Why Technical Copywriting Agencies are Different
When it comes to marketing or lead generation campaigns, content remains king – the assets that you put in front of your audience to tell them about what you offer and how working with you can benefit them. From extensive whitepapers to short video scripts and even captions, each needs to be carefully written to convey just the right message.
For a B2B campaign, you’ll need a technical copywriting agency - but what particular skills does an agency need?
As a company, they’ll need to understand your business, your technology, your markets and your customers. Only in this way can they hope to produce content that will grip your audience.
The writers employed by the technical copywriting agency should ideally have a good depth of technical knowledge about the industries you serve and the technologies you offer. In addition, they may have industrial experience themselves and will be accustomed to speaking to engineers and developers, encouraging them to give the answers that potential customers want to know.
When developing written content, too many people make the mistake of focusing on the features of the product or its innovative technology. These are useful things to know and should come across in many of the written pieces produced, but what does this mean for actual potential users? An experienced content writer will seek to get behind these headline features, to discover the benefits and what they can bring to users – will it save them energy, cut maintenance costs, improve quality, and make their processes better and more efficient? Users will ask what they can do with it that they could not do before - in effect, why should I invest in this? A good technical copywriter will keep the conversation focused on the issues important to customers and the questions they want answered.
At certain stages, you may want content that provides information on the issues facing the industries you are addressing. The technical copywriting agency’s writers will be able to write objectively about these issues, producing whitepapers and substantial feature articles that position you as a thought leader in your industry. To produce this content, they’ll ask the right questions of your industry experts, as well as research a wide range of online resources to back up the story with statistics, trends and projections.
Then there is the matter of tone. An experienced technical writer will know that a white paper is more academic, more formal in style and tone, and needs to be backed up with references from trusted sources that help develop and underpin the points you need to put across.
Similarly, a feature article will be more balanced in tone, while a blog can be more playful and informal, using idioms, humour and even slang to get a reaction from readers.
This is quite different to a brochure, which would have a style that is confident, informative and enthusiastic about your proposed solution. More promotional in its approach, the writer knows that this is the chance to really sell the benefits of your solutions. They will use language that stirs the imagination of the reader, showing them that your company understands their challenges and listing the benefits they could reap from becoming one of your customers.
A press release will be both informative and promotional – however, a good technical copywriter will ensure it is not mere marketing fluff but has something useful to say and says it in a way that resonates with readers.
Other collateral includes video scripts, landing pages, advertising and social media entries, all of which have their own goals and so need to be developed in a way that produces the desired effect. For example, while with a white paper, the writer has the space to develop an argument and back it up, social media entries are strictly limited in their character count, demanding some creativity to get a powerful message across in such a restricted form.
With all these content forms, a good writer will be able to get across the information that readers need in a way that will maintain their interest, balancing the right amount of detail while not overloading the piece with irrelevant material.
Another issue companies can face, is the audience that you want to address and the different roles or personas that your target companies have. For example, you may sell services that involve a strategic maintenance partnership that could help transform the cost base of a customer. Such an important decision would be up to the CEO and CFO, so you need collateral that would appeal to these personas, pointing out trends in maintenance and showing how other companies are benefiting from similar contracts.
Other personas could be the Production Manager, who will be interested in cutting costs and ensuring a high uptime for machinery and other assets. The Maintenance Manager will be interested in ensuring that technicians are making the most of their time, finding faults quickly and easily and ensuring machines are maintained efficiently and at the right time. Collateral for these personas should emphasise practical, everyday benefits of using your solutions, ideally with real-world savings figures from previous users.
Written content is the basis of all marketing and with the right technical copywriting agency, you can make use of its many forms to convey the message you need and improve your engagement with new and existing customers.
How to Make Your LinkedIn Lead Generation a Success
When it comes to marketing, getting leads is the be-all and end-all. It’s a simple equation – no leads equals no sales equals no profit.
It’s no surprise then that most businesses say generating leads is their top marketing priority. But how is it done? What’s the best way to get high-quality potential customers into your database?
Social media has emerged as possibly the most powerful way to get high-quality leads and the front runner among these social platforms is LinkedIn. Once thought of as mostly a tool for professional networking, LinkedIn has evolved to become the leading tool for generating leads both with organic and paid campaigns.
In fact, LinkedIn beats all other social media platforms hands down – today, over 80% of B2B leads from social media originate from LinkedIn. It’s not so surprising that LinkedIn is so valuable to B2B marketers when you consider the high number of professionals and entrepreneurs that are currently members – some 612 million users from 200 countries.
So how do you turn some of these millions of members into solid leads for your business? You are asking people to part with valuable contact information, so you first need to offer them something in return. Put up high-quality content – articles that tell them something useful, infographics that explain issues or technologies and webinars that offer the thoughts of leading commentators in the industry.
This is the basis of capturing lead data and once you have a compelling offer, LinkedIn will do the leg work for you. It does this through LinkedIn Lead Generation Forms, which automatically fills in contact data from its members who respond to your offer.
