Get the basics of your onboarding strategy right

In my experience as a marketing professional, potential customers almost never just decide to walk away from a purchase - unless given sufficient reason to do so. And, if you’re wondering how a promising list of leads managed to slip through your fingers, it might be time to refocus on the basics of your onboarding strategy.

While there isn’t a definite methodology for conducting 100% watertight onboarding strategies, certain fundamentals exist that should remain top of mind during this seminal stage of your hopefully long and prosperous relationship with your customer. So, here are a few back-to-basics considerations if your leads and sales funnels are dwindling.

Is my offering correctly aligned to my market?

If your sales, marketing and product teams look to each other for the answer to this question, there’s a problem. Product alignment is the first – if not most…

How I boosted my lead generation with visitor tracking software, in conjunction with blogging, pay per click, email and social media outreach.

When you’re growing an audience, and converting website visitors into customers, you need a watertight marketing funnel.

The sad truth is that most of us convert less than 5 per cent of our website visitors into contacts, meaning that more than 95% of visitors leave our sites, potentially never to be seen again.

So what steps can we take to improve our website marketing, tighten up our funnel, and generate more leads from what we have already?

I faced this challenge earlier this year, and have written this post to share my experience with you. 

My website was only four months old, so I had insufficient visitor data in Analytics, and I was up against a tight deadline. My challenge was that I needed to…

Interest in the value of Big Data continues into 2014

I'm not sure whether to be impressed by this infographic or annoyed. It shows both what's powerful about infographics and their weaknesses.

With the right headline, data and design, infographics can help raise awareness of an issue and associate a brand with a theme.  Kudos to McKinsey for getting the basics right, leading to it being shared by tens of thousands on Slideshare - interesting they're getting good exposure using the new infographic feature on Slideshare, maybe just because it's new. Expect Slideshare to be polluted by a lot of infographics in 2014....

Anyway, here's the infographic in question, weaknesses to follow...

The biggest weakness is that the claim of the headline isn't backed up by the data and worse still, the data sources they use are out of date - 2011 - heinous! Not…

Using Big Data to optimise engagement with your customers 

How to use big data to create better relationships with your customers as individuals instead of as a generic demographic

Enhancing consumer engagement and promoting loyalty is one of marketing’s key goals. But as technology advances, processes are changing. To boost engagement and loyalty, brands must use data to understand how multichannel consumers choose to engage; learn who your consumers are and what they want, and you can adapt to match.

Most organisations are well aware of this data advantage. But data analysis is not simple. The increasing availability of options from channels to devices means opportunities for consumer engagement are expanding, leading to an incredible increase in data generation. This volume and velocity can be difficult for organisations to manage in house initially so they invest in data experts to develop a solution to collate, curate and utilise data in the…

How Big Data and Predictive Analytics improve marketing

Predictive Analysis research and 'Big Data' is helping companies to improve their marketing, through accessing multiple sources of data and employing specialist staff to 'understand the data', providing actionable data which Marketers and Decision-makers can use to improve performance. This IBM and the Aberdeen Group  'Big Data for Marketing' research set out to identify the ‘Best in Class’ practices for companies providing accurate information in an efficient way, to support key Decision-makers and their planning processes. The Infographic below summarises the top strategies, results and capabilities: It highlights that it has helped companies to become more efficient, improve their decision-making and overall performance, through actionable high quality data analysis. The detailed report draws out the technologies and business…

The use of Net Promoter® (NPS) score as a way to collect customer feedback has been available for years although it's perhaps better known and applied more widely in the US. We're always interested to find more about new methods to better understand customers, so wanted to alert you to another tool. CustomerGauge, surveys customers continuously and provides the necessary reporting analytics to tie the feedback back to your process improvements. At the same time, I thought it could be useful to explain some of the principles of NPS since it's not known so well in the UK. Robert Kerner of Customer Gauge is in a good position to help here. Rob has worked in process improvement for the last 15 years in various business functions: finance, marketing and sales. I…

It"€™s perhaps hard to imagine now, but even just four years ago, talk of customer engagement was a bit of a rarity. It is only a couple of years ago  I did an interview with Dave where we discussed definitions and the scope of customer engagement. There are many excellent reasons why businesses now focus on engagement. This year"€™s Annual Customer Engagement Report reveals some of the most important, for example "€˜increasing customer value"€™, "€˜gaining customer insights"€™, "€˜increasing value delivered to the customer"€™ etc as shown in the chart below:

However while any or all of these are excellent outcomes from engagement they are rarely the best place to start when developing a robust customer engagement strategy. For that we need to understand the four main challenges to engagement that have come to define customer relationships this millennium.

1.…

Make 2009 the year for engagement analytics

Which resolutions have you made about your online marketing in 2009? With less budget available for investment in media in many organizations in 2009, it makes sense to resolve to engage more of the visitors you attract to your site. Improving on-site engagement is a worthwhile area to focus on which requires relatively limited expenditure. With Google Analytics freely available to all businesses to help them review and improve engagement, you should look at whether you are really getting the most from your site statistics. In a companion article on How to configure Google Analytics for marketing, I give specific advice on how you should configure Google Analytics to get the most from it. Google Analytics provides great insights from the moment you install the Google tracking tags, but specific configuration to setup the site to track performance for your own business will give…