Persona Marketing vs Account-Based Marketing

Thanks to the rise of Marketo and its plethora of early adopters, the company has pushed the concept of why to switch (from Pardot, Eloqua, etc.) with Account-Based Marketing. The content language of which speaks to the many pain points of commonly used marketing automation tools. The fact of the matter is that both concepts require a lot of content to be created just to make a decent waterfall or drip marketing campaign.

Persona-based marketing really looks at data segmentation as its main focus for generating content for different decision makers and influencers in customer lifecycle management. For example. when targeting K-12 institutions as a software developer of an educational platform, your buyer personas may include superintendents, edtech buying consortiums (NY does this, for instance), principals; and the influencers may include teachers, students, and perhaps even PTA groups, if they are involved with new technology purchases or adoptions within a school district. It's also used by electronics manufacturers as well that sell direct or through distributors into businesses. With persona-based marketing, not every persona that is targeted with marketing content is a viable buyer. Most are information seekers and will eat up valuable production time creating digital content assets for their insatiable appetites. But, it is all good in the long run because these people are very vocal within their own organizations if they really like what you have to offer.

With both styles, your market strategy for reaching out to customers is based on a few firmographic segmentations to start: industry/vertical markets, revenue, location

Microsoft SmartScreen Filtering: False Positives

I have recently run across two scenarios where Microsoft's SmartScreen service for Outlook mail has flagged single-opt-in subscription content as spam. It's annoying because one of those subscriptions is from Microsoft's Virtual Academy; which also has a glaring email autoresponder issue that I'll address in another post.

Imagine if you could: a giant inbox funnel with a mesh strainer on top of it called SmartScreen. The difference is that with Outlook.com (formerly live.com, hotmail.com, etc), it captures 110% of all incoming mail. Even the legit emails get caught in this spam trap.

What is SmartScreen? It's an Internet Explorer safety feature, really intended to be a phishing filter security feature. This is weird because I'm experiencing its affects using Chrome so I suppose Microsoft has separated its function from IE and made it app-centric instead.

What's the cure for businesses with legit email?

One possibility is to report the false positive to Symantec through this link. Another, is to contact Microsoft, but that like asking Google customer service to reset your free Gmail account password (which, if you signed up with verification service before you had mobile phone service, it just might be a problem for users trying to reset their password through automation tools. Just how many people have tied a landline w/o caller ID to Google's text verification password reset?).

Basically, you're nearly stuck.

But, what you should have been doing all along..

• Have an unsubscribe or preferences link
• Have your company name and postal address listed in the email's footer
• Double opt-in for promotional content, if your ESP has that capability
• Have legit unique content that's relevant to the receiver; even when they sign up for your services. Receipt nor open of an auto-generated welcome email does not constitute an acceptance of newsletter subscription; especially not in Canada

Email Layouts

Don't treat your whitepapers like they're just something to read. Think of your audience. Think of how they'd react when they seem something like this:

It could just be that it's late at night and I'm tired. Doesn't this layout just scream "delete me"? And, you'd think that a publication whose audience is made up of CMOs that the little things like content layout and a thought-provoking headline would be used. If I didn't know any better, I'd say that this entire email was packaged and sent by a bot.

LinkedIn: Gone Phishin'

One of the problems with automated platform emails is never knowing what you're going to get on the receiving end. Sure, there are plenty of people on my contact roster whose first name is "John" and others with the last name of "Smith", but the "John Smith" character simply does not exist. Maybe someone at LinkedIn thought it was clever way to add connections this way. What makes it weirder is the language of the email which reads:

"Your contact, John Smith, just joined LinkedIn
Help welcome John and get connected"

2014-03-12, mobile screenshot
of LinkedIn notifications email

If he's already a contact, presumably farmed from the LinkedIn ecosystem, wouldn't he by default be in my network already? It makes me think this is a phising email since I don't know any John Smiths. And none exist in my LinkedIn connections nor among the apps that share contact data with LinkedIn.