Email Marketing Best Practices: Subject Lines

Posted on February 8, 2012 by in Email

When it comes to email marketing, it’s definitely a matter of quality over quantity. Luckily, many of the features offered by marketing automation systems – CRM integration, behavior-based triggers, etc. – have allowed businesses to send high-quality emails that are more relevant and timely to their targeted audience than ever before. But whether said audience ever receives this valuable information all comes down to one thing – your subject line. So stop and think before you write this little line of text, and consider these three pointers on subject lines.

Consider the stage of your lead.
Have a goal in mind when you reach out to leads in each stage of the lead nurturing process and make sure that you are being conscious of their particular situation at that stage. For instance, you may want to avoid including keywords or branding in subject lines for first-stage leads. Remember that these leads have yet to realize that they have a problem for which your product would be the perfect solution, so if you send them an email titled, “You need [product they’ve never heard of] to fix [problem they don’t know they have]”…well, your email is in the trash before they can finish the subject line. Instead, stick to common language and generalized topics that your audience can relate to (think along the lines of, “Three ways to improve your lead management”).

Include dynamic content.
Yes, even in your subject line. The beauty of marketing automation is that you have more information about a leads’ specific needs than ever before, and you are able to send them content that reflects that. But what good does that do, if your lead never opens the email? So include dynamic content in your subject lines by adding double percent signs and dropping in a variable field ( %%variable field%% ).

Learn from others.
The best thing about finding effective subject lines is that, every single day, you are emailed multiple examples that are tested on a real subject – you. How many emails do you receive in your inbox that you instantly send to the trash? Which ones do you open? More than likely, you respond best to the ones that seem more human, and less like generic advertisements. But what keywords do these subject lines include that make an email seem more personal? Start being conscious of what emails grab your attention and why.

We’d love to hear your input. What are some other best practices for writing subject lines that you’ve found as a B2B marketer? Please feel free to share in our comments section.

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Is Automation Taking the “Social” Out of Social Media?

Posted on February 6, 2012 by in Social Media

Imagine this. You decide to follow one of your favorite brands on Twitter and moments later, are notified of a new email. You experience the briefest jolt of excitement when you see that said brand has sent you a direct message on Twitter, only to read on to find the most generic marketing message conceivable: “Thx for following. We’d love to have you as a fan on our Facebook page, too…” Womp, womp.

Not a difficult scenario to imagine, considering it’s probably happened to you. As automation moves into the social sphere and marketers are able to automate tweets, messages, Facebook posts, etc., concerns arise that automation is making social media less, well, social. A valid concern, considering the case above – nothing says impersonal quite like an automated advertisement. But automation doesn’t have to defeat the very purpose of social media. Here are two ways to make sure you’re not abusing automated social postings.

Be choose-y with what you automate.
Instead of sending out extremely transparent “personal” messages, focus on using automated postings with messages that don’t need to be personal – for example, content distribution. Your followers are still active on social media over the weekends; in fact, they might have a little extra time to pour over your company blog. So consider scheduling an extra blog post or two with interesting industry trends to go out over the weekend, and scheduling a social posting to alert followers of the release. Or, if you have weekly webinars, schedule posts reminding followers when they will happen and where they can sign up. Scheduling posts like these can provide followers with timely and valuable information, and save marketers a significant amount of time. And, most importantly, they don’t come off as advertisements masquerading as personal communication.

Never, never, never “set it and forget it.”
Social marketing is not just about quickly distributing your message to a large group of people, it also provides your company with the invaluable opportunity to personally engage with prospects and clients all over the world. This personal communication is social media’s greatest value to brands, and it can’t be faked. So if you are automating messages, make sure that you are still monitoring your social media outlets and personally responding to feedback, ideally within 24 hours.

When handled correctly, integrating social media with marketing automation software can have numerous benefits. It’s not just about setting social accounts on autopilot when you’re not around; using a service for social marketing allows marketers to see detailed reports on their efforts, including which prospects are interacting with their posts. Having a record of these exchanges is valuable to sales reps and can also help marketers figure out what works when it comes to social marketing. Marketing automation can help marketers get the most out of their social media efforts; just be careful that you’re not abusing the automated aspect and defeating social media marketing’s most valuable aspect – personal communication.

