Couch & Associates

In the 4+ years that I have worked in the marketing automation space, I have seen many different ways that companies use a lead scoring process.  Whether it is scoring based on product, service, frequency of activity or simply the title of the individual, a well thought out lead scoring program can help with efficiency on the sales team as well as validate the efforts made by marketing.

But the one question I have always come across is: How do I score someone’s offline behaviour?

Let’s look at a simple example – you have a booth at a trade show where you are scanning names of those who come by to chat and ask questions about who you are, what you do and what services/products you offer.  At the end of the day, you receive a file of all the names that you scanned and you want to ensure that sales can follow up with these people as quickly as possible.  But at the same time, you want to ensure that sales is following up with leads that you have considered “hot” based on your lead scoring process.

Utilizing Eloqua’s Program Builder functionality, you can create a simple 5 step program that works alongside your existing lead scoring program that will allow you score leads based on offline activity. (*note – the process defined below might not line up with how you currently add names to your Eloqua database or the frequency in which you score someone, but can be easily modified to do so)

Here is what you would want your program to do:

- Add contacts to a contact group
- Add contacts to your lead scoring program
- Hold the contacts for 1 day
- Remove the contacts from a contact group
- Remove the contacts from the program

The group that you are adding a contact to would have to be referenced within your lead scoring program.  You will want to create a decision rule or a conditional program step that evaluates if a contact is in the contact group in which they were added – if they are, then you can run an update rule on the “YES” path or based on if the condition in the step was met that increments their lead score by X amount of points.  I would also recommend reviewing your lead scoring matrix to see what score would be appropriate for someone who attends an event.

Here is what the program would look like:

This is probably one of many methods that could be used, so if you have another way that you are scoring offline behaviour, please do share it by leaving a comment below!

So you’ve mastered your landing page,  you’ve got Facebook fans and twitter lists and analytics is running smoothly…but what have you forgotten?  A page that usually gets lost in the shuffle is the “Thank-you” or “Confirmation” page.

Businesses often focus on external strategies to increase web traffic and higher conversions, and put little effort into making their existing conversions become returning visitors, brand advocates and loyal customers.

The basic goal of the “thank-you” page is to let the customer know that they’ve successfully complete the transaction. This is the bear bones approach and one that doesn’t leverage the fact that the person who filled out your form is not only interested but already sold and ready for more.  A good “thank-you” page can turn a one-time business engagement into a lifetime business opportunity. It will allow you to build a relationship with a customer and not just capture them. 

According to MarketingSherpa, “39% of all visitors to a thank-you page take advantage of another offer.” After a customer has purchased an item you can offer a second item, a newsletter subscription, an RSS feed or webinar. If they subscribe you have the ability to offer upgrades and new items on a continuous basis.

So before you pop the cork and celebrate for getting the notification that a new lead has signed up and come through your site, pause and reflect on what you are telling that lead before they’ve moved on.  Here are a few best practices you can use to make sure your “thank-you” page not only becomes part of the lead nurturing process but that every customer is excited to hear from your team.

Every landing page should have a dedicated thank-you page.  This will make it easy to fine tune your thank-you page to continue reinforcing the value of the offer.

Tell your lead what will happen next. A re you sending them an email with a link to a PDF for them to download? Will they be getting a call to schedule an assessment within 24 hours? The absolute last thing you want the lead to think is “Oh great, they have my email address – now what?

Add an additional call-to-action. Ask the visitor to subscribe to your blog or follow you in social media. They’ve already completed one action you asked them to do, so why not ask for something else that will help them stay in touch with you, while increasing your marketing reach.

Share, share, share. Ask the lead to share the offer with friends. Give them an easy to share link that leads others back to the landing page for the offer. This will expand your reach even further.

Be consistent. If someone fills out your form and goes to a page that looks nothing like the page where they filled out the form, they may worry that they did something wrong. Make sure your thank-you design is consistent with your landing page.

Some additional ideas for your thank-you page include:

- Downloads (Whitepapers)
- Newsletter subscriptions
- Latest media highlights
- Highlight testimonials or success case studies
- Anything to get them to know the company better
- Related products or information
- Fill out a feedback survey
- State when they’ll hear back if needed
- Tell-a-friend link
- Social media feeds and links

Incorporating these ideas into your lead conversion strategy will give you a better chance for loyal customers, brand awareness and marketing reach.  Thank-you…check out our twitter feed and head over to our website for more info.

