Quick Email Tip: Ditch the Attachments
Online marketing, especially marketing automation, is great because it allows you to track all that insightful lead activity, right? So you don’t want to lose a single opportunity to see how your potential prospects are interacting with your site, content, email and all the other great stuff you’re putting out their on the web.
When it comes to emailing out proposals, white papers, case studies and other materials, skip the attachments and instead send a link to a hosted file. This makes it easy for the recipient to view (no downloading, locating the file, dealing with network security). More importantly, it allows you to track the link clicks. Did a prospect request a white paper but never get around to reading it? Did they open it right away? Did they revisit it after a few days time? All of this information can be very helpful to sales reps when they make a follow up call.
In most cases, files can be uploaded and hosted within your company’s website content management system. If that sounds like a hassle, look for a marketing automation system that offers file hosting. Not only can you upload your marketing content, like white papers, but you can also upload any images you use for emails or landing pages, allowing easy access during the design process.
Best Practices in Lead Qualification: Defining a Marketing Qualified Lead
In our previous posts, we discussed what to look for in a new prospect and how to determine interest vs. intent. Once you’ve outlined what qualifies as showing interest and which actions show a more serious intent, the marketing team and the sales team should work together to define a marketing qualified lead (MQL). This means that you set a threshold at which you both agree a lead should be passed on to sales.
You may have a few different levels for your MQLs. For example, you may agree that someone who requests a test drive or fills out the contact me form should instantly be assigned to sales. You also may have a certain level of interest-based activities that push a person to sales, such as viewing three white papers, viewing both a white paper and a case study or returning to the website within a certain time period. Even things such as search terms can help play into your definition of a MQL.
The most important part about this definition is that both marketing and sales agree on the criteria. This will prevent sales from complaining about ‘junk leads’ and also give marketing a solid platform for assessing campaign success. Once the plan is set in place, it can also be helpful to set up an internal service level agreement (SLA) regarding how new leads should be handled. This would include communication standards on the sales end, usually tied to a time line like, “Sales will follow up with all new qualified leads within 48 business hours.” It may also specify the process for rejecting a lead to marketing as unqualified or putting leads in a nurturing campaign if they express they aren’t quite ready to purchase at this time.
Creating a common goal helps unify sales and marketing throughout the entire sales cycle and results in a more efficient, less leaky sales funnel.
Best Practices in Lead Qualification: Interest vs. Intent
In our previous post, we discussed some basic lead qualification measures, including using a combination of explicit and implicit factors to determine your best leads. Now, lets take a closer look at a particular aspect of implicit lead qualification – judging interest versus intent.
This is how you being to separate the leads that are in the research phase, and may require more nurturing, from the leads that are sales ready and need to be called on immediately. The standards are going to be different for every company, but you should start to develop a system based on the types of collateral that you offer. Most companies have a variety of conversion opportunities and marketing materials available to potential customers, including items like white papers, webinars, case studies and contact forms.
Things like white papers or time spent browsing on the site would be early indicators of interest. This person is starting to learn about your industry and becoming familiar with the benefits of your product. They may not be ready to enter the sales process yet and bombarding them with aggressive sales calls could turn them off to your product. When you have a new lead that is showing a tentative interest in your product, place them on a nurturing campaign to help them along in their education process.
Intent occurs when the prospect ‘raises their hand’ and shows specific buying activity when interacting with your materials. This can be in the form of viewing a very specific case study, filling out a contact form, reaching out to you with a question or signing up for your free trial. These people already understand the benefits of your product and they want to know if you’ll be the right fit for them. They were probably already on your radar; Perhaps you met them at a trade show, they previously downloaded some of your materials or you’ve been nurturing them along the way. These are the people that you should assign to your sales representatives immediately, even indicating with a note that they are ready for quick follow-up. The sales team can then use the tracking data you’ve gathered to craft the targeted call that will tell your prospect that this is going to be a the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Remember, these factors are unique to your company and your sales cycle. In some cases, a white paper might be a great sign of buying behavior. You can start to determine the right indicators for you by using your marketing automation data to look for patterns in past successes and using those as a starting point for identifying your best leads.
Mastering the Metrics: Abandonment Rate
For the last installment of our Mastering the Metrics series, we will cover Abandonment Rate.
Abandonment Rate most often refers to purchases started but not completed; so-called “shopping cart abandonment” has always been an issue of concern for online retailers. However, you can apply this metric in other areas as well, the most relevant of which would be form abandonment. Form abandonment is when visitors to your site begin filling out a form but do not complete or submit the form. The abandonment rate is a measure of just one aspect of a website’s conversion rate.
You can’t always be certain of the reasons for form abandonment. It might be that some visitors changed their mind, but most frequently the problem lies with the form design. Forms that ask for too much information at once or are difficult to fill out lead to a high rate of form abandonment. Redesigning your forms to make them simple, streamlined, and user-friendly is the best remedy for a high form abandonment rate.