Under LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager, a simple process of selecting your type of campaign, where you want it to run and what type of people you are interested in sets your ad up to receive interest from members.
When members click your ad, they see a form that’s already filled with information from their profiles. With a single click on the form, members can send you their information instantly, with no need to type anything themselves.
As well as generating high quality leads quickly and easily, you can use LinkedIn’s campaign manager to see how well your campaign is doing – track the cost per lead, see the lead form fill rate and the number of leads from your target audiences.
A more in-depth and detailed approach is offered with LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator tool.
This has several key features that can supercharge your lead generation and contact activities. It allows you to find the right people and companies to get the most relevant contacts. It will also offer customized suggestions of contacts at your target accounts.
Realtime updates will tell you about your leads, with details such as job changes. You can also integrate leads with your CRM, while the InMail feature allows you to get in touch with over 500 million LinkedIn members, even if you are not connected to them.
One feature, Smart Links Presentations, allows people to see content without downloading it, while you can see who has viewed it. You can also get profile data for contacts sent to your Outlook inbox and see who’s viewed your own profile.
There are also other tools out there to help you optimize your efforts on LinkedIn further.
These include LeadIQ, a software package that makes it easier to capture and analyse LinkedIn prospects. LeadIQ allows you to capture leads easily while browsing LinkedIn, or indeed any other site, while it also offers an analytics dashboard to keep track of performance. It can also interface with other sales tools, avoiding the need to manually re-enter data from one platform to another.
If you want to look beyond LinkedIn, Discoverly could be an option. This is a browser extension that allows you to see what your prospects are doing on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
Other options include Attach. Although LinkedIn InMail allows you to contact anyone on LinkedIn, it’s not possible to see if they have read your message until they actually reply to you. Attach can do this, telling you what the person read, when they read it and how long for. This could be invaluable to help you follow up with contacts and target them with the right content or offer to gain their attention.
LinkedIn is today’s top lead generation tool – use it together with some other tools to meet your specific needs and you could soon be on the way to transforming your lead generation efforts.
The Benefits to Enriching Lead Data
You may have a hatful of good leads to pursue but just having names and an email address may not be enough to define these leads as either an MQL or SQL. It’s all too easy to craft an email designed to grab the attention of a particular prospect and then have it bounce back as undelivered. The address was obviously inaccurate, leaving you scratching your head about what to do next.
What’s needed is more information about the lead. This is the idea behind lead enrichment, which gathers supportive data around the leads in your database.
Using lead enrichment gives you a better chance of being sure that the data you have on your leads is as up-to-date and accurate as possible.
The Value of Enriching Lead Data
Lead enrichment usually entails getting information such as industry, company size, job description, and contact details such as phone number and email. Beyond these details, lead enrichment can be any information that you add to help your sales team qualify their contact as an SQL and alter their approaches to be more successful.
This information can take the form of demographic data such as age, gender, education and interests. You may also find it useful to have more detailed geographic data about prospects, such as ZIP or post codes, the country they reside in, their home city, and the time zone they operate in.
Time zone can be particularly important if you are planning on holding live online events for an international audience, such as webinars or panel discussions. It can also help in the timing of email distribution.
Information about the contact’s professional life can also be valuable. This could include information on the business sector they work in, the size of their company, their position and responsibilities in the organization, their experience and career path and membership of professional bodies or standards organizations. There is also the possibility of capturing so-called behavioural data, which would include data such as the challenges, desires, needs and pain points of the individual.
Having this data to hand helps marketing and sales staff be more productive, ensuring they can tailor their approach to the lead and thus stand a better chance of achieving a successful outcome.
This additional information makes the basic data more useful by providing deeper insight into the needs, expectations and ambitions of the target audience. This allows you to target prospects with much more personalized and relevant messages.
Some of the other benefits include building more meaningful customer relationships. It also helps you identify those customers who are more likely to make a purchase. Lead data enrichment can therefore boost responses to your marketing activity or improve sales growth, while at the same time improving your customers’ experience, and enhancing your company’s reputation.
Lead Data Enrichment Providers
There are many companies and platforms that can help you gain this enriched data. However, you will want to be sure they can provide the information your team are actually looking for and will find useful. It is also good to know what your ideal customer profile/personas look like.
Knowing this helps you zero in on the providers that will offer what you need and won’t provide information that is of little or no use. For example, if you work primarily with B2B companies that provide automation solutions, you will want to find a data provider that specializes in those types of contacts and profiles.
Providers include LeadIQ, a software platform that makes it easy to capture and analyse LinkedIn prospects. LeadIQ allows you to capture leads easily while browsing LinkedIn, or indeed any other site. It also offers an analytics dashboard to keep track of performance, and can interface with other sales tools, avoiding the need to manually re-enter data from one platform to another.
A similar tool is Lusha, which provides accurate contact details from LinkedIn profiles. These include work and personal emails and even prospects’ personal phone numbers. It also allows you to search for employees and companies on a wide variety of sites, and contacts can be saved to your own CRM.
Another leading tool is Clearbit, which allows you to quickly extract lead information from a wide range of social media sites. These include Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. Clearbit can also integrate with your existing CRM.
