Thursday, February 17, 2011

Six Ways to Optimize Your Landing Pages For Improved Lead Generation



Improved lead generation
Marketing studies have shown that 93% of B2B buyers begin their buying process using the Internet.  When examining your website’s effectiveness, take into consideration the all-important landing page.   A high quality page not only ranks higher in the search engines but it also can earn more exposure in your pay-per-click campaigns and reduce your cost per click. Follow these six ways for increasing conversion rates and improving lead generation
1. Focus on a call to action:
Don’t worry about including navigation on your landing page, as this is not your homepage. Use an arrow graphic to show users how and where to get what they came for and build your content around fulfillment such as free downloads, reports or demos.  Keep the copy short and sweet focusing on the benefits and the call to action.
2. Think Branding:
This is your first opportunity to introduce users to your business.  Include a logo that reinforces brand recognition.  Include a mock-up of the white paper or photo of the webinar presenter.  Be sure to make your graphics click-able as a recent internet study by Eyeblaster showed that viewers who interact with web pages have higher retention rates than those that don’t.
3. Reassure your Prospect:
Create an atmosphere that encourages users to part with their information without feeling like they are risking their privacy.  Privacy statements, customer testimonials, Better Business Bureau logos and guarantees are a great way to do this.  Give them a reason to give you their information.  Set up the problem, talk about your solution and deliver the goods (content) in a professional manner, with biographical information on your author or web presenter when appropriate.
4. Say Thank You:
You can never make a first impression twice. Thank your prospect for sharing his time and information with you. Have a page that confirms their submission and tells them you appreciate their visit. Don’t neglect to show them another offer as well. Also make sure the email they receive in response is well written, short and easy to understand and includes your logo and contact info.
5. Be Search Engine Friendly:
Another important part of landing pages is the URL. The title of the page along with the URL path is weighed heavily. Make the best use of the 1024 characters available to you.  Optimize your URL with things a search engine likes, such as dashes rather than underscores and include keywords whenever possible.
6. Test:
Testing is an essential tool for lead generation.  Landing pages are one of the most valuable things to test and the best B2B marketers are test fanatics. Your landing page has plenty of elements to test, including headlines, copy, forms, offers, designs, colors and more.  Testing the landing page can lead to increased conversion rates of up to 115% or more.
Follow this equation: Take the number of conversions per day and divide it by ten.  Next, take your testing period in weeks and divide by two.  Multiply the two results to determine the number of versions you can comfortably test in your testing period.
Optimizing landing pages doesn’t have to be complicated.  Taking into consideration how you like to be treated as a user who visits a web site can be valuable when creating user-friendly elements.  Use these tips to build the most efficient landing page for lead generation and fueling the sales funnel.

Automated rules now available to all advertisers

Back in December, Google Adwords announced the limited release of AdWords automated rules, a new feature that lets you save time by scheduling automatic changes to your account based on criteria that you specify. Today we’re happy to announce that this feature is available in all accounts.

If you regularly log in to your account to pause or enable ads, adjust your bids, or perform other manual tasks, automated rules may be just the tool you need to manage your account more efficiently. For a step-by-step guide to creating an automated rule and best practices to get you started, visit the AdWords Help Center.

Keep in mind that when scheduling automatic rules, it’s important to check your work periodically to make sure your rules are having the desired impact on your account performance.

Once you’ve given automated rules a try, we want to hear about it! Share your feedback and ideas for improving automated rules by filling out this survey.




Sunday, October 11, 2009

7 Considerations for Tracking Social Media Success

7 Considerations for Tracking Social Media Success



With more and more marketers jumping onto the social media bandwagon, a lot of questions come up. Is it possible to track metrics and ROI? What are other companies doing? Why isn’t it working? Being prepared to answer questions like these can make a difference in how a company interacts with social media and if they can succeed.

How can we track social media?
Unfortunately, there is no one “most effective” social media tracking system. Marketers across the web are still working to figure out how to measure social media, how to attach ROI, and how to sell the benefits of participation on the social web to those that don’t “get it”.

Social media marketing isn’t like an email campaign where you can track the number of emails sent out, the number that were opened, the number of clicks, visits, leads and conversions all in one process. Much of what happens in the social media world happens behind a login and the old ways of tracking web visitor analytics just doesn’t work in that scenario.

Just like any kind of marketing, each company has their own set of objectives and reasons for reaching them via social media channels. That means different methods and approaches to the listening, monitoring and measuring of both social web and web marketing activities at large. The field of social media analytics is still very new. Here are 7 considerations as you evaluate what will work best in your social media tracking.

