I can now scan my breakfast fruit.

You can scan my business card as well. At the risk of sounding quite shallow, the main reason I added a QR code to my card is because it is a cool conversation piece. I get a lot of comments when I hand them out; however, there are a lot of great reasons to add QR codes to your campaigns and collateral as well.

Here are 10 of my favorite and most compelling ways to use QR codes. 

1. If your content is frequently changing but your hard collateral doesn’t, think about keeping it fresh with QR codes. You have a lot of assets in the field–brochures, business cards, trade show banners–and you want the links to reflect current information.
2. QR codes are a great way to add rich information to your interactions without having to include lengthy URLs that come from your video sites or product catalog. Just make sure that your landing page is adaptive and mobile friendly.
3. Customers see additional engagement as something fun. My kids love to scan QR codes off of Heinz bottles and more. So now I’m interacting with ketchup in ways I’ve never contemplated.
4. You can help sell your product while it sits on a shelf in a retail location. Now your potential customers can scan your item, watch a video and compare several products in your line.
5. QR codes make it easy to incentivize purchasing behavior with coupons and loyalty tracking. QR codes can offer information thatseems like secret insider stuff, encouraging both loyalty.
6. Social interactions are easier to track with QR codes.
7. Badge swipes at trade shows aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Someone walking by your booth might just scan a sign to enter a drawing or download information.
8. Educational materials in a reseller training class can instantly become memorable with multimedia links and take home summary materials packed with QR codes. Then when you need to update that material, just update the link not the field manuals.
9. Viral can become something done offline when you put QR codes on physical objects. This works great for free downloads, swag, contests and time-sensitive offers.
10. Microsites can make it easier for your prospects to learn more about you and your products and your services. This is particularly useful if your website is 500 pages or more or your product set is fairly complex.

Why are bananas never lonely? Because they hang around in bunches. Are you keeping up with your bananas? Maybe it’s time to add QR codes to your campaigns.

I’ve decided to move our group out of the private installation of BuddyPress and into a LinkedIn group. I believe that LinkedIn is powerful enough for our needs and will make it easier to check updates and invite other Mensa marketers to the group.

In addition, while I am still a big fan of the BuddyPress platform, LinkedIn will make my job as the Mensa group moderator quite a bit easier, especially with in battling spammers. Our BuddyPress site received a single real Mensa member for every five spammers.

Marketing Genius is a social network that operates as a Special Interest Group of American Mensa, Ltd. By joining Marketing Genius, you can connect with other Mensa marketing professionals. You don’t have to be a member to join, but it helps if another Mensa member recommends you.

Join our new LinkedIn group here.

When I want to say “thank you,” for any reason at all, I send a custom postcard. When would I send a postcard?

• In place of a thank-you card
• To say, “great to see you at lunch today.”
• When sending an idea for a new lead nurturing campaign
• As a congratulatory note when a friend or client has a success

Hand-written and USPS delivered communication is too rare these days. By sending postcards, you can stand out a little from other partners who only send thank-yous and other notes through email.

In addition, I’m able to communicate a little bit of marketing along the way by including this blurb on the back:

We help you achieve Enterprise Velocity by working alongside your team to develop strategies for hyper-growth. We provide consulting, team training, web, video and direct marketing focused on measurable results to help you achieve your growth targets. Our depth of experience helps you plan for future success, generate new sales and help you train and support young teams and new hires.

I almost always get a thank-you call from the recipient when the card arrives. What other marketing tool can do that?

A while ago I was playing a mens doubles tennis match against a duo that was collectively 150 pounds heavier than my partner and me. The points on our side of the net were won with a lot of running, tight angles, drop shots and finesse. The points on their side of the net were won with blistering forehands aimed right at our faces. I think I still have a mark on my forehead that says “ProPenn 4.”

At the end of the very close match–each set went to a tie break–one of their players said, “That was like a battle of the piano players versus the piano movers.”

That’s kind of like lead nurturing.

The reason the match was so close was that you need a little bit of both styles of play to win. You need to play fast and smart. You also need the brute force to make your competition eat some yellow felt once in a while.

When you are planning out your lead nurturing components for a product launch, you need a combination of piano players and piano movers.

Piano Players: Organizing Your Tactics

Successful nurturing campaigns require organization and planning. You want to get all of the piano players playing from the same sheet of music. Different companies have different lead nurturing responsibilities and assignments. Some companies have lead nurturing centralized under marketing. Other companies share the burden between marketing and several sales teams. Many companies choose to outsource their nurturing all together since it can be a specialized science–especially when it comes to moving those pianos, as we’ll see later. No matter what your company’s approach is to assigning lead nurturing responsibilities, you will still need to consider the following five elements when writing your score:

1. Strategy
2. Content
3. Design Concerns
4. Cadence
5. Measurement

Strategy

The first step in any lead nurturing plan is to map out your strategy. Here are some questions to get you started.

• What are the high-level goals you are hoping to achieve with nurturing in your product launch?
• Do you simply want to drive new revenue with a plus-one product?
• Are you hoping to educate your customers about your new developments to increase loyalty scores?
• Do you want to increase your overall marketing ROI with automation?
• Where does your target audience get their information (web, social, paid search, email, road shows, etc.) and how will you integrate those channels?
• How much support will you get from individual reps?
• How do leads flow through your marketing funnel, when do reps get involved, how do you score leads and what do you do with leads that are only halfway to qualified status?
• What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) with which you will measure the success of your nurturing campaign? Once you establish these, it is very important to manage the expectations in your company. You may think that a 25% lead quality score is a home-run but perhaps your VP of sales thinks you should be at 50%.
• Who is going to own the implementation plan?

Content

The good news with a product launch is that you are creating a lot of content already that can be reused for nurturing purposes. There is a lot of finesse in creating a good content plan. You want to create a nurturing flow that moves prospects through your buying cycle with compelling content. The content also needs to be matched up appropriately to each phase of that buying cycle. It’s a good time to take a look at your existing content to see if anything needs sprucing up or if you can repurpose for your new campaigns.

Here is a crib sheet of content you’ll want to consider in your plan:

• Press releases to leverage as well as article pick-ups
• Case studies
• White papers
• Blog links to email out
• Newsletters, both yours and your partners
• Podcasts and Vlogs
• Postcards and other direct mail
• Twitter, LinkedIn and RSS special features and offers
• Telephone and message scripts
• FAQs for other teams like support and services
• Letters to customers form your CEO
• Message sweeping scripts
• Webinar design, scripting, recording and promotion
• Pay-per-click ads, print advertising, radio, TV and others
• Content packages for your resellers to use in their channels

Design Concerns

I use the 40/40/20 rule of thumb when it comes to design. That is, 40% of your response in any campaign piece is because you got the the list right. Another 40% is due to getting the right offer to that right list. The final 20% is from a well-designed piece. In other words, if you make the right offer to the right person at the right time, even an ugly and somewhat confusing piece will work 80% of the time. But 20% is a big number and boosting your response rates by 20% can be the difference between success and failure in any campaign.

