MarketingSherpa Blog

I heard an offhand comment the other day from an agency marketer who said most of her B2B clients focused their email marketing on rented third-party lists (despite her advice). I thought to myself, “Really? That can’t be very effective.” I looked at some data and found I was right.

Although 46 percent of B2B email marketers use third-party lists:

• Only 11 percent score the tactic at “four” or “five” on a five-point scale of effectiveness, with “five” being the most effective, according to the MarketingSherpa 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report.
• 57 percent score the tactic at “one” or “two”

These numbers almost completely reverse when we look at B2B marketers emailing to a house list. About 95 percent of B2B email marketers send to their own lists.

• 67 percent consider the tactic a “four” or “five” in terms of effectiveness on a five-point scale, with “five” being the most effective.
• 5 percent consider it a “one” or “two”

For me, these stats help underline the point that high-quality email databases are workhorses in marketing departments, and that marketers need to steer away from thinking about email marketing as advertising.

Love and Respect Your Audience

To elaborate on a point that Brad Bortone made in yesterday’s post, I would like to emphasize that effective email marketing is based on relationships. These relationships hinge on expectations, promises, and trust.

This might sound like fluffy marketing-speak, but bear with me. Specifics are coming.

First, people have expectations when they opt into your email program. You need to clearly set these expectations during the opt-in process by describing:

• The content they’ll receive in your program
• How often they’ll receive emails

Once they opt-in, you’ve officially promised to meet these expectations. If you fulfill your promise and only send what they’ve agreed to, that will build trust. Subscribers will trust your emails will have something they want. That trust translates into higher open and clickthrough rates and helps build an effective program.

If you move outside of the expectations, you are assuming subscribers want something else. You’re breaking your promise, harming your relationship, and undermining trust. You’re encouraging them to click “spam,” ignore your emails, or (at best) opt-out — none of which are good.

So you cannot assume people want your emails. You have to clearly set expectations, keep your promise, build trust and establish good relationships to get good results.

Email Marketing is Not Advertising

Strong email relationships can only come from your house list. On a third-party list, their expectation is to not hear from you. They never opted-in. You’re assuming they want something they’ve never asked for, and you’re encouraging them to click “spam.”

Sure, sending to third-party lists can work. But look at the data above. You’re likely better off investing in your database, segmentation, and relevance.

The mindset that “we’re just going to reach people, even if they’d rather be doing something else,” is an advertising mindset. That’s what marketers do on television. I’d rather be watching Pawn Stars, but instead I’m stuck watching ads.

Advertising is great, but it’s not good email marketing. Good emails are anticipated by subscribers and are relevant to their needs. This is why a good house list is so valuable. Bad emails arrive out of nowhere and interrupt people when they’re doing something else. This is why emailing third-party lists is among the least-effective B2B email marketing tactic today.

Related resources

MarketingSherpa 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report

Email Marketing: Three lessons learned at the MarketingSherpa Email Marketing LEAPS Advanced Practices Workshop

Chart: Top tactics organizations use to improve email relevancy

Email Deliverability: Always test emails that link to third-party sites

MarketingSherpa Email Marketing LEAPS Advanced Practices Workshop

I recently attended the MarketingSherpa Email Marketing LEAPS Advanced Practices Workshop in Boston (my supervisors let me out for fresh air once per season), and though these events are always good for new tips, tactics and ideas, I never expected to experience one emotion:

Surprise.

But, after sharing an enjoyable lunch with a handful of attendees, I felt just that. We were in downtown Boston, just a few miles from the regular site of Sherpa’s annual B2B Summits, where the world’s most tactical marketers come to polish their skills, network with similarly experienced professionals and share their stories of success. To boot, we were at an advanced practices workshop – a title that implied this was no introductory, 101-level path into the “deep end” of email marketing.

But, one bowl of chowder later, I learned that a good percentage of the day’s attendees were either new to email marketing, or – in one case – new to marketing altogether. At first, I was taken aback by the fact that these relative newbies were putting themselves in a position to be overwhelmed. And, while the table waited for me to stop making that confused puppy look, they explained how not only was the workshop giving them actionable items to bring back to the office, they were also gaining a stronger understanding of email marketing in general.

