Last month, Matt Dickman on Techno//Marketer kicked off a great conversation on the need to treat content as commerce. In the post, he outlined a few key steps to succeeding with content-driven sites:

1. Create a clear interface for your users.
2. Rank your site’s content in the order it is valuable to the business and weigh that with the value to the consumer.
3. Visualize your traffic to see where it is going and shift it to the content you value.
4. Track and adopt over time.

What intrigued me here was the ensuing discussion on how to actually assign value to that content. Matt argues that the values can be arbitrary (with some level of executive agreement/approval) as long as the process is helping to more effectively manage the site. Others argued that there was little value in made-up figures. The only consensus seemed to be that this would be a very good, but very difficult exercise. In other words: a nonstarter.

This is unfortunate because placing value on content is something that can and must be done, and it need not be arbitrary. The goal of content marketing and social media marketing is to shift the majority of lead generation from outbound, interruption-based sales calls to inbound, permission-based activities. Only great content with clear value will allow you to successfully make this transition.

In the traditional marketing model we forecast, budget, and meticulously calculate our cost-per-lead in order to convey to senior management marketing’s contribution to top line revenue. What this process has given us is a wealth of known data to pull from so as to attempt to quantify (within a certain range) the value of our online content assets.

Here is an approach that we have used in a few cases with clients from the technology sector when trying to evaluate the ROI of online content for increasing/accelerating sales. What we do is map the content assets to the different intended stakeholders (CxO, business line manager, technical lead, end user) and the different stages of the selling cycle (Research, Consider, Evaluate, Select) and then try to approximate the bottom line impact of each content asset throughout its lifecycle. We base this value on the data we already have: cost-per-lead, cost-of-sales, and customer support costs.

A few examples:

Of course this is to be treated just as a base point, the exact details depending on particular industry & company specifics. Also, in some cases it’s worth expanding outside the selling cycle to include the impact of content to the customer lifecycle overall and/or factoring in the cost of creating and producing the content assets in order to produce a fuller picture.

No one would argue that we are faced with a new paradigm where content and messaging are no longer fully contained or controlled by marketing. However, saying that this makes it just too difficult to measure the value of content that is driving critical inbound leads is just doing marketers a disservice.

Following up to my discussion on the value (or lack thereof) of email marketing in today’s environment from an earlier blog posting, here are the six things you definitely need to have thought through before launching an email campaign.

1. Goal. “What is it in for ALL?” Don’t forget that email is a touch point for potential and existing customers. You are actually reaching people out there, who may actually take time out of their busy schedule to read what you wrote to them. Never bug these people without a clear goal in mind for you but also for them. So, make sure you are prepared to bring real and tangible value to your recipients to make it worth their time and interest. Having a goal is also key to being able to measure the performance of your campaign afterwards.

2. List. Send your email message to a list that is both opted-in and highly-targeted to what you are offering. Interrupting via email without having the recipient’s permission is one of the quickest ways to alienate prospects and customers, says email marketing consultant Simms Jenkins, author of The Truth about Email Marketing (FT Press, 2008) in a recent Marketing Profs article. Same applies when your message is not in line with the needs and profiles of your list members.

3. Content. You need to be able to convey value that makes an important and immediate difference to your recipients. And you need to do that in a clear and concise manner with actual proof points that what you are talking about is tangible and not marketing fluff. Also, make it easy for your recipients to engage with you via clear calls to action, specific landing pages, and options to interact online.

4. Tactics. There is a tremendous amount of empirical research and best practices on the web covering subject lines, “from” lines, optimal sizes of messages, message formats and layouts, availability of text versions of messages, best days/times to send emails, and detailed ways to test your email campaign to name a few. These do make a difference, so please follow them.

5. Metrics. Unless you measure it, you cannot improve on it. Marketing needs to be able to justify its ROI, so measuring the performance of email campaigns is not a nice-to-have, but a must-have. You should track bounce rates, open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and costs per conversion, and then optimize accordingly. And you should track these metrics for each target audience or emailing list you are going after.

6. Respect. Make sure you are honest and clear in your email message, you leave no room in the language you use to potentially trick or deceive your recipients, you support Sender Policy Framework (SPF) in your DNS, and you adhere to all types of compliance defined in the CAN-SPAM act. This is not a detail, it is as important as respect is for successful business relationships.

Malcolm Gladwell in the afterword of “The Tipping Point” wrote that email communication is showing “symptoms of immunity” with its growing overuse by communicators and marketers. This should come as no surprise.

Email marketing is clearly a cost-effective way to reach target audiences and is already a mainstream channel for internet marketing especially in today’s economic climate that calls for restricted marketing budgets. But are the returns there? Do recipients respond effectively to marketing messages mass-delivered via email along with tens or hundreds or even thousands of other messages that flood their Inboxes on a daily basis? How often and under what circumstances do marketing leads convert via the reception of an email? That’s where things are hazy. Just look in your Inbox and see what messages are really important to read and respond to, what messages are just informative to browse through, what messages are rather indifferent and a waste of time to read, and what messages are merely spam (whether caught as such by the spam filters or not).

There is no shortage of reports, analyses, best practices, and case studies on the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of email marketing. There is value in most of them, no question, but I just think it’s a matter of marketing strategy as well. So, I would like to share a strategic plan of success – in its simplified form – that we have used over and over with our clients (all in the technology sector) in a variety of email programs to target a multitude of different industries. It’s nothing outside what common sense and basic marketing principles dictate, but, in our experience, email marketing campaigns are carried out without proper strategic planning way too often. And if the plan is missing, in today’s landscape where professionals (including decision makers and influencers for marketing purposes) are actually turning more and more “immune” to email, these campaigns are the most likely ones to fail.

In my next blog posting I will go over 6 things you definitely need to have thought about before launching an email campaign.