The Most Important Lead Generation Tips You Never Heard Of

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I recently finished re-reading Brian Carroll’s excellent book, Lead Generation for the Complex Sale. Unlike most books on lead generation, this book doesn’t feature an in-depth look at the tactical side of lead generation (it’s been done to death anyway, right?).

Rather, it covers the “organisational” side of lead generation from a 30,000-foot perspective.

This includes defining what a lead looks like (and getting sales and marketing to agree), instituting closed-loop tracking (tracking a lead from the first contact through to the sale) and ensuring that lead generation and sales capacity are closely aligned.

I have always focused on the marketing side of lead generation - getting qualified leads in the door in the first place - but I’ve realised that the approaches outlined in Lead Generation for the Complex Sale are just as important for producing outcomes and another source of leverage in your sales and marketing process.

If your sales and marketing process involves multiple contacts, I highly recommend that you read and apply the information in Lead Generation For The Complex Sale.

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Attend 2-Day Business Seminar For Just $1

I’ve previously mentioned the upcoming Business Mastery Secrets seminar series in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

Tickets went on sale a couple of weeks ago at the introductory “Early Bird” price of $197, but a new twist has been added over the last couple of days…

You can now attend the entire event for *just $1*

(Yes, there’s a catch, but I think you’ll agreee it’s very reasonable.)

Click here to find out how you can attend for just $1.

(This offer is also a very interesting example of total Risk Reversal - one of Jay Abraham’s foundational marketing principles.)

What you’ll learn at Business Mastery Secrets

Business Mastery Secrets follows a unique format that brings together 6 business experts over 2 days.

Dr Marc Dussault - entrepreneur of the year finalist, Managing Director of Jay Abraham Asia Pacific, Business Development Manager for an International software firm’s sales team that sold more with a staff of 3 than any other worldwide office with staffs of 50+.

Peter Sun - founder of the Better Business Institute, $1 Million personal income per year working from home with 1 employee.

Ed Dale - 0 to $5 Million in 36 months on the Internet. Enough said!

Garry Kewish - superstar salesman, consultant to Brian Tracy, Jay Abraham and many other business luminaries. Garry is also Brian Tracy’s head honcho in Australia.

Richard Evans - CEO of Imagine Essential Services, credited by the Australian Financial Review for creating an entirely new industry in essential services cost reduction. Imagine can save the average business $500+ per month at no cost.

Dymphna Boholt - one of Australia’s foremost tax minimisation / asset protection experts who specialises in showing business owners how to save tax.

Venues and Dates

SYDNEY [Apr Sat 28 - Sun 29] Venue: SMC Conference Centre 99 Goulburn Street Sydney NSW 2000

MELBOURNE [May Sat 5 - Sun 6] Venue: Melbourne Convention Centre Corner Spencer & Flinders Streets Melbourne VIC 3005

BRISBANE [May Sat 12 - Sun 13] Venue: Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre South Bank South Brisbane 4101

Who else lets you attend their entire conference for just one dollar, then gives you seven full days to decide if the event was worthwhile or not, and you only pay if you think it was? NO ONE!

Reserve your seat now for just $1

See you at the event! Literally, if you’re in Brisbane!

Will

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Website Optimisation Part 7: Keyword Conversion Of Natural Search Campaigns

This is the 7th instalment of a 7 article series on how to accelerate your online sales using the Marketing Results ’hybrid’ approach to website optimisation.

See Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

How Well Are Your Natural Search Campaigns Converting?

Once the fat has been trimmed from your paid search campaigns and your website content is performing well, the next step is natural search engine optimisation.

Most Search Engine optimisation campaigns deal with the question of how to generate more traffic to a website and this is certainly a worthy goal. But it’s just as important to remember that you also want to target the right kind of traffic. That is, traffic that leads to more opt-ins, leads and sales.

Another useful application of Google Analytics is that it allows you to distinguish between traffic generated via natural search and paid search.

When deciding which keyword phrases to target in your SEO efforts, it’s useful to know which keywords are already converting via paid search. You can use conversion tracking within Google Adwords (and/or more advanced tools within Google Analytics) to establish this.

The next step is to establish how competitive your target keyword phrase is - are there dozens of well-ranked competitors in the space already, or are there no strong competitors?

Assessing the strength of your competition can be complicated, but one of the best resources for simplifying the process is the SEOmoz Page Strength Tool.