Specific design rules are beyond the scope of this post, but there are specific best practices that will drive more conversions on your landing pages and get more emails opened by your prospects. Regardless of your open and conversion rates, your materials will also have a lasting impact on the perception of your company and products. You want to take the time to put your best foot forward.

Cadence

Cadence is on of our main five Enterprise Velocity disciplines. When it comes to lead nurturing, it is all about the processes and rhythms you want to establish with a prospect during your various buying cycles and educational flows. Here are some questions to ask your launch team to help you establish the right cadence:

• How often will we be running webinars and other events?
• What is our press release and analyst briefing schedule?
• What is the right frequency for our autoresponder tracks?
• When should a prospect move from marketing to sales?
• How long will the campaign run? Will it be in place for the life of the product or is it seasonal? Will we be conducting a relaunch?
• What are the buying signals that will trigger new nurturing and sales processes?

Measurement

At the very least you want to measure some of the basics like opens, clicks and unsubscribe rates. Access to deeper information will provide you with better insights into your pipeline. Better ROI tracking will help you in your next campaign. You will also be able to determine which actions should get a higher budget allocation during the next launch and which actions should be pruned.

All of these measurements will be easier if you have some piano movers involved (see below). You should consider which of the following metrics you want to track in your lead nurturing campaigns:

• Visits, time on page, bounce rates
• Landing page conversion rates
• Lead sources, both online and offline
• Opens, click-throughs, page views, referrals
• Content popularity
• Leads by status or rating
• Lead quality percentage
• Lead close rates
• Total campaign revenue
• Campaign ROI
• Impact on social and brand

Piano Movers: Next Generation Marketing Automation

It’s great that you know how to play the piano; however, without a piano mover, there would be no piano to play. I’m talking about marketing automation. You need a system that is flexible and easy to use otherwise you won’t use it at all because the setup is too hard.

Note: The Boston Turner Group provides outsourced lead nurturing services for our clients that includes all of the following features. So what I’m going to write next is based on that experience and I promise it will be biased and focused on my particular view of marketing–just like all of the rest of my blog posts.

Here are the things you want out of your piano movers:

• An automated lead nurturing, autoresponder or drip marketing campaign. You don’t want to have to touch your prospects individually with every response, you mostly want to set it and forget it until the prospect gives you an appropriate buying signal.
• A system that will increase the number of leads you send on to sales with better qualification and better information
• A measurement system that gives you analytics and reporting based on the KPIs that are important to you and your launch team
• Integration from your nurturing tools directly into your CRM system
• Lead scoring that is based on the actual behavior of your prospects (e.g., downloads, click-throughs, return visits, etc.)
• Drag-and-drop workflow tools
• Landing form code that can be directly integrated into your website content management system
• Sales rep alerts based on real-time prospect interactions

Marketing Automation Toolsets

The specific nurturing toolsets we use with our clients include the following:

1. Automation Workflows
2. Email Nurturing
3. Message Sweeping
4. Direct Mail
5. Landing Pages
6. Lead Scoring
7. Behavioral Tracking
8. CRM Integration
9. Sales Rep Alerts
10. Lead Segmentation
11. Reporting and Analytics

Automation Workflows

The whole point of automation is to move your prospects through your marketing funnel faster. We do this by triggering actions based on the behavior of a prospect. For example, let’s say someone responds to one of your emails, goes out to a landing page but doesn’t download your white paper. You may want to immediately send that person an email, then wait two days and send them a follow-up email. If they respond to your first email, you want to put them into another track with new offers before they get your second email. If they respond to your second email, you may want a sales rep to call them. Multiply this process by 2,000 prospects and already this basic workflow sounds pretty complicated.

We use our system to customize these workflows on the fly so that you can give your prospect the exact experience you want to based on their online behavior.

Email Nurturing

The key to good email nurturing automation is to give it the appearance of a one-to-one interaction. So, we set up our targeted messages to be sent on behalf of your sales or marketing reps and track the prospects’ interactions with your content online. If the prospect does something interesting (e.g., returns to your website, downloads a new whitepaper, etc.), the system is smart enough to send new emails based on their interests.

Because the emails are automated, it encourages interactions with your sales reps even while they are focused on other critical tasks–like closing big deals. The emails are sent over a specific period of time so that you can keep driving interactions until the prospect is ready to buy. Because the emails are triggered by the unique behavior of each prospect, you won’t risk abusing their marketing permission because each prospect will only get relevant content that matches their behavior, interest, lead score and demographics.

Message Sweeping

Our message sweeping program is simple. A sales rep or a top executive records a single message, which is then delivered to the voicemail boxes of hundreds, or even thousands, of prospects in a matter of hours. Sales reps can easily cover their entire territory, or even expand their territory, with message sweeping. And because they’re making better use of their time, they can generate more sales, service more customers, and earn more revenue.

Message sweeping is a cost-effective way for sales reps to stay in personal contact with each and every one of their customers and prospects. With message sweeping, fewer reps can cover larger territories much more easily than ever before. They can leave monthly messages about sales promotions, new product releases, or special pricing. Using guided voicemail regularly, they become recognizable personalities, thereby becoming top-of-mind when it comes time for a customer to buy.

Direct Mail

Without going into the specifics of how to create a direct mail campaign for lead nurturing–and believe me, I’m pretty opinionated on the topic–the main point I want to emphasize is that you need to integrate your offline and online tactics. You messaging platform for direct mail needs to align with the platforms of your website, email and phone tactics. Your mail needs to be coordinated by message, stage and schedule. We use unique landing pages to track behavior from offline campaigns so that you can then fire off marketing automation events. For example, let’s say a prospect likes one of your postcards and then clicks through to a special online offers. We can then add that prospect to our email automation tracks based on what the viewed or downloaded. And you and your sales reps don’t have to click a single mouse to get the nurturing track started for that prospect.

Landing Pages

Our process for tracking landing pages is very simple. In fact, it’s much simpler than designing the landing page. The design of a landing page is a special science dedicated to driving conversions and viral behavior. But thanks to our automation toolset, we can take your landing pages and integrate them into your online marketing campaigns. We add form code to your landing pages to track and capture new leads. Better yet, you don’t have to talk to anyone in your IT department or at your web host to pull it off.

