An e-mail onboarding program, which consists of a series of communications specifically developed to address new e-mail sign-ups on your list, is recognized as the single greatest marketing moment marketers will have to connect with a new prospect, but many fail to take advantage of the opportunity. It is important to develop a relationship immediately after registration because the probability of a response drops dramatically after 24 hours. In fact, only 49% of marketers send a welcome or thank you message in the first 24 hours of registration.

Onboarding programs that "welcome" a prospect to your company reinforce the value of relationships and privacy commitments. A study completed by Return Path in 2008 looked at messages from leading brands after customers signed up for e-mail and found that 60% of brands failed to send welcome messages.

Creating and sustaining a relationship with customers after they have subscribed to your e-mail marketing program is a critical part of customer acquisition because the subscriber has expressed a high-level of interest in your company. New sign-ups are up to 3.7 times more likely to click on e-mails than customers that have previously been on the file, so this is the time to engage them with relevant, timely and consistent messages and information. It is important to demonstrate what your company stands for because this is the "honeymoon" period when they are most open to engagement and have the highest click percentage. This period lasts up to 8 blasts, unless an onboarding program is firmly in place. Once their click rate falls, it is extremely difficult to re-engage them at the same initial level.

Offering something special in your onboarding e-mails is a great way to retain these new sign-ups/prospects. Incorporating a coupon, a percentage off, free shipping, a bonus download of a whitepaper or free Webinar is a great method to show your appreciation and convert sign-ups into buyers.

When it comes to efficacy, a Web site is much like your home. Sure you have one, but is it working for you? Does the design of your house speak to who you are? Is the layout appropriate? Do the appliances appeal to the user and work as expected? For houses and Web sites alike, all of these questions are important. They help determine if there is a need to do a major renovation (major Web updates), or get a new house entirely (a full redesign).

Well, there are a number of things that indicate if a site is working as it should. Here are a few questions to ask yourself and your Web team:

Does the family come over for dinner very often?

In this context, your family is your users. It is important to examine the Web statistics and make sure they are using the site as expected. Do they come back often? Are they visiting pages you expect and interacting in the ways you intended – or are they sleeping on the sofa? It could be that what you have to offer isn't quite what your user needs now. The bunk beds may be out of date.

Do the drapes match the carpeting? (I'm going to flog this metaphor to death.)

We're talking branding here. As Web sites mature, the tendency is to add things you need at the moment, but didn't fit into the original design. This is only natural, but if the branding has drifted, if there are too many things inconsistent with the original idea, then it is time for an interior decorator or renovation contractor.

Can Grandma get up the stairs?

This speaks to usability. If the site contains information and functions that only appeal, or work for, one type of user, make sure that it is your key user. Even so, specialized sections of a site stand out as negative aspects of the site. Instead, consider redesigning around the core applications. If you are running an e-commerce site, makes sure that all of the core functions are geared toward making the process easy for customers to make a purchase.

Additionally, be careful of new technologies. For example, even if a new technology is cool and cutting edge, the good impression may be at the sacrifice of usability. If only 8% of your users have the plug-in, it isn't something to implement in your core functionality.

Does the floor plan make sense?

Finally, can the family even find the kitchen? What about the bathroom? Examine your key services and make sure the utilization makes is high enough to reflect a significant portion of the core user base. For example, at least 75% of users who place items in the shopping cart should complete the purchase. If this number drops below 50%, it is time to call the contractors.

The key to understanding the effectiveness of your Web site is to examine your expectations, your preferred user paths, and the actual outcomes. It is critical that all of these are examined. The Web stats and visit trends tell us only so much. Users can find the house, but will they sit down for a spell? If so, they are more likely to come back?

For more information, check out "How to know when it is time for a redesign".

A recent eyetracking study from MarketingSherpa vividly demonstrates how quickly viewers become blind to banner ads that have a consistent placement on a page. The image below shows where the eyes focused on three consecutive email newsletters with a banner ad on the left of the page.

In the first mailing, almost 80% of the viewers scanned the ad, but that was cut in half by the second email and ended up at only 20% in the third. This shows how quickly “banner blindness” can happen. We are able to very quickly process what’s new and what’s familiar on a page, and we pass over the familiar. While this processing is bad for cases like the example above, it also points to opportunities for grabbing attention.

This is MarketingSherpa’s advice for combating banner blindness:
1. Change the landscape
The most powerful way to combat banner blindness is probably to vary the page template itself. By moving landmarks, you encourage the eye to conduct a more complete scan of the page. This is easiest in the e-mail world, where creating and scheduling similar, but not identical, templates won’t send the Web team into paroxysms.

2. Change the look and feel of ads
If you can’t change the position of ads, think about changing ad sizes or the way they look. In our study, for instance, we swapped in a text list where a graphical ad had been positioned and saw a jump in attention. The eye tracks changes to a familiar landscape.

3. Increase ad rotation
The easiest way to combat blindness is to change ads frequently. For publishers, that’s easy. That’s not the case with sponsored placements or in-house advertising; these can sit static for long periods.

It isn’t clear yet if video ads suffer the same fate, but my personal experience online tells me that we should take steps to change these up as often as possible too.

