Automated Email Marketing

Automated Email Marketing
Using triggered email to put you in the right place at the right time.

Automated Email Marketing
Using triggered email to put you in the right place at the right time.
by Cyndie Shaffstall
C Shaffstall & Son, LLC DBA Spider Trainers
PO Box 280487
Lakewood CO 80228
303 468 8713
303 865 7774 Fax
http://www.spidertrainers.com
To report errors, please send an email to spidertrainer@spidertrainers.com
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You have heard of automatic, triggered emails, but don’t know where to start.
You are in search of best practices for deploying triggered emails.
You know that you need to nurture your client list, but don’t know how.
You need help in understanding the value of the names in your list.
You need to get better at overall list management.
You need to learn more about budgeting and using outside resources.
Spider Trainers can help
Marketing automation has been shown to increase qualified leads for businesses by as
much as 451%. As experts in drip and nurture marketing, Spider Trainers is chosen by
companies to amplify lead and demand generation while setting standards for design,
development, and deployment.
Our publications are designed to help you get started, and while we may be guilty of giving
too much information, we know that the empowered and informed client is the successful
client. We hope this eBook does that for you.
We look foward to learning more about your needs. Please contact us at 651 702 3793 or
cmeyer@spidertrainers.com.
You should read this book if:
©2013 Spider Trainers. All rights reserved. Page 3

Introduction................................................................................................2
Chapter 1. Reaching out just in time .......................................................4
Types of triggers..........................................................................................................5
Types of triggered campaigns....................................................................................5
Key points ............................................................................................................6
Analytics make the difference ....................................................................................6
Chapter 2. Choosing a software................................................................7
Chapter 3. Planning your event.................................................................9
Define your goal..........................................................................................................9
Buckets ........................................................................................................................9
Chapter 4. Campaign components..........................................................12
Checklist for campaign development......................................................................12
Launch email .............................................................................................................13
Response email.........................................................................................................13
Nurture emails...........................................................................................................13
Sign-up form .............................................................................................................13
Form-confirmation landing page......................................................................14
Form-confirmation email...................................................................................14
Targeted landing page .............................................................................................14
Design considerations.......................................................................................15
Survey or poll ............................................................................................................16
Database ...................................................................................................................16
Segmentation ....................................................................................................17
Chapter 5. Designing content .................................................................18
Content/design .................................................................................................18
Think before you add*...............................................................................18
Programming.....................................................................................................18
HTML vs. text ............................................................................................................19
CTA............................................................................................................................19
Testing CTAs......................................................................................................20
Personalization ..........................................................................................................21
Mobile (responsive) designs.....................................................................................21
Chapter 6. Writing subject lines ..............................................................22
Using subject lines to develop analytics .................................................................25
Chapter 7. Testing, tracking, and tweaking ............................................26
Feature testing..........................................................................................................26
Be sure you have enough data ................................................................................27
Chapter 8. Lead scoring...........................................................................28
Point values ...............................................................................................................28
Explicit and implicit give a better picture ................................................................29
Chapter 9. Following up .........................................................................30
Auto responders .......................................................................................................30
Traditional follow up .................................................................................................30
Personal follow up.....................................................................................................31
Tips for follow up ......................................................................................................31
Chapter 10. Surveying recipients ...........................................................32
Chapter 11. Retiring names.....................................................................33
Chapter 12. Social sharing ......................................................................34
Embedded in your email...........................................................................34
Embedded in your landing page..............................................................34
Embedded in confirmation emails (response emails)..............................34
Chapter 13. Learning from your campaign.............................................35
Email analytics...........................................................................................................35
Site analytics..............................................................................................................35
Chapter 14. Budgeting ............................................................................38
In-house development .............................................................................................38
Outsourced development........................................................................................39
Costs..........................................................................................................................40
Choosing an agency.................................................................................................42
Costs..........................................................................................................................42
Return on investment (ROI) ......................................................................................43
Chapter 15. Conclusion............................................................................44
About Spider Trainers...............................................................................................44
Specialties..........................................................................................................45
Spider Trainers contact......................................................................................45
Phone..........................................................................................................45
Email...........................................................................................................45
Website.......................................................................................................45
Address.......................................................................................................45
References and credits.............................................................................46
Table of Contents
©2013 Spider Trainers. All rights reserved. Page i

I recently read an article about how venture capitalists like to think that they are
marketing geniuses. As I see it, it’s not limited to VCs.
The article pointed out that if you sit in on a C-suite meeting, the CEO reports on
the overall health of the company, the CFO gives an update on revenue and
expenses, the CIO reports on the infrastructure. Everyone nods their head in
feigned understanding or sighs with concern.
The CMO stands to give his report and suddenly everyone vies for an
opportunity to pontificate on their opinion.
This reminds me of more than a small number of senior-staff meetings in which I
have participated, I’ve watched in complete disbelief as the CEO took a slightly
hostile stance concerning the subject lines of emails being sent to promote a
new product.
[Seriously?! The CEO doesn’t have more pressing concerns than the
subject line of an email?]
The article went on to point out that the reason [investors] have such strong
opinions about marketing is that this is an area where they can fake it far more
convincingly...
[Here, here.]
— Cyndie Shaffstall, founder, Spider Trainers

As marketers, we know the importance of timeliness —
being in front of the client with the right offer at the right
time — and, fortunately, email automation makes this
possible. With triggered campaigns, we are transcending
from when-we-can marketing to just-in-time marketing and
it’s making a difference. Triggered email marketing enables
us to reach our leads and prospects at a time that is most
relevant to them (and not when most convenient for us).
These campaigns, targeted with applications of explicit and
implicit data, are making great strides in:
Response rates•
Cross-sell and up-sell activity•
Relevance of messages and offers•
Timeliness of delivery•
If you’ve been considering just-in-time marketing through the
use of a triggered campaign, the checklist below may help
you to think through your current state of affairs and perhaps
understand whether or not your team is ready to dive right in
or if you need outside help:
You’re reading this eBook because you’ve heard of
triggered campaigns but do not understand them well
enough to launch one on your own.
You know that a triggered campaign is the answer, but
you’re not sure where to start.
You’re ready to take on your first campaign, but are short
on talented resources.
Introduction
79% of
marketing
leads never
convert
into sales. Lack of lead
nurturing is the common
cause of this poor
performance.
— MarketingSherpa
Your creative team is top notch, but you don’t have
specialists for SEO or analytics implementation and
recommendations.
You have loads of in-house talent and are fully prepared to
execute on all of the tasks required, but are concerned
about the impact on your production schedule for jobs to
which you have already committed.
You have all the content talent you need, but your website
is managed by a third party and deploying landing pages,
forms, and updates to your site must be scheduled well in
advance.
Your customer database is lacking functionality and
efficiency, you have no idea how often they are being
contacted by your sales team or other company
stakeholders, and you’re concerned about spam.
Triggered campaigns are challenging at best and though they
share many of the same requirements as single-event
campaigns, they have moving parts that far outnumber most
other types of events. With that said, it’s easy to feel
overwhelmed no matter how much staff or experience you
have.
In this eBook, Spider Trainers shares with you our collection of
tried-and-true lessons and advice, but honestly, if any of these
statements above fits you, it’s probably a good idea to give
serious consideration to hiring outside help — at least for
your first campaign.

Getting your name out there is critical to building and maintaining your brand and
establishing a good professional reputation. Regular distribution of emails will help in this
process as clients come to learn about your company, products, or services. Emails can also
be used to establish your company as an authority and a trusted advisor — to factor that
influence in to search-engine optimization as well. Most importantly, emails enable you to
be in front of your client when the time comes for them to make a purchasing decision. We
call this just-in-time marketing.
As marketers, we know that a client may take days, weeks, months, or even years to make that
purchasing decision and we need to be at the forefront of their thoughts at that critical
moment. Sending emails over a lengthy span of time could quickly become too burdensome
to manage, if it were not for email automation. Automated campaigns, also known as
triggered campaigns, makes staying in touch not just possible, but easy and timely.
“Making your way in the world today takes everything you’ve got,” lyrics from the TV series
Cheers theme song, Where Everybody Knows Your Name, could be the official theme song
for marketers throughout the world. It contains two very important rules of thumb for any
triggered email campaign:
Ensuring the client remembers your name.1
Ensuring the client is glad you came.2
Technological advancements in software have made event-triggered marketing an
indispensable part of long-term strategies and one that can easily remind your customer of
who you are with an enjoyable message.
Triggered campaigns typically require less effort than a string of one-off emails, but there is an
up-front expense in both time and resources that must be managed. Start by mapping out
well-defined goals for both your new and existing target audiences and include the C-suite,
upper management, and sales team in developing triggers, conversions, and ROI
measurements.
Chapter 1.
Reaching out just in time
Work with your sales team to learn what they
believe it takes to convert leads into
customers. Collaborating with the sales team,
marketing team, and management will make
designing your campaign messages much easier. While
it’s not always possible to convert personal interaction
into digital interaction, for the parts that can be,
triggered events are ideal.
Nurturing Campaign. A series of emails
designed to develop leads as sales ready. The
process is used to build relationships and
develop trust with prospects in a way that is
both consistent and relevant.
Drip Marketing. A communication strategy
that sends a pre-designed set of messages to
customers or prospects over a span of time —
like the constant drip of a leaky faucet.