Then I went through the event presentations again, and soon realized they had a point. In email marketing (actually, all marketing), no matter how advanced a tactic or idea may seem, it always comes back to the basics. And I don’t just mean marketing basics, but rather the very cornerstones of communication and interaction.

Here are just a few of the things I learned in the LEAPS workshop that support this point:

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1. Relevance is paramount

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Chart: Most significant challenges to email marketing effectiveness,
by primary channel–

According to the MarketingSherpa 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, providing relevant content remains both a top priority and the most significant challenge facing email marketers today. No matter how much time or resources you invest in your email campaigns, it’s all for naught if these messages don’t find their way into a recipient’s inbox.

Relevancy can be defined as sending the right message to the right person at the right time. In order to improve deliverability, you must engage your audience with relevant content. If I sign up for email alerts after shopping for cycling gear, please don’t bombard me with emails about all-natural fruit juice. Maybe I’ll care, maybe I won’t, but this isn’t why I came to you in the first place. Email content needs to be targeted and appropriate, justifying a user’s opt-in and continued opens and clicks.–

Remember – it’s good to eat a little humble pie before creating an email program. As marketers, sometimes our egos lead us to become out of touch with the reality of a situation. We start thinking we know what the customer “really” wants before they tell us their needs. There isn’t anything more important than keeping the promise to deliver exactly what the subscriber requested and nothing more.

At the core of relevant communications is value exchange. The majority of email messages should contain valuable information in the form of reports, entertaining videos and insightful stories — not endless self-promotion.

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2. Respect your audience

I had no idea that my mother and Aretha Franklin were email marketers, but just as they instilled all those years ago, respect is paramount in this discipline.

I like choices. We all do. When attempting to retain subscribers, it’s imperative to give customers a chance to “opt down” rather than opt-out. Options for this include reducing frequency, changing offer types as well as subject matter topics. Also, it’s good to include links to “follow” and “like” options, as your customers may prefer communicating on social media sites. The goal is to let the user control the conversation, not vice versa.

And for the love of everything we hold dear, let people decide when they receive from you. For the last 40 years, the US Postal Service has allowed people to stop mail delivery for a set period of time, so overflowing mailboxes don’t invite the local burglars over for a buffet of your finer things. Yet, this option is rarely mentioned for email.

Remember – while it might seem enticing to send every possible offer and announcement to all of your subscribes, if you over-send to an unresponsive subscriber, you may harm your deliverability reputation and success metrics.

In short, if someone on your list leaves, let them go. If they don’t come back, they were never yours to begin with.

(Speaking of which…)

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3. Email marketing is based on relationships

In email marketing, a relationship begins the moment the user opts-in. Once this happens, you are responsible for ensuring that your recipients feel welcome, informed and satiated with relevant content. This all starts with the welcome message.

The importance of the welcome email message cannot be understated. For some consumers, this will be the first conversation they have with the brand. Hopefully, it will be the first step toward that person becoming a regular customer, if not an out-and-out brand evangelist. Remember to give them more than they may expect, in hopes that they will be looking forward to your next send.

You want your email to set the tone for the ongoing relationship, which is why it’s always good to start with a sincere “thank you.” Yes, just like your mother told you – manners are important. The words selected must support your brand’s voice, and successive messages must meet subscriber expectations.

Remember – like  high school romance, not all relationships last forever. Try not to take it personally when you realize how many subscribers go inactive. Subscribers don’t always give an official good-bye. Sometimes their interests change, they prefer a different communication channel, or simply change jobs.

Stay positive and believe they have just been too busy to interact with your brand. You can send a simple “we missed you” note to reengage the subscriber, but keep in mind that the special offer should not be over the top so as to sound needy or even desperate.

No 75%, “buy-one-get-five” discounts, folks.

To draw a parallel, if my wife and I have an argument, I may apologize (yes, let’s work under the assumption that I’m wrong in this scenario) by offering a gift as a show of remorse. If I come presenting extravagant diamonds, she may accept my apology, but the extreme, over the top gift may indicate that the argument was more serious than it was, not to mention entirely my fault.

Approaching a re-engagement email this way might just chase them away permanently, even if there’s a significant offer on the table. An over-the-top offer might even make users question your product’s overall value.

However if I give my wife a small bouquet of flowers to apologize I will show sincerity for possibly hurting her feelings, but the focus will remain on the apology and not the gift. This also applies to an email relationship; you do not want an idle subscriber to reengage solely for the prize, otherwise you will be in the same situation again, and will have started (or continued) a bad communication cycle.