If the websites who already occupy the search engine rankings you’d like to occupy have high Page Strength scores, it may be wiser to start with less competitive key phrases and work your way up.

Above: output from a ‘CPC vs Organic Conversion’ report within Google Analytics. [cpc] refers to paid search and [organic] refers to ‘free’ search engine traffic. In this example, two conversion goals called G1 and G2 are being tracked. The system also allows drilling down to get a clearer picture of what’s going on.

N.B. This screen can be accessed via the Marketing Optimisation > Search Engine Marketing > CPC vs Organic Conversion menu within Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a surprisingly powerful platform, especially considering that it’s free! The danger lies in falling into the trap of thinking that data = knowledge.

Conclusion

In a previous post I wrote about the democratization of web technologies. In years gone by, companies spent their online optimization budgets on either media or the “widgets”, software and systems to drive their website. Now, those technologies are becoming freely available - now smart organisations are shifting their focus to invest in clever people.

Converting analytical data into actionable strategies is why companies retain consultants such as Marketing Results.

This article concludes this 7-part series. What did you think? What did I leave out that you think should have been included? Leave a comment and I’ll respond to your feedback.

Will Swayne Website Optimizer

7-Part Website Optimisation Series

• Part 1: Advanced Conversion Tracking
• Part 2: Cross Channel Tracking
• Part 3: Getting Your Emails Opened And Read
• Part 4: Retaining Email List Subscribers
• Part 5: Boosting Website Conversion
• Part 6: Visualising Where Users Are Clicking
• Part 7: Keyword Conversion Of Natural Search Campaigns

Add Your Comments »

Website Optimisation Part 6: Visualising Where Visitors Are Clicking

This is the 6th instalment of a 7 article series on how to accelerate your online sales using the Marketing Results ‘hybrid’ approach to website optimisation.

See Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

Visualising Where Website Visitors Are Clicking

In a previous post I commented on a service called Crazy Egg which allows you to visualise where users are clicking on your website. This post expands on the use of Crazy Egg as a data visualisation tool.

Above: Crazy Egg generates an easy to understand ‘heatmap’ image of the Jay Abraham Asia Pacific website, revealing exactly where visitors are clicking.

Why do you want to visualise data anyway?

The first thing you may want to know is - with so many analytics packages and tracking tools on the market, who needs one more?

Here are 4 reasons:

1. When an easily identifiable “conversion” is difficult or irrelevant to track.

On many types of website that you may wish to optimise (e.g. a blog), an easily identify “conversion action” such as a sale or enquiry doesn’t occur. Crazy Egg provides meaningful information by showing you where users are clicking - what’s how and what’s not.

2. When you want a detailed picture of how users are engaging with your content.

Many services including Google Analytics offer some visualisation functions that reveal where users are clicking. Crazy Egg’s output is much more detailed than other services I’ve seen. Rather than just telling you that a graphic or link was clicked, it shows you exactly where it was clicked. It also reveals when unlinked content was clicked (e.g. a graphic with no link).

3. When you want to decrease bounce rates and optimise clickthrough rates.

One effective technique of website conversion optimisation is to use your homepage bounce rate as a proxy for the effectiveness of your homepage in general. (Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who leave your site without clicking onto another page. An ineffective homepage will have a high bounce rate.) Crazy Egg allows you to quickly identify what’s working and what’s not on your homepage so you can optimise accordingly.

4. When you want to quickly understand and communicate what’s happening.

Let’s face it - a picture is worth a thousand words. Not everyone thinks in terms of figures and data. A visual summary of user behaviour is a useful way to communicate what’s working and what’s not without resorting to long reports or reams of data. (This can come in handy if you’re forced to engage in internal battles about what content to have on your company website).

Generous “free” plan plus paid plans

Crazy Egg offers a number of service plans, starting with the free plan, which is more than sufficient to test drive the service (or as a complete solution for relatively small or low-traffic websites). The fee-based plans are big enough for enterprise applications.

Conclusion

Many companies have no formal process for deciding how content is organised on their website (often it’s either by decree or by committee). Tools such as Crazy Egg give you the power to make informed decisions on what works so you can optimise accordingly.

Crazy Egg is also a simple, visual alternative to data-driven tools that many people find either too boring or too difficult to interpret.

If you could get just 10% more visitors to click deeper into your website than they are now, what would that mean to the profitability of your online channel? For many websites, this would translate into a significant increase in results.

