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.”

Read more…

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?”

Read more…

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.

  Read more…

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?

Read more…

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.

  Read more…

According to the MarketingSherpa 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report (free excerpt at that link), 71% of survey respondents indicated that generating high-quality leads was a top challenge.

So, in today’s blog post, let’s look at lead generation budget trends (hint: money is moving to online tactics) and provide some resources to help you make wise use of that budget.

To help you get the most effective use of your budget, here are several case studies and how-to articles for some of the tactics mentioned in the above chart.

  Read more…

Organizations target quality, but they don’t pay for it. That is one of the latest discoveries from the MarketingSherpa 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report (free 10-page excerpt at this link). Let’s take a look …

Click to enlarge

“In the past, it may have been acceptable to assume that if an organization can lower their upfront cost-per-lead, they will also increase lead generation, improve ROI and drive revenue,” said Jen Doyle, Senior Research Manager, MECLABS.

“This makes sense when calculated on a spreadsheet, but when rolled out in an evolved marketplace with an empowered buyer, it’s going to take a lot more than simply lowering the cost-per-lead to achieve the goals of today’s CMO.”

So how can you balance cost and quality of leads?

  Read more…

Back in 1992, if you wanted to find information about a company or its products, you had two choices:

1. Spend hours at the library poring over periodicals, annual and industry reports, and magazine and newspaper clippings. (Do you remember microfiche?)
2. Meet with a salesperson.

Life was simpler then: You could reach quota by sending some direct mail, making a few phone calls, and scheduling a few meetings. After all, the customer had very few alternatives to inform themselves. You could succeed without a solid strategy; all that really mattered was the size of your Rolodex. Lead generation as we know it today didn’t exist. Frankly, it really didn’t have to.

Those days are long gone, yet too many organizations are still selling like it’s 1992.

How do I know?

All it takes is a quick review of MarketingSherpa’s 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report (free excerpt at that link). Of the 1,745 B2B organizations that participated, 61%  still have that big-Rolodex mindset – they send any lead that responds to a marketing campaign directly to sales. Furthermore, check out the chart at the right: The vast majority has not applied strategy to any aspect of lead generation.

These statistics are just a reflection of the day-to-day behaviors and attitudes that keep sales and marketing organizations stuck in a time warp. Here are five of them:

  Read more…

Marketers rank webinars among email newsletters, Sales calls, whitepapers and thought leadership articles as top lead generation tools, according to the chart at right from the just-released MarketingSherpa 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report (free excerpt at that link).

But Jeanne Hopkins, Executive Vice President, Smartbear Software, advises that if you’re new to webinars, proceed with care.

“Unfortunately, most people think that having a webinar is easy,” she says. “That’s because they don’t prepare enough. Webinars are very resource intensive if you want to produce results.”

And, if anyone knows, it’s Jeanne.

She was most recently vice president of Marketing for HubSpot where, under her leadership, the organization held webinars that attracted 25,000 sign-ups, 10,000 attendees and 3,500 new leads. She’s been a marketing executive since well before webinars came into existence, and leveraged their predecessor, the teleconference.

She draws from this experience to inform her three most important tips for novice webinar producers.

  Read more…