Recently in Marketing Category

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, BuyerZone's President Mie-Yun Lee has been nominated as one of the 50 Most Influential People in Sales Lead Management for 2012. All of us here are very excited and are looking forward to the results next Wednesday!

To vote for Mie-Yun and other worthy candidates you must be an SLMA member. The good news is that you can join for free and access all of SLMA's useful content in the process - a no-brainer for those of us in the online lead gen space.

The voting period ends on Friday, November 30th so sign up this week and let your voice be heard!

Direct mail is one of the oldest forms of marketing but many marketers have abandoned the practice altogether in favor of more cost-effective approaches in this always-connected digital age.

Granted, direct mail is difficult to track and the printing and postage costs are less attractive than email campaigns and social media activities. But for some companies looking to engage with potential new prospects, direct mail may still have some gas left in the tank.

The Custom Letter
Now I'm not talking about the coupon flyers or credit card junk mail that sits on your kitchen table until you decide to shred it or toss it in the trash.  I'm talking about the personal touch that a well written letter can still provide to potential clients or customers - especially those in the B2B space.  

The About Leads team loves writing informative lead gen and marketing content for your reading pleasure - but we enjoy following the pulse of other awesome blogs as well. Here are 5 recent blog posts from around the web that touch on some recent topics we've covered here:

• Ideal customer profiles: 5 steps to ensure your lead generation stays on target
  
• Popcorn is for the movies, not marketing
• Common landing page mistakes & making social actionable
• Mobile email opens increase 123% in 18 months

For those of us on the east coast bracing for Hurricane Sandy, let's hope for the best!

Have a great weekend.

Last month, I posted about the headaches of email rendering in select clients when executing email marketing campaigns. To help elaborate further on this issue, I was able to grab (ok, abduct) our email designer and web-dev extraordinaire Ryan Doherty for a brief interview to get his take. Here's how it went:


About Leads: Why do emails render differently across email clients?

Ryan Doherty: There are many reasons why emails may render differently. For one, email clients typically use an external rendering engine to display the HTML and these can vary in their approach and tolerance for certain aspects of HTML code.

Also, there is a preprocessing phase that each email goes through prior to reaching the rendering engine and this has the potential to mess things up as well if your email isn't coded to account for all potential scenarios.

Earlier this week, Anne Kelly, our VP of Sales (who you'll be hearing more from on this blog in the coming months) and I attended Demandcon in Boston. It was our first time at this conference and we attended because the subject matter is right in our sweet spot: accelerating and aligning marketing and sales resources to succeed with lead generation.

I thought I'd share some key takeaways:

State of B2B Demand Generation

Jay Gaines from SiriusDecisions keynoted the conference with some interesting thoughts about the state of demand generation. Over the past few years, demand generation techniques have improved vastly - it's now a well-oiled machine, but the training wheels are still on.

• Tools and technology are on the rise, and marketers are doubling their investment in business intelligence and marketing automation/CRM software. But less than 25% of businesses are leveraging these tools to their fullest (especially marketing automation).
  

• And though marketers have many more tools at their disposal -- allowing for targeting, segmenting, lead scoring, nurturing and the like, many are still resorting to the tried and true tactics of "spray and pray" -- sending generic email blasts hoping to drive leads.

• The balance of inbound lead channels versus outbound lead channels is still skewing towards inbound. Inbound leads are always a good thing (especially when factoring in cost), but you still need a balance of the two, which we talk about at length in our recent whitepaper.
  

• As we all know, not all leads will close. According to Jay, 80% of Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) don't close. Thus, there is an immense amount of "lead waste" if you aren't prepared to turn those "wasted" leads into future opportunities with lead nurturing. The key is to manage the waste with smart but not overly complex lead nurturing campaigns. Campaigns that address the reason for non-closure, for instance, and not just a one-size-fits-all maze of emails that are unlikely to turn a prospect back into your pipeline. 

By Jon Faitel

Email marketing is a great way to stay in touch with your customers and promote offers, but with all of the email clients available, it can be a real headache to get your emails to look the same across the board when opened.

From Gmail to Yahoo, Outlook to Apple Mail, and now iOS to Android mail apps, it's a wacky world out there. I don't have a background in HTML, but I've worked with enough web developers to know that email rendering issues aren't always easy.

Outlook - the email destroyer

The primary culprit for email rendering problems seems to be the latest versions of Microsoft Outlook. Whenever we conduct an email campaign, Outlook is the client that always seems to strip out fonts, alter line spacing, and ignore table layout code. This can be especially frustrating if your emails are targeted to a B2B audience - of which many will be opening and reading your email in Outlook.

While I can't explain the technical side of why these things happen, I do know from a marketing perspective, it is not a good look for your company. You put in all that work to write inspiring copy and design a cool layout with nice fonts and then BAM! - Outlook defaults your font selection to Times New Roman, moves your layout around, and you're left with something that looks like a 6^th grader designed it in computer class. Ouch.

The good news is that this can all be avoided with a little careful planning and a few extra steps prior to your send date.

Last Tuesday we co-hosted a webinar with LeadsCouncil on our recent whitepaper, the Art and Science of Successful Online Lead Generation. Nearly 100 attendees learned simple and actionable lessons from two lead generation experts.

Watch the video (it's just under 50 minutes) and learn for yourself how these simple, yet vital steps can ensure success for your lead generation campaigns:



And if you missed the whitepaper, you can download a free copy here.

Do you have tips for success for online lead generation? Share them in the comments below!

BuyerZone has just unveiled a new animated video to educate buyers on the benefits of using our quote request service. We hope this video will help our buyers better understand our RFQ process which should result in better quality sales leads for our clients. Check it out!



Does your company have a video to help educate or drive leads? Feel free to share your thoughts on using video to enhance conversion and transparency about your product or service in the comments section below.