IMU wrapped up with presentations on old-school email marketing campaigns and web analytics and both speakers managed to provide meaningful suggestions, tips and tricks for small, medium, and large businesses (B-to-B and B-to-C).  Here’s a summary:

Successful Email Marketing (CV301), Professor: Eric Groves, Constant Contact

Since his company is one of the most well-known providers of email marketing campaign software, I wasn’t too surprised to hear Eric Groves’ overwhelmingly positive spin on this form of inbound marketing. Presentation bias aside, his passion for the topic really shone through when he was providing us with examples from his daily life – keeping a box of Constant Contact brochures/booklets in the trunk of his car to hand out to business owners who he discovered weren’t building/maintaining a customer list or hadn’t considered the potential of a intentional outreach campaign to those customers, totally believeable. In his talk, he focused on three steps to getting started with email marketing:

1. Making Connections

It’s hard to market to your customers if you don’t know who they are, so the first step is to build a high quality list. To ensure that you have the right people, make sure you’re collecting information at every customer touchpoint – if someone has referred a customer to you, is that referrer in your list? if you’re talking with one person at a company, then two, then three, are all three in your list? To ensure you have the right information about those people, make sure you’re asking good questions – are they interested in product A or B or both? are you targeting your message based on their response?

Two more tips:

• Ask for permission as well as contact information.
• Clearly describe the frequency and content of the emails your client will receive.

2. Informing Your Audience

Content is king! Eric described “email nirvana” as when a folder is created in someone’s inbox just for your communications (assuming that this means they’ve deemed your content important enough to keep. I personally use Gmail’s filters/labels to move these items out of my inbox because they’re less important. What do you think?) I do agree that a good test for the content is – would I forward this to my friends?

Know your objective so you can know which tool to use and how to measure success. Are you trying to inform your audience? Try a newsletter with good informational content (more text than pictures), links back to your website, and a soft call to action. Are you looking to sell? Send a promotional message (more images, less text) that highlights the offers and drives traffic back to your site. (Eric’s stat: 50% of what’s purchased through a promotional email isn’t specifically metioned in the promotional email.) Are you trying to build a relationship with your customers? Provide content that’s valuable to them and give them lots of ways to give feedback (comments, polls, forward this links).

Also:

• Although you want the email to match your company’s brand, don’t overdo the header with a big logo. Many people won’t see the image (especially if images turned off or if using some mobile devices), instead use text with your company’s name and put the logo at the bottom.
• 80% of response to email communication happens within first 48 hours, so know your readers and check your email stats – if you can see when folks read your emails, base your timing on that.
• “From” should be the name most recognizable to customers.  (If they know you, use your name. If they know your business, use that name.)

3. Growing Your Business

This part of the presentation was a very general overview of bounced / undeliverable emails, open rates, and click-through rates. If you’re really interested, I’d recommend finding more resources on the topic.

One last gem, from the Q & A session:

Q – “What do you do with all of those business cards you collect at a tradeshow/convention/event? Should you just add them to your list?”

A – A better method (than just adding them to your list) would be to go to your last campaign, use the “forward to friend” link and create a personalized message to that contact (“Great meeting you at the tradeshow. Thought you might like this. Thanks.) This allows you to follow up on the initial contact, but lets the recipient decide whether or not to subscribe.

Analyzing Inbound Marketing (AZ401), Professor: Marshall Sponder, Monster.com, Web Analytics Association for Social Media

Ok, this might have been a pretty dry topic for many, but parts of it were very appealing to my inner stats geek. And, since this was the last presentation, I found it interesting to compare the various presentation styles I’d seen throughout the week – the marketing guy was the most entertaining, the community guy was the most engaging, and the analytics guy was the most low-key. Overall, this session seemed like a decent overview of the topic, but perhaps due to the content, it’s hard to do only an hour long presentation.

Key takeaways:

• Google Analytics is fine for most people and accomplishes a lot; if you need something else/more, there are plenty of services, at all price points, covering most markets, to help you.
• Use non-traditional sources to analyze your traffic data – dig into the referral logs and do some data-mining, use tools like Twitter Grader or Facebook Grader to find influencers in the community, use delicious.com to find and analyze keyword data.

And to wrap it all up…

I am so grateful to all of the organizers, speakers, sponsors, and participants at the inaugural Inbound Marketing University – what a great resource (at an unbeatable price!) I’ll be brushing up this weekend on the two courses I missed in preparation for the exam on Monday and I’ll be posting reviews of the previous sessions as I work my way through my notes. Now, here’s my list of IMU bookmarks and the slides to the classes above. Enjoy!

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