that B2B buyers use a wide variety of tools in product/solution research. They research online, scour social media channels, and consume videos. A true full-funnel lead nurture strategy goes beyond email to include your website, social channels and the web. With this approach in mind, here are three recommendations B2B marketers can employ to expand beyond email: 1. Develop and Execute a Multi-Channel Lead Nurture Strategy Complement your email lead nurture programs with display advertising, social and website campaigns. As with email nurturing, messages delivered through these channels must be properly sequenced and relevant to each customer based on where they are in the buyer’s journey. 2. Create Message Alignment Across all Channels To realize the benefit of a multi-channel nurturing strategy, all channels must support one another in propelling the customer through their journey. Your messages must be aligned and consistent so that you’re always delivering the right message to the right customer at the right time. This means that the messaging for each channel must be specific to that channels, and all channels must be aware of where the customer is in their journey. 3. Build Out Your Marketing Stack Beyond Just Marketing Automation To nurture customers across multiple channels concurrently, automatically and at scale, B2B marketers must build out a robust marketing stack. B2B marketers can do just that by leveraging tools that engage customers across all relevant channels. This does not mean that, as a B2B marketer, you must scrap you existing marketing automation solution. Rather, you can complement your email-centric automation platform with a holistic, extensible cross-channel component to create the technology stack you need to properly engage customers through all relevant channels – email, website, social, video, display and mobile – in a consistent, synchronized fashion. It’s time to graduate beyond email alone. Let’s all adopt true marketing automation, where we automate the personalization of all messages across all channels.

Posted on behalf of our LaunchPoint Partner Spiceworks.

Posted on behalf of our LaunchPoint Partner LookBookHQ.

By: Nick Westergaard Posted: July 19, 2016 | Content Marketing Content is king! Content rules! No one is going to tell you in this day and age that you need to create less content. In fact, according to the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs, 80% of marketers across all sectors (B2B, consumer, nonprofit) are using content in some form. Of those same marketers, 74% have plans to produce even morecontent in the year ahead. And yet, 57% of marketers report that creating content consistently is a top challenge. As very few organizations claim content creation as a core competency, many are wondering how they should go about developing all of these new ebooks, newsletters, blog posts, videos, and images required to engage today’s buyer. Content creation can get real complex, real fast. In my new book Get Scrappy: Smarter Digital Marketing for Businesses Big and Small, I outline several frameworks, strategies, tactics, and hacks for helping today’s frustrated marketers do more with less. Let’s take a look at four content creation hacks that should be in every marketer’s toolbox, including yours: Hack #1: Relentlessly Repurpose Content In Content Rules, Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman encourage brands to be a “content chop-shop” by always looking for ways to get multiple uses out of a particular piece of content. You should strive to relentlessly repurpose all of the content you create. You can start small by combining smaller pieces like photos, cheatsheets, and blog posts into something larger like an ebook or whitepaper. You can also take a larger piece of content apart and create blog posts, videos, infographics, and social media updates. The possibilities are endless, so get creative! Pew Research Center does this by sharing individual data points on Instagram, which point to a longer article about the research, which then invites you to download the entire report. As expensive as formal research is, it makes sense to repurpose it as much as possible. This also provides an opportunity for you to reach your audience across multiple channels and get your team involved. For example, you can make re-imagining your content an internal challenge by encouraging others to offer ideas on additional forms of content you can create. Hack #2: Utilize Historical Content If your business has been around for a while, chances are there are old photos laying around in some closet or storage facility, or stored digitally. One of the scrappiest things you can do is to digitize this old-school content so that you can give it new life online. Whether it’s #ThrowbackThursday on Instagram or populating Facebook’s timeline feature, these content classics can be a tremendous asset. For examples, check out what Herman Miller is doing on Pinterest with their history board “107 Years and