2. www.act-on.com | @ActOnSoftware | #ActOnSW
Janelle Johnson
Director, Demand Gen
janelle.johnson@act-on.com
@janelle_johnson
Linda West
Manager, Demand Gen
linda.west@act-on.com
@misslindawest
Today’s Presenters
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1. The Evolution of Advertising
2. 6 Must-Have’s in Your Conversion Funnel
1. Focus on CTA
2. Website Visitor Tracking
3. Landing Pages & Optimization
4. Lead Scoring
5. Sales Insights
6. Tracking & Reporting
Agenda
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The Evolution of Advertising
• Saturation has been the focus of advertising since the ‘50s
• Messaging centered around conformity & narrow ideals
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The Evolution of Advertising
Access
+
Choice
_________________
Shift to Consumer
Control
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Your CTA Checklist
Format – match it to your medium
Language - be clear and direct; Use active.
Content - Make it engaging and encouraging.
Size - Make your CTA big enough to grab attention.
Color - Use color to draw attention to your CTA
Placement - Put your CTA on prime real estate.
Repetition - Repeat the suggestion to click if space allows.
White space - Let your CTA have room to breathe.
Icons and images - Incorporate visual clues.
GET YOUR CHECKLIST
Free Checklist – 9 Elements of
Killer Calls-To-Action.
Get your checklist, and start
creating killer CTA’s today.
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56% of advanced B2B marketers said
content-based offers were their most
successful campaigns.
- Demand Gen Report Research
Create Killer CTAs
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Website Visitor Tracking vs Website Analytics
Web analytics
• Broad focus on website
optimization and performance
• Measures traffic patterns to help
optimize site functionality &
online experience
• Common metrics include:
– Unique visits & page views
– New visitor rates
– Bounce rates
– Average time on site
Website visitor tracking
• Narrow focus
• Individuals’ behaviour while
they’re on your website
• Includes:
– Who they are
– Where they came from
– What precisely they’re clicking on
and engaging with
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Don’t Get Stuck On Your Homepage
44% of clicks for B2B companies are
directed to a home page, not a landing
page
- MarketingSherpa
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For 2 years running, A/B
Testing is the most used
method for Improving
Conversion.
- Econsultancy
Test, Test, Test!
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What to Test
Subject Line Headline Copy Length
Offers Button copy Colors
Images
Form
placement
# of Form
Fields
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Live Experiment: Actual Results
Versions CR Rel. Diff Stat. Conf
Control – Single Offer, Short Form 58% -- ---
Treatment 1 – Choice of Offer, Short Form 57% -1.3%
Treatment 2 – Choice of Offer, Long Form 51% -11.9%
31%
99%
Control Treatment 1 Treatment2
✓
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Lead scoring gives your company an objective system for
ranking your leads.
Group 1: Profile Group 2: Behavior
Is the user qualified to buy? Is the user engaged w/ the brand?
Demographi
cs
Persona
Behavior
Lead Scoring
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Behaviour Point
Value
Visitor visited the pricing page. 10
Visitor downloaded the How Do We Compare To Our
Competition white paper 5
Visitor browsed company website multiple times in the past 7
days. 5
Visitor downloaded the Evaluation Guide. 5
Visitor clicked on company's Jobs web page. -5
Behavioral Lead Scoring: Online Engagement
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Source: Gartner Research
UPTO
70
%
of sales leads are not properly
leveraged or are completely
ignored, thus wasting
marketing program dollars.
Why Use Lead Scoring?
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Source: MarketingSherpa - Jan 2012
The average lead
generation ROI for
organizations using a
lead scoring process
is
138%
lead generation ROI from
those surveyed who were
not using a lead scoring
process.
78%
VS.
Impact of Lead Scoring
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Real-time notifications
• Know when prospects or
customers visit the site (or
even a key page)
Timely engagement
• Be alerted when
prospects are most likely
ready for a conversation
Sales Intelligence
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• Use every
engagement
opportunity to learn
more
• Share profile data
with sales – both
demographic and
behavioral information
• Gathering intelligence
will save sales time
and allow them to
tailor their
conversation to the
individual
Sales Intelligence
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What to Track
What To Track:
• Total Clicks by offer and
by ad medium
• Click through rates by
offer and by ad medium
What To Track:
• Total Page Conversions by
offer and by referral source
• Conversion rates by offer
and by referral source
What To Track:
• Total Sales by offer type
and referral source
• Sales conversion rates by
offer and by referral source
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Revenue Impact Analysis
TOTAL CLICKS: 1,000
TOTAL LEADS: 500
TOTAL SALES: 100
(Value of Sales Generated - Ad Spend)
Ad Spend
_______________________________ = ROI
50%
20%
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Learn More about Act-On
Interested in a Demo?
