May 2011 Archives

In honor of the Friday before a long weekend, here is a roundup of some fun lead generation articles for your reading enjoyment.

Read the Four Reasons Why Funnels Are a Marketer's Best Friend from B2B Lead Roundtable Blog. See how marketing professional can learn from a sales tactic. Or you can buff up your social strategy with these tips from TopRank Online Marketing Blog.

Or check out this interesting article from Inc.com on 7 Leadership Lessons from an NBA Coach. They speak with Avery Johnson, former NBA player and new head coach of the New Jersey Nets. Find out what his strategies are for success.

I also recommend this article on why geo-targeted custom content marketing should be a priority from Brafton News.

Have a great Memorial Day weekend everyone!

Came across an interesting blog post by Eric Wittlake on Digital B2B Marketing about the end of lead generation. Although I think some of the points are fair, I'd contend that lead generation is evolving, but certainly not going away. Let's look at a few of his concerns from a different perspective.

Contact information isn't accurate
As a lead generation business, we're familiar with the fact that prospective customers often fudge their details - especially phone numbers -- when filling out a contact form. Naturally, some users are hoping to get the reward (in many cases a piece of content) without divulging who they are in order to prevent sales and/or marketing follow-up. But even if only 21% of registrants provide an accurate phone number, for instance, that's one out of five customers that you can contact and continue to develop a relationship with. With a big enough lead generation program, that can be quite a few. And many more customers will provide accurate email addresses you can use to keep in touch.

Being meticulous about subject lines is important for both operational and marketing emails. Everyone wants to make their message heard, but first you have to get your readers to open your email! There are a number of factors involved with open rate, but the subject line is, by far, the easiest to control. Issues such as deliverability, a poorly targeted audience, list fatigue, and IP reputation can all be much more challenging to overcome. We already covered a number of these common problems in our email marketing foundations post, so use it as a reference for additional information.

But what are some quick fixes to improve your open rates and encourage your list to interact more with your emails? Focusing on these subject line basics:

The Balancing Act. The most important lesson about subject lines is striking the perfect equilibrium between standing out in your customer's inbox and looking like spam. Your email will be judged in an instant based on those precious few characters, so you need to take advantage of your subject line to create an argument for readers to open your message. But be careful - your message might be distinct, but, "$100 for signing up at our gym!!! FREE MONEY!!! Limited time gift!!!" probably will entice your list to mark the email as spam -that is, if your message even makes it to the inbox. Think about your list and the different segments. What would they like to read? What is important to them? Could you convey the same message without sounding spammy? Try different arrangements like, "Thinking of joining, but want the right incentives?" or "3 ways to improve your health this month" or "Easy summer fitness tips". This way, you pull in your audience by making them wonder what the incentives/benefits are -rather than giving away your punch line before they even open the email.

Want to expand your small business marketing strategy? Many companies are successfully associating their brand with a worthy cause to try to win over customer support. After all, who doesn't like making purchases and feeling like they are contributing to the greater good? It worked for Gap's Join (RED) campaign and Lance Armstrong's Livestrong apparel. According to Inc.com, 79 percent of Americans would switch to your brand if it were associated with a good cause.

If you want a more basic strategy, you could always ramp up your content marketing. Creating content is time consuming and at first it can feel like a lot of effort for little return. So, is it really worth the hassle? Many businesses argue "yes". Read what Copyblogger has to say in "Is content marketing worth the effort?"