George Washington. Abraham Lincoln. Ulysses S. Grant. Alexander Hamilton. Benjamin Franklin. Andrew Jackson.

We know their names. We know what they have done for the United States of America. Some were great Presidents who led the United States through epic battles, others broke through the barriers of segregation. One was the very first US Secretary of the Treasury. One even invented swim fins, the lightning rod, musical instruments, and bifocals; and that is just barely scratching the surface.

BUT did you know that ALL of them can help us with our money marketing math?

Which of these things are you looking at every month (or more often):

  • Are you just getting some George Washington discipline or are you asking segmenting questions that bring the Benjamins?
  • Have you calculated your conversion rate and determined its value?
  • Have you looked at the bad news of abandonment rate?
  • Are you looking at your Revenue Per Visit (RPV) and what it can do for you?

Your success depends on making high-dollar  decisions.  Benjamin Franklin also invented the concept of “paying it forward” and the President’s (and others) are here to do just that. Take a look at this infograph and ask yourself where you are in your Math Marketing Journey?

President's Money Marketing Math Infograph

For more information, please read President’s Day Marketing Money Math.

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How To Conduct A Conversion Optimization Experiment | Relative Bearing

Here’s the first line from this very helpful little post:
“0 sales! What? But we got 517 unique visitors this week!”
Airing your mistakes is not seen as smart marketing in many circles, but this kind of thing really is helpful. Besides the important moral of this story, there’s another:
Failing the right way leads to success faster. Failing without knowing why invites unnecessary failure.
I predict good things for these folks.
To read the full article by Ethan Jones, visit Clearpath.

Our Biggest Problem is Brand Awareness

@sethgodin says “awareness isn’t a scalable problem to solve.” As website optimizers, we couldn’t agree more.
He continues, “The solution lies in re-organizing your systems, in re-creating your product or service so that it becomes worth talking about.”…or in making your website so intuitive that it isn’t worth complaining about.
Seth sums is up better than we could have ourselves, “When you produce something remarkable, more use leads to more conversation which leads to more use.”
To read the full article by Seth Godin, visit Seth’s blog.

frankenstein-labWe all know the recipe for  success: Reach and Frequency. To grow your business, marketing needs to reach more people more often. Translation: “Work harder.” The modern marketer is responsible for

  • Imagining the content
  • Developing the content
  • Reaching potential prospects frequently with it
  • Collecting the leads
  • Qualifying them Getting them to sales Maintaining all of the metrics to justify the ROI

As marketers, we need some little monsters handling the details or we will drown in the effort. Marketo just launched a Demand Generation Success Center that shows marketers how to become digital Dr. Frankensteins.

From Drip to Drive

The Marketo resource center provides advice on how to automate the many things that marketers must get done. They don’t just toe the party line.
For example, I believe that marketers should move from “drip” campaigns that “nurture” prospects, to high-impact educational campaigns that drive prospects to engage with you. The new resource center has some brilliant recommendations from me.

  1. Treat leads as customers. They purchased with their contact information.
  2. Make them experts at solving the problems they have.
  3. Wow them with your helpfulness or entertainment value.
  4. Invite them to “buy” more.
  5. Treat them like adults. Don’t be afraid to be controversial.

This is all easier said than done, and exactly that’s why you need to install little monsters like Marketo.
Visit the Demand Generation Success Center. Extend your reach, turn up your frequency, and still have time to develop killer cascading content.
Brian Massey

Jessica Davis of Godot Media how to increase lead conversion rates.

Converting leads through your website is an essential objective for any website owner. If your business relies solely on the performance of your website, then this becomes even more important.

For success online, you have to constantly strive toward improving the conversion rate of your website.

Conversion rate basically refers to the frequency of converting casual visitors on your business website into success leads for the business. This list can include customers who buy your services or products, sign-up on email lists, post comments, make inquiries, as well as perform interactions with your website.

Converting visitors into leads is not child’s play. Even when armed with social media and content marketing strategies, companies are still unable to successfully convert visitors to leads. A good conversion strategy requires constant testing and analysis.

Essential tips to improve lead conversion rates

Improving conversion rates should be your primary aim when operating a business website. Below, are a few points to help you boost lead conversion rates.

