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!  

Articles for the ‘Marketing Automation’ Category

5 Reasons Why Direct Mail is an Effective Marketing Tool

Published: Sept. 29, 2011, 6:54 p.m.

With the advanced capabilities and highly penetrated use of email and other online channels like video and social media, you may ask… Is Direct Mail still effective? You may even be wondering if the cost is worth it?

Well….according to me, when strategically integrated with these same online channels it certainly is! And, here are 5 reasons why it’s still a very effective and relevant tool for Demand Generation and Lead Nurture.

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B-to-B Marketing & Sales — Two Sides of the Same Coin

Published: Aug. 11, 2011, 3:45 p.m.

Too often companies silo marketing from sales when it relates to goals, strategies and tactics. In reality, they belong under the same roof and need to be collaborative, especially throughout the lead nurture effort.

Prospects today, especially those involved in higher ticket purchases, have longer decision-making cycles because there are more individuals involved in the purchasing decision and they need to build an airtight business case before purchases are approved. As a result you need to allow the purchasing cycle to evolve as opposed to an aggressive “push” effort driven by the sales team.

Marketing Sherpa’s latest CMO Benchmarking Report states that 95% of the prospects who visit a landing page through an incentive-based demand generation campaign are there to research not to buy. That said, about 70% of those who do visit will eventually buy but not necessarily from the site they first visited. Therefore you need to make sure that these non-sales ready prospects are nurtured through content, not aggressive sales tactics because today’s buyers don’t want to engage with sales until the end of the purchasing process.

In today’s post-recession landscape where buyers are in control of the sales process there are three areas where marketing and sales collaboration become critically important:

Continue reading “B-to-B Marketing & Sales — Two Sides of the Same Coin” »

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”” »

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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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