Figure 1.1 In this example, Lange Graphics used triggered marketing to promote their Welcome to
Creative Hell poster. (You can still get one for free at http://www.langegraphics.com/free-poster-request and if you’re
reading this eBook, it’s a poster you just have to have.)

Types of triggers
When you deliver emails (or any marketing event) based upon a response to a recipient’s
action or interaction, you are engaging in triggered marketing. While there are many types
of triggered events, for the most part they fall into one of three categories:
Transactional triggers. This type of triggered event is based upon a client’s action, such as
making a purchase or submitting a form. This action can also trigger a response message
(e.g., thank you for your order or thank you for submitting our contact form). The follow-up
response is an ideal opportunity to not just confirm their action but also to provide additional
links and information and extend their engagement with your campaign, social-media
accounts, content, or website.
Recurring triggers. This type of event is designed to launch based upon information that you
know about the recipient (e.g., birthday, anniversary, or last visit) and is often referred to as a
loyalty campaign because you are remembering something of importance to your lead and
this is shown to build loyalty.
Threshold triggers. This type of event is triggered when the recipient reaches some type of
threshold (e.g., flying a million miles, buying $100 worth of goods, or other action for which
you can provide tracking and measurement).
Types of triggered campaigns
While there are three main categories, you can use these campaigns for several different
types of purposes. Here are just a few ideas:
Re-engagement campaigns. This type of campaign is designed to reconnect and re-•
engage clients with whom you’ve lost touch or that have simply stopped responding to
your marketing — gentle reminders that you’re still interested in fulfilling their needs.
Demand generation. This campaign will use email marketing to drive the demand for•
your company's products and/or services.
Lead management. Categorize your leads and understand their behavior by•
designing events that will disclose explicit and implicit data. With this, you can better
manage lists and therefore improve future marketing and sales efforts.
Lead scoring. Accumulating lead score values is a great benefit of the automated•
process. Each email opened, link clicked, page visited, and form submitted provides
your sales team with mission-critical information and can indicate advancing sales
readiness.
Event-triggered messages have a response
rate that is 5X higher than that of non-
targeted push messages.
— Gartner
Companies that excel at lead nurturing
generate 50% more sales ready leads at
33% lower cost.
— Forrester Research
Only about 5% of marketers use a full-featured
marketing-automation solution.
— Jeff Ernst, Forrester Research

Lead nurturing. Nudge your leads and prospects down the sales funnel and remind•
them of their relationship and engage them with your company.
Lead generation. Create new leads and prospects that have an interest in your•
products or services.
Campaign analysis. The disclosing or distilling of information about not just•
messaging, but also other data such as send times or dates, design, device usage,
region, and content.
Lead qualification. Verify that lead and prospects are worthy of continued outreach•
and discard those who are not your target audience.
Sales effectiveness. Test assumptions that the company has made about the•
effectiveness of sales approaches and techniques.
Key points
To ensure that your audience continues to welcome or accept your emails, use all three
types of campaigns to focus on information that is relevant to your audience. For
deployment of your triggered events, create a schedule and stick to it. Keeping your
message deliveries consistent and the content relevant carries substantial weight when it
comes to subscriber retention. Furthermore, you should periodically send a survey that
enables the recipient to manage both the email topic and frequency. This empowers your
recipients and shows them that you care about their wishes.
Typically a triggered campaign is designed in advance (all creatives are completed), loaded,
and each event fires off automatically, without user intervention. Building in advance means
you stay in touch even when you’re overloaded with work and don’t have time to create a new
message.
Analytics make the difference
Sending a series of emails on a regular or an irregular schedule does qualify as a triggered
campaign, but it doesn’t necessarily guarantee a successful triggered campaign. The
success comes from the testing, tweaking, and tracking of the interaction between your
recipients and the campaign. Each event should be designed to disclose as much
information as you can glean — opens, clicks, opt-outs, spam complaints, design, colors,
subject lines, calls to action, buttons, formats, and even the device on which it is read. You
won’t get everything from one email, so design your campaign to accumulate additional
data over time.
Figure 1.2 In this screenshot, you can see the analytics for the last few
emails sent and how they stack up against one another.

Automation is important to triggered campaigns. While nearly any email application can
send a scheduled series of emails, triggered campaigns can become unmanageable if you
are required to launch every event, gather statistics, and segment responses into buckets
manually.
There are a number of applications from which to choose, including HubSpot, Eloqua,
Marketo, Pardot, InfusionSoft, Silverpop, ExactTarget, Genius.com, Vertical Response, but we
chose Act-On Software — for not just our clients, but our internal use as well. The automated
programs and list-maintenance features make creating triggered campaigns a viable option
for a company of any size.
Chapter 2. Choosing a software
We’re sharing with you a number of best
practices that we have learned after having
developed and sent thousands of emails. Many
of the figures show that we’ve not done as we
suggest. In some cases this is because the email design
predates the lessons we’ve learned, but in other cases
this is because, in the end, we do as the client wishes.
Vendor Full Automation URL
Act-On Software Yes http://www.actonsoftware.com
Constant Contact No http://www.constantcontact.com
Eloqua Yes http://www.eloqua.com
ExactTarget Yes http://www.exacttarget.com
Genius.com Yes http://www.genius.com
HubSpot Yes http://www.hubspot.com
InfusionSoft Yes http://www.infusionsoft.com
MailChimp No http://www.mailchimp.com
Pardot Yes http://www.pardot.com
SilverPop Yes http://www.silverpop.com
Vertical Response Yes http://www.verticalresponse.com
Table 2.1 There are a number of great applications from which to choose — whether you choose to deliver
your triggered campaign automatically or manually.

Alongside the importance of manageability is the need for visibility; one must be able to
monitor the success of the campaign and act quickly to make last-minute updates and
capitalize on the isolated successes (and failures) of any component. With tracking options for
web visitors, social media, clicks, opens, bounces, and more, you will always know what works
and what doesn’t. We believe that Act-On Software is the best option because it is easy to use
and enables our clients the opportunity and ability to participate in their programs, even
though they rely on Spider Trainers for the creatives and building of the triggered campaigns.
Constant Contact and MailChimp are fine applications — perfectly suited for sending business
emails — but as of this writing, do not offer full email automation, which is required in order to
automatically deliver emails based upon action or interaction of the recipient.
As you begin the evaluation process, here are some features to consider:
Create and send one-off
emails
Scheduled email delivery
Auto-responder email
delivery
Forms
Iframe forms
Double-post forms
Email analytics
Web visit analytics
Social media analytics
Resource analytics
Explicit segmentation
Implicit segmentation
SEO management
Spam check
Asset management
CRM integration
Webcast integration
Design editor
Social sharing functions
Lead scoring
User-roles management
Auto-responder email. An email sent
automatically using an email-automation
system to confirm an action made by a
recipient. For example, an email sent as a
confirmation that the recipient has completed a
form, clicked a link, or visited a website.

