What do all the numbers mean? What information is most valuable to a business like mine? What can I actually learn about my prospects’ behaviors and needs? How can I use data to make my marketing plans more effective?

Creating buyer personas is a smart way to transform information overload into an actionable set of insights. Buyer personas provide marketers with a clearer picture of their target customers, with the goal of creating marketing plans that connect with them more effectively.  Marketers have been creating personas for years, of course—but the level of specificity we can now achieve has the potential to make today’s B2B buyer personas much more effective.

As the Buyer Persona Institute’s Adele Revella explains in this excellent webinar, a buyer persona is really a detailed profile of a real person we hope will become a customer. Insights gleaned from a buyer persona can be tremendously valuable in developing lead generation strategy.

Here are five questions to help you climb in the data mountain and develop a truly useful B2B buyer persona:

What are the demographics that define your core B2B prospect? Start with the basics: average age, gender, industry, company, position, average income for position, location. Where is this person spending their time and resources? It might not seem like all of this information matters when it comes to connecting a potential customer with your products, and you might not have access to this level of detail, but the more color you can add to the picture, the better.

How does your B2B prospect define success? Remember to include the flip-side of the challenge question: What does your prospect want to accomplish—and what does their leadership want them to accomplish? What are their metrics for achievement? By gaining a clearer sense of your potential customers’ goals and hopes, you’ll develop more clarity about how you can help them get where they want to be. And as we all know, successful customers are loyal customers!

What are your B2B prospect’s pain points and challenges? By gaining insight into the hurdles and obstacles your prospect faces – real or imagined – you’re better able to position your product as a valuable solution. Challenges could include: issues they face every day at work in getting their job done; concerns about sourcing products or services; pressures from leadership; and other common industry frustrations.

How would your B2B prospect go about buying your product? What does a day in the life of your prospect(s) look like? Does she work day-to-day with a product like yours, or is she sourcing it for someone else? Is his company large or small? Does she need approval to make buying decisions? Is the buying process quick or slow? By putting together details like these, you can customize the sales funnel to meet the particular needs of your prospects.

What obstacles stand in the way of your B2B prospects making the decision to buy the product? What are their pre-purchase concerns or worries? What issues might they have had with a product like yours before? Where will they go to learn more about you? Who will they ask for a reference? How do they feel most comfortable connecting with you? The answers to these questions will help you smooth out the bumps in your sales process, and put your prospect at ease from the very beginning.

Better buyer personas translate into better marketing plans, and they help you target your prospects in a way that’s relevant to their specific needs. By asking the right questions and then utilizing automation to analyze the behavior of prospects across multiple channels and touchpoints, valuable insights will emerge. This data will help you tackle questions such as:

• What nudged buyers through the funnel?
• Did certain segments respond differently than others?
• Which messages resonate (and which ones don’t)?

Based on these answers, you’ll be able to tweak your buyer personas – and your future process – even more. The key, as always, is not to do more marketing, but to do better marketing. Using automation to fine-tune buyer personas and analyze buyer behaviors will help you become more strategic in your approach, so you can navigate a path through the data mountain, drive more sales and improve ROI.

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Trader Joe's maintains brand consistency by labeling ethnic foods in accordance to their overall brand strategy (Trader Jose's for Mexican food and Trader Giotto's for Italian, for example)

Smart brand strategy tells us that every aspect of what companies do…

• What they make
• How they make it
• What they use to make it
• How they sell it
• Where they sell it
• To whom they sell it

… needs to reinforce their overall brand.

That’s why you don’t see Rolexes selling in department stores, or processed foods at Trader Joes. Leading brands know where their customers go to find them. They pay careful attention to the kind of shopping experience customers expect when they get there. And they understand what each of those things say about their products and their markets.

Missteps anywhere in that process can significantly impact how both customers and prospects perceive your brand. So, avoid brand confusion by staying alert to today’s most common challenges to brand consistency, including:

You look different on the inside than the outside.