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Looking back at that lunch conversation, I shouldn’t have been so surprised that beginners were taking so much from an advanced practices workshop. Because, as we see in the LEAPS methodology, email marketing only serves to reinforce basic, evergreen marketing tactics.

If only I knew this stuff during my first heart-wrenching break-up.

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[Be sure to catch Jeff Rice and Adam Sutton on the next leg of the Email Marketing LEAPS Advanced Practices Workshop, coming soon to Seattle, WA and Washington, DC.]

–

Related resources

Risky Email Marketing Paid Off

Email Marketing: LEAPS methodology for improving performance

MarketingSherpa 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report

Members Library — Marketing Research  Chart: Top tactics organizations use to improve email relevancy

A recently published research paper may prove to be of great interest to marketers. “No Clicks, No Problem: Using Cursor Movements to Understand and Improve Search,” by Jeff Huang, Information School University of Washington; and Ryen W. White and Susan Dumais of Microsoft Research, takes a look at the correlation of eyegaze on a webpage and cursor placement.

This research found a high correlation between where the cursor was placed on a page and where the user was actually looking, and created a tiny JavaScript capable of running invisibly on a webpage that tracks where the cursor is in real time providing information on where that webpage visitor is looking and, possibly more importantly, pausing throughout the visit.

This is from the abstract of the linked paper:

In this paper, we examine mouse cursor behavior on search engine results pages (SERPs), including not only clicks but also cursor movements and hovers over different page regions.

We: (i) report an eye-tracking study showing that cursor position is closely related to eye gaze, especially on SERPs; (ii) present a scalable approach to capture cursor movements, and an analysis of search result examination behavior evident in these large-scale cursor data; and (iii) describe two applications (estimating search result relevance and distinguishing good from bad abandonment) that demonstrate the value of capturing cursor data.

Maybe most intriguing for marketers is the final line of the abstract, “Our scalable cursor tracking method may also be useful in non-search settings.”

The JavaScript code that drives this online tracking tech is a mere 750 bytes and had a negligible effect on the load time of webpages hosting the script. Although this technology is not yet commercially available, it should eventually present another interesting avenue for marketers to test website visitor’s behavior.

Click to enlarge

Jeff Huang, the team member who implemented and deployed the cursor tracking code, mined the cursor data, and wrote parts of the paper, took a few moments to answer several questions I had about this intriguing technology.

Tell me a little more about this research.

Jeff Huang: We examined mouse cursor behavior on search engine results pages, including not only clicks but also cursor movements and hovers over different page regions. In an eye-tracking study, we showed that cursor position is closely related to eye gaze. We developed a scalable approach to capturing cursor movements, and an analysis of search result examination behavior for over 300,000 queries from around 22,000 people. Finally, we were able to use cursor movements to estimate search result relevance and distinguishing good from bad abandonment.

Marketers are probably familiar with click and heatmaps, and this seems closely related to that technology. Do you think this technology can be useful for more than search?

JH: Cursor movements can create heatmaps with a similar appeal as click maps. While click maps show only the regions being clicked, movement heatmaps can also show regions that received attention by proxy of the cursor position. Often clicks are not available for smaller sites so movements can provide richer information.

Could marketers utilize this tech for webpage research to improve, say, the eyepath of the page? Is cursor movement correlated with a page visitor’s eyepath?

JH: Yes, as we mention in the paper, the cursor is typically within 200 pixels of the eye gaze. The most common position for the cursor is to be slightly below what the user is looking at. We also found that the cursor follows the eye gaze by around 200ms [milliseconds] (although the data for this is highly variable).

Does this technology offer other applications for marketing efforts or webpage testing?

JH: Sure, having records of the cursor movements allow marketers to replay the user’s session on the Web page. For example, they can see which order a user filled out a form even if they did not complete the form and left the page instead. We have developed an efficient method to record the cursor movements so they take a minimal amount of space and can be collected without disrupting the user.

Is this tech publically available, and if not, when is commercial roll-out expected?

JH: This was developed as part of an internship at Microsoft Research last year, and deployed to internal users. I will return to Microsoft again this summer, but I cannot comment on its commercial availability.

