Subject Headings to Turn Heads for Your Next Science Email Marketing Campaign

To elaborate on last month’s post “How to Create a Successful Email Marketing Campaign by Engaging the Scientific Mind” , this month I will be addressing how to choose a subject heading for your science email marketing campaign that will save it from the recycle bin.

Your choice of words here is essential, and has to immediately grab the attention of your audience and entice them into the body of your science email. Within the span of just a few key words, you must make the temptation to read on irresistible. It may sound like an impossible task, but here are a few surefire ways to snag a scientist’s attention in the subject heading of your science email marketing:

Building Sales Through Social Media Part III – LinkedIn Power

Generating Leads and Networking via LinkedIn

Welcome back to our ongoing series with Ken Schmitt, LinkedIn Coach.

In Part 1, we discussed why social media space for your brand is important. So very important.  From reaching customers, to building reputation don’t miss out on this chance to increase the “shelf space” of your brand.  And in Part 2 we identified the value of LinkedIn for sales reps and marketers and then found some quick ways to find your audience and generate leads using LinkedIn.

Great you found them! Now what?

The key to all of this, of course, is building your personal network in LinkedIn to allow for more connections and “links.”

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

How to engage and connect with scientists at trade shows

The Secret Product Your Customers Want

How?  They know their audience – really well.

What’s your goal in 2011? A trick to make it happen.

by Rusty Bishop, PhD.

2011 is already flying by. Hopefully, you are out there selling products to scientists that will make their lives better and research stronger.

Like most companies, here at Red Funnel, we made laundry list of resolutions and business goals. This year, I plan on actually following through using a method that has worked like a champ for me in 2010, the all-mighty Post-It Note.

The Sales Bible

On the recommendation of good friend I recently read the The Sales Bible by Jeffrey Gitomer. I must say it is an impressive read and, I highly recommend it. Gitomer is little over the top with his bravado and “you’re terrible at selling” comments, but his techniques are highly tested and proven, if you can get over the bravado.

I highly recommend the chapters on Overcoming Objections and Networking! Extremely useful for us “sales folks”. In fact, if you travel for sales, the AudioBook Version is great for planes and driving with your iPad or iPod.

The Sales Question that Engages Scientists and Qualifies Leads in Less than a Minute

by Rusty Bishop

Those who read this blog regularly know I am student of sales and marketing with 17 years of experience in the lab.   I question, I observe, I test, and I report my findings to you to help you sell better, because I believe you have the products to make scientists’ lives easier and better.

Last week I spent 4 straight days in the Exhibit Hall of the Neuroscience 2010 Meeting here in San Diego.

It was and is a golden opportunity to crush your numbers and generate hot leads.  Where else in the world do you have the chance to meet 35,000 potential customers?

35,000 potential sales and repeat sales!                          

How to Sell More Products and Services to Pharmaceutical Scientists – Assay Depot’s Marketplace.

How to Sell More Products and Services to Pharmaceutical Scientists – Assay Depot’s Marketplace

by Rusty Bishop, PhD

One question we consistently get here at Red Funnel is, “How do we reach more scientists in Pharma/Biotech?”

It seems every sales representative or marketer we meet wants to penetrate that marketplace. And for good reason, there’s a lot of money there.

Big obstacles for marketers and sales reps are that the doors to labs are most definitely locked, emails are filtered, information restricted, and when they do order products, its often through complicated systems with major gatekeepers. So what to do?

There are companies that provide channels into specific marketplaces that you can use to your advantage. Similar to deciding whether to use a distributor to sell your products or not, do you spend your time and effort to penetrate a market yourself or do you work with other companies that have had more success in that effort? Finding complementary businesses or non-competitors that already have that channel is a great way of jumpstarting your efforts.

For the pharma market, enter Assay Depot.com.

What is Assay Depot?

Assay Depot is a marketplace for research services (assaydepot.com) that uniquely enables you to communicate directly with thousands of global research vendors to ask technical questions, create custom services, get price quotes and place orders  through their public website. The site is broken down into 5 main stores:

I bet your products fit in one of these categories!

• Biology – from antibody conjugation to anti-microbial screening
• Chemistry – from compound libraries to API synthesis
• DMPK – from Caco 2 cells to rat PK/PD studies
• Pharmacology – pretty much any animal disease model you can think of
• Toxicology – from Comet Assays to In vivo Tox studies

Within each category are 1000′s of individual assays, services, and research materials for sale. Each one has its own description accompanied by a list of companies offering the product or service. The site also provides easy links in which to contact the company or request information from Assay Depot’s team of experts.

