"I was told there would be no form."

You've probably spent countless hours and lots of money driving traffic to your website, where you intice potential leads with demo request forms, contact us forms, high value content download forms, etc.

If you have a relatively long sales cycle, chances are you will be asking someone to fill out multiple forms over the course of their buying cycle.

Any idea what your average form drop off rate is? You might be surprised that the average is about 90%. Yikes! That means that only about 10% of visitors to web forms actually fill them out. This is probably because these forms did not adhere to the form submitter's Bill of Rights.

FORM SUBMITTER'S BILL OF RIGHTS:

1. I only want to fill out your stupid form once.
2. I never want to give you the same information you've already asked me for previously.
3. Your content better be worth the number of fields you want me to fill out – and btw, if there are more than 5 or so fields…forget it.
4. PLEASE – make it easy! Give me pick lists wherever possible (but don't give me more than a handful of picklist choices).
5. Don’t expect me to tell the truth (at least not initially).

So how does your current form process stack up against managing the expectations of most form submitters?

Do you ask for the same form information over and over? Are your forms too long? Too complicated? Too much?

Here's a summary of possible form solutions, from worst to best-in-class:

1. Do Nothing - Continue to present the full form every time.

• Pros: Nowhere to go but up
• Cons: 10% form conversion on average

2. Pre-populate known form fields

• Pros: At least it displays what you already know about them
• Cons: The entire form is still visible, causing noise and clutter.

3. Use a Gated Form

• Pros: Checks to see if the form has already been filled out, if yes, then goes straight to the asset, etc.
• Cons: Requires technical resources to develop

4. Use a Gated Form combined with Progressive Profiling

• Pros: Checks to see if the form has already been filled out, if yes, then asks one additional question (usually a question tied to lead scoring) each time the form is presented
• Cons: Requires technical resources to develop

5. Use a Gated Form combined with Progressive Profiling, combined with a date lookup to allow updating outdated information

• Pros: Checks to see if the form has already been filled out. If yes BUT the information is older than say 1 year, it then displays only previously submitted data older than 1 year and requests it be updated. If all the form data is newer than 1 year, it then asks one additional question (usually a question tied to lead scoring) each time the form is presented.
• Cons: Requires technical resources to develop

Of course, like anything else, testing will drive your decisions. Especially if you develop gated forms with progressive profiling. Maybe you can get away with asking 2 additional questions instead of just one each time, for example.

Forms are a fact of online life. But the closer you can get to adhering to the form submitter's Bill of Rights, the higher your conversions will be.

For additional form best practices, see my blog post:
You Had Me at Submit.

Updated 5-8-12
Visit my brand new website and learn more about form conversion best practices

Steve Kellogg
-Demand Generation/Marketing Automation Consultant, Astadia
-Eloqua Certified Marketing Best Practices Consultant

Funnel Goo

Leads cost money to generate, yet almost all companies lose thousands of dollars in lost revenue due to a leaky sales funnel. Now you can repair the leaks quickly and easily! Simply apply Funnel Goo directly to the leaks and watch as it stops them instantly.


Perfect for repairing:

• Leads that leak out after Sales has cherry picked the DB

• Leads that leak out after sales rejects those that marketing deems qualified

• Existing customers who receive no-cross sell or up-sell nurturing

• Even works on customers who leak out at the end of their subscription renewal

Funnel Goo has been especially formulated to repair even the most costly leaks, including the following:



Leak #1: Marketing generates fresh leads and hands them off to sales. Sales cherry pick the best, the rest leak out.

Leak #2: Marketing generates fresh leads and nurtures/scores them. Once qualified they are handed off to sales. Sales accepts some and rejects others. These sales-rejected leads leak out.

Leak #3: Leads purchase products and services and become customers. Yet, because there are no up-sell and/or cross-selling activities, the customer leaks out at the end of their lifecycle.

Leak #4: Leads purchase subscription services and become customers. Yet, because there are no renewal activities during the subscription period, the customer leaks out at the end of their term.

