A Simple 5 Step Lead Generation Approach to B2B Email Marketing

Lead generation is the heart and soul of many business models, especially services firms and SaaS providers that rely on a steady flow of new customers for cash flow and growth. The tactics available for lead generation range from using appointment setting firms to hiring outside sales teams to improving your SEO and inbound marketing tactics. But a number of anecdotal experiences suggest that strategic outbound email marketing (and applying similar techniques to networking through platforms like LinkedIn) can help get you in front of the CEO (or your target prospect) quickly and effectively. The advantage of targeted emailing campaigns is that they let you control which companies and contacts you make and attract to your company. Here’s a closer look at one technique I’ve seen in play very successfully, specifically in B2B markets.

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By |2014-04-21T14:52:41-07:00February 28th, 2014|The Funnel|5 Comments

How to Get More Customers through a Complex Subscription Funnel

In the worlds of content marketing and conversion optimization, the buying funnel is a core part of the discussion. Understanding your customers and how they move through your buying process is absolutely critical for creating content, design, and other inputs that get prospects to take action. It’s also the foundation of developing smart strategies for conversion testing programs.

But the concept of a one size fits all approach to mapping the buying funnel misses something important. The standard formulas may be overly simplified for more complex products, such as software as a service (SaaS) products that rely on multiple micro-conversions to make the sale. Here’s an in-depth guide that’s designed to help you successfully map the buying funnel for a SaaS product. It’s also intended to serve as a case study for other marketers, especially those in the business to business (B2B) space that are struggling to understand their buyer’s journeys and convert those into actionable insights.

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By |2014-04-21T14:53:40-07:00February 13th, 2014|The Funnel|2 Comments

Putting Cross Selling and Upselling to Work in Your Business

If you’re building your sales funnel strictly on a single sale process, you’re missing out on significant profit potential. Cross-selling and upselling can help you quickly maximize one of the most important business key performance indicators (KPIs): your customer’s lifetime value. In other words, a customer isn’t so much valuable because they buy that preliminary $25 product from you. Instead, it’s important to think about how to build a sales experience that carries the $25 eBook customer into your $10,000 group coaching program or your $100 per month subscription product. Here’s a closer look at how techniques such as cross-selling and upselling can dramatically increase the profits in your business.

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By |2014-04-21T14:54:26-07:00February 6th, 2014|The Funnel|12 Comments

5 Steps to Reduce Your Churn Rate

Can you imagine bringing in any new customers and still not growing your business?

It’s possible, especially if you’re operating a SaaS or other subscription-based business.

You work hard to convince people to give your business a chance, so it’s a shame to see subscribers drop off after a few months.

Instead of racing out to get more customers, have you considered what’s causing people to leave in the first place? Odds are you can make some simple changes to keep more customers loyal, happy, and paying.

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By |2014-04-21T14:55:35-07:00January 20th, 2014|The Funnel|2 Comments

How To Educate Your Prospects And Make More Sales At The Same Time

Ever have a friend who’s having relationship problems or going through a bad breakup?

It seems like they could just go on and on about it forever. It’s like a switch goes off. Even the shy types can’t resist spilling all the grim little details.

When someone has a problem, they can’t stop talking (and thinking) about it.

You can use this to build your credibility and make sales online.

You just need the right strategy to do it…

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By |2014-04-21T14:57:12-07:00January 3rd, 2014|The Funnel|0 Comments

Why Content Marketing Fails: 3 Tools to Improve Content-Driven Conversions

If you’ve been investing in content marketing and aren’t getting the results you hoped for, you’re not alone. A recent study highlighted on Forbes suggests that 10 to 20 percent of your site’s content drives 90 percent of your web traffic, and just .5 percent of that content is what’s really drawing in over 50% of visitors.

Before you conclude that this means content marketing isn’t effective, think again: There’s significant evidence that suggests content marketing works, when your content is sufficiently optimized and part of an overall data-driven strategy. It’s all about getting to the data of what really works for your business, and using that to improve your future content writing and promotion. Here’s how to avoid this common content marketing pitfall, and significantly increase your ROI.

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By |2014-04-21T14:57:50-07:00December 23rd, 2013|The Funnel|6 Comments

The Secret to Making Each of Your Online Prospects Feel Special

What if you could use your website to deliver a personal, relevant experience to each of your visitors?

Your website feels like a one-on-one conversation instead of a “billboard on the side of the road” sales pitch. Visitors become more receptive to buy from you because your approach recognizes them as individuals with unique needs. That’s what strategic customer segmentation can do for you.

Most businesses don’t do this. Their websites treat their “target market” like they’re identical parts from an assembly line instead of a diverse group of people.

That approach kills conversion rates. The gap between your prospects’ unique tastes and what they find on your website weakens your sales message. The smaller the gap, the more likely they become your customers.

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By |2014-04-21T14:59:29-07:00November 25th, 2013|The Funnel|0 Comments

How to Give Web Users What They Want

Want to know the secret of great conversions? It’s giving your visitors what they want when they come to your site. If you don’t, they leave.

But how do you know exactly what they want – and how do you deliver? Here’s a shortcut for you – check out some research Hubspot did earlier this year that shows that most of the people who visit your site want it to be easy to find the information they want and accomplish the actions they have set out to achieve. In a nutshell, that’s web usability, so when you improve web usability, you improve the chances that your site will convert well.

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By |2014-04-21T15:01:48-07:00October 10th, 2013|The Funnel|0 Comments
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