B2B Marketing ROI

Over at DMNews this week, Mark Stebbin of MarketMotive wrote a piece on A/B Testing for online marketing campaigns. Though the example used is a B2C campaign,  B2B marketers can benefit from the same concepts.

Marketing automation tools can be used to create multiple campaigns - changing out key elements such as graphics, subject lines or special offers - and then compare ROI results. Viewing click-through and conversion rates for the campaigns  will help you understand what strategies appeal to your target audience and lead to increased success in your future campaigns.

Automation software can also offer multivariate testing for your landing pages to compare conversion rates from you PPC campaigns. Just as you can determine which emails are most attractive to your prospects, you can analyze conversion rates and choose the landing pages that yield the highest ROI.

Creating two versions of a campaign may require a little extra legwork, but think of it as an investment that will save you time and increase future profits with just a few clicks.

More and more, marketers are beginning to embrace quality over quantity and putting in place steps to help the sales team improve their odds of closing the deal. Brian Carroll sheds some light on the issue of cost-per-lead vs. cost-per-opportunity in his post, Why Cost-Per-Lead Budgets Fail and Fewer Leads Are Better. Though it can be hard to accept such a claim - why would any one want fewer leads, isn’t it a pure number game? - Carroll says, “The truth is that sales people care very little about the cost of the leads we generate. What they really care about is how many of those leads will actually become viable sales opportunities.”

For a small sales team, the information being passed in to the CRM system can be overwhelming, making it difficult to efficiently sort through the “noise” and determine which leads to focus on. It’s easy to dedicate too much time to unqualified leads and unknowingly passing by valuable opportunities. One step marketers are taking to improve lead quality is developing a system to triage leads and evaluate them for “sales-readiness.” Instead of dumping huge numbers of leads in to a CRM system, marketers are using this lead qualifying system and keeping the junk out of the sales team’s hands. Management and web automation systems can serve as a great “holding pen” for leads before they are passed in to the CRM, allowing the marketing team to review prospects, assign a grade or score and pass the record to the appropriate sales rep.

If marketers can begin to live by the rule of quality over quantity, they will see a great improvement in their conversion and greatly increase their percentage of qualified opportunities. Not to mention, they will get a big “thank you” from the sales team!