Few issues create more conflict between sales and marketing than lead qualification criteria. In the MarketingSherpa 2011 B2B Benchmark Report, 72 percent of marketers listed generating higher-quality leads as their single biggest challenge, up from 69 percent the prior year. In most cases, Sales and Marketing each see lead qualification from very different perspectives, both of which have value.

In sales, management spends considerable time, including extensive one-on-one coaching, teaching sales people about lead qualification criteria, often dissecting specific sales calls, contacts, opportunities, and accounts. Good sales people soon learn that qualifying prospects takes significant skill and judgment.  Invariably, the best sales people are superb at this skill.

In contrast, the best marketers look at a sophisticated combination of techniques for delivering more qualified prospects to sales:

• Targeting. By soliciting the right audience, fewer out-of-market prospects inquire.
• Messaging and calls-to-action. The right message and supporting content will attract the most qualified buyers.
• Explicit user-supplied information. Registration forms enable marketers to ask qualifying questions, questions that can evolve as the prospect moves deeper into the buying cycle.  Unfortunately, prospects are unwilling to fill-out a lot of information on a registration form so this tactic must be used with great restraint. MECLABS has one case study, for example, that shows a 189 percent increase in registration largely by decreasing the amount of information on a registration form.
• Implicit data. Increasingly, marketers are drawing inferences about not just an area of interest, but the likely depth of interest, the role of the responder in the buying process, and similar qualifying information, all based not on what a prospect says but on what he or she does, primarily via his or her clickstream behavior but also via other media and transactional information.
• Data Hygiene, enhancement, and consolidation. The cloud is creating very scalable and cost-effective tools for cleaning up inquiries, appending additional or better business card or firmagraphic information to each record, and consolidating duplicate accounts, contacts or areas of interest. The right processes will typically identify 14 to 21 percent of the lead pool as either duplicate or not usable (e.g., the visitor enters “Mickey Mouse” for a name).
• Lead Scoring. Lead scoring uses any and all of the implicit, user-supplied information along with explicit and appended information to identify and prioritize records worthy of human follow up.

Leaving aside tele-qualification as a marketing function, the key difference between the approach of sales and marketing is this: marketing uses largely quantifiable techniques, primarily driven by highly scalable business rules and automation while sales uses qualitative techniques that are extremely nuanced and very subjective and invariably much more exacting for a given account.

In other words:

• Marketing improves the probability of success across a pool of responders.
• Sales identifies the probability of success for a particular responder.

Customers and prospects hedge, withhold information intentionally, change their minds, and/or misunderstand and even fabricate information.  Sales people use, not just the words of a customer, but a range of information, including someone’s tone, body language (in the case of on-site sales calls), the perspective of others within the account, external sources, and many other tools to evaluate the probability of purchase. While lead scoring is improving every day, it obviously has a long way to go before replicating the qualification techniques of sales people.

The truth is these two approaches are highly complementary

The more sales understands the tools and limitations marketing uses, the more insightful their suggestions can be; likewise, the more marketing understands the criteria and methods the best sales people use, the more marketers can improve their own upstream practices.

Related resources

MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2011 – in San Francisco and Boston

B2B Marketing: Building a quality list

B2B Marketing: The 7 most important stages in the teleprospecting funnel

Members library – B2B How-To: 5 lead nurturing tactics to get from lead gen to sales-qualified

Free MarketingSherpa B2B Newsletter

Review: B2B Marketing Best Practices – MarketingSherpa 2011 Handbook by Lee Odden at TopRank online marketing blog

To truly gain ROI from social media marketing, you need to take a strategic approach…as you would with any other marketing discipline.

So, at 1 p.m. EDT in today’s MarketingSherpa webinar (sponsored by Facebook) – Intro to Strategic Social Media Marketing: Get your business or agency started with an ROI-based approach – I’ll be moderating an hour-long session with Todd Lebo and Zuzia Soldenhoff-Thorpe from MECLABS and Tamara Rosenbaum from Facebook, to arm you with some ideas as you embark on a strategic approach to social marketing.

But before we share our research, we asked your peers what advice they would give fellow marketers to help you transform your efforts from random acts of marketing to a strategic approach. Here are a few of our favorite responses…

Relationships are based on an open and honest conversation

The best advice I can offer is to look at social media as an extension to your Acquisition, Engagement, Retention, and Growth strategies. The majority of companies look at it as a function of PR – what about marketing, sales, and support? Isn’t a happy customer worth more than a random fan?