External marketing teams are focused on what they believe customers want to see and how they can meet those needs with the products they have to sell. By contrast, internal teams are charged with getting everyone on board within the company. These are two very different kinds of challenges, and if you don’t integrate external and internal materials and messages, both will fall flat.

You’re not as agile as you need to be.

Internal product and marketing review processes can be huge hurdles when it comes to maintaining a strong, consistent brand image across products. The processes exist to support the brand, of course—but if they’re impossibly slow or complicated, they’re more likely to be sidestepped by folks who are eager to get things out the door. In addition, multiple hand-offs can easily lead to delays, misinterpretations and other unintended consequences.

Your use of digital channels has expanded.

As the number of channels through which a brand can express itself continues to proliferate (think of the emergence of Pinterest, or evolution of hyper-local marketing) it becomes difficult to maintain a steady message across mediums. Ensure that your digital, traditional, field and partner channels are consistent. Decide how each new channel will mesh with your messaging, not the other way around.

You now make more than one thing.

Today’s global marketplace is enormously complex. If your company has a diverse range of products, at different price points, from different product genres, targeted at very different audiences, it can be incredibly difficult to present a unified, strong, clear brand. Once again, integrating processes is imperative when you’ve got more than one or two—or a few—things going on.

Your marketing objectives and your business objectives are no longer aligned.

Many companies grow and evolve into something different than they were when they began. You might make the same type of product, but with new technology. Or, as above, you might have expanded your product line. Maybe the company has different ownership now, and the founder was a big part of the original brand promise. Whatever the changes might be, they can make it tough to figure out where you’re at now—and if you don’t know that, it’s impossible to determine where you need to be.

A clear brand message and image are essential in this noisy marketing world. The only real way to rise above the fray is to be consistent in what you do, how you talk about it—and how you treat the customers who opt in to your promise.

How can you achieve this level of coordination and collaboration? Ultimately, you’ll need to implement a multi-channel strategy that helps you:  1) improve efficiencies across different marketing functions, 2) better understand consumers and, 3) continuously accelerate profitable growth. But, first things first: Start now by identifying the immediate challenges you face. Recognize the critical importance of maintaining brand consistency, and you’ll be one step closer to creating a brand that people will remember, relate to … and love.

Has your overall brand message become frayed? Try our Marketing Leadership Challenge to see how you can weave your brand back into each channel!

These original “TV” shows, made to be viewed online, are probably just the tip of the antenna, so to speak – considering the reported $500 million that Hulu plans to spend developing content this year.  It seems like the market is ready for this type of investment.In February alone, Americans watched 2.5 billion videos on Hulu, which the company calculates to be 1,000 videos a second.

So, keep your eye on this channel. After all, it was only a few months ago when a Forrester research report showed that the average Joe Viewer spends just as much time surfing the web as surfing channels on TV, about 13 hours a week. For cord-cutters, the decline of the TV set continues, and naturally, the ramping up of digital means that more and more video companies like Hulu are going to play in this media sandbox.

What does it mean to marketers that Hulu, an ad-supported, on-demand video streaming service, is stealing prime time? For one, Hulu is demonstrating that it’s willing to put more skin into the advertising game. Hulu advertisers will not be charged unless their ad has been viewed to completion, and Hulu is hoping this commitment will show advertisers that the time to invest in online video is now. Second, the shift to online viewing –-and from a variety of different devices, such as phones and tablets – is a reminder that multi-platform tools of engagement (social media, interactive promotions, etc.) are the way to engage consumers and retain customers.

Hulu’s move toward original programming, underscores that:

Tracking is key. Though television may be losing viewers to online video, up to this point, it has been holding on to advertisers. In part, this retention is due to the standardized nature of TV ad formats: the rating systems, buying models and counting methodologies show reliable, familiar numbers. But the still-somewhat fuzzy picture of the digital space is yielding innovation, flexibility, and most important to advertisers, interactivity. As we’ve seen with other digital channels, the ability to track is key. Marketing revolves around behavior, and digital channels offer the opportunity to track preferences, actions and performance.