Conducting research among your customers is also a brand-building opportunity. Customers gain further respect for those companies that ask their opinion. Here are direct quotes we received this week in a survey that we conducted on behalf of one of our clients:

• I respect companies that want feedback on their public opinion and how they are currently viewed.
• I have participated in these surveys in the past and feel that company xyz generally cares about customers. Thank you!
• I think it's a great idea to request comments from customers.
• Thanks for your support!
• I like to see a company retrieving information from its customers.
• I generally don't respond to these requests. However, company xyz's commitment to continuing education made me willing to participate. Thank you.
• Thank you for giving the opportunity.

Thus, our client has not only benefitted from the knowledge gained in the survey, the perception of their brand has been elevated among the survey participants.

We carefully analyze click and sales results for all of our client's e-mail campaigns. So when we hear about an e-mail test like the one by the Email Experience Council, we are happy to take the challenge. Their challenge is to analyze the efficiency of a top navigation bar if it is included as part of the e-mail.

What we have found is, it depends. It depends on the nature and audience of the e-mail. For example, a product heavy e-mail's top navigation is a useful guide to the rest of the site and should be included, while a lifestyle or offer-based e-mail will get little benefit from including the top navigation.

Using analytics to help guide the creative message will allow marketers to stay connected with their audiences. It's these types of customer behavior insights which will help with effective, one-to-one database marketing.

Several years back, when The Cluetrain Manifesto hit the bookstores, it spoke of a new era where consumers play a more critical role in controlling brand messaging and perceptions. With the rise in social marketing opportunities, brands would lose some control of the messaging that hit the public as a new forum for sharing thoughts would continue to emerge. Essentially, a brand is decreasingly what the corporate marketing department professes it to be—instead it is a sum of the influences, both good and bad—that it has on the consumer.

Case in point is www.brandtags.net. This experiment by Noah Brier enables visitors to "tag" brands with top-line thoughts of what they believe the brand to stand for. Visit the site and you'll see a vast listing of popular brands. Click on a brand and you'll see a variety of words and phrases that individuals attribute to the brand. You can also "tag" a brand with your own words or phrases. Of course, with any open forum, you'll get your share of junk phrases and comments from people who get their jollies out of spewing profanity in public. But look a little closer and you'll see clear themes in consumer perceptions. Sites like this are an increasingly effective barometer of whether the brand promise is resonating with consumers, or if other issues are overtaking the message the brand hopes to promote.

The site also underscores the importance of staying connected with your customers and prospects to learn what they really think of your brand. If you're not taking the time to ask customers what they really think of your brand, and whether you're delivering on your promises, investing the time in that research is critical—if you're truly interested in shaping your brand destiny. Failure to do so could result in someone else shaping it for you, and the results may not be what you're hoping for.

Is your data working as hard as it can? Today, marketers seeking to boost their ROI, mine information beyond the traditional basics of recency, frequency, and dollars. Programs such as our own Data121 help marketers examine their database from every angle to provide a 360-degree opportunity analysis, sales and marketing contact overview, and insights into long-term customer development. For example:

Opportunity analysis determines the quality of your lists, potential contained in your existing data for lead conversion, and possible need to supplement data from internal or third-party sources.

Sales and marketing contact overview provides an insight into the completeness of the information including customer information, segmentation, and demographic information that will allow materials to be targeted and personalized.

Insights into long-term customer development are derived through analysis to determine the database's ability to support the achievement of business objectives and improve marketing ROI.

One key to supporting a one-to-one, multichannel marketing program is a market-savvy database that's equipped to engage your customers wherever and whenever they want.

One of the greatest challenges that B-to-B marketers face is generating and cultivating new leads. If you're facing a similar challenge, consider hosting a Webinar to initiate a one-to-one dialogue with your target customers. Ovation recently conducted a two-part Webinar series for one of our clients that produced an ROI of more than 58%. The event attracted 750 registrants, of which two-thirds attended the event. It was highly successful in generating new leads (65% of attendees were not in the client's database), and it also enabled our client to connect with its current customers in a meaningful way.

We conducted a multichannel marketing effort to encourage people to sign up for the Webinar. The campaign consisted of an e-mail invitation to prospects and current customers, a print and online ad in industry trade publications, a press release, and a flyer that sales representatives could send to their customers. The e-mail generated more than 50% of the registrations with the trade ad producing approximately 20% of the sign-ups. There was also significant word-of-mouth. Nearly 20% of the registrants heard about the Webinar from a colleague.

At the conclusion of each event, attendees were asked to take a brief survey. We measured their satisfaction with various aspects of the event (content, duration, delivery, etc.) and requested their input on other topics they'd like to learn more about in future Webinars. This feedback has been valuable for planning upcoming events. If you're considering conducting a Webinar to generate B2B sales leads, here are a few key factors to keep in mind:

1. Don't go overboard talking about your products and services. Attendees will immediately be turned off if you use the event to overtly sell your products/services. It's acceptable to occasionally give your company a plug, but keep it subtle and avoid the temptation to sell, sell, sell.
2. Keep the Webinar less than an hour and leave ample time for Q&A. We also found that people prefer to have multiple Q&A sessions during the presentation rather than have one session at the end.
3. Use polls to keep attendees engaged. We saw a spike in the number of questions attendees posted shortly after a poll was conducted.
4. Follow up with an e-mail to no-shows to encourage them to participate in an archived version of the Webinar. Post links to the archive on your Web site. Within a week after the event, we had more than 15% of the participants take part in the archived event.
5. Plan your follow-up strategy in advance of the session and don't delay in following up with both attendees and no-shows. These prospects are hot. Now is the time to pitch them on your products and services.