Properly designed and tracked landing pages allow you to increase your responses and ask custom questions to better qualify your prospects and leads. The code we install allows us to recognize a returning visitor which enables us to tweak their nurturing track automatically. You can use your own imagery and templates with our system as well.

Lead Scoring

Automation allows you to score and prioritize your leads for your sales team based on specific profiles and interactions. Maybe a prospect gets more points for attending a trade show presentation than they do for visiting a landing page. Maybe they get more points for watching a demo than for reading a white paper. Whatever your criteria, you can maximize your sales performance by targeting the best profiled leads.

Behavioral Tracking

My thoughts on targeting prospects through behavioral tracking have evolved over time. I used to feel that it was a little “big brother,” to watch what my prospects are doing and then respond in real time. The truth is that behavioral tracking allows you to provide a better service and a better experience to your prospects.

Rather than fit everyone through a one-size-fits all funnel, you can provide the right information to the right people at the right time. I use our tools to gather key behavioral data on prospects by tracking which pages they visit, how much time they spend engaging with our content, which white papers they are downloading and more.

Behavioral tracking isn’t creepy at all. In fact, it makes your prospects feel special. One of my clients told me that a recently closed customer told them, “if you’re paying this much attention to me as a prospect, I can’t wait to see how you treat your customers.”

CRM Integration

If you’re going to all the trouble of setting up a piano mover system, you want to make sure it integrates into your CRM system. That way, you can effortlessly send qualified leads to sales or send unqualified leads back through your marketing teams and systems to track and educate them until they are ready to buy.

Also, you want to have a bidirectional flow of information so that your CRM system can educate your lead automation system and vice versa. All of this creates a much tighter alignment between sales and marketing.

Sales Rep Alerts

Occasionally something will happen along the course of your nurturing cycle that doesn’t require tracking in CRM but still requires action by a sales rep. Maybe your reps are working a “most wanted” list of prospects and want to get an email if anyone on that list takes an action. Maybe you have a time-sensitive offer and your sales reps want to engage as soon as a prospect clicks on a video link.

Immediate alerts to your sales reps will improve your contact rates because you know that the prospect is sitting at their computer when you get the alert. After all, they just downloaded your new white paper.

Lead Segmentation

An important aspect of your one-to-one nurturing campaign is being able to profile and segment your leads. You might create groups based on demographics such as industry, company size or number of locations. You might also create groups based on the behavioral criteria you established through your campaign.

This segmentation allows you to “speak their language.” Instead of sending a generic email, you can send a specific email about the topic they are the most interested in. Instead of leaving a generic voice mail, you can enter them into an industry-specific message sweeping campaign that allows you to focus on their particular terms and phrases.

Reporting and Analytics

The last–but potentially most valuable–benefit the piano movers bring is the ability to track your leads through their entire lifecycle. You want reports that let you monitor prospects in real-time. The types of things you want to track include:

• Which campaigns are the most effective for revenue generation
• Which campaigns contributed the most qualified leads
• Which emails generated the most opens, clicks and forwards
• What steps seem to deliver the best ROI
• How are visitors interacting with your website after they respond to an email
• Which leads have the shortest sales cycles

Better Product Launches with Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is one of the most important aspects of your product launch. A good nurturing strategy can help you penetrate new markets with a tighter educational program. Good lead nurturing also lowers your acquisition costs through automation and by stopping leaks in your marketing funnel.

The next time we return to our product launch series, we’ll talk about branding considerations that can add velocity to your launch.

When I was a young writer working for the Entrepreneur Media Group, one of my tasks was to write new product and company launch articles for two of their magazines and their online community. I was a voracious consumer of press releases in those days. I would read every release that crossed my desk searching for something interesting to share with our audience.

That was well before Web 2.0.

At the risk of exposing my advanced age, the year was 1994. That was also the first year of NAFTA, Bill Clinton had just ended his first term, movie tickets cost $4 and Weezer released their debut blue album. Good times. There was no such thing as Facebook or LinkedIn. There were no blogs–we were all writing dead-tree indie ‘zines.

In other words, press releases mattered a lot more than they do today. Writers like me actually read them and put them into articles.

Today, you cannot afford to simply rely on press releases. Press releases have to be part of your long-term corporate public relations campaign. If you are a hyper-growth company, “long-term” might mean six months. Other companies need to think 18-36 months ahead.

Product Launch as Inflection Point

While explaining the ins-and-outs of a corporate PR program is well beyond the scope of this post, the general goal of your PR program should be to raise awareness and build trust in your company. A product launch is an inflection point in the history of your company that provides many opportunities to develop your reputation and even overcome bad market perceptions.

Product launch public relations is one of the most frequent PR activities most hyper-growth companies pursue. Because it is a significant inflection point, it can be used to support a number of marketing and sales goals:

• Promoting a new product launch as we’re discussing in this series
• Raising awareness of the depth and expertise of your company
• Correcting perceptions about your company that you may feel are less than accurate
• Increasing the knowledge of your products among your employees, customers and partners
• Driving wider adoption of your products in your base or in new markets
• Providing a critical plank in your enablement, nurturing and top-of-mind-awareness (TOMA) programs

Public Relations Tactics for Product Launches

A good public relations campaign is really more about relationships and nuance than it is about any specific tactic. But since we’re talking about building your product launch plan in this series, I’m going to outline the most important consideration that I think you should incorporate into your product launch PR steps.

Where Should I Look?

Before you begin, realize that the consumption of your PR content is not that different than the consumption of your other marketing content. Two important rules still apply: you need to go where your market already is because they won’t come looking for you and you need to hit them with 27 touches.

The good news is, you have a lot of opportunities to consider. Here are just a few suggestions to get you started. Your industry will have it’s own unique areas to consider as well.

• Issuing a press release about your new product is essential. Perhaps you should consider a series of releases related to the new product, webinars, case studies, white papers and more.
• Can you wiggle your way into some product surveys for magazines and analysts?
• Your new product undoubtedly involved some sort of innovation, right? Can you contribute articles that relate to your super-human development efforts and complex thinking?
• Can you talk someone from outside your organization into writing a clever article of how-tos that feature your product?
• Ghost write some articles for your R&D team to supply industry publications with new content.
• Get your evangelists and sales reps to start blogging and tweeting.
• Develop an ROI related story for industry publications featuring statistics. Here’s a dirty little trick. If you can get one publication to mention one of your stats (e.g., “XYZ software saves 20%), then you can start quoting that stat as if it was fully vetted by a third-party (e.g., “According to Industry Pub, our software saves 20%…”) Sure, it’s circular, but who is going to research it out that far?

