Investigative Prospecting


As a sales professional I always found it more productive to initiate informed conversations with my prospects vs. making tons of calls hoping to get a hit, i.e., someone who happened to be in the market for "xxx..."  I made fewer dials but had a significantly higher qualified appointment Read more

Marketing Lessons from My Furniture Mover


During most of March and April I've been consumed with selling my house and purchasing another.  From inspectors for this and that, to contractor estimates, to selecting the service providers who will move my household goods and furniture its been an overwhelming process of specing needs, soliciting bids, evaluation Read more

Intelligent Targeting


By now it seems clear that matching product or service offers to the consumers who need them, want them and are ready to purchase is the best possible marketing practice.  This is targeting, pure and simple.  Among the many goals of target marketing, efficient use of resources is one Read more

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Investigative Prospecting

May 4, 2012 Ann McCartan Leave a comment  

As a sales professional I always found it more productive to initiate informed conversations with my prospects vs. making tons of calls hoping to get a hit, i.e., someone who happened to be in the market for “xxx…”  I made fewer dials but had a significantly higher qualified appointment rate.

But this post isn’t about sales per se.  It’s about the type of prospecting that is thoughtful, probing, prospect-focused and directed at finding common ground.   It’s about finding opportunity and gaining better understanding of where the product or service will fit within the prospects toolkit…if it fits at all.  I call it Investigative Prospecting.
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Marketing Lessons from My Furniture Mover

May 1, 2012 Ann McCartan Leave a comment  

During most of March and April I’ve been consumed with selling my house and purchasing another.  From inspectors for this and that, to contractor estimates, to selecting the service providers who will move my household goods and furniture its been an overwhelming process of specing needs, soliciting bids, evaluation and final commitment.   Aannd….you ask:  How the heck does this relate to marketing?

Here’s the analogy.  Just as with the process of selecting a moving company, the selection of a marketing automation vendor should ultimately come down to not just what they will do (pricing, timing, truck size, man hours) but how they will get you from point A to point B.   In the case of moving, ease of packing, management of the move, pre-move check lists, online resources and helpful hints, turnaround time to answering my queries, the number of folks involved in my move are the soft factors that provide the sense of security I need to undergo this fairly stressful change.  I’ve selected a company who will choreograph this event freeing me up for other details that I’m better at.

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Intelligent Targeting

March 2, 2012 Ann McCartan 1

By now it seems clear that matching product or service offers to the consumers who need them, want them and are ready to purchase is the best possible marketing practice.  This is targeting, pure and simple.  Among the many goals of target marketing, efficient use of resources is one of the most important, especially if you are a small or medium sized business – with limited marketing funds and few marketing staff.  You’ve got the product and services ready to go, now who are the right audiences or segments to match up with?  Let’s see how customer analysis can help.

Customer analysis can be applied to answer many different questions.  Depending on what data you have on your customer – from demographic, geographic, firmographic to transactional and behavioral – you can understand what makes customer different or the same and most of all, what motivates their purchases.  As a small or midsized company, SMB, you might not possess all of that data but if you are able to group your customers into some type of business category and match purchases against them, you can accomplish intelligent targeting for your offers.
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B2B Aquisition – Simple but Effective

February 7, 2012 Ann McCartan Leave a comment  

I’ve been posting recently about multichannel marketing,  “Multichannel Marketing Integration is Vital”, and while I’m convinced that communicating in multiple channels makes for very satisfied customers and responsive prospects, I’ve also noted that it’s possible to be successful even when using one or one+ channels.

Case in point:  a large, eBusiness company wanted to acquire new SMB customers.  As a fully digital company, reaching out to unknown but highly qualified prospects, utilizing email made the most sense.  By working with reputable vendors we acquired email addresses for the majority of our target prospects.  A note here,  when purchasing prospect email addresses it is critical to determine their provenance to insure that these individuals have given permission to be contacted.  In fact we insisted that the email addresses be further submitted to a separate email invitation to connect.  This is known as double opt-in and many good companies even submit their own customers to the process from time to time.

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Multi-channel Marketing Integration is Vital: 3

January 30, 2012 Ann McCartan Leave a comment  

But How Do You Actually Get There? Part 3

As I’ve been discussing in the post series, “Multi-channel Marketing Integration is a Vital Start But How Do You Actually Get There? Part 1″,  knowing what to do is a start but if you are a small to medium business, or a small department in a large company, with limited staff or technology, how do you implement what could be a complex eco-system?

