The Secret to Getting Great Sales Leads from Online Marketing

Most digital marketing campaigns — SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC), display advertising, and others — fail to validate conversions. This puts an extra burden on the sales force, reducing productivity and close rates. Adding a validation process into your campaigns will make your sales team much more efficient.

What Is Lead Validation?

Lead validation is the process of reviewing conversions to separate true sales leads from other types of inquiries. A typical digital marketing campaign tracks conversions. When a person clicks on your link in Google organic search results, an SEO conversion is recorded. When someone phones your office using a phone number displayed on your Bing Ad, a PPC conversion is recorded. At the end of the month, a report is generated showing how many conversions were recorded. Sales and marketing personnel review these reports and make decisions about whether to ramp up or scale back campaigns and how to adjust them for better results.

The big problem: Many conversions are not sales leads.

A conversion could be a sales opportunity — or it could be a customer service inquiry, a misdialed phone number, a personal call, spam, or one of a hundred other things.

Failure to Validate = Failure to Generate More Leads

If you think this is a minor issue or a marketing nuance, think again. Our lead validation experience has revealed something surprising: As many as 45% of all conversions are NOT sales leads.

Two bad things happen when all conversions are lumped together:

Companies are unable to accurately evaluate the performance of their digital campaigns. They may overestimate the level of success and continue to invest in campaigns that are not working nearly as well as perceived.

Companies are thwarted in their goal to improve the lead generating power of their campaigns, because their tactical decisions are based on misleading data.

From the salesperson’s point of view, these are very unhappy consequences. Not only does the stream (trickle?) of leads from digital marketing campaigns remain consistently modest, but also the salesperson may have to spend valuable time following up on non-leads rather than working on the real ones.

How Lead Validation Helps the Sales Effort

Lead validation is laborious but worth the effort. To validate leads, someone must listen to every phone inquiry and read every form inquiry — website contact forms and so on.

The validator or validation team separates legitimate sales leads from everything else, and passes them along to the sales team as quickly as possible. This simple action has three big benefits:

Sales management becomes aware of leads quickly, while they are still hot.  Taking special action on high-quality leads increases the opportunity to close them quickly.
Sales personnel are no longer sidetracked following up on non-leads.
Sales management can listen to and evaluate recorded phone inquiries, gaining the ability to continuously improve internal systems for handling leads and non-leads.

How Lead Validation Generates More Leads

When leads are validated, digital marketing campaign reporting becomes more transparent and accurate. Managers see how many leads their campaigns are producing, not merely a vague number of conversions. This level of precision enables them to make better strategic and tactical decisions, both of which result in continually improving lead generation.

Strategically, companies accurately know if their campaigns are producing leads — and then can do something. Let’s look at a simplified example.

If a company saw (without validation) that every month its SEO campaign yielded 500 conversions and its PPC campaign yielded 300, it would invest more heavily in SEO. However, if the company saw (with validation) that SEO yielded 500 conversions and 100 leads, and PPC yielded 300 conversions and 200 leads, its investment decision would be to put more into PPC. Over a year’s time, this better decision produces 1,200 more leads — maybe more.

Actually, “maybe more” should be “definitely more,” since validation enables companies to continuously improve campaigns. In our hypothetical PPC campaign , let’s assume the company has set up accurate call tracking. Now it can do more than merely identify leads — it can also determine what specific PPC ad generated the lead, what time of day it was generated, what keywords were used, and more. This granular lead data tells PPC campaign specialists which ads work, what times of day are best to display ads, and which keywords generate the most leads. As the campaign progresses, it gets smarter — generating more leads more efficiently.

Very few companies validate leads, which is unfortunate but understandable. Validation is tedious, time-consuming and never ending. But interestingly, very few companies rave about the quality and quantity of their online leads, and very few feel they are getting the most out of their digital marketing investment. Why? Validation is the missing element. Add it to your marketing and sales strategies and reap the benefits from your more focused marketing and sales teams.

How You Can Be Better At Affiliate Marketing

How You Can Be Better At Affiliate Marketing

Although traditional optimization techniques have lost a lot of steam, they’re still an important part of maintaining a successful website. You’ve just got to use them a little differently to see any benefit from them, is all. Affiliate marketing, for example – a system by which a business rewards a partner for each conversion they generate – can help you build a valuable network of trusted associates and bring traffic which might otherwise not see your site

Of course, to actually succeed, you’ll need to know what you’re doing. Affiliate marketing is anything but easy, after all. There’s a ton of competition in the market, and if you’re new, it’s going to be some time before you start seeing returns.

It takes knowledge, patience, hard work, and a bit of luck. We can’t really do much about the last three, but we can provide you with a little knowledge to help you be a better affiliate marketer. Let’s get started.

