B2B Marketing ROI

MarketingSherpa put out a really interesting piece this week about ‘Banner Blindness,’ or the tendency for repeat readers to ignore advertisements and selected sections of your email messages (or those you sponsor) over time. When your template remains static, readers learn where ads are located and tend to skip over that section of the messaging. The full article contains some striking images from an eyetracking study, illustrating viewing patterns over time.

For the quick takeaways, MarketingSherpa gives us the following tips:

Change the landscape
The most powerful way to combat banner blindness is probably to vary the page template itself. By moving landmarks, you encourage the eye to conduct a more complete scan of the page. This is easiest in the email world, where creating and scheduling similar, but not identical, templates won’t send the Web team into paroxysms.

Change the look and feel of ads
If you can’t change the position of ads, think about changing ad sizes or the way they look. In our study, for instance, we swapped in a text list where a graphical ad had been positioned and saw a jump in attention. The eye tracks changes to a familiar landscape.

Increase ad rotation
The easiest way to combat blindness is to change ads frequently. For publishers, that’s easy. That’s not the case with sponsored placements or in-house advertising; these can sit static for long periods.

Marketing, especially B2B Marketing has its own unique language. Attend any professional event and you’ll hear jargon tossed around as freely as the coffee flows at the refreshments table. Sometimes it is important to return to the basics and make sure you review the terms so that you can keep up.

Aaron Ross at Build a Sales Machine provides a rundown (and even some fun illustrations) of the sometimes confusing definition of inbound leads versus outbound leads. According to Ross:

Inbound leads are, as it implies, leads that come to your company and into your website or 800#: usually through word-of-mouth and referrals, public relations, search engines or perhaps through marketing campaigns… these leads generally are already interested in what you have to offer, and are about to start a buying cycle.

Outbound leads are lead that you had to go dig up, whether through market development campaigns or a Cold Calling 2.0 or other “proactive” methods to let prospects who aren’t already interested know who you are, what you do and why it should matter to them.

Ross goes on to explain how a marketer should approach or nurture these different types of leads and what to expect from each group.

The success of your email marketing campaign depends on a combination of aspects.  Subject lines, email content, formatting and timing are key factors contributing to open and conversion rates.

Subject lines:

• Subject lines should be relevant to the recipient and match the content of the email.
• Research shows that while shorter subjects optimize open rates, longer subject lines tend to optimize click and click-to open rates.
• The same research shows that the more words in a subject line, the more likely the email is to appeal to the “right” people.  Increased information allows people to better decide if an email is relevant to them.

Content:

• The first line should tell the recipient why they are receiving this email (i.e. “You are receiving this message because you have subscribed to list XYZ.”)
• Check that the content matches the subject line and is relevant to the recipient.
• Make sure the unsubscribe link is easy to find (this may mean shortening your message.)

Formatting:

• Don’t rely on people being able to see your images - image blocking is common on many email services.
• Add inline styles - again, many email services will not allow anything else to show up correctly.
• Use structural tables to create columns.
• Make sure that the plain text version of your email is reader-friendly.

Timing:

• Don’t send email too frequently.  This can cause recipients to tune out and ignore your email, or worse, annoy them to the point where they mark your emails as SPAM.
• Don’t send emails too infrequently, this can make your recipients forget you.
• Find the delicate balance between having your users forget you and having them annoyed by you.
• Send out your emails during regular intervals so the recipient comes to anticipate them, and is less likely to mark them as SPAM.

In Marketing Sherpa’s recap of their B2B Lead Generation Summit, they designate one point as the summit’s key takeaway. The “most scribbled-down-tip” was when Jackie Kiley of Sybase explained the importance of passing only qualified leads into your company’s CRM. Marketing Sherpa’s article highlights this point reinforcing that your firm should “*never* put suspects, inquiries, or unqualified leads into [your CRM]”.

By not filtering your leads, you send the good and the bad onto your sales team, and create an immense amount of “noise” which the sales people must sort through to be successful. Rejection and lost time results in a less-than-motivated sales team, that will begin to distrust leads sent to them from the marketing department.

A lead qualifying tool can improve the relationship between your sales and marketing departments by allowing for a more seamless interaction between the two. Marketing automation software allows only qualified leads to make it to the sales pipeline, allowing both departments to more effectively accomplish their goals.

Also key in aligning sales and marketing is providing scheduled feedback on leads by having sales report on the status of leads (good, bad, accepted, rejected, etc.) Doing so is the final step in closing the loop between the two functions by further refining the filter for the next sales cycle.

A web clinic conducted in June by MarketingExperiments provided an in-depth look at multivariate testing and landing page optimization in action. This summary illustrates the impact of friction vs. incentive and how to find the right balance.

Friction is defined as psychological resistance to a given element in the sales process. This resistance is created by requiring visitors to fill out a form or take a similar step to obtain an item of value. That item of value is the incentive, or an appealing element introduced to stimulate a desired action.

Since completely eliminating friction would result in no information for your sales efforts, it is important to find the right form length, call to action and incentives to provide maximum conversion and prevent drop-off. MarketingExperiments examines how the item offered, the landing page layout and the difficulty of a form can impact conversion rates.

The report is definitely worth the read for marketers who rely on landing pages to convert visitors to prospects.