It’s quite easy for a triggered campaign to become unwieldy and provide you with more
information than is useful to your company. To rein in the collection of too much data, we
recommend that you map your program using a schematic of some sort. Our application of
choice Is OmniGraffle (an example of which appears in figure 3.1), but you can use Excel,
PowerPoint, or any drawing application that allows you to track and plan what to send,
segments, and information to be gathered.
This schematic shows the strategy and the rules for a triggered campaign. Bucket icons
indicate analytics or segments. With this series of emails, we should learn which of our launch
calls to action (CTA) is most effective (in each segment), which of our passive emails are most
interesting, and whether or not our pricing is on target.
Define your goal
To keep your campaign on target and establish its success, you must define a goal and track and
measure quantifiable results. It’s best to have campaigns targeting new and returning customers
separately and to first test a smaller campaign before launching into a complex triggered event
based on unproven assumptions about your clients, your lists, or your design concepts.
Goals are not necessarily all about converting leads to customers. Your goal might be to
increase your Facebook fans, build your list, drive visitors to your website, or qualify your list
for a new product. Whatever the goal, get it firmly in your mind and develop the campaign
out from that point. Your goals (Click Here to Purchase, Download the White Paper, etc.) will
guide the call to action, or CTA.
Buckets
The action your leads and customers take in a triggered campaign should be used to
categorize the recipient’s position in the purchasing or engagement process. Recipient names
are dropped into buckets so that future interactions can be targeted based upon that (implicit)
action. An example of analytics that can be used to generate buckets is shown in figure 3.2.
Chapter 3. Planning your event
A schematic is used to visually map out your
strategy, rules, and responses — and to act as
a map for the building of your creatives and
triggered events.
Active lead/subscriber/contact. A term to
identify members of a contact list who have
clicked on a link that can indicate a level of
interest or engagement, e.g., fill out a form,
visit a website, or download a resource.
Passive lead/subscriber/contact. A term
to identify members of a contact list who
have neither unsubscribed nor clicked on any
message links. We do not count social sharing
links or forward to a friend links as message links.
Call to action (CTA). Words that urge the
reader, listener, or viewer of a sales-promotion
message to take an immediate action, such as
Write Now, Call Now, or Click Here.

Figure 3.1 In this triggered campaign schematic, we have shown the implicit (lead status) and explicit (company revenue) segments of our lists. Each segment will receive A/B
testing for the call to action. If a recipient clicks the call to action, they will be directed to a form and will receive and auto-responder message thanking for their interaction. If the
form is submitted, a second auto-responder will notify the sales rep and marketing team (and whomever else we choose) that contact has been requested. If the recipient does not
unsubscribe, visit the website, or socially share/follow, their name will be moved to the nurturing bucket (called the passive path because they did not engage with the offer). After
a series of six emails they will receive a survey enabling them to unsubscribe or set their preferences for email frequency or content type. If a recipient of any nurturing email clicks
the call to action, their name will be moved to the offers bucket (called the active path because they have actively clicked to engage) and will receive a series of offers. The series is
designed to disclose which offer converts best. If the recipient clicks on any call to action of the active path, they will be presented with a form and if they submit the form, the
auto-responder emails are sent to both the recipient and the sales team. If the recipient never clicks on a CTA of the active path, they will be moved to the passive path.

For example, a recipient who clicks on a social-media link goes into one bucket, while clicking
a link to visit your website goes into another bucket. A follow-up email to the first group might
be thank you for following us socially and the second bucket thank you for visiting our
website. Depending upon how they interact with the second email, they could be shuttled off
into yet another bucket.
Buckets are not necessarily a physical or actual moving of the recipient’s name into another
list, it might simply be the ability to track the action performed by the recipient. In figure 3.2,
we have identified recipients (and therefore buckets) to whom the email was not
sent/suppressed, those who opened, bounced, did not open, clicked, opted out, and
reported the email as spam. We could create a segment or list for any one of these groups in
order to further manage the names and send auto-responder emails, but we typically use the
information exclusively for analytics.
The opt-outs are a group that we will want to remove from the active email list (they are
automatically moved to a separate list by Act-On Software), so in this case a physical list (or
bucket) will exist. In the case of the did-not-open group, this is a list of names to which we will
likely resend the message under a different subject line. In this case, we will create a segment
or list of this bucket.
We will segment our list further using the information provided in the click-thru report as shown
in figure 3.3. We have offered our recipients the ability to manage their preferences: this is
done through the use of a short survey or form with check boxes. As someone ticks a check
box, a list-maintenance program automatically drops their name into a new bucket so that in
the future they receive only the types of email they want or only at their preferred frequency.
If a recipient clicked through to the sign-up form and submitted it, they would receive a
submission-confirmation email and a salesperson would follow up with the lead and, if all
goes well, convert the lead to a member of the VIP program. If the recipient opened but did
not unsubscribe, shared the email through their social network, or visited the website, their
name was dropped into a bucket indicating that action. We also assigned a score value of 1,
2, or 3 respectively. We’ll delve deeper into lead scoring later in this eBook.
Figure 3.2 Any triggered, nurturing, or drip campaign should allow
you to create buckets, segments, or lists, based upon implicit actions
or interactions on behalf of the recipient.
Figure 3.3 Not all buckets are actual lists to which we send email.
Some buckets, like those who have visited the website, are simply a
set of analytics that we track.

Not every triggered campaign will have all of the possible components, but understanding
the role of each is important. In the table below, we have outlined the broadly general steps
of a triggered campaign. For you, there may be more or fewer steps, but this will give you an
idea of the scope of the project. If you are using an email system that does not support full
automation, you can look forward to quite a few more steps than those we’ve listed here.
Checklist for campaign development
Checklist for campaign
development
Define campaign (give it a
name)
Define your goal
Define strategy for
achieving goal
Define measurable metrics
(so you know whether or
not your campaign is
successful)
Rent or purchase third-
party lists
Draft launch messaging
Draft triggered messaging
Develop a schedule for
triggered releases
Write, proof, and edit copy
Design creatives
Develop A/B or other
testing points
Code HTML and CSS
Create email
Create sign-up forms
Create response pages
and emails
Create landing pages
Check all HTML for CAN-
SPAM compliance
Test all HTML for browser
compatibility
Develop automated
program
Deploy tests
Implement any needed
changes, corrections,
additions, etc.
Import house lists
Import purchased or
rented lists
Remove duplicates
Segment lists
Define lead-scoring values
Deploy live launch email
Chapter 4.
Campaign components
Do not include sign-up forms or other
JavaScript directly in your email, or you will
run a much higher likelihood of going directly
to the recipient’s spam folder.

Launch email
The launch email is the initial email used to get your campaign rolling. At Spider Trainers, we
typically design our launch emails with four to ten versions, depending upon the size of the
client’s list, the goal of the campaign, and the benefits/features being promoted. If it’s a B2C
email, we might try various offers of the similar value; for instance, save $10 against save 10%.
If it’s a B2B email, we might test the value of various resources (videos, white papers, and the
like) at their site. At the very least, we will test a small handful of subject lines — especially
with rented or purchased lists.
Response email
The response email is at least one other email triggered automatically based upon some
action or interaction on behalf of the client. We might, for instance, send an automatic email
to each recipient who visited the client’s website or shared the message socially. Inaction,
such as not clicking the unsubscribe link, might also trigger a response.
Nurture emails
Nurturing emails are typically a series of emails (though it is possible that your nurture
campaign would include only one email) sent after the initial launch. The emails that follow
nurture your leads and prospects along the path to becoming a customer. The messaging
within this series will vary greatly depending upon your audience: new, existing, B2B, B2C,
your product, your offering, and other factors.
Sign-up form
A sign-up form should be displayed on a landing page, either at your website or hosted in
your automated email application, like we do with Act-On Software. Act-On also enables us
to pass information from their system forms to a web form, but we rarely find this necessary.
The form’s landing page should focus on exactly what information the visitor needs in order to
get them to complete the form. It should also closely (nearly exactly) match the design of the
email in which the original link was provided, as this assures the visitor that they have come to
the right place. Resist the urge to fill this page with links that distract your visitor from the
primary goals of filling out the form.
Figure 4.1 Rather than create a landing page with a button to get to
the form, embed the form in the landing page. This will reduce clicks
and is more likely to keep the recipient engaged.
A high bounce rate can be an indicator that
the landing page isn’t relevant to your visitors
or that their expectations were not properly
set. Try better educating the recipient about
what they will find when they get to the landing page.
This should be used for both email and PPC
advertisements. Be clear, be honest, and deliver on
expectations. While you may reduce your click-thru rate,
you will also reduce your bounce rate — and search
spiders are watching.

Form-confirmation landing page
Upon submission of a form, this displays a confirmation of
successful submission in the same browser window. This
landing page should use many or all of the same design
elements. In this page, you can display other links, such as your
social icons or direct access to other downloadable resources
at your site, since your visitors have successfully completed the
form and taken the one action you wanted. If you link to other
pages, have those links open in a new browser window so that
if the new page does not interest the visitor, they can close the
window and still have your message open.
Form-confirmation email
Like the form-confirmation landing page, this is a message
to confirm to the visitor that you have received their form
submission. The difference is that this is an email sent to
their inbox and provides you a great opportunity to tell
them about additional resources you have available for
them. The longer you can engage this recipient, the more
likely they are to remember you in the future.
As a side benefit, you will help your search-engine rankings
when you offer links to multiple areas of your website — pages
with videos or galleries, and pages that list multiple resources
that will extend their visit as they read through the options.
Targeted landing page
Landing pages are web pages (hosted within your email
automation software or on your website) that provide you
with additional real estate to sell the recipient on the offer or
just provide additional details. The landing page might
contain a form, video, links to downloadable resources,
testimonials, or any other information that you believe will
further the recipient along in the call-to-action process.
Figure 4.2 We’ve tested landing page color, size, CTA, content,
format, and even shape. We were quite surprised to find that this
email and landing page design converted at twice the rate of
standard pages.

