The stories
out there are too numerous to recount. Inattention to detail and follow
established process lead to catastrophic failures, sometimes resulting in the
needless loss of human lives.
Most Demand
Gen and Marketing Ops professionals know how to check for the biggest sources
of mistakes. Many of you probably have QA checklists to look for the obvious
issue, such as:
Bad links
Grammar and
misspellings
General
formatting issues
Other, less
obvious mistakes often get through, however. And these can be real campaign
killers.
Managing Segmentation: How do you manage your mailing list against
the proper segmentation for a given campaign? Is there a mechanism to check the
audience to make sure it is appropriate for the communication? Or do you just
send to the list you are provided? Or, worse, just send to your entire
database?
Content Connection: Is there a seamless transition from your
email to your landing page to your asset delivery? Are expectations properly
set around what your recipient will receive and how they will receive it? Is
branding, look and feel consistent throughout the user experience?
Fair Trade: Is your CTA offer a fair trade for what you’re asking in return
from the user? Relative to user expectations on the Internet, does your trade for
an asset in exchange for the user’s information demonstrate reasonable
reciprocity?
Bait and Switch: Does your asset provide valuable insight or
information to the recipient, or is it a thinly disguised sales pitch? Nobody
likes to be scammed, so this technique will only result in mass abandonments of
your messaging.
Follow Through: So, you’ve crafted a great message,
provided a valuable, informative asset and generated great response. What next?
Have you provided logical next steps so the recipient can dive deeper into a
conversation about your ability to solve her business challenges? Or is the
recipient left to rummage through your website to try and figure out what to do
next?
Inattention
to all of the details is necessary for flawless execution and nowhere is the
“weakest link” analogy more appropriate than a close look at demand gen
campaign execution. A miss on any of these details is a campaign killer that
will stop your responses cold.
Notes:
You cannot expect to execute flawlessly without
a detailed campaign execution plan.
You cannot expect to execute flawlessly
without strict adherence to your detailed campaign execution plan..
Your campaign execution plan must be a key
component of into your overall demand gen process (see this {Demand Gen Brief}).
In next
week’s edition, we will look at Demand Generation FAIL Number 4: Where's the Menu? The last note above is the perfect segue to next week’s
{Demand Gen Brief}.
