Auteur: Karen Rubin

Internet down? Don’t get caught with your pants down, too.

Earlier last week, Amazon experienced a significant outage at their North Virginia data center. The outage affected large portions of the internet, including popular sites like Pinterest, Reddit, Foursquare, Airbnb, and even HubSpot for several hours Monday afternoon. 

Furthermore, today much of the Eastern seaboard is expecting (or already experiencing) a hurricane. No doubt the internet — not to mention countless other things — may not be operating as usual.

When an outage of this magnitude happens, all types of businesses (and marketers) are affected. Ecommerce sites can’t make sales; lead generation sites stop getting leads; and ad driven sites stop getting visitors. As a marketer, you can cry about all the revenue you’re missing out on … or you can do something about it. 

While you can’t really call up Amazon and give ‘em an earful (it wouldn’t be productive if you could), you can try to prepare for the next time one of these outages happens. With a little more preparation, you might suffer just a little bit less pain and agony. Here are some things you can do to prepare for when the internet just … gives out on ya. Or if you prefer a different format, check out this short video of Mike Volpe (and me!) chatting about the subject.

What to Do When Someone Unplugs the Internet

1) Have a Killer “Site Down” Page

When your site experiences problems, the standard site unavailable page looks something like this:

 

 

Yawn. In most cases, you can customize this so that users see something branded. Put a little effort in and work with your design team to come up with something great that represents your brand, and gets the message across. Do you want to be witty? Entertaining? Sympathetic? Find something that sets the right tone for your business, and also lets them know that you’re aware there’s a problem. HubSpot’s site unavailable page, for instance, features one of our very own for a touch of whimsy. 

2) Communicate!

In any situation where people might be disappointed or let down, communication is key. Even if it isn’t your fault. Thing is, you know you have no control over a third party’s outage … but your customers either don’t know, or don’t care. Or both.

If your website is down, you have to be both creative and effective in how you communicate with people. Posting a message on your homepage isn’t enough. Make sure you have multiple approaches to communication at your finger tips. This allows you to identify those that aren’t working, and focus your energy where it will make an impact. Consider:

• Twitter – Share updates on this more than once; one tweet will get lost in the fast-paced Twitter shuffle.
• Facebook – Consider highlighting the post so it takes up more real estate on your Timeline.
• LinkedIn – Simply post this as a status update, but include a link to another property for those that need more information on the outage.
• Smoke signals, or anything else you have at your disposal to get your voice heard. 

3) Remember Your Customers

Leads are important, sure, but you shouldn’t forget your current customers. If customers are impacted by an outage, you are better off proactively letting them know than letting them find out on their own. Discuss the severity of the situation, and figure out what kind of response is necessary. Sometimes social media outreach is enough, but if the problem is more severe, you might want to consider emailing your customers to let them know. 

Also consider having a back up site that is hosted someplace completely different. For example, HubSpot has trust.hubspot.com, which is hosted in an entirely different location and shouldn’t be affected by an outage at our main data center. Customers know this is where they should go to learn about issues, so if there is a large internet outage, we can hopefully always have a place to update those who will be impacted.

 

 

4) Have a Sense of Humor

S*#t happens. Lots of companies lost business the other day, and might lose it today, too. You can cry and moan about revenue lost, but it won’t change the outcome. Keep your head on straight, stay calm, and try to laugh about how much we all rely on the internet these days. Balance a sense of humor and sense of understanding for what your customers are doing through in your communications and messaging. Unless, of course, the internet is down because of something dangerous, like a hurricane — safety really isn’t a laughing matter. But in general, keeping a light-hearted tone will help those affected will respond better, and keep an internet outage in perspective.

5) Prepare for the Next Outage

While you should keep your sense of humor in the midst of the outage, when everything’s up and running like normal, ask the right questions and make sure you are prepared for the next time. Some questions to discuss with your IT team might be:

• What caused the outage, and could if have been prevented?
• Do we have the right kind of backup systems?
• Should we look into better redundancy?
• Can we improve our responses when something like this happens again? 

In the end, as a marketer, you probably aren’t working on bringing your website or the internet back online. But if you can keep your community, your leads, and you customers happy, it will reduce the impact of those outages on your business. 

