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With the economy now officially in a recession (as if we didn’t know that), marketers are under increasing pressure to do more with less. On the interactive marketing side, few marketers will get budget increases enabling them to drive more clicks. The challenge, then, is to maximize marketing productivity—to get more leads out of the same number of clicks. This is the first of two posts that will look at how to improve conversion rates to get more value from each click.

One answer to this challenge is provided by “post-click marketing,” a.k.a. lead automation management vendors. While the specifics of each service vary, all of them essentially:

• automate the process of extracting visitor IP information from your log files;
• match the IP address to an organization;
• filter out ISPs; and
• map the company name to one or more external databases to provide additional information (company size, industry, key contacts etc.).

The better services also use geo-location filtering to determine which city the visit came from, rather than providing only corporate headquarters information (e.g., someone from IBM visits your site; that’s great, but it would helpful to know whether the visit came from Armonk or from one of IBM’s hundreds of other office locations).

Critics of these services refer to them as “spyware,” though that term isn’t really fair. These services don’t collect any information beyond what Google Analytics, WebTrends or other web analytics packages do. They can’t identify the specific individual who visits a site, only the network location from which the visit originated. The distinction is that they filter out ISPs and supplement network location information with data from third-party sources.

What’s key is how this information is used. If a marketing group uses the information collected to segment their market and provide relevant, targeted follow up messages, then the services ultimately benefit both buyers and sellers. But if used by sales to make an immediate call (”Hi Bob, I noticed that someone from your office just visited our website. Was that you? If so, I’d like to tell you about a special offer we have going…”), that’s where the creepiness factor comes in.

These vendors are quick to point out that you’ve already paid for the traffic to your site through PPC, SEO, interactive PR, banner advertising or other activities; their services simply help you learn more about the 97% of visitors who don’t immediately convert into a lead. They aren’t so much “lead generation” as they are “lead extraction” services.

The bottom line is, with pressure to generate more leads with flat budgets, these services are likely to get increased interest. And again, if the used properly, they can be helpful in engaging site visitors who perhaps aren’t quite ready to become a “lead.”

The Vendors

Here are six services that offer post-click marketing analytics:

VisitorTrack, from netFactor—in the company’s own words, VisitorTrack is”like caller ID for your website…(it) integrates Website Tracking, Business Intelligence and Sales CRM into a powerful on-demand application for capturing detailed information on your website’s Business Visitors.” VisitorTrack service provides robust geo-targeting (so you know exactly where visitors are coming from) and email notification, but it’s biggest strength is detailed and customizable reporting capability. Contact names are available free through LinkedIn or on a pay-or-play basis from Jigsaw. Pricing starts at about $300 per month.

Demandbase—referring to its service as a “lead quality platform…that unlock(s) the potential of online advertising, search, CRM, and social networks,” Demandbase provides both a desktop wideget similar to a stock ticker that displays website vistitor information in real-time, as well as daily summary emails and 90 days worth of visitor data for reporting. Demandbase is a simple, elegant lead enhancement solution with an affordable starting point at under $200 per month. You can use the widget for free, but won’t get any data stored for reporting. The platform only provides data on North American visitors for now, though international tracking capability is in the pipeline.

LEADSExplorer from Engago Technologies is a powerful service that helps marketers discover who’s visiting their site, identify their interests, segment visitors based on company size and industry, track results through reporting, and integrate visitor data with backend CRM systems.
Based in the U.K., the LEADSExplorer staff is sophisticated about website lead capture technologies and practices, and easy to work with for both U.S. and European countries.

LeadLander is one of the most mature providers of what they term “real-time customer intelligence.” LeadLander is a robust, proven platform that shows you who’s been visiting your site, what they’ve been looking at, how much time each visitor has committed to reviewing various pages of your online collateral, the search terms used to find your site and more. It’s also fully integrated with Salesforce.com.

LeadGenesys offers broad functionality for tracking email campaigns and website visits. The service is integrated with Salesforce.com and is used by a blue chip customer base including RR Donnelly, Praxair and AMD.

Opentracker is a simple yet powerful service that provides real-time visitor monitoring, search term analysis, online reporting and other analytical capabilities. While it doesn’t offer all the features of other services, Opentracker offers smaller companies an extremely affordable entry point into post-click marketing starting at about $20 per month.

Further Reading

Forrester’s Laura Ramos provided an excellent summary of what she broadly termed lead automation management in August of this year, though it seems a bit odd to place Hubspot (inbound marketing / website optimization), Leadlander (site visitor tracking) and Zoominfo (an online directory / database) in the same group.

