Sending an email to all your customers in the Pacific Northwest announcing a one-day training event may be simple enough, assuming you already have geographic data for your existing customers. But how do you present a geo-relevant web page to anonymous web leads and prospects?

Well, there are a couple options. There are database companies (like ip2location) that take a best guess at where anonymous web visitors are physically located based on their Internet Address. This is really the best option for public pages handling organic leads that cannot assume where the visit is coming from.

The other option is to utilize the geographic targeting capabilities of PPC advertising engines, such as Google's AdWords campaign manager (see screen shot below).

These tools allow marketers to target customers by location and direct them to geographically relevant web pages.

This is an extremely important facet of Internet marketing that must not be overlooked. It really pains me to do a Google search on something like "transmission repair" and see pay-per-click AdWords along the right side for businesses like "Bob's Transmission Repair Shop" in North Carolina.

Clearly Bob is not interested in attracting International business and will likely burn through his daily advertising budget is less than 2 hours unless the ad can be geographically targeted to only IP addresses in North Carolina.

There's a fantastic article on Wired called "Web 2.0: A Pattern Library" written by Tim Ziegler. The article provides a great summary of best practices and principles that are floating around; and covers everything from content management and information architecture to human filtering and "folksonomies".

Especially important is the notion of iterative development of web campaigns. Todays tools provide an unprecedented level of flexibility and agility that allow marketers to make frequent changes and receive feedback in near real-time.

With 6 customer lifecycle phases and over a dozen i-Dialogue eMarketing tools at your disposal, it can be overwhelming to know how to effectively apply the right tools and when.

The Solution Worksheet (below) simplifies this problem by providing a matrix for mapping eMarketing tools to customer needs by lifecycle phase.

When working with clients, I find it useful to sketch specific requirements and notes into the matrix. Over time the matrix will reveal some patterns; the most common of which I would refer to as "offensive" and "defensive" marketing.

Offensive marketing solutions are typical in B2C environments where the objective is to constantly make consumers aware of your product and persuade a purchase. But these campaigns treat every dialogue as if it's a first encounter with the customer.

Defensive marketing seeks to retain existing customers by segmenting the customer base and providing more personalized self-service to information. This is common in B2B environments where the sales cycle is longer, the customers are self-identifying, and there are formal support and service level agreements in place.

The solution worksheet will quickly reveal any gaps in your overall relationship marketing strategy and help guide the discussion towards these gaps.

You can click on the image below, download, and print on legal size paper to help design your own solutions.

The i-Dialogue 360° solution is premised on helping businesses manage the entire customer lifecycle. The 'cycle' term simply refers to a businesses objective to create repeat customers.

Effective relationship marketing views customers as progressing through various stages in a lifecycle. Below is the cycle we use in i-Dialogue 360°.

Prospective customers enter the cycle as they become aware of an organizations products or services. They may then subscribe to a newsletter, drip-campaign, or do some other research to educate themselves about your solution.

Many customers prefer to take a test drive and evaluate a product before purchase. Service oriented businesses might offer a free consultation visit.

A prospect becomes a customer once their business is acquired, and from there the customer immediately enters a service and support relationship.

Persuading customers to upgrade or try new products is common in growth or expansion campaigns, where you're simply trying to make customers aware of a new solution, educate them, and encourage the cycle to repeat.

It's been awhile since I even thought about Salesforce.com system availability, so I went out to http://trust.salesforce.com/, SFDC's new system status site, to check out the last 30 days and was impressed (see screenshot below).

Some minor interruptions, but no major disruptions. The table layout of the report made it easy to cut and paste into Excel, which revealed some positive trends for the trailing 30 days (see charts below).

In short, the number of transactions continues to grow and the response times are getting quicker.

The up and down oscillation in the transaction chart is due to non-working Weekend hours (and I suppose some planned maintenance downtime).

It's curious that weekend utilization of SFDC is ~33% of workday utilization. This is rather high, but I suspect that a large portion of this is probably from automated batch jobs using the sForce API conducting backups and synchronization.

Here's a tip to help email designers visualize what different groups of people will see once a personalized email campaign is launched.

Problem: You've created an elegant email template with some Dialogue merge fields that will be replaced at launch time with targeted content (either based on CRM contact properties, segment rules, role, or whatever). But that nagging feeling persists in the back of your mind saying "I wonder what existing customers will see when they receive this personalized email? Will the call to action be relevant? What will our top client's Executives see?".

Solution: Create several mock user profiles, called personas, then launch a test campaign (the emails will be individually created and personalized but not actually sent) then review the email content rendered for each persona.

Here's a screenshot (below) of an email campaign whose template has already been defined. Several personas have already been created for Executive, Existing Customer, Technical Decision Maker, and so on.