Was your business affected by the Amazon outage? What else will you do to prepare for future instances of these outages?

Image credit: 4nitsirk

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From the results of its Marketing Automation Survey last year, Loopfuse released some interesting data about the adoption of advanced marketing automation features. Based on 361 respondents, Loopfuse showed that, while many users have adopted the basic features of its marketing automation tools, most haven’t started using many of the more advanced features. 

This raises the question: Why are the more advanced marketing automation features tripping marketers up, and how can you prevent yourself from getting snagged? Let’s take a look at the 4 least used advanced marketing automation features, explore why marketers get hung up them, and discuss what you can do to prevent it from happening to you.

Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is a fantastic way to continue moving your leads through the sales and marketing funnel. According to DemandGen Report, nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads. And using marketing automation, you can set up your lead nurturing emails to get sent automatically as leads progress, without any additional maintenance required. So if it’s so effective and easy to maintain, then why are only 49% of marketers utilizing this wonderful tool? 

The Challenges

There are two main reasons marketers struggle when trying to get started with lead nurturing:

1. Overcomplicating Lead Nurturing: They make it more complicated than it needs to be. There are a million and one different ways a lead can move through your sales and marketing funnel. If you try to create a customized nurturing campaign for each, you will be quickly overwhelmed by all the options.
2. Content Deficiencies: Many marketers don’t have enough content at their disposal to keep lead nurturing campaigns interesting and relevant throughout the sales and marketing funnel. This leads to emails that don’t add a lot of value to the sales cycle, preventing leads from moving further through the funnel. 

The Solution

To prevent yourself from running into these problems, focus first on content creation. If your marketing team isn’t continually creating new and relevant content through blog posts, ebooks/whitepapers, and webinars you will always be struggling to keep your lead nurturing campaigns interesting and relevant. Make sure you have a variety of the following three types of content to suit leads in each stage of the sales cycle:

• Top of the Funnel Content: content suitable for leads when they first discover your company
• Middle of the Funnel Content: content suitable for leads when they  know who you are, are familiar with your company, and are interested in learning more
• Bottom of the Funnel Content: content suitable for leads when they are looking to make purchasing decisions

For a deeper dive into what type of content is suitable for each of these stages, read this post. Once you have the right content and marketing offers to fuel your lead nurturing campaigns, map them to these different stages. A basic, educational ebook about your industry is a top of the funnel offer, so if a lead downloads this type of content, they should be followed up with a series of lead nurturing emails that provide additional top of the funnel content. A demo or trial request, on the other hand, is a bottom of the funnel offer and should be followed up with a different series of emails containing content that a lead who is closer to making a purchasing decision would be more interested in. 

When you’re just getting started with lead nurturing, the key is not to get overwhelmed by all the options. You don’t need to craft enough nurturing emails to get through a six month sales cycle. Instead, work on nurturing a new lead through the first 2 or 4 weeks. If they haven’t taken the next step, then move them into a more basic weekly newsletter that will introduce them to a variety of your content. The beauty of setting up your lead nurturing based on stages of the funnel is, when leads are ready to move into the next stage, they will automatically start getting nurtured by the right level and type of content. 

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is a great way to make sure your sales team is spending their time calling the right, most likely to convert, leads. So why do only 29.6% of marketers say they’re successfully using lead scoring, even though doing so can be a wonderful time saver for both Sales and Marketing?

The Challenges

The truth is, sometimes it’s a waste of time to score your leads. If your sales team doesn’t have enough leads or doesn’t like the leads they already have, you need to focus on getting more of the right leads first. Many marketers think they have a middle of the funnel problem (i.e. they have enough leads, but they aren’t converting into customers) and that they need marketing automation tools to solve it. In reality, much of the time we see companies with top of the funnel problems (i.e. they’re not generating enough leads or they’re generating too many of the wrong leads) that they need to solve before they implement a lead scoring system.

The other reason marketers fail to set up lead scoring is that they don’t have enough data or analytics in place to create an indicative lead score. You need a mix of demographic data (or data collected from a lead on conversion forms) and lead intelligence (data gathered by a lead management system about a lead’s behavior) in order to calculate a lead score. Marketers often either ask the wrong questions on their conversion forms or don’t have a lead management and analytics systems in place to collect the right information needed to implement lead scoring.