Pipl is a powerful data enrichment software, able to turn any email address or domain into a complete profile for a person. The data captured includes name, size of the company, job information, demographic data and social profiles.
Similarly, FullContact provides a complete vision of the contact, offering a variety of data based on their name, email, phone number or location
Gathering leads is an essential activity – if you ensure you also enrich that data by using one or more lead enrichment tools, you can make your marketing or sales activity much more focused and help turn those prospects into lifelong customers.
Landing Pages: Best Practices for Lead Generation
We often see them in our trawl through the web for information on technology solutions and services. Some grab our attention, while others are dull. Some are clear, while others are cluttered and confusing.
I’m talking about landing pages. We have all responded to at least a few and they form an indispensable part of the marketer’s playbook. But what exactly is a landing page? What is it for and what do you need to do to make sure yours is a great one?
A landing page is first and foremost simply a web page, but one with a very specific purpose. It displays directed sales copy that is a logical extension of the advertisement, search result or link or whatever drove the user to that page.
As such, they can be a great way to capture new sales leads. Direct people to a landing page with a good offer - a white paper, a report or some other useful collateral - in return for some basic contact details and you could be on the path to some valuable new contacts.
There are lots of ideas about what makes a great landing page, and there are many ideas of best practice. Essentially, the mark of a good landing page is that it works. It maximizes the number of high-quality leads and minimizes the number of time wasters. Ultimately, conversions are what matter most.
But what about the details? What do you actually put on a landing page to ensure these visitors download your content, leave their contact information and turn into potential customers?
What is best practice for landing pages?
Fit the flow
Firstly, the landing page must fit the flow of the ad or link that drove people to the landing page. You’ll also need a great, compelling headline, one that really resonates with your audience.
Customize them
Landing pages need to be customized - they are a destination designed to meet a specific purpose, to generate leads, so don’t simply route people to your homepage or a product page. Create many different custom landing pages so that the experience is as smooth as possible, from whatever search or LinkedIn ad, or even link on your email that you’ve provided potential leads.
Keep it clean
A good landing page is a simple one – clean, uncluttered design is much more attractive to the visitor than one that has different, clashing elements all over the page. It should be immediately obvious what the visitor has to do, with clear, simple instructions in an easy-to-read font. No-one wants to hunt around for the ‘download’ button amongst a host of other elements.
Make it obvious
The best landing pages have a strong offer and tell you straight away what you will get. Readers need to see what they are getting by downloading your content, as well as a clear call to action that invites the user to do something.
For this reason, the heading should be direct and unequivocal - ‘Download your free eBook', ‘Get your white paper here’. There’s no room for subtlety here – tell it like it is.
Also, be sure to highlight the sign-up form and have the button stand out in a contrasting colour to the rest of the page.
Give them a reason
There should also be an ‘inescapable why’ - the challenge or problem that is solved by your product or service. This can be best done by using the headline and subheadings – put the main value in the headline and use the subheads to back this up.
For example:
‘Free guide to IoT connectivity’
- Choose the right connectivity option for your IoT solution
If you want people to find out more about your solution, you can also highlight some issue, be it cost, convenience or speed – make it clear that your solution is cheaper, easier or faster than the alternatives.
Remember, you have only a few seconds to grab the reader’s attention and encourage them to take action, so make them want what you are offering.
Don’t get bogged down in detail
If you want to offer supporting information, be sparing and make sure it doesn’t clutter up the page. Put extra material in concise bullet points. If you really need to offer more details than can be summed up concisely, consider putting them lower down the page so people can scroll to them if they want to.
You could also consider video landing pages – you could put the key points in text and offer a clickable video to share more detailed information.
Make it urgent
It doesn’t hurt to introduce some urgency – ‘download now’, ‘get your white paper today’. You can put CTAs in the headlines, in the body copy and even on the form submission buttons, like ’get your copy now.’
Match the form to the offer
As a general rule, keep the form to a minimum – no-one likes to fill in lots of boxes to get what you’re offering, so only ask for the minimum you need. Name and email are usually enough.
Many forms from market information companies go really minimalist, typically just asking for email – as they know they can use marketing tools to get other information about that person.
However, if you are offering a particularly valuable piece of content, say an extensive white paper on a topic everyone wants to know about, or a piece of original research giving great insights into an exciting market, people may be more forthcoming.
In this case, you may want to ask for more than the minimum details – getting information on the contact’s role, responsibilities and industry could give you a better idea of how to approach them with further offers.
Stick to these best practices and you could be well on the way to making great landing pages that maximise conversions. For more information on what works and what doesn't, why not check out our on-demand webinar, 'Landing Pages: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly', where we analyse the layout and content of landing pages used by a variety of B2B technology companies.,
Top 5 Marketing Applications for Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making inroads into many aspects of both industry and everyday life and marketing is no exception. As a powerful analytics and decision-making tool, AI can take much of the drudgery away from optimizing campaigns, as well as providing better insights about potential customers and how to serve them better.