Don’t forget the most important part of social media: listening. Look at all the companies that pride themselves in having thousands of followers/fans but in turn only “listen” to a couple of hundred… that’s more of a monologue isn’t it? Don’t measure your success by the number of people listening to you.

Relationships are based on an open and honest conversation. Listen, and only then “talk” about things that are relevant to your audience. Do it in a timely way. Measure reactions to your conversations.

Using social media as just another channel to “get your message out” is not the way to build the dialog needed to create and nurture a close relationship with your prospects and customers.

– Roberto Lino, Skype Enterprise Global Head of Ecommerce, Skype

Research, strategize, and then get going

My top 3 tips for success in social media would be…

1. Do some research to find out where your customers are having the conversations before trying to join every single social site. Monitor what’s being said about you and your competition.

2. Go in with a strategy!!!

Who will be in charge of this effort? How many times a week will you tweet? What kinds of content will be useful for your audience?

3. Start small so you make sure you have time to keep it up. What we find is many companies have such limited resources to devote to social media marketing that time is wasted in the wrong groups, content is too weak, and schedules get too busy and the first thing to drop to the bottom of the priority list is the social stuff. Consistency is key when it comes to social media, so it’s important to find a way to keep it up.

I look forward to hearing everyone’s advice and joining the webinar!

– Michelle Etherton, Creative Director, Nurture Marketing

A dissenting opinion

My advice to marketers is to not transform your efforts from random acts of marketing to a strategic approach. Social media is all about being random and experimenting. Show up. Participate. Be random.

Social media marketing differs from traditional marketing in that you don’t just set it and forget it. Successful social media marketing requires interaction. It requires actively networking, meaning you are responding to others and your status updates are more than predetermined calculated scheduled posts.

By being random, you will find new and unique ways to gain ROI. I think you take all the fun out of social media marketing if you are rigid with strategy.

– Lara Nieberding, The Data Digger

Related Resources

Free webinar, Today June, 9th 1-2pm EDT — Intro to Strategic Social Media Marketing: Get your business or agency started with an ROI-based approach

Social Media Marketing: You value (and earn ROI on) what you pay for

Social Marketing ROAD Map Handbook

Inbound Marketing newsletter – Free Case Studies and How To Articles from MarketingSherpa’s reporters



Free. Look inside any copywriting book or on any marketing blog, and it will tell you that “free” is one of the most powerful words in marketing. However…how often are you, as a marketer, susceptible to that magic word?

For most media we use – from PPC ads to television spots – we recognize that an investment must take place. Yet social media, with its tantalizing lack of an invoice, seems almost too good to be true. Thanks to the power of technology, you no longer have to spend money to make money!

Some say the best things in life are free…

Well, the attitude may not be that severe, but take a look at this quote from the 2011 MarketingSherpa Social Marketing Benchmark Report…

“I do not look at social media marketing as something I invest in. I advertise on Facebook and consider that an online advertising expense like Google AdWords. I consider the time I spend creating, maintaining and promoting my Facebook page as “free” because I do the work myself so the costs are all soft, not cash. I know this approach isn’t really accurate and may not help me understand my costs, but it’s how I think of it for now.”

This marketer is not alone. According to the Benchmark Report’s lead author, Sergio Balegno, “On average, 15 percent of organizations think social marketing is free and wish to keep it that way. When we segment this group by primary channel, we find that B2B marketers are, by far, the least likely to believe this misconception. Social marketing is a time-consuming practice requiring significant staff commitment to execute effectively.”

…but you can keep it for the birds and the bees

As Sergio says, all of that social media buzz comes at a price. But, you may say, what is the harm in viewing soft costs as, essentially, no costs? There’s no outlay in cash, so what’s the difference?

The savvy CMO is looking for money (that’s, what he wants). Specifically, ROI. So it takes an attitude shift. From my experience, when people (and especially marketers) don’t pay anything for a product, service, or media, they don’t value it. And if they don’t value it, they don’t invest in it. And if you don’t truly invest in a tactic, you will never nail the ROI.

