In our highly connected and insightfully customized world of consumer engagement, lead nurturing ROI programs are paramount to building long-term relationships with prospective customers and retaining the attention of existing ones. Well-planned lead nurturing strategies allow companies to interact with consumers throughout various stages of the courting process, tailoring the messaging they receive to their specific product or service needs. It offers a human element so your company stands out.
Nurturing Data
You’re probably wondering just how well this “courting process” really works. According to Inbound Marketing Agents IMA, nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads and companies with mature lead generation strategies enjoy 9.3% higher sales, but it doesn’t stop there. Lead nurturing follows the prospect through the entire process and reaps benefits along the way. Not only will this strategy produce short-term results with new conversions, but it will also help retain loyal customers who begin to feel like they are part of your company’s “family.”
Still having trouble wrapping your head around it? The numbers don’t lie:
- Lead nurturing emails get 4-10 times the response rate compared to standalone email blasts reports Silverpop.
- Lead nurturing emails generate an 8% CTR compared to general email sends, which generate just a 3% CTR says inbound marketing powerhouse HubSpot.
- Companies that excel at lead nurturing have 9% more sales reps making quota states CSO Insights.
- Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads indicates a report from DemandGen.
- Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost and companies that automate lead management see a 10% or greater increase in revenue in just 6-9 months says a study by Gartner Research
Lead nurturing is driven by obtaining valuable customer data collected through various touchpoints. Once you have these insights they can be easily segmented and dissected to personalize your marketing reach, making it more likely your efforts will lead to a conversion down the road, and we’re not talking just one sale but for a long-time, loyal customer.
Personalization is Key
In a world where it’s becoming abundantly easy to explore products, services, and brands, that personal touch is essential when trying to woo over potential clientele. You must first get their attention. This can be done by engaging them with content and then nurturing the relationship along the way until they are ready to buy. Understanding your customers and their needs is essential to crafting a successful lead nurturing program and knowing what questions they’ll need answered well before they’ve asked them is the key to keeping them flowing through the sales funnel.
Makes sense, right? The best way of getting into the prospect’s pocket is by getting into their head. Making it personal makes it familiar, and making it familiar makes it a little easier. Even Ebenezer Scrooge loosened the purse strings once his story took a personal turn.
Making your campaign personal through lead nurturing can be the difference your firm needs. Investing in these strategies will provide the personalized experience proven to make a return on investment with increased conversions and customer loyalty.
But, sometimes even a through plan may need a little guidance based on experience and Millennium has just that. We’ve invested resources in vetting the top lead nurturing programs available and have worked through some highly successful strategies with our clients to help keep their sales funnel full and their customers engaged. See how a lead nurturing program can add that personal touch to your marketing and boost conversions by connecting with me, Kyle Mallinger, on Twitter or feel free to shoot me an email at [email protected].
These days, it’s getting a lot harder to live without technology—and why would we want to? Whether you have a go-to website, a frequently-used app or piece of software, or a favored social media platform, there’s a good chance UI/UX designers had something to do with why you love it so much.
In this post, we’ll focus on one particular area of digital design with two parts: User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX). Then, we’ll see how they work together to improve digital technology.
User Interface (UI): Making Technology Functional
To begin our discussion about UI, let’s think about cars. An early Ford Model T fulfills the basic purpose of a car, getting you from point A to point B in a crude prototype of what we now think of as an automobile. A new BMW, on the other hand, is a more practical and user-friendly choice than its predecessor. The functionality of cars has vastly improved over the years with advancements in engineering and design.
Like a contemporary BMW, UI is concerned with design functionality: UI designers might be responsible for choosing the best button size on an interface, or they may make decisions that impact the navigation, look, and feel of a site or program. UI designers are interested in foreseeing what users might want in terms of function and then deciding what makes the most sense. UI designers consider organization, needs, simplicity and clarity when thinking about the functions of items on a webpage, for example.
Just as users have had different requirements in cars over time (simpler designs like the Model T were followed up by muscle cars, hatchbacks, trucks, and sedans, each of which met the specific needs of market consumers), they’ve also had different needs when it comes to technology. UI designers are responsible for meeting the needs of users when it comes to the functionality of technological design.
