Posted by: Mackenzie Ross, Marketing Coordinator
There is no clear best practice, or set-in-stone rule, as to when to send an email broadcast. That’s because it all depends on your specific audience. Every audience’s email-checking habits are different. For example, a B2B audience might check mail throughout the day while stay-at-home moms might only check email at night. There are, however, different steps you can take to zero in on your audience’s preferred send time.
Get Started: Check your site analytics and note the busiest times. You can use this information to tell when your customers are their most active or are more engaged at their computers. This may be easier to nail down for a business audience, given that you know the work day’s approximate start time, lunch hour and end time.
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Posted by: Rosemary Riley, Senior Copywriter
Forbes has just released the results of its “Ad Effectiveness Survey,” conducted among senior marketing executives during February and March 2009. The survey delved into behaviors and beliefs around digital marketing and forecasts areas of growth and weakness over the next six months.
Highlights include:
- When it comes to influencing brand perception, the most effective tactics were site sponsorships and pay-per-impression programs on digital publications.
- For garnering conversions, search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and email were seen as the three most effective tools.
- 82% of marketers are using conversions or sales data.
- 55% use registrations.
- Over the next six months, respondents plan to allocate a higher percentage of digital media dollars to viral marketing (42%) and SEO (40%), while 53% stated they would spend less on Ad Networks.
View the complete survey results.
Posted by: Christy Roth, Project Manager
When setting lead generation goals for a new program, there are many important considerations to keep in mind. To start, you need to realistically evaluate your team and resources. It’s important to have an idea of what type of lead volume your sales force can handle. You want the users to have the best experience possible, including receiving timely follow-up if they are requesting contact. In addition, it’s helpful in planning to talk to the sales team about what types of leads they receive the most value from, which could be dependent on the type of offer(s) the user registered for, the type of online event they attended, whether or not they raised their hand for contact, etc.
Another key part of starting the lead generation program is knowing what products or campaigns will be the focus of the lead generation push. When embarking on a lead generation launch, you need to keep in mind what you’ve done with past products and how your brand is perceived. Will users understand that this is your product? Do they already trust your brand?
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Posted by: Jenny Bachner, Media Specialist
We’ve always known that banner ads provide good overall branding exposure for a company, but what we really need to know is how effective they are in driving click-throughs for lead generation. And it seems in the past year we’ve witnessed a decline in users clicking through on ads intended to drive conversions.
This is due in part to the lack of targeting techniques available in early 2008, and I also think that banner blindness set in when the users’ need for information was not being met by 90% of the ad units served to them. However, with the integration of more useful targeting techniques, such as behavioral and demographic targeting, perhaps we’re seeing the beginning of an upward trend in click-though rates for banner ads. Take a look at these results from the “Search Engine Marketing and Online Display Advertising Study” recently posted to eMarketer.com:
As people begin to find ad units served more relevant and actually find value in them, they’ll begin to pay attention and be more likely to respond again. I have already witnessed an increase in click-through rates on niche websites that are able to contextually target ad units, and I look forward to following this new trend as we progress through 2009.
Posted by: Gloria Dutton, Marketing Coordinator
It’s no secret that times are tough. But mandatory spending freezes and budget cuts are not insurmountable. Your customers’ current spending trends will eventually turn around. Now is the time to put your company in a position of strength as a thought leader and partner, so that when the good times return, your company’s products and services come to the top of your prospect’s mind.
Lead nurturing is one of the top ways to prevent an overall downturn in customer acquisition during times of recession and to ensure more business when the economy improves. By continually keeping your prospects in touch and informed while they are unable to buy, your company is looked at as more of a long-term partner and smart long-term business choice. It also will help customers to see that you are there in support of their interests and will most likely not end the relationship once the sale is final if you did not drop interest in them when they were not even making a purchase.
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Posted by: Shannon Anderson, Project Manager
Social media marketing (SMM) is becoming an increasingly critical tactic in driving website traffic and staying involved in the conversation that surrounds a company’s industry. As you implement a social media campaign, it is important to track these efforts to see which sources are paying off.
Google Analytics now allows webmasters to see how users are interacting with a company’s website through the following sites:
To view this data requires Analytics add-ons, but once gleaned, it’s valuable in understanding what social bookmarking websites people are using to get to your site. Using this information, you can evaluate the target audiences of these sites and consider new ways to reach them. On some sites like Digg.com, you can even click directly to the users’ profiles who have bookmarked your site.
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Posted by: Megan Amick, Marketing Coordinator
Email is a great tactic for qualified lead generation and for delivering traffic to your website because these visitors have already expressed interest in your offering. So, it is important to track emails to see which tactics within your emails are the most effective. The best way to track your email campaigns is to create tags within each email and use Google Analytics to provide measurable statistics. Tags are created by inserting additional traceable information into your email marketing campaign links. Using the Google Analytics URL Builder you can create these tags to track email campaign information.
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Posted by: Jenny Bachner, Media Specialist
You’ve done a lot of work to prepare for your lead generation or lead nurturing campaign. You’ve assessed the audience, strategized offers, determined the best timeline, drafted a media plan and created a landing page based on conversion marketing best practices. It’s easy to let the details of the program’s final execution slip under the radar. But how you craft your landing page’s registration form(s) is too important to pass over.
The registration form is ideally your prospect’s final destination. So take advantage of these tips for making yours as user-friendly as possible:
Posted by: Lauren Klostermann, Project Manager
Google Analytics has recently released a feature with the assistance of two companies, Mongoose Metrics and LivePerson, which allows users to integrate telephone leads and live chat with its services.
The way it works with phone leads: you use a trackable phone number in an online campaign, and then when the number is dialed and connected, the phone server tracks a visit to a hidden page within your site with a special tag. Google Analytics is then able to show the data. Analytics will go so far as to show the date and duration of the call.
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Posted by: Megan Amick, Marketing Coordinator
Interested in maximizing your conversions? Google has created a blog specifically targeted to marketers driven by the most important goal – converting users. This new blog includes tactics geared toward increasing sales, leads, and conversion performance. The conversion-based blog can be found at http://conversionroom.blogspot.com/.