Quality over Quantity
This has been said again and again and lots of people still feel that the more followers/friends/subscribers/connections they have, the better. The reality is, quantity is not and end goal for lead or sales generation outcomes. What good is it to have 13,000 followers if 1/3 of them are spam accounts and 1/3 are auto followers who will never engage with you? Sure 13,000 looks good to those who can only focus on numbers, but what is the quality of those 13,000? Seth Godin mentioned at the MIMA Summit that all you need is an audience of about 1,000. But it needs to be the right 1,000 people.

Hearing vs. Listening
Have you stopped to think about who is actually paying attention in social networks? A person or a brand may have X number of followers or friends, but how many of them are actively listening at any given time? How many people do you ACTUALLY reach when you post a tweet, make a status update or blog post? Subscriber counts and reach are two different things. Think of it like a college professor talking to students: How many of them are paying attention during a lecture? With social media participation it’s the same thing; you need to realize that not everyone is always hearing what you have to say and factor in the difference between connections and actual reach.

Engage & Participate
Effective social media marketing is about is engaging and participating. If a marketer joins a social network and focuses on promoting themselves, product or company, they’ll get an entirely different set of outcomes than those they have goals for. Think about it. Social means to be conversational, friendly, helpful. When participating in social channels, talk to other members of the community, participate in the conversations and give people a reason to interact with you. Add a little romance before you ask to get engaged  

Social Media is About Being Where the Conversation Is.
Marketers need to stop and think about where their audiences are online and where relevant conversations are happening. That could be niche social networks, forums and blogs. Those niche areas may have fewer people, but will more than likely have more engagement value for relevant products or services being shared. To find those niche communities and conversations, use social media monitoring software. Free tools include Google Alerts or Social Mention. Low cost tools include Trackur and PostRank Analytics.

Assign Value to Get Value.
Whether it’s a tweet, retweet, a status update, comment, photo upload or story submission, if you want to find out how valuable it is you have to assign a value. It doesn’t matter how or what that value is, but setting up some sort of system will help determine what’s working and what’s not.

Define an Objective.
Before jumping into social networking, it’s essential to set an objective. Going in and participating with social network and media sharing sites just to participate may not bring the kind of results you’d like. A clear objective as part of a social media strategy should be set so you know what you are working towards. It will guide your messaging, behaviors, networking activity as well as the kind of content you seek and share.

Social Media is An Investment.
Social media success takes time. The seeds of relationships need to grow and you’ll need to invest what’s needed to make it work for whatever end goals that are set. Expecting results in a month or two isn’t realistic; it may take a year or more. It really depends on the Roadmap that guides your: Audience > Objectives > Strategy > Tactics > Tools > Measurement. Effective social media participation is about building a network and building trust. That doesn’t happen overnight. Be patient, do it right, and you’ll be rewarded in the long run.

What other considerations should be in this list? If you’ve undertaken new social media programs with your company, what were some of the measurement and analytics hurdles that you overcame?


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Friday, September 25, 2009

PostRank Combines Google Analytics With Social Media Stats



Traditional web analytics tools like Google Analytics are a great for both small and large bloggers and publishers. However, traffic data can only tell you so much. As conversations surrounding blog posts start to take in place other places (Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc.) and people use tumble blogs like Tumblr and Posterous to quickly comment and share helpful information, tracking that data and its correlation to overall traffic numbers can become really, really helpful.For smaller publishers or bloggers, getting all of this information in one place can be difficult. Today, PostRank is publicly launching PostRank Analytics as a way to capture social engagement and traditional metrics all in one place.

When you sign-up for a PostRank Analytics account, you just need to enter in your blog address and connect your Google Analytics account. You can also enter in your Twitter username, so that your Twitter follower stats can be monitored in tandem with your web traffic.

What PostRank Analytics does is take the Google Analytics data and show you the pageviews, Twitter followers and “engagement score” for the day before. You can see how your figures stand up over time, by week, month or quarter.

But that’s just the beginning. The really cool part about PostRank Analytics comes when you evaluate individual blog entries. Not only can you see your total page views, unique visitors, bounce rate and average time on the post for each entry — you can also see how many people have tweeted about the post, how many comments it received, if there are any FriendFeed or Reddit reactions, was it re-posted on Tumblr, etc.
You can also see all of those reactions underneath the post. You get points for engagement and you can quickly determine which posts have high engagement scores and which don’t. What’s nice about this system is that you can compare the raw traffic metrics against the level of social engagement. So you might notice that something is a strong traffic performer, but has lower engagement details. Or maybe something is the opposite.

You can also see what types of posts tend to work best on what types of networks, and what impact that has on your traffic number or Twitter followers.

Earlier this week, I wrote about a new study that said 84% of social media programs don’t measure ROI. Although blogging is only one aspect of social media, it’s one of the easiest ways to measure feedback.

