Response Capture

We all have access to more information that we can even fathom. In the last few years, twitter alone produced 37 times more data than all bills that introduced to congress since the 1950′s! We perform 3 billion searches every day – 85% of which are through Google. And, above all, we are spoiled rotten by just how quickly and effectively we can filter and access relevant information. When we type something into Google *poof* we expect the results to magically appear.

We are easily frustrated if the results are not immediate, relevant and personal. If I ask the magical Google for a sparkly purple bicycle and find myself on a page with mountain bikes, my mouse suddenly becomes a homing device for the back button. Nothing erodes confidence in a website or company than arriving at a page, feeling like they are wasting my time with loads of content that is not pertinent to me. Google has taught us to expect exactly what we want the moment we want it.

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We all know that it is important to tell people why they should buy their good or service. And, yes, clearly stating your value proposition is key to successful sales and marketing. But, something works even better than the most perfectly crafted marketing spiel: courage.

Zappos has it when the CEO openly discusses how his customer service team has ordered a pizza for a caller, WordPress has it by offering free software and Southwest Airlines has it when their flight attendants get people clapping, so they can rap. Read the rest of this entry »

Current customers are the lifeblood of your business. Unfortunately in the pursuit of growth, companies can lose focus of how valuable current customers are to business operations. While it is always important to grow new business, this new business comes at a higher retention cost than does maintaining your current clientele. Read the rest of this entry »

First impressions are everything. Now that’s a lesson we’ve all learnt growing up and through our professional careers. Yet, businesses spend hundreds and even thousands of dollars, to score a higher rank on popular search engines without first investing enough in their own virtual presence. Everyone knows that if you don’t show up on the first page, perhaps even the top half of the search engine results page, you have very little chance of being noticed. But if your website looks and functions like it was created in 1998, that may be a good thing and a blessing in disguise.

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I received a door knob flier the other day from a coworker. A window company was soliciting his neighborhood for window replacement. Aesthetically, the ad is a very nice professionally produced promotional piece—a 6”x12”double-sided full color ad on card stock. The ad attempts to create a need, by mentioning the rise of home energy costs and substantiates the claim with a qualitative fact: “Old outdated windows lose 60% of your home’s energy” But does it really matter how “pretty” an ad is, or even how well it is written? I would argue that neither of these very important aspects of communications matter, if within the first couple of sentences of copy you start questioning the validity of a company’s claims.

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One of the main ideas behind marketing communications is to offer a “big promise,” something that sets your business apart. Whether that big promise is a guaranteed lowest price, industry leading warranty or the highest quality service the list goes on and on.

Far too often when an industry or company falls on hard times they rely on big promises as a way to gain market share. But today’s consumers have more access to information than ever before. They are constantly being berated with substitutes, have more things influencing buying behaviors and are now exhibiting more educated purchasing behaviors.

Consumers will always be influenced by tangibility. Especially when purchasing services that they may never touch or see. If quality companies backup their big promises with action they are bringing something more tangible to the table. Read the rest of this entry »

In today’s era of marketing message onslaught, marketers are searching for ways to get through the clutter. Using messages that are relevant to the prospect is not a new, secret love potion. However, few marketers have mastered offer testing and personalization strategies as part of their effort to initiate more responses and grow their prospect funnel.

In this relationship, it is all about being right

It has been said that delivering the right offer to the right customer in the right channel at the right time gives you the best probability for marketing success. For some of us, the thought of trying to determine all the appropriate variables can seem overwhelming.

Yes, there are also costs associated with testing and it takes more time before you can roll out your campaign. But, there are even greater costs associated with not testing at all.

And with a strong opportunity to significantly increase your return on marketing investment (ROMI), it’s no wonder that, according to an Offer Optimization report by Aberdeen Group in October 2009, offer testing is now playing a key role in campaign optimization.
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Before we get into revealing why you need a Landing Page, let’s first define a Landing Page.  Let’s take a minute to walk down a grocery store aisle.  Trust us, it will all come together!

A grocery store carries several thousand products, but if you want your product to “communicate” with more potential customers, you showcase it on the end-cap. The end-cap is prime real estate and companies pay big bucks for this space to give their products better visibility and not have it drown in the aisle noise.

Instead of the customer walking down the aisle and finding an endless selection of similar products, the end-cap provides you an opportunity to engage the customer, highlight the product features and perhaps offer a discount. Voila! Highly targeted and extremely effective.
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A friend called me today to share results from a recent webinar program.  I was excited to hear how the program performed because I had shared some of my learning’s from a landing page optimization course when she was in the webinar planning stage.

The first thing she said was, “please no laughter,” and of course I could not help but laugh.  I felt like a kid being told not to do something and purposing doing it anyway.

We both stopped laughing and got down to evaluating the marketing performance results. She explained that:

• 10,000 email invitations were sent out for the campaign
• 40 people registered to attend the live webinar
• 20 people actually attended the webinar

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We meet a lot of marketers who do a great job of creating activity across multiple channels. As a result of this activity, they generate interest in their company from a wide variety of prospects. However, many times, the result is that the sales team (or sometimes even the marketing team) ends up picking through the leads in an effort to pan for gold. 

In the best run marketing kitchens that we have witnessed, there is a separate funnel for marketing that only qualified leads can make it through.  These companies analyze the cost per channel and can measure which activity produces the most qualified leads, at the lowest cost.

Don’t Eat Raw Meat

Every company has prospects enter their funnel that are either not capable of buying or will need more nurturing before they are ready. For every channel and touch point, establishing lead scoring processes can ensure that the food is fully cooked, before your serve it to your sales team.
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