Working in new business development for a direct marketing agency, I have the pleasure of receiving many weekly inquiries regarding our services. Quite honestly, I am starting to think that there must be a book out there titled, The most general and vague questions to ask a direct marketing agency.
Marketers traditionally have looked for marketing agencies with previous experience in their industry. The old way of thinking was that there would not be a learning curve to accommodate. Those small, yet ever so important, nuances pertaining to the industry were already understood. Most of all, the industry experience meant that the agency knew how things were traditionally done. The way all the players in the industry do things. Anyone see the underlying problem here?
OK, I admit it. My only wish is to be able to tell marketers when their “personalized emails” are, in fact, not personal at all. This bold statement is not based solely on the fact that most marketers will say they are doing something when in truth they are lacking in the execution. Rather, my frustration stems from the fact that most people who say they are already personalizing emails are basically telling me that they see no value in optimization. They are already closed off to any possibility of improvement.
If you’ve ever been tasked to respond to a request for proposal (RFP), you probably came across some questions that caused you to scratch your head. Here are my favorites, followed by my observations about what these marketers should be asking.
Many retail marketers say they know everything about their customers. I recently had a conversation with a CMO for a well-known store who said, “We do demographic, geographic, age ranges, household incomes; we do segmentation and post ads on Facebook and tweet at least 10 times per week. We combine that with the information we collect in our loyalty program as well.” The list of buckets seemed to go on and on.
Seventy-nine percent of marketing leads never convert to sales.1 Lack of B2B lead nurturing is the common cause for this predicament.
A recent marketing benchmark survey revealed that 78% of business-to-business marketers say generating high-quality leads is the top priority this year. Quantity of leads came in a distant second.