Click on 'Launch Test Campaign' and the email service will immediately process the emails (and again.... will not actually send them).


Once the test rendering is complete, you'll receive an email. You can now click each Persona's View link (I've prefixed my personas with 'aa_' to ensure they always appear at the top) to see how the segmentation rules populated the merge fields for each individual user.



You can also drill down and view emails that would be sent to individual users. This enables an iterative process whereby an email template is updated, a test launch is executed, and the resulting content is reviewed and refined.

Once you're happy with the results, simply launch the actual campaign. The production launch will execute with exactly the same behavior as the test launch.

While writing my previous post on SEO Fundamentals, it occurred to the me that it wouldn't take too much effort to automate an analysis of these best practices in i-Dialogue Customer Portal. About 2 hours later I came up with the following report, which is available in 6.01.

There are a number of other heuristics I'd like to add to this report, such as checking for the existence of <H1> and <H2> tags, and duplicate HTML content.

But for now, this is a great tool for quickly determining which best practices are not being enforced with convenient hyperlinks directly to the pages for on the spot correction.

I stumbled upon this great product configurator (PC) at http://vtx.honda.com, which helps prospective motorcycle buyers visualize the various models and configurations of the Honda VTX motorcycle.

This is a great example because it provides a self-service interface that helps consumers experiment with various configurations and immediately answers key questions, such as "How much will this cost if I add this feature?", "What does it look like in Blue?" and "Where can I get it?".

I'm still hoping for the day when these product configurators are tightly integrated with ERP Bill of Materials (BOM) systems so that Marketers and Engineers can collaborate and quickly make product configuration and part changes (price, source, look) and then immediately publish the changes live to their web site.

But the low-hanging fruit for most relationship marketers is simply to get some basic customization capabilities and images available on their web site.

I recall reading a case study where the conversion rate of customers who actually used the online PC and requested a quote was phenomenally high (> 30%). It may cost anywhere from $10K-$200K for a really good configurator (depending on product complexity) but with 30%+ conversion rates that can be easily be measured in closed-loop reporting environment, who can afford not to consider that investment?

Of course, an organization must be MTO capable (Made-To-Order) to truly recognize the benefits of a PC.

Search Engine Optimization is really just good copywriting. That's all there is to it. Sure, some technical skills are useful, but 80%+ of effective SEO is about writing good copy.

For example, if a customer is interested in purchasing a "widget offset attenuator" (fictional bizarre example here) they are very likely to enter this term into a search engine, such as Google or Yahoo!

Now, if you sell "widget offset attenuators" how do you ensure your web site gets listed towards the top of the search engine results page (SERP)? Simple, you write structured copy in a language that search engine bots understand. Bots are constantly crawling the web, visiting your web site, and recording the information they find on your site.

But having "widget offset attenuator" simply in the HTML of a web page is not enough. If the bot also sees that the name of the page URL is widgetOffsetAttenuators.aspx, the Title of the page is "Widget Offset Attenuators", and page description and keywords support this, then most bots are designed to conclude "Yep.... these folks are more serious about 'widget offset attenuators' than any other page I've visited. Let's rank them higher".

Here's a simple SEO page template that we use for all i-Dialogue marketing campaigns:

URL Name:
Title:
Description:
Keywords:
Heading 1:
Heading 2:

And a completed template might look something like this:

URL Name:
Title:
Description:	Provides attentuation and precise adjustment for Widget offset frequencies.
Keywords:
Heading 1:
Heading 2:

Each of these fields in an i-Dialogue web site is mapped to a structured tag in a page template that is guaranteed to be requested by each search engine bot and used in their evaluation of the web site.

So, you can see that the actual technical aspect of SEO, once the template is done and out of the way, is quite easy. i-Dialogue uses a database to store these values, but you can just as easily add them to your own HTML page template (See more on META Tags here).

The really difficult part of SEO is having the discipline to complete this template for every single public page in the web site, and writing effective, clear and concise copy. This is the only way to achieve organic and enduring search results and is fundamental to every successful web marketing campaign.

An SEO copywriter must have the ability, in this example, to think like the prospective customer and know several other alternative keywords and phrases the customer may be looking for. Instead of "widget offset attenuator", some customers might try "widget adjuster" or "widget attenuator".

Customers will search on both singular and plural variations of your products and services. They will often misspell them (and yes.... you should create pages dedicated to misspelled variations if you think the occurrence frequency is high enough).

Internet customers, as a whole, will tend to enter simpler keywords and phrases than more complex ones. Monitoring your own web sites search engine is a continuous, iterative activity that good SEO copywriters engage in to understand what customers are actually looking for.


Things not to do:
Some SE optimizers might think "If a few well placed keywords and META tags are good, then repeating the keywords several times must be very good!". No... this is actually very wrong and most bots will penalize your web site if they discover hidden text (white font color on white background or commented text) or duplicate keywords.