Sometimes you’ll need targeted landing pages to support
your campaign beyond those required for the email
recipients. This is the case when you talk about the content
of the email within your social media accounts, blog articles,
press announcements, website, or in any other medium or
digital presence, such as an ad.
Each individual mention of your campaign’s content must be
met with a targeted landing page relevant to that group. For
instance, if you mention the email message’s offer or content
within your Twitter account, create a landing page with a
greeting at the top welcoming Twitter followers, likewise for
other social accounts or mentions. This targeted landing page
has three primary benefits:
Visitors feel special when you welcome them1
specifically.
Tracking analytics is much easier when you can see2
the originating source for every page’s traffic
individually.
You can easily A/B or multivariate test the3
effectiveness of components within the various
landing pages to see what messaging, design, or
elements increase your conversion rates.
Design considerations
If your landing pages do not contain a form, there may be
myriad other concerns. Will it contain a video, links, tracking,
or scripts? Whatever links or content must be included, the
landing page enables you to display your company’s
branding. There are a number of other items you should
check off as you develop this page, as well:
Be polite and say thank you.
Use a design consistent with the other event components.
Start with a strong, appealing headline followed by logical
subheads that neatly break up the content.
Figure 4.3 Your campaign components should share a consistent
design like this email, sign-up form, confirmation email, and nurture
email for Cell Gate USA.

Provide a graphical, clear call-to-action button to indicate
what they should do (click now, watch the video, buy now,
and so on). If you have a standard button, try adding a big,
colorful arrow pointing to the button or odd shape and see
if your clicks increase.
Remember that your page is about the visitor so answer
questions quickly and tell them what you can do for them.
Talk about benefits (what’s in it for them), not features.
Make sure your pitch contains a clear value proposition.
Close the page with who you are, how to contact you, and
how they can learn more about you.
If appropriate, add a link to your privacy policy to lessen
concerns about filling in any form within the landing page.
Survey or poll
All triggered campaigns should at some point in the process
enable the recipient to set their preferences for messaging
and frequency. The simple addition of a poll or survey to
your campaign will reduce the number of unsubscribes and
confirms that the people in your list want to be there and
want to hear what you have to say. Like the other
components, be sure it is design-consistent.
Database
Even the most effective campaign design can fall short when
sent to a bad list — and coming up with a good list gets
harder each day. Most experts agree that the best list is the
list you build through standard business practices such as
attending events, outbound calling, direct mail, partners, and
offering valuable content for download. Unfortunately, these
standard practices take time — in some cases, years — to
develop a lead or a contact list that performs well. With that
in mind, it’s no wonder that at some time or another nearly all
companies will resort to list rental or purchase.
Figure 4.4 We use our preferences survey to automatically segment
our list (drop names into buckets) so that we can send relevant
messages, or in this case, requested messages, to each group.
According
to data
gathered
in 2012, larger lists
experience lower
bounce rates. The
average bounce rate for
industries with 25 – 499
members is 2%, for
500 – 999 members,
1.6% and for 1000 or
more members, 1.2%.
These results may seem
counterintuitive since
larger lists have more
members to manage.
However, their list
subscription and
management
procedures may be
more refined.

We understand this business need and strongly believe that a
long-term triggered campaign is your best chance for
converting a less-than-desirable list into a valuable asset.
Testing and tweaking your campaign will ensure that you are
sending relevant messages to the list and prompt removal of
opt-outs will guarantee your message is being sent only to
those who wish to receive it.
Segmentation
Segmentation is the division of a large mailing list into
smaller lists based upon some type of demographic and will
enable you to send targeted messages to each division. For
instance, if you own, purchase, or buy a mailing list of print
shops in the US, you could develop an email message that
specifically targets commercial shops, one for digital shops,
and one for quick-print shops. A single message is not likely
to be appropriate for all three groups, so segmentation is
key and produces:
Improved message relevance•
Better A/B and multivariate testing•
Targeted subject lines that increase open rates•
Improved click-thru rates•
Higher sales•
Improved keyword association between your brand•
and your offer
Once you understand the need for segmentation, the next
step is to know what types of segments to create and how
much is too much.
Figure 4.5 Use surveys to learn more about your recipient list. In this
sample, we are asking our recipients about the type of message and
the frequency with which they wish to hear from us and then use their
responses to segment our list.
One of the
most-
challenging
aspects of
marketing is making
certain that you are
sending relevant
messages to your
audience. Segmentation
improves your ability to
identify your audience
and create targeted
messages.

An inbox is a very noisy place and the importance of design cannot be understated. Most email
applications offer templates, but templates rarely represent the uniqueness of your company,
brand, product, or services. For a small investment companies such as Spider Trainers can create
a custom template that visually promotes your brand, matches your website, or is completely
new and unique.
In a phenomenon known as tunnel vision, users may focus on only that content that
specifically interests them. Unfortunately, this often means that they will ignore all other
content — even if it is important or critical. Good design, planning, and grouping helps to
overcome this narrow view. Whether you are B2B or B2C, these are the key elements that you
should include in most messages:
Content/design
Visual connection to the brand•
Personalization•
Call to action•
Permission reminder•
Unsubscribe link•
Share with a friend link•
Legally required details (click here to learn more about the CAN-SPAM act)•
Think before you add*
Social-follow links•
Links to your website (beyond those included in the CAN-SPAM required footer)•
Other links•
Programming
Well-formed HTML with inline CSS•
Responsive layout•
Plain text version and web version•
Group important items closely together•
Chapter 5. Designing content
Personalized emails improve click-through
rates by 14%, and conversion rates by 10%.
— Aberdeen Group
4 of 10 emails are being read on a
mobile device and just under 40% are
reading email on desktop clients — a
percentage that likely represents business email.
— Return Path
40% of mobile usage is related to
consumer products, 38% for real estate,
and other verticals, for example, banking,
indicate that 60% of emails are opened on desktops.
— Return Path
*As you’ll read more about in the next section, our advice is that you
do not dilute your call to action by including links and information
that distract from the goal — click here, watch now, buy now, or
whatever your CTA may be.

HTML vs. text
Among your first considerations, as you develop any email or series of emails, should be the
topic of email format: HTML vs. text. This topic is sure to create a number of debates and
myriad issues such as the message, the audience, promoting the brand, deliverability, spam
complaints, design, cost, and more. Given the number of emails we’ve sent, you’d think we
could settle this debate once and for all. Well, that’s it: There is no right answer.
Choosing HTML over text or vice versa will depend upon all of the topics we’ve just noted
and more. The only way to know for sure is to test, and in some cases, both formats are right.
Marketers always want to include graphics, since this is typically how open rates are
measured. Text-only content does not offer the same level of visibility for those of us invested
in the analytics of our campaigns; however, have a conversation with any outside salesperson
and they will tell you that the plain-Jane emails that they send from Outlook have extremely
high delivery rates (100% is not uncommon), so they will often advocate the same format with
a triggered campaign. Most email-automation clients have the ability (and by default) send
both an HTML and text format, and if the recipient’s email client is set to only allow text, the
text format will be delivered.
When you do choose to send HTML-formatted emails, give lots of consideration to the
graphics and how they are used. In the Spider Trainers’ infographic shown in figure 5.1
(available at http://www.spidertrainers.com/resources), The ROI of Images, we talk about the
different types of email formats, the different ways to include images, and some interesting
deliverability statistics to boot.
CTA
As you work on the design of your campaign elements, remember to stay focused. Provide
only one call to action or you run the risk of diluting your message or worse, confusing the
recipient. If you have more than one offer, send more than one email. Stay focused and your
recipient will too.
Arguably, the most important content within your triggered campaign are the calls to action.
These little nuggets are the engagement point of your event — the reason to click. There are
several studies on which CTAs are most effective, but like everything else about your
campaign, CTAs require testing. What works for your competitor or parent office may not
work for you — at the very leastt, you have a different contact list.
Figure 5.1 In this infographic, we talk about the various ways you can
include or exclude images from your emails.