PostRank Analytics is a great add-on to Google’s own data. I would love to see the service monitor other types of social media accounts (like Facebook friends or fans) or plug into other analytics engines, but the data that PageRank Analytics can offer already is fantastic.

You can sign-up for a free 30-day test drive. Pricing starts at $9 a month after that.

How do you measure your blog and social metrics?





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Monday, September 21, 2009

Email Marketing for Hotels: A Step-by-Step Guide


Hotel Email Marketing

With all the hype over social media during the past several years, e-mail has taken a backseat role in many ways.

That’s a shame. E-mail remains a very powerful marketing tool when used correctly. It can serve as the cornerstone of permission-based relationship marketing — the concept Seth Godin explained in his 1999 book Permission Marketing.

E-mail usually has a higher psychological value than other social media communication. If you are consistently delivering value in your messages people will listen to what you have to say. They may even take action.

This may sound like just theory, but in this article I will show you concrete examples of how hotels are using e-mail marketing to make money. We will look at ways your hotel can use email, how to build your list and create a campaign, benchmarks for testing, and finally some case studies of other hotels.

Part 1: Ways your hotel could use email

Use it as a direct response tool. When done correctly, e-mail allows you to communicate with laser-like focus to specific groups of people. This is one of the best ways your hotel can drive direct bookings.

Use it as an automated sales force. More than any other marketing tactic, email lends itself well to automation. You can create a powerful sales system, and then sit back and let it do the work for you. (At the end of this article, there is a case study of how the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado used this tactic to generate $245,000 in revenue from a $15,000 investment.)

Use it as a feedback and research tool. Many hotels send an automatic survey link to gather guest feedback. That’s a good start. But I think there are also other ways you can use e-mail to get feedback… not only on the guests stay, but also for new ideas and other market research. This depends on the type of list that you have developed, but the potential is there. Be creative about it.

Use it as a relationship building tool. You can send loyal guests special offers. You can notify them of new amenities or features. You can provide insider information. You can use email to give your organization some personality. The opportunities are endless for building top of mind awareness.

Use it to provide superior guest service. There is so much potential for hotels to use e-mail to improve their guests’ experience. A series of e-mails could be triggered whenever someone makes a reservation: leading up to the stay, and then following up after they leave. Putting everything on autopilot insures every guest has an excellent experience interacting with your hotel. It reduces staff busywork and the potential for errors.

Email marketing by hotels

Use email to communicate with other important stakeholders. Email communications don’t always have to be sent to guests. There are other groups you should focus an equal amount of time on.

Fairmont Hotels understands this. Nearly half of their email newsletters are written for and sent to other businesses. One newsletter goes to administrative assistants that handle corporate bookings. Another goes to travel agents. Reaching and working with these people plays a large role in generating revenue.

Thought: What business partners should you be communicating with?

Part 2: Plan your list building strategy

Even aside from the ethical considerations, getting the best results from your email promotional efforts requires you create a list organically and with the explicit permission of your prospects.

  • You can include a signup form on your website. Just keep it short: email & first name is best.
  • Your front desk staff can ask for addresses during check-in or check out
  • You can leave a letter of invitation in their room

However you plan to collect email addresses, make sure there is a strong benefit for the person signing up.

The prospect of receiving generic updates from your hotel may or may not be enough. Exclusive discounts or preferred service is more compelling.

Part 3: How to create an e-mail marketing campaign for your hotel

Tips for putting together good emails for your hotel

  • Make sure you get through the spam filters. Mail that isn’t delivered isn’t read.
  • Write effective subject lines. Tell what’s inside, but don’t over do it. Sometimes boring is best. Don’t use too much hype.
  • Always send a text version of each message. If you’re using HTML, you want to provide an option for people who don’t – or can’t – read that format.
  • Use a table of contents for longer emails
  • Make the email content scannable
  • Include descriptive links with a call to action
  • Link to a web version (if the email does not display properly)
  • Include a “forward to a friend” link on all messages

Choose a publishing frequency

Whether you plan to publish a monthly newsletter or special offers as they’re available, it’s best to create a schedule and stick to it.

Publishing too often can lead to people unsubscribing. If you don’t publish enough, people may forget about you. Find a frequency that works well with your audience. Better yet, give them the option to choose.

Ski email

The Deer Valley Ski Resort in Utah publishes a “daily conditions” email. Daily emails may normally be too much, but it works when you’re providing information people want. It certainly made Chip House happy.

Part 4: Test, Test, Test

As with most online marketing, success is achieved through continual testingand making changes based on what you learn.

Tests usually take the form of split-testing: where you send two variations of an email at the same time to the same list. Most email services make this very easy.