Using PR for Demand Generation

One of the biggest choke points in your demand generation efforts is probably a lack of education in your markets. Here are some ways that PR can help you get new leads.

• Getting more links back to your site for traffic and SEO
• Promoting case studies and white papers which will drive new clicks and hand-raisers
• Featured articles that promote the thought leadership of your executives and employees
• Promotion of free offers, ROI calculators, surveys and other demand generation tools
• Promotion of a contest or social media campaign that drives viral effects for your product launch

Should I Hold a Press Conference?

Yes, you should. I’m assuming that your product release is critical to your company and important to the market. If not, why are you releasing it? A press conference allows you to meet with journalists, editors and analysts in person (or voice-to-voice) and brief them on details that would otherwise be missed.

A press conference sounds really difficult. It isn’t, really. The hardest part is usually getting your executives to participate. Today, a lot of what you want to do in a press conference can be handled virtually and without a lot of expense. Here are some tips for you to hold a successful event.

• Treat it like any other event, road show or webinar. That is, focus on value for your target audience and apply all of your promotional muscle.
• Don’t just invite journalists and analysts, invite customers, partners, vendors and your mother-in-law. More people means more buzz.
• Give everyone plenty of notice and if you can, try to time the event with the editorial calendars of your most important publications.
• Design press packages. These can be electronic but they need to look good and professional bold and sexy. You should include background information, product details, literature, photographs or other graphics, statistics, customer quotes and more.
• Make sure your executive team is available. They will need to be coached. You will need to make appointments on their behalf. You probably even need to buy their plane tickets and book their hotels if necessary, because executives aren’t good at details.
• Book interviews with key journalists and analysts with your executives throughout the day. Make them feel like an exclusive group with access others don’t have. If they can’t make it, schedule a private web briefing just for them.
• Your team should split up that night and each take out one journalist and two customers for dinner. It will sweeten the deal for the journalist and they’ll appreciate your candidness by being willing to let them grill a real customer all night.
• Record the briefing and put it all online, but only after the live event happens. You want to maintain the air of a “scoop” and some exclusivity for the event itself.

Avoid These Mistakes

Product launches are busy times filled with many opportunities for mistakes. Let me help you avoid some of the bigger ones that seem to happen all the time.

• Failing to leverage the results. If you manage to get some good ink, spread it around. Send articles to other analysts. Send them in your direct mail. Blog them, because link love is the universal currency of today’s social and SEO. Put them in your newsletter. Ask and order reprints because the publication will make some money and be more likely to write about you in the future. Quote the articles everywhere.
• Being all about “you” and not about “them.” Most companies write about how great their products are from their own perspective with their own jargon. Instead, you need to write about the benefits for the customer and the market. Make it interesting with real life examples. You know who does this really well? Microsoft. Take a look at this cloud article. That doesn’t really look like PR flak, it looks like research. (Hat tip: Ricardo Villalobos, the best product evangelist on the planet).
• Writing something that is basically unpublishable. I almost titled this mistake, “targeting the wrong editors,” because it is basically the same thing. Know your publications inside and out. Don’t assume that everyone will be equally interested in your message. If you do, you will waste your ability to pitch to them in the future
• Assuming journalists know anything about you at all. Journalists are busy. They aren’t surfing your site and interviewing your customers hoping to find someting interesting. Even if they know you, they may not be up to date with your current offerings. Maybe they scanned a press release, but they don’t know how it relates to their readers. Take time to nurture them like you would your prospects so they know you and the company background already.
• Letting product people do your job. Product people are great interviewees, sources and bloggers. But don’t let them write your press materials. Take what they give you and rewrite it to suit your goals, drive interest and improve readability.

I hope this was a helpful list to follow when considering your public relations options in your next product launch. When we next return to this series, we’ll talk about one of my favorite topics of all time, lead nurturing playbooks for product launches.

I’m sure he was hoping I’d say social media. Perhaps a nice video campaign. Or at least email. Something elegant and fun. Those are all great. Those things all significantly increase the effectiveness of your integrated marketing strategy. But if I only had one thing I could do, I would make a ton of calls.

I’d win ugly.

With apologies to Brad Gilbert, what I mean by “winning ugly,” is being willing to do the hard work that your opponents are not willing to do. It’s being willing to look old school in order to bring a deal in. Its using brute force because you know brute force will work and is measurable.

The success of calling is not intuitively easy to grasp but my experience proves if out. In various companies and client’s companies where I’ve been in charge of marketing strategy, we would increase lead passes by as much as 25% with great calls. In addition, we would increase webinar and event attendance by as much as 50%.

Imagine if you could drive double the number of attendees to your next webinar. What would that do for your pipeline?

Why Calls Still Work

1. Fewer companies are doing them than in the past so you actually have get past less noise.
2. More employees are wearing multiple hats so they are picking up the phone and willing to listen to good ideas (just don’t call with bad ideas).
3. Creative voicemails instantly cut through the clutter, stand out with humor and get calls back while even the best emails may only get an 8% open rate depending on the industry.
4. People do business with other people, not with websites, search engines and Facebook and there is an unfortunately rare quality to hearing another human voice.

Why Calls Don’t Work

1. It’s no fun to win ugly and most sales reps will do anything to avoid making another call. Most marketing executives would rather show off a cool social campaign rather than brag about an old-fashioned telephone call.
2. You don’t have enough time to make all the calls you want. It would be great to call everyone in your customer base three times a quarter, but who has that kind of time?
3. There is usually an opportunity cost in calling. As valuable as calls are, there is more value in negotiating a $100,000 contract. Studies show that each call a sales rep makes can cost $10-20.
4. Many sales reps are erratic. Their call volumes and messages vary with their attention and energy. They may not be able to deliver a consistent vision-based message every call.
5. 89% of calls go to voice mail anyway, so you need a low-cost strategy to pull off a creative voicemail campaign.

The Secret Weapon: Message Sweeping

We’ve developed a secret nurturing tactic we call Message Sweeping. It allows you to record a message–a real message, not a robo-call–and deliver it effortlessly to your prospect’s or customer’s telephone inboxes. As often as you want. With no time or calls from your sales or support staff.

And we can do it for 15-30% of the cost of one of your sales reps making the call.

Examples of Winning Ugly

Let me give you some concrete examples of how message sweeping has worked for me and my clients in the past. These are specific plays we have run using voice mail campaigns that have delivered calls backs, leads, event attendance and more.

Play #1: The Executive Touch

Wouldn’t it be great if your CEO could call every customer in your base with a message of thanks that sounded personal? Imagine the effect on your customer loyalty. Something like, “HI, this is Mary Jones, the CEO of XYZ Corp, and I’m just calling to thank you for your business. I’m sorry I missed you but I also wanted to let you know that I’m always open to hearing any feedback, positive or negative, from great partners like you.”