Call +1 (877) 530-1555
Email sales@act-on.com
Web www.act-on.com
THE FORRESTER
WAVE™ LEADERS
QUADRANT
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Janelle Johnson
Director, Demand Gen
janelle.johnson@act-
on.com
@janelle_johnson
Linda West
Manager, Demand Gen
linda.west@act-on.com
@misslindawest
Q&A
Hinweis der Redaktion
1:40In the 1950s and 1960s, the goal of advertising was to get as my eyeballs on your brand as humanly possible. And that’s because the most efficient way into the American psyche at that time was to just completely saturate the media with your brand message. You had to build a massive amount of brand awareness to create trust with your audience. The more ads you could get on bus benches, and on the radio, and in the local paper, the better. So with this “canvas the universe” approach, you had no way of knowing if your messaging was working. You had to just get the message out there, sit back, and pray that the customers would come knocking on your door.
1:10But now, with the evolution of technology, access to information is unlimited. Access to choice is unlimited. So, this has created a paradigm shift in marketing where consumers, not advertisers, define the buying process. Consumers are in the drivers seat. They have the power to find and discover products at their own leisure, and direct their own buying journey. So from a marketing perspective, this means that advertising and media saturation is not as significant as it used to be. Consumers are constantly bombarded with messages, and they can and will choose to tune you out. So it’s no longer enough hang your hat on “total reach” figures or number of impressions in advertising campaigns. You have to dig further into the buying journey, and understand that your job as a marketer now extends into measuring engagement, measuring conversion, and understanding ultimately how online advertising dollars are contributing to the bottom line.
Format: Your call to action (CTA) can be image- or text-based; do remember that buttons often out-perform text links. Make sure you’re linking to something that will fulfill the expectation the CTA sets—a landing page, a form, etc. Language: Be clear and direct; let the reader know exactly why to click and what to expect. Use active verbs to add a sense of urgency. Content: Make it engaging and encouraging. Your body text should support your CTA, and design elements should help focus attention toward the CTA. Size: Because people have short attention spans and scan rather than read closely, make your CTA big enough to grab attention, without being overpowering. Text should be easily legible and complement the CTA. Color: Use color to draw attention to your CTA, and make it different from the background. Keep your overall branding color palette in mind. Placement: Put your CTA above the fold; don’t count on a busy reader scrolling to the bottom of your message. Repetition: Repeating the suggestion to click strengthens your message. Sprinkle clickable elements throughout your message, and ensure that logos, headlines, images, and so on link to appropriate pages, to maximize conversion. White space: Let your CTA have room to breathe; give it balanced negative space from other text and images, so it’s a focal point. Icons and images: Incorporating visual clues can help a reader understand and take action. For example, a shopping cart icon is both recognizable and helpful.
According to DemandGenReport, 56% of advanced B2B marketers said content based offers were most successful. Content is critical throughout all stages of the demand gen process – from attracting visitors to your site, to converting them to leads – and into customers.
The best advice I can give when creating calls to action is to mix it up. When trying to convert visitors to leads, offer a variety of different content types, such as video, surveys, whitepapers and webinars. Different folks prefer to consume content in different ways – some want to attend a webinar and get the information, others would prefer to download a whitepaper they can print out and review later. By offering a variety of formats, you’ll increase the number of visitors that engage with you.
Website visitor tracking allows you to see – often in real time – who is visiting your website and, based of their trackablebehaviors: why they’re on your site, what their issues, interests, and/or pain points are, and where they are in the buying process.The ability to “see” what individuals – both known and anonymous visitors – are doing on your website gives you the ability to target them; meaning you can deliver valuable content that’s tailored to their needs and encourages them to take the next step. (Yes, this is possible with anonymous visitors. It just takes a little bit of investigative work using visitor-tracking filters and integration into a tool such as Data.com.)As a result, processes are streamlined for everyone; marketers can gauge the effectiveness of their content and nurture campaigns, sales teams can optimize their time by focusing on the highest-priority leads, and prospective customers can move at their own pace to a purchase decision.
Website visitor tracking is a specialized subset of the generic category called Web Analytics.They’re interrelated and complementary, but not all web analytics tools offer website visitor tracking. For those that do, it might be included in the overall solution or available as an additional for-fee service. (The Act-On platform includes website visitor tracking.) For simplicity here’s a way to parse the terms:Web analytics has a broad focus on website optimization and performance. It measures traffic patterns to help companies optimize site functionality, the online experience, and marketing initiatives. Common metrics include unique visits, page views, pages per visit, new visitor rates, bounce rates, average time on site, and conversions (note that “conversion” covers many actions, depending on the business and/or campaign). Website visitor tracking has a narrow focus on individuals’ behaviour while they’re on your website, including who they are, where they came from, what precisely they’re clicking on and downloading and engaging with, how recently, and how frequently. It goes beyond that aggregate level, and looks at activity on an individual contact level.The combined use of both capabilities forges a powerful tool for sales and marketing efforts. Web analytics provides the solid understanding of how your site is working … or not. And website visitor tracking provides in-depth information about the specific individuals and companies engaging with your site.The net:net is a veritable motherload of knowledge that directly benefits your lead-gen and sales efforts, including their efficiency and their revenue numbers.This is a really important distinction to make, and as we go through today’s presentation, we’ll show how the data sets from both types of tools are used to impact both website performance and business performance.