Analysing Pay per Click
One of the major uses for AI in marketing is in PPC advertising. AI PPC tools take your data and combine it with their own, analyze it and make recommendations. It works by finding phrases your competitors are using and flags up opportunities you may have missed. It will point out search terms you could be using in your own campaigns.
The tool can then take these phrases and run them against Google’s own algorithm, making further suggestions. This can be done in real-time, allowing you to optimize your PPC strategy hour-by-hour and day-by-day, without the need to make manual adjustments.
Another related challenge is knowing where to place adverts and messaging. Programmatic advertising platforms use machine learning to bid on the most relevant ad space. Using data on interests, locations and purchase history, the platforms allow marketing teams to target the right channels for their campaign at the correct time.
Social media
Social media has taken the word by storm and has become one of the major tools in the marketer’s toolbox. In fact, it is probably today’s biggest and most dynamic form of marketing.
AI can do a great deal to make it even more useful, with tools to autogenerate social media content as well as automatically including hashtags and short links to other content. AI also offers tools to automatically schedule social media shares and for some types of social media, it can help create ads and manage them in minutes.
Tools exist to optimize social media campaigns and discover which posts work best using advanced analytics. AI can also be used to measure trends across each social media channel and find the target audience you are looking for.
It can also analyse what is being said on social media, making use of techniques such as Natural language Processing, or NLP, to analyse what is being said about your product and help determine the level of customer satisfaction you are achieving. Using this data, AI can track mentions of your brand, find emerging trends, new audiences and keep track of your reputation.
Predictive analysis
Understanding what someone is likely to want next is a major goal of marketers, who can then respond with timely content or offers to suit a potential customer’s needs.
AI can help marketers assess how likely it is that a user would use a service or buy a product. It can also predict which products are more likely to generate interest as well as finding the most brand loyal customers and those who might possibly turn to other vendors or providers.
Understanding the types of products, a customer will be looking for and when allows marketers to position campaigns more accurately.
AI can also help marketing teams track ROI, allowing them to see which campaigns contributed most.
Lead scoring
AI is great at uncovering things that affect whether or not someone is likely to become a customer. For example, machine learning models can score marketing leads using a wide variety of factors. This can help the model learn about the leads that became opportunities and those that went further to actually create revenue.
Each lead can be evaluated and scored by looking at customer behaviour, company size, industry and other factors, resulting in a ranked list of leads that sales representatives can follow up. AI can also provide reason codes for each lead, allowing sales to see the key factors that make the lead valuable. This ensures that sales get the highest quality leads, helping them achieve quotas more quickly and giving lower sales costs.
Language processing
The ability of AI systems to process and analyse human language allows the input from the customer to be converted into something that can produce the correct response or content.
NLP allows chatbots to augment customer service agents, allowing customers with more basic queries to be answered cost-effectively with immediate, accurate answers. The scans use historical data and previous answers to give personalized results for each customer. Customer service agents can then use their time to deal with complicated enquiries that require the human touch.
Advances in speech recognition and NLP have allowed Google to achieve a speech recognition accuracy rate of 95 per cent, leading to searches becoming better and improving consumer experience.
AI is opening up a whole new world of opportunities for marketers, bringing powerful tools and techniques that ensure campaigns are more targeted, cost-effective and above all, successful.
Straight Talking is the Way to Get to Engineers
In B2B marketing, we are very often communicating with engineers – but how can we do this effectively and what kind of approach will work with them?
Engineers spend their time dealing with hard facts – if they don’t get things right or achieve the right degree of precision, the project can fail. In the worst-case scenario this can result in death or serious injury to users. So, they need to deal with things as they are, not how they want them to be.
This means that when talking to engineers, we need to adopt the same approach – give them actual verifiable facts about your product. With their objective approach, engineers do not like ‘marketing puff’. Although they are happy to know why you think your product is amazing, you have to back this up with real data.
They are also a sceptical bunch. Engineers have seen it all before and will have experience of products, equipment, techniques and their own designs not living up to expectations. They will tend to doubt any extraordinary claim, so be prepared to put your arguments forward rationally if you want to persuade them. They certainly won’t be impressed by excited advertising.
A numbers game
Similarly, engineers love proof in the form of numbers. Their profession is based on them, and they use them as a fundamental part of their daily work. Measuring, collecting data and drawing up plans depend on numbers. They need to be precise to ensure products are the right size or have the correct performance or fit with other components.
This is why your communications should be heavy on the numbers – show what performance your product can achieve, how many percent it is better than the alternative or how much time it can save.
Don’t be afraid to go into too much detail - engineers want to see all the specifications of your product or the details of how your service will benefit them, so make sure all the information is available for them to access.
Precision in all things
As well as numbers, language must also be precise. To engineers, using words with accurate meaning is important. Many industries have their own particular jargon, words that convey a lot of information to people in the know. To communicate with engineers, you must know the definition of the words in common use in their specific industry sector and use them correctly in the right context.
Also don’t be too disappointed if your well-crafted LinkedIn post doesn’t receive a host of replies and comments. Engineers can be reticent about giving praise and will tend to give it only if fully justified. This means that when you do get favourable comments from them, they are all the more valuable for being sincerely felt.