Here are some ideas for CTAs that we have found to perform
well across most clients’ campaigns:
Live webcasts•
Recorded webcasts (videos, posts to YouTube or•
Vimeo, and the like)
Slide decks or PDFs of presentations•
Portfolios and galleries•
New articles added to your blog•
Tips and tricks•
Infographics•
White papers and case studies (with testimonials)•
Free tools, templates, and checklists•
Survey results, stats, and trends (present these as an•
infographic to boost interest even more)
Relevant news articles•
Press releases or news announcements•
Numbered and top-ten lists•
Testing CTAs
Calls to action are great fodder for A/B and multivariate
testing, as long as you follow the rule of one message, one
call to action.
By way of example, a recent client told us that all of their emails
offered a discount toward the purchase of their software — it
was standard operating practice to discount their product right
out of the gate. This was done not just in outbound messaging,
but also by their field sales team. We recommended a triggered
campaign that never discounted the product but rather offered
resources in order to nurture the purchase (videos, white
papers, customer testimonials, case studies, etc.). Each email
offered a different resource (one CTA). With this in mind, the
goal of the campaign was to learn if the software was
appropriately priced and if it was, for our client to stop leaving
money on the table through discounts.
Figure 5.3 In this email for Azuga we have a video screen shot that is
our CTA button in the email and in the video-player landing page,
large, engaging CTA buttons with arrows that direct the recipient’s
eye right where we want them to go.

Personalization
Most studies on the effectiveness of personalization in email
indicate that click-thru rates are higher when the message is
personalized, but not when you personalize the subject line.
We’ve found that this needs to be tested for each client and
for each of the client’s lists. It’s not as simple as it never
works or it always does. We recommend you test, track, and
tweak.
Personalization is not limited to your greeting, look it beyond
that to find opportunities to make your message very specific.
Include information such as the last purchase date, recipient’s
birthday, their web address, or avatar. The more tailored the
message, the more likely your recipient will feel a connection.
Of course, there is such a thing as TMI, so don’t go overboard
— stay professional, not creepy.
Mobile (responsive) designs
According to a 2012 survey (as of the last quarter) the
desktop computer still dominates most email interaction
and accounts for 64% of opens overall, with the mobile
(tablets and smartphones) making up the other 36%. That’s
up from 27% at the end of 2011. Of course, these numbers
represent a broad spectrum and may not hold true for you.
The only way to know what devices your audience uses, is
to turn to your analytics reports and develop accordingly. If
your mobile users account for even as few as 10% of your
list, it’s probably time to consider sending responsive
formats (emails that scale to fit the device’s screen size as
shown previously in figure 5.2).
Figure 5.3 In this example, the desktop version of MedPro Staffing’s
branded template are shown on the left and the mobile version on
the right. This is a responsive template in that the format scales and
reconfigures automatically for display in the narrow window of a
mobile device.

There are countless articles about writing successful subject lines and twice as many opinions
on what works and what doesn’t. Some schools of thought follow best practices while others
go entirely against the grain. It’s well established and common sense that subject-line
content needs to grab your audience’s attention and get them to continue reading —
anything short of that and you’ve wasted your time — but word length plays an equal role
and has its own list of dos and don’ts. It is partially the reason why subject lines are the most
commonly tested factors in an email campaign.
A study conducted by Communicorp (Henderson, 2011) looked at 100,000 email campaigns
spanning a wide range of industries with various mailing list sizes ranging from double digits
to millions. The open rates for this study were between 2% and 95%. The findings were that
size does matter.
Subject lines with five to six words had the highest open rates. Subject lines with three or four
words had lower rates. For those who still feel that fewer words can create a higher impact —
they can and do. Single-word subject lines such as: Sale!, Hurry!, and News! carry quite a lot of
impact, yet too few words may not properly convey the message or set the recipient’s
expectations. If that is true, will too many words water down impact?
The answer is “no,” according to Dayne Shuda, a contributing blogger to Email Critic, it’s all
about the subject itself, no matter how many words are used in the subject line field. It can be
ten words in length, according to Shuda, just as long as it piques the recipient’s interest.
When your email lands in my inbox, the first thing I want to know is, what’s in it for me?
(Which, BTW, is the same question I ask when I visit your website.) Your subject line needs to
answer that question quickly, or you run the risk of meeting up with the dreaded delete key.
While the tips below will give you consideration points, above all, set the user’s expectation.
You can be funny, direct, ask a question, or be a bit pushy, but always be honest. If you get a
reputation for misleading recipients, you will just as quickly become permanently relegated to
the spam folder — no matter how creative your subject line.
Chapter 6. Writing subject lines
Subject lines with 49 or fewer characters had
open rates 12.5% higher than for those with
50 or more. Click-thru rates for subject lines
with 49 or fewer characters were 75% higher
than for those with 50 or more.
— Return Path
Subject lines with five or six words
outperformed subject lines of any
other length.

To create an interesting subject line, consider these points:
Convey a sense of urgency. Time-limited offers, last-chance reminders, and any
combination that drives action with that sense of urgency are winning strategies.
Value proposition. If you offer something of value to your recipients, it’s not always
necessary to get clever with your words. Offer tips, information, helpful hints, and so on,
and be clear about the offer. Not only will your open rates improve, but so will your
conversions.
Timeliness. If there is a current event making the news, capitalize on it: Super Bowl
Recipes, New Year Diet Tools, This Winter Save Your Back/Lose the Shovel, and the like.
If the topic is popular, and your product or service is aligned, pounce on it.
Calls to action. A call to action doesn’t need to be relegated to the content only. It can be
used in a subject line as well: Sign Up for Our Newsletter, Get a Free Window Treatment,
Kiss This Offer Goodbye, Get 50% Off Your First Order.
Give it a number. Using numbers adds interest and makes the message seem
quantifiable. It’s easy to include numbers if you simply consider the number of benefits
you are providing the recipient: 5 Steps to a New You, 3 Days Until This Offer is Gone, 7
Reasons You Should Read this Email.
Look for inspiration. Check your inbox for inspiration. See which subject lines got you to
open. It’s not necessary to always be original, just be interesting.
Ask a question. Depending upon how well you know your target audience and what
traits they share, give your recipients something to consider: Can You Improve Your
Rates?, Is Your Dog More than Three Years Old?, Are You Ready for Simpler Tax
Returns?
Be clever, use a pun, or try risqué. Leave the recipient guessing and use a clever
leading introductory subject line: You’ll Never Guess What’s in Store, What are Your
Holiday Hours? (on an email that pointed out that if they had an online store, they would
be always open), or The Printer Down the Street is Kicking Your Ass (which, as a point of
interest, was Spider Trainers’ all-time, best-performing subject line).
Use segmentation for a personal touch. While personalization in the subject line
doesn’t work for everyone, crafting your subject line to connect with your audience will
improve open rates in nearly every case. If you are sending a message about a new GPS
tool for cars, segment your list by vehicle type and then use subject lines such as: New
Figure 7.1 Look to your inbox for inspiration. We found that this
design got us to open, so we tried it out with our clients. The subject
line wrote itself.

GPS for Your Truck (Car, Jeep, Motorcycle, and so on). Work hard to get this right. It’s
pretty irritating to get a message intended for a Jeep owner when I have an F-150 truck.
Keep it short. Many email-automation applications limit you or at least caution you
about keeping your subject lines short and sweet. Vertical Response, for instance,
strongly recommends 50 or fewer characters and provides warnings if you go over that.
Act-On Software, on the other hand doesn’t have such limits, but still, you should
consider brevity for other reasons. Take a look at your smartphone’s inbox and it’s easy to
see why the shorter, the sweeter.
Write it last. Most email-automation applications prompt you to create your subject line
first and then develop your campaign. In many cases, saving your work requires the
subject line. For this, we have a single, default subject line used during development (as
a reminder that it is development) and save our subject writing line for last. It’s much
easier to write a subject line when you can see the design, read the message, count the
benefits, and so on. In the campaign shown in figure 7.1 on the previous page, we
reworked a concept that made it to our inbox and the subject line virtually wrote itself:
Act Now or You Can Kiss this Deal Goodbye.
Test, track, and tweak. At Spider Trainers we test every subject line. With rented or
purchased lists, we usually send the first email and then resend the same email with a
new subject line to all recipients who did not open in the first round. We repeat this
process up to five times, or until the open rate peters out to less than 2%. Not only does
this increase the overall open rate, it also provides analytical statistics for comparing
keywords and subject-line messaging.
Of course, there’s always the anomaly — those who did not follow the herd and had great
results breaking the rules. A few marketers have debunked the commonly held best practice
to never use CAPITAL LETTERS in subject lines. Some have found that a few words capitalized
in the subject — keywords — are attention grabbers. Others still, and more recently, are using
special characters in subject lines with varying degrees of success (the special characters do
not display correctly in all email clients).
Personalization in the subject line needs to be tested for each client and for each of the
client’s lists, as mentioned previously in this eBook. It’s not as simple as it never works or it
always does. Disney uses their subscribers’ names in one out of every four emails with good
results. However, it’s paramount to make sure that any strategy continues to be effective by
regularly testing it.
Figure 7.2 This email subject line was, What are Your Holiday Hours?
and sent around the Christmas holiday season. It is a pun, because
we were pointing out that if they had an online store, they wouldn’t
need to post holiday hours — they would be open 24/7.