Will Swayne Data visualiser

7-Part Website Optimisation Series

• Part 1: Advanced Conversion Tracking
• Part 2: Cross Channel Tracking
• Part 3: Getting Your Emails Opened And Read
• Part 4: Retaining Email List Subscribers
• Part 5: Boosting Website Conversion
• Part 6: Visualising Where Users Are Clicking
• Part 7: Keyword Conversion Of Natural Search Campaigns

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Website Optimisation Part 5: Boosting Website Conversion

This is the 5th instalment of a 7 article series on how to accelerate your online sales using the Marketing Results ‘hybrid’ approach to website optimisation.

See Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Optimising Your Site Content To Convert More Visitors

Most attempts to increase the effectiveness of websites that I have seen revolve mainly around increasing traffic volume. While increasing traffic volume is undoubtedly an important factor, it ignores the other side of the coin - the percentage of website visitors who convert into qualified enquirers and customers.

In the short term, there is normally more leverage in improving your site’s conversion rate than in Search Engine Optimisation.

One technique for improving conversion rate is to serve different content to different visitors, then trace conversions back to the content served. Multivariate testing platforms can be used to handle the technical side of this process, provided that you know what page components to test and how to test them. The following case study illustrates what some of these factors are.

Case Study:

Australia’s leading speed dating service Blink Dating asked us for assistance to increase their already impressive conversion rate. We set up a multivariate testing schema that included the following elements:

• 4 headlines
• 4 photos
• 3 versions of the main call to action
• 2 registration form headlines
• 2 registration form designs
• 2 privacy policies

In total, this makes 4 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 384 page combinations organized into an experimental design that allows relatively fast and accurate testing of the different versions using Taguchi multivariate analysis.

Above: 384 landing page combinations were tested, increasing the conversion rate of Blink Dating’s online client acquisition process by 20% within 6 weeks.

This process resulted in a conversion and sales improvement of 20% within 6 weeks by identifying which page elements were most effective at encouraging visitors to sign up.

Recommended Tool: Google’s recently released (and free!) Website Optimizer is a huge advance on many previous multivariate testing platforms. You can think of this tool as ‘Free Money’.

Conclusion

For some reason, most business owners and marketing managers I talk to get very excited about search engine marketing and search engine optimisation, but are far less enthusiastic about website conversion optimisation efforts. Why? Increasing website can be equally as effective and often faster than SEO efforts. Give it a try and let me know how you get on.

Will Swayne Website Conversion Geek

7-Part Website Optimisation Series

• Part 1: Advanced Conversion Tracking
• Part 2: Cross Channel Tracking
• Part 3: Getting Your Emails Opened And Read
• Part 4: Retaining Email List Subscribers
• Part 5: Boosting Website Conversion
• Part 6: Visualising Where Users Are Clicking
• Part 7: Keyword Conversion Of Natural Search Campaigns

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DoFollow Plugin Activated On Marketing Results Blog

One well-meaning but ultimately futile feature of the WordPress blog platform is the mandatory addition of the rel=”nofollow” attribute to links within all comments.

From the Wikipedia entry “nofollow”:

nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of spamdexing, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place. Google announced in early 2005 that hyperlinks with rel=”nofollow” attribute would not influence the link target’s PageRank. In addition, the Yahoo and MSN search engines also respect this tag. rel=”nofollow” actually tells a search engine “Don’t score this link” rather than “Don’t follow this link.” This differs from the meaning of nofollow as used within a robots meta tag, which does tell a search engine: “Do not follow any of the hyperlinks in the body of this document.”

Why nofollow is silly

Much has been said about why nofollow is silly, including this seminal post. I agree. For starters, comment spam is absolutely rife [11,009 spam comments gobbled up by Akismet since installing it around 2 months ago].  nofollow doesn’t work.

Nofollow Deactivated On This Blog

I have just installed the DoFollow Plugin which deactivates the default nofollow setting within comments in WordPress.

What this means is, if you comment in even a half sensible way on this blog, your comment will contribute toward the search engine rankings of your site!

Will

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MailWasher Pro Review - Recommended Anti-Spam Program

Have you noticed that email spam is getting beyond a joke? Many countries have instituted anti-spam legislation but judging by the state of my inbox every morning it’s not doing much good, and I know I’m not alone.

Have you actually calculated how much time spam email costs you every week to download, sort and delete? 15 minutes a day is over an hour per week of lost productivity…

Recently I came accross and Anti-spam program called MailWasher Pro that is already saving me hours every week.