That said, engineers love technology and the effect it can have. By sticking to the facts of what your solution can do and the great benefits it can offer, you can get them on side and as excited about what it can do for them as you are.
Seven Secrets of Good Copywriting
I once did some work producing magazines for a government department. One day my main client contact told me I would soon be receiving a news item for the next issue. ‘This will go through with no editing needed,’ he assured me. ‘The guy writing it has a master’s degree in English.’
Hmm, I thought – we’ll see. Sure enough, the article kicked off with this beauty of a sentence:
‘The dominant Transatlantic paradigm is predicated on assiduous improvement.’
I don’t mind admitting that some of those words had me scurrying for a dictionary. I eventually converted it into: ‘Most people in the US and the UK believe that things can only be improved through hard work.’
You guessed it – no-one queried my version and it was the one that ‘went through without editing.’
So, how do we avoid confusing our reader and instead, leave them more informed and knowledgeable than before?
Here are our seven tips for better copywriting.
Keep it simple
As in the example above, the art of good writing lies in trying to make yourself understood by as many people as possible. That seems obvious but it’s surprising how many writers over complicate things, opting for esoteric and arcane words in place of the simple and the everyday.
I’m a big fan of the articles in ‘New Scientist’. With an easy-to-read style and the ability to simplify complex concepts without trivializing them, the writers get information straight into your mind without you needing to re-read any sentences – for a time after reading the article, I understand ideas like string theory and membrane universes.
Most people are capable of understanding what you want to get across to them. I’ve found that if they don’t, it’s most likely because I haven’t explained it well enough.
Break it up
No piece of writing will attract a reader if it is merely a long block of solid text, so break it up with frequent subheads. Depending on the form, you may also want to include tables or illustrations. Try short sentences.
It’s at about this time in a blog that I’m glad of some bullet points – so here goes.
- If it’s a blog, consider starting off with an anecdote – nothing gets the reader hooked quite like a story, so get personal to keep people reading.
- Suppress your inner nerd – it’s easy to get too technical but resist the urge to start quoting your data sheet. It will just read like a manual and turn people off. If you want people to know more, point them subtly towards a landing page for your downloadable collateral.
- Don’t be afraid to use humour – you need to be careful, but a little harmless fun in the right place can give the reader a break and doesn’t go amiss. Sending your readers away with a smile can help them remember your piece. And speaking of humour…
Avoid cliches like the plague
Too often we adopt lazy words or phrases that add nothing to what we are trying to say, or even just make things less clear. ‘Leverage’ – I’m looking at you. What does it bring to the party that the simple word ‘use’ doesn’t? The same goes for ‘impact’ and its mushrooming verb forms – ‘effect’ and ‘affect’ do the same job more elegantly.
Overusing words and phrases that everybody else makes habitual use of just gives the impression that you are not thinking about what you are writing and have not bothered to really find a way to connect with your audience.
Have a good structure
This all depends on the type of piece you are writing of course – a whitepaper will have a different structure to that of a feature article, which will be different again from a blog. But whatever form you are using, getting the structure right will help you organize your thoughts and present the information in the best way – the way that ensures your readers understand it.
Essentially, a good structure should tell a good story, taking the reader from little or no knowledge of the subject to a reasonable understanding of its main points.
Who are you talking to?
If you are talking to automation engineers, they won’t appreciate you spelling out PID control and what it does – on the other hand, you might need a different approach if you are trying to persuade high school students to take part in a STEM programme run by your client.
You need to know who you are trying to reach – what do they know about the subject already, what is their level of expertise, what do you need to spell out and what can you take for granted?
Style matters
An important question to ask yourself is what style you are going to adopt? A white paper will be more academic in style and tone, whereas a brochure would have a style that is confident, informative and enthusiastic about your proposed solution. A feature article will be balanced in tone, while a blog can be more playful and informal, using idioms, humour and even slang to get a reaction from readers.
Also don’t forget things like passive and active voice. In general, active voice is preferred to passive voice – ‘the cat chased the ball’ rather than ‘the ball was chased by the cat’.
In the active voice, the subject is something or does something – in the passive voice, the subject is acted upon by something else. Active voice makes your writing stronger and more direct.
Eye for detail
Don’t worry – even the most experienced writers miss typos and repetition. It’s all too easy to spoil a seemingly well written piece by failing to spot a misplaced or missing apostrophe. The trick here is not to be in too much of a hurry. If you can, put the piece away for a day or so and come back to it with a fresh eye. You’ll almost certainly think ‘How on Earth did I miss that?’, as you correct punctuation and remove unnecessary spaces.
Stepping away from the article also lets you view it more objectively – suddenly, it’s not your best ever piece of work, full of stunning phrases and eye-catching concepts, but simply another text to appraise with a critical eye.
Follow these tips and you could soon be on the way to improving your own copywriting and making those vital connections with your readers.
