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Posts Tagged ‘email marketing’

Telemarketing Causes Spike in Website Visits

June 21st, 2010

Website Visit Increase

Brian Berg/BB Direct – brianberg@bbdirect.com

I recently received 16 visits to our website from one telemarketing call.  Here’s what happened.

First, BB Direct uses Live Person as our chat tool on www.bbdirect.com, our primary corporate website.  With this tool, we’re not only able to chat with visitors on our site, but the service also allows us to view who visits our site, how they found us, how much time they spend on what pages they visit and so on.  The details of who the visitors are are sketchy at best, i.e., ip address, city and county, and the browser they use.  On occasion, if the organization is large enough, their business domain page is also displayed.

Last week I peeked at a visitor profile previewing our site.  Without mentioning names, I noticed it was someone from a prominent ad agency looking at some of our e-marketing pages.  I initiated an invite to chat of this visit but they were uninterested.  After a few minutes I decided to make a friendly telephone call to this agency and ask for the individual who might handle the e-marketing services.  I explained to the receptionist that someone from there organization was visiting our site and I was hoping to reach out to them.  She told me that their agency has many possible individuals working in the e-marketing capacity, but offered to send an “all persons” email to the company to ask who might be searching our site at that moment.

(I’d like to say at this point that I don’t normally call a company who is on our site but doesn’t respond to my chat invitation.  If someone doesn’t want to chat, why would they want to take my call?  I called this agency only because we work with many agencies and this particular one was on my radar.)

Back to the story….  After a minute or so, the receptionist explained that no one responded to her “all persons” email and we ended our call.  What happened next was interesting.  As I viewed the same visitor who was still crawling through our site, I got another visitor from this agency, then another, and then another.  At one point I had 16 visitors from this agency on our site at one time.  Then it occurred to me, the “all persons” email sent out by this one receptionist included a link to www.bbdirect.com.  Many of the agency employees read the email and connected to the site.  Throughout the day I had other visitors from this agency but I cannot tell if they were new visitors or repeat visitors.

This example begs the question, what can you include in your emails that would invite viral sharing?  And how can you initiate a viral email campaign into your telemarketing campaign.  An email that’s been sent to us by someone we know is given far more attention that one that is sent otherwise.  Never underestimate the value of your emails.  Always include a link to your website, and if you’re talking to your customer or prospect about an email that you sent them, ask that they share it as the content may be of value to others.

Now, email a link to this blog post to 10 people (preferably those with the master list of all employees within your company) within 5 minutes you’ll have extremely good luck for one year.  :-)   And, of course, thanks for sharing!

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Focused Target Plus Strong Offer Equals Response

May 28th, 2010

Target Marketing

Many businesses mailing for the time neglect to make a strong and relevant offer.  They invest heavily in the creative design, print, mail and mailing list only to conclude that direct marketing doesn’t work for them.  Outside of targeted mailing list, the campaign strategy likely lacked an offer strong enough to generate measurable response.

Whether it be a postal direct mail or email campaign, your message must be interesting enough to catch the eye of your audience.  Without these key ingredients, you’re likely to conclude that direct marketing doesn’t work.

Real Life Example

Here’s a perfect example of a direct marketing campaign that BB Direct recently deployed to its customer and prospect email list.  Under normal circumstances, our email campaigns generate predictable click-thru rates.  Whether the campaign is a notice of something important and informative or an offer that’s relevant and attractive to our customers, BB Direct will typically see between a 2% to 5% click through rate.

One of most recent email campaigns (you may have seen it) was a notice about a deadline for applying for a substantial discount in postage during the summer months thru the USPS.  This is a postal discount campaign the US Postal Service is running to step up Standard Rate usage during the summer months.  We detailed the criteria for this program in our blog and deployed an email to everyone we knew.  The results were significantly better than anything we’ve ever done.  We saw an 11% open rate for this campaign and a whopping 10% click-thru rate of the total number of delivered emails.

What is so significant about these numbers was the fact that we’ve have good historical response rate data over the past 2 years to this exact same audience.  This campaign outshined everything we’ve ever done in the past.  Why?  Simply because of all the message/offers we’ve ever put in front of this audience, this offer had a greater appeal to more people than any other.  It stands to reason, all mailers, whether postal or otherwise, should seriously question the offer and message they are sending.  If you’re going to make an offer, make it strong enough to grab the attention of your prospects.  They are listening and will respond.

Need help?  Give us a call at 866-501-6273 or visit us at www.bbdirect.com.

