Blog: Digital Waves — Expert Ideas, Unfiltered Opinions & Best Practices

Digital Waves Expert ideas, unfiltered opinions & best practices on Custom Landing Pages, Marketing Automation, Email Marketing & eBusiness Apps. Helping small businesses and Fortune 500 customers generate a rapid ROI on Marketing. Feedback & Opinions welcome!  

A Paradigm Shift in Real-time Response – From “nice to have” to “must have”

Published: July 22, 2011, 2:59 p.m.

Not too long ago marketers were given a grace period when responding to a prospect or customer. Depending on the nature of the inquiry the grace period could range from a few hours to 1-2 business days. The tools were still evolving, it was expensive to respond quickly and quite honestly, no one was expecting it. Not anymore.

If you’re looking for auto insurance, you can visit the GEICO website for a near-instant 15-minute quote. That’s still (far) better than many sites which ask for that same 15 minutes for you to complete a form and then inform you that an agent will call you. Who knows when. GEICO’s “15-minutes could save you 15 percent or more” promise speaks volumes compared to the “an agent will call” promise.

Continue reading “A Paradigm Shift in Real-time Response – From “nice to have” to “must have”” »

The Art of Enchanting Customers

Published: July 12, 2011, 4:05 p.m.

So, I just finished reading Guy Kawasaki’s book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions (available on Amazon). It’s one of the best books I’ve read. A one that provides meaningful and actionable insights into cultivating and managing strong customer relationships.

I wanted to reflect on how one creates Enchantment, whether at a personal level or in their professional life. Now, we all Enchant in our own ways in our personal lives. So, I won’t speak to personal Enchantment, however, as a business we could share some common knowledge and BKMs of Enchantment.

Continue reading “The Art of Enchanting Customers” »

Projecting metrics for your campaign? Avoid magical thinking.

Published: July 1, 2011, 12:26 p.m.

Avoid Magical Thinking When Projecting MetricsJustification is the name of the game when it comes to determining budget for a demand generation or lead nurture program using an integrated multi-channel contact strategy. The CFO wants to know what the ROI will be before funds are released and in many cases wants metrics by each of the channel components.

But many marketers harm themselves by engaging in “magical thinking” i.e. they come up with unrealistic metrics to justify the investment.

A variety of factors ranging from lack of response history to changing purchasing behavior cause estimates on response and conversion to become suspect. Nevertheless, proforma metrics need to be calculated.

So what can one do? Well, the first choice is to test and learn. Continue reading “Projecting metrics for your campaign? Avoid magical thinking.” »

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Custom Landing Pages are utilized to complement and enhance the performance of your marketing efforts like Direct Mail, Email Marketing, Telemarketing, QR Codes, Banner Ads and PPC. They can also be used to support traditional mass-media marketing channels like TV (think infomercials) and Radio Ads. A landing page allows you to selectively target and profile your audience while offering them customized and targeted offers. They are an optimal touch point for your prospect and optimized landing pages have been proven to boost conversion rates by up to 50%. CLPs can be used as a vehicle for event registration, product surveys, or to promote and sell real estate. Read more about the 7 Habits of Building Highly Effective Landing Pages.

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Marketing Automation focuses on demand and lead generation with targeted marketing programs to drive awareness and interest in a company's products and/or services and nurture leads from first interest through to sale. To develop a strategic marketing plan, a fully automated marketing automation platform is designed to develop, manage and analyze campaigns, enable audience and customer segmentation, lead qualification, lead scoring and lead nurture. Distributed Marketing, a discipline that encompasses automation of internal marketing processes, is one way to enable marketing automation across your channel, partners, dealers, franchisees, etc. This type of system dramatically increases the organization's ability to deliver personalized content to relevant entities or individuals at appropriate times.

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Email marketing is a very powerful customer engagement tool which is extremely cost-effective and effective, if done right. Email marketing is often reported as second only to search marketing as the most effective online marketing tactic. (MarketingSherpa, January 21, 2009). An effective email marketing strategy involves 3 things: Improved Deliverability, Better Open Rates and Increased Click-through Rates. Use the following design and content guidelines to Create an effective email marketing campaign and follow this 7 step checklist to avoid spam filters and cater to different flavors of email clients.

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eBusiness methods enable companies to link their internal and external data processing systems more efficiently and flexibly, to work more closely with vendors, suppliers and partners, and to better satisfy the requirements of their customers. eBusiness involves business processes spanning the entire value chain: purchasing, order processing, logistics, customer service, cooperating with business partners, etc. Special technical standards and/or APIs meant for eBusiness facilitate the exchange of data between companies.

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