change  February 23, 2011

Joel Lockwood, Partner and Chief Marketing Officer

According to research, 64% of marketing and sales executives are dissatisfied with their lead nurturing programs.

Are you one of them? And have you abandoned some or all of your programs as a result?

If so, maybe it’s time you took another look at lead nurturing. Although the process seems like a lot of work, the benefits far outweigh the effort. Here are five reasons why.

1. You’ll find out who really wants to hear from you.
As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, you can’t take for granted that everyone in your marketing database wants you to send them content. One best practice of lead nurturing is to get explicit permission up front from your recipients.

We at Ozone Online recommend using the double opt-in method, in which you ask your prospects to confirm their original opt-in by responding to an email. Yes, this adds a step to the process and may scare off a few lukewarm prospects – but you’ll end up with a list of subscribers who truly want to hear from you. (You’ll also prove that your organization has the utmost concern for online privacy, which certainly can’t hurt your sales.)

2. You’ll get to know your prospects better.
The lead nurturing process gives you numerous opportunities to ask your prospects for more personal data in exchange for the free information you’re providing. You’ll use this data to build increasingly detailed prospect profiles.

These profiles will not only help you provide the right information to the leads already in your pipeline, but also enable you to refine your lead generation activities in the future. The result? More high-quality leads to pass to Sales.

3. You’ll show customers how you can solve their specific problems.
Some companies figure “anything is better than nothing” and indiscriminately blast content to their entire prospect database. But if you take the time to develop relevant messages that focus on solving specific problems, you’ll differentiate your company from the competition.

Using the information your prospects submit and the actions they take throughout the buying cycle, you can present them with information on the exact products, services, or features that address their needs. You’ll have a chance to call out specific, relevant benefits that you may not have mentioned in your initial lead generation pieces.

4. You’ll know exactly when prospects are ready to talk to Sales.
As your leads move through the buying cycle, it’s key to set up a lead scoring process. Just make sure your process is based on your most important demographic and behavioral characteristics. These may include:

• Company size
• Title
• Purchase timeline
• Budget
• Downloaded white paper
• Used product comparison charts
• Attended webinar
• Downloaded product trial
• Watched video
• Commented on a blog
• Called your 800 number
• Visited your tradeshow booth

So, when do you pass a lead to Sales? It’s simple. Just assign point values to each of these characteristics and activities, and then set a trigger point for passing along the lead. You’ll continue to adjust your point values and trigger point over time, as Sales gives you feedback on the quality of your leads.

5. You’ll get results.
You may be pleasantly surprised at the numbers you see in your lead nurturing program. In one program documented by Marketing Sherpa, IBM Cognos recorded impressive results:

• About 11% of website visitors completed a registration form, compared to an industry average of 3%.
• Open rates for nurturing emails increased to 33.3%, compared to 13.2% for the company’s traditional multi-touch campaigns.
• Click-through rate increased from 0.09% to 15.5%.
• Response rate increased from 0.05% to 17.5%.

Tap an Untapped Resource
Leads that sit in the marketing pipeline month after month are wasted opportunities. And in this economy, nobody can afford to waste an opportunity.

By implementing even the simplest lead nurturing program, you tap an untapped resource – the leads you already have – and squeeze value out of marketing programs you ran in previous months and years. As your program grows and gains sophistication, it can deliver results that more than pay for its cost.

Ridge Sampson, CEO

Anyone who knows Ozone Online knows that we’re a dog-centric company. Dogs are amazing creatures. Mine, Luke the dog (aka Cool Hand Luke), is a working dog who delivers newspapers and performs tricks for unsuspecting tourists and clients. 

What you may not know is that I’m a reluctant adopter of social media. From the start, I’ve struggled with the notion that it may all just be a fad. I’ve also wondered, how does social media actually help our customers grow their businesses? Do people really have time to consume all this content? Do these little blips of information really make any difference?

But over the past few weeks, I’ve been converted from “reluctant adopter” to “rabid fan” ...with the help of a bunch of dogs.

It all started two weeks ago when I decided to follow Luke one morning as he was making his rounds to say hi to everyone in the office. During our rounds, Vanessa called me into her office to show me a video. Lo and behold, there was Luke up on the screen! While Luke and I were wandering around the Marina over the weekend, someone had taken a short video of Luke doing what he does best: performing a few tricks. The video was now posted on this guy’s humor blog. That began my transformation.

In addition to being a project manager, Vanessa happens to be our Social Media Analyst. Within minutes, she had posted the video link to our Facebook page and Twitter feed, and added it to Luke’s bio on our website.

“Great,” I thought. “That was fun. It’s a topic of conversation, and now it’s out in the Twitterverse, whatever that is.” But then it was out of my mind. Yes, I could see that social media is entertaining... but is it useful? I still wasn’t convinced.

This past week, my outlook changed. All that social media stuff triggered one of my friends to send me yet another dog video (they all like to send me dog videos). This one was an amazing video by the band OK Go! Knowing dogs as I do, I can appreciate what an impressive feat it was to get numerous shapes, sizes, and breeds to perform so well together – and with a band, to boot. But to top it all off, the entire video was shot in a single take. Robert Altman would be proud! I recall the opening scene of The Player being around 8 minutes long. One of the actors actually comments on the length of cuts in the scene.