Marketers need to find focus amidst the media clutter. Consumers still rely on the Old School venerable mass media outlets of print, radio and TV. But these now compete with newer digital channels, such as (let’s rattle them off) websites, Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube, Twitter and a dazzling array of other social and community networks. At the end of the day, the key question is this: How can you break through the clutter? One way to answer that question is to start mastering these various channels through marketing automation solutions that support a holistic campaign approach, some of which are focused on 1:1 interactions. Today’s technology offers levels of sophistication never before available, and these solutions can help you break through the online clutter, get noticed and engage with both your prospects and customers.

The latest is the greatest (maybe). Much of what we knew two years ago – or even a year ago – about video marketing is now obsolete. In fact, many would say that no form of marketing has changed its channels as constantly as video marketing.  As a result, it is absolutely essential to not just fire your so-called remote control at any target that moves. You need to understand the significance of measurement to avoid the white noise out there – and there is plenty of that these days.

Follow the Leaders. Take a look at German automaker BMW, which is ramping up its mobile marketing through Hulu Plus’ mobile app for the iPhone. BMW is promoting its new luxury cars with short, mobile-optimized clips, offered while consumers watch TV shows and movies in the palms of their hands. Here’s the take home message: Mobile video advertising is an immersive experience – there are no distractions or clutter as with television, and viewers can click through on calls-to-action if they want/need more information. In addition, video offers sight, sound and motion, a winning trifecta for luxury brand makers. Could this media work for your brand? How can you use video to optimize engagement with your target audience?

Social TV is poised for tremendous growth. Analysts expect social TV to become a $12 billion dollar market by 2020. And why not? Social TV is at the intersection of social media, TV devices and programs, and it supports all of the TV-related content and conversations going on in social media. The action is fast in furious and includes check-in tools for location-based TV viewing, with services like GetGlue and Miso helping TV programmers and networks establish loyal viewers.

As with any rapidly evolving technology, there’s sure to be plenty of uncertainty in the video landscape and for social TV, but stay tuned. These platforms are poised to completely disrupt the screen as we know it. What will media look like in the future – will it be “out of the box” or “inside the box?”

The Beacon Hill Patch gets hyper-local in the upscale Boston neighborhood, helping marketers deliver segmented and relevant information to this target market.

Now, there’s one more to add to the list: hyper-local marketing, which is going above-and-beyond to maximize business results through street-level local campaigns that bring your message directly to the consumer (instead of flying high from a thousand-foot view).

Sites like Patch.com, owned by AOL, specialize in community news, while hyper-local content providers include established players like Foursquare, Google Maps and Yelp.

According to the Pew Research Center, the internet is now the go-to reference source when consumers want local news and information.  More specifically, the Pew study found:

• Most adults (55 percent) said they get news and information about local restaurants, bars and clubs, and when they do, they rely on the internet most (51 percent), followed by newspapers (31 percent), word of mouth (23 percent) and local TV (either broadcasts or websites) (8 percent).

• About half (47 percent) of the adults polled who get news and information about local businesses other than restaurants and bars said they also depend mostly on the internet  –and that’s ahead of print newspapers (29 percent), word of mouth (22 percent), local TV (8 percent), local radio (5 percent), printed newsletters (4 percent) and mobile phones (1 percent).
• People who seek out information and news about local businesses and restaurants are a diverse and somewhat upscale group. They are more likely to live in relatively well-off households – those earning $75,000 or more – and have college educations. Plus, 55 percent of adults who get information about restaurants, bars, and clubs are more likely to be women, young adults, urban and technology adopters.

Findings like these suggest that digital marketing can be extremely beneficial, helping local businesses find new customers and reach a receptive audience. But, are you using digital hyper-local marketing to its full advantage?

If you want effective neighborhood reach, keep in mind these five characteristics of successful hyper-local campaigns:

A unified force

Although hyper-local media is unique in its ability to target closely both in geography and time (reaching people in seconds), it cannot stand alone. Sure, you might be able to tackle the one-off goal of reaching a niche audience in a certain zip code, but without integration, hyper-local marketing leads to ineffective use of resources. When you go local with your marketing, make sure it fits with other campaign efforts and even larger organizational goals. Brands need to consider why hyper-local makes sense. Do you want to reach a new demographic? Overcome a particular obstacle that’s preventing audience engagement? Offer new promotions or discounts? Try out a new mobile platform?