So, Linda spoke about increasing clicks and traffic with the right call to action. Once you’ve got them looking at your content, it’s time to find out who they are.Converting visitors to leads–is a crucial step in the demand gen process. It focuses on the ability to drive prospects to specific call to actions where a company can capture an individual’s contact information for future marketing activities. The use of web forms, landing pages, surveys, offers, newsletters and website visitor tracking comes into play. This step focuses on turning unknown visitors into an identifiable lead that you can then market and sell to. For example, the Act-On home page offers a variety of actions a visitor can take to get more information, such as signing up for a webinar.
The use of web forms, landing pages, surveys, offers, newsletters and website visitor tracking comes into play. This step focuses on turning unknown visitors into an identifiable lead that you can then market and sell to. For example, the Act-On home page offers a variety of actions a visitor can take to get more information, such as signing up for a webinar.
If you’ve implemented website visitor tracking, and you’re doing an awesome driving traffic to your website through ads and other marketing channels, then chances are you’ll have a lot of “anonymous” or unknown visitors coming to your site. An important feature to look for in a website visitor tracking system is the ability to identify anonymous visitor IP addresses so that you can tie the activity back to at minimum, a specific company. That way, you can target communications and calls to companies that have visited your site, but may not have made their way to your lead database. Also, make sure you have a system implemented that can connect that anonymous user data directly to a profile, once that user is identified by filling in a form, or clicking on an email that you’ve sent.
To optimize something, quite literally, means to make as effective, perfect, or useful as possible. So, to optimize a landing page would be to make it as effective as possible to achieve the goals it was created for. Generally, within direct marketing or demand gen, it’s to get the visitor to take a specific action – perhaps filling out a form.So, let’s look at a couple ways we can optimize landing pages.
It’s interesting to note that many B2B companies are directing clicks to their home page rather than a specific landing page. This puts a lot of pressure on the web visitor to sort through your site to find what they are interested in. Think of your home-page as a store entrance. It’s a menu of content, which highlights key areas that might interest people most. It’s an entrance point. In the context of search or online ads, or email, the last thing you want to do if someone raises their hand to indicate interest is direct them to the front-door. You want to take them inside, and show them the exact shelf and product they need. Direct them to the specific piece of content that will solve their problem, meet their need, or answer their question.
But how can you ensure that the landing pages that you are directing traffic to are optimized for converting leads? You’ll want to test these pages to ensure the best possible results.A/B testing is the preferred method for marketers to test best performing elements – including emails, landing pages and forms.
There are a lot of things that you can tests! As long as you isolate each variable, and test one thing at a time, you can test a plethora of page elements to make sure that the effort that you put into developing a page is actually paying off. A/B testing will incrementally improve your results so that you’re getting the maximum conversion rate on your page.Let’s talk a look at a test we did a couple months ago with our friends over at MarketingSherpa.
At the lead gen summit last fall, we partnered with Sherpa to test landing page conversion. This was a very interactive test, with conference attendees voting on some of the elements being tested. Testing starts with a control. The control for our test – seen on this slide – featured a single whitepaper with 4 data fields required to get the paper.
There were two other treatments that we tested – one being a choice of offers and the other being number of fields requested on a form with the choice of forms. These treatments stemmed from 2 hypotheses:Hypothesis A By offering prospects a choice between three incentive options, we will add to the perceived value of the offer and increase the Lead Gen Rate.Hypothesis B By increasing the perceived value with the additional incentive options, we can collect additional information without negatively impacting the overall Lead Gen Rate.The question we were trying to anwer was: Which incentive approach is more effective for generating leads?
It’s interesting to note why testing is so important. It’s based on actual data with your target audience – not just what you as the marketer BELIEVE will happen. Often times in marketing, we go with a “gut feel” or “belief” that something will perform better. But with running a test, you can get proof with actual data.So, in the instance of our test, we asked the audience to predict which treatment would win. As you can see on this chart, the audience overwhelmngly believed treatment 1 would be the winner.Were they correct?
In actuality, the control won out! For this specific test, with our target audience, we had 3 key learnings:Learning: A choice of incentive does not increase perceived valueLearning: The perceived value does not outweigh the perceived cost Learning: The additional Job Title field reduced Lead Gen Rate by 11%So, before changing your landing pages based on a hunch – test it out!