Best Practices in Lead Qualification: The Basics
If you are lucky enough to have a large flow of inbound leads, chances are that not all of them are a perfect fit to your ideal customer profile. While the sales team may be excited to receive so many new leads, identifying the quality leads that will lead to sales can be a bit like finding a needle in a haystack.
One thing that marketers don’t always remember about their sales counterparts is that sales is a fast-paced game and their success typically depends on closing leads this quarter. If they reach out to a new prospect several times and they aren’t able to get in touch with the person, they will move on to the next name on the list. Unless you have a system in place to return leads to a nurturing campaign, they likely get tossed into the abyss and never looked at again. One statistic that really shows the impact of throwing away those leads is this: 70% of your mishandled leads will buy from a competitor within 24 months. Just because the person wasn’t ready to buy today doesn’t mean they should be disregarded. Six months down the line when they are a bit more educated, they may be ready to speak with a sales person.
So how do you as a marketer ensure that you’re only passing along the leads that sales can focus on closing? You won’t be right 100% of the time, but the best way to pick out sales-qualified leads is by using a method that combines implicit and explicit evaluation factors. Implicit factors are what a prospect does on your website. This means deciding a person is qualified based on the fact that they filled out a contact form or did a search for pricing. You can track these activities at the individual level using a marketing automation system. Explicit factors are who the prospect is; For example, is the prospect a part of your target industry or do they possess decision making power? You can start to collect these facts using forms on your website or by connecting with tools like LinkedIn and Jigsaw. The reason it is important to look at both of these factors is it prevents your sales reps from wasting time on a prospect who may be highly active on your site but turns out to be a recent college graduate looking for a job.
While explicit factors are fairly straightforward, determining the best implicit factors to look for is a bit more subjective. In a future post, we’ll discuss best practices for looking at these more tricky factors of lead qualification.
Mastering the Metrics: Net Reach
In today’s installment of our Mastering the Metrics series, we’ll be discussing Net Reach.
Net Reach (also just “Reach”) refers to the number of people viewing an ad at least once. This metric gives you an idea of how widely the ad is getting dispersed throughout a population. But maximizing exposure isn’t as simple as just maximizing reach. Ads with wide reach but low frequency can get lost in the shuffle, while an ad with limited reach coupled with high frequency risks overexposure — think of how many times you’ve seen the same late-night TV ad over and over, and how sick of it you’ve gotten. Strike an effective balance between reach and frequency to optimize your ad’s distribution and impact.
Total Impressions / Frequency = Net Reach
Mastering the Metrics: Visitors
In the last installment of our Mastering the Metrics series, we covered Visits. Today we’ll discuss Visitors.
Visitors are the number of unique individuals who view a website in a given time period. This differs slightly from the Visits metric in that it allows you to measure a website’s reach, as opposed to just its traffic. Visits measure the volume of traffic itself, but comparing this number to the number of visitors will help you understand what type of traffic your website is generating and what sorts of visitors you’re attracting. If you consider that one visitor can have multiple visits over a certain timeframe, you can begin to judge the quality of your visitors. For example, you can tell whether your site has a small group of die-hard fans who visit the site repeatedly and often, as opposed to just a bunch of casual visitors who stop in once for a peek but never return.
By tracking visitors and visits during a specific timeframe, you can also use this metric to measure the concentration or urgency of activity by repeat visitors. Therefore, the time period you look at can be an important factor in calculating this metric. If one visitor makes repeated visits to the site in the course of a day or two, you can bet that they’re seriously interested in your site — they may be doing research before they take the next step. These are good visitors to target and reach out to since their interest has been demonstrated by their repeat visits.
Mastering the Metrics: Visits
Mastering the Metrics: Cost per Customer Acquired
In the last installment of our Mastering the Metrics series, we covered Cost Per Order. Today, we’ll be discussing a related metric called Cost Per Customer Acquired.
Cost Per Customer Acquired measures the cost-effectiveness or ROI of advertising by dividing total advertising cost by the number of customers acquired. Cost per customer acquired goes a little deeper than cost per order in that it conceptualizes customers not just as a single order, but as a possible source of multiple orders. This metric helps marketers determine if customers are worth the cost of their acquisition and is useful for comparing to customer lifetime value.
Advertising Cost / # of Customers Acquired = Cost Per Customer Acquired
Mastering the Metrics: Cost Per Order
We will cover Cost Per Order in this installment of our Mastering the Metrics series.
Cost Per Order measures the cost-effectiveness of advertising by dividing total advertising cost by the number of orders generated. This metric is tied to successful conversions, so it applies more directly to profit than does Cost Per Click (CPC), which measures a marketing function. Ads that have strong clickthrough rates but that fail to result in lots of conversions have an unacceptably high cost per order, which is often indicative of an unconvincing or disappointing product.
Advertising Cost / # of Orders Generated = Cost Per Order
