MarketingExperiments Blog: Research-driven optimization, testing, and marketing ideas

The funnel is a convenient paradigm for the complex process of guiding a potential customer from initial interest to final conversion. Convenient, yet flawed.

Dr. Flint McGlaughlin elaborates in an interview with Jim Ducharme, Community Manager, GetResponse Email Marketing, in this video from MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012.

A few key points:

1:05 – The flawed image of the traditional Marketing- Sales funnel. “Gravity is not our friend”

1:58 – The “gravity” you, as a marketer, must overcome

3:08 – The “yeses” you need to get from your customers to make that happen

Related Resources:

Video produced in cooperation with GetResponse Email Marketing. See more at: http://www.getresponse.com/promo/emailtv

Marketing-Sales Funnel Optimization: 3 questions to ask as you kickoff 2012

Marketing Funnel: How to optimize your Sales and Marketing funnel in 5 steps

B2B Funnel Optimization: What happens after you capture the lead?

According to MarketingSherpa’s 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, lead generation is the top priority for B2B marketers. Yet it is also the second most challenging business objective for marketers.

Part of the problem with capturing quality leads is that there are quite simply an infinite number of ways to do it. And every time someone comes up with a new way of doing it, a layer of complexity is added to the fundamental question every B2B marketer asks:

What is the best way to acquire leads for my business?

At our recent Email Summit  in Las Vegas, Jim Ducharme, Community Manager with GetResponse, interviewed MECLABS Executive Director of Applied Research, Brian Carroll and asked him this question.

You can watch the interview below to see what he had to say.

In the 5-minute video below, you’ll learn:

• How testing tactics can help you choose the best one for your business
• Why driving leads with a single event is ineffective
• 3 steps you need to implement for effective lead generation
• 3 questions your potential leads are asking on your site

Read more…

On the MarketingExperiments blog, we often write about landing page optimization and email optimization. And, while optimizing these channels can have an outsized impact on your results, you sometimes need to take a step back and look at your marketing campaign, even your sales-marketing organization, as a whole.

So, with the new fiscal year right around the corner, grab every smart person you work with (yes, even those that work in Sales), throw them in a room for an hour (bring some eggnog, it will help the festive brainstorming), and ask these three questions about your current sales and marketing funnel:

Question #1: Do we have the right “ask” at every stage of the funnel?

The picture we have in our minds of a funnel is so pretty, isn’t it? A big, wide mouth at the top for all those leads to fall into, and then, they nicely fall down the path to closed deal. But is it really so easy?

Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, wants you to question the very way you look at the funnel. “People don’t fall into the funnel; they fall out. Gravity does not work for the marketer. It works against the marketer,” Flint says.

So, what frame of reference can help you as you optimize your funnel? Perhaps a tower.

“The prospect climbs it, and the force which ATTRACTS the prospect upward is the force of the value proposition,” Flint says.

Click to enlarge

At every stage of the funnel, the prospect must make a decision, and will only say “yes” (essentially, a “micro yes” leading up to the ultimate “yes” of a purchase) if the perceived value outweighs the perceived cost. And, of course, it only takes one “no” to halt the entire process.

Here are five examples of what can cause that “no”:

1. An “ask” to the wrong person
2. An “ask” without sufficient value force
3. An “ask” with too much cost force
4. An “ask” that is premature (in the thought sequence)
5. An “ask” for too much

  Read more…

Everyone wants to improve cost-per-lead, right? And so, it would be logical to assume that the cheaper the lead is to obtain, the lower the cost-per-acquisition, the greater the margin, and the bigger the bonus in your paycheck at the end of the quarter.

Well, at MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2011 in Boston, Brian Carroll, Executive Director of Applied Research, and Nicolette Dease, Program Manager (both at MECLABS) showed, essentially, that cheap leads can be downright expensive.

I grabbed Brian at the networking event after he spoke and asked him to explain …

Read more…

Upon the completion of the recent MarketingSherpa 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, we learned that because of an ever more challenging environment, B2B marketers are beginning to embrace sales conversion as a Sales and Marketing responsibility, and not just Sales alone.

We are on the right track. The challenge is that marketers are having trouble gaining funnel optimization maturity.

Chart: B2B marketers show high levels of maturity at top of the funnel, not at the bottom

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Click to enlarge

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B2B marketers are the most likely to have formal processes established for lead generation, and the least likely to have them for overall funnel optimization. Now is the time for marketers to capitalize on this trend, and really get ahead of the curve to establish their companies and themselves as industry leaders and champion over the competition.

So how can marketers gain maturity in funnel optimization? As a highly complex process, it is likely the reason for marketer’s struggle. Starting with some funnel optimization is going to be more effective than paying no regard to it. In this interest, we have identified a simplified, five-step process to getting started with funnel optimization. Read more…

After driving potential customers to your website through PPC ads, organic search results, or a targeted campaign to create online traffic, the most logical way to turn those visitors into leads is by getting them to register via an online form.

For this blog post, let’s assume you’ve already presented an offer with a strong enough value proposition to get your visitor to actually be interested in filling out your registration form. Let’s just focus on optimizing the form itself.

A form can have any number of fields, of course, and it would seem if you have more required fields on the form, you will generate more lead information for the database.

Can we all agree to that point? Great, let’s take a look at a recent lead generation test then. Read more…