~ Ah, if it were only this simple…But maybe it is.

Step 1: Identify the leaks (chances are they include all 4 above)

Step 2: Decide which leak to repair first

Step 3: Develop a process to plug that leak

Step 4: Once the 'goo' (process) works, move to the next leak and go to Step 3

Imagine how much stronger your sales revenue would be if you did nothing else but focus on repairing these leaks this year.

SHOUT OUT

A special shout out to my Father-in-Law, a retired NASA Physicist and avid tennis player, who invented the original Shoe Goo after getting tired of wasting so much money buying new tennis shoes, simply because there was no effective way to repair his existing ones.

I like his thinking.

Updated 5-8-12
Visit my brand new website and learn more about marketing automation best practices

Steve Kellogg
-Demand Generation/Marketing Automation Consultant, Astadia
-Eloqua Certified Marketing Best Practices Consultant

Social Media Executive Primer Part 8

Social Media Do’s and Don’ts

Don’t: Allow anyone and everyone within your organization to do whatever they want on social media sites.
Do: Develop a social media policy that outlines for your employees what they can communicate about in the online world. It’s your job as CXO to push for a social media policy and to educate your employees on it. They need to understand how they can communicate about their employer in the online world. You can’t expect your Legal Team or anyone else to understand the negative ramifications that can occur from not having this policy. But you, as CXO, understand how powerful social media can be and how one employee tweeting about issues your organization is experiencing can have some serious repercussions with your clients, potential clients, investors, partners, and other employees. It’s important to develop a clear social media policy, establish a format to educate your employees on it, and enforce some form of punishment when it is violated.

Don’t: Hire a young marketer that’s savvy on social sites without requiring they have experience in online marketing.
Do: Utilize your online marketer(s) to manage your social media marketing. They may not be social media marketing experts but they can quickly educate themselves and work with you to create your social media marketing plan. If they do not have the bandwidth, hire an online marketer with experience in social media marketing. If you don’t have the budget for a new hire, look at other employees in your organization that might have the social media marketing experience. The key is assigning one person to head your social media marketing efforts so the efforts coincide and maintain brand consistency. You don’t need 3 “Company X” accounts on Twitter or Facebook as it will just confuse and deter people. Already hired a young marketer that’s just not doing the job? It might be worth it to keep them on board and train them but if you lack confidence that they’ll get it, let them go.

Don’t: Tweet every day about your company only with no personal mix or opinions. And just let anyone follow you.
Do: Tweet at least once a week about both business and personal topics. And follow your followers. Mesh both business and personal topics in your tweets which should be done once a week, at the minimum but beware of over-tweeting/spam-tweeting! People will stop reading your tweets and your brand can quickly lose credibility. Also, follow as many people as you can, don’t just let people follow you. It shows your business is interested in what others have to say (you listen) and that you are not just a voice trying to be heard.

Don’t: Allow your target audience to hunt for you in vain in the social world.
Do: Make it easy for your target audience to find you in the social world. Let your clients, prospects, partners, and employees know that you play in the social media world. Promote your social sites on your website(s), employee signatures, and email footers. LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and others even provide logos for you to use in your marketing materials and of course they do – it’s free advertising for them. Tap into their brand strength to help promote yours!

Don’t: Send your team to get you on every social media site possible.
Do: Focus on the social sites where your target audience is most likely to be found. You should have an organized plan for your social media marketing and it’s ok to start small. The key is managing your presence well on the sites you choose to be on and monitoring what’s being said about you elsewhere. This will help you determine what sites make the most sense and better evaluate where you should focus.