More best practices for using social media with marketing automation can be found in our white paper, Six Simple Ways to Get More Out of Social Marketing.

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Webinar: Marketing Metrics

Posted on February 6, 2012 by in Webinars

If you are new to marketing metrics (or maybe are a little intimidated by them, or just curious as to what they are), then this 1/2-hour webinar blitz is for you! In this webinar, you will learn:

    Marketing metrics – What are they?
  • Why marketing metrics are important to you and your company
  • How you can apply this valuable information and improve your everyday efforts as a modern-day marketer

Sign up now for the webinar:

Marketing Metrics [Click here to Register]
Date: Thursday, February 9, 2012
Time: 2:00 PM EST (US)

Description: Join us as Kati Newburg, Pardot Training Coordinator, provides an educational and useful view into to the wonderful world of marketing metrics.

Register for Marketing Metrics

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Webinar: The Next Five Campaigns

Posted on February 3, 2012 by in Webinars

So, now that you’ve got the basics down – it’s time for the next step! Mastering the five campaigns addressed in this webinar will place you in select company. We’ll start off with a little advanced segmentation, a few conditional landing pages and some advanced nurturing tactics. And there’s more! Sign up for this webinar to see what else Mathew Sweezey (Sales Manager at Pardot) has cooked up.

Sign up now for the webinar:

The Next Five Campaigns – Strengthening Your Email Campaign Reach [Click here to Register]
Date: Thursday, February 16, 2012
Time: 2:00 PM EST (US)

Description: Join us for webinar #2 in a series of 3 informative webinars, where campaign creation is the name of the game and incredible results will be your claim to fame!

Speaker: Mathew Sweezey, Sales Manager, Pardot LLC
Mathew Sweezey is a leading expert in Marketing Automation, specifically lead flow analysis and nurturing execution. His primary focus is in Advanced Lead Nurturing Workflows. He has worked with numerous lead technology companies, helping them create and execute their lead flow and nurturing processes.

Register for The Next Five Campaigns

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New feature: automatically push new leads/contacts in SugarCRM down to Pardot

Posted on February 3, 2012 by in New Features

Pardot could always push prospects up to SugarCRM but our newest package includes an optional trigger to automatically push leads or contacts down to Pardot when they are created in in the CRM.

To add the trigger simply update your SugarCRM account with our latest module/package and check the box in your connector settings.

SugarCRM Create Trigger

Please note: If your are upgrading your existing connector and you have a large database and do not want all your leads and contacts to be created in Pardot, update your leads_cstm table and contacts_cstm table, setting pi_is_queued_c to 0 in your SugarCRM database.

 

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New feature: more CRM data (last sync time, CRM ID, etc.) shown on prospect screen

Posted on February 3, 2012 by in New Features

We have just opened up some more CRM data to administrators from within the prospect profile screen. You can see the last time a prospect synced, whether or not it is syncing with a lead or contact, the ID of the CRM owner, and the CRM ID for the lead or contact. This is useful if you are wondering what record in your CRM a prospect is syncing with, what ID the owner has, etc.

More CRM Data Available to Administrators

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New feature: Automation Rules interface improvement

Posted on February 3, 2012 by in New Features

We’ve heard some feedback over the past couple of months about how “Match All” and “Match Any” can be confusing, especially when you start adding in lots of rule groups to the equation. We have just updated the interface some to help make that clearer.

We:
- Added divider lines with “and” or “or” at the beginning so the rules read more like a sentence
- Made the add / delete rule buttons only show on hover to reduce visual clutter
- Made the links to add rule groups and rules at the bottom of the list buttons instead of plain links so they are more prominent

Automation Rules UI Improvement

There were no structural changes made so automation rules still work exactly like they did before. They just look a little snazzier and are less confusing for the less boolean minded of us.

Still to come is a similar change for both Dynamic Lists and Segmentation Rules.

