Event Summary

CIMA was proud to be hosting an educational event, "Take Your Online Lead Generation to the Next Level,"on Thursday, September 22nd at the Merchandise Mart’s Holiday Inn.

In anticipation of the big day, we decided to get some conversations brewing with three of our panelists: Cass Baker, Executive Vise President for Digital Marketing at Leapfrog Online; Nancy Hamlin, Vice President of Marketing and Merchandising 1800Baskets.com; and Bob Girolamo, CoolSavings’ General Manager & Q Interactive’s Media Group SVP.

Our CIMA Insights Team - Patrick Davis, Sales Manager at PulsePoint and Shannon Moran, Sales Director at Efficient Frontier – conducted phone interviews with these industry experts on September 20th. Read the interviews here.

Top 10 Tactics for Encouraging Your Company or Client to Expand its Definition of Lead Generation

Since the dawn of internet advertising Lead Generation has been synonymous with Direct Response.  As discussed at the September 22nd CIMA -- Chicago's Internet Marketing Association -- Fall Luncheon, Lead Generation goes far beyond the last click.  The event included three esteemed panelists – Cass Baker from Leapfrog Interactive, Bob Girlanmo from Coolsavings and Nancy Hamlin from 1-800 Baskets -- and was moderated by CIMA board member Jessica Boggs.  Pre-event interviews with the panelists can be found here.   The discussion was insightful and spirited with the audience providing real-time input via Twitter.  The following tips are for marketers to espouse to internal management and clients alike.

Tip # 1) A Lead is more than a cookie, a pixel, or a last click; it's a person.
Nancy Hamlin started off the Lead Gen discussion by simply stating, "A lead is someone that has identified themselves as interesting to your company.  This is a noticeable change in syntax -- "interesting to" as opposed to "interested in" shows that it is not only hand-raisers that should be qualified as a lead.  Lead Generation is a two-way street.  Anyone who has the "Potential to make a purchase" is a lead to Nancy Hamlin.  For Nancy, Vice President of Marketing and Merchandising for 1800Baskets.com, the goal is to create an environment that encourages repeat customers.  And that means building a relationship.

Tip #2) Social is the Wild West.  Test Budgets and flexibility are essential.
Cass Baker, Executive Vice President of Leapfrog Online, noted "One area of rapid growth among consumers that has not been nearly as successful are social channels."  And maybe that's okay.  Set the expectation to your management and clients that failure and optimization are necessary evils when it comes to social.  Bob Girlanmo, SVP, Media Group at Q Interactive and Cool Savings goes further, "We have seen many of our clients place a growing focus on social media for lead generation."  With that said, what is a marketer to do?  Nancy's success has been in respecting the medium for what it is.  "We have to be very careful in pursuing efforts linked to social media as it is a delicate balance.   People don't generally want to be sold to in social media, but if their data can be leveraged to make commerce easier, we think it is striking the right balance."

Tip #3) Successful Lead Generation requires engagement.
Hamlin embraces this topic most strongly.  Representing a business that was once built on catalogues, she sees marketers getting caught up in the next big thing. "Marketers today have to be fluid.   Regardless of the channel they need to be ready and able to engage and change.  Some catalogers have struggled with this, clinging to the idea that they are catalogers, not merchants."  1-800 Baskets is naturally tied to affiliate marketing, which is good in some sense but also suffers from a lack of brand individuality because of it.  She says, "Customer loyalty is evolving.  Many consumers are not even sure who they're buying from."  Hamlin offers her video project as an example of how 1-800 Baskets hopes to engage users in the thoughtfulness behind each basket and differentiate itself from deal-based sites.  "One other effort we are launching to drive lead quality is internal video to describe our gifts.  We are patterning this off the cool work done at Zappos where employees talk about products on YouTube and Skype."

Tip #4) Give Mobile the respect it deserves.
Mobile is often less scalable than other channels and for most marketers is still considered an emerging medium.  Be that as it may, our panel suggests that mobile should not be ignored.  Low in the funnel, Baker says these consumers are "Typically motivated and ready to close" particularly in the telecommunications vertical." Baker says that in some cases "Mobile delivers more customers than a desktop" and that when it comes to mobile search "It is about the ability to deliver clean results."

Thus far for Hamlin mobile success has come through partners and affiliates.  However, 1-800 Basket's sister company, 1-800 Flowers has definitely seen success in mobile and that success is something Baskets wants to emulate in the near future.

Tip #5) It's no longer about leads.  It never was. It's about converting leads into profitable revenue.
Enough with the soft stuff.  Relationships and engagement are great.  So are all of the channels used to procure them.  Whatever the means, marketers must keep their eye on the prize: revenue.  Baker says, "In each channel we have the same goal, a revenue event.  Despite this commonality, we have to look at each channel differently to understand where the consumer is, what metric set we have about the consumer and attempt to discern where we are in the sales cycle and present our messaging accordingly.  For example, the sales cycle in automotive is about 18 months with about seven unique stages."  This model of unique goals for each channel can be applied to any business model.  For example a good rule of thumb for companies with experience in e-mail marketing but looking to get into social, is to start off valuing a "like" on Facebook in the same manner you would an e-mail address in e-mail marketing.  It is helpful to establish this type of baseline for others to evaluate a campaign's success.  Girlanmo wraps up this topic nicely with the following example: "An amusing question series that I've seen asked to audiences like this one is 'how many people are advertising on Facebook' followed immediately by 'how many people are advertising effectively on Facebook' and you always see a big difference in the amount of people who raise their hand in the crowd.  Again, it depends on the brand and the objective, but the exciting part is the testing and the understanding."

