Archive for January, 2010
ActiveConversion Wins Best of SaaS Showplace Award
Wellesley, Mass. - January 25, 2010. THINKstrategies, Inc., the leading strategic consulting company focused on the business implications of the on-demand services market, announced today that ActiveConversion has been named the latest winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program, which is aimed at promoting the measurable business benefits being delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions. 
The BoSS Awards program was announced in January 2009 by THINKstrategies as an initiative aimed at bringing greater attention to SaaS and cloud computing companies that are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations and greater profitability.
B2B Blogging and Marketing Automation – eHow To Guide
ActiveConversion recently released another in their popular series of “eHow To” guides. This one deals with using Marketing Automation to leverage B2B Blogging. From the summary:
Lead nurturing is the process of communicating with prospects who are not yet ready to buy. B2B Blogging enables marketers to contact such prospects on an ongoing basis.
Only 10 to 25 percent of all leads are sales-ready. A similar percentage of leads are not qualified at all. This means 50 to 80 percent of all leads generated are potentially wasted if no appropriate action is taken.
With B2B Blogging marketers can realize significant benefits. Leads that are not sales-ready are not lost and significant online lead generation effort is not wasted. Automation of lead nurturing increases the ROI of all online marketing activities.
To download this whitepaper on why, when, and how to implement an automatic lead nurturing plan for your business, click on the image!
Effective Email Newsletters for the New Year
Many companies send regular email newsletters to their customers but not many of them measure the effectiveness of their newsletters and adjust them. I recently helped a non-profit organization improve its email newsletter campaign. They had been doing several newsletters each month in the past but they didn’t know if they were being read or even opened. Peter Drucker once said that you can’t manage what you don’t measure, and this can apply to newsletters too!
When I looked at the newsletters. I found that it had too many articles. These articles covered many different topics and the staff had to spend quite a bit of time collecting these articles each month. They created long newsletters and there wasn’t any focal point in them. I then looked at the email opens and click thrus from previous newsletters and found that the numbers were very low.
As a result, I advised them to greatly reduce the number of the articles in each newsletter and focus on a theme for each month. For interested readers, we provided headlines and excerpts linking to longer articles on their blog and website.
I also noticed that they used the same email subject line for every month. The only difference in the subject line was the month. Many recipients will automatically set it aside in the hope that they would come back to it when they have time, but this may not happen unless the subject line has relevancy. I advised them to make the subject line more relevant and describe the theme of the newsletter with some curiosity and urgency for the recipients.
The results: It freed up time for the staff and the email open and click through rates increased significantly. Now the recipients see the value to them and some are even anxiously waiting for the next e-newsletter!
So the point is: You have to regularly monitor, measure and adjust your email newsletters to make it work. Don’t give up on it – it can be one of your most powerful marketing tools.