There was a time when spam filters were set up to filter out certain words such as FREE, but
today emails are more likely to be filtered out based upon a company’s reputation. If your
email content is reported as spam, your reputation is weakened, and it will get you on a black
list. However, as long as your reputation is strong, you can try using some words that may
have been considered spam in the past.
Using subject lines to develop analytics
Subject lines are a great source of analytic data. Of course you want to be creative and
improve your chances of having your email opened, but testing is what will make you a better
marketer. Given that your audience is made up of lots of different types of people with various
tastes, wants, and needs, it’s critical to gather recipient data and compare the numbers over
time so that you can learn about what appeals to them and what gets them to engage. This
will allow you to adapt your content based upon response rates in order to capitalize on and
gain optimal results.
Figure 7.3 This snapshot of our Act-On Software dashboard makes it
easy to compare the subjection line analytics.

Testing the effectiveness of your campaign components is essential to gaining insight into
recipients’ behavior so that conversion rates can be increased. At Spider Trainers, we divide
testing into two categories: pre-open and post-open. We’ve found it’s essential that you
understand what about your email you can affect when you implement testing processes.
Deciding what to test will be based upon the goals for each component of your campaign
and for your entire campaign. You will likely start with what we deem pre-open testing so that
you can learn what it takes to first improve your open rate. If you already have high open
rates, you may choose to skip this part of the process.
Testing ideas and improving conversions doesn’t end when your campaign performs well. By
testing, tracking, and tweaking your results could improve even good results by tenfold or
more. Testing your campaign could include:
Feature testing
In addition to A/B and multivariate testing, your campaign can be used to test the
importance of benefits, features, and site content. In the examples shown in figures 6.2, you
can see two email formats that test the various benefits of each client’s product. We have
provided three large icons and each is linked to a landing page at the client’s website. Using
this format and monitoring clicks, it’s easy to tell which of the three benefits is most
appealing to their audience.
To further verify the analytics we were collecting, we first segmented the list into three
groups and changed the order of the button for each. As we discussed earlier, sometimes a
recipient will get tunnel vision and focus on one area — in a design like this, typically the
top button. To ensure that the results are not skewed by the position of the buttons alone,
three segments enabled us to test position as well as benefits.
Chapter 7.
Testing, tracking, and tweaking
A/B testing. An experimental approach to
campaign design, which attempts to identify
changes to the campaign component that
causes an increase in action or interaction or
that maximizes an outcome of interest (e.g., open rate,
click-thru rate). In an A/B test, two versions (A and B) are
compared, which are identical except for one variation
that might impact a user’s behavior. Version A might be a
personalized subject line, while version B is a generic,
non-personalized subject line. Tracking and comparing
open rates of the two versions will help the marketer to
understand which format is more effective with their
audience.
Multivariate testing (MVT). Testing of two
or more design or content changes at the
same time. In many cases, MVT is more
difficult to distill since it may be a challenge to
ascertain which of the design or content changes caused
the better response rate. In cases such as this, the MVT
can be followed by a more targeted A/B in order to hone
in on the elements that cause the better results.

Be sure you have enough data
If you are testing a call to action and sending two versions of the email (with the same subject
line) but have an open rate of only 1%, you will not likely have sufficient data to effectively
measure the call-to-action results. A call to action is a post-open testing point. For this A/B
test to be effective, you will need to first focus on pre-open testing points in order to increase
your open rate.
Campaign Analytics Pre-open Post-open
Open rate Spam content Design (color, layout, buttons, button placement, and so on)
Click-thru rate Format Call to action
Opt-out Subject line Messaging (headline, subheads, and text)
Spam complaints Personalization (subject line) Coding (HTML and CSS)
Undeliverable Images
Landing page
bounce rate
Format (standard vs. responsive)
Device (browser) Form length
Compatibility
Navigation
Personalization
Figure 6.2 This is an example of message testing. In both cases, we
are trying to determine which benefit most appealed to their
audience by measuring clicks on the icons.
Figure 6.3 In these two examples, we compared the conversion rate
of the two different main graphics.

Within the scope of triggered marketing, lead scoring is the process of ranking prospects
against a scale that represents their sales readiness. The resulting score is used to determine
which leads will be further engaged, in order of priority. For best results, both explicit and
implicit demographics and data should be used to calculate the score.
To establish your lead-scoring system, it’s critical that you work with the sales team to
understand and incorporate their current scoring system — marketing and sales need to be
on the same page. Lead scoring will ensure that your sales team only works with leads who
are ready to hear from them and that will make everyone happier — client, sales, and
marketing. Act-On Software and other email-automation systems can pass lead-scoring
information to some CRM systems, such as Salesforce through the use of a connector.
Without a sales team, lead scoring is still quite valuable. It can help marketers determine sales
readiness too and provide in-depth looks into ROI and interaction trends.
Point values
Once your organization has agreed upon criterion that accumulate and identify a sales-
qualified lead, you will need to assign a point value for each milestone as it is reached. You
may set any point value that is meaningful to your group, but make it easier on everyone
involved with a point scale of 0 to 100 and assign higher-value numbers as the recipient
engages at a more committed level. For instance, your implicit scoring might look something
like those shown table 8.1 and would, of course, be added to the explicit values:
A prospect or lead’s score will change with each campaign you send and, when available,
using the connector to push the data to the CRM, your entire organization can be armed daily
with updated information.
Chapter 8. Lead scoring
Marketing is Latin for let’s try new s*** and see
what works.
— Mike Dewey, HuntingInsider.com
Explicit demographics are calculated based
upon demographics or information such as
company size, industry segment, job title, or
geographic location.
Implicit data is accumulated through the value
of the recipient’s actions or interactions, such
as those who open, click, download a
resource, watch a video, visit your website,
share your content with their social network, and so on.
79% of B2B marketers have not established
lead scoring.
— MarketingSherpa

Explicit and implicit give a better picture
Lead scoring can be as simple or as complex as necessary to meet the needs of your
organization, but as we mentioned earlier, the best type of lead scoring comes from the sum
of both explicit and implicit data. Both will help you to create targeted, relevant messages,
build buckets, and, thus get better responses.
With your email-automation software, monitor the lead score and set up automatic alerts to
notify the appropriate team member when a lead or prospect reaches an ideal score.
It’s natural to want to delete leads and prospects with very low lead scores, but resist this urge
and instead develop a special nurturing campaign designed to specifically address why the
lead isn’t qualified.
*In addition to providing a score for visiting web pages, you could
also assign values to specific pages, for example, more value for
product pages and less value for the press release section.
Implicit value Lead score
Receive 1
Opened 2
Shared with a friend 3
Shared in social media 3
Clicked web link 3
Visited web site (per page)* 3
Clicked to download 4
Clicked to view form 5
Submitted form 5
Clicked to watch video 7
Clicked to register 8
Submitted registration 9
Clicked to purchase 10
Downloaded a demo 20
Requested a trial version 30
Requested a person demo 40
Purchased/ordered 50
R eivecR e emaileive email
Open emailOpen emailOpen emailOpen email
Shar
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Figure 8.1 In marketing, an engagement funnel might look something
like this. As your recipient shows higher levels of engagement
(making it further down the funnel), they will accumulate more and
more points that add to their total lead score. The conversion funnel
may have different labels when developed by the sales team. Your
final funnel should incorporate both.
Figure 8.1 This is a very simple example of lead score values.