Part 1-Social Media: An Executive Primer
Part 2-Define Your Strategy
Part 3-Define Your Purpose
Part 4-Define Your Voice
Part 5-Audience Relationships
Part 6-How to Start
Part 7-Measuring Success
Part 8-Social Media Do’s and Don’ts

Updated 5-8-12
Visit my brand new website and learn more about Social Media Marketing Best Practices

Steve Kellogg
-Demand Generation/Marketing Automation Consultant, Astadia
-Eloqua Certified Marketing Best Practices Consultant

Social Media Executive Primer Part 7

Measuring Success

Metrics from Social Media are a hot topic these days. Even the ability to actually measure true ROI is under debate. New Social Media metrics acronyms such as ROE (Return on Engagement), RORE (Return on Ripple Effect) and others muddy the metric waters even more.

Still new tools are launching every day to help make the impact of Social Media more quantifiable. Traditional clipping services are now offering daily insight into who is saying what about you. Social Media ROI calculators abound. But you have to ask yourself – so what? What it comes down to is what specific metrics do I need to make decisions?

To answer this, you’ll need to articulate your overall objectives. Are you looking to increase your website traffic? Are you looking to add qualified leads to your funnel? Are you interested in expanding the reach of your overall brand? Are you looking to increase your blog subscriptions? The list goes on and on.

Social Media Analytics

Website Traffic
Social Media that drives traffic to your website is a good (and easy) place to start. While you may already incorporate web analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Woopra or Omniture, some don’t always measure the effects of social media effectively out of the box. But 3rd party extension are now being developed that help bridge the gap.

If you use Eloqua, they recentlfy released 'sub sites' which allow website vistor tracking specifically from social media sites. There is a new application developed for use with Omniture (Now part of Adobe) that tracks page-level statistics on a variety of social media platforms including Facebook and LinkedIn. Greasemonkey offers an extension that adds a social media information layer to Google Analytics, providing information on Diggs, stumbles, delicious bookmarks and others. Do a search for “Blog Metrics” and you’ll see a host of other available apps.

As with any website traffic metric, showing the volume of traffic to your site is one thing, but you are probably more interested in conversions. How many filled out and submitted a form? If you use a marketing automation tool such as Eloqua, you can easily track conversions of any form, including the source of the submitter. If you have Eloqua integrated with your CRM you can track full closed-loop ROI reporting, including opportunities, closed-won specifically generated from your blogs, etc. Eloqua has also just released a new social media viral tool that allows prospects to easily repurpose and share your content on their own social networks. Integrated reporting helps track which social media sites are driving traffic to your website.

Even if you don’t currently deploy any website analytics, there are some stand-alone apps that will help. Here are some you might consider:

SocialToo is a tool for creating social surveys and tracking social stats on Twitter and Facebook. It also will send you a daily email describing follows and unfollows.

Xinureturns: Offers a dashboard overview of your website’s standing in social media. Run a report and you will receive stats on Technorati, Google Pagerank, Diggs. It also includes backlinks to your website.

PostRank offers detailed information on Tweets, stumbles, diggs, and FriendFeed all in one place.

Bit.ly: If you use a URL shortener, it’s a good idea make sure it has analytics information as well. Bity.ly is one such app. It will track information including the number of clicks, traffic sources, even the time clicks occur.

Blog Traffic
Another fairly easy metric you can incorporate is the “stickiness” of your blog. You can track subscriber growth, reader comments vs. views, etc. As mentioned above there are a number of tools that act like web analytics tools but are specifically designed for your blogs, posts, etc. It’s a good way to judge the success of your social media efforts on their own.

Track as Campaigns
You can segment your efforts into campaigns and track them that way, providing a campaign ID in the query string for any subsequent form submission.

Additional Social Media Metrics Resources:
http://www.radian6.com/
http://www.techrigy.com/

Part 1-Social Media: An Executive Primer
Part 2-Define Your Strategy
Part 3-Define Your Purpose
Part 4-Define Your Voice
Part 5-Audience Relationships
Part 6-How to Start
Part 7-Measuring Success
Part 8-Social Media Do’s and Don’ts

Updated 5-8-12
Visit my brand new website and learn more about Social Media Marketing Best Practices

Steve Kellogg

-Demand Generation/Marketing Automation Consultant, Astadia
-Eloqua Certified Marketing Best Practices Consultant