Duplicate copy on multiple pages is another thing to avoid. Bots believe that when this pattern occurs, that they are being lured into a "link farm", which is a common tactic to artificially create the illusion that a particular page or keyword is more popular than it actually is.

Your organization name should not appear in any of the template fields, except for the home page, about us, or contact us pages.


So remember... it all starts with good copywriting. In a future article, I'll discuss how to build on these SEO fundamentals and pursue some more advanced SEO activities.

I mostly focus on B2B marketing, but the recent Origami campaign by Microsoft caught my eye as it was technology related.

There was a lot of hype and viral marketing leading up to the announcement, and even I got caught up in visiting the origami project web site in the weeks leading up to the products formal announcement.

My only bit of constructive criticism here is that these teaser microsites could really benefit from engaging the customer in more dialogue. How many consumers would have subscribed to a simple email alert like "Contact me when new Origami updates are available [email address here]". I know I would have.

Regardless of whether the final Origami announcement does or does not meet consumer expectations, at least Microsoft would (and should) have the opportunity to engage in follow-up dialogues with curious subscribers. It may take 5-7 intelligent follow-up 'drips' for the marketing message to really resonate.

Update: Dustin Hubbard, Group Manager for the Mobile PC team at Microsoft, gives some genuine follow-up and history on the Origami campaign.

I made the 3 hour trek up to Seattle yesterday to attend a Salesforce.com live event (check for events coming to a town near you. I highly recommend attending) and made some great connections with prospects, customers, partners, and SFDC employees.

My key interest was the "Developing for AppExchange" session, since we're within about 45 days of launching our Relationship Marketing solution for AppExchange. It was great to hear first hand from other CEOs the genuine concerns and accolades on how the AppExchange is working out for them.

From a marketers perspective, I'm getting pretty excited about the potential of this solution. True closed-loop marketing campaigns have historically always been an afterthought, requiring data warehouses that aggregate historical marketing data from weeks and months ago.

But with Salesforce.com and the AppExchange, we're building marketing campaigns that have closed-loop, real-time integration built into the DNA. Employee-Customer dialogues are real-time and Marketers can be more agile, launching campaigns faster and adjusting on a daily basis to optimize their ROI instead of taking a waterfall, batch-and-blast approach to marketing.

Side note:
On the train ride back to Portland, while I was refining our AppExchange solution description, I realized that i-Dialogue may be the most hyphenated solution on the AppExchange (or should that be most-hyphenated?); with keywords such as closed-loop, real-time, business-to-business, employee-customer interaction, and mid-market.  I wonder what a college English teacher would say about this? 

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft CTO, has posted a great demonstration of a new technology called Live Clipboard. The value to relationship marketing would be tremendous if prospects and customers could simply cut and paste a marketing event from an email or your web site, directly into their calendar.

A Live Clipboard would also make your 'Contact Us' web page (which is a standard in all our marketing campaign templates) truly live, and allow customers to quickly and correctly synchronize their Contacts list with your web site information.

This kind of smart web browsing has long been the holy grail of what is referred to as the Semantic Web, which are basically just smarter web pages and browsers that can infer the meaning of a web page, and occasionally a users intentions.

This will be an interesting technology for me to follow, as it would require a certain amount of critical mass distribution and adoption before it truly makes sense to provide this functionality in i-Dialogue sites.

 I was recently optimizing an email template that contained an "Email a Friend" link that was catching my eye as clutter. After removing the link and improving the layout I was then faced with the thought of "OK.... what have I really sacrificed here? Have I removed any possibility of viral marketing by removing the 'Email a Friend' link?"

The metrics clearly showed me that about 1 hundredth of 1 percent (0.01%) of all email recipients actually click through on "Refer a Friend, "Refer a Buddy", and "Email a Friend" links. But without the "Refer a Friend" link, wouldn't customers simply use the 'Forward' buttons in the email reader anyway? Afterall, that's how 99.99% of all Internet viral marketing happens anyway.

I believe that most marketers today have to assume that customers will hit their "Forward" button long before they'll utilize an inline forward feature. Forwarding email is a sub-conscious activity with reliable results that requires no learning curve for most consumers, whereas the "Refer a Friend" found inline behaves differently from one email marketing engine to another, and privacy conscious consumers will not be comfortable using your email marketing engine for exchanging messages between friends.

Maybe it's time to re-think this feature and propose some new and innovative approaches to viral marketing. In a B2C environment, maybe there would be more success by taking a Hallmark card approach where the sender gets to email a card to a recipient (birthday, anniversary, whatever) and incorporate the marketing message into the email?

In other words, "Refer a Friend" links are competing directly against email forwarding, and must therefore provide more utility and value to win.