Other bloggers that have reviewed these services include:

Capture Website Visitors To Know Who Has Been Visiting - They Might Be Qualified Leads from ReadyContacts

Qualify Leads with VisitorTrack from Manoj Jasra at Web Analytics World

Turning Web Site Visitors into Paying Customers from Jim Berkowitz

Demandbase launches lead generation platform with Adobe funding from Enetlive.net

Visitr - No, I am not scared you know my location but dammit I respect you from 640K Ought to be enough for anybody

Demandbase Raises $8 Million For Online Lead Generation Platform from Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch

How Do I Build a List of Target Companies and Contacts? from Aaron Ross at Build a Sales Machine

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Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

View post:
Getting More Out of Each Click with “Post-Click Marketing”

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Excerpted from:
Jive Software Lays Off 1/3 Of Staff

Channel executives at IT hardware and software companies are being asked to sell more through their reseller channels, and both they and their channel partners know what kinds of programs can help make resellers more successful. Yet new research indicates that, despite knowing what to do, technology vendor channel chiefs don’t always act on this knowledge.

A channel sales effectiveness study just concluded for PRM vendor BLUEROADS by Sirius Decisions shows a “clear link between the types of partner programs that top channel executives emphasize and their impact on revenue growth in the indirect channel.” Of executives “who said they focused on sales ‘effectiveness’ strategic activities such as lead management and deal registration, 62% reported an increase in revenue. Paradoxically, 80 percent of the channel investments by the vendors that were surveyed focused around tactical issues such as training, partner portals, and partner communication tools – all activities that simply automate the relationship with partners. Of those who focused investment on these types of ‘efficiency’ programs, only 40% reported an increase in channel revenue.”

In other words, the study says that channel executives, on the whole, know what works—they just don’t do it. They’re all hat no cattle, all show no go, they talk the talk but can’t walk the walk, pick your over-used idiom.

Charles Watson, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Sales for BLUEROADS, suggests that many channel chiefs lack the “alpha mail” orientation of their direct sales counterparts, and thus continue to make small, “safe” investment in low-return activities like training programs and partner portals. Such investments are focused more on reducing costs through improved efficiency than increasing revenue but typically don’t require executive team buy-in because they have low visibility and little impact on the enterprise. An alternative explanation may be that the corporate culture in many organizations discourages precisely the type of risk-taking that is needed to significantly improve channel sales effectiveness.

Based on this study as well as past research focused on channel partners, BLUEROADS recommends five practices that should be employed to improve channel sales performance:

• Invest in high-quality leads for partners; depending on the product category and price point, this can range from a quick visual screening to making pre-qualification calls before handing leads to the channel.

• Ensure that leads are delivered rapidly. Particularly for near-commodity products, leads can “cool off” quickly, and first-to-respond often beats best product offering.
• Get the right leads to the right partner, every time. Besides checking for named accounts and pre-established relationships, this may include sorting and routing leads based on industry vertical, company size, geographic location and product. (The folks at BLUEROADS are quick to point out that their PRM software automates this process.)
• Protect partners from channel conflict. Okay, that one’s pretty obvious.
• Help partners accelerate sales cycles with selling guidance and coaching. Engaging with channel partners as they need assistance—learning by doing—is less common though much more effective than “train and forget” programs.

Finally. the most sophisticated vendors are creating feedback channels that enable them to collect valuable market intelligence from channel partners, to answer questions such as:

• How does our product compare (in detail) to competitive offerings?

• What new capabilities are most important to the market?
• What is the “whole product” that customers (and potential customers) are buying?

The study concludes that channel chiefs, in many cases, know that they need to focus investments on high-visibility, high-impact programs aimed at increasing channel sales effectiveness, yet continue to invest in safer but lower-yielding efficiency improvements. this research from BLUEROADS suggests that those vendors willing to improvements in channel effectiveness a higher priority will ultimately prevail over their more cautious counterparts.

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More:
Five Strategies for Improving Channel Sales

Adobe Systems, a publishing and design software company, has reported that its quarterly profit fell 7%, but this is still better than what Wall Street has expected.

Higher operating costs and lower interest income contributed to Q3’s lower net profit. But the company is optimistic, as it plans to unveil new Adobe Creative Suite 4.0 in several days.

Adobe’s Sales Up, Profit Down

Vignette is not having a good year. The company released its Q2 2008 financial results, and they’re not pretty. The revenue is down (again), GAAP net loss is substantial, non-GAAP net income is 73.5% down compared to the same period last year. The company says that sales and marketing efforts need improvement. But is it really so?

More here:
Vignette’s Year on Year Income Falls 73.5%