You’re an IT Director in financial services. Or the Head of e-Delivery in the public sector. From our decision-maker research, we know that you receive around 30 supplier marketing emails every day (without even considering more regular spam emails) – and probably find barely a quarter of these to be relevant.

It’s a sign of email’s growing popularity or even over-use in isolation from other activities (as a more ‘measureable’ and ‘cost-effective’ digital channel) and of some common mistakes being made in how it is used.

We recently reviewed a year’s worth of emails sent out as part of wider relationship, lead generation or thought leadership programmes. The key conclusions are presented – and illustrated with examples – in a paper available to download here.

What’s in the document?
- 10 tips to consider at the tactical level. If you believe that you are communicating with the right people about something that should be important to them, but are failing to see the results you need, then the chances are that these tips will help. Issues in email execution – like when to go for beautifully designed html versus personal-looking text – are absolutely critical.
- And stepping away from the tactical, the document also puts a narrative around the whole email story – its place in wider programmes, what the audience likes and dislikes, considerations around testing, and the need for exceptional content.

For me, the single most important advice the document has is about creating simple steps for the audience.

No-one ever signed an outsourcing contract after reading an email – so rather than trying to lay out the complete case for the deal, the email has to have a clear and realistic action it asks the reader to take. This could be nothing more complex than a compelling case for why they should click through to read a document that positions you as a thought leader on the subject. Or it could make a proposition for them to arrange a first workshop with you (something more personal than a ‘healthcheck’ offer – do you have a recent business case from a deal with a similar client? Have you got research that you could share with them?).

This idea of creating emails with a realistic call to action (one you would feel comfortable writing in a personal email to someone you wanted to meet) applies to both planning and execution of email programmes. At the planning stage, it means mapping out the call to action, audience journey and key messages. And when it comes to execution, it is why emails are potentially the very hardest job facing any copywriter today. Hopefully this document goes some way to solving the challenge.

Computing.co.uk reported this week about the rise of the interim CIO. In a very useful article, they looked at the reasons behind the increasing number of interim appointments, and made a good start at getting under the skin of this new breed.

 John Hall, who works as an interim CIO, describes how the role has come to be popular for driving through change:  “more recently it has become about change implementation. We are used to coming in and ramping up quickly, taking control and driving something forward. Also, because we are interim we are unencumbered by thoughts of our careers, any hidden agendas, or indeed office politics.”

What does this mean for IT marketers? Among the range of consequences, here are three trends we have picked up.

1. In my recent interview with the former CIO of Egg, Tom explained the importance of the ‘trusted advisors’ around him (subordinates, peers in other departments, key suppliers) – with CIO change becoming more common, it’s essential to have programmes that reach out to these other audiences.

2. Other marketing programmes may need to move from a company focus to an individual focus. We have seen great examples of event series that someone attends as CIO of one organisation, moves companies and then gets back in touch to request an invitation. Web 2.0 strategies can also be very powerful for keeping track and maintaining relationships (in a very simple example, we’ve seen more and more people subscribing to email newsletters with personal rather than business addresses).

3. Timing becomes even more important – seeing when a new CIO is brought in, understanding the change that this is intended to drive, and building your messages around this (whether advising as an incumbent supplier or making a speculative move to break into the business). Equally, it means that now more than ever it is important to be very strict before qualifying an organisation out or stopping a programme around a specific proposition – things can change overnight.

We don’t have to look far for examples of the power that these individuals hold – see the recent post on the most popular man in IT.

…This time from the SME market, where ChannelWeb.co.uk reports on CompTIA’s research.  56% of UK SMEs plan to increase their IT budgets in the next 12 months, with a focus on IT security, and the number of UK firms planning to increase spend has grown to 56% from 54% last year (while the percentage of US firms planning to invest more has dropped from 64% to 52%).

Other interesting stats out recently highlight that there is slowing growth in the services market (IDC), whilst Silicon says that Datamonitor is showing spending growth in healthcare:

Viviane Reding, Member of the European Commission responsible for Information Society and Media made a speech yesterday on the theme “Why ICT research is even more important in the aftermath of the financial crisis.”

