Round Table Topic: Expert Advice on Leveraging Your CRM System to Survive This Economic Crunch

Jason Kort, Director of Marketing, SoftVu

Jason Kort addresses this month’s round table topic: Expert Advice on Leveraging Your CRM System to Survive this Economic Crunch”. Jason points out that aged leads have a lot of value that can be tapped in adverse economic situations.

A recent study of 100,000 aged lead survey responses across 38 different lending clients, reveals that 60-70% of aged leads remain viable after the second contact—some beyond even six months after applying online.  The typical practice of not following up with leads after one or two contacts—not nurturing leads effectively—means you’re throwing away 60-70% of your total investment in leads. Read more »

By Jason Kort - Director of Marketing, SoftVu

Most salespeople tend to focus on the high-probability “hot leads” that recently came in the door. They don’t have time to stop and sweep through a list of aged leads on a regular basis. SoftVu recently completed a “meta study” compiling four years worth of data across 38 clients to quantify what we already knew—when you ignore aged leads, you’re throwing away money. Here’s a quick look at results for a typical lender. In general, our findings show that:

• 58% to 76% of aged leads remain viable for a significant period of time after initial contact.
• The typical sales team misses somewhere between 600 to 800 aged lead opportunities for every 1,000 initial leads.
• Most respondents still want to be contacted with follow up information, offers, etc.

The simple message is, “Stop ignoring aged leads!” But, how you go about doing that is not quite so simple. There are three primary takeaways here…

• The vast majority of aged leads are still viable (and most sales teams ignore them).
• Staying in front of your potentials results in significantly more closed deals.
• Your sales staff is doing a good job if they’re just keeping up with new leads (someone else needs to qualify and nurture leads after the initial contact).

One solution to this problem is a consistent lead nurturing campaign that can be automated to…

• Identify which aged leads are still viable
• Stay connected with viable aged leads with relevant, timely messages, and
• Route “new” leads and recycle viable “aged” leads back to your sales team in a timely fashion, so they can stay focused on high probability leads.

Learn more, please visit Business-Software.com’s marketing automation vendor showcase for SoftVu.

Email Marketing Resources

Looking for some insight into email marketing strategies that work? 
Want to learn more about the latest and greatest email communication trends? 

The Web can be a valuable resource for today’s marketers, and these sites provide a wealth of timely and up-to-date information about this important aspect of customer outreach. 

ClickZ
The Internet’s largest resource of interactive marketing news, information, commentary, advice, opinion, research, and reference.

About.com
A compilation of articles and other resources about the newest tried and true email marketing tips and secrets. 

iMedia Connections
This trade publisher and event producer serves the interactive media and marketing industries.  Their site contains a variety of information channels, including one that highlights email techniques. 

Marketing Sherpa
A research firm that specializes in tracking and reporting on today’s most effective strategies in all aspects of marketing. 

BeRelevant
An online blog that discussed best practices in email marketing. 

Email Marketer’s Club
A social network for email marketers across the globe.

Why PPC Management Software?
While highly effective in delivering qualified prospects, the management of pay per click (PPC) advertising on search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN is increasingly complex. Many software marketers marvel at how their simple campaign with a hundred or so keywords has grown into a multi-national lead generation machine with thousands of keywords, across multiple search engines, and bidding strategies that sound a bit like war.

Successful PPC campaigns require extensive keyword lists, constant management and monitoring, sophisticated bidding strategies, and well-tested creative and landing pages to outperform the competition. Manually managing a PPC campaign of any significant size is nearly impossible.

Paid search marketing software helps software marketers manage their ad campaigns by consolidating campaign management, optimizing bidding, and eliminating tedious account management tasks to improve their marketing return on investment.

Signs Your Company May Need PPC Management Software
Is your marketing team spending more and more time monitoring your PPC campaigns? Have you shifted more of your marketing budget to PPC advertising? Or perhaps you have the opposite problem, a campaign that hasn’t been looked at in months? These are some of the indicators that send marketers in search of paid search marketing software. Another sign that it might be time to abandon your manual optimization efforts are competitor ads that continually outrank yours (and they are NOT spending more).

Read more »

The CRM Advisor
You ask the questions, and our resident CRM guru shares her wisdom.

This week’s question: “How important is the use of personalization in our email marketing campaigns?”

A: Email is one of today’s most popular marketing communication channels, and as a result, buyers receive hundreds of unsolicited promotions every week.

Read more »

CRM In Action: Infor and CryptoLogic

Focused on integrity and innovation, CryptoLogic Inc. is a world-leading developer and supplier of Internet gaming software. CryptoLogic’s leadership in regulatory compliance makes it one of the few companies with gaming software that is certified to strict standards similar to land-based gaming.