Why I like MailWasher

Many anti-spam solutions that I’ve seen suffer from one or more of these problems:

1. They’re too agressive - they eat up legitimate emails
2. They’re not agressive enough - they allow tonnes of dodgy emails through
3. They can be circumvented and rendered useless by inventive spammers

MailWasher overcomes each of these problems. Here’s a quick summary of how it works:

Sorting Emails and Nuking Spam is Fast!

Because you only see a preview of incoming emails without downloading the whole message, MailWasher is lightning fast - no more waiting for dozens or hundreds of rubbish emails to clog up your inbox before you get a chance to delete them.

Reduced security risk

Because you don’t actually download emails to your computer until they have been sorted by MailWasher, malicious emails with viruses attached never even reach your computer.

MailWasher is a fast learner

When I first purchased Mailwasher Pro after previewing the Free Version, I found that for the first week or so I had to keep an eye on the automated sorting function to ensure that mails were sorted correctly.

But ever since flagging most of my “friendly” email addresses and blacklisting others, the learning filter has taken over and the program functions brilliantly. Previewing and sorting 100 emails now takes less than 1 minute.

MailWasher Versions and Prices

Even if spam email is costing you only 15 minutes a day, that’s 50 hours you’re sacrificing every year based on a working year of 200 days. Then multiply that by how much your time is worth to you (your hourly rate)…

Convinced yet?

So, how much does this little baby cost? Well, there are two versions, the Free Version and the Pro Version. Here’s how the versions compare.

Why I use and recommend the Pro Version

• MailWasher Pro allows multiple email accounts
• It has a built-in “learning filter” which increases speed and accuracy.
• It integrates with the First Alert global spam database which allows automatic screening and flagging of 95% of spam email
• It is an absolute no-brainer at only USD $37.

So if you want to free your inbox of clutter and claim back countless hours every year, grab MailWasher!

Will Swayne On-the-warpath-against-spam

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Website Optimisation Part 4: Retaining Email List Subscribers

This is the 4th instalment of a 7 article series on how to accelerate your online sales using the Marketing Results ‘hybrid’ approach to website optimisation.

See Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Email Marketing Optimisation: Keeping Prospects Engaged With Your Conversion Process

Every online conversion process is different, but all are made up of a series of conversion steps. Understanding how users are responding to each step of your process is the key to incrementally improving your results.

While an email sequence is by no means the only way to convert ‘raw’ website visitors into high-quality sales leads, it is an effective technique that we have successfully deployed across dozens of industries.

Case Study: Optimising an Email Autoresponder Strategy

Hutton Real Estate is one of Australia’s most successful independent real estate agents. One of their lead generation strategies involves giving away a highly informative Home Selling Guide to people who may be thinking of selling their home, then following up with a series of autoresponder emails to provide additional information and encourage qualified prospects to enquire.

(At the same time, this process is designed to sharply reduce unqualified enquiries (e.g. people who not thinking of selling their home in the next 3 to 6 months). If low lead quality is a problem you face, filtering prospects through a well-designed autoresponder process is a strategy you could test.)

Two months after successfully launching the process, we ran a report to determine how many people had unsubscribed from the contact list. Here are the results:

Above: This report from the Aweber autoresponder system shows that a total of 78 users unsubscribed (around 15% of the total), and also when they unsubscribed within the 7 email series.

Clearly, most of the unsubscribe requests were being triggered by messages 4, 5 and 6. This information enabled the content of each message to be reviewed and adjusted:

• Message 5 didn’t add a lot of value - it merely re-iterated some earlier points from the ebook - so it was removed from the sequence altogether.
• Messages 4 and 6 provided valuable new information, but based on feedback from subscribers we suspected that the delivery interval between messages was too short and that prospects felt “bombarded” by emails, so we increased the delivery intervals for these two messages from 4 to 7 days.
• Additional messages were added for delivery 6 and 12 months after the initial signup. In other words, this system can be set to automatically follow up with prospects without requiring any additional effort from the Hutton Real Estate team.

Results

Introducing the above tweaks reduced the unsubscribe rate from around 15% to less than 3%. Leads cost money to generate - it pays to keep them in your marketing funnel even if they don’t convert into new business immediately.

Hutton Real Estate has also used this optin process to capitalise on several successful PR campaigns. Many PR campaigns generate a flood of interest that quickly dissipates. In the case of Hutton Real Estate, a PR piece that appeared in the Brisbane Sunday Mail generated over 600 opt-ins within a matter of days, locking in long-term value.