One of the most important email statistics that you can look at is your unsubscribe rate from an email campaign.  At a high level, unsubscribes can often times validate if your campaign hit the nail on the head in terms of your or content and messaging…. or did it?

I like to compare unsubscribe reporting to an iceberg – 10% of your unsubscribe reporting is typically done by looking at the total number of unsubscribes from your campaign, but 90% of the reporting (what I believe to be the most important) is done by analyzing who unsubscribed.

For example, if you send out 10,000 emails and 100 people unsubscribe, you would have an unsubscribe rate of 1%.  However, if you drill into who those 1% of unsubscribes are and you notice that the majority of them are considered high value prospects in regards to industry or title job/role, your unsubscribe rate might not start to look so hot.

Here are a few ways that you monitor your email unsubscribes:

1. Setup a simple Eloqua dashboard – this dashboard could reference fields in your database such as Title, Industry, Lead Score or Lead Source in relation to those that are unsubscribing.

2. Ask why someone is unsubscribing – if you are utilizing a subscription management/preference center and someone chooses to opt out, offer them an option to explain why.  You will be surprised as to how many people will actually provide a reason.

As the GI Joe’s used to say – “Now you know… and knowing is half the battle”.

Social media has become an integral part of many B2B/B2C marketing organizations. Whether it be Tweeting, creating fan pages on Facebook or posting information in LinkedIn groups, most B2B companies have begun to embrace this growing medium.  But like any channel, marketers want to be able to track the effectiveness of it.

Utilizing Eloqua, here are 2 simple ways that can help you better track your social media effectiveness:

1. Creating Unique Landing Pages For Each Social Media Platform

Utilizing Eloqua Hypersite PURL pages, a simple way to uniquely track page visitors via various social media channels is to copy existing campaign landing pages that you have created to generate “new” ones.  The reason for this is that when you copy a page, you are generating a new URL that you are able to use specifically on sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.  With this, you can uniquely track how many visitors (both known and unknown) are visiting your landing page through specific social media sites by campaign and by channel.

2. Tracking Conversions/Net New Names Through Form Submissions

In some cases, the landing page that you have copied may also have a form on it, which gives you a perfect opportunity to track how many conversions you are generating through a specific social media site as well.  However, there are a few things that you should consider with your form:

- If your form has many fields on it, you will want to consider limiting the amount of information you ask for.  Social media is meant to provide an easy way for people to access information, so start by only asking for a few pieces of information, such as email address and first name.

- A best practice for form configuration is to have a process to capture the Lead Source of names who enter into your database.  In the past, I have typically created a hidden HTML field on my form that has a value of “Twitter” or “LinkedIn”, so that when I run an analysis on a database, I can easily segment and report on those who were added via a social media site (*note – your company may have a specific naming convention for lead source, so incorporating the name of the social site into that will also help with reporting/segmentation).  Even if the conversions generated are not related to net new names, form data reporting can assist with showing how many submissions came via a social media site in relation to the lead source of the submission.

By capturing the source of these net new names, there are many types of ways that you can report on them over time:

- If you have a lead scoring program in place, you can determine the quality of the names you are generating
- What is the basic profile of a person created through a social media site (ie. what sort of titles do they have?)
- Within your CRM, you could track these names against any opportunities generated

By utilizing these two simple methods, you will be able to get a better sense as to how big a part social media is playing into your marketing efforts.

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Happy sharing!

Creating positive user experiences is the goal of any good web design. From landing pages to online advertising a company’s online presence is usually evaluated before the webpage even fully loads. But how can you ensure that you are optimizing an exceptional online experience for customers and also producing high ROI? As the web is continually evolving there is no perfect solution to reflect users’ behaviors, but there are several best practices to keep in mind when developing your online marketing strategy.

A landing page is customized to fit the specific call-to-action and is often the first page a visitor sees when clicking on a paid ad or link from an email.  Combining an attention-grabbing button with an effective landing page can turn what was once just web traffic into a steady stream of leads for your sales team.