On the flip side, you don’t understand the true costs either. Even soft costs are costs. For example, you have the opportunity cost. A sole entrepreneur must decide whether to engage in Twitter for an hour or call some customers and see if their needs are being met. A content marketer at a major company must decide whether to invest in writing a blog post or spending some more time testing and optimizing the Web site.

In the above-referenced Social Marketing Benchmark Report, there was an interesting chart about how CMOs perceive Social Marketing ROI…

Almost half of marketers that are taking a strategic approach to social media marketing are realizing a measurable ROI.

Yet, as you look at the bottom of the chart, all too many marketers (especially those who haven’t reached the strategic phase) just look at social marketing as a freebie, not a marketing discipline.

So, in this week’s MarketingSherpa webinar (sponsored by Facebook) – Intro to Strategic Social Media Marketing: Get your business or agency started with an ROI-based approach – I’ll be moderating an hour-long session with Todd Lebo and Zuzia Soldenhoff-Thorpe from MECLABS and Tamara Rosenbaum from Facebook, that we hope will give you basic info to help you begin to take a strategic approach to social media marketing or give you ideas to optimize your current approach.

Oh, and did I mention? The webinar is absolutely free.

Related Resources

Free webinar, Thursday June, 9th 1-2pm EST — Intro to Strategic Social Media Marketing: Get your business or agency started with an ROI-based approach

Study: Marketers Reporting Social Media ROI of 100, 200, Even 1,000 percent
— via Forbes

In Social Media, Your Return Represents Investment –via Fast Company

Social Media Marketing: Facebook news feed optimization

Social Media Marketing: How to optimize the customer experience to benefit from word-of-mouth advertising

Day one of 2011 Optimization Summit has come and gone. Many of us have vertigo, either from the amount of content we absorbed, or the view from the rotating restaurant atop the Westin, the tallest hotel in the Western Hemisphere.

Yesterday’s sessions were rich with insights from experts and marketers presenting their experiences in optimization. I say “experiences” because, as we saw, not every test improves results. But every valid test offers valuable insights.

Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, CEO & Managing Director of MECLABS, addressed this point head-on in the day’s first session. McGlaughlin presented examples of landing pages tests that brought greater than 50% declines in response.

Was Dr. McGlaughlin feeling woozy? Did he sit in the rotating restaurant too long before his session? Actually, no. Dr. McGlaughlin illustrated that even tests with poor results can reveal valuable insights about an audience.

“The goal of a test is to get a learning, not a lift. With enough learnings, you can get the real lift,” he said.

The above image features the tests McGlaughlin touched on. If you’ve seen such results, then you’ve probably asked yourself “well, what do we do now?” Part of the answer came from Boris Grinkot, Associate Director of Product Development, MarketingSherpa, in a later session. Grinkot mentioned two typical reasons landing page visitors do not convert:

1. The page does not offer what visitors want

2. The page does not clearly explain that you have what visitors want (or why they want it from you)

These two causes can help identify the causes of poor landing page performance, and what you should test to improve results.

With this in mind, the researchers tested a final treatment that featured drastically shorter copy. The idea was to get out of the way — to clearly show visitors that the site had what they wanted and to make it easy to get.

This treatment increased conversion rates by 78%. Why?

The marketing channel driving traffic to the page had already done the selling, Dr. McGlaughlin said. The page did not have to convince  visitors to convert — they were ready to convert. The previous treatments were impeding them.

The results of the previous two tests helped the researchers form this hypothesis and create the third treatment. Even though the two tests had abysmal results, they gave the team enough insights to identify a better treatment that would generate a real lift in response. So even tests with poor performance can improve your marketing — they just might not have improved it yet.

Related resources

Optimization Summit 2011

Landing Page Optimization: 2 charts describing the best page elements to test and how to test them

Marketing Research Chart: Top website objectives to determine optimization priorities and tactics

Landing Page Optimization: Minimizing bounce rate with clarity

Optimization and A/B Testing: Why words matter (for more than just SEO)

Members Library – Online Marketing: Website redesign leads to 476% increase in page views and 64% lower bounce rate

Members Library – Campaign Analysis: Optimization expert lists 5 tweaks to boost an email campaign’s conversions

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

Last month’s webinars on leveraging the human touch to drive leads, presented for the B2B Lead Roundtable and Marketo, prompted a great question: “What should I look for in a teleprospector?”