She made some interesting points about the amount of investment the EU is making (more than 2bn euro in 18 months), the areas where they want to encourage European growth (software and services, especially in the cloud). Some of the interesting parts of the article and what she had to say are below: 

“The ICT sector provides the heartbeat of the real economy, of our productivity growth, of our capacity to innovate and create jobs and of our ability to address key societal challenges.

What is on the agenda at ICT 2008? We will unveil details of the EU-funding for the next wave of ICT projects – more than € 2 billion of EU funding over the next 18 months.

If Europe wants for example, to lead the transition to a low-carbon, knowledge economy we can only do this with a massive and targeted development and take-up of innovative ICT solutions.

• In telecoms, European equipment manufacturers are leaders in broadband data networks and mobile devices.
• Europe is also a leading worldwide player in the design, integration and supply of embedded systems.
• Europe has secured 30-35% of the market for ICT systems embedded in products in domains like automotive, industrial automation and avionics.
• Europe is also a leading player in the semiconductor industry. Here European programmes have helped us build and keep these positions as the recent funding decisions by the embedded systems and nano-electronic Joint Technology Initiatives demonstrate.
• Europe also has leaders in enterprise software, equipping many of the world’s major companies and SMEs. World leading research on software technologies is also taking place in our public labs. We need to build on this and expand further our presence in software and services including in important areas such as web-based services 

The second principle is that we should be well placed to seize the opportunities of future markets. Let me highlight two such markets: The Future Internet and ICT for Energy Efficiency

Our investments in research and the opening up of the new markets will not be fully exploited unless we can make Europe a much better place to establish high-tech start-ups. Today, few European SMEs break through the ceiling of € 20 million turnover. Why is it that so few European ICT start-ups have come through to become global players?”

The whole article is available from Public Technology

Tomorrow night sees the November gathering of the ever-slinky S&M Forum.

Our topic couldn’t be more timely – the need to justify the business value of marketing is perhaps more pressing than ever. Why, so the boardroom argument may go, should we invest in marketing when propping up our sales team would surely get more money in? When such a claim is levelled, marketing needs the numbers at its fingertips to respond. Why then, are they often so far from reach?

How can the marketer quantify what he or she does in terms of boardroom-friendly raw numbers? How can ‘marketing success’ be measured? What activities are generating a good return on marketing investment? Is answering any of these questions actually possible? In researching tomorrow’s event, we dug up a number of useful articles and interesting commentators on the B2B marketing measurement debate…

Starting with the basics, Jim Lenskold’s recent study (2008 Marketing ROI and Measurements Study) showed that many marketers are struggling with the fundamental measurements required to manage and improve marketing’s contribution to an organisation’s business plan.

Thus those who do measure are already ahead – the study showed that simply the act of measuring marketing in the first place has a direct effect on performance.

Respondents who described their marketing as highly effective all showed better measurement and ROI practices than those lower down the table, and they are using business information that ranges from sales reports, financial data, lead gen data, marketing spend and sales pipeline details to furnish their measurements. Perhaps most revealingly, these ‘highly effective’ companies comprised only 9% of study respondents.

Arguably, the main reason for this paucity of highly effective marketing measurement lies in collecting this data and presenting it in an actionable way to those in the marketing department, and an understandable way to those outside it. There are certainly tools that can be deployed to assist in this process, for example marketing dashboards, but the key is to have not just the short-term, but also the long-term view driving all analysis.

This long-term view was touched upon in a recent series on B2B marketing measurement in which Forrester’s Laura Ramos urged for customer-centric metrics to be employed to measure the impact of marketing over the entirety of the customer life-cycle. Ramos recommended that marketing measurement should move away from focusing on the basic lead-gen approach and towards building and maintaining brand loyalty by measuring how prospects buy, using demand management to build further customer dialogue and align marketing and sales around common objectives.