#1 – Employ different strategies for for different leads

You have to treat your leads individually. Your customer base will likely be comprised of different groups who have different interests and triggers. For instance, there may be some customers who like reading exhaustive content describing your business, yet others, may lack such patience and would rather take part in a webinar. As you can see, each group would have a different trigger so you need to approach each category with material that appeals to them.

Offering incentives is a great way of converting leads. This method has been used in the online business scenario for a long time now. The longevity of this method proves its success in lead conversion. An example of this method can be seen in several blogs where casual visitors are asked to give their emails in exchange for an exclusive link to a free resource such as an eBook. This principle is applicable in any online business for lead capturing purposes. You can increase you email list very quickly if this is done correctly.

#3 – Get to know your leads better

Every business has its ideal customer. You should ask yourself how well you know yours before creating your content marketing strategy. If you don’t know them very well, then it’s time to get to know them. Check out their demographics. You should know their location, income, occupation, buying habits, lifestyle, and similar data pertaining to financial situations. This data is called as Central Demographic Model or CDM. Apart from this, you will also want to know customers’ Central Psychographic Model or CPM. This defines the preferences, behaviors, and other factors affecting buying decisions of customers. CDM and CPM collectively can help you in converting leads better.

#4 – Understand successful conversion processes

Conversion processes are not an exact science. You may be surprised at how something mundane has contributed toward lead generation in the past. Hit and trial also works in online business lead generation. As such, you should always look at what has lead to successful conversions in the past. Proper attention should be paid to your website’s history in converting leads. Once you realize what has impacted your visitor’s decision in buying your product or service, that should be properly incorporated into your content marketing model, and should be duly communicated to everyone in the sales and marketing teams.

#5 – Always customize follow-up communication

Customizing follow up according to client preferences is also a must for lead generation. Whether you are using batch signs or whether the sales team is directly following up with specific leads, you have to ensure that you have proper understanding of the follow up campaign. Doing this will assist in customizing campaigns and avoid any clashes between the different follow up campaigns. As with the process of tailoring lead generation campaigns and content marketing according to client preferences, follow up measures should also be done for best results.

About the author: Jessica Davis is a Content Strategist at Godot Media – a leading copywriting company. She is an expert in article writing category, and has helped several businesses succeed through effective use of content. Other areas that interest her are technology, social media and fashion.

This is a guest post by Jason Wells of Convirza (formerly LogMyCalls), who has some interesting data on the power of phone calls – and good reasons to measure your web-influenced call traffic.

One of the byproducts of the mobile marketing explosion is an increase in the number of phone calls businesses receive. BIA/Kelsey, in a report released in mid-June, says that the number of phone calls most businesses receive will double by the end of 2013. You read that correctly. Most businesses will receive twice as many phone calls in 18 months.

It sounds staggering, but it makes sense.

Google says that 61% of mobile searches result in a phone call. xAd says that 52% of all mobile ads result in a phone call. Add those numbers to burgeoning smartphone penetration and it all equals more phone calls.

What Does this Mean For Conversions?

I can hear you, expert online marketer, panicking a bit here. Won’t this mess up your conversion rates for landing pages? Won’t it make things ‘messier’ to track if people start calling you more? Maybe. But it will also make your conversion rates go up.

Convirza tracks conversions resulting from phone calls, and here’s what our research shows us.

Inbound phone calls are 10-15 times more likely to convert than inbound web leads. In other words, someone that downloads a White Paper or attends a webinar is significantly less likely to receive a Demo of your product or buy from you than someone that calls your business.

Not surprisingly, the same BIA/Kelsey report notes that 61% of businesses rate their inbound phone calls as ‘excellent leads.’ Only 52% rate web leads as ‘excellent leads.’

Recently we ran 3 different email campaigns with 3 different advertisers. Each campaign advertised the same White Paper. Because we’re obsessed with marketing analytics, we tracked these campaigns fastidiously. We tracked how many people downloaded the White Paper and we tracked how many phone calls each landing page produced.

Here’s what we learned.

LogMyCalls Landing Page

This landing page saw a 47% click conversion rate and a 50% call conversion rate.