Quality, not quantity

The digital roadmap to hyper-local is different than reaching out to a national audience. Local marketing isn’t about the number of hits, but rather the quality of the leads that come in. Keep audience size and demographic in mind, and remember it’s not just about return, it’s about value. Test, measure and learn. Use analytics to gain insights into how can you adjust your efforts and tweak your messages to improve your hyper-local marketing impact.

SOS to SMS

Segmentation based on customer location is literally hitting home in more than one way. What offers can you make to customers that are location-specific? Provided that they have “opted in,” those with smart phone-in-pocket welcome relevant, real-time interaction.  Hyper-local SMS campaigns provide a way to directly engage targets with personalized messages they understand (and want). For example, mobile coupons not only extend the brand, but they can be timely incentives to visit local outlets.

 BZZZ, hear the feedback?

Local is relevant. Where is the closest and cheapest gas? How’s the traffic? What are movie show times? No matter what service or product, the beauty of hyper-local is that users truly want the meaningful, useful information can provide. Make the effort to think through how your business/brand is experienced on a local level, and proactively collect consumer data, whether it’s through email or social media feedback. Analyze the behavior of your target audience and explore the growing variety of mobile app/advertising opportunities to reach them when they are out and about and searching for information.

 Standing on multiple platforms

Hyper-local communication on a variety of platforms is the new must-have accessory for marketers. Location-based information works well on Twitter and Facebook, of course. But, be sure to design your efforts around your customers and prospects. What are their favorite digital channels? Should you be using a blog, an app, or other social network to reach them locally?

Clearly, this space is heating up fast as consumers become increasingly comfortable with using digital channels for local, real-time information. Here’s the hyper-bottom line: Mobile devices are redefining the consumer experience, and it’s time to start planning for hyper-local digital initiatives as a critical component of your marketing mix.

In this webinar series, Romek Jansen seeks to answer the questions that marketing pioneer John Wanamaker left lingering long ago

We’re all familiar with famous John Wanamaker quote: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

But, in his webinar last month, Romek Jansen, founder of MRMLOGIQ, took this old adage and added a twist. According to Romek, half of the money you spend on your marketing operation budget is wasted, too, but . . . he CAN tell you which half.

“It’s the half that keeps you busy with the wrong things, things which are executed inefficiently or  things that keep you busy but don’t serve any strategic purpose,” Romek explained.

The webinar, titled Marketing Operational Excellence: Where to begin, was the first installment in Aprimo’s five-part ´Get Inspired with Marketing Operational Excellence´ series, during which we’re offering practical tips, helpful concepts and strategic insights.

Romek’s presentation focused on the value drivers and the strategic business case for Operational Marketing Excellence, and he described how you can benchmark the maturity of your marketing operations against industry scores and pinpoint where to begin to get results fast.

Why is Operational Marketing Excellence such an imperative? As Romek pointed out, Operational Marketing Excellence is becomingly increasingly vital because it:

• Creates efficiency – which lowers investments
• Facilitate effectiveness –which increases the return on investment
• Embeds compliance – which lowers risk

Unfortunately, though, most marketers don’t take that kind of comprehensive view. They focus too much on managing returns and too little on managing risk. As a result, there’s usually a disconnect between marketing and risk-attuned finance –and that’s one of the reasons marketers always get slaughtered in the cost-cutting massacre, Romek said.

How can you do better?

For starters, look internally to see where your processes need to be improved. Romek suggested rating your operations based on a maturity model with these five levels:

• Level 1: Operations are ad hoc, undocumented, reactive.
• Level 2: Operations are repeatable and described, but not enforced. Consequently, they offer limited guidance and limited benefit.
• Level  3: Operations are well -defined, standardized and mandatory, leading to consistent, coherent results.
• Level  4: Operations are adjustable and flexible, yet quality standards are maintained.
• Level  5: Utopia. Marketing operations are integrated, measurable and fundamental to a learning organization.