Auto-responders
As noted earlier, in order to develop your campaign, you must first define your goal. Your
email-automation software should enable you to automatically send messages to the person
who has interacted with the campaign and key stakeholders — internal triggers that notify
marketing, sales, or whomever that a follow-up step is in order. Both of these types of emails
(to the recipient and to the stakeholder) are called auto-responder emails.
When it comes to the sales team, use auto-responder emails to notify stakeholders as the
recipient’s lead score improves. When received by the stakeholder, it’s important that the
notification be acted upon quickly and there are several ways you can do this. Each type of
follow-up allows you an opportunity to foster your budding relationship and increase the value
of the lead or prospect to the company.
For the recipient, auto-responder emails should focus on trust — deliver on their requests and
be as personalized as you can. This follow-up communication is also a great opportunity for
you to offer additional information designed to advance the lead’s sales readiness, such as links
to relevant articles on your site, social media accounts, downloads, testimonials, and the like.
Traditional follow-up
Few types of contact are as welcomed as handwritten notes. When you think about the best
way to follow up, this is a vehicle that carries great influence, but one that must be balanced
by the statistics that show the vendor who responds most quickly may well be the one that
wins the client. That means a lead or prospect searching across several sites for a solution, is
more likely to purchase from the marketer or sales team that has the best auto-responder
process. In some studies, 50% of the time, the quickest vendor is the winner.
Follow-up, however, should not be limited to a single touch. In fact, reaching out across
multiple vehicles not only reminds your potential client who you are, but it can go a long way
in convincing them that you care about their business. With that said, a handwritten note may
not be the best first touch, but rather a second touch that includes a recap of your phone call.
Chapter 9. Following up
35-50% of sales go to the vendor that
responds first.
— InsideSales.com
The best lead-to-sales processes are established jointly
between marketing and sales. Be sure to establish sales
follow-up guidelines... As those guidelines are
established, make sure to communicate the sales
processes to the marketing and telequalification teams,
so that those departments can always set clear next
steps with each lead.
— MarketingProfs

Personal follow-up
While mailed notes are typically met with delight, phone calls may be a different matter and
one that should be approached cautiously. If you decide to have your sales department make
a phone call to a prospective customer based upon their visit to your site, it can — and most
likely, will — give the client a moment of pause.
Many people are not even aware the level of information that marketers can collect about
their actions and are shocked when a follow-up phone call occurs within minutes of a visit to
your website. This shock or surprise could possibly even hurt your opportunities for future
sales depending upon how welcomed your call is.
As you deploy your triggered marketing campaign, ideally you should be working toward
building trust with your recipients so be careful when you choose the phone as your vehicle
for connecting. Your follow up should never take away from establishing you as a trusted
source.
Tips for follow-up
Having a light touch with regard to personalized follow-ups — rather than a heavy hand —
can make all the difference. As an alternative to the phone, perhaps you should consider
following them socially and sending a private welcome or thank you through their account.
While some may still find this a bit invasive, depending upon the social platform, it is a passive
approach to interacting that offers the benefit of immediacy.
Regardless of your follow up, be sure your message is relevant. Sending a canned note,
whether emailed, handwritten, or posted online, is fine but straying off topic or sending
something so generic that it doesn’t further the trusted relationship is bad.
If your recipient has filled out a form and provided you with information about him or herself,
be sure that your follow-up message specifically calls out their responses. This confirms to the
lead that you are listening and that you are grateful they took the time to provide you with
that information.
Be polite, be relevant, and say thank you.
46% of marketers with mature lead-
management processes have sales teams that
follow up on more than 75% of marketing-
generated leads.
— Forrester Research
Companies that try to contact potential
customers within an hour of receiving queries
are nearly 7X as likely to have meaningful
conversations with key decision makers as
firms that try to contact prospects even an hour later. Yet
only 37% of companies respond to queries within an
hour.

Building a solid and trustworthy relationship with your email recipients involves knowing
what kind of information they wish to receive from you and how often they would like to
receive it. Allowing them to make their own decisions by providing them with a preference
survey will help you achieve that goal.
Preference surveys are easy and depending upon the questions can be serviced
automatically using a triggered marketing campaign for each type of response. In most cases
you will be able to repurpose design concepts and messaging from your campaign to simply
deliver at a different rate for another bucket. For instance, if you have a triggered campaign
set to deploy every Tuesday morning and you send a survey that allows your recipients to
choose to receive emails once a month, you could simply duplicate the weekly campaign
and change the delivery from weekly to monthly to deliver to those recipients that you have
moved from the weekly bucket to the monthly bucket.
There are various types of subscription surveys such as:
Subscribe or opt-in•
Ask your recipient what they would like to receive and how often. Keepo
it simple with only two or three options.
Unsubscribe from all emails•
Otherwise known as opt-out, this situation can provide valuableo
information. Ask the recipient why they are opting out using a short
form to help you improve future email campaigns.
Subscription email preferences•
A request for particular content type, such as newsletters, offers, oro
resource downloads
Follow up all preference surveys with a confirmation email. Let them know they’ve been
heard.
Chapter 10. Surveying recipients
Lead nurturing emails have a slightly
higher unsubscribe rate (1%) than
individual email sends (0.5%), indicating their
effectiveness in removing unqualified leads from the
sales funnel.
— HubSpot

Chapter 11. Retiring names
The value of keeping your mailing lists updated and current must not be underestimated.
Neglecting your databases can have a negative impact on your campaigns and, therefore,
take a toll on your outcomes. On the other hand, simple list maintenance improves delivery
and open rates, reduces the instances of email going to spam folders, and helps maintain a
solid sender reputation. By removing stagnant leads, duplicates, those who have
unsubscribed and opted out, and just plain old contacts, you are building upon your email
campaign’s effectiveness, which will automatically boost your success rate.
Maintaining a clean (hygienic) list involves regular scrubbing. Following are the types of
addresses for which you should keep an eye out and that should be banished from your email
databases:
Duplicates•
Hard bounces•
Soft bounces (has bounced three or more times)•
Opt-out requests•
System email addresses (e.g., helpdesk@abccompany.com, sales@abccompany.com)•
Recipients who have not interacted with your content in an amount of time that your•
company deems as indication of expired interest
Addresses that have triggered spam traps•
Once your list has been scrubbed, there are a few techniques to help keep it clean:
Send a preferences survey with a reminder of their current settings.•
Include an unsubscribe link and set your preferences link in every email.•
Be very cautious when importing lists that you have not developed through standard•
business practices.
To sum up, keeping an updated list is critical to the health of your campaign and your sender
reputation, while ignoring or neglecting your lists can and will be harmful to all of your efforts.
The average email list depreciates by 25%
annually.
— MarketingSherpa

There are several approaches to integrating the promotional value of social networks in your
email campaigns, some are embedded in the email itself while others are best left to the
landing page (they require JavaScript which is often marked as spam content when embedded
in an email). It’s important to remember the purpose of your email, however, as you choose
which links to include. Your email should have a single call to action. When you add social
sharing, social following, and other links to the email, you distract from the call to action.
For some emails, you’re hoping for sharing and forwarding and in this case, links are
appropriate and encouraged. The more, the merrier.
Embedded in your email
Social sharing code so the recipient can share the message within their social accounts.•
Share with a friend link.•
Embedded in your landing page
Retweet this code in your landing page (not appropriate for all landing pages).•
Like this on Facebook code (not appropriate for all landing pages).•
Pinterest Pin-It code in your landing page (not appropriate for all landing pages).•
Embedded in confirmation emails (response emails)
Social sharing code so the recipient can share the message within their social accounts.•
Social follow code.•
Email is one of the best ways to connect with customers, and it is essential to engage with
customers via social networks. So it makes sense that the value of email and social media is even
higher when they’re used together. Not all networks are created equal; however, and some are
more appropriate for your business or your offer than others. Determine your best-performing
social networks and capitalize on them to add additional lift that goes well beyond your in-house
contact lists. When sharing your message with your own networks, turn back to the section on
targeted landing pages if you need a reminder about the benefits of providing this group a
specific web page.
Chapter 12. Social sharing
Social sharing. Buttons or links within your
email that enable the recipient to share the
message contents within their social network.
Forward to a friend is also in this category.
Social following. Buttons or links within your
email that enable the recipient to connect with
you within your social networks.
Facebook is the top social network displayed
or promoted within emails, followed by
Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest respectively.
Unique open rates for Twitter follow us
mailings are 9.5% higher than those for other
mailings.
60% of brands that sent emails with Facebook
in the subject line averaged a 27% increase in
traffic to their website from Facebook the
week following deployment.

