And on another front, they spend more dollars executing email marketing campaigns. They’re using Constant Contact, Vertical Response, ExactTarget, or one of the other 50 email marketing programs to get the word out through their email campaigns. Again hoping that a visitor will convert by filling out a form and taking advantage of some new offer to become a hot lead.

“Be-Backs” and Website Window Shoppers

I first heard that term from my father, who by the way, was the quintessential salesman. Yes, he sold cars for a living. Used ones at that. And quite a few of them. I never saw him sporting the plaid sport coat and he hardly fit the stereotype but he did sell a lot of cars.

So who or what was a Be-Back? Well that was the guy who spent hours of time looking at a car and asking a lot of questions only to finish with “I’ll be back.” No name, no phone number, just I’ll be back. And in fact at the end of the day, the measure of success was oftentimes measured in the number, actually lack there of, of Be-Backs. And the problem with Be-Backs in the car business? More often than not, if that Be-Back did come back, you weren’t there.

So what is the point? Well most commercial websites have literally tons of Be-Backs. They’ll look today. Maybe again tomorrow, and even the day after. But they don’t fill out a form. They don’t become a “hot” lead. And without a lead, your sales rep has no one to call. And the part that’s tough to swallow is that you actually have a “warm” lead lurking out there. Lots of them.

Work The Math

Let’s say your website produces 100 hot leads per week. Or per month. Doesn’t matter. The average conversion rate for a well-oiled website optimized for conversions with a good offer supporting a strong value prop typically runs at about a 5-10% conversion rate. Other sites may run as low as 3-5%. Let’s further suppose that your close rate for those leads is, I don’t know, 30%? So that would mean 30 buyers.

Now what about that other 90+% of your website visitors? You know they’re looking for something you’ve got. And having a need is the strongest factor in qualifying any prospect. So for that 100 hot lead website, you also have 900 warm leads. Now they’re less qualified because that haven’t taken any other overt action than to just look and you still have to find some way to follow-up with them. But let’s say you have a way to contact half of them, and because they’re less qualified, your close rate is 3 times lower or just 10%. Multiply that out and you have the potential to increase your closed sales by 45 or 150%!!

How to Harvest Your Warm Leads

The trick here is being able to tie that visitor behavior to their identity and then alert your sales rep that they’ve gone warm. Clearly this doesn’t work if you have absolutely no previous identity information on the visitor or a way to find it but maybe you do…

So here’s the approach we take for our clients at ApexTwo. The solution hubs around something we call our Lead Capture Solution. This is a database-driven application that sit between the client’s website and their CRM that continually monitors visitor activity, notifying the CRM system at appropriate points in time.

What website platform do you have to be on? Doesn’t matter. What CRM? Doesn’t matter. We call this a “solution” because it is about 70% common platform (the database engine) and 30% customization to the client environment. We can usually integrate it with whatever you have – well assuming it’s something built within the last 10 year and has an Application Programming Interface (API). Salesforce, SugarCRM, NetSuite, SAP, Zoho, all have APIs.

Here’s How it Works

Here’s one example of how it works with an email campaign… You start with the list of emails you intend to campaign against. Could be your “house” list of prospects, something you’ve gotten from JigSaw, a partner mailing list swap? Just something where you have email addresses and contact information, maybe even a phone number.

We then set up your email program to tag the emails that go out. This means we need to use an email package that supports this but most all of them do. But here is where the magic comes in.

We place a little snippet of javascript on each of your web pages. Just like Google Analytics. But what happens with this is that when the visitor comes to the site, our Lead Capture Solution intercepts the click and logs the information. We then set “triggers” based on actions taken, pages visited, etc., that generate an alert to the sales rep.

From there, the Sales Rep goes to their CRM and immediately sees some initial campaign information (campaign name, search keywords, landing page, etc.), but then they can also click a link to see not only all of the pages the visitor actually looked at, but even their location, domain name and oftentimes the company they are with (even if you don’t already have that in their record). Now the Sales Rep can pick up the phone or email that prospect and suddenly they have the opportunity for a “warm” conversation.