Unfortunately, that can’t be answered with a fast, convenient sound bite. That’s why I’m going to do my best to respond here in my inaugural blog post.

Over the past 15 years, I’ve been involved in hiring hundreds of teleprospectors. Along with Brian Carroll, I was one of the co-founders of InTouch, now MECLABS Leads Group. Fortune 100 companies from a broad base of industries hire us to do teleprospecting for them; they know the value of the human touch to optimize their lead generation efforts. It seems like we’re always on the lookout for powerful teleprospectors to support these accounts, and over the years, we’ve pinpointed some of the critical traits that are inherent in every top performer:

An abiding desire to serve. Teleprospectors must sincerely want to help others, because that’s what they’re going to be doing all day, every day. When they conclude a conversation with a prospect, we want that prospect to feel like the call added value to his day — regardless of his timing to buy. To make that happen, teleprospectors must have an attitude of service, a sincere eagerness to help others. Furthermore, not only must teleprospectors serve the people they call, they must gain real satisfaction from serving their colleagues as well. There’s no room to be territorial, because they’re going to be passing leads to someone else who will take them to the next level in the sales process.

The focus to follow process. A full-time teleprospector can expect to make 80 to 100 calls a day. This entails far more than simply smiling, dialing and spouting a script. After all, we use call guides, not scripts; read this or watch our most recent webinar to find out why. Our team must be fully engaged in each and every call to successfully execute proven, tested tactics that drive opportunity. It doesn’t matter how clever or charming a candidate is; if he’s unwilling to follow process, you don’t want him calling.

Tenacity and patience. We’re not bell-ringers here; people aren’t getting leads every three minutes. It can typically take 8 to 19 calls to reach a prospect. Teleprospecting is not for someone who thrives on instant gratification.

Empathy and strong listening skills. They must be able to put themselves in their prospects’ shoes and anticipate their needs. That means listening intently to pick up on the subtle signals that indicate where a prospect is on the buying process. You would be impressed at the engagement we get from prospects who can sense that our teleprospectors are paying close attention. People know when they’re genuinely being listened to.

Curiosity coupled with a love of learning. People with this combination like to be informed; they’re well-read and take pride in keeping up with what’s happening in the business world. This is a key trait for our teleprospectors because they can ultimately work with a variety of clients. While we train and coach them extensively, they must be ready to intelligently discuss any number of topics ranging from manufacturing devices to educational programs.

A clear, measured, confident speaking voice. This is lower on the list because, more than any of the other qualities, it can be taught.

Obviously, you’re not going to be able to scan a resume and identify these skills, and you can’t take someone from outside sales, plop them down with a headset and a script, and expect success. Road warriors are accustomed to closing; hunting for opportunity requires a completely different skillset and very few people have both.

To find great teleprospectors, we have candidates undergo multiple interviews and tests, including role-playing and psychological analyses, to identify strengths and opportunities for growth. You just never know where you’re going to find out a stand-out employee. Case in point is Mark Wicka, our Senior Business Development Representative. He came to our company as a temp and had never worked in any kind of lead-generation role. Eleven years later, he’s still here. (And talk about work ethic — he’s never called in sick during those entire 11 years!)

He began his career here generating leads for our clients. But these days, we’re using his skills to generate leads for MECLABS while mentoring and supervising a team that is doing the same. He thrives on learning; when he worked for our clients, he dove into educating himself about their industries and products. Now that he drives business for MECLABS, he has become expert in all aspects of lead generation. Yet, he’s the most humble guy you’d ever meet; he never comes across as a know-it-all, just very informed and authentic. His spirit of service shines through in everything he does. Consider what he has to say about what motivated him to come to MECLABS:

“I feel like fate brought me here. I worked in print advertising, but it didn’t resonate. I didn’t think it was very effective and I wanted to work for a company where I knew their solution worked,” he recalls. “I was doing more than look for a job, I wanted to work for an organization that I believed in. I’ve found that at MECLABS.

“My goal is to be an intelligent follower. There’s no disgrace in following, the person who follows leaders most effectively is the one who develops leadership most rapidly. I’ve had great mentors here — when I started it was my program managers. Today, it’s Brian Carroll and Flint McGlaughlin (CEO and Managing Director of MECLABS). Their success is my success.”

