Hourly reports from Google Adwords can help to reveal some interesting facts about when your searchers are looking for what you offer. Where are the clicks and impressions going? Is your product a daytime or evening seach subject? And why waste your clicks on low traffic times? go here for more from Google.
Let’s talk about work that’s good to have around: prospect follow up. Here are som points to help you excel at this critical stage of the lead generation process.
When you’re starting out you lead volume could be quite small and in this case a semi-manual option may be all you need. In this process, prospects that register on your landing page receive an automatic email message that is both a thank you message and a link to the content you are offering. (Working on the theory that all prospects are in a hurry and want to get at the information asap.)
As well as the prospect receiving a message I also tend to send on a copy of what has happened to the person in charge of the Web site prospecting process, so they can see what is happening. From here on in things become quite a manual process for the sales person. They need to contact the prospect via email or phone, introduce themselves and start to kick the normal sales process off.
You can refine this a bit further for the prospect by altering your Web forms so that when they return to receive more information their details are already pre-filled out to make their second registration that bit faster. From experience the less typing prospects have to do the greater the chance they will gather more content from your site to help them make a decision.
This semi-automated way can become a bit of a bind when you are managing a mass of prospects registering on multiple Web pages day and night. And while that’s not such a bad problem to have it makes it hard to keep the sales process working well under such a load.
When this happens you need a more automated process that can handle not only the registering volume but also the sales follow up. Some of the tools that cater for this are called “auto-responders” and can be used for a whole range of tasks to take the load off following up a mass of people. They are simple to set up and Permission provides access to a few that fit a range of different options.
For instance you could set up a cycle of messages to keep in contact with your prospects for a six month period from the time they register. (Naturally they can turn the communication off at any time by following the un-subscribe link at the foot of each communication.) Using such a system there should be no reason why you should ever fail to remain in touch.
The DMA has gone a long way to define some common sense standards for online marketing. You can find their document here. It’s worth a peek, print and wade through if you are already or planning to venture online with your marketing spend.
Planning shouldn’t be an onerous task.
The other day I sat down with a customer team to plan out their email marketing activities. After just a few hours we had put together some great points that outlined the proposed outcomes, content, frequency and direction of their email messaging.
My four step methodology took us through the process and we were done and dusted in record time. Planning shouldn’t be a difficult task. Check out this document as a thought starter. Or if you would some more interaction, here’s a streaming ppt preso to kick some ideas around. Now how does it go? Something like fail to plan – plan to fail??? Have fun.
One of the top email newsletters for lead generation is from Grokdotcom. Their latest newsletter is out and about and worthy of a peek. It’s simple logic that is rarely enacted on. Your web site is not visited by a pool of unique visitors – there are different people out there with different needs wanting to achieve different tasks. One size does not fit all when it comes to designing the voice of persuasion for your web site.
Need to know how much you need to spend in lead generation to make you sales targets? Here’s a simple spreadsheet worth a download. Have fun.