The Solution

If you don’t have enough leads to keep your sales team busy (or happy), focus first on creating more content to attract more people to your website. Launching a blog or increasing the frequency at which you currently publish to it is the best way to do this. Then work on building up the number of marketing offers and conversion events you have at your disposal. Boost your visitor-to-lead ratios by testing and improving your landing pages and making sure people are finding the right offers at the right time. If your sales team doesn’t call the leads you generate, work on establishing a sales and marketing service level agreement. 

If you don’t have the right data to set up lead scoring, start by talking with your sales team about what makes a lead “qualified.” Test your conversion forms with different form fields and lengths to make sure you’re capturing the right information you need to decide whether a lead is qualified. Then ensure that your lead management and analytics systems are collecting information about activities and behaviors such as how many pages your individual leads have viewed, how often they’ve visited your site, how many and which offers they’ve downloaded, etc. Pull the different pieces of data together, and work with Sales to prioritize and weigh the value of each item compared to the others. Once you have an initial lead scoring system in place, test it with different sales team members and a variety of leads. Then iterate and test until you have a lead scoring process that both you and Sales trusts. (For more in-depth information about how to implement a lead scoring system, reference this post.)

Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring can help make the wide world of social media digestible for marketers. With Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, niche networks and new options like Pinterest and Google+ cropping up what seems to be weekly, it can get overwhelming. However, only 50% of marketers indicated they use social media monitoring to help sift through the mess. 

The Challenges

One likely reason marketers don’t use social media monitoring tools is because they don’t know where to get started, especially considering the vast array of monitoring tools at their disposal. Not only are there countless social media sites to monitor, but there are also countless monitoring tools to help you do so.

The Solution

As a marketer, you need to narrow down which social networks you need to monitor, and then find one social media monitoring platform that brings all those sites together. The first step is to figure out where your prospects and customers hang out in social media. Are they all over Twitter? Or do they mainly congregate on Facebook and Pinterest? Is it a B2B crowd leveraging LinkedIn? Or a B2C crowd leaving reviews on Yelp? Are there any niche, industry-focused social networks you should watch? Chances are your customers don’t use only one social network, but there’s also a pretty good chance they don’t use all of them. Spend time looking for the influencers in your industry to see where they hang out. Then look for your potential customers and where the conversation about your industry is happening. Identify the top 2 or 3 networks, and get started there. 

The next thing you want to do is take a look at the various social media monitoring tools, and find out which one supports the social networks you’re looking to monitor. Whether you’re checking out HubSpot’s social media tools or another platform, look for tools that allow you both to monitor the conversation and respond all in one place. Then, depending on your needs, consider additional features like analytics and the ability to manage monitoring through a collaboration of team members. Every marketing team will have different needs, but your life will be significantly easier if you can find one monitoring tool that can track the social networks that matter to your business.  

Campaign ROI Reporting

Campaign ROI reporting allows marketers to understand the value of their marketing campaigns and determine what’s working for them (and what isn’t). Measuring the return-on-investment of marketing is key to determining which tactics to invest your marketing dollars in, yet only 39.1% of marketers are using it. 

The Challenges

One of the main reasons marketers aren’t able to successfully implement campaign ROI reporting is because they don’t have closed-loop reporting in place. Closed-loop reporting takes your marketing analytics one (big) step beyond traditional web analytics. In addition to knowing how many visitors an element of your marketing generates, you can also track how many leads and customers it generates. Setting up closed-loop reporting generally requires integration between your web analytics and your CRM (customer relationship management tool). 

The second reason campaign ROI reporting can be tough is that many marketers don’t have the ability to track multi-touch campaigns. It’s rare that a lead or customer will have been touched by just one campaign or one campaign element during the sales cycle. Chances are much more likely that they’ll interact with your marketing in a number of different ways through a variety of channels. As a marketer, you want to be able to track an individual lead’s first conversion event (i.e. how they found out about you the very first time) as well as their most recent conversion event (i.e. how they interacted with your company most recently or just before purchasing). In a perfect world, you’ll also be able to identify what other elements of your marketing they touched in between their first and most recent conversion events. 