User Experience (UX): Making Technology Enjoyable
To return to our example about cars, which car would you rather travel in on a freeway—a Model T or a BMW? While driving a Model T along an interstate might feel novel at first, it would quickly annoy you to have no seatbelts, outdated transmission, and a max speed of 40 MPH. Compared to a Model T, a BMW has a much more sleek appearance, a better feel, and an all-around improved experience for the modern automobile user. Using an outdated or vintage car for modern purposes just doesn’t make sense.
User Experience designers are in the business of just that – improving the experience of users. UX designers exist to improve the usability and enjoyment of digital design. They work by examining technology from the perspective of the user themselves: How intuitive is the technology? How does it look? How does it make a user feel? UX designers are responsible for the emotions attached to a technology.
To sum up: When it comes to tech design, UI is responsible for organization and function while UX is responsible for feel and experience.
How Does UI/UX Work Together?
To show how UI/UX work together, let’s consider music streaming services. These are a fantastic illustration of how UI/UX work together—or fail to do so. Compare services like iTunes and Spotify: if you want to add a playlist to iTunes, all you have to do is make a new playlist and easily drag and drop anything you’d like to include in it. This is an example of when UI/UX work together to make a technology both useful and enjoyable. Spotify isn’t so easy: after making a new playlist, you must individually search out each song and click another button to add it to the list. It’s “functional,” but much more time consuming, and an altogether less pleasant user experience—this is an instance when UI/UX have failed to work together.
Both UI and UX are critical components for the best possible design outcome. Without UX, UI might be reduced to something that is functional but not pleasing; without UI, UX might be reduced to something visually pleasing but not functional. Imagine it this way: Without UX, you’d have a car with all the necessary parts (brakes, steering wheel, gas pedal) but none of the comforts (leather seats, air conditioning, radio, power steering). Without UI, you might have a tin box that is very nice to sit in, but can’t move at all. Both aspects are vital to creating an enjoyable, useful experience for users that will keep them brand loyal and have them coming back to use technology again and again.
As always, I love a good UI/UX discussion so feel free to connect with me, Mark Dingman, on Twitter or email me at [email protected] to learn more about how UI/UX can work for your business.
It almost goes without saying in the digital age: before you buy a product, try a service or go out to a restaurant, you’re likely to read the reviews first.
But, as a business owner with so many available review sites to choose from, how do you pick which sites you should have a business page on? Reviews can make or break a business and you want to be sure that not only can you be found for positive reviews, but that you’re also part of the conversation for any damage control.
Customers tend to gravitate towards different review sites for different industries. To make sure your efforts are focused towards the appropriate sites, here is a quick run down of the best review websites for restaurants, products and services:
Best Review Site for Restaurants: Yelp
With over 83 million reviews in total, 135 million visitors a month and availability on nearly any platform, Yelp is one of the most relevant review sites available. Yelp has reviews for anything ranging from mechanics to hairstylists, but the area they tend to dominate is restaurant reviews. (The only category that outdoes restaurant reviews on Yelp is shopping; however, Yelp continues to maintain its perception as a restaurant review site). Restaurant owners can sign up for a free account that allows them to post photos of their business and message customers – a smart way to attract people to your restaurant –and even has a “Best Of” category, which allows site users to quickly determine which restaurants are worth visiting.
Conclusion: A tremendous amount of Internet traffic, as well as Yelp’s continued public perception as primarily a restaurant review site, gives Yelp the advantage when it comes to focusing on restaurant reviews.
Best Review Site for Products: Amazon.com
With over a million reviews to date, Amazon.com reviewers have evaluated everything from moisturizer to video games. Amazon has a Top Customer Reviews list that highlights the best and most helpful reviews on the site to date. Amazon’s five-star rating system allows customers to distinguish quickly and clearly between a product that is rated two stars and one that is rated 4.5 stars. They can also see how many individuals have given reviews, and at what rating, which assists them in making better, more informed decisions about the products they want to buy.