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Recorded Webinar: Designing Content for Inbound Marketing Automation

Posted on February 3, 2012 by in Webinars

Contents
  1. Abstract
  2. Video
  3. Slides

Abstract

Content fuels marketing machines. Engaging prospects, educating prospects on your company’s products and services, activating inbound and nurturing campaigns – all require solid content. But, creating content is hard work. You want to create the right pieces, the right amount – just the content pieces your prospects actually need.

In this webinar, you will learn how to:

  • Identify the needs and concerns of your ideal prospects
  • Provide your prospects with the right information, at the right time
  • Feed your nurturing campaigns
  • Draw people back to your site to advance them around their buying-cycles

(This webinar is an encore presentation from Elevate 2011.)

Speaker: Eric Goldman, President, Gossamar, Inc.

Eric is generously offering 1 hour of consulting…for FREE! Please contact him directly for details.

Video

Slides

Designing Content for Inbound Marketing Automation
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5 Simple Tips for SEO

Posted on February 1, 2012 by in Ideas

Search engine optimization is a hot topic these days, and it’s easy to understand why. Achieving a high page rank for your key terms is a great way to drive more (and free!) traffic to your site. SEO needs to be an important component of any online marketing strategy, and needs to be managed on an ongoing basis. Here are a few simple ways that you can integrate SEO strategy with your web property.

    1. Include an XML sitemap on your site. One of the easiest things to implement, and one of the most frequently neglected. A sitemap tells the search engine spiders which pages are live on your site, and where they are located. Remember, an XML sitemap is different from an HTML sitemap, and your site should have both. You can generate your own current XML site map by using free tools like this one.
    2. Make sure your URLs are search engine friendly. And by search engine friendly, I mean two things – keyword rich and content targeted. Don’t, for example, have a URL that is totally unrelated to your site’s content and not keyword targeted (i. e. www.ford.com/woglx-lgke versus www.ford.com/mustang-convertible). URLs that are search engine friendly are more likely to be crawled and indexed faster.
    3. Develop new content for your site, and develop it frequently. As the saying goes, “content is king” when it comes to page rank, and your site needs as much relevant content as it can get. Start by researching the most popular keywords in your category and develop new content based on those targeted keywords. WordVision is a great tool to help get your started with that. You can also get insight into popular search terms that are driving to your site by using Pardot’s natural search reports.
    4. Get links, links, and more links. One of the key factors that search engines like Google use when determining a page’s organic ranking is the number of sites that that link to your site (aka a “backlink”). The search engines’ algorithms attempt to determine the level of trust and relevancy that other website owners have in your company, and have decided that the more companies you have linking to you, the better.
    5. Make sure your meta information is optimized. While meta tags are not as important as they once were, they are still a necessary part to any SEO strategy. Each page should have a title tag, description tag, and a keyword tag. That’s right, every single page. Remember, SEO is not a one-time event. Search engines change their algorithms, new competitors enter your market, and things that worked yesterday might not work tomorrow. The key is to keep your content fresh and new, and to have a long-term SEO strategy in place.

Check out our SEO Field Guide for even more tips and best practices (registration required).

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New feature: start and end dates for Pardot campaigns

Posted on February 1, 2012 by in New Features

You can now set optional start and end dates for Pardot Campaigns.

Pardot Campaigns: Start and End Dates

This feeds into two places: the campaign table which now has “active” and “inactive” views and also all campaign drop downs which also now are separated between “active” and “inactive” campaigns.

Our clients accumulate lots of campaigns over the lifetime of using our product, especially if they are doing campaigns monthly or quarterly. By setting a start and/or end date you can better designate which campaigns are actually active and more easily find the ones you are currently using.

A campaign is considered active if:

  • it has no start date and no end date
  • it has a start date that is in the past, and has no end date or the end date is in the future
  • it does not have a start date, and the end date is in the future

Inactive campaigns will still have all their associations and reporting stats tracked, the only difference is they appear in the “inactive” view of the datatable and the “inactive” section of the campaign dropdown.

Campaign Drop Down List

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