The Solution

In order to make sure you don’t run into these problems when trying to conduct campaign ROI reporting for your business, you need to conduct some very thorough research about the tools you’re either already using or thinking of using. When considering a marketing automation solution, having campaign ROI reporting tools isn’t enough. Your tools also need to offer closed-loop reporting and easily integrate with your CRM. When researching options, be sure to dig into the tools’ multi-touch campaign capabilities. Make sure you can track and report on first and most recent conversion events as well as monitor conversion events that take place in the middle. 

Advanced marketing automation features can be wonderful additions to a marketing team’s day-to-day efforts. However, getting started with these tools can often be a really tough challenge. In order to make sure your team doesn’t get tripped up like so many others do, put these solutions in place so you can be sure you’re focusing on the right marketing automation strategies for your business. 

Image Credit: zzpza

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There are times in a marketer’s life when lead scoring can seem like the Holy Grail. According to the MarketingSherpa B2B Banchmarking Report, only 21% of B2B marketers have established lead scoring, but many more are thinking about adding it. Lead scoring can not only help your sales team prioritize leads so they focus on the best ones first, but it can also show how high in quality the leads you deliver to them are. Yes, lead scoring can be a great tool for a lot of businesses, but there are also times when implementing a lead scoring process can be a big waste of marketers’ time. 

If you’re trying to decide whether lead scoring should be a part of your business’ lead management strategy, first consider the following signs that indicate you might want to hold off a bit.

Your Sales Team Doesn’t Have Enough Leads

Unless your sales team is overwhelmed by the number of leads you’re throwing at them, you don’t need to worry about lead scoring. If they have time to reach out to all the provided leads, or if they are supplementing your marketing efforts by cold calling poor, unsuspecting souls, you don’t need lead scoring because you aren’t providing enough leads for it to matter! Your sales team doesn’t need to know which leads are the best if they don’t have enough leads to begin with. Lead scoring should be used to prioritize leads when you have too many and can’t reach out to them all. 

If you aren’t generating enough leads to CRUSH your sales force, you should instead focus on generating more leads! Spend some time analyzing your traffic numbers and your visitor-to-lead conversion rates. You’ll find that you either need to work on generating more traffic (by creating more content, optimizing it for search engines, and promoting it in social media) or doing a better job of converting the traffic you do have into leads (by improving your calls-to-action and landing pages). 

Your Sales Team Doesn’t Call the Leads You Send Them

If your sales team isn’t calling the leads you generate, or if they spend their time complaining about how bad the leads are, it’s easy to think lead scoring can help. If you had lead scores, your sales team wouldn’t call the wrong leads because the lead score would point them to the best leads. Right? Not necessarily. If your sales team isn’t calling any of the leads you generate, your problems probably go much deeper than what a lead score could solve. 

If Sales doesn’t like any of the leads you send them, you have internal alignment issues that need to be resolved. Instead of adding lead scoring, you need to get your sales and marketing teams on the same page. If Marketing and Sales aren’t in alignment, no amount of lead scoring is going to convince sales to believe in the leads you’re generating. They won’t trust the score you provide any more than they like the leads you provide. It’s time to sit down with the folks running Sales, have a heart to heart, and get to solving the real problems. 

Try setting up marketing and sales service level agreements (SLAs). The marketing SLA should set expectations regarding the quantity and quality of the leads they are providing to Sales, and the sales SLA should set expectations about how deeply and frequently sales people will pursue leads Marketing provides. SLAs help encourage alignment between the two teams, which is something you’ll need before you head down the path of adding lead scoring to the mix. (Learn more about how to set up SLAs in your organization here.) 

You Don’t Have Enough Data

There is no doubt that lead scoring can be super sexy. But it can only be successfully implemented if you can back up those lead scores with super sexy data. Lead scoring is generally based on two different types of data: demographic data and lead intelligence. Demographic data is information about the company or individual you are selling to. You can generally collect this via the lead-capture forms you ask site visitors to complete in order to convert them into leads. Lead intelligence is the information you gather from a lead based on their behavior on your website. How often they visit, which pages they view, and which offers they convert on are all great examples of lead intelligence to include in your lead score. 

