I keep hearing about split run testing: what is it and why does it matter?

Getting the most from email is something hardly any firm actually explores. Take your average trade show: thousands of people captive for a day, dozens of business cards exchanged by each person - a frenzy of communication so loud that it's deafening. Then a week later there's a follow up from the sales team, and then, in most cases, silence.

And that's the oddity of event marketing. Part of the problem is simply the cost of field sales teams, the lack of coordination for leads management inside most firms, and the rather painful reality that there's just not much that most businesses seem ready to say to customers. So with high communication costs and little to say, the conversation dries up, leads go stale, and that frenzy of business card exchanges blurs into distant memory. Sure, a couple of key firms and people will always stand out, but most of the communications potential goes untapped. Why?

The difference email makes starts with the potential to maintain a weak tie between the potential buyer and seller. That tie might be in the form of a few relationship building messages after the event and business card exchange, or a monthly newsletter that explains what the firm does and what's new. It could be something simple and generic that goes to everyone from the show, or a message that starts to be segmented based on their interests. At a property show customers could be segmented by the buildings they were interested in, the level of budget to spend, whether they were professional investors or amateurs, and what the country of both buyer and seller is. Just a few variables like this create a relevancy in the message the customer receives and leads instantly to higher conversions for sales.

The marginal cost of each extra email is (almost) zero, and this is where the economics of communications in the digital networked society are fundamentally different from what we know in classic marketing. For a marketer with classic direct marketing, this approach to segmentation and relevancy will all be second nature, but if you're new to online marketing, then try these simple steps from Digital's team:

A simple exercise:
- Create a segmentation grid by dividing new prospects into a couple of groups based on the products they could be interested in, and another variable such as their likelihood to convert to sale.
- Create a simple email message that follows up from the event and has space for customization.
- Build out variations; one for each target group.
- Line up a response email so your sales team have the next two or three steps planned out.
- Track response rates and learn about how customers respond.

Along the way you might need some professional email copywriting support because tiny variations in the key fields you control in an email (subject line, sent from, time of day etc) can have a massive impact on the quality of the response and the likelihood of the mails getting opened.

This week I've been at MIPIM which is the world's property show. 29 000 delegates, 85 countries and 17 exhibition halls. Companies spend a year building up for a 4 day show. Here is an event where surely online marketing can come into its own - imagine the power of email, an online property showroom with TV clips of all you need to know about the investment destination. Link that to an online appointment setting system. Surely digital marketing would really add value in a fast moving international, multi-client real estate sector.

In a few weeks time I will have the pleasure of participating in the UK's largest food and drink exhibition at the NEC in Birmingham. Here buyer meets seller, in our case for the first time. We're bringing 15 companies to a Polish national exhibition stand. Imagine how much more powerful our proposition would be if we had developed a web site to inform people about our great, tasty food! We could have linked it to some photoshots of the products and maybe created an online trading platform at least a matchmaking meeting system. How to do all that; ah in English as well? - go digital and see how much more you sell more quickly.

Selecting the right channel for the right user

Even as enthusiastic digital publishing trainers, we know that not everyone is ready for digital channels and that’s fine. Part of the skill in media and marketing is knowing your audience and what they want. That applies to the formats and channels as well as the content. Some audiences will prefer their media by email, others in print, or by web or by RSS. The trick is to develop editions of the content which work within each of these channels. For example, here at Digital we produce weekly email news digests marketers can sign up for, as well as printed reports that are given out at training events and the main web editions of our publications. There’s even a mobile edition at www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/mobile as well as RSS feeds from many of our pages.

Let people chose the channel they want. There’s no need to force them from one to the other unless the economics of the business prevent print publishing from continuing. Give audiences choices about email editions, RSS and web editions alongside the print titles and they’ll gravitate to the channel that’s right for them.

We can cover some of these issues on the next Digital Publishing Strategy Academy - 27 March http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/termtime/2008/03/building_stronger_online_publi.php

How do we deal with the changing readership ages: the web is all young people, print is older. How do we move people from print to web?

Dust off your old contact list and slice into strength of lead (both the value and the potential to convert).

Go back to them with an informal 'hello', maybe explaining some of the other things you've been up to since the two of you last spoke.

Ideally have some web links inside the message so there's something they can progress into that shows more about what you can offer now.

Look for a reason to engage, typically asking more about what their needs are and where you could help.

And then maybe it's time for lunch with them ;-)

Remember that simple text email, crafted on an individual basis can have a much higher response than all the bells and whistles on a big campaign mail.

How do I re-ignite my old contacts after an absence?