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Multiple Email Deployment Tells a Story

August 26th, 2009

Like any direct mail marketing effort, email makes an impression.  For most successful digital marketing campaigns, it’s not the sheer number of impressions you make but it’s the message relevancy.  Just as important is it to targeting the right audience is communicating the right message.  Your message should tell a story, not a repeat the image or sound bite over and over.  This relationship building between how many times you can broadcast your message before it is ignored is sometimes referred to as the signal-to-noise ratio.  The most effective repetition tells the prospects something of meaningful value, i.e., why they might consider your product or service, how your business differentiates itself from your competitor, and considerations one should make when shopping from businesses like yours.

Telling your story
The balance between brand and response has been argued; should you spend 60% of your budget on brand and 40% on response?  How important is brand building to the smaller business with a limited budget for testing various advertisement mediums and offers?  Regardless of what this ratio might be, a multiple email deployment can accomplish both brand building and response.  It’s done by telling a story about your product or service with multiple varied email create of relevant, timely and offers of value.

Let’s take a closer look at how a multiple deployment email broadcast and tell your story.

Deployment One – “Attention Getter”
First consider that whatever you tell your prospects, you will ultimately want to do it within the 4 messages.  The first email is the “Attention Getter”.  It sets the stage of the story and frames the duration of the campaign.
•    Test multiple subject lines
•    Make your logo, offer, and benefit statement within the view pane
•    Make sure your message is relevant with your audience

Deployment Two – Legitimize your presence
Your second email should be a congruent continuation of your message and offer.  This one is geared toward reassuring that the first email is legitimate.

Deployment Three – Emphasize the Call-to-Action
Your third email again continues with congruency, however, reminds them not as much about the offer as about the deadline of the campaign offering.  This third deployment should create a sense of urgency.

Deployment Four – Extended Offering
Your fourth email should speak to those who have already shown interest but not yet responded.  These are the click-throughs who have also shown interest in your offer but have not yet signed on, given you more attention, or purchased.  The message to be said here is one that says, “Ok, so we have what you want, we offer what you’re interested in, and the deadline has come and gone.  Since the response was so overwhelming, we’ve decided to extend the promotion until this week so act now.”

With email, you have the opportunity to say something.  You don’t have much time to say it so what you say should be a carefully thought out part of a bigger story.  It may offer something that is of value to your customer, even though your customer isn’t in the moment to respond.  Should they not respond, hopefully your message served as a reminder that you are in business.  What they see and remember from your email message is simple images, your logo, and maybe the offer.  What they may or may not take away is that you may or may not be professional.  You may or may not offer something they would ever be interested in.  You may or may not communicate the same ole thing you did last month.  Should you not bring anything of immediate value to your recipient, its better wait and send something of value.  Making a “bad” impression is worse than no message at all.

So think about the story you might want to tell.  Consider again the very small amount of time you have for the email recipient to “take in” your message.  And ask yourself, “how do I tell a story in nice bite sized chucks”?

Consider your sales pitch when designing your email deployment.  What do you say first?  How do you frame what you truly want to communicate?  And how do you close?

For more help with your next email deployment, consider calling BB Direct.  That’s what we’re here for…

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Direct email marketing is now affordable

August 12th, 2009

Gone are the days of high cost email data acquisition.  With email aggregators in full force, the sheer quantity and targetability of email deployment has sky rocketed while the cost for effective deployment has plummeted.  What’s more, the effectiveness of email advertisement continues to improve.

Email Deployment Example
Let’s take a look at a typical scenario with a direct email campaign.  A medium sized retail specialty store wants to reach out to the local community.  Unlike others forms of marketing, an email broadcast can reach people on the cheap and collect names of potential customers from each which to further communicate your messages.  It wasn’t too long ago when email data wasn’t selectable by geography.  Now we have the ability to make push millions of impressions to both a targeted geographic market, as well as a targeted demographic or behavioral interest category.

Multiple Deployment Program – 3 Plus 1 Package
BB Direct offers many a multiple email deployment package to include broadcasting to the same audience 3 times, then once more to those who previously clicked through to a site.

The first deployment tests the same email HTML with 4 different subject lines.  This signals the mailer to mail again with the top two best subject lines for the second deployment.  The third deployment tests the best of the top two for the deployment.

The third deployment is a modified email HTML.  It’s sent to all previous click-thru’s as a last attempt at visitor conversion.  BB Direct offers the above campaign test for $3,500 for up to 250,000 targeted email impressions.  That’s 750,000 impressions plus another revisit deployment for maximum exposure.

All campaigns come with open click-thru reporting to better understand how the campaign is performing over time.  If you’d like to learn more how BB Direct can help you with your next email campaign, please email us at info@bbdirect.com or call us toll-free at 866-501-6273.

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