If you aren’t collecting the right information from your lead generation forms or aren’t tracking how leads interact with your site, then you don’t have the right data to start lead scoring. Figure out what are the right questions to ask on your conversion forms by working with Sales to determine which kinds of data would be most helpful to identify the best leads. In addition, test different form fields and form lengths to see how these changes impact your conversion rates. Next, make sure you are collecting detailed information about how leads interact with your site (you’ll need a marketing analytics and lead management platform for this). It’s not enough to know that someone was there; you also need to know which web pages and content they’re interested in and what their level of engagement is. Once you have this data on a lead by lead basis, you can start thinking about adding lead scoring to your strategy. 

Lead Scoring Might Not Suit Your Business’ Needs…Yet

There are lots of reasons why you would want to score your leads. But getting reliable, valuable lead scores in place take time. First, make sure you aren’t focusing on lead scoring when you should be focusing on something else. Before you start implementing lead scoring, you want to make sure you are generating enough leads, that your relationship between Sales and Marketing is a healthy one, and that you have enough data to make your lead scores relevant. 

Have you incorporated lead scoring into your business’ lead management strategy? What other tips can you share for those who are considering it, too?

Image Credit: Michael Pick

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Writing the subject lines for your emails can be one of the most stressful steps of email marketing. Is it engaging? Too short? Too long? Too boring? Will people click ‘delete’ because of it? Or will they open it? Will it even get to them, or will it trigger SPAM filters? It’s the last of these concerns that we’re here to help with today. 

SPAM filters can be triggered for a variety of reasons, causing your email to skip recipients’ inboxes and land straight in their SPAM box. One of easiest ways to avoid SPAM filters is by carefully choosing the words you use in your email’s subject line. Trigger words are known to cause problems and increase the chances of your email getting caught in a SPAM trap. By avoiding these words in your email subject lines, you can dramatically increase your chances of getting beyond SPAM filters. 

Next time you sit down to write an email subject line, consult the exhaustive list below and make sure you aren’t using any words that will get you in trouble. In fact, you might want to bookmark this list so you can refer back to it every time you craft an email subject line. Back off, SPAM filters!

Commerce 

As seen on	Buy	Buy direct
Buying judgments	Clearance	Order
Order status	Orders shipped by	shopper

Personal

Dig up dirt on friends

Meet singles

Score with babes

Employment  

Additional Income	Be your own boss	Compete for your business
Double your	Earn $	Earn extra cash
Earn per week	Expect to earn	Extra income
Home based	Home employment	Homebased business
Income from home	Make $	Make money
Money making	Online biz opportunity	Online degree
Opportunity	Potential earnings	University diplomas
While you sleep	Work at home	Work from home

Financial – General

$$$	Affordable	Bargain
Beneficiary	Best price	Big bucks
Cash	Cash bonus	Cashcashcash
Cents on the dollar	Cheap	Check
Claims	Collect	Compare rates
Cost	Credit	Credit bureaus
Discount	Earn	Easy terms
F r e e	Fast cash	For just $XXX
Hidden assets	hidden charges	Income
Incredible deal	Insurance	Investment
Loans	Lowest price	Million dollars
Money	Money back	Mortgage
Mortgage rates	No cost	No fees
One hundred percent free	Only $	Pennies a day
Price	Profits	Pure profit
Quote	Refinance	Save $
Save big money	Save up to	Serious cash
Subject to credit	They keep your money — no refund!	Unsecured credit
Unsecured debt	US dollars	Why pay more?