As operations improve and you become more mature, you lower risks and need less investment even as you create sustainable value.

Romek, who bills himself as a business modeler and someone who’s passionate about Marketing Operational Excellence, explores these concepts in much more detail in the webinar. He even provides a detailed discussion of how to calculate marketing ROI using this equation:

ROI  result = (return – investment) divided by  (1 + cost of capital), where “cost of capital” is defined as interest rate + risk premium.

As this equation shows, marketers can create value when returns increase, investments decrease and risk profiles decrease –all of which can be achieved through Marketing Operational Excellence.

“The business case for Marketing Operational Excellence can be enormous  . . .  but you have to prove it the right way, using the right arguments and the right metrics and calculations,” Romek concluded.

The 30-minute webinar, Marketing Operational Excellence: Where to begin, is available here.

Upcoming webinars in the ´Get Inspired with Marketing Operational Excellence´ series include:

• Strategic & Operational alignment, Thursday May 10, 01:00 PM CEST
• Marketing Supply Chain Management, Thursday May 31, 01:00 PM CEST
• Change Management, Thursday June 21, 01:00 PM CEST
• 10 Pitfalls To Avoid, Thursday July 12, 01:00 PM CEST

Join us for the next webinar on May 10th, where Romek will be back to discuss how strategic marketing objectives can be translated and embedded into daily tasks. Get more info and register here: Strategic & Operational Alignment: One Single Version of the Truth

Image: wikipedia

Today, with Teradata’s announcement of a definitive agreement to acquire eCircle, Europe’s leading cloud-based digital messaging solution company, Aprimo and Teradata pulled that vision one step closer to reality.  The braid got pulled tighter.  The promise just got better.

Digital marketing – which is comprised of social, web, mobile and email – is a critical component of Aprimo’s IMM solutions.  Much of Aprimo’s recent work has centered on cloud-based IMM – where we are the leader.  As for Teradata, their focus has long been on big data management and, through Teradata Aster, on real-time analytics.  Now, by weaving in eCircle, we are quickly empowering you to take full advantage of today’s digital marketing opportunities, putting you ahead of your category competitors.  Here’s how.

The addition of eCircle not only strengthens our presence in Europe, it strengthens Aprimo’s leadership position in digital marketing.  And that benefits our customers.  eCircle will enable you, via the cloud, to easily manage and execute integrated, targeted digital campaigns that are at once consistent and highly personalized across all channels.  You get, quite literally, a digital messaging platform for social, mobile, web and email that can scale to support hundreds of billions of messages a year.  Take that, plus what Teradata and Aprimo already deliver, and you will now be able to gain AND leverage endless customer insights obtained through your campaigns.  You’ll make instant sense of these insights, so you can DO MORE with them, through the combined power of data warehousing, marketing applications and big data analytics.

As customers increasingly interact with brands across multiple channels, insights from big data analytics will help marketers analyze the resulting data, while Aprimo’s IMM applications will empower them to act on those data insights in real-time.

There’s no other offering in the market quite like it, and we think the timing couldn’t be better.  Because with over 45% of Big Data implementations involving Marketing according to Forrester(1), and with the world’s data literally doubling every two years as said by McKinsey(2), it’s time somebody tied these capabilities together.

So that’s what we’ve done.

It’s the Golden Braid: The pulling together of all the key elements to achieve a true vision for Integrated Marketing Management, all from one source.  Aprimo.

For more details, read the press release.  [www.aprimo.com/ecirclepressrelease]

[1] Forrester Research, Inc., “How Forrester Clients are Using Big Data,” September, 2011.

[2] McKinsey Global Institute report titled “Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity,” June, 2011.

As Columbia University’s Thomas B. Edsall beautifully illustrates in his recent commentary at The New York Times, political campaigns, interest groups and a network of private companies are now using sophisticated tools to comb through Big Data, looking for ways to target specific fractions of the electorate. This new political industry, called nanotargeting, has the potential to help politicians and their campaigns identify and communicate with certain segments of voters . . . and as you’ll see from the charts included in the article, all this data mining has revealed some fascinating correlations.