Launching your fully automated triggered campaign seems like the perfect opportunity to
push your chair back and put your feet up as you watch the lead scores tally or orders come
in, but before you start the self-congratulatory (and well-deserved) pat on the back, log in to
your Google Analytics and email-automation application. Be on alert for anomalies that
might indicate an exceptional win or a failure in the system. Be prepared to tweak.
Email analytics
Whatever your choice for an email automation application, post-send analytics are the
cream of your nurturing-email crop. In order to understand and improve upon results, you
need an application that will provide you with ample visibility into the metrics — from send
to purchase, and all the steps in between.
Each application has its own shining point when it comes to analytics, but at a minimum you
need reporting on sent, opened, delivered, opt-outs, spam, and click-thrus. If you can get
data beyond that, it’s a bonus. In figures 13.1, you can see reports from Act-On Software and
Vertical Response. Both platforms provide additional information beyond what’s shown.
Site analytics
Our first rule of thumb for any campaign launch is that the client must have the site depth to
support the campaign. That means that there must be several pages at your website that will
further the message of the campaign. It is a fact that most, if not nearly all, recipients will
attempt to validate your company or your offer at your website — especially if this is the first
correspondence they have received from you. Make sure you have enough information at
your site to convince them of the validity and your trustworthiness.
Of these pages, at least one should be a targeted landing page (whether the page lives within
the marketing software or at the website, a landing page is a must). Most businesses do use
analytics of some sort, and my guess is that nearly all marketers use analytics to some degree,
but we’re often surprised at how low a degree that is.
Chapter 13.
Learning from your campaign
Figure 13.1 Snapshots of Vertical Response and Act-On Software
email-delivery reports.

Website analytics are critical to the success of your campaign and not just because you can
track your events from end to end, but also because monitoring your analytics will enable you
to identify landing pages and other website pages that are not engaging your audience.
Pages with high abandonment or bounce rates typically indicate that the content on the page
is not what the visitor was expecting. These pages need a careful review to ensure that they
are aligned with the campaign message and that you are delivering on your promises. If you
say click here to learn more, you must deliver; if you don’t, your customers will leave, and
leave quickly. This has a distinct impact on your overall search-engine rankings since search
engines monitor how long each visitor stays on your website, what links they click, and in
general, how engaged they are.
We’ve found that most marketers are simply intimidated by the sheer volume of data available
to them and that they feel unequipped to sift through it all trying to identify what data is
meaningful and what is not. When it comes to monitoring analytics for a better understanding
of the success of your marketing campaign, there is no set report or collection of data that is
right for everyone. If you have an eCommerce site, you will monitor different analytics than
those of a company that relies on an outside sales team to close deals.
Instead of feeling overwhelmed by copious data points, approach it more simplistically and in
small doses — don’t try to ingest it all at once. Focus only on time spent on page or the
bounce rate, both are easy-to-understand bits of data that will help you with your campaign
and provide you with a primer into analytics.
If you’re looking for ideas for your triggered marketing campaign, your analytics can help here
too. In your analytics report, find the search terms that people used before visiting your site. If
your visitors are looking for white papers on widgets and you don’t have one, write one. Then
include that as an offer in one of the nurturing emails.
Site analytics and search-engine optimization is not just about attracting lots of visitors; it’s
about engaging those visitors. Site analytics are designed to help you understand what your
visitors find most interesting within your site, what pages aren’t worth keeping, and what pages
convert visitors to customers. Look for indicators and capitalize on what you’re doing well.
Figure 13.2 My favorite report is the Act-On Software Daily Digest of
Website Visitors that is delivered to my inbox every morning. This
report alerts me if one of our customers has stopped by our site and
is perhaps looking at additional services, or if there is a particular
domain that is showing interest. The search terms help me to
understand the visitor’s intent.
Google Analytics is used by about 56% of all
websites — up from about 50% a year ago.
— Web Technology Surveys

Google Analytics is committed to privacy, whereas your marketing software is focused on
associating the leads, prospects, and customers in your list with how they behave at your site.
Like Google Analytics, it’s about tracking and disclosing behavior, but with an email-
automation solution that tracks recipients through to their visits, it provides additional
specificity as shown in figure 13.4.
With most email automation software, you will receive information on who’s opening, clicking,
and buying within seconds of deployment. Despite this, marketers are apparently still having a
hard time with campaign measurement.
There are dozens of books out on Google Analytics in addition to videos on YouTube and
other training sites. Don’t feel as though you need to learn it all at once, take it in chewable
bites and learn as you go.
Not every event in your triggered campaign is going to be a blockbuster, however, every
event, whether a winner or a dud, will provide you with valuable insights. Your ability to
improve any of the individual events or the entire program hinge on how well you’re able to
identify what worked, what didn’t, and how to move forward. Study your events (and the
entire campaign) to better identify the best messages and tactics to reach your audience
and be prepared to tweak.
Figure 13.3 Instead of trying to understand everything about Google
Analytics, focus on just one thing that can help your campaign, such as
the bounce rate or time spent on each of your targeted landing pages.
Figure 13.4 In this website visitors report within the Act-On Software
application, we have even more data that helps us to understand how
people are interacting with our site. Notice that the name of the third
visitor in the list is provided — this is a level of detail not provided by
Google Analytics.

Chapter 14. Budgeting
For many companies, marketing is an afterthought and the approach to marketing is to simply
not budget at all. According to Counselors to America’s Small Business (SCORE) and the U.S.
Small Business Administration (SBA), companies should invest as much as possible in
marketing, especially in the first few years — even up to 15 – 20%. Yet in difficult economic
times, we find that many companies look to marketing first when cutting costs.
Most companies spend well below this recommended amount annually, believing that by not
spending on marketing they are saving money rather than considering the additional revenue
that proper spending will generate. There is an old adage that those of us in marketing have
heard and repeat often: “You must spend money to make money.”
As you set out to define your marketing budget, keep in mind the development and
advancement of your brand and what that is worth to your company.
In 2011, Focus Research reported that marketing automation had seen the fastest growth of
any CRM-related segment in the previous five years. Forrester Research found that companies
that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost. With
statistics like these, it’s clear that a well-executed, automated campaign is a sound investment
for a company of any size.
In-house development
At first blush, many companies believe that all marketing and ad work should be kept in-
house — it’s seen as a more-efficient use of budgets and team members — after all, you’re
already meeting the payroll for your crack team, so why not apply that expenditure to your
long-term marketing needs in the form of a triggered-campaign development? Additionally,
in-house ownership would seem to ensure that you are not competing with other clients for
priority, but as anyone in the corporate environment knows, you simply trade clients for
departments and projects. No matter where your development ends up, there will always be
competition for the creative team’s attention.
Marketing, like many jobs in the business world, is labor intensive and can have substantial
overhead. If you personally do all your own marketing, you’ll need to budget more time and
less cash for marketing, but just because you can do it in-house doesn’t mean you should.
Businesses that use marketing automation to
nurture prospects experience a 451%
increase in qualified leads.
— The Annuitas Group
Companies that combine marketing
automation and ROI metrics report an
increase in the outcome of total marketing
revenue contribution, with 69% of marketing
automation users also using ROI metrics to assess their
effectiveness compared to the 19% of marketing
automation users using only traditional, non-financial
metrics.
— Lenskold Group/Pedowitz Group

Outsourced development
If you suspect that outside help is the solution, you’ll need to evaluate the fit of the agency
with your needs. Ask first to see an overview of the services they offer since some marketing
or production agencies specialize and others generalize. As an example, if you intend to
offer videos, white papers, eBooks, slide decks, and other resources during your nurturing
campaign and do not have in-house talent — or available in-house talent — able to create
the required inbound content, make sure your that the agency can provide these services or
be prepared to blend the services of your in-house team and multiple agencies.
Outsourced development offers your firm several benefits, including:
Exposure to advancements. As savvy as your internal team is, they may not be as1
motivated as an external agency to stay on top of technological advancements and
industry trends. A production team such as Spider Trainers is only profitable when
they can deliver projects on time and deliver ROI. This means they need to stay
atop technological advancements that reduce overhead in the form of time spent
to produce a project. If you want a project to stay on budget and on target, you’re
much more likely to have a winning combination with a team motivated by real
Job title Responsibility Annual salary
Director of marketing Define marketing goals, strategy, and approach; work with sales team
to understand conversion requirements; manage team and
orchestrate delivery against deadlines
$150,000
Marketing coordinator Administer the email automation software $35,000
Art director Develop design concepts $90,000
Graphic designer Develop designs $50,000
Copywriter Write all copy, proofread, and edit $53,000
SEO specialist Optimize for search engines all content $69,000
Social media specialist Promote campaigns in all social media accounts $55,000
Public affairs specialist Promote campaigns through analysts, press releases,
and news announcements
$57,000
Computer programmer Create HTML and CSS content $75,000
Web developer Create and implement landing pages and in-site forms $61,000
Analytics specialist
Review and present statistical information on
success/failures of the campaign
$86,000
TOTAL $781,000
Table 14.1 This table shows the national average annual salary of the various staff typically put to task to
deploy a triggered campaign.
Optimizing email for mobile devices is no easy
task and can add substantially to development
overhead. With more than 7,000 handsets
available today, marketers need to ensure
their messages are rendering properly.
— Epsilon Q1 2012 Email Trends and Benchmarks

Automated Email Marketing

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