Counting.” Even your old marketing collateral and advertisements offer some nice history. Southwest Airlines has a Pinterest board dedicated entirely to their old photos and ads. Hack #3: Curate Content Beyond finding ways to repurpose as much of your brand’s internal content as possible, there are other sources you can leverage outside of your organization through content curation. With budgets spread thin, curation is a viable part of the mix for many. Some examples include a blog post or email newsletter that rounds up the best articles on a particular subject important to your buyers or industry. There are several tools that can help you streamline the task of finding good content. Some are free or low-cost—like Feedly, Scoop.it, Newsle—and some are geared more toward the mid-market or enterprise level with more functionality and features, such as Curata and TrapIt. One word of caution: Avoid thinking of curation as simply a low-cost alternative to content creation. Bothshould be viewed as complementary approaches to the same overall strategy—providing your community with useful content. Hack #4: Encourage User-Generated Content The final external source for content is from your own community. User-generated content is valuable in more ways than one. First, it’s content you don’t have to create that you can turnaround and share again, which brings me to my second point. User-generated content is powerful as it demonstrates in a very public and authentic way that your audience is engaged. A common misconception is that user-generated content just “appears.” Like all things involving others, it starts with a request from you. Remember, no one (your buyers and community included) will know what to do unless you ask them. More often than not your community will participate if you ask them. For instance, after seeing their fans share photos showing their love and happiness around their product, Ben & Jerry’s put out a call for fans to share their best euphoric photos by using the hashtag #CaptureEuphoria, with favorites featured in print and digital ads for the brand. As you work to do more with less when it comes to your content marketing, these four scrappy content marketing hacks—relentlessly repurposing content, utilizing historical content, content curation, and user-generated-content—deliver big results. Looking to get scrappy with your other marketing initiatives? Register for my upcoming webinar Get Scrappy: Smarter Digital Marketing for Businesses Big and Small to learn how to create a scrappy marketing strategy to win in today’s complex digital world.

By: Jamie Lewis Posted: February 2, 2016 | Marketing Metrics While it may seem like there is a new marketing channel available almost every day (I’m devising my smart fridge strategy as we speak), email marketing, when done right, is still one of the most profitable acquisition and lead retention channels available. To clarify, by “done right” I mean permission-based email marketing with content that is personalized, relevant, timely, and highly optimized. And if you don’t have a great email program like this already, then you’re leaving tremendous value on the table. Be data-cated So how can you craft a slammin’ email channel to drive value to your stakeholders? The answer is actually quite mundane: you need to have the right set of metrics to analyze your email marketing channel and optimize it to stardom. This set of metrics is called your key performance indicators (KPIs) and should be very closely tied to your organization’s primary business goals. In fact, they will be a direct measure of how well you are achieving those goals. Traditionally, email analytics has been hard because all of your demographic data, open rates, etc. resided in your email service provider (ESP) database, while all of your web traffic and conversion data was being tracked by your content management system (CMS) and/or Google Analytics. This was a problem because unifying your end-to-end data is really hard, not to mention time consuming. Nowadays, this problem is being solved by the adoption of marketing automation platforms that unify email and conversion data in an end-to-end fashion. Now let’s talk data. When choosing KPIs that help measure your business goals, it is important that you follow these three rules: keep them very simple, produce them in a timely manner, and make sure they are useful. In other words, make it so that people can view your KPIs, quickly understand what they mean, and then take action on them immediately. This is critical because in today’s world we all need to act fast! There are three categories of data you will analyze when it comes to optimizing your email marketing channel. When creating your KPIs, you need to always be thinking about these things: 1. Engagement Engagement is a category that encompasses email campaign metrics and reveals how your emails are resonating with your target list. It measures things such as: how many emails were sent, who you sent them to, and what the result was. Here are some great KPIs that help measure the business goal of driving deeper engagement within my list: Delivery rate: (# of emails – bounce backs)/ (# of emails) – measures the quality of your lead list. Open rate: (# opened/# emails delivered) – represents the success of your “from” field and subject line. Subscriber retention rate: (# subscribers – # bounces – # unsubscribes)/# subscribers) – measures how well you are targeting your database and if you are delighting them. Click to delivery rate: # of clicks/# of emails delivered – helps you understand the mailing list quality and email content relevance. 