Play #2: Event Urgency

Leading up to a big trade show, there is usually very little time to call the hundreds or thousands of prospects you would like to meet on the trade show floor. What if each of your attending sales reps could leave a message like this: “Hi, this is Bob from XYZ Corp. Hope all is well. Hey, are you planning on attending the distributor show next week? I was hoping to meet you but my calendar is almost booked. I’ve got a couple of times and a lunch and dinner available and was hoping you could just give me a quick call back so we could arrange our schedules.”

Play #3: Road Show Invitation

I’ve used this before to dramatically drive attendance to road shows, user groups and other company sponsored live events. In fact, the last time I used this for a road show we exceeded our enrollment goals by over 70%. “Hi, this is Jane, the COO of XYZ Corp. We’re coming to Dallas the last week of June and I didn’t see your name on the list. I’d really like it if you and anyone else from your team could join us. Plus, your particular feedback on the event is important to me, so I wanted to make sure we could meet at the cocktail party afterward. Hope to see you there.”

Play #4: Webinar Reminders

We’re all very busy and if you send an email out to remind people to attend the webinar they registered for it will get lost in their inbox for hours if not days. Because calls are so rare, they cut through the clutter and in my experience can double your webinar attendance. It’s especially great if it comes from your guest speaker. But how many guests speakers will make 1,000 calls for you? None. Most speakers will, however, record a voicemail for you if it means higher attendance. “Hi, this is Gary from Super Knowledgable Consulting Org. I’m giving a webinar tomorrow for XYZ Corp and I saw your name on the list. First of all, thank you for registering. I just wanted to give you a quick call to remind you to attend so you can receive a copy of my latest book and be entered into the drawing for a New iPad.”

Play #5: The Sports Callback Bet

This is my personal favorite. Let’s say I’m targeting a list in Northern California. I might throw this into the mix: “Hi, this is Matt from the Boston Turner Group and I have a bet to make with you. The Colorado Rockies are playing the Giants on Monday, April 9. If the my Rockies win you owe me 30 minutes of your time on a phone call to discuss your marketing strategy. If your Giants win, I’ll buy you a Starbucks gift card. But you have to call me back to let me know if you take the bet.” If you received that voicemail from me, it might not have actually been me. It might have been a recorded message. I bet you didn’t even know at the time because that’s how smooth Message Sweeping works.

I don’t want to turn a blog post into a sales pitch, so if you’re wondering how you can implement a great Message Sweeping campaign into your mix, give me a call or send me an email. I’ll be happy to walk you through some details. In the meantime, give some thought to how you can win ugly in your next event or campaign.

Your website is the first sale rep people meet at your company. Unfortunately, many marketing teams can quickly find themselves overwhelmed when trying to tackle all of the elements of their web strategy– websites, SEO, blogs, pay-per-click, email integration and more. We want to take the mystery and frustration out of using your web elements in a successful product launch.

Impact on Brand Equity

Before you can decide on the exact tactics for your website, you have to answer the question, “what is the impact of this launch on brand equity?”

Option 1: This product launch enhances brand equity.

The product is part of our core service offering. If so, fasten your seat belts, there really isn’t a single step you should skip. Your website is the first place most of your prospects will interact with your brand. You can’t afford to leave parts of it out of date with regard to a central brand offering.

Option 2: This product launch borrows from our brand equity.

If you’re a software company, you might refer to this type of launch using Geoffrey Moore’s term, “Plus One.” In this case, you may not need to address every page on your site but instead consider a subset in your product areas and enhance your click paths. You’re not off the hook with social media either, because you will have some explaining to do when all those customers ask why your plus-ones don’t come free with their standard product.

Option 3: This product launch has the possibility of cannibalizing our brand equity.

Perhaps you’re launching an extension of your current product set into a new market. This is especially risky when moving downstream. First, you may be losing money in new deals as prospects and customers decide that the additional functionality in your premier product suite isn’t worth the additional investment. Your new small or SaaS-based offering is good enough. Second, research has shown that the market will perceive a reduction in the quality of your brand as you move downstream. It’s not so easy to move upstream either. That’s why when Toyota wanted to rival European luxury automobiles they went to market as Lexus. If you think you might cannibalize your brand equity, you should really consider a separate suite name, with a separate microsite. You might even consider a separate business unit or even a separate company. You’ll thank me later for not eating away at your current revenue sources.

Option 4: The product launch has the ability to confuse our market.

Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be CMOs. If you think there is a real contradiction between your current brand position and your new launch, run it as another brand, company or division. You can only own one brand position at a time, and then only if you’re really good or really lucky, usually both. Here are some of my favorite brand confusions:

• Who is Martha Stewart? Is she a curator of sophisticated taste and if so what is she doing in Home Depot, Staples and in 2013 J.C. Penney. At least she’s not in Kmart anymore.
• Have you ever seen Quaker Oats Breakfast Cookies? Yes, cookies. Isn’t Quaker Oats supposed to be about health? I’ll believe the rice cakes and even the chewy granola bars–even though both are far removed from anything your cavemen ancestors would have put into their mouths. But cookies?
• Stop reading here if you have a sensitive gag reflex: Cheetos Lip Balm and Sylvester Stallone Pudding.

End Confusion with More Content

Assuming you have a workable website, the general principle for any new product launch is more equals more. This is true even if you decided to take your potentially cannibalistic product to another site.

Too many people are depending on your content to make their lives better: sales reps, prospects, channel partners, journalists and analysts and more. Let’s face it, most of the people in your own company have trouble explaining all of your offerings today. It’s not going to improve after the launch of your new products.

With all that new content, your website is going to do the heavy lifting. So let’s now turn to the specific areas you need to address.

Product Areas

This should be the most obvious but you’d be surprised how many people I talk to who tell me, “don’t go by what’s on the website, it’s a little out of date.” And by a “little out of date,” they mean that none of the products on the site actually match what they sell. Here are four things to consider:

1. Do a complete audit of your web site against your current product offerings. Make sure they match up.
2. Present your products in a way that makes sense to your prospects. I know you really like the name “Turbulator 5000,” but I have no idea what that thing does. It’s better to refer to it by it’s function than it’s name if the name isn’t on the nose. Call that page and navigation link “Workflow Management,” or something that specific. As a bonus, you’ll pick up some search engine love along the way.
3. Decide on your organization. Which are the main product suites, which are the plus-ones, which are modules and what content simply describes additional functionality? Or, will you organize by industry grouping? I suggest doing both because again, more equals more.
4. Get an outside person to navigate and read the content to make sure it makes sense to the cultures that live outside your tribe. In fact, find out what your grandmother is doing next Saturday. Is the copy filled with insider jargon? Are you making assumptions about how much people already know about your brand?