This latter point, the disconnect between marketing and sales, is often the shadowy figure lurking at the back of this measurement debate.  So much so, in fact, that one article in the Harvard Business Review from a couple of years ago, set about ending the war between sales and marketing once and for all by tackling the economic and cultural differences that usually cause the tension. But what relevance would such a sales and marketing peace treaty have to effective marketing measurement?

Unsurprisingly, it is value. With an aligned sales and marketing team communicating with the market in a consistent and timely fashion, the ROMI is not muddied by conflicting sales activity – the marketing effort put in at the beginning of the sales cycle will have a direct effect right through to the end.

Indeed, Laura Patterson develops this point when she states that marketing isn’t an island. Pulling the lens out so the focus is on sales, product, customer service and finance as well as marketing can really add value to the measurement process by placing all campaign activity into its real-world business context.

Brian Carroll’s call for a marketing funnel is another case in point. Carroll takes the view that most companies use only sales funnels to collect all their leads, qualified or not. The result is less a funnel and more a bucket riddled with holes out of which the less-qualified leads leak. By creating a marketing funnel, leads can accurately be filtered through to sales only when they are sales-ready. And Carroll agrees with Patterson when he says that measuring the effectiveness of this sales-marketing interaction is central to its success.

Generating actionable leads rather than just leads is important here too, and certainly something that should be the focus of any measurement. Lead quality is vital in the context of marketing value. For example, if a lead is measured purely as a cost-per-click (CPC), does this mean that each resulting sales opportunity is treated as equally valuable? CPC certainly has its place – if the average sales opportunity return isn’t expected to be high compared to the number of click-throughs, a decision would be made about using such a model. But if a relatively few click-throughs (with a higher-than-normal CPC) results in one or two significant sales opportunities, the value of this kind of marketing must be properly measured.

The damn lies inherent in such measurement statistics are ably demonstrated by email marketing. As Stephanie Miller points out, a study conducted by the DMA for marketing activity throughout 2007 showed that email marketing had 150% more ROI than non-email online marketing. Great, but behind these bare figures lurks the spectre of spam and the Gatling gun approach to some email marketing. Because there is simply so much of it out there, hitting thousands of potential targets with a broad email sweep usually has a negative effect of alienating potential sales leads. With a smaller but more targeted email campaign approach, the opposite can be true. Miller urges us not to be blinded by the glittering promise of gold with email marketing but to measure emails in exactly the same way, using customer take-up across different styles and sizes of email campaign to guide future success.

So, is there a danger of measuring too much? Perhaps not, if the right activities are measured in the right context. And, no matter how difficult the economic climate is, marketing value will always come down to money: the sales that are generated directly from a campaign.

As Paul Dunay suggests, in the grand scheme of things, sales is the only metric that really counts. This is, he argues is the ‘right context’ for measuring marketing value, based on three tiers of marketing metrics, with the first two tiers feeding into the most important third tier:

1. Reach metrics: the straightforward campaign hits – e.g. webpage click-throughs

2. Efficiency metrics: how cost-effective each form of reach activity was and whether it achieved the desired result – e.g. cost-per-clicks and the number of downloads of a whitepaper

3. Value: the contribution to the sales pipeline – e.g. the ROI for the number of attendees at an event

Of course, saying that marketing reach and campaign efficiency impact on and drive the overall value of the campaign is nothing new, nor is it astounding. But this is a very tidy way if thinking about it.

Measure what you’re doing to make sure you’re doing enough of it. Measure how you’re doing it, to make sure you are learning and getting better. Finally, measure if it’s working for the business. So, in the end, it’s all very simple.

(Although setting up the lean, mean marketing operation that can get hold of those figures and track them is a whole new blog post!)

We’ve been doing an increasing amount of bid support and win-based marketing work for clients in recent months.

With their strong understanding of positioning and presentation, B2B marketing departments complement the sales team’s skills are well placed to make a real impact on the outcome of a bid.