No, It’s Not Rocket Science

Is this something only we could invent? Well, no. Is it unique in the market? Well not the concept. But maybe in the implementation. Meaning? You’ll find many “products” out there that address parts of the solution. Or products that address more of the solution but only for a few environments (e.g., Salesforce.com only). But what we do think is unique is our semi-custom approach. It keeps the cost down, but more than that, it provides you with unlimited flexibility for tailoring campaigns, landing pages, calls-to-action, special offers, you name it, all to your specification.

You can go here to learn more about our Lead Capture Solution or give us a shout and we’ll give you a short demo. Or if you’re doing something similar, or something very different, please shout it out for discussion in the comment box below.

The Challenge:

• There are a hundred different email solutions out there to choose from.
• They all claim some level of integration with various CRM systems.
• But how do you find the best one for your situation?

Here are some suggestions on finding the right solution without pulling your hair out…

The barrier to entry for creating an email solution appears to be as impenetrable as wet cheesecloth these days with new players popping up every day. And although they all have simple 2.0 looking websites, finding out what they really do is a bit of a challenge.  So here are some suggestions, with more to come, as we continue to work through this with several clients.

The Holy Grail – Tight CRM Integration

If you think about it, why don’t CRM systems provide all of this natively? Well maybe they will and they’re just waiting for the dust to settle.  Or maybe the market is just too small. Or maybe none of them will do a good job of this until one of them really does. But in the meantime, here’s what to look for…

1. Initial integration – you’re probably starting with a list so you will need some way to get your existing emails into the product. That’s the easy part although some email services require double-opt in (to protect their spam reputation) and therefore are more difficult. For example, Feedblaster will not allow import for that reason.
2. Ongoing integration – here you’re really looking for synchronization and there are several areas to look at:
   • Signups - does your web form interact with the email solution or your CRM and how do they synch.
   • Optout - perhaps you can live with just maintaining these within the email solution but then you need to only send through the emailer.
   • Delivery, open and clickthru history – most solutions do not sync this so you need to go back to the emailer to see it. This is actually the major loss when you shift from your CRM’s inboard email campaign management to an external tool.

Blog and Social Media Integration

It usually goes like this… Much of the world is not yet following Blog posts but everyone gets email so should I spend my time blogging or writing newsletter articles? And I’d kinda like to check out this Twitter thing I keep hearing about but who has the time for it.  And all of it seems like a lot of redundant effort. So isn’t there some way I can just create a Blog post and have it automatically go out in my next email newsletter and generate a Tweet?

Well there is at least one solution we’ve found so far. The latest system we’ve been looking at closely is the mal-named newcomer – MailChimp. And while I’m not looking forward to becoming a Chimper or whatever the moniker ends up at, it is a very impressive solution that is gaining a lot of momentum.  Part of the reason is that it already supports this integration. (The only downside: CRM integration is still pretty limited.)

Deliverability – Without It, You Got Nuttin

That is, if your email doesn’t end up in their mailbox, who cares about anything else. If you haven’t dug into this yet, “Reputation Management” is now a big factor in making it to your target inboxes. And what that means is that major ISP’s are now grading emails based on the reputation of the sender. And what governs that reputation? Spam reports, primarily. And so what that means is you now more than ever, need to conform to the CAN-SPAM act and moreover you need an email delivery provider that manages to that as well.

Although high end players like ExactTarget have done this for a while, you’re still in the dark with most of the other players like VerticleResponse and ConstantContact. But here again, the monkey pops up claiming 97% deliverability for MailChimp emails. Not sure where that number comes from but it was enough to get our interest.

So That’s Us – What About You?

Please feel free to chime in with your stories.  We’ll continue to keep you posted on our travels in this area and maybe even put a whitepaper together at some point but let us know what you’re finding. And if you don’t agree with anything we’ve said, let us know that too.

Why Should I Care About Them?

• Field reports are substantiating vendor claims on effectiveness
• New, lower-cost options coming online every day
• Limited initial cost to participate
• Adoption rates are soaring

How Can I Learn More About Demand Generation Systems?