As a provider of one of the most extensive Internet gaming solutions, CryptoLogic-developed software powers one of the largest poker rooms on the Internet and offers more than 260 online casino games and multiplayer bingo games, all in multiple languages and currencies. The company also offers back-office, player, and marketing support services to its customers.

As an international leader in online gaming, CryptoLogic operates in one of the most regulated industries. The company must provide solutions and services that both support its customers’ business growth objectives and meet the wide range of stringent government regulations that exist in most countries.

The business results of CryptoLogic are closely intertwined with the business results of its licensees. “Much of our revenue is based on the volume of online gaming activity that our licensees can achieve,” explains Patrick Siconolfi, manager, CRM Solutions, CryptoLogic. “Because of this, we have even more of a vested interest in seeing that our licensees succeed than most companies.”

In working with its licensees to optimize their marketing programs, CryptoLogic found many areas for improvement. “We found that their marketing dollars weren’t being spent as effectively as possible,” he says. “Many of our licensees were giving promotions to players who didn’t represent the most value to them.”

To correct this situation, CryptoLogic knew that it needed to implement an advanced customer relationship management solution that would help better segment players and do it in an a way that was efficient. The new solution also would need to provide analytics and reporting capabilities so CryptoLogic’s licensees could understand the results from marketing initiatives and continually improve their campaigns.

Getting Business Specific
CryptoLogic chose to implement Infor™ CRM Epiphany® Outbound Marketing to enhance its marketing product suite. “We purchased the Infor solution primarily to make our licensees’ marketing dollars go further and, ultimately, to make them more successful,” Siconolfi explains. “Of all the solutions available, Outbound Marketing clearly offered the best combination of advanced outbound marketing functionality, scalability, and ease of use.”

Read more »

The CRM Advisor
You ask the questions, and our resident CRM guru shares her wisdom.

This week’s question: “We are about to launch an aggressive email marketing program. Which approach is more effective – HTML or text?”

A: This long-standing debate is one that has yet to be resolved.  As the email marketing landscape shifts dramatically, the answer to this question isn’t so “cut and dried”, and even the top industry experts have yet to agree on which one works best. 

Read more »

By: Patty Azzarello, president, Azzarello Group

Big Help for Small Business: How Companies Waste Leads

I have worked with many different sized companies and one of the universal truths I have seen is that sales people basically hate leads that are generated by marketing.

Unless of course, the prospect has money that he will lose if he doesn’t spend it today, and he is calling you to place an order.

Sales people only like HOT leads.

I don’t say this to take a shot at sales people. Effective sales people do a heroic job of cultivating their own business, and getting their own leads based on referrals.

Warm or cool leads generated by marketing by comparison are viewed as “action items”, which get in the way of developing the business they are working on.

So why bother generating leads?

If you are in the marketing role, generating leads is built into the DNA of your job description. It’s also makes for a clear measurement: how many leads did you generate and how much did it cost?

The basic goal is to spend the right amount of money and generate high quality leads that sales people use and turn into business.

The real goal is to leverage that same marketing investment to generate more HOT leads.

I have seen two basic practices make a huge difference.

Don’t Throw Away Warm Leads

This is one of the most well studied and most ignored marketing practices.

Read more »

In most corporations today, email marketing programs continue to play a major role in sales and marketing strategies.

In fact, a survey conducted earlier this year by Dantran Media indicates that as many as 83 percent of businesses still consider email to be their most important and widely-used advertising and lead generation initiative. That same study shows that approximately 35 percent of B2B marketers and almost 40 percent of B2C marketers actually plan to increase their use of email as a marketing tool in the coming year.  

But, buyers are getting increasingly frustrated by the massive volumes of junk email they receive on a daily basis, and are relying more and more on sophisticated spam filters to block unwanted messages from clogging their inboxes. This approach, however, can be counterproductive – often preventing legitimate, relevant, and targeted marketing messages and promotions from getting through. 

So, how can you avoid the dreaded spam filter, and maximize the results from your email marketing campaigns?   The truth is, no two spam filters are exactly the same. And, most available solutions offer extensive customization, so companies can adjust the filtering techniques and related controls to meet their specific needs. However, there are some smart ways to outwit the spam filters, regardless of how they are implemented or set up, and make sure your email gets delivered to its intended target.

Avoid Certain Words

Certain words and phrases simply scream “SPAM”, and almost every spam filter out there today will be dynamically triggered to block any and all messages that contain them.

Read more »

The CRM Advisor
You ask the questions, and our resident CRM guru shares her wisdom.

This week’s question:
“I’m currently evaluating email marketing solutions.  If I choose a hosted solution, how secure will my customer contact information be?”

A: The good news is that most third-party vendors are aware of concerns like these, and have addressed them quite successfully.  Read more »