Blogs and Social Media

We’ll cover public relations and social media in a future post for this series. We’ll also be returning at a later date to discuss what you need to do to generate hype during the prelaunch phase. But for now, you have a blog, you have a Twitter account, you have a Facebook page so go forth and BloTwitFace. (That sounded better in my head).

To get you going, here are 10 things you could blog or tweet about:

1. Your five favorite new functions
2. Installation tips and tricks
3. Profile someone in R&D
4. Photos of the product or better yet, videos of the product in action
5. Customer and partner testimonials and shout outs
6. A challenge you overcame in the development of the product
7. Provide some guidance on return on investment
8. Talk about how your industry is evolving and why your new product shows you are a leader
9. Promote a webinar
10. Roll all of the nine things above into a white paper or e-book and tweet for downloads

See, wasn’t that easy?

PR Announcements

These are pretty standard. The harder work is to get an actual story out of a product launch. But most trade magazines need the content so they will at least pick up a blurb or two for their web site.

Here are the three releases I think you should plan at a minimum:

1. The standard new product announcement. These aren’t as important as they were a few years ago but a lot of people still cover new products. At the very least, you can generate some new links to your site this way.
2. Announce a case study of a client using the product. These do drive a lot of activity and can even get you some ink.
3. Promote a series of events at which you’ll be demonstrating the new product: webinars, trade shows, road shows and more.

Microsites

When they are done correctly, microsites can helps generate urgency, excitement and buzz. The easiest way to pull off a microsite with a product launch is to focus it either around product content–especially social and video–or focus it around an industry you serve. As an added bonus, you’ll pick up some search engine links from another domain.

In addition, if your launch has the potential to cannibalize your brand, a microsite can help. Or perhaps your current product offering is so large that you worry about getting lost with your new launch.

If you play it right, a microsite can look educational and not self-serving. That could pick you up some links, shares, likes and retweets.

PPC Campaigns

You may not need to change anything with your pay-per-click campaigns with a new product launch. Your markets and core pain points are the same, lucky you. But chances are you’ll at least want to review them and add a few of your new selling points to attract new prospects. As with all new PPC campaigns, this will set off a series of tests to make sure you’re hitting the right notes in your copy, design and ad headlines.

Search Engine Optimization

As long as you’re building all those new pages and posts, you might as well take the time to optimize them for SEO and get you link structure working to your advantage. This is too large a topic to cover in this post, but a new product launch is a great opportunity to grab some SERP real estate. At the very least, do a little keyword research in your market to see if there are some keyword phrases you haven’t approached that could use you brilliantly written copy.

Landing Page Development

You’ll be doing a lot of campaign work–calls, mail, email and more–that you need to track. You also want to drive conversions as quickly as possible with as few clicks as possible. Enter the landing page. Here are eight basics you want to cover:

1. A headline or grabber that is very specific and let’s the prospect know he or she is on the right page
2. Clearly written copy and subheaders that drive the reader to an eventual action
3. A video or a photo
4. Grammatical perfection–the page needs to be perfect to reduce bounces
5. Social proof–testimonials, awards, analyst mentions, PR blurbs and more
6. A call to action: download a white paper, sign up for a demo, purchase today, etc. Make it as obvious as possible.
7. Load up your additional analytics code to track conversions and A/B testing
8. Consider some other unique URLs. Make them pretty, not some weird code. In other words, www.yoursite.com/wow is a lot better than www.yoursite.com/100eiai$$?asp~blahblahblahblahblah.

Interactive Elements

Interactive elements have the potential to go viral. You don’t have to add them right away, but if you can it can really boost the number of likes and shares you get. Some of the most popular involve games, movies, recorded demos and ROI calculators. These have the added benefit of demonstrating your empathy with your prospects, which is why they encourage viral behavior. Make sure you encourage them to pass the information along through email and social media.

Click Paths

Once you have everything lined up above, you want to bring it all together with click paths. Most people only think about two click paths. First, a big splash on the main page. Second, navigation links. But why not put display ads and calls to action on the appropriate interior pages as well. A good click path strategy can boost your conversions by 20% or more.

Automation: The Last Mile

The last mile in your web strategy for your product launch should be automation. According to the Aberdeen Research Group, companies who use marketing automation convert 107% more leads than their Luddite counterparts. Here are five things you should be able to do with automation:

1. Automatically fire off emails based on profiles
2. Link prospect behavior (e.g., downloaded a white paper) to future action (e.g., get a call from a sales rep)
3. Automatically score and add prospects to your CRM system
4. Integrate into other campaigns so that you get a whole view of your prospects interactions with you
5. Put your prospects on a proven path of lead nurturing based on results and best practices

That wraps up our discussion of web elements in a product launch. I’m not pretending that this is the end-all list; however, if you do these things you’ll be doing more than 85% of your competitors are doing. Next time we talk about product launches, we’ll cover public relations tips and tricks.

According to the Harvard Business Review, only 3% of new consumer packaged goods exceed the benchmarks set for a successful launch. Lack of a successful launch strategy for a technology company can reduce your profitability by as much as 35%.

From an outbound or downstream marketing perspective, the biggest problem with a new product launch is education (sometimes referred to as enablement). Of course, I’m assuming you’ve already done the important inbound/upstream marketing:

1. there’s a market for you product,
2. you’ve built it correctly to meet those needs, and,
3. you’ve created a hype-cycle within your niche of followers.

If you’re not sure that you nailed the inbound marketing, you should stop here because your product launch will only fail faster if you follow my steps with a bad product.

Unfortunately, even if you have a terrific product, your launch can easily get tangled up in a sea of confusing chatter. How many of you have suffered these symptoms of a tangled product launch?