Financial – Business

Accept Credit Cards	Cards accepted	Check or money order
Credit card offers	Explode your business	Full refund
Investment decision	No credit check	No hidden Costs
No investment	Requires initial investment	Sent in compliance
Stock alert	Stock disclaimer statement	Stock pick

Financial – Personal

Avoid bankruptcy	Calling creditors	Collect child support
Consolidate debt and credit	Consolidate your debt	Eliminate bad credit
Eliminate debt	Financially independent	Get out of debt
Get paid	Lower interest rate	Lower monthly payment
Lower your mortgage rate	Lowest insurance rates	Pre-approved
Refinance home	Social security number	Your income

General

Acceptance	Accordingly	Avoid
Chance	Dormant	Freedom
Here	Hidden	Home
Leave	Lifetime	Lose
Maintained	Medium	Miracle
Never	Passwords	Problem
Remove	Reverses	Sample
Satisfaction	Solution	Stop
Success	Teen	Wife

Greetings

Dear [email/friend/somebody]

Friend

Hello

Marketing

Ad	Auto email removal	Bulk email
Click	Click below	Click here
Click to remove	Direct email	Direct marketing
Email harvest	Email marketing	Form
Increase sales	Increase traffic	Increase your sales
Internet market	Internet marketing	Marketing
Marketing solutions	Mass email	Member
Month trial offer	More Internet Traffic	Multi level marketing
Notspam	One time mailing	Online marketing
Open	Opt in	Performance
Removal instructions	Sale	Sales
Search engine listings	Search engines	Subscribe
The following form	This isn’t junk	This isn’t spam
Undisclosed recipient	Unsubscribe	Visit our website
We hate spam	Web traffic	Will not believe your eyes

Medical

Cures baldness	Diagnostics	Fast Viagra delivery
Human growth hormone	Life Insurance	Lose weight
Lose weight spam	Medicine	No medical exams
Online pharmacy	Removes wrinkles	Reverses aging
Stop snoring	Valium	Viagra
Vicodin	Weight loss	Xanax

Numbers

#1	100% free	100% Satisfied
4U	50% off	Billion
Billion dollars	Join millions	Join millions of Americans
Million	One hundred percent guaranteed	Thousands

Offers

Being a member	Billing address	Call
Cannot be combined with any other offer	Confidentially on all orders	Deal
Financial freedom	Gift certificate	Giving away
Guarantee	Have you been turned down?	If only it were that easy
Important information regarding	In accordance with laws	Long distance phone offer
Mail in order form	Message contains	Name brand
Nigerian	No age restrictions	No catch
No claim forms	No disappointment	No experience
No gimmick	No inventory	No middleman
No obligation	No purchase necessary	No questions asked
No selling	No strings attached	No-obligation
Not intended	Obligation	Off shore
Offer	Per day	Per week
Priority mail	Prize	Prizes
Produced and sent out	Reserves the right	Shopping spree
Stuff on sale	Terms and conditions	The best rates
They’re just giving it away	Trial	unlimited
Unsolicited	Vacation	Vacation offers
Warranty	We honor all	Weekend getaway
What are you waiting for?	Who really wins?	Win
Winner	Winning	won
You are a winner!	You have been selected	You’re a Winner!

Calls-to-Action

Cancel at any time	Compare	Copy accurately
Get	Give it away	Print form signature
Print out and fax	See for yourself	Sign up free today

Free

Free	Free access	Free cell phone
Free consultation	Free DVD	Free gift
Free grant money	Free hosting	Free installation
Free Instant	Free investment	Free leads
Free membership	Free money	Free offer
Free preview	Free priority mail	Free quote
Free sample	Free trial	Free website

Descriptions/Adjectives

All natural	All new	Amazing
Certified	Congratulations	Drastically reduced
Fantastic deal	For free	Guaranteed
It’s effective	Outstanding values	Promise you
Real thing	Risk free	Satisfaction guaranteed

Sense of Urgency

Access	Act Now!	Apply now
Apply Online	Call free	Call now
Can’t live without	Do it today	Don’t delete
Don’t hesitate	For instant access	For Only
For you	Get it now	Get started now
Great offer	Info you requested	Information you requested
Instant	limited time	New customers only
Now	Now only	Offer expires
Once in lifetime	One time	Only
Order now	Order today	Please read
Special promotion	Supplies are limited	Take action now
Time limited	Urgent	While supplies last

Nouns

Addresses on CD	Beverage	Bonus
Brand new pager	Cable converter	Casino
Celebrity	Copy DVDs	Laser printer
Legal	Luxury car	New domain extensions
Phone	Rolex	Stainless steel

Photo Credit: Arndog

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