2. Behavior Behavior is a measure of what happens after the viewer clicks a link on the email. It answers: what do they do on my site, how well they engage, and do they buy? Here are some great KPIs to measure the business goals of deeper engagement on my website, elevated content consumption, and an increase in Sales Qualified Leads : Bounce rate: (# of clicks to the website with a single page view / # visits) – a great measure of the alignment between email and landing page. Depth of visit: (% of email campaign visits that last longer than xx pages) – especially important for non-ecommerce. Actions completed: (% of visits that took the call-to-action on the landing page) 3. Outcome Outcome is a measure of the goals, conversions, and revenue you drove through your email channel. Tracking all of these conversions and attributing it back to your email programs is critically important. Here is my list of outcome KPIs that measure the business goal of increasing total revenue: Macro conversion rate: (revenue producing conversions / visits) – How successful are you at targeting your audience with the right message at the right time. Avg. revenue per email sent: (total revenue / # of emails sent) – Use this to measure how clean your list is. Profitability: (rev generated – cost – cost of goods sold) / # emails sent) – the “Holy Grail” of KPIs One last thing to note is that there is no one size fits all when it comes to email KPIs, you must be willing to experiment with your campaigns and how you analyze them and change your approach accordingly. Nor is it always possible to track all of these metrics all the time. I find that choosing one from each group may be sufficient. For example, if I wanted to keep it simple I would choose “click to delivery rate” for engagement, “bounce rate” for behavior, and “profitability” for outcome as my top three and go from there. Metrics are critical for building success and identifying what works and what doesn’t. With the right ones in place, you can realize the full potential of your email channel. What KPIs are you currently tracking for your email programs? Share them in the comments below!

By: Jessica Minasian Posted: June 8, 2016 | Email Marketing Over Memorial Day weekend, I took a road trip with my twin sister through Northern California. Before we embarked on our journey, we prepared for everything we needed (or so we thought): directions, extra snacks, water, and a good road trip playlist. However, nothing could have prepared us for the fact that anything can happen on the road, such as a flat tire or getting lost. Unforeseen incidents and mistakes happen in marketing as well, no matter how much you prepare. And similar to road trips, there’s no magical undo button that can take back whatever just happened, like the moment after you send an email and realize it wasn’t what you intended. But that’s how we learn, right? Usually, it only takes us making a mistake once to learn a valuable lesson. And no matter how bad things seem at first, it can be remediated. Drum roll, please. In the many years of working with marketers at Marketo, Business Consultants like myself have been called in to fix many of these road trip-like blunders. One of the most common email marketing mistakes that we see is when marketers accidentally send the wrong email to a subscriber. It could be sending a Russian email to all English-speaking customers (yes, we have seen this happen). Or sending out an incorrect subject line: “[Replace] with your creative subject line.” Or even offering something that does not exist: “20% Off of Unicorn Sale” (again, this has fallen into our laps, but we wished it was real). At Marketo, we don’t consider marketers battle-tested until they can overcome sending an incorrect email. Sometimes, this is done by sending an apology email. An apology email should be to the point and explain what happened, without risking further damage to your brand’s image. You certainly don’t want them to unsubscribe or lose faith in your brand, so decide if the mistake warrants an apology (this ebook offers some advice on how to determine whether or not to send one), more publicity, and if it actually risked customer’s confidence. And if it does, use the tips below to get back on the road. Here are four steps, written from the road, to crafting an apology email to redeem yourself: Step 1: Turn Around and Fix It Even the