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CSS3 is still hiding over the horizon, but more browsers are offering more support everyday. These new properties are sure to make web design simpler while adding powerful new tools for creative design.

Click here for a webpage sampling of some these new features available in CCS3 that promise to enrich the creative process and make acheiving these effects much easier.

* Best viewed in a CSS3 compliant browser such as Safari. Firefox and Chrome have support as well.

I recently had an opportunity to assist a client in setting up an Eloqua hosted campaign that utilized A/B testing using Omniture Test & Target.  This was my first experience with Test & Target and from what I’ve seen so far it looks like a great tool for marketers to add to their toolkit.

The campaign consisted of Eloqua hosted landing pages, forms and thank you pages.  The landing pages have traffic driven to them via Google Adwords.  Eloqua captures the lead information and sends it to Salesforce, passing along a campaign id for closed loop reporting on the Salesforce end.

Omniture SiteCatalyst is leveraged to provide more segmented reporting on the Omniture end.  Each landing page corresponds to a different campaign and pageNames are kept track of in the Omniture parameters as well – something that was key to setting up roll up reporting in Test & Target as well.

Now for the Test & Target part, this is the cool part.  Each landing page has two versions (“A” & “B”).  These are different landing pages in Eloqua and there are also “A” and “B” versions of the form and thank you pages.  Now, when a lead comes into the landing page from a google ad (they go to the same url for “A” and “B” versions) Test & Target will route the lead to either the “A” track or the “B” track.  50% will go to the “A” version and 50% to the “B” version.

That’s it, you’ve got your usual closed loop reporting via Eloqua and Salesforce (you can see in Salesforce the track as well “A” or “B”), plus more reporting in Omniture SiteCatalyst and Test & Target.  In Test & Target the reporting is straight forward, which version of landing pages worked better overall (“A” or “B”) to get a call to action click through and to get a form submission, plus on an individual page level, which version worked better.

Have you been sending out emails to find new leads which you can pass on to your sales team?  Have you been using your Eloqua or marketing database for a while now? Would you like to identify who is responding to your campaigns?

If you continue to send communication to contacts who do not respond to your marketing efforts they might mark your emails as spam rather than unsubscribing.  Identifying these contacts in your database will allow you to suppress them from frequent communication.

How we define active and inactive contacts in your database:
An active Contact is defined as a contact that has opened an email, visited your website or completed a form in the last 4 months.

An inactive Contact are defined as a contact who has been sent at least 3 emails over the past 4 months and not had ANY tracked response activity.

Using the new Eloqua contact filter interface you can now combine the ability to filter on contact field values, activity and inactivity data.  Having all your filtering criteria in one filter you might have to apply advanced logic to make your filter accurate and execute correctly.

Once these contacts have been categorized you can now see the potential of how you can target your marketing efforts to these segments of contacts.  We would suggest that you create a re-engaging nurturing campaign for the inactive contacts as they are not ready to buy but when they are you will be on top of their minds.

Recently, I completed a gated form project for a client that protected three ‘kits’ of assets. The design and functionality were similar to that of most form landing pages I’ve personally project managed – except for one exception. They had a fair amount of targeted banner ads and plugs on various sites belonging to resellers, partners and other stakeholders of the particular product and the benefit of promoting it. A new marketing director had just joined their team and his first task was to quickly find a way to measure and assign these inbound leads from the very start of their clickstream.

Through the use of query string parameters (easily set up in Eloqua) a reseller, for example, could link a specific URL to the banner on their site, and when clicked, it identified to our client that this potential lead had come from them. This isn’t rocket science by any means, but depending on your business model, this scalable, simple and cost effective solution may provide you some basic attribution tracking if you are investing even a small amount (or just starting out) on branded placement on sites other than your own.