Campaign 1 – The landing page converted at 42.1%; a respectable, 11.7% of those leads wanted a demo of our product. We also placed a phone number prominently on the landing page. That phone number produced sixteen phone calls, ten of which resulted in demos. That means 62% of the phone calls resulted in a demo. That’s higher than 11.7% :-)

Campaign 2 – The landing page converted at 40.1%. And a reasonable 13.2% of the people that downloaded the White Paper ended up receiving a demo of our product. Again, this landing page also generated phone calls. Around 50% of those phone calls resulted in demos.

Campaign 3 – The landing page converted at 47.4%. And a very, very poor 3.6% of those leads wanted a demo (this campaign was conducted very recently so we expect that number to rise). Again, over 50% of the people who called via the landing page requested a demo.

Phone conversion rates are higher. It is just that simple.

Mobile Marketing Produces Calls, Conversions

Google says that pay-per-call mobile Adwords campaigns have 6% to 8% higher conversion rates than pay-per-click mobile Adwords campaigns. They also say that including phrases like ‘Call Now’ or Call us Today’ in the mobile ad copy improves conversion rates.
Calls are king.

The reason for these higher conversion rates for mobile is simple: it is natural for mobile searchers to call. After all, they are searching on a phone. Mobile callers also enter the sales funnel at a much lower point. Mobile searchers rarely do extensive research on their mobile device. Rather, mobile users search when they are looking for something they need immediately. This means action is more likely and a phone call is more likely.

What Does All This Mean?

The first thing it means is that a landing page conversion rate is simply not as ‘clean’ as it used to be. You have to factor calls into the equation. To ignore them is to ignore the highest performing element of the landing page. And that would be silly.

Second, it means that businesses need to be staffed and prepared to answer phone calls and answer them effectively. Because, just like a landing page, small tweaks to phone pitch can make a close rate go up or down.

Third, it means that you shouldn’t measure mobile conversions in the same way you’ve measured online conversions for the last 10 years. Mobile is not about pageviews and abandon rate.
Finally, we should point out that some businesses will be impacted by mobile more than others. We recognize this. But, keep this in mind: if you have a lead type (inbound phone call) that is converting 30%, 40% or 50% of the time, why wouldn’t you want to generate more leads of that type?

In your rush to get as many Likes, Follows, Connections and +1’s as you can, have you thought about how you are going to turn those fans and friends into leads and sales? This 13 minute video introduces you to the tools you need. You’ll learn:

  1. What are the components of social conversion?
  2. What is a Social Media Landing Page?
  3. What is the difference between an on-network and off-network strategy?
  4. What can you do with Facebook applications to increase conversion rates?

Watch on YouTube

This was originally presented at PubCon Las Vegas and you can see me at PubCon Hawaii in 2012.

 

The art works, but bad science lowers lead conversion rates and keeps you from capitalizing on their genius. What to do?

Perhaps the hardest thing to do in Conversion Science is getting the art right.

Your value proposition, value statement, unique selling proposition or offer are critical to getting seen, heard or read.

At Enviromedia the art works, but the science keeps them from capitalizing on their genius.

Good Art, Good Engagement

I love bold value propositions. “Business-savvy Tree-hugger” and “Capitalist pigs with a social conscious” communicate the value system of this company much better than something like “An environmentally-focused communications company.”

It will totally turn off businesses that aren’t concerned with environmental issues. Conservative republicans will leave the site quickly. This company has staked it’s claim and isn’t worried about losing the wrong business as it enchants the right clients.

Bad science lowers lead conversion rates.

Bad science lowers lead conversion rates.

Enviromedia has a great value proposition but their implementation is not conversion friendly

Enviromedia has a great value proposition but their implementation is not conversion friendly

Bad Science Lowers Lead Conversion Rates

For some reason, this fabulous value proposition was implemented as a flash panel. It took close to five seconds to load on a very fast broadband connection.

I almost didn’t see it.

Search engines won’t see it.

Why? So that the words can shimmer.

Why is this bad science?

Slow load times increase bounce rates and reduce conversion rates.

The human brain is hard-wired look at movement. Movement draws the eye.

In this case the eye is constantly drawn away from the page content. Doesn’t Enviromedia want me to click on “Who we are” and “What we do?” If not, why put them on the page.