savviest of road warriors can take the wrong exit and get lost, but once they address the mistake, they can quickly get back on the road again. For email marketing warriors to do this, you need to first admit that you’ve made an error so that you can fix it. This starts with crafting the beginning of your apology email. There’s no need to overly explain your mistake; just get to the point. If your apology email is brief and sent to your email recipients soon after, you can catch most of them before they open the original email. Then, you can provide them with the correct information before they negatively respond. You could start off by saying, “Today, we sent you the wrong email by mistake.” By getting straight to the point, you are owning up to what happened without sounding overly wordy or concerned (even if you are, save your real feelings for internal conversations). Taking responsibility for the mistake clears the air. And by being clear and concise, you can send a message of confidence, security, and sincerity. Don’t waste any more of your time, or your recipients’, because there are more important things to get to—like continuing your journey. Step 2: Say You’re Sorry Whether you’re sending an email to your customers or on the road with your friends, proper etiquette still applies. One of the rules of the road is to apologize when your actions affect your fellow passengers. So, if you ate the last piece of beef jerky without asking anyone if they wanted some, then it’s time to say sorry. The same goes for an apology email. Ultimately, you need to say you’re sorry. In some cases, sending the wrong email will not raise any red flags for your recipients, but in others, this might be a sign your team is slipping. Depending on your line of work, the type of information you have about your customers (e.g. credit card, sensitive data) a misstep like the wrong email, can put them on edge if they receive an incorrect email. To put everyone’s mind at ease, you can include a section in your email that apologizes for the mistake and explains what went wrong and what you’re doing to ensure it will not happen again. Reassuring your customers of your ability to fix the mistake helps them continue to trust your brand. This section can also be an opportunity for your team to show a little humility. Some apology emails use humor to lighten the tone, but if your company is not known for humor, just stick to the facts. For example, you could write: “We apologize for the mistake. We have addressed the issue with our team and have taken steps to ensure this will not happen again.” You can even customize the subject line to: “Correction,” “Oops,” or “We Apologize.” Step 3: Ask for Forgiveness and Make Things Right Mistakes happen, but it doesn’t hurt to ask for forgiveness when something goes wrong and try to make amends. No one wants a road trip to end on a sad note and neither do your subscribers when it comes to marketing mistakes. Give your subscribers a reason to not only forgive you but also re-engage with your brand. Transform your mistake into an opportunity to re-engage inactive subscribers by offering a great deal. People are more willing to forgive you if you give them a good reason to and nothing works better than offering them a sweet deal. If you’re on a road trip and eat the last of the snacks, offer to pick up the tab for the next batch. As for marketers, the last section of your apology email could look something like this: “Click here to take an additional 10% off.” If you do not have a deal to offer, then you could end with, “Our customers are our highest priority. If you have any questions or concerns, please email us and we will respond to you promptly.” Step 4: Final Pit Stops Before Hitting the Road Again While it’s hard to avoid all the possible marketing mistakes, you can do your best to prepare for them and address them accordingly when they happen. It goes without saying that one of the best ways to prevent a blunder in the first place is by testing and scanning every email and double checking your lists and campaigns. Good email marketers understand that every email should follow a series of different checkpoints before it goes out. Here are some questions that you may want to ask yourself as you review your emails: Will these emails be sent to the right lists and segments? Do the custom fields throughout the email reflect the right information? Is the content up-to-date? Is it free of spelling or grammatical errors? Do the images render properly? Do all the buttons and links hyperlink to the correct URL? These checks and balances ensure that you’ve reviewed your email for mistakes to the best of your ability.  And if a mistake manages to slip through the crack, revisit where you made the mistake to prevent it from happening again. The last thing you want to do is send out another wrong email right after the first one. Do you have any email horror stories of your own? How did you overcome them? Share your experience in the comments below!