Tip #6) In order to successfully service your lead from one end of the funnel to the other the message must be consistent.
Message is the creative, the images used in an ad, and the design of the site.  Message is a product's point of differentiation.  How a product or company addresses those consumers is the most important part of lead generation.  Within this topic two points of advice emerged: testing and consistency.  Testing is the first rule of optimization.  Hamlin shares, "We are trending back towards traditional A-B split testing.  We're going back to the beginning and looking at email subject line testing and similar approaches with catalogs.  So, that we're definitely looking at but in terms of copy, we are a slave to Google.  That's where I get my traffic and so we're making sure we're putting the right search terms in all of our copy."  Then once a marketer has enough data and figures out what is working at the higher brand or product level it is important to make a decision and unify the copy.  Girlanmo has found A/B testing to be increasingly difficult when you consider all of the mediums involved.  A consumer might see "one version on their phone and one on the web."  "The drum that we're beating at our house is just to keep a consistent message regardless of platform."  To that end Nancy is on the same page and uses mobile as an example but focuses on experience rather than the actual copy.  Hamlin's goal is repeat customers therefore the mobile experience needs to be similar to the desktop.  Hamlin explains how the mobile experience might play out once her mobile site is re-launched in the near future.  She explains "Mobile is more of the 'Oh my God, I forgot to buy my mom flowers for Mother's Day' and they make the purchase immediately.  So, they have an account, and with that re-launched site, it will feel and look the same on mobile as what those consumers are accustomed to."

Tip #7) Any analytics department's goal should be the attainment of a full data universe.
Analytics departments are core to any modern marketers success.  Marketers need to justify each channel's spend individually, and in the best case scenario, tie together how the channels interact.  Successful marketers establish goals and Key Performance Indicators upfront, even in new channels.  Girlanmo's explains his strategy for the front end of the analytics process.  "Before you get into any of these campaigns, what is your goal?  It's most important to educate our clients that this is just the beginning...getting the lead isn't solving any problems; you need to cultivate it."  Baker then offers a live example of how the front end and backend data can and should marry: "The call center experience, the mobile experience – that are all built in to that same information.  We have a full data universe against each of the customers we work with and have access to that data in real-time.  We actually pass that data to the call center.  So, let's say it was a code saying you were on Yahoo at this time and on this page and ended up going offline.  Well, that promo code is actually the experience code...we pass that to the call center.  So, everything that we do with the consumer in the digital world is passed through to those call centers.  It all comes together."

Tip #8) Marketers must employ tools that both specialize and unify.
All three of our panelists rely on a team of analysts – in house and third party.  Hamlin is in the thick of it as we speak: "On Dec 30th we will have completed building a fairly complicated data warehouse that will include not just purchase behavior but click-stream behavior.  It's bringing all of this and website tracking into one large (terabytes of data) warehouse."  Baker specifically mentions his use of Omniture and DSP's for front end data.  Hamlin theorizes, "You can [monitor analytics] on a silo'd basis.  But, without that holistic viewpoint, you're not going to see those truly insightful or actionable trends across behaviors that your company needs to grow."  Baker seems to agree here and later adds that "Applications connecting social/local/mobile are the Holy Grail for many categories of lead generation and must be embraced."

Tip #9) Collaboration is the secret sauce.
Marketers toughest challenge is often within their four walls.  How do you encourage your channel teams to put aside their ego while also giving and receiving credit? You have to get creative and incentivize teams to work together.  Baker suggests vendors and publishers should get on board as well: "There are always companies that don't want to give away their 'special sauce,' but the companies we've seen success with understand that, hey, we all win when we sell product, so let's share information.  If you're going to be successful, the collaboration and the trust is really critical in this little ecosystem that is digital right now."  Without this collaboration, Baker says both sides are just spinning their wheels with bad data.

Tip #10) The Future of Lead Generation is wherever customers will be.
In the future, as in today, marketers with a single focus will be less and less relevant.  Girlanmo says, "The industry is quickly evolving to much more effective but expensive interaction and those that aren't prepared will suffer."  Baker's predictions are even more specific "Lead generation is only going to get better, primarily as we capture and integrate more data at the front of process.  The consumer profile dataset is improving and those that embrace data partnerships will see meaningful benefit.  Ultimately certain marketers should be willing to pay $400 per lead for 50 highly qualified leads rather and $40 per lead for 2000 unqualified leads."  While Hamlin takes a wider view.  She says marketers need to remain fluid because at the end of the day, marketers can't lose sight of the fact that they are in fact merchants.

