SMB Marketing Blog

Wondering if you’re wasting sales time or marketing budget? Or likely, both?!

In this free companion webinar to the eHow To Guide A Marketing Automation Guide to Lead Scoring, join Paul Uppal, Senior Account Executive at ActiveConversion, as he speaks with  his customer, Tim Lawler – Lead and Demand Generation Consultant at LMG Consulting, on how Tim successfully implemented closed-looped lead scoring systems with Active Conversion for his clients.

“The key is getting the user to click through the email to a landing page with the Active Conversion code.  That starts the lead scoring process (a download is not necessary).  After the first landing page visit, the user web activity is tracked  and scored going forward.”

Tim Lawler

Tue Mar 9, 2010 at 1:00-2:00PM EST, 10:00-11:00AM PST

Learn best practices on how to implement a lead scoring process, automatically manage leads, and focus your time on the best prospects to increase ROI by 30% or more.

Not all leads are created equally. A lead scoring system acknowledges this by assigning values to leads based on objective criteria. The lead score determines the appropriate action for that lead.

See real world tools and examples to help you shorten your sales cycle and make intelligent sales and marketing decisions.

This is the fourth of ActiveConversion’s very popular “How To” guides.  This one deals with using Marketing Automation to score the behavior of website visitors, and those who click through on emails, so that they can be automatically sorted for prioritization.  From the summary:

Identify online behaviors that indicate interest or sales-readiness

Not all leads are created equally. A lead scoring system acknowledges this by assigning values to leads based on objective criteria. The lead score determines the appropriate action for that lead.

In establishing your system you should;

• Identify online behaviors that indicate interest or sales-readiness
• Assign point values to each of those behaviors
• Establish a score that defines “Sales-Ready”

With a contemporary marketing automation solution like ActiveConversion, today’s B2B marketers can reduce costs and increase revenue through prioritization with lead scoring.

To download this eHow To Guide on why, when, and how to implement an automatic lead scoring plan for your business, click on the image!

The principal sponsors of this blog, Active Conversion, are offering an limited time 60 day free trial if you sign up as a result of reading this post, so here’s a quick look at what to expect:

After you’ve taken a few minutes to activate your trial account and install the Active Conversion code, you’ll begin seeing results immediately and within days patterns will begin to emerge.  To start with, visitors to your site will be identified by company name.  Some of these visitors may surprise you and as a B2B marketer or sales professional you’ll gain valuable information about which companies are interested in you.

After a while some visitors will start to jump out at you, repeatedly returning to your website to visit more and more pages.  Intuitively you may have pegged them as higher value and more qualified but now you have quantified data to back that hunch up.

For the trial, most marketers or sales professionals simply used the default lead scoring.  By looking at the online behavior of your visitors you’ll begin to correlate that to the lead score that each visitor accumulates.  Eventually you’ll be able to develop your own lead scoring criteria based on the behavior of visitors to your own site but for now you can see that higher lead scores mean higher quality leads.

If your site has pages with form fills using the same default conventions as Active Conversion, your visitors that have previously been identified by company now become people with names, email addresses and/or phone numbers.  In other words, leads.

You’ll also want to take an email nurture campaign for a spin during your trial.  Load up some content into a nurture campaign, pick say 3 emails over six weeks, and anytime any of the respondents clicks through on a link, they are identified as though they had form filled on your website.

Eventually when these leads are presented to your sales team the lead information will include a summary of their activity.  This will give your reps some background for that all-important first call.

This has been a quick look but you can see that even on the trial, things happens automatically, like it’s on cruise control.  We haven’t even talked about, lead nurturing, lead management, email marketing campaigns to your existing in-house lists, or social media ROI tracking.

Feel free to pass this offer along to your network, as long as you or they use this sign up page they’ll have access to a 60 day trial.

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.

The folks at Forrester Research have updated their Interactive Marketing Forecast out to 2014. 

The table of contents has some predictable headlines:

• Interactive Will Cannibalize Traditional Media
• Interactive Marketing Spend Will Near $55 Billion By 2014
• Search Marketing Still Leads Interactive Spend
• Display Advertising Rebounds
• Email Marketing Continues Healthy Growth
• Social Media Fixes Itself In The Interactive Mix
• Mobile Marketing Matters – Post Recession
• WHAT IT MEANS – Interactive Trends Will Redefine Your Business

It’s a very good read, and a few points jumped out for me.

When faced with budget cuts or the need for immediate sales, these marketers find that interactive tools are less expensive, more measurable, and better for direct response than traditional media.

Empowered consumers today expect a customized, interactive brand experience that goes way beyond a 30-second television spot or two-dimensional print ad. Forty-two percent of online adults and 55% of online youth want to engage with their favorite brands through social applications.

And last, even laggard industries feel that they have enough experience and data to prove interactive marketing’s worth. Online display spending by telecom companies in Q1 2009 grew 50% over Q1 2008.

What was also interesting was the the potential for more growth; interactive marketing ad spend is still under represented and laggard compared to how much of sample media time is spend online.

You can sign up for a copy of the full report here, courtesy of  DemandGen Report. Check it out. Your marketing future may depend on it!

ActiveConversion recently published a lead nurturing guide that we at the SMB Marketing Blog would like to share with you (link, or click on the image at right).

