Tracking the Effectiveness of your Banner Ads

August 3rd, 2010 by Cindy Ryan

I am only a few months into my new job here at LoopFuse, heading up their marketing team, and it has been full steam ahead with the exciting announcement of FreeView, the first and only free marketing automation solution. Being a previous user and advocate of LoopFuse, I found it easy to jump in feet first and start developing new marketing programs utilizing our own tool to create and track their successes.

As I continue to ramp up the marketing efforts here I wanted to share my experiences with everyone. Personally, I relate better to a product when I understand how I can use it to make my job easier on a daily basis. I am a marketing user just like you and I am going to discuss real-life use cases for using marketing automation in this post and future posts.

One of my first projects was to manage the launch of our new website and the messaging around it. The homepage was getting a makeover and one of the biggest changes was the addition of some scrolling banners. We wanted to get our audience’s attention with graphics that popped and content that was simple and to the point. Today we have four rotating banners.

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Webinar: “Search and Rescue” for your lead database: How to find lost leads and turn them into opportunities

August 2nd, 2010 by Cindy Ryan

Live Webinar: Wednesday August 4th, 2010, 11am PDT/ 2pm EDT

Where did all our webinar leads go? Did any of the 250 whitepaper downloads turn into sales opportunities? Did we get our money’s worth when we paid $40 per lead in a lead gen program? This 45-minute webinar will teach you how to save those leads and turn them into revenue for your company.

You will learn how to:

•    Create workflows so no lead is left behind
•    Improve your data quality by segmentation and nurturing
•    Nurture your leads with relevant information
•    Convert qualified prospects into paying customers

Join us and get useful tips on how to help save your drowning leads and bring them to the surface so you can start generating revenue NOW! Jep Castelein of LeadSloth, a long-time marketer and thought leader in the area of lead management and marketing automation, will demonstrate the simplicity by which you can automatically start to better nurture and qualify your leads today.

RECORDING AVAILABLE: if you can’t make it, you can still register so you’ll receive the recording afterwards

Click here to register for the webinar.

Who is following your digital footprints?

July 29th, 2010 by Matthew Quinlan

There is a natural trade-off that each of us makes everyday between convenience and privacy. You can drive through the toll booth and sit in line with everyone else waiting to deposit your anonymous quarters or you can drive through the SpeedPass lane at 80 MPH and have your wireless toll tag charge your credit card. For pragmatists, this decision is easy. But consider for a moment all of the information that has been generated about you and with whom that information may be shared.

Who (or more precisely which vehicle) was driving on which highway at what toll booth traveling in a given direction at an exact point in time. If the trip passes through multiple toll booths then a driver’s route, progress, and even his/her speed can be calculated. Applying analytical processes to all of the historical data for an individual allows us to generate a profile of the driver. For example, based on the time of day that the driver passes through certain tolls, educated guesses can be made about the location of his/her work. And remember, this data can be combined with the existing demographic data already on file to improve the accuracy of these guesses. For example, the driver’s home address is already on file for billing purposes. Using this home address services like Zillow.com can determine the cost of the home and therefore the driver’s likely household income. If that the driver goes through the airport toll road towards the airport on average twice a week and returns the next day and you might begin to suspect that this person works in sales or is an executive and travels extensively for short overnight trips to visit clients. With every data point collected this profile becomes more and more accurate; correcting false assumptions over time.

Of course, this kind of profiling can be used for many purposes, some mutually beneficial, some downright creepy. For example, the toll plaza could flash traffic warnings to you when you pass through based on your historical driving route. City planners could use the data to justify the installation of so-called “Lexus Lanes” based on segmentation of the income level of drivers on a particular highway. Or an unscrupulous individual could use this information to target homes for burglary when it appears the owner is out of town (remember the airport toll road). The possibilities are endless.

Online marketers are using a similar approach to profile their prospects in order to better measure level of interest and to segment and qualify prospects before handing them over to their sales department. Marketers who leverage this technology effectively can provide a more targeted and relevant evaluation and purchasing experience to prospects who truly show interest in their offerings and avoid annoying those who are “just browsing”.

Let’s review the kinds of information that marketers can collect online to build this profile:

Behavioral
The moment a visitor lands on my website, his/her browser is “tagged” with a unique ID that allows me to recognize him/her upon return visits to my site (or even across multiple websites depending on the situation). Now every click the visitor ever makes on my website(s) can be associated with his/her anonmyous profile.

Implicit
In addition to click stream data, the visitor’s web-browser shares certain information about his/her environment including his/her operating system, browser type, screen size (iPad anyone?), and IP-address.

Here is what YOUR browser is telling us about you: