The next time you have an event to attend – be it a trade show, a networking event, a usergroup meeting, etc, do a little work ahead of time to make sure you meet with and get the contact info for key attendees.

Make a list of the people you want to be sure to meet at the event, and if you can, track down their email addresses. At the very least, you’ll be able to make a list of names to check off as the event progresses, but with a little effort you can do so much more than that.

Research:

Turn an Email Address into a Social Profile.

Do a litte digging on the people you want to meet. See if you can find their blog, their website, their facebook page, etc (use a tool like Flowtown to get headed in the right direction). With Flowtown, a simple email address unlocks the door to social profiles, and even compiles them all in once place. You can snag an image, jot down a few notes about the person, and maybe even connect in advance of the event. At the very least with a little additional insite to their personality you’ll be able to keep the conversation going with a few specific talking points.

Compile Your List:

Now take your list of names and email addresses and compile that will all the other little goodies you found about the people you want to connect with. You could put these together and print them on a small card (leave room for phone numbers and email addresses for those you don’t already have).

Get Tech Savvy:

Bump

If you’re really good, you’ll take your list of contacts and preload it – with all the additional info you found – into your phone’s address book. This way when you do get a chance to meet someone you can quickly add their contact info the address record you’ve already created. You could also try adding Bump or a similar app to your phone to make exchanging contacts super fast.

This certainly beats an akward business card exchange – and having to enter all the business card info into your CRM or address book later.

Another cool trick would be to use CardLasso from Model Metrics. CardLasso allows you to take a picture of a business card and have it automatically transcribed and entered to a csv file, your Outlook contacts or even to Salesforce as a new lead. I’m guessing the CardLasso trick is the least cost effective, but when I saw it at Dreamforce ‘08, it was really very cool.

Don’t forget to bring your business cards – you’ll still run into people who expect them – and create a plan of action for following up with all of your new-found friends in a timely manner.

Have any of your own networking tips? Share them in the comments.

My buddy Steve Caldwell and I came up with a simple work around that takes about 5 minutes to implement and doesn’t cost a dime. Rest assured, your org will still find a way to enter duplicate contacts, they always do, but this should help save some of your time and sanity.

1. Create A Unique ID Field

Create a text field (allow about 20 characters) and name it Unique ID. Make it read-only and don’t add it to any page layouts. Be sure you mark the field as a Unique ID field.

2. Create a Workflow

Now create a workflow that runs anytime a contact is created or edited. Assign a Field Update action to that workflow that combines the First Name and Last Name into one string in the Unique ID field. (John Smith unique id = johnsmith).

3. Update All Contacts

You’ll want to run the rule once to a. populate all the Unique ID fields and b. pull a list of existing duplicates. If you use the Apex Data Loader, this is really easy to do. Simply run a report that includes all of your contacts. You’ll only need to include the Contact ID column in this report. Then turn around and run an update through the Data Loader using that same list. Wa-lah! You’ve just updated all your contacts to have a Unique ID and your error report contains a list of existing duplicates you can go clean up.

4. Salesforce Administrator Triumphs

The next time a user tries to create a contact with the same first and last name as an existing contact, they’ll receive an error message that the Unique ID already exists and won’t be able to save.

This little trick should work for most objects you need to prevent dups on (leads, opportunities, custom objects, etc). If you run into multiple contacts with the same name, you may need to do something a bit more sophisticated or check the App Exchange for some paid solutions.

I stumbled across a Firefox plugin that lets you leave comments on blogs and articles from inside your Google Reader. This is a huge thing for me, because I really try to be an active participant, not just a reader, but its so annoying to have to open the blog in a new tab just to leave a comment.

The Better GReader Plugin lets you do some pretty cool stuff to Google Reader, but most importantly, leave comments. Once you install and activate the plugin, just click the Preview button.

Then you’ll get the full blog entry, with comments and all, right in your Google Reader.

Image via Wikipedia

Ok, so a confession, the image is the chemical makeup of caffiene. I thought that was just too good to pass up! And I had to play with my new Zemanta plugin.

Something that shocks and quite honestly scares me is how few organizations have their Sales and Marketing teams really working well together. At Dreamforce I talked to company after company where the Marketing team has no insight to what Sales does and the Sales team has no insight to what Marketing does.

One thing we’ve accomplished since I stepped into the Marketing Specialist role at ADX is to really bring the two departments together. That’s not to say that every sales guy (or gal) here knows exactly what email campaigns or website changes we’re working on at any given moment, but we are watching each others results and communicating to see how we can make changes to get the best results in the long run.

Its certainly easier to do this in a smaller company like ours than it would be in a larger organization, but the principles are the same.

Align Your Goals from the Beginning

As a marketer, your goals may be different than the Sales team’s. In fact, your short term goals should be different than the Sales team’s goals. The important thing is to create challenging, but attainable goals together from the beginning. Decide how much pipeline you need to generate for Sales to have a chance at making their goals. Decide which mediums are most effective for reaching your potential leads and how your Sales team will learn of those leads.

Make a Schedule and Stick to It (or change it together)

Let your sales team know when you plan to run each ad, what the schedule for your email campaigns is, when the website changes will go live, and so on. Create a schedule that works for you and your Sales team, and then stick to that schedule. If you get into the schedule and things are moving too fast or too slow, then change the schedule together.

