Creating a value proposition

A value propostition should communicate the collection of reasons why people buy:

1. How we help customers achieve their business objectives? It has to resonate with them.
2. How we do this better than anyone else? You have to differentiate.
3. How do we demonstrate 1 and 2 to customers in a compelling way that they believe and remember?You have to substantiate.

10 Beautiful Examples of Creative Email Newsletters

Some really nice email designs for insipration...

http://www.dwsmg.com/10-beautiful-examples-of-creative-email-newsletters.html

B2B Sales decision factors

The BuyerSphere Project states -

1. More Risk Averse
• "B2B buying decisions are usually driven by one emotion - fear. 99% of B2B buying is about covering your butt
• Identify what your buyer's fear is. If something goes wrong, what would happen to them - would their company lose money? Would they lose their job? Find ways to reduce risk, both for the organization and the personal risk of everyone involved in the decision.
2. Multiple Influencers
• "In organizational buying, you have many people - all with their own agendas, all trying to reach a common decision."
• Don't focus only on the main buyer. Find out who else is involved in the decision making process and make sure you address each one's needs and fears.
3. Power of Word of Mouth
• "Another common risk mechanism is the gathering of opinions. the opinions of others, expressed as word-of-mouth recommendations can be hugely influential. When the objection is the elimination of risk, a known quantity is always preferred over an unknown quantity."
• Make every effort to become a preferred vendor. Share the experience others (similar to your current prospect) have had with you. Facilitate ways to have current or former clients share their opinion of you and your work.
4. More Complex Process - Longer Sales Cycle
• "With each additional person (in the decision process) the complexity has the potential to raise exponentially, because each person has his or her own personal risks that will factor into the final decision. This leads to a greater need for information, with different information required for different people. It leads to longer sales cycles."
• Be prepared for a longer sales cycle. Have a system to nurture leads along they way. Be quick and thorough in your follow up. Be a trusted educational resource and thought leader. Make it easy to find information. Be less transactional and more relational in your selling
5. Importance of Personal Relationship with Sales Person
• "Looking at the primary reasons to do business with vendors, first is price and value, but nearly as important is the relationship with the sales representative. It's the second most important factor in successful sales"
• Nothing can replace face-to-face interactions with your clients. Build those personal relationships and build that trust.

Business leads to boost sales - Experian B2B Prospector

• See data before you buy
• Immediate results - secure download
• As few or many leads as needed
• View new records from previous searches
• Freshest leads - updated constantly

Business leads to boost sales - Experian B2B Prospector

5 email testing ideas

1. Opt-in incentives - Providing a tangible incentive for new opt-ins such as a coupon or free gift.
   Dell offered 20% off select products resulting in 14x lift in average opt-in rate during the holiday season.
2. Personalisation - The closer you can get to creating a sense of one-to-one communication, the better the response is likely to be. Expedia sent emails from a real travel consultant i.e."Cathy Cruiser" resulting in 5.5% higher opens, 23% higher CTR and less unsubscribs and spam flags. Personalising the subject line with the recipient’s first name e.g. "Dave, Your 7 Day Alaskan Cruise Awaits.", resulted in 10% lift in opens.
3. Call-to-action (CTA) placement and button size - Increasing the size, shape or color of buttons and the placement of CTA, can often increase clicks. Salesforce.com moved the CTA from a small box on right side to just below the message’s headline and made buttons larger resulting in 26% increased in CTR.
4. Video links - Watching online video is one of the most popular activities on the Internet. Promote video content in your messages by displaying a screenshot of the video and embedding a link for video playback. Interactive Intelligence, included video screenshots and playback links in their email newsletters resulting in double or triple the number of clicks as text links.
5. Email frequency - Testing the point at which you maximize revenue from messages without increasing the rate of unsubscribes. An ecommerce company who sell special-occasion gifts identified a highly motivated and loyal segment and tested various message frequencies, ranging from one message every other day to one message every three weeks. Sending an email once every other day increased revenue 3x compared to sending email once a week. Unsubscribe rates on a per-message basis did not rise significantly. 