I would love to hear your thoughts about the qualities you think are essential to be an effective teleprospector. Are you surprised by my conclusions? Are there other skills you think are just as important as the ones I’ve listed? Do you want me to expand on any of these thoughts? Feel free to comment below.

If you’ve been reading this blog for just about any amount of time, you already know that landing page optimization is an effective way to increase the ROI of your website traffic.

But when most people think of landing pages, they think of pages tied to certain traffic sources. The most popular of those sources are generally PPC ads and email messaging.
But there are a few other opportunities to capitalize on your traffic with landing pages. Take a look at this marketing research chart from Boris Grinkot’s 2011 Landing Page Optimization Benchmark Report:

According to the chart, most marketers aren’t optimizing traffic from:

1. Social media sites
2. Referring sites
3. Organic search

Now right off the bat, you might be thinking that the reason those traffic sources aren’t capitalized on has to do with the fact that most websites aren’t getting traffic from those sources.

However, this data only factors in marketers who have traffic from these sources.

So for example, of the E-Commerce sites that are currently receiving organic search traffic, only 31% of them are capitalizing on it with dedicated landing pages.

The fact that some marketers are dedicating landing pages to these particular sources of traffic is a good indicator that they are working to convert that traffic, but that most marketers are simply missing out.

This one chart signals that there is a tremendous opportunity to get ahead of your competition and start capitalizing on more of your traffic.

Get 41 more charts like this one…FREE

This is simply one insight from one chart in the Benchmark Report. If you really wanted to, I’m sure you could get a lot more out of this chart. You’re only limited by your own business intelligence.

For the next few days, the entire chapter from the Benchmark Report this chart is in can be downloaded for free thanks to a generous sponsorship from HubSpot. All you need to do to get your 41 free charts including Boris’ insightful analysis is click the link below, fill out the form on the landing page, and download the chapter.

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Optimization testing can be daunting. With so many elements on a Web page, and so many ways each could be customized, knowing what to test and how to change it can feel like testing spaghetti the old college way (throw it at the ceiling and see if it sticks).

But optimization does not have to be daunting or random. Some marketers will receive a crash course in landing page optimization at our Optimization Summit this week. If you can’t make it, don’t fret. There’s always next year. In the meantime, MarketingSherpa just published the 2011 Landing Page Optimization Benchmark Report.

I pulled two charts from the report to give marketers some reference points when designing their tests. Hopefully they will help keep crusty pasta off your ceiling.

This chart lists the four page elements that rank most consistently as having a “very significant impact” across three optimization objectives. Note that a different page element ranks highest for each objective:

• Direct lead gen: The highest performing element is the form layout at 44 percent
• Incentivized lead: The highest performing element is the body copy at 41 percent
• Ecommerce: The highest performing element is the image content at 43 percent

The chart lists only four of 17 page elements measured by our analysts, so there are many other elements that can be impactful in your tests. Your results may not mimic this data exactly, but this chart points to elements that other marketers are seeing as having the most impact.

Once you select a page element to test, the big question becomes “how do we change it?” This chart lists tactics you can use to segment your audience and add more relevance to your optimization pages. Each tactic is ranked by its effectiveness, ease of use, and usage rate among marketers.

The far right of the chart features the most effective tactics: segmenting based on purchase history and other CRM data. Customizing landing pages to a customer’s purchase history appears to be an opportunity for marketers. It is the most-effective tactic listed and appears relatively easy to implement.

In the report, our analysts also point to another opportunity: messaging in the referring ad or page.

“Using the messaging in the referring ad or page can be especially easy to apply when the marketer also controls that messaging, making it a highly efficient way to segment,” according to the report.

However you go about your optimization tests, it is important that you test accurately and continuously learn from the results. The data in these charts can provide reference points to guide your plans, but only your team can uncover the best tactics to fit your audience and your brand.

Related resources

Optimization Summit 2011

2011 Landing Page Optimization Benchmark Report

Marketing Research Chart: Top website objectives to determine optimization priorities and tactics

Landing Page Optimization: Minimizing bounce rate with clarity

Optimization and A/B Testing: Why words matter (for more than just SEO)

Members Library — Campaign Analysis: Optimization expert lists 5 tweaks to boost an email campaign’s conversions

Members Library — Landing Page Optimization: How to serve 2 markets with 1 page

Members Library — How to Plan Landing Page Tests: 6 Steps to Guide Your Process