For example, Edsall summarizes the results of an analysis comparing cable-television viewing, political party affiliation and voter participation.

“ . . .viewers of soap operas and VH1 skew strongly Democratic, but they turn out to vote at low rates. Viewers of MSNBC and CNN also skew Democratic, but they turn out to vote at far higher rates. On the other side of the aisle, Country Music Television attracts a strongly Republican audience, but its viewers are not regular voters; viewers of the Golf Channel and Fox News, on the other hand, are reliably Republican and also turn out in large numbers.”

And for restaurants:

“ . . . some chains are well to the right or left, but most, including the largest ones like McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s, are at the political center. Those chains with high-turnout clientele are overwhelmingly Republican-leaning, including Cracker Barrel, Macaroni Grill, Outback Steakhouse, Arby’s and Chick-fil-A, while Church’s Chicken and Chuck E. Cheese’s are low-turnout Democratic.”

See the article for similar analyses of internet use, auto ownership, alcohol consumption and more.

Of course, identifying all these correlations is one thing. But, as marketers know, the key is to use Big Data to obtain actionable insights, and the jury is still out on how politicians and their campaigns should best use the information nanotargeting yields. In light of what the data tells us about TV-viewing audiences, would you run campaign ads targeted to supporters, in hopes of strengthening (and motivating) the base? Or, would it be more effective to try to attract voters from the opposing camp? Maybe the greatest spend should be directed towards the middle-ground, where voters are not as polarized?

And traditional channels like TV are only one dimension of the problem. This year, the presidential campaign is expected to evolve into an “epic” social media war –complete with millions more digital inputs, all of which can be added to consumer data already derived from credit card usage, Nielsen ratings, voter participation histories, party affiliation, etc.

The explosion of Big Data has made it crystal clear: Marketing isn’t just art; it’s science, too. Armed with the data generated by today’s digital strategies, marketers now can apply the same scientific discipline and metrics to marketing that are used in all other areas of business. We can segment audiences. We can automate and measure marketing processes. And fortunately, most marketers have a luxury political campaigns don’t –we can analyze conversions, adjust accordingly and implement strategies to achieve maximum business value.

Going forward, there’s no doubt that harnessing and mastering Big Data will lead to competitive advantage and revenue growth. However, it’s going to be interesting to see how campaigns leverage Big Data for wins at the ballot box. The fact that more Republicans than Democrats own Land Rovers is intriguing, but how would you convert information like that into votes for your candidate?

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nrmadriversseat/6503268911/

How can you tell if your emails resonate? What can you do to make sure your transmissions aren’t being ignored –or worse, sent to “Report Spam” oblivion?

For starters, check your campaign level report.  Data from this fundamental analysis will provide basic insights about your rates for click-through, spam, opt-out, etc. and alert you to any glaring red flags.

But, don’t stop there.

If you want to improve your deliverability rates and stay out of increasingly more sensitive spam traps, you need to start regularly reviewing your domain level report, as well.  Domain level reports are essential to comprehensive deliverability audits because each ISP now looks at its own subscribers independently. By monitoring the metrics at this level, you’ll be able to see how your audience is distributed across ISPs and where there are the highest spam complaint rates, percentage of hard bounces, etc.

In other words, combing through your domain level report will help you determine where you can fine-tune your approach to increase your effectiveness. For example, we feel if your:

• Spam complaints are greater than .05%,
• Hard bounce rates are more than  3%, and
• Opt-outs (Unsubscribes) are greater than 1-2% . . .

. . . then you have work to do. Why? Because exceeding these thresholds can negatively impact your overall inbox placement with the ISPs.

So, scutinize your domain level report, and then consider these steps to lower spam complaint rates and improve overall deliverability for your email campaigns:

• Run a domain distribution report for each message you send and look at each message to determine what is causing the high spam complaints. The usual suspects are: subject line, content, frequency and content/ frequency mismatch.

