Measuring Lead Attention Span

Here is an easy way to measure the general attention span of your active lead database. It borrows the same formula used to track Churn Rate.

definition -

Churn rate is a measure of customer attrition, and is defined as the number of customers who discontinue a service during a specified time period divided by the average total number of customers over that same time period.

So the formula looks like this:

# of customers who discontinue service during a specified time period
Avg. # of customers in same period

While churn rates are closely watched by companies that depend on subscribers, such as cell carriers and cable TV operators, we can adapt this churn formula to quickly detect the overall loss of attention within our active lead database.

In our churn definition above, let’s define customers who discontinue service as: Inactive Leads + Hard Bounces + Unsubscribes, within a specified time period

Let’s also define customers as: Leads with at least 1 web visit, 1 form submit and/or 1 email open, within the same specified time period

If we do a little napkin math, here is how this might look:

10,000 Inactive Leads (measured as the total # of once-active leads but now with no web visits, no form submits and/or no email opens) during the last quarter

+300 Unsubscribes last quarter

+200 Hard Bounces last quarter

= 10,500 total leads in last quarter that no longer pay attention to us

Divided by

75,000 = Average total of leads with at least 1 web visit, 1 form submit and/or 1 email open in the last 3 months

= Lead Attention Span Loss Rate = 10,500/75,000 = 14%

So essentially, we lost the attention of 14% of our active leads last quarter.

This is a good metric to trend quarter over quarter as it tells you in general how well you are improving your segmentation, messaging relevance and nurturing efforts.

It's hard enough to get a lead to respond, much less keep them engaged. Use this Lead Attention Span metric to guage the overall effectiveness of your engagement efforts over time.

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

Steve Kellogg

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

Puppy Training Your Leads

I recently got an 8-week old Great Dane puppy. My family and I had to train her as quickly as possible, since she was already getting really big, really fast.

Top on the training list (other than potty training) were things that would likely ruin the relationship: like, no jumping on people, no dragging us around while on the leash, no sitting on us (Great Danes are the world’s largest lap dog).

Luna is now 6 months old and already weighs 81 lbs, on her way to 140 lbs. While the training continues, she has done very well. The techniques used to train her turned out to be remarkably similar to the techniques we recommend when nurturing (training) new leads.

#1: Don’t Overwhelm Them
Puppies have very short attention spans. Trying to teach them to sit, stay, heal and lay down all in one training session is too much. Focus on only one concept at a time.

The same holds true for leads. I’ve seen nurturing emails that offer 4, 5, even 6 or more multiple offerings all in the same email.. Focus on one concept at a time, one Call to Action at a time.

#2: Use Rewards, Not Punishment
Like all animals (and most humans too) dogs seek pleasure while avoiding pain. Luna made much more progress when the training was kept both fun and rewarding, Try and make things as much fun as possible when nurturing your leads.

For example, avoid lengthy forms that cause pain. Instead keep them short and as pleasant as possible. I’ve seen some very creative (and even funny) ways to ask for (and get answers to) form questions. For example,

Change "Job Title" ___________ to
“What Your Boss Thinks You Do”:____________


Change "Job Role" ___________to
“What you Really Do”________________


Change the picklist values for "Purchasing Timeframe"

Old picklist:

0-3 months
3-6 months
6-9 months
9-12 months
No plans to purchase

New picklist:

-My problem is keeping me up at night. I’ve got to get some sleep
-While annoying, I’ll probably have to wait a few months
-I’m just checking you out. So far so good, but don't call me yet
-I’m just not that into you yet

(try and make the picklist answers relevant to your target segment)

#3: Don’t Bore Them
I noticed that Luna got bored with the treats I was giving her during our training sessions. She began to spit out even her favorite treats after 4-5 offerings.

Create plenty of variety when offering treats to your leads. Don’t just offer white paper after white paper, or case study after case study. Mix it up, keep things different.

Even the look of the emails should vary. I’ve seen many nurturing emails that all looked exactly the same, no matter what the offer was.

You can keep your general branding intact and still provide plenty of visual variety. Maybe create one template for white papers, one for case studies and one for webinars, all looking very different, yet keeping the overall branding elements intact.