• Sales reps who continue to sell older products
• Web sites that are not updated to reflect new functionality
• Journalists and analysts who continue to refer to your old product names
• Customer support reps who email the wrong information about your products
• Trade show booths that still reflect old products
• Product catalogs that were never updated
• Resellers who are confused about your new offerings and pricing
• Contracts that aren’t up to date
• Customers who recently upgraded but feel cheated out of the new product

Here is the final impact on the cohesiveness of your team:

• your R&D team starts blaming your sales team for not taking the time to understand the new product
• sales blames marketing for not producing enough training and marketing material for them
• marketing blames implementation for not screwing the product in properly and creating bad buzz in the user community
• implementation blames development for a buggy product that is hard to install, when in fact the product is perfectly designed
• your CEO blames everyone, and rightfully so

Be a Product Launch Hero

All of these pains can be avoided with the mastery of a systematic outbound launch process. And that is why I’m writing this series of blog articles. I want to teach you how to be the hero of your next launch by giving you insights into the 10 key areas of your education cycle during a new product launch. These 10 steps will include:

1. Website elements that every successful launch requires
2. Public relations tips and tricks
3. Lead nurturing play books for product launches
4. Branding considerations that can add velocity to your launch
5. Email guidelines to coordinate your messaging across teams
6. Event guidelines to inject product launches into other niches
7. Mail coordination tips and tricks
8. Reseller channel product launch needs
9. Networking ideas for referrals and social proof
10. Customer advocacy to turn your product launch into a loyalty builder instead of a loyalty killer
11. Bonus: How to build a launch team

I hope you’ll join me for what I hope will be a fun and useful set of articles that help you with your next product launch. Please follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn to be notified each time a new article is posted in the series.

I talk to a lot of people about marketing strategy every day, and I’m fascinated by the different perceptions people have regarding their websites. We marketing people seem to fall into two main camps when it comes to our websites: paranoid and delusional. Among the paranoid, I’ve talked to executives who think their website is terrible compared with their main competitor, yet they stack up quite well to an outside observer. The temptation for the paranoid is the change their website almost weekly in pursuit of the latest widgets, plugins and content. Among the delusional, I’ve talked to marketing VPs with horrible websites who believe design doesn’t matter. “Look at the number of leads we’re getting,” they’ll tell me. But how many more leads would they get if 52% of their visitors weren’t immediately blinded or hospitalized upon viewing their homepage?

Why Design Matters

Your website is your first line sales rep. If you are an e-commerce, cloud or SaaS company, your website might be your first and only sales rep. Is there a difference if your sales rep shows up to a demo wearing a suit or wearing a stained Tenacious D concert tee? The rep in the t-shirt might still win the demo, but your product and your relationship needs to be inordinately strong. With a bad website, you could be losing deals before you know you’re even in them.

How Can I Tell If My Website Is Frightening Small Children?

The problem with design and marketing is that they are very much like religion and politics–everyone thinks they have the one right solution and no one agrees what that solution is. So I’m going to offer a very quick list for you to perform a gut check.

Note: It’s important that you don’t perform this analysis, but that you ask someone unconnected and objective to provide this feedback to you. It can’t be a top executive because they are often too isolated. It can’t be your marketing team because they are married to the status quo. It can’t be your top sales rep, because he or she is too focused on the competitor of the day to be objective. It can’t be your IT department unless you want to end up with pink Verdana fonts thrown onto a blinking yellow background.

Answer the following 10 questions and you’re 80% of the way home:

1. Can you instantly tell what your company does before you scroll or click to the “About us” page?
2. Do you use Flash or any other kind of splash or animated welcome screen? If so, no one using an iOS device can see your site and another 25% will leave just on general principle.
3. Does your site have auto-play video, music or other annoying scrolling marquee types of animations? Stop right here and remove them before you finish reading this blog post.
4. Does your site use pop-up advertising or sign-up windows? If yes, are you a spammer selling get-rich-quick “information” products or a personal injury lawyer?
5. Is your color palette complimentary, inviting, easy to read and use no more than five or so colors? If you’re a Microsoft fan, don’t be tempted to use blue and white like 90% of all the other copycats. Ditto black and red, Oracle fans.
6. Are you so worried about SEO that your site is 100% text, jammed with spammy keywords and includes completely unusable navigation? You need to design for real human beings, not search engines. Search engines will never buy your products anyway.
7. Do you need to scroll to get to the good stuff on a 1024 screen? Negative bonus points if you have to scroll horizontally.
8. Are you dishing up PDF files instead of faster loading and easier to digest dynamically created content?
9. Do your graphics look like something out of the Microsoft Word clip art file? Do the photos look like stock photos from the early 90s (the free ones always do)?
10. Does your content at least seem to be written by someone who is a native English speaker?

ROI on Website Design

There is real return on investment for website design. Here’s a quick back-of-the-napkin sketch of a current client. They get about 1,000 uniques a month and 20 lead forms. By decreasing their bounce rates with better design and clear communication, they are now getting 35 lead forms each month. What would the impact be on your business if you could almost double your web leads? I bet that would feel pretty good.

How are you stacking up against your competition? If you need an objective–albeit potentially snarky–objective third party to take a look at your website, call me today. We can arrange a 34-point analysis of your website and compare it to your top three competitors for even more fun.

Today I wanted to share my thoughts on the important metrics for your web funnel–those parts of your website that drive revenue. Here are 24 web funnel metrics you should be measuring right now.

What Is Your Web Funnel?

Before we get to the metrics, we should take a step back to discuss what your web funnel looks like. Most companies have the following tactics in place to generate new leads from their web presence:

1. Raw Traffic
2. SEO Activity
3. Pay-per-click Activity
4. Blog Readership
5. Social Networking
6. Email, RSS and other subscriber bases

You might be surprised how many companies I talk to every week that are missing some of these basic elements. So before you put your web funnel measurement plan into place, gather the low-hanging fruit by launching elements of your web funnel that are still in development or consider relaunching them if they are stagnant.

And Now… The Top 24 Web Funnel Metrics

Raw Traffic Metrics

If you have a web site, a simple (and free) code insert into your footer widget will get you Google Analytics on all of your pages. Conversations with friends about web analytics usually sound like this:

Web Guru A: What analytics package are you using on your web these days?

Marketing Guy B: Google. I know it’s not the best, but it’s free…

WG: Nah, it’s great, I use it, too. It’s all you need. What are you doing about bounce rates?

MG: Um. I haven’t actually logged into Google for about three months…

The quality of your analytics package won’t matter if you’re not at least logging in weekly to find out the following:

1. Unique Visitors: Most people think that this is the number of different users on your web site. That’s probably close enough to wrap your head around; however, it really means the number of unique cookies set over a given time-frame. That means that someone who deletes cookies could visit your site 10 times and appear to be 10 different unique users. Still, if you’re not tracking growth in unique users, you’re not tracking your overall reach.

2. New vs. Repeat Visitors: New visitors are counted the first time they arrive at your site during the time frame you are tracking. Assuming they are using cookies, they are counted as a repeat visitor when they return during that same time period. You probably have different goals for different types of pages. You might really want to see a high return visitor percentage on the parts of your web site used for nurturing and education, like your blog, customer portals, training videos and more. But on landing pages, return visitors might signal a problem in your messaging, click paths or even a competitor scoping out your offer.

