We’ve discussed using email marketing as a way to automate the lead nurturing process. But how do you figure out if those leads that are cycling through the top of the funnel are worthwhile to your company? Simply put, you would need to develop an effective lead scoring process. But First, What is Lead Scoring? Lead scoring is a method of assigning a point based relative value to each prospect that comes into your sales funnel. A set of criteria is assigned points, and those points are attributed by matching each piece of criteria with the qualifiers that a lead shows. These numbers do one... Read More

There’s a new kid in town, and she’s taking the social media world by storm. Pinterest, a virtual pinboard, has retailers and other marketers very excited about about the potential cross-channel marketing opportunities of this powerhouse of a social platform that’s already been ranked by Mashable as the third largest social network. A Brief History Pinterest emerged in early 2010, but it wasn’t until early 2012 – after its SXSW Interactive debut – that it started gaining traction among users –and rapidly. The social site operates on the basis of collecting,... Read More

Not everyone is a marketer. Even fewer people are email marketers. This was the dilemma facing Selltis, an industry-leading Customer Relationship Management (or CRM) software company. Selltis recognized that email marketing could be a great addition to any salesman’s arsenal of tools, if it could be made simple, easy and intuitive enough to be integrated into existing sales tools. Combining email marketing with the sales process would also get them one step closer to their philosophy of “Closed Loop” sales, one of the key tenets of which is minimizing the space between the marketing... Read More

Only 33% of B2B marketers say that they have an effective lead nurturing process. According to a 2011 DemandGen report, 67% of all B2B companies are scrambling to introduce new leads into their sales cycle, creating a chaotic situation and impairing effective lead response. A systematized process that moves prospects through the sales funnel isn’t just a good idea, it’s a necessity for companies to grow. Even more so, a lack of a systematic lead nurturing process wastes resources by tying up a company’s most important asset for sales: the sales team. To add insult to injury, there’s... Read More

19 hours. That’s the average amount of time that passes between the moment when an online abandoner first visits your page to when they finally make a purchase. A whopping 20% abandoners wait 3 days or more. These numbers, from the National Mail Order Association, present a very interesting view of the problem of shopping cart abandonment. When we did our blog post on conversion optimization a short while back, we mentioned “not ready to buy” as one of the leading causes of abandonment, and today we’ll look at what it means to abandon a cart and what to do about it. Before we’re an... Read More

Two items in the news recently have focused the debate about privacy and its role in online marketing communications. The first: Google’s plan to move to a unified privacy policy across its services. The second: a very interesting article in the New York Times which discusses the way Target uses behavioral analytics to market pregnancy and baby products by statistically determining when (anonymous) women were likely to be pregnant. Read more about that here. The Google news has sparked controversy because of the move from individual privacy policies for each service, to a blanked policy... Read More