That’s right. I said easy links to companies. (Links equal good stuff for search engine optimization.)

The Ask an Expert feature on each page is one of my favorite parts of the site. All a scientist has to do is request information on a particular assay or service and the experts at Assay Depot will seek out companies to do the work for them. What I wouldn’t have given for that when I was in the lab.

According to Kevin Lustig, Founder and CEO, “Assay Depot gets hundreds of requests per month with most of them coming from pharmaceutical companies.” (emphasis is mine)

They pass along quotes and have contact information for these scientists to get their experiments done by companies just like yours. For example, you can read about the $80,000 antibody order from a mid-sized pharma.

Of course, you will never see this posted on the site because the Pharma scientists generally are restricted from posting research-related questions on the internet.

The Inside Scoop

Here’s an insider tip – Assay Depot has done a superb job of building SEO into their site to specifically target Pharma, Biotech, and CRO scientists. (Full disclosure, Assay Depot is a client – I admit that we helped them a little.)

Red Funnel spent the last 6 months buried deep inside the web analytics of Assay Depot. One of the things that jumped out to us was all the visits from domains like pfizer.com, gsk.com, and novartis.com. Yep, scientists at Pharma companies were discovering assays and services at Assay Depot.com. In fact, they were spending a lot of time on the site investigating the range of services.

Why? Because it saves them time and money. It’s much easier to search a single site then the entire web, the information about services is organized so you can scan and compare, and it’s simple to make a quote requests that are forwarded to multiple CROs.

For more information on how to get involved with Assay Depot, visit their BackOffice Website.

Red Funnel digs the Assay Depot and benefits from giving you the inside scoop.  It’s hard to find those pesky pharma scientists who buy online!

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Don’t Repeat My Google Adwords Mistake – A PhD Tells All

Don’t Repeat My Google Adwords Mistake – A PhD Tells All.

by Rusty Bishop

This week I’m going to confess to you how I blew it the first time I used Google Adwords.

In the process, I hope you learn a valuable lesson about Pay Per Click Marketing and save yourself a lot of explaining… perhaps your job.

It’s not something I talk about much on this blog, but PPC is a powerful tool to use if you have the budget, and…

… A PLAN.

My Sad Story

During my first year at a certain life science company, I was given the task of taking over the Google PPC Campaign. The previous person had set everything up nicely with a great set of keywords and phrases, excluded sites, and was buying approximately 5-10,000 clicks per month.

Being the cool scientist that I was, I stepped in and added some hot new terms and made the decision to push our ads to some sites in foreign countries with up and coming science companies (read China).

The results were fabulous! We were buying an extra 20,000 “visits” per month for pennies each. Traffic is up, I told the bosses. Everyone was happy. Man, I’m awesome.

Unfortunately after a few months, someone pointed out to me that our online “conversions” were not going up. In fact, they were flat.

That resulted in our conversion rate actually decreasing! (conversions divided by visitors).

I quickly learned how to use Google Analytics and filtered the PPC traffic we were buying from regular organic traffic so we could analyze it (Yes, I can show you how to do this, just email me).

Bounce rate on the bought traffic – 95%!. The time on site was 10 seconds or less. They were clicking the ad and promptly leaving the site when they arrived.

Google loved me. I was embarrassed.

In essence, I was buying useless traffic- the equivalent of buying a huge mailing list and never sending an email offer.

The Lesson

The lesson I hope you take away from my tale is – haphazard keyword buying will get you traffic and NO conversions.

Have a PLAN established for EVERY campaign.

The key is to start with the goal of conversion first (what do you want me to do when I land on your site?), and work your way back up the sales funnel.

Goal – Keywords – Ads – Budget – Track – Repeat and Refine

Here’s My Short Questionnaire for a PPC Plan that I start every campaign with

1. What result/conversion you want to achieve? low bounce rate, see other pages, buy something, etc.

2. What would I be searching for or reading about that would entice me to click on the PPC ad? experiments, assays, troubleshooting, reagents, manuscripts

3. Who would click on my PPC add? Scientists, MDs, CROs, Pharma?

4. Do I have analytics set up to track this campaign?

5. What is the benchmark for success? low bounce rate, conversions, email sign up

6. What am I willing to pay for it? (Hint, sometimes more costly clicks are more valuable)

Parting Shot

Track the results religiously on a schedule.

Please don’t make my mistake.