Archive for July, 2010

The forgotten “Thank-You” page

by Lionel Mann on July 27, 2010 in Email Marketing, Hypersites and Landing Pages, Nurturing Campaigns, Website Design with No comments

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.

Why Unsubscribe Reporting Is Like An Iceberg

by Mike MacFarlane on July 21, 2010 in Email Marketing, Other with No comments

Why Unsubscribes Are Like An IcebergOne 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”.

2 Ways To Track Your Social Media Effectiveness In Eloqua

by Mike MacFarlane on July 14, 2010 in Other, Social Media with 3 Comments
social_media

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.

Feel free to follow me on Twitter

Happy sharing!

Master Landing Pages

by Lionel Mann on July 6, 2010 in Other with No comments

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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