The coup de tat? This big attention-drawing graphic isn’t clickable.

DOH!

Good Science Increases Lead Conversion Rates

Rip out the flash. Put the exact same words in an image. Make the image clickable so that I can see what you mean by “business-savvy tree-hugger” and “capitalist pigs with a social conscience.”

Now I’m engaged. I’m into the site. I’m vulnerable to offers to start a conversation.

I’d hire Enviromedia.  I like and understand their value proposition. Of course, they could make it easier for me to hire them with a little conversion science in the mix.

Your Turn

Would you like us to look at your site? Sign up for a free conversion consultation with The Conversion Scientist™.

New Tool Makes it Easy to Find Prospects on Social Networks via Social Appending.

In my most recent ClickZ column, I reflect back on my days as a marketing cog in the corporate machine, a time in which the practice of “appending” was considered “black hat.”

Appending is the practice of adding contact information to records in your prospect database. If you have someone’s name and company, you could “append” their email address and mailing address through a number of services that keep that kind of information.

Companies that sell mailing lists often provide this kind of service.

The thinking was that the prospect hadn’t given you permission to contact them through these other channels, and that it violated the “submit button contract” that is implied when they completed an online form.

Social Media Appending: How Far We Have Come

Social Media Appending: How Far We Have Come. Source: Unbounce.

We’ve come a long way

Oli Gardner has an interesting infographic on the Unbounce blog. The graphic highlights a tool called FlowTown. This is a social media appending tool. Marketers can use it to find the social media accounts of their prospect list, and begin marketing to them through those social media channels like Facebook and LinkedIn.

This is where those of us who have been around the block groan, and then secretly cheer.

Social Media Appending: Why this is different

While appending has not been considered a best practice, it happens. In fact, the best way to do this is to send ask your prospects for permission after appending the data; sending them an email asking if they want email messages, for example.

Many social media platforms allow us to easily “unfriend” or block unsavory marketers. This puts the opt-out capability in our hands. So asking for permission ahead of time is less of a problem.

But there is a right way to inject yourself into someone else’s conversations. It’s called a Content-oriented Social Media Strategy.

  • Only “append” people who have expressed an interest in your industry or products. This is how you know your content will be relevant.
  • Begin with non-promotional content. “How-to” and “10 Ways” style articles test well.
  • Use social landing pages, such as a blog or Facebook page to “keep it social”
  • Measure what you send. Stop sending content that doesn’t generate clicks, shares or comments.

If you’re going to jump into the social conversations, do it right, or it will backfire in a very public, viral way.

Not only should B2B marketers try everything that B2C businesses are using, they risk irrelevance if they don’t.

What are you afraid of?

The goal of my Ion Interactive presentation “What Can We Learn from the Bad Boys of Marketing?” was to shake things up a bit.

Conversion marketing is about bringing visitors to choice. B2B conversion marketers carry this same burden.

Can marketers in more conservative industries use techniques proven to increase online leads and sales in B2C markets?

In my Ion Interactive webinar, I use two B2B landing pages to illustrate how these B2C techniques can be used: Mary O’Brien Adwords Advantage landing page AdwordAdvantage.com and CoverActionPro.com.

The elements are the same for B2B conversion marketing as they are for B2C webpages.

  • Long copy
  • Bold headlines
  • Highlighting and bullets
  • “Johnson” boxes
  • Risk reversal
  • Testimonials
  • “Act” buttons
  • Signatures and postscripts

Check out Secrets of The “Bad Boys” of Online Sales Conversion for a detailed description of these Useful B2B conversion marketing elements.

I go as far in the Webinar to state:

“Business to business copy sucks. It’s horrible to read. There is a need, that when someone recommends a site to their boss that you look professional, but it doesn’t mean you have to write like an idiot.”

Ready for B2B Conversion Marketing?

Anna Talerico interviews Brian Massey • B2B Conversion Marketing

Anna Talerico Hosts Conversations on B2b Conversion Marketing

Certainly you can deliver a high-converting experience without harming your online brand, like CoverActionPro.

You have to work harder. You can’t ask a committee of executives to review your pages. You have to know how your page is performing and how changes are affecting your results.

