According to a joint study by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and BtoB Magazine, the marketers’ role is evolving beyond their primary function of communications.  The survey, conducted in February and March by research firm Guideline, is a follow-up to a previous ANA survey, which found that 70% of marketing organizations have been reorganized in the last 3 years.

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Rich Schefren recently interviewed Dan Ariely.

The recording is freely available online here. In the call Dan highlights how companies can increase perceived value and get their customers to spend more by creating a decoy offer, which is discussed in the first chapter of his Predictibly Irrational book.

The decoy marketing offer introduces false choices to make another choice look more appealing. We have a hard time valuing offers, but are relatively good at valuing relative deals. The example Dan uses to discuss the decoy is the pricing of The Economist.

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I just finished reading Jason Lee miller’s terrific post on Web Pro News “24 Ways to Get and Keep a Customer“.

In it, he references a Future Now’s 2007 Retail Customer Experience Study that every business owner with a Website should be aware of.

The study states that a 2007 Forrester survey revealed, “only 26% of online consumers were simply satisfied with their shopping experience. This suggests a whopping 74% - three-quarters of online shoppers - weren’t even satisfied. And what of the remaining 26%? They weren’t delighted. They were merely “satisfied.” In other words, the shopping experience was, at best, adequate.”

Twice recently I was personally reminded of how bad some Website shopping experiences can really be-as well as what a stellar shopping experience is like. In the course of one day, I had shopping experience that ranged from frustrating, to great, to near perfection.

Let’s start with perfection… Read the rest of this entry »

…and the PPC and banner ad crowd goes wild!

The IAB has announced that Internet Advertising Revenues are up over 18% year over year, or $5.8 Billion smackaroos for the first quarter of 2008. That’s just off the pace of the $5.9 Billion record set in Q4 ‘07.

Source: (excluding Borat) PwC/IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report (www.iab.net)
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We’ve all seen ratings and reviews online, starting way back when Amazon first introduced them. Over the years, they’ve become a staple of e-Commerce, with online retailers catching on to their impact on conversion rates.

But what about B2B marketers? Why isn’t there more usage of reviews in business-to-business marketing? If you’ve wondered why B2B marketers seem so much less inclined to show reviews on their sites than their consumer-facing brethren, so have I. Let’s explore what the reasons might be.

Sure, there are some B2B companies that place ratings and reviews on their Web sites. I wrote about Sun Microsystem’s use of reviews over a year ago, and Dell Computer and Staples offer them, also. I’m sure there are others. But B2B marketers seem to be far more reluctant to use ratings and reviews than B2C marketers. Read the rest of this entry »

As part of our ongoing series about sales and marketing alignment, Paul Dunay of the Buzz Marketing for Technology podcast and I recently chatted about why B2B marketers should care about lead scoring and how they can get started qualifying and prioritizing leads.

Download the full MP3: Sales is from Mars, Marketing is From Venus - Vol II - Lead Scoring.

Podcast Summary:

Lead scoring is the process of determining a prospect’s level of interest in your solution (engagement), as well as your interest in a prospect (demographics targeting). Lead scoring matters because fewer than 25% of web inquiries are sales ready. Since sales reps don’t want to waste their time on leads that are not in an active buying cycle, passing these early stage inquiries to sales tends to hurt the relationship between sales and marketing. Read the rest of this entry »

ESPN recently decided to stop selling remnant ad inventory via automated ad networks / exchanges.

“We’re heading down a path where it no longer suits our business needs to work with ad networks,” said Eric Johnson, executive vp, multimedia sales, ESPN Customer Marketing and Sales.

Sources say that ESPN would like to rally support from other publishers behind this move and ultimately tamp down ad networks’ growth. Turner’s digital ad sales wing is rumored to be considering a similar move, though officials said no decisions are imminent. Read the rest of this entry »

A reader asked me to explain why fewer leads are better and why “cost-per-lead” budgets fail. These are two great questions that have the same fundamental answer: quality first then quantity.

The truth is that sales people care very little about the cost of the leads we generate. What they really care about is how many of those leads will actually become viable sales opportunities.

For this reason, I think cost-per-lead measurements are irrelevant unless we can answer another fundamental question first, “What is our rate of lead acceptance (a.k.a. sales pursuit) into the sales pipeline” and then “What is the cost per opportunity?”

Sadly, I find that a lot of marketers tend focus on cost-per-lead because they really don’t know what happens to their leads after they hand them off to their sales team. This is why closed loop feedback and lead management are so important.
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Won’t it be just wonderful that every click that we get on our sites would turns into a customer. Afterall we work hard only to get more customers. Every visitor is a potential customer, so it is important that every click that we get must turn into a customer.

But ‘how’ that is the question. YSM here has offered ten landing page tips to turn your visitors into customers:

Ten tips to convert your clicks:
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In the first installment of this series on Forms, I talked about the critical role of usability testing in the development of good Form processes on the web.

Even after a Forms process roles out, a lot of the focus of analysis tends to be on its basic operational performance. Is a Form Page broken in some instances (usually because of untested field edits)? How long does it take users to traverse the Form? What error messages get triggered during Form completion? These are all important questions and they tend to get a lot of focus.

But one of the key real-world aspects of Forms behavior - and something that you absolutely CANNOT test in usability labs - is whether the Forms are doing a good job selling the product.

Forms aren’t supposed to sell the product, are they? As usual, I’m going to answer, “It depends.” Read the rest of this entry »