Keep Tabs on Each Other

Don’t be afraid to keep tabs on your Sales team. In fact, encourage them to do the same to you. Share reports, wins, and losses with each other and identify areas where you can help one another improve. If your Sales team tends to lose opportunities after they show a particular slide deck, rework the deck. If you get great click-through rates on your emails, but your Sales team isn’t following up with the leads, remind them that the campaign only works when they do their part.

Stop Problems Mid-Cycle

Don’t wait until the end of the quarter to address problems in your Marketing and Sales processes. Check in with each other weekly to see what’s working and what’s not. As a Marketer, you can help your Sales team understand how you are getting the word out about your brand or product, as a Sales team, they can provide you priceless feedback about how leads are responding to your efforts. But don’t wait until the end of the quarter to review, try having weekly calls or even email conversations to review progress and brainstorm new ideas together.

Sales and Marketing should work together, we’re all trying to achieve the same goal in the long run, so why not bond together and consolidate our efforts in the short term?

Deciding Who the Audience Is

The first thing we have to do is set up a good recipient list. The bests lists are ones that folks have opted-in to, but a bought list from a reputible source (Like Jigsaw.com) is great too. Now take that recipient list and think about whether or not you’ll need to divide it into multiple lists based on industry, level, interests, etc. You’re going to want to target as narrow an audience as possible in your emails so you are more likely to speak directly to the recipients.

Creating the Email

Subject line: It needs to grab the reader’s attention, tell them to perform an action, and maybe restrict their time to respond. When readers feel like they will miss out if they don’t act quickly, they are more likely to open the email and do what it says.
Header: Just as important as the subject line, the header draws the reader in to actually read the email. Sub heads are also important. Sub heads make skimming the email easier for the reader.
Look and feel: So, we came up with a great subject line and got the recipients to actually open our email. Great! But now, we need to do something to keep them interested. Text is great, its obviously important, but if you send out a word-heavy email with no pretty things to look at, you’ve just lost the reader. And the graphics have to be good.  A nice, clean background is great. Add a slick logo, a nice demo or progression of screenshots and you’ve got their attention.
The Text: The text is there to do one thing. Call the reader to action. Use links with specific anchor text (don’t fall into the Click Here effect). Using active, rather than passive voice is also important.

• Unique Value Proposition: The content of your email should convince the reader that the product/service you have to offer is unique and better than anything they can get elsewhere.
• Testimonial: Including a customer quote relevant to to the product/service is great.
• KISS: Keep it simple, stupid. We’ve all heard this one. The best way to cut content is to write a draft, read it out loud, cut out what sounds awkward, boring, or confusing. Repeat. You’ll be amazed at how quickly you lose 30-50% of the original text.
• Call to Action: This is the most important part of the email. Its where we get to tell the customer what to do. It should be close to the top of the email, the link should describe what we want the customer to do, and we should limit the choices of actions to one or two different links. (The content of the page can have multiple links to your site as well)
• Branding: Branding is a great way to appear professional and organized. Its also a way to communicate our personality and objective. A clean, sleek logo with matching color scheme that ties into the website is ideal.
• Sending at the Right Time: Obviously first thing Monday and last thing Friday are out. That email is going in the trash, and quick. For B2B email marketing the best times are Tuesday and Wednesday mid-morning or mid-afternoon. For B2C email, try early evening during the week and Saturday afternoons.

The Results Are In!

So, we’ve run the campaign, and gotten our reports back. Let’s talk a little about what all of those stats mean.
Total Recipients: Pretty obvious. It’s all the people we sent the email to.
Successful Deliveries: These are the emails that made passed the spam filters and firewalls and landed in a real, bonafide email inbox.
Bounced Emails: These are the emails that did not make it to an inbox. There are generally two reasons for this:

• Hard Bounce: It’s an undeliverable address. The person closed their account, was fired, moved to Fiji, whatever. Basically this email address is useless and should be removed from the list
• Soft Bounce: Usually this means the email account was not available at the time we sent the email. This could mean the server was busy, the account was full, etc. This could be a good email address, but we’re just not sure.

Anything more than a 10% bounce rate and we need to reevaluate our email list. If we keep our bounce rate too high, we can start to look like a spammer and email services will automatically start flagging all ADX emails as spam. That’s no good, so we want to make sure we keep our email list nice and clean.
Total Opens: this is the total times the email was opened. This number is really misleading. If one person opens your email 200+ times, you might think you’ve had an effective campaign, but further investigation will show that what you really had was one person who really liked reading your email over and over.
Recipients Who Opened: This is much more useful. Our report shows who opened the email and how many times they opened it.
Total Unique Opens/Clicks: This shows the number of times the email was opened or a link was clicked with all duplicates removed. So, that person I mentioned earlier who opened the email 200 times now only counts for 1 open. (By the way, a good open rate across all industries is about 22% but see the bottom of this email for a breakdown of each industry).

Post-Campaign Checklist

• Bounced Emails: Determine how many emails bounced and why, then clean up the email list.
• Unsubscribes: How many unsubscribe requests did we have? Why are people unsubscribing?
• Open Rate: How was the open rate? If it was lower that 20%, rethink the subject line and the time the email was sent.
• Links: Did people click like we wanted them to? If not, go back to draft on the email layout and content.
• If they did click, were leads generated? If not, work on the website content.
• Longevity: At what point to people stop clicking and opening? If folks are still clicking a week after the email was sent, a follow-up newsletter may be a good option for us.
• Cost: How much did the campaign cost in effort and resources? Was it worth it? Is it worth it to do it again?