#4: Be Very Clear About What You Expect
My trainer told me never to repeat a command more than once. In the beginning I was telling Luna to sit, sit, sit, sit, sit, SIT. Most of the time she just stared at me. Each time I would say sit even louder hoping for a response. Nope. Wrong.

Say it once. Then if they don’t do it, show them what you expect them to do and then reward them after they do it.

You’ve seen emails that offer 8 links to the same whitepaper sprinkled throughout the message. Additionally there is a DOWNLOAD NOW button and then a few more links that all click to the same white paper. (See how annoying this is?)

This is like saying sit, sit, sit, sit, over and over. If you are including this many links, your emails are way too long to begin with.

By highlighting your link (command) once you keep things much simpler and make it blatantly obvious what you expect your lead to do.

The only caveat is to make sure the link or button is VERY obvious. Don’t hide it. The more links, the more indecisive we get. Make the ONE link to the whitepaper big and bold.

Summary
I think it's actually harder to train leads than puppies. Why? Puppies are only getting lessons from us. Same teacher, same lessons.

Leads are getting multiple lessons from every nurture program they are a part of; ours, competitors, other sites of interest to the lead, etc. It’s no wonder they are already overwhelmed.

This makes the techniques above even more important to implement. Your leads will greatly appreciate all your efforts and might just reward YOU with a sale.

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

Steve Kellogg

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

Sharing the Love This Valentine's Day

Sending flowers to your Sales Department is probably not something you’ve thought of this Valentine’s Day, but why not take a minute to reflect on how to make this special relationship even better.


Step 1: Identify Where the Relationship is Now

Just Dating – Sales and Marketing have a casual, non-committed relationship. Each helps the other when they get a request, otherwise both work independently.

Engaged – Sales and Marketing have made a commitment to work together in meeting each other’s needs and are exploring/testing solutions.

Blissfully Married – Sales and Marketing are successful in meeting each other’s needs on a continual basis. Marketing is continually generating highly qualified sales leads and sales is both accepting and actively working those leads.

Separated – Sales and Marketing simply ignore each other, except in meetings, where Sales blames marketing for sending over too many junk leads and Marketing blames sales for ignoring all but the best cherry picked leads.

Divorced – Sales and Marketing won’t set foot in the same room together.

Step 2: Identify and meet each other’s needs to help repair or enhance the relationship:

Typical Sales Needs:

More qualified leads
This can be accomplished by nurturing and scoring not ready to buy leads until they show strong buying signals

A pecking order of who to call first
Lead scoring manages this by providing a combined lead rating based on both implicit and explicit criteria

Better insight into lead activity
Marketing Automation tools such as Eloqua provide excellent lead activity reports that identify online activities including email click thru, web site visits by page, form submissions, asset downloads, etc. This provides incredible insight into what solution(s) the lead is most interested in.

Typical Marketing Needs:

Sales accepts the leads marketing has spent time nurturing
If not-ready-to-buy leads are nurtured, chances are sales will happily except a significant portion of them. Still, there are times when even highly scored leads will get rejected (no budget for instance). Marketing needs a process by which sales enters these rejected leads into a re-nurturing program – This is typically a link in CRM that adds rejected leads into a special re-nurturing campaign, usually driven by marketing where the emails appear to have come from the sales rep.

Plug all leaks in the sales funnel
Sales will need to fulfill on the internal processes that marketing has established to plug all funnel leaks. To learn more about how to do this, read my recent blog post on Funnel Goo.

Collaborate on continual adjustments of nurturing and scoring efforts
Marketing needs the input of Sales on how well the nurturing/scoring programs are performing. Are leads being scored too high? Too low? Is nurturing doing its job in building the relationship? A continual review of all scored/nurtured leads is essential, including the adoption of new processes. For instance there are typically certain lead status fields in CRM that marketing needs sales to keep up to date in order for Marketing to measure ROI and other KPIs.

Summary

The best relationships are those where everyone wins. The needs of each are continuously being met by the other.

It’s not that most companies aren’t striving for this, it’s just that until recently there haven’t been many of the tools which are now currently available to actually meet these needs.

Hmmm, maybe we should send flowers to all those who keep our marketing automation system running too.

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

Steve Kellogg

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

"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