MarketingSherpa Blog

Optimizing form fields in emails can be tricky as sales and marketing departments don’t always agree on how to create an effective lead flow process that captures important customer information while minimizing elements of friction.

So, today’s MarketingSherpa Blog post will share two case studies featured at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 and how one marketing team increased its conversion rate 22% by removing its capture form. Our goal is to share with you some real-world email campaigns you can use to aid your lead generation optimization effort.

First, let’s get some backstory on the role segmentation played in these case studies …

According to Dave Mossop, Manager of Interactive Marketing, Expedia CruiseShipCenters, segmenting between prospects and return customers early on in the campaign was key to allowing the team to offer more relevant content in its messaging.

“We did a very simple split of prospects versus customers and that alone gives you enough information to talk to these audiences very differently,” Dave explained.

By segmenting between prospects and return customers, the team was able to deliver a greater relevance for:

• Price points – Lower for new prospects and higher for return customers
• Itineraries – Specific destinations for new prospects and a broader range of destinations for return customers
• Information – Answer first time cruise information for new prospects and explain the benefit of “Why book with us?”
• Special offers – Exclusive bonus offers for prior customers

“As our team grew, we started going one level deeper by going to customer segments,” Dave explained.

Additional segmentation of past customers allowed the team to:

• Focus messaging, sales offers and itineraries
• Discover upsell and cross sell opportunities
• Prevent down-selling to luxury cruise clients

The team took its segmentation efforts even further by grouping past customers based on previous cruise lines. Expedia CruiseShipCenters discovered past customers were likely to book on the same cruise line again.

By understanding past customer behaviors, the team was also able to:

• Promote cruise line loyalty program offers and exclusives
• Write content from perspective of experience

“We see phenomenal results as we get completely relevant and completely personal with the customer we have this data on,” Dave concluded. “Personalization makes a difference, but who we send to matters even more.”

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On the latest episode of Marketing Research in Action, Milap Shah, CEO, NexSales, discusses research from the MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Benchmark Report …

A recent B2B newsletter article, “CRM How-to: Tactics on Marketing/IT alignment, database strategy and integrating social media data,” covered three tactics on customer relationship management, commonly known by its acronym, CRM.

In researching the article, and speaking about many customer relationship management concepts with six experts on the topic, one aspect of CRM that came up was, “How is CRM defined?”

Even between the story’s sources, there was no hard and fast definition. However, I thought it was also interesting to think about how different people define CRM, often depending on their role in a company or as a thought leader in the customer relationship management field.

Although there is an entire continuum of concepts, most can fit into one of these three general areas, completing the sentence, “CRM is ____:”

• Simply the software piece called a CRM solution, such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, InfusionSoft, Oracle Siebel, et al.
• All technology related to customer relationship management, including CRM solutions, marketing automation software and email marketing solutions
• Everything involved in the customer lifecycle and customer interactions with a company, including all of the above, customer service and more

Since this topic did not make it into the newsletter’s how-to article beyond the introduction, I thought I’d give MarketingSherpa Blog readers the opportunity to hear what several of those experts had to say on answering, “What is CRM?”

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In the 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report, we asked 1,915 marketers which lead gen form fields were most important to them. Here’s what they had to say …

Q: Please select the most important fields you need to collect from your leads on lead generation forms.

Click to enlarge

Interestingly enough, most of the discussion about this chart surrounded one of the lesser-used form fields – key pain point.

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We surveyed 1,915 marketers for the MarketingSherpa 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report, and asked them about the importance of offline lead generation tactics. Here is what the data revealed …

Q: How do you feel the importance of OFFLINE lead generation has changed over the last three to five years?

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There are times when one marketing tactic seems to totally dominate the discussion. In recent years, social media has been in that mix, and mobile and its various form factors and latest upgrade release dates are pretty top of mind for plugged-in marketers.

These days, the one tactic I hear about most often when speaking with brand-side practitioners and vendors/agencies/consultants alike is content marketing – particularly how important content and having a content marketing strategy is for B2B marketers.

I did not keep a formal tally, but I am willing to bet content marketing figured in to every presentation at the MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2012 in some fashion. So much that I made the entire tactic the number one lesson learned in the event recap.

A recent B2B newsletter how-to article featured two B2B content marketing consultants providing tactics on the basics of B2B content marketing. As with many MarketingSherpa articles, while gathering material for the story, I ended up with more great marketing ideas than needed for the piece.

In this case, one of the expert sources for that article, Stephanie Tilton, B2B Content Consultant, Ten Ton Marketing, provided an excellent eight-point breakdown of how to get started with content marketing, and I wanted to share her insight with MarketingSherpa Blog readers.

Here are Stephanie’s eight steps to get started with B2B content marketing:

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The Internet has a wealth of free, public information that could help you uncover sales leads, get closer access to industry influencers, monitor your competition, and curate news for content marketing.

