Robb Luther

What the heck is a lead anyhow??

Details: Category: Marketing; Published Date; Robb Luther; Hits: 59

I have the email address of a friend of a friend. Is that a lead?

If you have contact information for a particular person at a particular company, that does not mean said contact is a lead. Sorry. They are just... a contact. They may not even talk to you.

A lead is someone who has expressed interest in your company, service or product. Although there is interest there, we don't know at this point if the lead has any value. Once we determine that the lead does have value, it graduates into a prospect! No cap. No gown. No ceremony. It just quietly pops into prospectiveness (Yes, I made up that word).

The goal of any good marketer is to get as many quality leads as possible. We do this through communication. The better our communication, the better the quality of leads we receive.

Take a website for example. Every page of your website is a piece of communication material that should deliver good information and in an ideal world, elicit an emotional response. Not only that, but it should be delivered to the appropriate audience. The catch is, this is very easy to say and very difficult to do. So in order to get down to the nitty gritty... lets ask some questions.

What is your message?
Who is your audience?
Is it the BEST message?
Is it the BEST audience?
How do you know?

That is all I am going to leave you with today.

Oh, and as I was writing this, I was looking around to see what other people thought of leads... You should read Geoffrey James article on leads. He has some great rules over there that will tell you what a GOOD lead is.

Quick thoughts on How to Clean Dirty CRMs

Details: Category: Marketing; Published Date; Robb Luther; Hits: 259

It is amazing gross when I look at our Customer Relationship Management Frankenstein application we use at the office. We have... well... a LOT of contacts. Two thirds of which are useless and total garbage. The question is, how do I eliminate those contacts? I can't just go deleting two thirds of my entities so I have a clean database. A clean database for the sake of a clean database is not a smart move. I need another solution and this is my approach.

MailChimp.com

Mail Chimp Website

MailChimp is an amazing software package for your company newsletters. It is a direct competitor of Constant Contact and in my humble opinion, a better one. It is free for the first 2000 contacts and up to (I believe) 12k mailings/month. A great deal, but how does this help me with cleaning my list? By their terms, I can't just dump my data in there unless they opted into my newsletter. Not all my contacts have email addresses anyhow. What I can do, is add all my opted in contacts and start my newletter. I can then gradually add smaller chunks of data to help me determine its cleanliness.

I don't want to delete it... because I am a data hoarder. You will probably see me on that A&E show soon.Granted, this is still a bit of a no no according to their terms, but I don't mind skating the edge a little to help me clean up my data. It also allowed me to take my email marketing more seriously and I now have two regular monthly newsletters.

Call Your Contacts

This actually makes the most sense, is the easiest, but the one everyone hates to do. It works though. If they are there, they are clean. I think the big reason people don't like to call for this house keeping is on account of not having a legit reason to call. So, make one. Ask them if they would mind opting into your email newsletter. Craft an eBook or some informative white paper and tell them if they opt in they will receive it in the next newsletter. This way you are cleaning and adding to your email list.

A little dirt never hurt anyone

Also keep in mind, that the bad data in your CRM is not necessarily hurting anything. I know you anal retentive marketers out there hate it. I do to. I like clean. I did however learn to compartmentalize. I can ignore that data. I am tagging data I know is good based on last communications, orders and quotes. I then focus my list marketing on these segments. I ignore all the other stuff. I don't want to delete it... because I am a data hoarder. You will probably see me on that A&E show soon. Data hoarder. It is nasty and dirty, but I just can't delete it.

Content Creation - Website content that converts

Details: Category: Marketing; Published Date; Robb Luther; Hits: 1400

Developing Website Content That Converts

Website Content Creation Content may be king but content for the sake of content is crap and will hurt your conversion rate. Reuben Yau recently wrote a topic on content creation that was very on point. If you have time to test, test away. You can learn a lot from testing. If you can't... don't want to... or whatever other excuse you have, err on the side of conversions. you can create content that is SEO friendly AND user focused. Sure, you may not get the traffic of truely optimized content, but would you rather have a hundred visitors with a 10% conversion rate or a thousand visitors with a 0.5% conversion rate?

This is why testing is so critical for the success of your website. If you had an employee doing work for you, wouldn't it be important to know how effective they got their job done? The exact same thing applies to your website. Even more-so, because your website is working for you 24 hours a day.

More website traffic is great, but…

Details: Category: Internet Marketing; Published Date; Robb Luther; Hits: 429

Is website traffic what you really need to be your top, number one, highest priority?

Increasing website traffic is certainly not ALL you need to be focusing on.

Increasing website traffic Let’s assume your website is getting 100 visitors a month and you have a 70% bounce rate (people who pretty much leave immediately). That leaves 30 visitors a month that visit at least two pages of your website. 30 people out of 100 searching for your product actually look to see what you have to offer. I call those 30 visitors your Effective Visitors.

Your effective visitors need to perform an action on your website so you can measure how successful your website is. These actions are typically called "Calls to Actions" and you use Goals in your analytics package to measure them. Here are instructions on how to setup Goals in Google Analytics.

Calls to Action - Tell you visitors what to do. "Buy Now" - "Register"

Maybe your website converts pretty well. 5% of your visitors convert a goal you have setup. They buy something, sign up for your newsletter or fill out a form. They do something that makes you consider them a successful visitor. So we have 100 visitors: 30 who browse the site and 5 who convert your call to action.

So we have 5 conversions per 100 visits.

Lets get sociable! sociable!

Details: Category: Internet Marketing; Published Date; Robb Luther; Hits: 1018

Social Media Marketing

Yes, it is a social world and really always has been. Word of mouth has always been the preferred method of communication and is the most valued marketing method.

Google and Facebook will be duking it out in the coming years to digitize that word of mouth marketing in the realm of search engine results. Google's new +1 experiment is a big step toward socializing its search engine results.

If you are trying to build a website to marketing your - whatever you are marketing - you need to take social marketing into heavy consideration.Google is starting to move more and more toward social influence in their SERPs by accounting for user interactions, tweets and other social measures. If you are trying to build a website to marketing your - whatever you are marketing - you need to take social marketing into heavy consideration.