By: Johnny Cheng In my role at Marketo over the past few months, I’ve had the pleasure of paging through mounds of enticing Marketo data. I have seen some absolutely outstanding stats from some of Marketo’s top customers—stats covering everything from email sends to opportunities sourced. Now, I want to share these stats with you so you can see the potential of what happens when smart marketers, the right technology and great campaigns come together. These stats show us how far marketers can take their marketing programs and campaigns. So, get your hands warm and get ready to learn about and applaud these truly impressive (and inspiring!) accomplishments. Largest Email Campaign Wow, over 249 million email sends from one campaign! That’s equivalent to the total U.S. population back in the 1990s. Aside from the volume, imagine the anxiety that email marketer had clicking the “confirm send” button. And judging from the deliverability and performance stats of the campaign, that email marketer deserves a raise (just sayin’). Why It’s Impressive: The sheer email sends coming from this one campaign is remarkable. Compared to the average send size which is 8,900 per email campaign across all Marketo customers, this is absolutely massive. What’s even more extraordinary is that this particular marketing team runs multiple email campaigns in the millions, ALL of which have over 90% delivery rate! They’re surely doing something right! Highest Performing Email Campaign (over 5,000 send size) Whatever this email campaign was, kudos to the marketing team; not only did they get an extremely high open rate, they got a near perfect click rate. With results like that, I’m going to imagine the email subject was “Free Trip to Disneyland (not a scam)” and the call-to-action was “Claim Your Free Tickets NOW (not a scam)”…and then the whole thing truly wasn’t a scam. But really, they seem to have cracked the code on what yields near-perfect results. Bravo, team, bravo. Why It’s Impressive: Think of your typical email campaign—what percentage of open and click rate would you be happy to get? At my past few companies, we were ecstatic to get over 30% open rate for prospects and double that for customers. It’s hard to fathom an open rate of 90%, and even more impressive—a 89% click-to-open rate, especially for this email send size. To do this, their team must have attained the email trifecta: a squeaky clean list, extremely relevant content, and an irresistible call-to-action. Nice job! Widest Net Cast by a Campaign Over 525,000 opportunities were sourced from one single inbound asset. I have no idea what the content of that asset was, but it must have been pretty compelling to capture that many leads. Just imagine that company’s sales team swimming in that ocean of leads (seriously, imagine it). What a fantastic problem to have! Why It’s Impressive: This is every demand gen marketer’s dream: the golden goose—an asset soooo good it practically prints leads. This campaign towers over the average 180 opportunities generated per campaign (first-touch attribution) across all customers. When I looked up which company this was, I wasn’t surprised to find it was one of the most well-known respected brands in the world (which partly explains the golden goose content). But what we can learn from their massive success, is the potential and power of great content. Largest Pipeline Attributed to a Campaign OK, get ready for this one. $2.3 billion of pipeline was generated from a WEBINAR. I’m not making this up. And I know you’re thinking exactly what I’m thinking on this one—that’s more than what the Titanic movie made! OK, maybe that’s not what you were thinking, but in all honesty, this webinar is the Titanic of webinars, and probably a lot cheaper to produce. Actually, even if they hired Leonardo DiCaprio to host the webinar, the ROI would still be impressive! Why It’s Impressive: Webinars usually perform really well in terms of pipeline attribution, but this one is beyond an anomaly. I actually have to take this off my data set because when I graph this, it breaks my chart—literally, it’s off the charts. I was only half joking earlier in that this might actually be a mainstream film that a media company classified as a “webinar”…that would explain a lot. If it’s not, they probably have developed a mean set of webinar best practices. What’s your company’s most impressive stat? Please share in the comments section below!

By: Marissa Lyman Posted: March 31, 2016 | Content Marketing Did you know that grammatical errors are the number one cause of work-related aggression? Okay, that’s a lie–but if everyone cared as much about grammar as I did, I can guarantee that misplaced commas, subject-verb disagreement, and improper use of “your” would top the HR incident list. A degree in journalism, numerous media internships, and nearly two years editing the homepage for America’s most-watched cable news network inadvertently turned me into what I recently told a colleague was “The Grammar Hammer” (copyright pending). To me, editing is like a treasure hunt, and finding each error brings a degree of satisfaction or–if it’s published– immense and somewhat irrational rage. The fact of the matter is that, at their core, typos in collateral undermine a marketer’s credibility with customers and