I’ve since learned that OK Go! has a unique style that combines the zaniness of a Rube Goldberg performance with great music. Needless to say, I started sending the link out to everyone I know. I also fired up iTunes after realizing I liked the song almost as much as the video. I sampled a couple of tracks, and I bought an EP and a couple of singles.

Wow, social media works! Not only that, but it worked on me.

I had never even heard of OK Go! But now I own a bunch of their music. A viral video convinced me to buy, but that would be a boring post if it ended there – unless you watch the video.

Another thing most people know about me is that I am an Apple fan (OK, fine. A fanatic.). So of course, I also “liked” the songs on my Ping profile in iTunes.

I told Vanessa the story today, and she pointed out how effective social media is and how comfortable with it I have already become without even trying. The first key to this story was that I am a follower of the people around me both online and offline, so when Vanessa showed me the blog with Luke, I was listening to an advocate I trust.

Next, when we tweeted the blog posting, we as Ozone amplified the message. Because my followers now knew that I had a preference not only for dogs, but for dogs doing tricks, they reflected back a viral video to my preferences. The video was not explicitly an advertisement, but it drove me to purchase.

Lastly, Apple made it possible for me to create a follow-up message for my Ping followers to find next time they logged in, when they could see I “liked” OK Go!

It would be interesting to know exactly how many sales eventually result from the cascading effect of that original video of Luke doing tricks. How many people will ultimately end up becoming OK Go! Fans? Out of those, think of how many will continue to amplify the message. Remember those Breck Shampoo commercials? “...and she told two friends, and they told two friends, and on, and on...” That was sort of a caveman tutorial on how to be viral – and, I guess you could say, social.

So, I now must admit that social media is here and it works on many levels. It has the ability to drive sales, and to build new brands or support existing ones. Our social media team officially gets to say, “See, I told ya so.” Of course, I’m a sucker for a good dog video, so the deck was partially stacked. But now look what they’ve done – they’ve actually got me blogging!

Share your comments and tell us how you liked OK Go!

Brian Sullivan, Technical Director

I can’t even count how many times I’ve been in this situation: I finish some great piece of functionality for a project. It has all the bells and whistles. It functions well and looks even better. Then I test it in Internet Explorer (IE) and it all falls apart.

This isn’t an IE-bashing post. Nor is it a list of IE6’s myriad shortcomings. For better or for worse, IE is here to stay. And IE6, the worst of the worst, is here at least until 2014. But just because Microsoft has committed to keeping IE6 on life support until then, does that mean we must do the same?

The short answer is yes. The long answer is ^%&$* *&^#%!!!....(plaintive sigh)… yes.

Despite the best efforts of those who would like to bring down IE6 now, despite the fact that IE6’s market share is in freefall, and despite the fact that Google has dropped the hammer, IE6 (as of this writing) still commands more market share than Safari and Opera combined. But we’re getting close to the tipping point where we can finally put IE6 in the same category as these other things that were popular in 2001:

IE6 users: Who are these people?
I’ll admit there must be some people who made a conscious decision to stick with IE6. Not many, but they’re out there. Maybe IE7 interferes with their other software – or maybe they’re just trying to be retro. There are also those who are happy with their Pentium II running Windows 98, ME, or 2000 and can’t upgrade, and those who are running Windows XP but skipping browser updates because they are on dialup.

But the largest segment of IE6 users is corporate IT departments who won’t upgrade. Whether they’re putting it off because of cost concerns or because their company intranet only works on IE6, corporate users are the last holdouts. After office hours, IE6 usage drops by over 50%.

The solution? Know your audience
So, how can you determine what level of IE6 support to offer? By answering one question: “Who will be accessing my content?”

If you’re building an internal reporting dashboard that will be viewed only by corporate users, just find out what browser they’ll be using. If you’re rebuilding an existing site or have access to a site with a similar audience, you can learn everything you need to know from your server logs or analytics platform.

Otherwise, you may be able to make certain assumptions about your audience based on the type of site you’re running. For example, if it’s a tech blog, your visitors may skew in the Firefox direction. But if it’s an online store for plumbing supplies, expect to see more IE6 folks.

What you absolutely shouldn’t do is not check. If your site looks terrible in IE6, that doesn’t tell your users, “We’re so cutting-edge that we refuse to support outdated technology.” It tells them, “We’re sloppy.”

Support, don’t enable
We can’t quite drive a stake through IE6’s heart yet. But that doesn’t mean we have to give it the same attention we give to… *cough*… real browsers. In fact, most IE6 users are probably used to things not looking quite right. There’s a point at which rewriting a whole section of JavaScript code, adding CSS hacks, or dumbing down your site to accommodate these users just doesn’t make sense.

If IE6 users can access your content, fill out your form, and do whatever else they came to your site to do, then you probably shouldn’t bend over backwards to make sure they have an identical experience to non-luddites. In fact, it might even be a good idea to prod them a bit.