The Seven Key Things We Learned From Litmus’ State of Email Report
With its familiarity and ease of use, e-mail is a powerful communications tool, one that marketers have used to their advantage. But how is it changing – are users opening more or fewer marketing e-mails, or using different platforms? How has the pandemic affected e-mail’s prospects?
These are the questions addressed by Litmus’ State of Email Engagement Report 2020, a handy guide to the state of play in marketing emails.
Here we take a look at the findings and get some tips on how to improve the success of marketing emails.
Where does your audience open e-mails?
It’s vital to know where your potential customers open your e-mails. Is it on a mobile, or perhaps on a desktop? The clients they use can also affect your strategy – for example, if many of your customers use Outlook, you may want to rethink your e-mail design to reflect this.
Litmus found that the top email clients are Apple iPhone and G-Mail, with each battling it out around the 33% mark. Also, webmail has trumped mobile for the top spot for where to open, most likely due to the pandemic.
The report recommends analyzing your customers’ use of email clients and optimizing your testing and design to reflect this. If people are moving away from mobile email, design should again reflect this but ensure your email can be easily read across all devices.
When are emails opened?
To maximize their chances of being read, it is vital to know when your audience is likely to open the e-mails you send them – and this differs with each country.
For example, the report found that, in the US, 21% of all opens happen between 9 am and noon, the same as last year, whereas in the UK, there has been a distinct shift in opening times from the second to the third quarter, from 11 am to 9 am.
Litmus suggests there is no magic opening time that should govern your send schedule – instead, look at the demographics and time zones and send out test emails based on their location. If you are seeking to grow in a particular region, it may be best to start your testing there.
How do subscribers engage with your e-mails?
How many people open your e-mail is an important data point but it’s also essential to know other things about how your audience engages with your e-mails.
For example, do you know how much time they spend reading your e-mail? This could govern how long they should be.
The report found that the time spent reading an e-mail is down 12% from two years ago and now averages only 11.82 seconds. Litmus suggests keeping an eye on how your reading time compares with the global average.
Despite mobile being a less popular medium for reading emails, when people do engage with them in this way, they now spend an extra 1.33 seconds reading them then they did at the beginning of 2020. To boost the chance of an e-mail actually being read, Litmus suggests introducing fun elements like quizzes to keep peoples’ attention.
Printing e-mails can be a good indicator of how people are engaging with your offers – for example, some offers may require printing out a physical coupon. The average print rate has gone down by 40%, with only one print for every 568 opens, most probably due to the pandemic. Knowing who printed your e-mail will determine how you follow up with reminders on time limited offers.
As forwarding rates are higher, with 1 forward for every 277 opens, tracking forward rates is a good way to assess which e-mails are likely to go viral and extend the impact of your offers.
It’s clear that knowing more about how, where and when emails are opened is a great basis for maximizing the effect of this powerful tool. To download and read the full report yourself, please click here.
An In-Depth Look into the Truth about Artificial Intelligence in Marketing
As with many other aspects of industry and commerce, Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is having a huge effect on marketing, bringing exciting new tools to bear on the task of promoting goods and services to varied markets. There has been a huge increase in the numbers of companies offering marketing technology. Many claim to use AI, but how many of them actually do so?
To get the real picture, we first need to be clear what AI is. One of the major characteristics of an AI solution is its use of algorithms, which could be formulae or logical decision trees - basically, a fixed set of rules to actually optimise a campaign or to do something else as part of your B2B marketing activities. The key thing about these algorithms is they’re programmed by a human and will typically have very limited ability to develop or learn.
The other side of AI is machine learning or neural networks, which is essentially computers understanding the world, and then trying to apply rules based on that understanding. The key thing about machine learning is you need to train the computer with various data sets. But once you’ve done that, the computer can do things and have insights that a human may not have, making it the most exciting part of AI.
AI can also be narrow or general - narrow AI tends to be focused around trying to achieve a particular outcome, or perform a particular activity, whereas general AI is basically the intelligent computer HAL from the film ‘2001’.
When we look at AI for B2B marketing, we’ll be focusing on narrow AI, so our definition is a computer algorithm that can learn from data to produce insights and recommendations specific to the brand or campaign. To add value, the algorithm must learn and can’t simply be a preprogrammed set of rows.
And if it’s learning from the activities for a particular brand or campaign, it should then be able to produce recommendations that are uniquely beneficial to that brand, or that campaign.
The challenges of machine learning
We need to ask if there has been a huge impact from machine learning on B2B marketing.
The CMO survey for 2019 shows that almost 60% of the respondents say they’re using AI today, although its main uses are in personalization of content, and predictive analytics, both of which tend to be algorithmic type applications. In these, the computer might be delivering different content, to different personas, but it’s based on a set of rules – not machine learning.
This means that the bar is not very high for using AI in marketing, as predictive analytics can be as simple as lead scoring algorithms. So, at the very simple level, everybody can start using AI.
If we look at some simple examples of AI in marketing, the first to consider is content creation. One of the most common uses is email subject line generators. These tend to use a very basic approach where a stock phrase is put in front of a benefit. This is not a bad way to generate ideas for a subject line, but it will be sometime before we get AI writing with the same degree of verve as a human copywriter.