You can learn more about analytics and their proper application at my AEN Short Course “Web Analytics: Tools and Best Practices” on June 11, 2010.

Enjoy the Webinar and don’t miss Anna Talerico’s Conversations on B2B Conversion Marketing podcast. Or give your sales a boost. Check out our lead generation solutions tailored to your industry.

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Brian Massey

There is a great deal of information, but you have to decipher the code.

There appears to be some amazing solutions in the behavioral marketing industry. In this article, I parse the language of the behavioral marketing world and find out once and for all what it all really means.

I use the websites of a number of behavioral advertising vendors in an attempt to clear the fog that surrounds this marketplace.

I can already hear the groans.

Yes, the behavioral marketers’ children have no shoes, to borrow from a famous euphemism. The websites of the behavioral marketing world aren’t necessarily the best examples of advanced marketing techniques. But I am not interested in casting stones at individual sites. I’m on a search for meaning and truth.

Here are some general observations about why it is so difficult for marketers to narrow the list of behavioral marketing vendors based on their websites.

In the Behavioral Marketing Vendors’ World Everyone’s a Leader

As ClickZ author Tessa Wegert points out in her survey of ad networks, there are a lot of “leaders” in the market. In fact, most of them call themselves the “leading provider” of something. We’ll see if we can find clues to what each vendor is a leader in.

Shooting at the “Other Guys”

Behavioral marketing vendors spend a lot of time describing what they are not. They’re dealing with an industry that has exploded over the past several years, a market with few barriers to entry. As a result, aggressive vendors have entered the market creating privacy issues and abusing their customers’ brands in an effort to get “reach” at any price.

More reputable vendors go out of their way to differentiate themselves from these “pray and spray” approaches, writing about “premium ad networks” and “comprehensive technologies.” For those of us who don’t know the history, this language sounds like bravado and manipulation.

Everyone Does Everything

From their websites, it’s very difficult to tell what these vendors do and don’t do. In general, the claims to fall into these categories:

  • We have a network of online publishers — websites — that let us place ads on their sites.
  • We collect data from the people who have been to the sites of our ad network.
  • We collect data from publishers that help us target ads at visitors across an ad network.
  • We have a special technology that makes us better at targeting ads at visitors across an ad network.
  • We develop the strategies and/or creative that will make you better at behavioral marketing.

All of the vendors provide some combination of these services, but they all do them differently. Most are also courting publishers, which I am ignoring for this series. Their websites have a complex message to deliver, making it difficult for any vendor to differentiate themselves. They should try harder.


21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks to Skyrocket Conversions

21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks

Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.

  • 43 Pages with Examples
  • Assumptive Phrasing
  • "We" vs. "You"
  • Pattern Interrupts
  • The Power of Three

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Valueless Value Propositions

Anyone who subscribes to the “eight-second rule,” a rule that says you have only eight seconds to engage a Web visitor, is in for a communication challenge. Behavioral marketing vendors adhere to this rule, trying to fit everything they do into a sentence or short paragraph. The result is that their value propositions sound remarkably similar.

  • “patent pending, dynamic ad optimization technology”
  • “comprehensive suite of targeting technologies to reach target audiences across a Premium Network
  • “The technologies we use to deliver, target, and optimize your campaigns go far beyond established norms and standards for performance”
  • “the leading targeting platform and advertising marketplace that connect people to engaging advertising.”
  • “increases the productivity of each customer interaction through our industry-leading predictive marketing solutions

In contrast, the “self-serve” sites get to the meat quickly. “Hundreds of millions of impressions a day on hundreds of thousands of sites. Click here to get started.” Now, that’s works in eight seconds.

Playing It Safe

The majority of the sites I’m reviewing would be called “brochure sites.” The main goal of a brochure site is to look professional and successful. However, this encourages a vendor to be very careful with the content it places on the site. This is certainly the case for the behavioral marketing industry.
Roy H. Williams of the Wizard Academy says:

“You’re not communicating effectively if you’re not pissing someone off.”

I’d like to acknowledge those vendors who take a chance in the interest of communicating more clearly.

This article The Language of Behavioral Marketing, Part 1 by Brian Massey originally appeared on ClickZ.

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