We live in a scary Digital World. If you look at the factors that drive the success of a site, you begin to realize that you don’t have as much “control” as you thought you did.

Search is a battlefield.

Let’s start at getting visitors to the site. We aren’t all Amazon or Nike and developing name recognition takes time. In the meantime, we play the SEO game. We build keyword lists, we see what our competitors are doing, we gauge the depth of our keywords, and we put them out there for Google et. al. to index. And then we wait. And we see how we did. Then, once we’ve invested the time, manpower and money into getting a baseline, someone goes and changes their algorithm, and the rules change. You know, the rules we never really know in the first place, they change. (ahem. Panda Update) And so, we are back at the beginning. And that’s just organic.

Competition is king.

Let’s say you’ve actually got customers visiting your site for the right reasons – they want to buy something. (Yay!) And now they start looking at your prices, and then they look at your competitor’s prices, and maybe even ask a few friends. All the while, you are doing the best you can. Between costs of running the site (software, hardware, manpower and your sleepless nights) you’re just squeaking by. But then big chain X comes along, and offers the product $2 cheaper. Because they can. And soon, your customers have gone off in search of greener (and cheaper) pastures.

Who really is the master of your domain.

Then there’s your platform. In most scenarios you might not even have selected the platform that you think is perfect for you. There are too many cooks in the kitchen. You have IT Managers, Budget Directors, and Marketing Managers who have their own needs, and those needs need a solution. The result, you are working within less than ideal limitations.

Now What?

At this point, you might feel that there is nowhere for you to go. Nowhere for you to win. At the end of the day, you are the victim of all these outside forces, and making the site work is harder than you expected. You need to send out the bat signal.

Enter Bruce Wayne. There is light at the end of this tunnel and you might have a fighting chance after all. Often ignored by IT, skirted by Marketing and loved by Customers – it’s the one element that you have complete control over. The User Experience.

What does the User Experience mean you ask? Well, think for a moment about the sites that you like. The sites that you regularly go to. The ones that provide not only the information, but also the delivery method that appeals to you. Whether it’s layout, colors or simply the style in which the whole package is presented – there’s a site that appeals to you. And you know what? There are dozens of other sites that do the exact same thing, but lose your eyeball. They lose because those other sites, although having the same information were not designed for you.

Here are suggestions on making your user experience a positive one…

You make it inviting.

Just like a home filled with the smell of apple pie and a comfy couch, you have to make your target audience feel comfortable.

In order to do this, you need to get to know who your customers are. This goes much deeper than demographics. You need to get to know them – like really get to know them. You investigate their fears, wants and desires. You find out what frustrates them and what excites them while shopping online. You need to uncover how internet savvy are they really and how much time do they even have to spend online?

Engaging them in a way that they feel good about is key in keeping them on your site. By speaking to them in a way that they understand and in a format they respond to – you’re on the right path.

You establish comfort and trust.

We know that people feel more comfortable in situations where they are understood. They might have had some bad experiences on other sites and they might be more cautious making purchasing decisions because of it. You need to understand that making this purchase might be a tough decision for them and they need you to understand that. An easy way to address this is to reflect your position as that of ‘sympathizer’:

“I know what you’re going through. I know how difficult it is to make a decision when making this purchase. I know the issues you have and I’m here to make this easier for you.”

Your goal is to start building the relationship and good relationships are built on trust. You can instill trust in many ways but one way that you can do immediately is through creative.

The creative process is necessary, but an often overlooked component to a successful site. It goes way beyond just ‘making it pretty. If done correctly, insights such as color palette, button placement and column width can make a huge difference to the comfort level of the user and build trust.

You stand apart – in a good way.

At the end of the day you have a product – a really great product – that solves a problem. And ultimately you do have some tools you can use to breathe more life into your site than the competition does. Put yourself in the customers’ shoes. If you know your customer is busy and only has a short amount of time to spend online, make it easy for them. Talk to your users throughout the site with targeted messaging and guide them to the right answer.

User experience has become the one place where you can differentiate yourself from your competition, wrap your customer in the setting you know will make them enjoy being on your site and hopefully drive them to make a purchase and return.

Getting to know your customers is key. Developing personas, information hierarchy, and user experience strategies takes time but in the end, it is worth it. That information can help you make your site better for the very people that you’re trying to sell to. By becoming empathetic to your users you are making them feel good about being around you.

You can make this happen.

You have this power. You have the ability to customize, refine and present your story in a way that no one else has the experience or authority to do so. There is a reason that you entered into this market, there’s a reason people buy from you, and there’s a reason why people keep coming back. The question is, do you have the ability to tap into that shared consciousness of consumer, and have the right people on your team to extrapolate that into a cohesive design?

Visit AlphaZeta Interactive on the web.

To gauge the state of the interactive marketing industry and explore trends, the CIMA conducted its seventh semi-annual survey. Data was collected during Q3 2009 from over 100 respondents across the CIMA community.

View the results PDF