Initially, we created five query string parameters and added a sixth later on. Each one represented a type of campaign, lead source, and information about the reseller. A shortened example of what we developed would be this:

http://www.couch-associates.com/product_gated_forms.php?campaign=GatedFormBlitz&source=Banner&source_info=240×60&reseller_id=AJH567

The above URL would pass the following parameter values:
Campaign Name: Gated Form Blitz
Campaign Source: Banner
Source Info: 240×60
Reseller ID: AJH567

This told the marketing team which campaign had generated this lead – they had clicked on a banner, identifiable by the dimensions and the site from which the lead was generated was also captured. With this information, you can run visitor reporting in Eloqua to evaluate these known and unknown visitors to your site. Query string values are considered profile data in Eloqua and as such are tied to the visitor profile. If the visitor has been targeted correctly and they show interest, they may submit a form to acquire more information. At this point, you can now take the profile data and save it to the contact record. You will most likely need to enlist the help of a developer to provide with you some code to do this because you will need to get (grab) the parameter values from the URL and store them to a hidden form field.

Once the data is stored in the hidden fields, you can use an update rule to write the form data to any contact field, such as Lead Source – Most Recent (or Lead Source – Original if no value already exists) or other campaign fields. In our example, the client created all 6 fields to store this – but they had a good reason. Depending from which campaign a particular lead had responded, a different lead score was applied, and often, a score high enough to become marketing qualified and sent over to their CRM for sales to start the conversion process. In addition to the impact on lead score, certain parameter values that came across with the lead triggered different lead assignment/routing decisions, ensuring that specific leads were routed correctly to the sales representative best suited to engage.
What was originally applied to three gated assets is currently being implemented across another 30, and each high value asset download that generates from online advertising placement can be tied back to a unique and specific source. In the short term, this type of tracking will help you measure (and verify) the effectiveness of your demand generation efforts whether it be from Google Adwords, or in the case of our client, working with your third-party stakeholders to generate those valuable leads.

Part II: Coming Soon – Creating a form for resellers/partners that will allow them to generate their own referring URLs automatically.

One of the most essential things necessary to create successful websites, landing pages, or marketing campaigns is to be able to measure your own success. There are many different ways to extract this information from your projects, but one of the most simple, reliable, and powerful solutions to do this is Google Analytics.

Google Analytics has come a long way since its initial release in 2005. Many marketers, webmasters, and companies now rely on this free platform for all their analytical needs. The reason all these people continue to use Google Analytics is its vast amount of reporting and integration features that Google constantly keeps innovating and releasing.

Google Analytics also allows integration with Google Adwords, which is currently one of the largest and most successful online advertising platforms available to date.  Syncing Google Analytics with Google Adwords allows for you to get accurate information of traffic and income generated from your Google Ads. This allows you to collect trend information on which ads are doing better during which time/days of the weeks, empowering you to fine tune your ad budgets to maximize your Google Adwords profits. 

Another reason why Google Analytics has been able to thrive is its simplicity of implementing it on website. General set ups require a simple step by step setup which entails posting a block of code that has your account id generally in your pages footer above the </body> tag. The block of code necessary to track your code won’t interfere with any other tracking your site has, and won’t bog your site down.

Example of a code required for simple tracking purposes.

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : http://www.);
document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-XXXXXXXX-1″);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script>

Google Analytics then automatically creates daily/weekly/monthly reports based on your traffic that can provide you with the insight you need to better manage your sites. Some of the useful features include reports showing what percent of your visitors use a certain browser, or how many of your visitors are from a specific state or province, and even what resolution they’re using to view your site. Information like this can be used to better cater your sites to your target audience allowing you to make the correct decisions in your marketing campaign design process. 

One of Google Analytic’s newer features that is still in beta and began in October 2009 is Google Analytics Intelligence. Intelligence monitors your sites traffic and automatically alerts you to any significant changes in your traffic. The created alerts also indicate when and where the change happened. Alerts are setup to monitor your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, and are all automatically compiled into Google Analytics Dashboard styled reports. Intelligence also allows you to make your own custom triggers that creates alerts, and can also automatically email you allowing you to see any significant changes on your mobile devices.

Google Analytics can also be integrated into your ecommerce sites to help track which products are selling, where the traffic that is buying is coming from, and how it’s getting there. This is very useful to help you design your ads to increase revenue of products that aren’t selling as well as you would like. This also helps you identify which sales processes are more effective I.E. does the 2 pages stream sell more then the 4 page stream? Identifying which sites are referring the most traffic to you is also important to determine which sites you need to invest more advertising in to maximize your ad income.

There are still a large amount of features and abilities of Google Analytics that I have not covered, but the best way to figure out which features are most valuable to you is by trying Google Analytics yourself.