Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Here are some ideas for reaching marketing people with your plan.
1) Paid advertising on this very site
2) Article placement using case studies run in marketing journals

Your program looks very attractive. Another market you should explore is business associations. I know of several who would perhaps be interested in a co-oping type of program for their members.

You might first attempt to improve your rating (such as found at: https://email-marketing-service-review.toptenreviews.com/stream-send-review...). Having independent "best of class" offering is a strong supporter of your own marketing effort.

For agencies, consider investigating:
https://www.maaw.org
https://www.ad-tech.com/
https://www.btobonline.com/

Also, you might want to target web hosting companies: https://www.webhosting.info/webhosts/
They could rebrand your offering as a VIP email marketing offering

Also, you might offer a non-profit program (for non-profit organizations) or have a designated reseller for non-profits. That could likewise be another opportunity.

Inbound Marketing. Create content of interest to agencies that will attract them to your business. Learn more about inbound marketing here.

Do a case study on one of your most successful affiliates and market that through an email campaign. Take your time and run multiple test prior to running a full campaign.

Consider offering a "best practices" webinar. Ask some of your current customers to either allow you to use some of the success stories they've had with you and use them in the webinar as illustrations of how you've helped them accomplish their goals, or invite them to participate in the webinar as a presenter.

Promote the webinar on your website, but also on sites that cater to people who work in email marketing. You might try, for example, the American Marketing Association, or some sites that contain information helpful to email marketers (https://www.emailstatcenter.com/ for example).

I think trying to set up an affiliate program with some big webhosts would be a grand idea. Many of these hosts sell space to resellers who would love to have this service. Here is a place to start with some hosts: www.webhostingreviews.com.

I host with Bluehost and they have other services that they do offer as affiliates. At least I assume that Bluehost is getting something out of it.

Even if a company changes hosts at least they would have exposure to your services and might be inclined to sign up even with a different host.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Best way to reach web designers offline is in the back of web design magizines (i.e. advertisement). Then there are sites like pixel2life that offer banner space for sale.

A good old plain and simple affiliate program would likely be the best. You could buy an affiliate program script online and add it to your web site. Then let folks start to spread word. The folks you seek tend to congregate together, so once you get a few, it begins to spread rapidly to others.

You might want to place banner ads with a webhosting listing company like www.findmywebhost.com or the like, or cheapwebhosting.com

Hope this helps you.

Darcy

Neil, you probably know this already, but I'd take a detailed look at how Campaign Monitor goes about business.

They have set themselves up as the ESP for web designers and most of their marketing efforts and outreach programs are focused on reaching exactly this demographic and not on reaching typical email marketing end users.

I'm sure there are approaches there which transfer equally well to reaching agencies.

I would go with darcy and mikee, get an affiliate program. While they take a nice cut they can bring in a lot of clients that you would otherwise never see. So while they may take 40%, you are still getting 60% of sales that may never materialize with them.

We use an affiliate program on top of our PPC campaigns and they do take a hefty cut (35-45%) but they bring in far more money than our PPC campaigns do. Thats after they take their cut. While it kind of sucks having to give them such a large cut it is worth it.

Also you should try using the new google content targeting feature. That way you can place your ads on the same page as content that potential clients would be reading. It may turn out to be more effective than PPC's since there is much less competition.

Hope this helps Neil

Dear Neil

Maybe some of the experiences we’ve picked up with a handful of UK and International clients are translatable to the US agency scene – I hope so because one is replicating the model from a new base in CA. My colleagues have covered the affiliate angle to good affect, so I’d like to concentrate a bit on the agency route.

Also, don’t forget that StreamSend is quite a favourite on this forum and after all we do have about 360,000 subscribers. You might make use of the in-house popularity

Each of the clients supply an innovative marketing product which could be used by almost any organisation to inform potential customers of their company offering – The similarity to email marketing is that though you deploy a different media, the aim is similar – to reach a large number of prospects and to carry a marketing message with a call to action.

They could have addressed the internal marketing departments of the larger companies and indeed, they will do so in good time. The direct approach is hard work and time consuming, because they have first of all to market their product to the end user, persuade them of the benefits, engage in a string of meetings and then, hopefully to close a lucrative order. Same as you would do if you approached Ford or Dell with StreamSend.

Instead, we recognised that almost all of their target end users use advertising, marketing and creative agencies to handle the execution of their marketing ideas. Those agencies do the hard work, press the flesh and win the overall contract which might or might not utilise my client’s products or services. We decided therefore to concentrate on marketing to the advertising agencies so that their particular product and specifically, their ability to deliver it was well known and trusted in the agency community. You can’t sell this sort of offering (or yours for that matter to an agency – they are unlikely to be an end-user or have a use for it!)

The unique challenge was therefore to make our client a memorable supplier to the Advertising, Marketing and Creative community, rather than trying to batter down the end user’s well guarded doors. We looked at the traditional media such as marketing week and rapidly discovered that for a given marketing spend, their impact would be minimal. Instead we took the PRM / CRM approach, (Prospect Relationship Management and Customer Relations Management) with a goal to achieve a high level of product awareness amongst the executive management of the agencies – in other words make our product a natural part of a campaign which the agency would be pitching for with, say Diago or Pepsi.

The beauty of selling to the agency market is that it is a well defined “Universe” All the agencies are listed in handbooks, directories, yellow pages and so on, so the first laborious item was to enter as many of these creatives onto a CRM system as possible. We used Maximizer Enterprise, because I had a Business Partner Arrangement with them at the time, but you might wish to consider another product.

Using purchased CSV lists and paper directories, over a couple of months they identified about 4000 agencies and the key creative contacts within them. Then we started mailing them (email came later, once a relationship had been established) The product packs contained samples and examples and an invitation to discuss potential campaigns they were working on to show how the customisation service could benefit a wide range of end users. Over 2 years, the CRM system grew to encompass 9000 agencies and about 45,000 contacts in them.

Mailings of innovative new products were sent to the agencies every 2 months and almost from week one, the agencies started to request samples. You might emulate this by offering trial email campaigns.

As the agency CRM system expanded and deepened, areas of specialisation and expertise emerged, which could then be targeted in mini mail campaigns with innovative products which would suit a particular market (Specials for BMW or Audi for example once we knew who handled their campaigns)

By this time, the CRM system was populated with agency specific details so that campaigns could be segmented and the number of contact email addresses had grown from about 800 at the outset to over 32,000. Now, micro email campaigns could be conducted to known recipients and as a consequence, opening rates were massive (88% on the last one) with a 70% click through to their website where the latest product and a demo pack request was available.

We are now 5 years down the line and the company is 7 times bigger than when we started. The CRM system gives them an asset which makes it difficult for new entrants to gain a foothold and command the attention they need to survive. I have estimated that to do what we have done over the last 5 years in a hurry to break into this market would cost in excess of £1.5M to get a result in 6 months.

Could I therefore suggest that you take the PRM / CRM approach and start to build a coherent relationship with every agency which might possibly use your services?

One note of fact – though the agencies negotiate a keen price and charge their clients – we know not what! – We do not offer discounts or commissions for using my client’s products. They are good enough to stand up without a bribe.

If you wish to re-sell, set this out as a separate business proposition, but use the same CRM model. There a commission is payable, but your Business Partners will be being rewarded for putting in hard work to gain clients on your behalf which, unlike an advertising agency, they will not necessarily benefit from by supplying additional services.

Best wishes

Steve Alker
Xspirt.com