Content personalization is offered by many tools, with most of them based on simple fixed rules. The most important thing here is the insights used to personalize the content, which are generated by humans - a human works out why one persona needs a particular message, and another persona needs a different message or a message phrased in a different way. So, it’s very different from something that’s truly intelligent, making it a great way to get into AI.
However, we’re still some way from computers actually running your marketing campaign and typically, most people are not using machine learning tools.
So, why don’t computers learn? Well, it’s actually quite hard to train a computer, requiring a neural network and a training set. There is also no easy answer to how much data you need, but typically, it’s thousands of data points and you may not have thousands of email subject lines you can compare to find out which will be most effective.
Although computers are pretty slow learners, they’re much less likely to jump to incorrect assumptions than humans. People may assume that the email with the highest percentage open rate must be performing better, whereas, taking into account randomness and long term performance, the AI solution will come to a more considered conclusion. But, still, computers are very slow learners, making it hard to take advantage of machine learning.
AI can be basic but very effective
There are actually fairly few applications of AI that really make a difference in marketing.
In AI for B2B, they really fall into three key areas around marketing itself. One is look-a-likes - if I know this particular profile of customer is a good customer, then find me similar people who might well be good customers.
You can use AI to predict intent, which can be as simple as lead scoring, or it can be a much more complex algorithm that learns who’s likely to buy which product.
Performance prediction is being able to assess whether a particular campaign is likely to perform well. These three areas of AI are all things that you can actually use now that will use machine learning and help you with your campaigns. But as you can see, they’re fairly small elements of the overall campaign and there’s some way to go before AI takes over a whole campaign.
Although things like look-a-like audiences or predicting intent are probably the least exciting forms of AI, they give the most benefits.
Pay per click advertising often uses AI, so if you’re using Google ads, you might be using smart bidding, which will basically determine how much you pay for an ad, using an AI.
Chatbots are growing because a lot of inquiries on a website can be dealt with fairly simple automation, but what is really needed is some intelligence to process the different ways people can ask questions.
By the end of 2021 about 40% of companies will adopt voice technology, creating things like Alexa. This does all the difficult work of understanding what the user is asking, so it’s very easy to generate these chatbots and generate voice skills.
Another application is image recognition. The huge data sets available for images make it relatively easy to train AIs to understand images, not only what’s in the image, but also to understand things like colour, and even the emotions of people in the picture.
One of the biggest is Google Cloud Vision API. This lets you send images to Google, which processes them and sends back information about them. A great example of this would be our client Censhare. They have a digital asset management system and they will automatically add more information, more tagging, and more data about an image using the Google Cloud Vision API.
Designed for marketing
But what you really want to know is, are there actually AI applications that truly optimize marketing activities, above and beyond the more generic ones? Well, yes, there are, including several designed to help you find and target the best accounts.
Once you’ve got an account list, you can use a tool like Bombora, which will identify things that drive sales, such as if they hire new people, if they announced new sales, if they perhaps are a startup, or getting new funding.
There’s also automated account discovery. With Terminus, you provide a list of accounts that you want to target, and the system then identifies similar accounts.
Then there’s digital behaviour analysis. This takes what Bombora is doing and looks at some of the contacts you’re targeting, trying to build a picture of the company and the contacts and assess the right time to approach that particular customer.
Another aspect is personalizing content. Power Factory tries to serve content so people visiting your website get the right content at the right time. You can track things like the time spent engaging on each part of the content and see if it resulted in a sale, so you can get a lot more information than just offering a PDF.
Persado discovers which phrases resonate with your audience, so you can use the phrases that work the best - pure AI powered copywriting. And then there are also products that actually identify content, such as rasa.io which finds related content for your newsletters.
Still, generating natural language is not easy. I think our copywriters can relax, because it’s unlikely we’re going to see them put out of business - maybe product descriptions could be written with AI in the very near future, but long form copywriting will still be written by humans for the foreseeable future.
There are also a number of AI assistants that aim to follow up contacts you might meet at a trade show, for example - they’ll send emails that appear to be from real people, following up and trying to get someone to respond. You can get into this with a free trial with products like Conversica. The interaction is pretty limited, but it’s not a bad solution if you just want something that’s going to automatically send follow up emails.
The next area is understanding engagement, looking at how and when people engage with the content, and ultimately aiming to provide smart personalization. Again, it’s not necessarily generating the content that people are going to engage with, but it’s certainly going to help you serve the right information at the right time to visitors.
Optimizing the time to send emails as well as the frequency is another thing that AI can help with. It’s really difficult to optimize this and it requires machines to sit there and look at what works and what doesn’t - Seventh Sense is a well-known product that aims to detect and act on engagement with email.
Go your own way
We’ve talked a lot about different products that use AI, but what about creating your own? Actually, you can. If you’ve got custom data and you want to find out why one particular project is more likely to convert than another, you might choose to build your own AI rather than buying something off the shelf.