• Review your points of opt-in. Make certain customers are fully aware of the specific publications, frequency and content they have subscribed to. Resist the urge to auto-populate opt-in boxes, and always provide a link to review a summary and sample of the publications your recipients will receive.

• Send a welcome email when new subscribers opt-in. A simple greeting like this reminds users that they subscribed and helps them better understand the benefits of opting-in. Plus, a welcome email is a valuable opportunity to include an “Add to Address Book” option.

• Consider differences between ISPs. For instance, does your domain distribution report signal there’s something different about AOL addresses , compared to others?  Often, AOL subscribers are older (as in, they are longer on the file because they signed up in early days –not that they are genealogically older) than other web based email subscribers.  Is that an issue? Are these AOL users less active?

• As I mentioned earlier, you must recognize that each ISP handles spam differently. For instance, we know that AOL takes into consideration “This is not spam” votes, spam complaints, hard bounces and opt-outs. Some strategies to help avoid these spam filters are detailed in my earlier post about challenges with Gmail . (These approaches can work for all ISPs and can improve results across your whole list.)

• Look at each communication and segment you have defined (Purchasers, Newsletter Subscribers, Event Attendees, etc…) and see if there is a different level of response in each of these segments.  Is there one segment that has higher complaints, bounces, or opt-outs? Why? What was their opt-in experience when they signed up? Did they ever respond?

• Pay careful attention to specific subject lines that are causing higher spam complaints, opt-outs or lower engagement (clicks/opens).

• Consider using a spam checker and/or inbox monitoring service to help optimize your process.

• Reactivate inactive subscribers. Create segments to isolate anyone who hasn’t clicked or opened a message in the last three months, and then target these addresses with special appeals and promotions. (I’ll talk more about this in a future blog post.)

• If they resist reactivation, scrub inactive subscribers from your list. Ensure you are eliminating unsubcribers, as well. Keeping your email list clean should now be a top priority. After all, if someone doesn’t want/doesn’t respond to email from you, and yet you continue to deliver to that address, that recipient is more likely to report you as spam –and that will subsequently affect your reputation and inbox placement for users who do want to get your email.

Email is an effective strategy to engage with customers and increase sales, but you’ll only be successful if your message is delivered –not relegated to the void of “spam.” So steer clear of spam traps, and make sure you reach your intended target with a message that’s relevant and compelling.

Targeted Updates

With LinkedIn’s new Targeted Updates, companies will be able to interact with their followers in a more effective and relevant way. In a nutshell, the new tool allows company page administrators to fine-tune how they share content.

Using Targeted Updates, content can be delivered to either “all followers” or to a specific “targeted audience,” and company page administrators can select those specific targeted audiences based on company size, industry, function, seniority or geography.

Adding even another level of refinement, LinkedIn also will provide impression and engagement metrics for the targeted post.  This data will appear 24 hours after the content was shared, and from these results, marketers will be able to determine which content resonates  . . . and which needs revision.

The goal of Targeted Updates is to increase engagement and brand loyalty –and it appears to work. According to LinkedIn, examples have shown a 66 percent increase in audience engagement as the result of targeted updates.

Follower Statistics

Savvy marketers realize there’s tremendous value in tracking engagement metrics for social media fans and followers, and LinkedIn’s new Follower Statistics is designed to provide exactly that kind of detailed data.

The new Follower Insights dashboard provides follower demographics, as well as information about likes, shares, comments, total followers, number of new followers month-to-month, etc. Marketers can use these insights to create strategies to gain followers and optimize engagement.

As social media networks become more and more crowded and noisy, it’s becoming increasingly vital for companies to make their marketing messages as customized and meaningful as possible.  Businesses that use LinkedIn’s company pages will be able to use each of these new tools to communicate with followers more effectively –and less obtrusively.

Have a job opening at your company? Use Targeted Updates to send that info only to followers associated with certain industries. Maybe you’re running a special promotion in one region of the country? Targeting your followers by geography can help make sure you find the right audience . . . without “bothering” others.

Note: For now, these features are in limited release, available only to early release partners.