I’m going to switch gears a bit and focus on how you can continue to engage, track and measure your web visitors. Lead scoring provides a great way of doing this. Once someone has filled out a form on your site, converting from a visitor to a lead, you can continue to learn about their needs and base your interactions on their behaviors. Let’s dive into this a bit more.
Lead scoring gives your company an objective system for ranking your leads.Most scoring systems use ranking criteria that fall into two categories:In Group 1, the user profile, we are looking at whether are not the contact is an ideal customer, and whether or not the individual is qualified to buy the product. This group is primarily composed of demographic and firmographic data, but some elements of psychographic or persona data might also come into play here. In group two, the behavioral data, we are measuring the contact’s engagement with the brand, and their readiness to buy. This is where we use all of that awesome website visitor tracking data to understand where they are in the buying process, and how close they are to making a purchase decision.
So we’re tracking online interactions like email clicks, whitepaper downloads, and the pages they have visited online. Here’s a quick example from the act-on website. Here are two unique pages on our website. One is our pricing page, and the second is our careers page. If a contact visits our pricing page, that indicates a certain amount of intent, and it indicates that they are interested enough in our product to investigate cost. This is often one of the last steps in the buying process, so we know that someone visiting our pricing page is a really hot prospect, so we attribute a high lead score to anyone who visits that page. If a contact visits the second page you see on screen, our careers page, we can definitely infer an intent from that, but it’s not an intent to buy. That’s a strong indication that this person is interested in seeking employment with the company, and they aren’t very likely to buy the product. Therefore, we attribute a negative lead score to anyone who visits our career page.
So, how does that translate into a lead scoring program? If you recall from a couple of slides back, a lead scoring program looks at two major groups of information. Group 1 looks at profile data, which includes demographic and firmographic data. Group 2 looks at behavioral data, most of which is going to be collected on your website. Your marketing team most likely already has a lot of great demographic and firmographic data that they can score, but the missing piece of the puzzle is often this behavioral layer. Here’s an example of a behavioral lead scoring program that looks at website activity.
Let’s look at a few stats on the importance of lead scoring. 70% of sales leads are not properly leveraged or are completely ignored, thus wasting marketing program dollars. And leads aren’t being ignored because sales is lazy – it’s because they need to prioritize their time. Lead scoring can help with this prioritization.
And lastly, according to MarketingSherpa, the average lead generation ROI for organizations using a lead scoring process is 138%.In comparison to 78% from those who were not using a lead scoring process. Lead scoring not only increases lead gen ROI, but also helps bring sales and marketing into alignment on common, agreed-upon goals and objectives.
Another benefit of website visitor tracking, is all that great information and intelligence you are gathering can be passed on to your sales team. Because this data is connected to an individual, it can be displayed in your CRM, whether it’s saleforce, or sugar, or microsoft dynamics.Website visitor tracking provides sales reps with a real-time monitor and alerts system for prospect engagement. The salesperson can set alerts to get real-time notifications when prospects or customers visit the site (or even a key page), allowing for timely engagement when prospects are most likely ready to have a conversation.Marketing automation has the ability to identify and serve up those prospects with the highest probability of buying or moving to the next stage of the buying process.
This means that every interaction that a customer has with your brand is an opportunity to learn more about who that prospect is, what they care about, and what they want from you– and we can take this way beyond the on-page experience, all the way to a conversation with a sales rep.You see on the right a quick screen grab of what that might look like to a sales person. They can see what pages the prospect has visited, how often they’ve visited, a long with a lot of other great information about how they have engaged with other digital marketing campaigns. Think of this as aggregate data for reporting and trend watching for that individual, data that will indicate if there is a spike in activity or a leaning toward consuming a particular type of web content. This brings the work you are doing on the website full circle. It helps the sales team determine how and when to have sales conversations with prospects. This saves a ton of time in the sales process. Sales reps don’t need to spend the first three calls doing this dance with a prospect to determine what they are interested in. They can now have more informed interactions, and tailor their conversation based on the prospect’s online body language.
We’ve made it to #6! Our last must-have feature is Tracking & Reporting. This is crucial to connect the dots between your ad spend an the rest of the process we’ve just gone through today, all the way to the sale.
Ready to Learn MoreWe already have quite a few questions coming in, so really quickly before moving to Q&A, you probably are ready to learn more, so please feel free to give us a call, send us an email, or visit us on the web to get more information on what Act-On’s marketing automation solution can do for you and your business. As you may know, Act-On Software is a leading provider of cloud-based integrated marketing automation software and was named a leader among lead-to-revenue management vendors in the 2014 Forrester Wave, was rank on the Inc. 500 List of America’s Fastest Growing Companies, named to the Forbes "America's Most Promising Companies" list of 100 U.S.-based, privately held, high-growth companies and ranked 48th on Deloitte’s 2013 Technology Fast 500 list of fastest growing technology companies in North America.