There’s a range of win-based activity you can undertake to support sales. We’ve a free powerpoint outlining the best of these - available from The Marketing Practice’s main site here.

“Lloyds TSB has named Mark Fisher – currently overseeing the integration of ABM Amro into the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) – as director of group IT and operations.

“Fisher will join next year as a member of the group executive committee (GEC) of the newly named Lloyds Banking Group to head the integration of high street rival HBOS.” http://www.finextra.com/fullstory.asp?id=19229

This article features an interesting breakdown of Westpac’s IT budget in the light of the CEO’s concerns over IT’s performance. Interestingly, the breakdown shows the bank’s compliance spending has increased dramatically – part of a wider trend?

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/business/soa/Kelly-laments-Westpac-s-poor-IT-performance/0,139023166,339292944,00.htm

What makes a successful account-based marketing (ABM) programme? Great execution is essential (as is a planning framework like this one), but here we wanted to highlight three elements of programme management that we think mark out ABM that really delivers results.

Having run account-based marketing (ABM) programmes for our clients over the last 2 years (treating their key individual customers as markets of one or, at least, a few), we’ve identified these areas as essential to keep in mind.

They’re important to ensure an ABM programme stays within its original budget and doesn’t demand more management than originally expected; keeps the faith and interest of the sales or account team; and delivers the promised results.

1. Turn theory into practice: we’ve seen a few situations where ABM becomes all about the planning, and ignores the detail in execution that can make or break the programme. For example, marketing might take on the role of profiling a target account, understanding its current priorities, and handing this analysis back to the sales team with a list of propositions to target the account with. For an effective programme, this should only be the first phase (and should be done with sales, not in isolation). For marketing’s involvement to stop there means that the most effective potential actions are never taken (whether it’s creating sessions to run for new contacts in the target account, or putting more effort into engaging them with corporate materials and events, or even targeted lead generation to help the stretched account team break into a new area of the business). Equally, there will always be some personalisation – or even unique material – needed at the account level. If it was as simple as just targeting the right existing activities at an account, then everyone would be doing it.

2. Keep focus: there are instances where we’re asked to support 9 or 10 different propositions being taken into 5 or 6 areas of a customer account. While this is achievable over a year, it can’t all be done at once. The key is to pick the most important 3 propositions and find where in the account they are most suited, craft the specific story and work with the sales team to take them in (supporting by building data, or creating campaigns, doing research or preparing sales materials). This way, the sales or account team will really feel the benefit and stay engaged, without the danger that your work will either be watered down or you will be asking for more time than the sales team has to give.

3. Avoid overcomplicating: in some cases, an ABM programme is really no different from any other marketing programme, just targeted at existing customers. Yes, it needs more intelligence upfront to avoid stepping on toes or saying the wrong thing – as well as more consistent interaction with sales or account teams. But that shouldn’t stop us being able to quickly and effectively get returns from existing customers: now more than ever, they are the best sources of potential new business.

Bearing all this in mind, we can deliver the three or four key activities that will make a real difference in a single quarter.

Just in the last month, we’ve seen examples of the results: two instances where our clients have uncovered workshops in their customers that they wouldn’t have known were happening – and which they can now use to start scoping a new project. All this aside from many other meetings with fresh contacts to discuss new propositions, opportunities entered into the pipeline, bid support on major deals, and the intelligence on customer plans that we have built.

All of which ties in to our ABM planning diagram (available to view here) – a useful tool for outlining the stages and scope of any ABM programme.

Andrew Higgins, Tesco Chief Executive, pointed the way to a wave of IT spending by retailers looking to capitalise on new business models.

Tesco’s plans include extending its current financial services offerings to that of a “full service retail bank.

According to this Finextra article, the supermarket previously dismissed suggestions that it would offer mortgages because they were seen as unprofitable. However Higgins said the credit crunch – and the return of “rational pricing” in mortgages – appears to have created a potential opportunity.

And where Tesco goes, others will follow – needing the solutions and expertise to set up new business operations.