prospects. If your company doesn’t know the difference between “there,” “their,” and “they’re,” how are you supposed to be trusted with the hard stuff, like–I don’t know–revenue generation? (For the record, “there” refers to a place or the existence of something, “their” is possessive–like, “Have you seen their new nap room? I am filled with envy.” and “they’re” should be used any time you can substitute it with “they are”–like, “They are going to be so well-rested! I hate them!”) Yes, typos happen. But if you follow the steps outlined below, you can significantly reduce the number of errors in your work, leading to fame, fortune, and marketing glory: 1. See If It Passes the Jargon Test You basically invented marketing–that’s how good you are. In fact, there is no industry term, TLA (three-letter acronym), or obscure marketing reference that you’re not familiar with. Well done, you! Yet not everyone is an expert like you are, so pumping copy full of jargon runs the risk of alienating those in your target audience who aren’t as technologically savvy as you are. You want to sound smart, not pretentious. Your external communications should be engaging and informative, and a major part of this is using appealing vocabulary. There is a time and a place for all of these “inside baseball” terms–like an in-depth how-to guide. But err on the side of general terms that are easy to read through, especially if it’s on an initial call-to-action. When in doubt, have someone in a different department or job function take a gander at your work. If it leaves them scratching their heads, it’s worth an edit. 2. Let It Sit You just wrote the copy for what, in your opinion, is the world’s most beautiful nurture campaign, and you’re getting ready to set it up for deployment. Your quest to finesse your language means that you’ve been staring at the same two paragraphs for the better part of the last two hours. What should you do? Save the copy and walk away. Do it. Tear yourself away. I know you’ve been itching to get this off your plate, but there’s a high probability that if you set it up for distribution now, you’re going to discover once it sends that it’s riddled with errors. The more familiar you are with text, the less likely your brain will pick up on any subtle inconsistencies. That’s why it’s important to give yourself a break, let your brain focus on something else (maybe this is a good time for a walk or a nap), and come back to the text with fresh eyes. You’ll be shocked by what you catch the second time around. 3. Print, Read Out Loud, Repeat You’ve just awoken from your nap–now what? Reread your work on your computer? You could, but–environmentalists, cover your ears!–I recommend printing out what you’re working on. Whether you’re reviewing plain text or the layout of a new ebook, without all that blue light hitting your eyeballs, you’ll be able to focus better. Errors will jump out of the page as obviously as that whale at the end of “Free Willy.” And once you’ve printed your work (or even if you haven’t–shame on you!), read it out loud. Hearing the words instead of reading them will give your brain a different perspective and help it to catch additional errors. These can range from typos and misspellings to sentence constructions that just don’t sound right. Try it the next time you write an email–this is the type of exercise that helps you walk that fine line between “The webinar is public” and “The webinar is …” You get it. 4. Ask the Experts I’ve lauded the power of Google in previous posts, but it’s worth a mention here too. Google is a wonderful source for your grammar needs and can also help to end any editing debates you might be having. It may take some digging, but you’ll usually walk away with knowing what the most common and widely accepted approach is for spelling or punctuation. Just make sure you’re getting your insight from a reputable site and one that is reflective of the grammar in your geographic region. And think about your internal experts as well, often on your Communications or Content team. Does your company prefer the Oxford comma? What solution names are capitalized? Smart marketing departments will implement a set of brand style guides for everyone to adhere to. WHAT. You don’t have one? Congratulations, you’ve just identified an important, proactive opportunity to make your mark. It’s like I always say, quality control is everyone’s problem. 5. Practice Makes Perfect I have literally spent days of my life editing things. DAYS. Do I wish I had been spending this time on a beach somewhere? Maybe. Would my written words benefit from a rich mahogany glow? Absolutely not. The tips above will help and should become standard practice whenever you’re developing external content. However, the only way you’re really going to step up your error-free game is through practice. How do you do that? Edit everything you can get your hands on. Your stuff, your coworkers’ stuff, your competitors’ stuff–everything. You can even search for practice tests as a fun and informative alternative to Sudoku or Candy Crush. There is no limit to how much practice you can do. Now go forth and conquer typos, you smart marketer, you. Are you a spelling and grammar connoisseur? Share your tips for writing spotless marketing copy in the comments below!