Ideas for testing

  • Days of the week (Tuesday…or Saturday?)
  • Time of day (morning, afternoon, etc)
  • Frequency
  • Personalization
  • Subjects & Topics
  • Content
    • Copy
    • Graphics
    • Colors
    • HTML vs. plain text
    • Length
    • Number of links
  • Prices
  • Call to action

3 most important email marketing metrics to watch

  • Open rates
  • Click through rate
  • Conversion rate – how many people take the next step…whatever you want that to be

Email marketing benchmarks for hotels

MailChimp, a great little company that I use for most of my email promotions, released a benchmarks report with these figures for the hotel industry:

  • Open rate: 27.5%
  • Click rate: 7.17%
  • Abuse complaints: 0.08%
  • Unsubscription rate: 0.49%

As they said, this is slightly biased towards smaller hotels - but it’s close to the averages I’ve seen.

Of course, stats like these only serve as a point of reference — your individual situation may be very different. E-mail campaigns that I’ve run typically perform at least 50-75% better than the numbers above. List quality has a huge impact on your metrics. Keep testing, and you can reach above average levels of performance.

Part 5: A few examples of how hotels are using email

Kimpton Hotels uses affinity-based email to boost revenue

As this case study from MarketingProfs (membership required) shows, creating your email program around individual preferences can dramatically increase profits.

Kimpton had a loyalty program that recognized and accommodated individual perferences of guests: all the way down to the type of pillow they preferred. Steve Pinetti, VP of Sales and Marketing, decided that if their email campaign matched the customer care as well as their loyalty program, they could increase revenue.

To do this, the company created seven affinity groups: wine, pets, dining, eco issues, LGBT, “hot dates and great rates,” and “packages and promotions.” By integrating their databases, guest information was updated in real time. Once this system was set up, Kimpton could send very customized emails based on individual preferences.

The end result? Average revenue generated by a customer email campaign increased from $70,000-80,000 to $350,000-750,000.

Lesson: Identify affinity groups, and plan ways to serve them

The Broadmoor Hotel gathers trade show leads with a savvy followup system

As Karen explains in a ClickZ article, The Broadmoor Hotel was trying to obtain sales leads at a trade show a few years ago. People visiting the Hotel’s booth had their badges swiped, which populated a database. Then, a series of 3 email messages was sent to each prospect:

  1. Instant followup with an incentive. The recipient was notified of an upcoming drawing for a digital camera. At the same time, the Broadmoor’s benefits to meeting planners were reviewed.
  2. Are you a winner? A week later, an email was sent asking the person to click through and see if they won the drawing.
  3. Another contest. Three weeks after the show, prospects received another invitation to enter a contest for a 4-day vacation at the Broadmoor.

The end result? The campaign cost $15,000 and generated $245,000 in revenue.

Lesson: Automate emails to create a powerful sales followup system

The Monmouth Plantation uses “sensory overload” to avoid price cutting & increase response

Recently, I shared the story of Monmouth Plantation, a historic luxury Mississippi inn. Because of the recent economic crisis, the hotel had been using special (low) room rates in their email newsletters to generate business.

Recently, however, they decided to focus on selling their lavish experience – and less on the price. They began sending email promoting sensory-overloading experiences.

For example, read the description of their $1,900 Gourmet Package offer that included two nights of accommodations, a tour of three historic mansions, a carriage ride through the quaint downtown area, and in-room massages:

“Upon arrival, guests will be greeted and escorted to their rooms where chilled champagne, chocolates and flowers await their arrival. That evening guests gather in the dining room for hors d’oeuvres and wine; a host/hostess will give a history of the antebellum home. Dining under 17th century chandeliers on the Empire table with beautiful china, silver and first-class service is the highlight of this package. The chef will greet each guest and invite culinary conversation. After-dinner drinks featuring the Southern signature drink, mint julep, will be served in the study nightly. A private hot air balloon ride over Natchez is the featured activity in this package.”

The result? The email open rate increased 15% and their promotions enjoyed a 30-40% click-through increase.

Lesson: Use “sensory overload” to sell your hotel’s experience in your email promotions

laptop-beach

Without a doubt, email is one of the most powerful marketing tools we have at our disposal today.

Please, Please, Please (my closing plea)

Speaking as both a marketing professional and a frequent hotel guest, I just ask you to remember what most of us are thinking:

I’m busy. I don’t have much time. My inbox is my sacred space. I use it to interact with friends, family, and business associates…and I’m not particularly anxious to hear from an organization I barely know that wants to sell me something.

  • What’s in it for me? I don’t really care about your business operations. I do want to know about stuff that will help me.
  • Ask my permission, and have me confirm before you add me to any list.
  • Don’t e-mail me constantly. I probably don’t want to hear from you every single day.
  • If you send me something I don’t want, I’ll consider it spam… even if I opted in to your list a long time ago.
  • Make it easy for me to leave. If I like your content, I’ll stay.
by Josiah Mackenzie on September 11, 2009

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