One way to tap into this wealth of data is with a listening dashboard. At one of the roundtables recently held during the B2B Summit 2012 in Orlando, Nancy Chou, Senior Director of Customer Success, LeadFormix, shared a presentation on how B2B marketers could use social media to generate leads by creating a “listening dashboard.”

What is a “listening dashboard”?

A listening dashboard is ultimately a customer intelligence gathering strategy that consists of collecting and combining together smaller pieces of information to produce a larger and more insightful picture of a given topic, brand or prospect.

Here are some of the benefits Nancy listed that a listening dashboard can offer:

• Hear what people are saying, and uncover sales leads whenever people discuss relevant keywords
• Gain closer access to the industry influencers through the article and blog posts they write
• Monitor your competition, gather sales intelligence and beat your competition by following discussions in real time
• Share fresh news and content from industry thought leaders with prospects and customers

How to set up a listening dashboard

If you’re interested in building your own listening dashboard, Nancy provided four steps for building a listening dashboard for free:

1. Create a list of the RSS feeds you typically read
2. Gather additional newsfeeds on specific keywords using sites like alltop for newsfeeds and technorati or Google blog search to gather blogs written by industry thought leaders or topics of interest
3. Start following influential people on Twitter using search engines like listorious and wefollow that categorize Twitter users by keyword
4. Set up a Google Alerts account to be notified whenever a keyword, industry topic, competitor or thought leader releases new content

The steps above will get you started; however, if you need more sophisticated social media monitoring and tracking services, fee-based tracking tools are available.

Related Resources:

How IntraLinks Used Social Media to Generate Twice as Many Sales-ready Leads as Any Other Channel

B2B Lead Generation: 6 social media tactics from 7 experts

Social Media Marketing: 9 tactics for B2B social channel advertising

B2B Social Marketing: 4 ways to build one-to-one relationships with social influencers

Attempting lead nurturing without strong content is like hosting a Monsters of Rock show during a power outage.

The results will be disappointing.

That’s because effective content is the power behind lead nurturing success, insist Toby Murdock, CEO and Co-founder, Kapost, and Chris Baggott, Chairman and Co-founder, Compendium.

Both companies are content software providers, and both leaders recently spoke about the value of content marketing: Murdock at Marketo’s Social Marketing Rockstar Tour, and Baggott at the MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2012.

“The Internet has put buyers in control,” says Murdock. “Seventy percent of the buying is completed before Sales is contacted.”

What that means, he went on to explain, is that Marketing now has the greatest responsibility for guiding those opportunities through the sales cycle. However, traditional advertising methods no longer help leads move forward.

“The average clickthrough rate on paid Internet advertising is .01%,” he points out.

Baggott contrasts this with clickthrough rates on content that is meaningful to prospects. He provides an example: creating content that speaks directly to prospects’ needs and has strong calls-to-action.

“When we do this, we see clickthrough rates that exceed 20%,” he points out; it’s an observation they’ve made working with hundreds of clients.

“I click through because I am very motivated. I see something that will help me; I look at the content and say, ‘Yeah, these people get me.’ When you have a need and the content meets it, you’re very eager to move forward,” he explains.

Instead of pushing products or services, pull the right prospects through by providing information, ideas and solutions that will help them, advise Baggott and Murdock. (It will also help you rank high in search engines.) This is the essence of relevance, and without it, everything you consider content is just more advertising, they insist.

They offer these tips to create content with the power to move beyond advertising into relevancy:

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Marketers are poor parents.

Walking recently by a sea turtle nest here on Jacksonville Beach, I was thinking about how sea turtles abandon their young after laying their eggs.

Harsh, yes, but as marketers, are we really any better?

We create landing pages, triggered emails and lead forms, and then … eventually forget about them.

Sure, we have good excuses. We’re busy. With the turnover in most marketing departments, we might not have even been around when some of these orphans were created. Additionally, unlike a reflective process — such as a continual media placement where we get a bill and must make a choice — keeping an old page live is essentially an automatic choice with no additional cost.

And, before I get on a soapbox, we have our share of orphans at MECLABS as well (which Pamela Markey, Director of Marketing and Brand Strategy, MECLABS, lovingly refers to as “land mines”). After all, our sites are more than 10 years old.

But, I want to tell you a quick story about the results we received by showing some love to one of our orphan forms. My goal is to inspire you to conduct a basic site audit to find what pages, forms and automated messages you’re overlooking.

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Day one of B2B Summit 2012 has finally arrived.  Today, I had the opportunity to listen in on the panel discussion “5 B2B Social Media Career Killers … and how to overcome them.”

This session went beyond simply helping your company, and on to improving the future of your personal career.

MECLABS Director of Editorial Content Daniel Burstein moderated the panel of three B2B social media experts: Eddie Smith, Chief Revenue Officer, Topsy Labs; Chris Baggott, Chairman, Compendium; and Nichole Kelly, President, SME Digital.

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With the introductions made, they jumped straight into the first B2B social media killer …

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