Understand That Affiliate Marketing Is NOT Link Building

It can be tempting to look at affiliate marketing solely in terms of link juice and traffic – though that’s a rather critical error. At best, the two fields are only tangentially related – though some types of affiliate marketing make use of tracked links, many other forms utilize more complex and varied advertising methods. It isn’t as simple as belching out a few links.

Ways to Improve Your Email Marketing Results

Email marketing is an inexpensive yet highly effective way to reach customers. Get the most from it by using these tips.

Have you ever wished you had a magic wand that would send customers your way every time you waved it? Magic wands don't exist, but there is a tool you can make work like magic. It's email marketing. And, it's one of the most inexpensive and effective marketing tools available to you. If you're not using it, you should be. If you are using email marketing and aren't getting the results you'd like, review your email strategy and use these 8 tips to improve your results.

Understand your target market and how to reach them

Successful email marketing starts with an understanding of who you want to reach, and what it will take to make them want to do business with you. For some businesses, that means your email marketing campaigns will consist at least in part of information that educates, informs or entertains your readers to build brand familiarity and trust. For others, it means sending existing customers notices about new products and special offers. Before you start any email campaign, take the time to work out your strategy and deliver the right type of message to your customers and prospects.

Send to a receptive audience

A receptive audience is a permission-based list. People you add to your list without first getting permission will ignore your email, or mark it as spam. Build a responsive list by inviting prospects to sign up for your email list at every possible opportunity. Here are just a few suggestions:

    Put a signup form on every page of your website
    Put a sign at the checkout in your store with a QR code to sign up for your newsletter and/or text to subscribe instructions.
    Include a sign-up link on your Facebook and Google+ business pages, and in your profile on other social media sites
    Include a link to your signup form in the description for your YouTube videos
    Add your signup link to all printed materials
    Consider creating and including a QR code to let smart phone users quickly add themselves to your email list.

Let subscribers know what to expect when they sign up

Your target audience is more likely to give you their email address if they know what you will and won't be doing with it. Will you be using the list to announce new products or to send out discounts and special offers to your subscribers? Or will they be getting regular emails that are educational or entertaining? Will you be sending out an email once a month? Or once a day? The person who thought you would be sending them industry updates will unsubscribe if you barrage them with ads.

Write compelling subject lines

Your email marketing message is one of hundreds of email messages that hit your subscribers' inboxes each week. To get your email opened and read, you need a compelling subject line - one that appeals to the recipient's self interests, not yours. You may be pleased that you will start manufacturing fashionable leather handbags with storage space for a tablet computer, and it may be something retailers want, but few will open your email if the subject line reads "MiLady Manufacturing Announces New Product Line"

Encourage recipients to open your emails by using short, action oriented headlines that promise a benefit or solution to a problem.

Include a call to action

Just like direct mail or printed ads, your emails need a call to action. If your readers are expecting promotional mailings, the call to action would focus on getting the customer to make a purchase today. If your email campaign is aimed at building brand recognition and trust, the call to action would be presented along with helpful information and could urge readers to visit your website for more problem solving tips, or call your office for a free consultation or free sample.

Create emails that are readable on any device

A Pew Research Center report on mobile device ownership shows that as of October 2014, 64% of adults in the US were owners of smart phones. According to their research, 34% of cell internet users go online mostly using their phones, and not using some other device such as a desktop or laptop computer.

The device a person uses to connect to the Internet (and read their email) has a big impact on what they see and read. If they open your email on their smart phone and have to scroll from side to side to read each line, or see only an X at the top of the email because a photo didn't load, you've lost them. The solution: put text at the top of your emails, and use a smart-phone friendly email template to prepare the email. Major email services offer mobile-friendly templates for their subscribers to use.

Divide and conquer

Unless you have a small or very niche list, don't blast out the same email to everyone on your master mailing list. The small business with 1 or two employees is going to have different accounting needs and interests than the small business that has 20 employees. The avid skier may have no interest in the snowboards you're putting on special next week but may want boots for extreme skiing. You'll get better open rates and responses from your email marketing efforts by sending appropriate material to each group. You can ask people to indicate their preferences when they sign up for your email list. Other options might be to segment your main list products purchased, or by the number of communications you've sent to the particular customer.

Encourage readers to share your emails

Many businesses find that their top sources of new business are referrals and word-of-mouth. Encourage your email readers to spread the word by making it easy to share your email. Social media buttons, and forward to a friend links let subscribers "tell" their friends about you with a click of the mouse or the touch of an on-screen button. And, don't forget to include a link to subscribe to your newsletter in the newsletter itself. That will make it easy for people who receive the forwarded email to add themselves to your mailing list.