By: Becky Hirsch Posted: August 11, 2015 | Email Marketing Do you hear that? It’s getting louder. It’s the sound of millions of emails, targeted ads, and personalized web experiences fighting for relevance. Despite the noise, B2B and B2C brands succeed at delivering relevant information to their target audiences. According to Direct Marketing Association, for every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return-on-investment is $40.56. But there’s a difference between threading the needle and really creating something. In many cases, data is being used to deliver personalized email campaigns with fantastic results. The Aberdeen Group says that personalized emails improve click-through rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10%. With results like these, the motivation to test, segment, and personalize email campaigns will no doubt increase. However, the success of these incremental improvements to email marketing depends largely on the next steps customers take after engaging with your email. Whether you’re sending them to a specific landing page or inviting them to take advantage of a personalized offer on-site, the work doesn’t end in your customer’s inbox. By looking at how you use data to improve email marketing from the broader perspective of your web or mobile experience, you can multiply the impact of your targeting. And it’s worth it. According to Steelhouse, using correct targeting and testing methods can increase conversion rates up to 300%. Break Down the Barriers Closing the data loop and breaking down the organizational divisions between email marketing and website optimization is increasingly common. Marketers are adopting this strategy, particularly as facts about open-rates on mobile come to light and digital teams unite forces. But any brand making a significant investment in email marketing will soon be throwing good money after bad without an optimized, personalized mobile experience. Eisenberg Holdings says that companies typically spend $92 to bring customers to their site, but only $1 to convert them. Instead, make your money count twice by investing in a strategy that combines data from email marketing with on-site behavior for a comprehensive approach to optimization. According to EConsultancy, 64% of companies would like to improve their personalization, 64%, their marketing automation, and 62%, their segmentation. The key is to unify these three key areas for a strategy that will keep your communications relevant and your audience engaged. Here, I’m going to share four ways your website’s optimization strategy can enhance your email marketing efforts, and vice versa! Let’s get started… 1. Use Website Data to Validate Email Segmentation Segmenting your audience for email marketing is not an uncommon practice. However, the segmentation of your website traffic is often treated as a mutually exclusive effort. Try This: Use your website data to validate predefined segments for email marketing campaigns with a URL parameter. By doing so, you can find out whether your segments behave how you expected them to with metrics that look at their behavior from first click to exit. 2. Use Email Marketing Attributes to Create a Better On-Site Experience The data from email and websites can interact in either direction. One leading travel brand worked with Maxymiser, a website and app optimization solution, on an email campaign designed to bring users to the site by converting email prospects with a featured destination that best reflected their preferences (either collected or expressed.) Using Maxymiser’s optimization solution, the brand selected 36 destinations to offer and used each one as a specific variant of the test. Try This: Segment visitors who came from email and determine which predictive attributes will make their visit the best possible experience. In the above instance, the brand took the attributes generated by an email campaign and used them to test and target on their site—and you can too. 3. Map Email Engagement and CRM With the right tools, you can map the unique identifier to a CRM file and target specific individualized content to that visitor. Try This: The data-driven marketer (you!) could place an individualized identifier in the URL of an email campaign. You can also match up an individual from the aforementioned unique URL to segments or visitor groups defined in the CRM file. 4. Test and Target from Email to Landing Page (Mobile or Desktop) Using your optimization solution, you can test custom content on your predefined email segments by redirecting them from email to a specific landing page. Try This: Optimize both your emails and landing pages in a single test and combine your analytics for a clear perspective on your user’s behavior. This might be a particularly interesting test to run on a mobile landing page. In Q1 2014, more email was opened on iPhones (38%) than all desktops combined (34%). You can be sure that these percentages have only increased in the last 12 months. With that being said, if you’re hoping to convert a visitor with email, you have to optimize your mobile landing pages. A website optimization solution like Maxymiser can run the aforementioned desktop landing page test on mobile as well. A unified optimization and email marketing team could easily work together to generate a rich tapestry of insights by segmenting email audiences and testing the optimal experience on desktop or mobile, depending on where the user comes from. So, don’t just think about the connection between email marketing and optimization; plan for success by aligning your strategy with a multi-channel approach like the one I have described above. On the road to becoming a holistic digital marketing organization, the marriage between email marketing and website optimization is one of the most valuable steps. Becky Hirsch is a content writer and editor at Maxymiser. She works closely with consultants and analysts to turn their optimization expertise into accessible content for the modern marketer.