And you probably only need a relatively small number of lines of code to do that sort of analysis, although you need a data scientist to write them – you will also need a lot of data.
AI is going to help us more, particularly with image and voice recognition and natural language processing for chatbots - if you’re not using those technologies for your digital asset management, or to create chatbots, now’s the time to start thinking about it.
Campaign optimization is an area that really is about to hit primetime - you might not want to deploy it today, as it’s still expensive, but in the next few years, we’ll see a lot more people using it, particularly in terms of dynamically serving content on the website, to drive people through their customer journey.
AIs are also going to be able to give indications of performance, whether you’re likely to win a particular design opportunity, or whether your lead is a high or a low score for example.
Top tips
So finally, how can we take advantage of AI? The first thing is, don’t feel left behind. The actual use of AI is pretty straightforward, so you can get on board very quickly without needing to invest a lot.
I would certainly experiment with simple AI - probably the easiest way to do this is with Google ads. Sometimes we see great results, sometimes not but certainly experiment with AI and try to understand how to get the best out of it.
Keeping up to date is very important, to follow what’s going on and try to understand who the new vendors are in the market. Build your data sets - the more data you can build now, the more you’ll be able to use AI as those machine learning tools come on board.
And your agency should understand AI. It is going to replace everything that they do, but an agency that uses AI is going to be a more efficient agency.
Although few organizations are really using heavyweight marketing AI, there are real applications that can be delivered with very reasonable budgets - get on board now and start understanding how AI can benefit you.
If you want to find out more about AI in Marketing, who not check out our Uncovering the Truth about Artificial Intelligence in Marketing webinar.
Drives and Controls Postponed to 2022
The Drives & Controls Exhibition will now take place from 5th - 7th April 2022, alongside the MACH Exhibition. The reschedule also applies to the co-located events - Fluid Power & Systems, Air-Tech, Plant & Asset Management and Smart Industry Expo.
We reported on the original postponement, which saw the show slip to January next year. However, with the continued uncertainty about physical events and when they may be allowed again has led the organizers, DFA Media, to make the decision to postpone to 2022.
Announcing the reschedule, DFA’s event director Ian Atkinson said: “The health and wellbeing of all our exhibitors, contractors and visitors (many of whom face travel restrictions) has to be our top priority. Therefore, as a consequence of the continued global situation, the social distancing restrictions and the requirements of our exhibitors, we have taken the decision to postpone the events until April 2022.”
Although it's sad to see that Drives and Controls won't go ahead in January, it's clear to see this has been a hard decision for DFA Media and that this move will allow them to host what we are sure will be an outstanding exhibition in 2022.
Hannover Messe Goes Digital to Beat COVID
With the world’s largest trade show cancelled because of the pandemic, organizers of Hannover Messe took the event online to ensure it could still showcase the latest innovations. Taking place from 14-15 July, Hannover Messe Digital Days was judged a great success, attracting 10,000 registered participants and 50,000 views.
A comprehensive program of presentations and panel discussions saw participation from 200 speakers and 100 companies. With a focus on Industrial Transformation, the event brought together all the latest topics in the industry, including Industry 4.0, artificial intelligence, 5G, and smart logistics.
There was also a distinct theme of how we innovate to deal with the ‘new normal’, with several presentations looking at subjects such as decentralized working, design and simulation from the home office, business continuity in a time of crisis and the future of work itself.
One of the messages of the event was that COVID-19 was accelerating digitalization in industry and that agile working will become ever more important.
There was also a ‘WomenPower’ stream, with numerous presentations and discussions looking at how women could build their careers and make their presence felt in technology industries.
Dr. Jochen Köckler, Chairman of the Board of Management of Deutsche Messe AG, says: “We made history with the HANNOVER MESSE Digital Days, demonstrating impressively that we can also organize digital events. For us as a trade fair organizer, this is an important step forward towards hybrid events. With our high level of trade fair expertise, our digital know-how and our content-related expertise, we are ideally prepared for a fresh start after the crisis.
“In the future, we will digitally extend the content of HANNOVER MESSE or address individual trends or topics with digital formats. The content of the Digital Days will continue to be available online and promote networking between companies and visitors.”
All presentation content is available online at https://www.hannovermesse.digital/en
PCIM Europe Opens Call for Papers 2020
The PCIM Europe conference 2020 has launched its call for papers, with researchers invited to submit abstracts of their papers or posters by 15th October 2019.
PCIM Europe is the world's leading exhibition and conference for power electronics, intelligent motion, renewable energy, and energy management.
All accepted papers will be published in the PCIM Europe conference proceedings, as well as in the scientific databases of IEEExplore, Scopus, Compendex and IET Inspec Direct. Speakers can gain valuable contacts at the conference and exhibition, taking place at the same time and hosting more than 500 international exhibitors, over 800 conference attendees and around 12,000 visitors.
Winners of the Best Paper Award and three Young Engineer Awards will each receive prize money of €1,000. To encourage student participation, a Student Travel Grant Program is available to help students with the costs of attending the conference and presenting papers.
For further details and conditions about the “Call for Papers”, please visit the conference website.