ApexTwo has partnered with industry expert David Raab to provide you with an Intro to Demand Generation Systems which will give you a basic understanding of capabilities of the products and services that are currently available.

Additionally, ApexTwo will be providing a stream of practical, actionable information for businesses that are interested in how they might take advantage of this exciting new technology.

Download your free copy of Introduction to Demand Generation Systems.

The founders of ApexTwo have been pioneers in online marketing and lead generation since 1993.

After a  long history involving sales, marketing and consulting into the Fortune 500 with firms and accounts that included IBM, First Chicago, Sears Roebuck, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and a brief stint in international consulting with McKinsey and Company, founder Brian Briggs followed his entrepreneurial spirit to form a company called Language Partners International (LPI) with some former colleagues from IBM. LPI was a worldwide provider of specialized tools, training and consulting into the foreign language translation market.

The birth of LPI was coincidental with the birth of the internet and the World Wide Web which turned out to be a life saver for LPI. Why? Well LPI’s market turned out to be a very fractionalized and spread across the globe. Traditional telesales activities just couldn’t cut it and it wasn’t until LPI discovered the power of online and email marketing did it begin to gain traction.

During the years that followed, LPI became highly proficient in developing effective email marketing campaigns and was one of the first online marketing organization to sucessfully  implement automated nuture marketing (aka drip marketing) in order to educate and qualify prospects for its products and services. Driven by a customized version of GoldMine, LPI drip campaigns included automatically scheduled email, direct mail, fax and telesales activities targeted by buyer segment and based on website visitor activity.

Following the sale of LPI to SDL International (LSE: SDL.L), Brian and his colleagues continued on with SDL where Brian headed up marketing for SDL’s translation products. During that time, and the years that followed, Brian and his team continued to honed their skills in email marketing, CRM automation, and automated drip marketing.

January 2008 brought the formation of ApexTwo with a very simple mission – to take all of those previous learnings to the market in order to assist clients in achieving remarkable results with cost effective automation for online marketing. Believing that the key to sucess lies in the strength of the customer relationship, we take a wholistic, CRM-centric approach that includes all aspects of marketing from tradition to emerging social media.

According to SearchEngineWatch and John Cecil, they do! In fact, over they claim that over 90% of their clients achieve some uplift in conversions.

Recent tests on companies using Innovative Media Group’s video spokespeople suggest that dramatic gains can be realized:

- ClosetWorld added embedded video to their landing page and then a video spokesperson as well. This increased conversion rates from 0.5% to 1.0% and 2.2% respectively.

- Tanberg increased the conversion on their lead-generation page from 0.75% to 2.2% by adding a spokesperson.

Big companies are piling onto the bandwagon as well. Other recent successes include Napster, Service Magic, and Rhapsody. And according to a recent interview of John Cecil, CEO of Innovate Media, one of the leaders in the space, the following are also tr Research shows that over 90% of people like video spokespersons on their landing page.

video for delivery over the web and most of our videos fall into some sort of marketing or solicitation of sales pod where we’re using the videos to sort of make movements on the web.

Who Are the Players

In addition to Innovate, here are a couple of other shops that focus on this new market. Warning: Be ready to be talked at when clicking these links…

• www.WebsiteTalkingHeads.com
• www.YakkingHeads.com
• www.ispeakvideo.com

What Does it Cost?

You’ll find some companies leading with price point of $99-199.

How Do They Do It?

1. Talent - Client chooses talent that we offer them and we hire that talent on their behalf.
2. Script - Typically the clients will write the scripts working with our copywriters.
3. Studio - We take their chosen talent and their scripts. We go into the studio, put the script into a teleprompter and we shoot that video in front of a green screen. The talent meets with the client. There’s lights, camera, action. There’s make-up. There’s a full production crew and we produce the video.
4. Action - We then take the video.
5. Post Production – We go back into our post house and we eventually produce a line of code. We give you that line of code and you put the line of code where you want the video to appear on your page and then we give you a log-in and password to the backend, our backend system where you get reporting information and can track the effectiveness of your video.

The Secrets to Success

• Keep it short
• Cut the fluff
• Have a close