Best And The Rest

Volume 12 - April 2006

A conversation with Ruth P. Stevens, President eMarketing Strategy

Ruth P. Stevens is a highly respected consultant focusing on the customer acquisition and retention functions. Ruth began her career in 1986 at Time Warner and consequently moved on to anchor senior positions at IBM, and two Internet startup companies before starting her consulting company in 2000. One of the 100 Most Influential People in Business Marketing in 2002, as identified by Crain’s “B to B” magazine, Ruth has authored two books on marketing and teaches marketing to graduate students at the Columbia Business School. She has studied marketing management at Harvard Business School and holds an MBA from Columbia University.

Ruth P Stevens

1. Can you give your thoughts on Marketing in the technology arena?

The world of B2B marketing is different from consumer marketing. Today, technology marketing is primarily a support service for sales. In this context, marketing serves two important objectives. The main one is to understand the objectives of sales and help them be more productive by identifying market opportunity and positioning the products or services to meet the needs of the target market segments. Second, tech marketers need to build awareness of the product or service and act as a door opener. One of the key deliverables is providing the sales force with qualified leads so they can actually spend more time with qualified prospects. As an aside, Internet has emerged as a key tool in helping marketers provide support to sales in a very effective manner.

If you asked me for some tips on where tech marketing dollars should be invested, I would recommend the following three areas.

Media relations and analyst relations – This approach to awareness-building is very productive for technology companies. Much more cost-effective than advertising

Website – Today, you literally do not have a business if you do not have a website. But many companies are still under-leveraging their websites and the main culprit is “brochureware”. Companies are treating the site like a print brochure. They are under-optimizing the functionality and navigation the website offers. It’s important for business marketers to take advantage of the interactivity that the Internet offers. For example, they should motivate visitors to leave behind their contact information through a simple registration form. They need to give a good reason for the visitor to provide the information, like an offer of a white paper or a case study. The objective is to de-anonymize the visit, and allow the company to kick off, and continue an on-going relationship with the visitor.

Lead nurturing – As you are aware, only a small % of leads generated are ready to pass to a sales person. Most inquiries are not ready for sales attention because of budget constraints, because the the decision maker has not been identified or owing to the timeframe. In cases where the leads are not ready to be handed over to sales, marketers need to nurture them via an ongoing series of communications through email, telephone and postal mail, until the lead is fully qualified. Most companies have under-appreciated the importance of lead nurturing programs.

2. Where do you see emarketing moving? Do you see more companies adopting these strategies? What are some of the trends you see in this area?

The trend is definitely towards electronic channels because of speed and cost. The challenge today for business marketers is in outbound communication, because email has almost been destroyed as a prospecting medium, due to spam. Email continues to be strong as a tool for customer retention and lead nurturing.

For customer acquisition, prospecting through direct mail in the US is still highly effective. The list business is extremely mature and we have some excellent mailing lists available. Surprisingly, postal mail is doing better than email as most people welcome mail and are willing to look at it. So an effectively written mail piece can yield good results. We are seeing much lower CPL (cost per lead) levels via postal mail, compared to email today

3. In your experience, what kind of companies should necessarily take to emarketing campaigns? It is applicable to almost all companies, large and small, all industries. Of course emarketing is a complicated arena. It includes the website, solo email, e-newsletters, extranets, webinars, banner advertising, search engine marketing—the list goes on and on.

4. We find that many offshore based companies rely on lead generation for sales and do little beyond that. Isn’t an integrated approach to the sales cycle important? What is your advice for technology companies especially those that are offshore based ?

Combining direct mail, telephone and internet is THE solution. Smart companies are developing a contact strategy. They target a particular audience based on value or complexity and devise a series of touches to initiate and sustain a business relationship. Touches will be a combination of websites, emails, specialty websites (landing pages, microsites, intranets and extranets and e-newsletters.

Communications are timed to stay in touch with the prospect over the length of the buying process. The recommendation is to deploy a variety of touches strategically.

ROI depends – function of margin and sales volume. DMA publishes an annual report – avg response rate was 2.7% in 2005 and avg for tel calls was 8.5% retention email avg was 2.5%