7-Part Website Optimisation Series

• Part 1: Advanced Conversion Tracking
• Part 2: Cross Channel Tracking
• Part 3: Getting Your Emails Opened And Read
• Part 4: Retaining Email List Subscribers
• Part 5: Boosting Website Conversion
• Part 6: Visualising Where Users Are Clicking
• Part 7: Keyword Conversion Of Natural Search Campaigns

Add Your Comments »

What The…? This Blog Looking A Little Retro Today

Um, something’s happened to the blog. My project manager Phil was working on some upgrades today and by the looks of things some vital bit of code got misplaced.

I’m sure things will be back to normal within a day or two.

And what’s with all this bally comment spam?

I’m currently using the Math Comment anti-spam plugin, but it appears that 99% of spammers have now cracked it. Judging by the fact that I have hundreds of spam comments getting gobbled up by Akismet every day, the Math Comment plugin has had its day and will have to be euthanised.

Add Your Comments »

Website Optimisation Part 3: Getting Your Emails Opened And Read

This is the 3rd instalment of a 7 article series on how to accelerate your online sales using the Marketing Results ‘hybrid’ approach to website optimisation.

See Part 1 | Part 2

Email Marketing Optimisation - How To Get More Emails Opened and Read

Not every website or company has a newsletter or email strategy, but email campaigns often prove to be very profitable. Keeping in touch with prospects or clients is one of the simplest ways to encourage deeper engagement with your website and increase sales volume.

But how many of your clients are actually opening and reading your emails? Many email services provide you with statistics on open rates and click through rates, which are a good start, but in isolation this information is not particularly useful from a results improvement point of view.

Split-testing multiple email copy versions is a much faster way to improve your results. (Most email platforms don’t support split-testing of subject lines and email content, but many systems can handle it with some manual intervention. Testing is worth the effort. The system I recommend which does support automated split testing is called Aweber.)

Here’s a simple example of how optimising your email process can work:

In this example, the target opt-in list was broken up into three randomly selected groups. Three different emails were sent containing the same body text but different subject lines.

Here are the headlines and results:

Subject Line 1: “FIRSNAME, November Client Attraction Newsletter out now” Click through rate: 20.3%

Subject Line 2: “FIRSTNAME, here’s a new 7 Marketing Trends report for you Click through rate: 28.0%

Subject Line 3: “FIRSTNAME, 7 Marketing Trends I think you should know about” Click through rate: 45.6%

The winning headline outperformed the second best headline by 63% and the worst headline by 125%!

Making this type of split test an integral part of your online marketing process allows you to ramp up your results by orders of magnitude on an ongoing basis.

SIDEBAR:

Two factors that can influence the effectiveness of email subject lines are Personalisation and Proximity.

Personalisation: “FIRSTNAME, how to improve your profits” will perform better than ‘How to improve your profits’.

Proximity: Proximity means writing your subject lines such that they convey your message as quickly as possible (preferably in the first 4 or 5 words). Most email clients only display the first few words of a subject line, so it pays to make them count. Subject Line 3 above communicates the most information the fastest, which is why I believe it performed best.

END SIDEBAR:

Here are some more ideas on how to translate your test results into improved outcomes:

• Keep a “knowledge base” of email test results, including which subject line formats and templates produced better results.
• Test one segment of a large list first, then mail the whole list with the best-performing version.
• Test a number of versions, then re-mail the entire list with the best performing subject line (Hint: a second mailing of the same email to the same list can produce around 50% of the original response again.)
• Add the best-performing version to the end of an existing autoresponder or follow up sequence with the knowledge that it performs better than other tested alternatives (this is an easy way to redeploy valuable content).

Conclusion

Subject lines are just one of the variables that can be tested, but they are an obvious leverage point and a good place to start. What would happen to the effectiveness of your email campaigns if you split tested every email broadcast and optimised accordingly?

7-Part Website Optimisation Series

• Part 1: Advanced Conversion Tracking
• Part 2: Cross Channel Tracking
• Part 3: Getting Your Emails Opened And Read
• Part 4: Retaining Email List Subscribers
• Part 5: Boosting Website Conversion
• Part 6: Visualising Where Users Are Clicking
• Part 7: Keyword Conversion Of Natural Search Campaigns

Add Your Comments »