Example email creative

SEO for video content - 7 tips

7 tactics for optimising search viability for video content

1. Educate your video production team on SEO basics e.g. identifying keywords for video titles and file names, tagging options, creating keyword-rich text descriptions of video content
2. Identify a specific theme for video keywords e.g. more tightly focused. Identify related terms that share the same root as the primary theme and use the term 'video' as a modifier
3. Host each video on a separate web page so you can use your landing page for keyword rich content
4. Write compelling titles and 140-150 word descriptions for your videos that include the keyword themes.
5. Employ video tagging and user comments on video pages
6. Include a transcript of the words spoken during the video
7. Add a video site map linked from your home page with a complete list of videos, organised by category e.g. an xml file with a list of URLs that contain video files, along with keyword-rich video title, description, duration and frequency of updates and page's relative importance.

Sharing made easy

ShareThis is an easy and clean way to encourage visitors to your site to share your content.

Twitter tips

Buzz marketing is about getting people excited by what you have to say and giving them a reason to share your content with other people.

How to get your brand on Twitter

• Tell people what is happening in your life / business
• Engage with like minded by following industry thought leaders, post replies to interesting threads, retweet posts that you want to share with your followers and send direct messages to create one-on-one dialogue. Mr Tweet helps identify people on Twitter to either follow or influence.
• Highlight new content from your website
• Monitor conservations using search tools you can monitor references to your company. Respond to negative comments and reinforce positive comments.

Tips

• Use URL shortening such as TinyURL
• Install Tweetdeck to make management easier
• Use Mr Tweet to identify useful contatcs
• Check you @replies folder and respond to comments
• Always check direct messages and respond
• Make tweets interesting - don't just sell!
• Retweet intersting posts
• Be human and ask questions

Remeber Twitter is for customer engagement but also can form an effective sales channel as shown by Dell selling over $1million worth of discount products via Twitter updates.

eNewsletter best practice

1. Great content to engage the subscribers. Readers want valuable, relevant content - not marketing messages.
2. Getting opened: who it is from, the prior value provided by the sender, the subject line, as well as what can be seen in the preview pane.
3. Getting it read: keep executive summary under 75 words, create summaries that link to the full article or webpage, within articles paragraphs should be between 50-100 words, use of white space, spacing, bullet points, italics and bolding make it easier to read.
4. Getting action: use active language that creates a sense of urgency - instead of “learn how” use “learn now”, place the CTA near the relevant content, send them to a relevant landing page and give multiple choices for contact not just email

Read more great tips

Conversion optimisation - Journey analysis

1. Where are visitors routed to when they first come to the site?
   Natural search visitors often don’t arrive on an appropriate page. Using an Advanced Segmentation report showing paid and non-paid search traffic segmented by landing page will highlight high bounce rates. You either need to route them to another page or provide a more relevant experience when they land.
2. What is the journeys forward from the initial pages?
   The Navigation Summary can be used for forward or reverse path analysis - you can see where people are flowing to your conversion pages or add to Basket page. It highlights the most popular paths and the content that influences the decision e.g. how many who convert go to the “About Us” page? Entrance Paths report shows which content visitors prefer when arriving at a particular page.

Methods for improving conversion

Where to focus efforts to improve conversion:

• Customer journey analysis
• Copy optimisation
• Online surveys / customer feedback
• Cart abandonment analysis
• A/B testing
• Event-triggered / behavioural email
• User testing
• Segmentation
• Expert usability reviews / consultancy
• Multivariate testing
• Pinchpoint analysis

What is Crowdsourcing?

“Utilising a network of customers or other partners to gain insights for new product or process innovations and to potentially help promote a brand“.

Great example of by penguin for the development of Spinebreakers, a new proposition for teenagers.

“During the website development Penguin recruited hundreds of teenagers from every area and background for focus groups and usability testing. The teenagers made every decision, choosing the URL and the nature of the brand themselves. “We decided not to make any assumptions,” says Rafferty. The site is now run by three tiers of teenagers, or “crews” as they elected to be called, who have varying levels of control over the site“.

and running the site:

“The core crew of 12 teenagers write all of the website copy and come into the Penguin offices every month to discuss strategy; the second crew of 70 deputy editors are based all over the country and have back‑end access to the site; while the third tier consists of the hundreds of teenaged bloggers who participate on the site“.