3. Traffic Sources: You should know how users are finding your pages. Typically you’ll want to evaluate the mix of direct traffic (people who just type your URL into their browser), referring sites (see next metric), SEO-related traffic, paid campaigns and lands from pages related to off-site techniques like mail, shows or call campaigns.

4. Referring Sites: Here you want to know which sites are referring you (get your thank you cards ready) and also understand how their behavior differs from users that come from other sources. What content are the using? Are they staying longer? Are they converting?

5. Top Content: You want to know what the most commonly viewed areas of your site are and how they are being used. But also think about the holes you have in your content with lower ranking pages that are important to you as well as bounce rates (see below) and high exit rates.

6. Search Keywords: What keywords are your visitors typing in to find you? Are they the right keywords? Where do you need to improve based on your SEO and PPC efforts? Are there interesting trends you could capitalize upon with a new video, blog page or webinar? Are there any embarrassing “this company sucks,” kinds of searches?

7. Bounce Rates: This is the percentage of users who left after viewing only one page. Generally, a high bounce rate means that you need to work on quality and engaging click paths. High bounce rates could indicate a page that needs to be redesigned based on the keywords and ads that drive traffic toward it.

8. Goal Performance: Goals are different depending on what type of site you have. A conversion to you might mean a sale, a download, a thank you page for a subscriber or just viewing an important press release.

Of course you know that any of these metrics can and should be used on important individual pages as well. Right?

Search Metrics

SEO goals can be a little trickier to define and measure, but start with these four.

9. Keyword Performance: If you haven’t already done so, choose 6-12 keywords that you know you can own, have good traffic and low competition. Then report on those keywords weekly. You could set up a lot of fancy tools and measure multiple engines; or, you could just type those phrases into Google once a week. That practice will focus your entire team on improving the performance of those top search phrases. And it’s so low-tech, even your grandma could do it. Then take it the next step and find out what your traffic from those phrases is actually doing–are they bouncing, exiting, clicking or converting? This will tell you if you picked the right terms.

10. Rankings: This requires a good tool, but there are some free ones out there. Find out how you are ranking for your best terms, keep an eye on page rank, find out how your competitors are ranking and consider the public relations pros and cons of certain ranks.

11. Traffic from SEO: Bonus points if you are able to assign a real dollar value to your organic traffic because now you don’t have to spend on PPC ads.

12. Inbound Links: Sign up for Google webmaster tools and track your inbound links. The more the merrier–even the lowliest of web sites can add to your rankings.

Pay-per-click Metrics

Pay-per-click advertising is a speciality in its own right. If you do it wrong, you can burn through a wad of cash in no time at all. If you do it right, you can outperform and underspend your competition by wide margins. Here’s what you should track in your PPC campaigns:

13. Click-through Rates: This is basically the number of clicks you get on a PPC ad divided by the number of impressions your PPC vendor loads up for you. For example, if your ad is shown 100 times and you get 5 clicks, you have a 5% click through rate. That’s a little something I like to call “math.” If your click-through rate is low, take a look at your ad copy and your search phrase. If you copy is poor, people won’t click on it. I can’t tell you why your copy is bad without looking at it, but the clicking public is never wrong. You might have a bad search phrase. For example, you might want to own the phrase “CMS,” because your company sells “court management software.” Unfortunately, CMS is an acronym for no fewer than 296 other search phrases such as “content management system,” or “Canadian Mathematical Society.” If your search phrase is CMS, your click-through rate is going to be low. Deal with it. And don’t spend a lot on SEO for it, either.

14. Cost per Click: Generally, you’re paying for every click whether the user takes another action or not. You should at least track average CPC so that you have a sense of what it costs you in your current marketing mix to drive a new user to your site with ads.

15. Conversions: This is the big one. This is where the ROI tracking hits. You should already know your average cost per lead. How much more or less are you paying for a web lead from your PPC campaign? Are certain pages converting better than others? Can you test different types of landing pages, offers, video, white papers and lead forms to boost your conversions?

16. Halo Effects: PPC can give you halo effects in other areas such as rankings on other search engines, increased inbound links, new subscribers and more.

Blog Readership Metrics

The two most important things to know about your blog is where the readers are coming from and are they growing? So you need to measure:

17. Referral Sources: who is sending you traffic, how many are coming in from SEO, other blogs, etc.

18. Subscribers: It’s pretty easy to set up a tool like Feedburner to try to track subscribers to your blog. It’s not perfect and you won’t get them all, but you can measure overall growth this way.

Social Networking Metrics

I know what you’re thinking: “I sell widgets to a small group of middle-aged men–I don’t need no stinkin’ social networking metrics.” You’re wrong. Everything is social. As of this this writing, the LinkedIn Fastner Industry group has over 7,600 members. That’s a lot of people networking about nuts, bolts, rivets and twist-ties. You should be on top of two things:

19. Reach: is your network, your audience, growing? How many followers and group members are you adding?

20. Engagement: I’m guessing, but right now I imagine there is a 13 year old getting her Harvard Ph.D. in the measurement of social engagement. This can seem like tough stuff to the rest of us. But I would start with the basics like tweets, retweets, mentions, group posts, blog trackbacks and pings. That’s 80% of what you need to know.

Subscription Metrics

For those of us old enough to have lived and marketed our way through Web 1.0 (you know you still have that flannel shirt and a beat up pair of Doc Martens), this stuff should be bread and butter. You will probably apply this to your email and autoresponder lists, but it could work with other databases as well.

21. Subscribers: Is your list growing or shrinking? Is it growing but suddenly you did something wrong and picked up a lot of unsubscribes? In some cases, you might have done something right and picked up those unsubscribes.

22. Click-through rates: Every message you send should have a call to action. At least include a link to a landing page to get them to do something. Maybe you want to track links to articles in your newsletter. Click-through rates are better than tracking opens, because an “open” these days could mean that they never read the message at all but accidentally opened it in a preview pane.

23. Growth rates: Unless you’re doing something really wrong, you list will always grow. But what is the rate of growth? Is it predictable based on a percentage? Is it seasonal? Is it a steady 30 new subscribers a month because the only thing you’re doing to attract new subscribers is your call campaigns?

24. Forwarding: Along with trackbacks and retweets, this is the best indication of the viral effects of your message platform. You know you hit onto something golden when people start forwarding your message around. I’ll save my tips for how to make things viral for another day. For now, try to be useful, different and empathetic. And don’t forget to include links for them to forward your message or post to their social network.

You have the cheat sheet, now go forth and measure. It probably won’t happen unless you make time for it, so if I were you, I’d copy this message and paste it into a weekly calendar reminder. As always, if you need any help figuring this out, call or write. We are all in this together. If you enjoyed this article, please share it with the tools below.