From the landing page for the guide:

Lead nurturing is the process of communicating with prospects who are not yet ready to buy.

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 lead nurturing B2B 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, follow this link or click on the image to the right.

(eHow To Guides)

This post is a bit of a rant inspired by a web comic I stumbled on, but it is so true and so common that it bears talking about.

At a certain point most SMBs decide that their website is no good, and that this critical portion of their marketing (which is very true of course) needs a makeover, or a re-design.  The ones that are smart go out and hire a professional, or a very reputable firm, the ones that aren’t hire the cheapest thing they can find, waste time, money and opportunity, and then eventually hire professionals.   So pros are hired, people with years of experience maximizing what a website can do, especially those who combine website development with online marketing, social media, demand gen, and inbound marketing.  But then this SMB proceeds to tell the pro(s) exactly what to do, or as the website nears reality, others in the company suddenly take interest and chime in, and then change their mind(s) over and over. This is a little like going to the doctors office because you have a medical problem and telling the doctor what the diagnosis is (based on your web research) and what medications you want him/her to prescribe, and of course on your next visit change your mind entirely.

The blog The Oatmeal sums it up all too accurately in this little web comic.  I showed it to our designers and one of them said he wanted to laugh, but it brought up some painful memories.  I thought this was funny, but he had a very serious look on his face.

The really sad part is I’ve experienced that sorta thing so many times the comic actually makes me a bit mad because it brings back some haunting memories.

So the takeaway is, if you’re going to pay good money and hire a professional to develop a marketing strategy (in this case part of your online marketing mix) and execute tactically (design and build the website), let them!  Sitting over their shoulder and directing the development almost guarantees a worse end-result.  The same is true for hiring a professional firm to do your SEO, or set up and maintain your Google Adwords campaigns, or set up and integrate a marketing and lead management automation solution; they do this full time, you’re paying them for their expertise, your involvement above what they ask for diminishes their performance correspondingly.

Last week at the Salesforce Dreamforce conference, ActiveConversion was invited to be part of a panel on email marketing. The panel covered some basics on email marketing along with specific applications on campaigning within Salesforce, lead nurturing and the impact that social media has on email marketing.

An interesting observation I took away was that many B2B Marketers are not using email marketing on a regular basis.  I feel like this is something which we take for granted, because we have been using email marketing for so long.  I thought it would be valuable to cover the 5 tips for email marketing which were covered in the presentation:

1. Targeted Lists – Ensure you spend the time when building your lists to segment them.  This allows you to send out more targeted messages and offers, which will help give you a higher response rate and better return on your efforts.  Fields to segment on include: Country, City, Zip, Phone, Company size, Job title/level, past purchases, Age, Gender, etc
2. Targeted, Relevant & Fresh Content – Build messages which are relevant to those groups which you’ll be targeting in your offer. Use fresh content and offers to encourage the desired outcome of your email (ex. New whitepaper, limited time discount, new product announcement, etc)
3. Tracking and Reporting – To improve the quality of your email marketing be sure to use the built-in tools for tracking or reporting of your marketing campaigns.  Some of the metrics you may choose to measure success on include: Unique open rates, Unique click-through rates, Delivery success rate, Conversions and Unsubscribes, and Post click-through activity scoring.
4. Go Viral – Email is a great means to get your marketing messages out because they are easily forwarded and shared with others.  Make it easy for your emails to be forwarded or shared by your recipients
5. Permission is everything – Allow prospects to opt-in to receive your marketing messages and respect their privacy and requests if they choose to unsubscribe. When you are requesting information from your prospects, ensure you make it clear that their information will not be sold or rented to any third parties and it is being collected to be able to provide information on your company’s products and services

You can view the recording of this presentation and panel discussion here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eAkoptsBG0

In October ActiveConversion co-hosted with VerticalResponse a webinar called “Boosting Sales with Continuous & Qualified Leads“. Due to popular demand, we’re providing a recorded version of this webinar for those who couldn’t make it.  The webinar covered:

• Overview of Email Marketing Best Practices
• Post-Campaign Marketing Campaign Tracking With ActiveConversion
• Re-engaging Prospects with Nurturing Campaigns

This webinar had a great turn-out and the Q&A afterwards was lively; SMBs are hungry for email marketing best practices.  Feel free to pass the link to this webinar around, the more the merrier.

A great post back on Sept 10 from Funnelholic called Increase in Connect Rate = Increase in Conversion Rate made one point vividly clear: it is critical to resist the urge to dump all arguments for buying into an email campaign (or in a trade show booth meeting, or in a cold call) just because we have that prospects attention for once, and because we’re afraid of never getting it again.  Predictably, there is too much content, too big a message to swallow, and the prospect’s eyeballs roll back in their head and they delete the email, or leave the booth, or say “not interested” and hang up.

Marketers ALWAYS try to achieve too much with their campaigns and in most cases they are trying to sell the product when what they really need to do is sell the next step.

He goes on to make great points regarding Marketing Automation software, pre-connect scripts or emails, and opening scripts: use MA to help time the connect, then sell the connect, then with permission sell the next step.  Like any worthwhile, complicated, time consuming endeavour, break a sale down into bite sized pieces, and then achieve them sequentially.  Offering a glass water to a thirsty prospect will be more successful than offering a fire hose.