Don’t Let Your Science Email Marketing Campaign End Up in the Trash

Science Email Marketing Success

The December holidays were always fun for me in the lab, because it was a time when life science vendors showed off their more creative side via events and marketing materials (free stuff).

The holidays this past year were no exception – for example, this past December a scientist friend forwarded me this email marketing piece containing an e-card from a life science vendor.

Though the content in DNA 2.0’s e-card may have been interesting, the card itself wasn’t exciting enough for me to want to click on it. Admittedly, I have a severe case of ADDO (ADDOnline), meaning effective marketing must grab my attention, tell me where to click and why in about half a second, or I’m off to the next shiny web page, and this email is in my Trash before you can blink an eye.

Fortunately for DNA 2.0, my friend took the time to say I (and 10 other scientists on her forward list) would enjoy the “holiday geekiness” of the card. She wrote “click on the new research results below” – so I did!

Good thing I clicked, otherwise I would have missed out on the very cool “publication” – a paper titled “Carolome: Functional Imprints of Culture Memes in the Global Genome.” It flows entirely the same way a regular journal publication would, including references and abstract. Super cute and so very clever! This team obviously put a ton of time and effort into it.

But I finished looking at the paper and thought two things -

1. Scientists can be your evangelists
2. You shouldn’t rely on that

Do you have scientist evangelists for your brand? Try connecting with your scientists with great content like this paper!

But one thing about your scientist-evangelist– this may be a one-time thing for her. She may never forward anything. She may forward everything. You just don’t know. Her promotion of your ecard was the only thing that made me click this time – that guarantees nothing for the next round.

Make your science email marketing self-sufficient: clickable in its own right and really friendly to forwarding.

Attention-grabbing headlines or images will help to ensure an increase in clicks from your email and a solidly placed “forward” button will increase odds that you’ll see who’s clicking where, what other pages they visit, popularity of  your content, and all the other goodies that come with fully tracking your email marketing campaigns.

You just can’t rely on that puny little forward link at the very bottom of your email. People (scientists too) will instinctively click their usual Forward button within Outlook, Gmail, etc – unless you subtly prod them to do otherwise.

Ok, I’ve crudely re-made this science email marketing piece, just to make a point.This gem of a Santa image is straight from the Carolome publication itself – perfect!

In addition to the awesome content, a little caption change plus a larger forward suggestion and you’ve made even more progress toward creating a trackable science email marketing campaign that will stand apart in a scientist’s inbox.

So next time you have a science email marketing piece to send to your scientists, remember your’s will be stuffed shoulder-to-shoulder with other vendor emails.

Try jazzing up your email campaign a bit plus give scientist’s an easy way to share with friends (other scientists)- then have fun tracking all those clicks you’ll be racking up! That’s the science email marketing tip of the week!

Building Sales through Social Media Part II – Why LinkedIn

Generating Leads via LinkedIn

Part 2 of our sessions with Ken Schmitt, LinkedIn Coach. If you missed part 1, start there.

As a small business or individual sales rep, how much value do you place on customer loyalty?
If you could engage your customers (scientists) by providing true value, offering real-time data and introducing them to your connections, do you think they’ll buy from you when the time is right? You’d better believe it.

In Part I of this series, we talked about the importance of securing “social media shelf space” – leveraging multiple social media tools – Facebook, Twitter, corporate websites, blogs and LinkedIn – to build a broad-based web presence that speaks to multiple audiences across a variety of demographics. Failing to incorporate these channels into your sales & marketing campaign will allow your competition to connect with your customers. A recent study of 2,100 businesses by the Harvard Business Review revealed that 79% are using social media.

Which social media channel is right for sales reps and marketers?

While there are a number of reasons to consider Facebook with 500m users, a $50b valuation and one of the most recognized brands in the world, it is not necessarily the best platform for your business. Likewise, while Twitter now boasts 110m tweets per day, star power including everyone from Anderson Cooper to Ashton Kutcher and a $10b valuation, there is a great deal of noise in this particular channel – Sysomos claims that 71% of tweets are ignored, 23% garner a reply and only 6% secure a retweet.

The key to this question – “which channel is right for me” – is determining where your customers and prospects hang out online!

My guess is that a quick analysis of your top 20 prospects will reveal that the greatest presence, and easiest access, is on LinkedIn. After launching in 2002, LinkedIn now boasts over 90m worldwide users, representation from every Fortune 500 Company, a total of 1,000,000 company profiles and over 600,000 specialized groups – oh yeah, and a valuation of $2b with only $100m in revenues! LinkedIn has become so prominent, that a new user joins every second…. That means approximately 8 users joined while you were reading the last sentence!

So how do you know if your customers have a presence on LinkedIn? And more importantly, how can you determine whether or not the specific person who will buy your services has a presence on LinkedIn?

Luckily, LinkedIn makes it very easy to find companies, people, titles, events, jobs , and of course, connections. That sound like good old fashioned lead prospecting?

LinkedIn Magic

LinkedIn has done an amazing job of integrating an easy-to-use interface with in-depth and relevant content. Are you interested in building a list of prospects in the pharmaceutical industry? Click on the “companies” tab at the top of the page, go to “browse industries”, click on the “Pharmaceuticals” link, and peruse the 9,586 different businesses in this category.

Here’s an example of how you might find a scientist on LinkedIn who currently works at Novartis, doing immunology research:

1. Set the search at the top of the page to “People” then click on the Advanced link
2. Enter “immunology” in the Title field, and “Novartis” in the company field, and select “Current” in the dropdown box
3. Get leads

Give it a try! We bet you find all kinds of new leads.

More great LinkedIn tips will be in Part 3 of this series coming soon!

About Ken Schmitt:

Ken C. Schmitt is an Executive Recruiter, Career Coach, Expert Resume-Writer, Master networker and LinkedIn trainer. He has been training, coaching and placing mid-senior level professionals for 13 years with a particular focus on leveraging social media for career management. Having presented to nearly 1000 professionals and written more than 50 career-related articles, Ken is well positioned to provide valuable information about social media, recruiting and career management. For more career management advice visit- Turning Point Search

The Secret Product Your Customers Want

How?  They know their audience – really well.