Conclusion: An easy-to-use rating system, alongside a review count and historical information about the best reviews, allows Amazon’s users to make better choices about products they identify as superior or inferior.
Best Review Site for Services: Angie’s List
Unlike Yelp, a membership to Angie’s List will cost you. However, if you’re a business owner, you can sign up for a free account to be reviewed on the site. Angie’s List boasts an impressive 3 million plus users, making it one of the best review sites for services. Angie’s List aims to evaluate services based on five different criteria: service cost, quality of service, responsiveness, punctuality and how professional the service is. These are reviewed in a grading system of A through F. Angie’s List has been in business for more than ten years, making this site an easy and popular way to find standout services in your area.
Conclusion: Angie’s List isn’t free like some of its competitors, but still has a significant number of members – in the millions range – that make up its clientele. Angie’s List also has a well-rounded evaluation system for reviewed services.
To learn more about the best review sites and how to make sure your business is featured on the right ones, contact Millennium at 877-873-7445 for a free consultation. You can also connect with me on Twitter and LinkedIn or feel free to send me an email at [email protected].
Companies looking to stand out among the competition know the importance of being found and being remembered, making online advertising a valuable component to any marketing strategy. With a larger reach than ever, the internet has become one of the most popular places for businesses to place ads. There is a vast range of online placement options and each one is just a piece of the puzzle, fitting into different methods to meet varying business goals. The proper combination can be what separates you from a company a customer skims by and a company a customer remembers.
To know what type of piece you’re holding and get the puzzle started, here are the basics of paid search and display advertising:
Search Ads
Text based ads that appear alongside a list of search results with key words. These ads are typically used in situations where customers are searching for a specific product or service.
Photo Credit: Google Adwords
Display Ads
Can be ads in text, but tend to be rich in images, media, or video format that appear on websites with related content. Instead of the customer searching directly for these products, they are displayed within websites the customer is visiting and are placed based on their relevancy to topics or interests on the display website. For example, if you were visiting a camping related website an ad for tents or backpacks from a sporting goods store may appear within the camping website.
Photo Credit: Camping.com
Retargeting Ads
Ads used to reinforce customers who may not be ready to make a purchase. These ads target customers who have already visited your website or have left their contact information in your database.
Retargeting ads serve as a reminder of what was left behind on other websites and encourages potential customers to return and make a purchase. There are two types of campaigns, pixel-based and list-based. Pixel-based is the most popular type and refers to the topic we all know as “cookies.” Once a customer visits your site, their browser receives a pixel, which turns into a “cookie” and causes specific retargeting ads to appear on other sites they visit. List based is a more personal form of retargeting advertising as it uses information customers have provided the company to create a more personal message.Now with a basic understanding of a few placement methods, it is time to cover the main metrics used in placement pricing and measurement.
Cost Per Click (CPC)
Cost per Click (CPC), also commonly referred to as Pay per Click or PPC, is the most a business is willing to pay for a customer to click on its ad. The main goal of CPC is to drive traffic to your website or landing page by creating an ad customers are compelled to click on. CPC is great option for companies who are focused on increasing sales or boosting website traffic where the goal is to have the consumer take action via a purchase, contact form submission, etc.
Cost Per Mile (CPM)
Cost per Mile (CPM) or Cost per Thousand Impressions is a method aimed at delivering a message and increasing brand awareness. Companies pay based on the number of “impressions” or times an ad is viewed and a CPM strategy is very useful for businesses focused on building brand recognition or product familiarity.
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
Cost per Acquisition (CPA) is where a specific action is desired and a company pays each time this action is completed. The CPA required action is generally a conversion to a sale where the ad has led to a customer order and this acquisition is tracked electronically.
After a basic understanding of both ad placement and pricing strategies it is time for you to decide which one you believe will work best for your company. Always remember to establish your goals you want to achieve beforehand; as this will help you better determine where you place ads and how much you are willing to spend.
If you are still unsure or just want to discuss if you are making the right decision, call Millennium today for a free consultation and we can help create a digital advertising strategy that best fits your goals. Please also feel free to reach out to me via email at [email protected] or catch up with me on Twitter and LinkedIn.