Again, Here’s the pitch:

“From search to social, customers are interacting with your brand across a variety of channels, most likely created by many different people, in many different departments. However, chances are your customer thinks of your brand as just one entity, purchasing across channels, oblivious to your internal structure and processes. Providing a consistent message and customer experience is critical, so savvy marketers are optimizing campaigns through automated marketing programs and integrated data strategies.”

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Multi-channel Marketing Integration is Vital: 2

January 27, 2012 Ann McCartan Leave a comment  

But How Do You Actually Get There? Part 2

As I’ve already mentioned in my last post “Multi-channel Marketing Integration is a Vital Start But How Do You Actually Get There? Part 1″,  knowing what to do is a start but if you are a small to medium business, or a small department in a large company, with limited staff or technology, how do you implement what could be a complex eco-system?

Again, Here’s the pitch:

“From search to social, customers are interacting with your brand across a variety of channels, most likely created by many different people, in many different departments. However, chances are your customer thinks of your brand as just one entity, purchasing across channels, oblivious to your internal structure and processes. Providing a consistent message and customer experience is critical, so savvy marketers are optimizing campaigns through automated marketing programs and integrated data strategies.”

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Multi-channel Marketing Integration is Vital

January 25, 2012 Ann McCartan 3 Comments

But How Do You Actually Get There? Part 1

I like to quote or reference colleagues’ posts, articles and such, but this time I find myself quoting from a solicitation to a webinar! That’s because it summarizes one of the biggest challenges you face as a marketer…cross-channel integration. Hats off to “Direct Marketing News” who will not doubt put on an informative webinar.

Knowing what to do is a start but if you are a small to medium business, or a small department in a large company, with limited staff or technology, how do you implement what could be a complex eco-system?
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Gaining Customer Attention is Step 1

January 4, 2012 Ann McCartan, DBMCatalyst 1

Continuing on the theme of last month’s post “Every Campaign Gain is a Win”,  let’s discuss incremental gains. While measuring incremental revenue and profits is the bottom line, measuring incremental email opens and click through rate (CTR) is indicative of how well each wave of the campaign is performing.

Just looking at email metrics, a recent campaign showed a lift of 8% in Opens among existing customers.  What does that mean?  It means that 8% of the total universe of customers mailed in this wave engaged and opened the email although they had not done so in the prior wave.  Additionally, we saw a 2% incremental lift in CTR (click through rate.) Read more ›

Every Campaign Gain is a Win

December 15, 2011 Ann McCartan, DBMCatalyst Leave a comment  

We all set goals – email opens, email clicks, conversions, store visits, product purchases – for our marketing campaigns & programs. As we should! And typically those goals are high – 40% uplift, 20% incremental revenues or profits driven, 30% conversion. Many companies, especially when they are implementing more sophisticated techniques like multiple waves of communication or multi-channel initiatives, sometimes forget to factor in the type of audience they are addressing.

Consider a campaign to existing customers. If you are a service provider with loyal customers (those who have purchased from you repeatedly), you should look for modest gain. Hey, they already love you! Take the extra 2 – 3% gain over past campaigns and consider it well worth the effort. You’ve just retained a valuable customer who will continue to buy from you in the future. In one recent campaign, set to execute 4 communications to customers over 4 weeks, we’ve seen an 8% lift with just the first communication alone. Read more ›

Let’s put the Data back in Database Marketing

January 4, 2011 Ann McCartan, DBMCatalyst Leave a comment  

In the last year I’ve had numerous opportunities to explain what I do…and explain and explain…mostly to people who are involved in some aspect of marketing but not database marketing specifically.  To a person, when I’ve said “database marketing” they’ve said “oh you work with computers (database.)”   Well, I do some of my work through a database but that’s not the essential point.   And then, as you can imagine, the conversation has veered off into technology….

Technology may be the enabler, and clearly the database is key, but the data are paramount.  Database marketing is about the collection and application of data – about the customer and the prospect.   Wikipedia, an eminently detailed reference describes it like this:  “…Database marketing emphasizes the use of statistical techniques to develop models of customer behavior, which are then used to select customers for communications…”  Read more ›

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