WebleadsB2B

So here’s the problem: You’ve gathered lots of names at some trade shows, or perhaps even purchased some email lists, but you don’t have any opt-in permission to contact them by email. So what do you do?

Sure, you could just email them anyway, but this would be against anti-spam rules in the USA and EU Regulations in Europe, so that really isn’t the right way to go about it. And even if you did, your response rate would be low since they have not opted in to receive emails from you.

The solution is to use a service we are now providing that allows  an independent party to request permission from each contact to opt-in, and clean up any dead emails you may have from your existing lists.

Generating sales leads using email marketing services like this is really the most cost effective method you can use.

By using a

proven and reliable email prospecting system that allows you to generate quality lead generation through the sending of opted-in emails, you really can leverage those business cards and lists you have acquired. And let’s face it, you really don’t have

too much choice anymore since nearly all email service providers today won’t allow you to use email contacts that have not opted-in. Quite rightly, they will simply consider them as a high potential SPAM list.

With this new service you can effectively contact any non opted-in email lists you have, and also track them effectively. Even better, you can nurture them until you identify which are the warmest leads so that your sales teams can close more leads faster.

So why not give this service a go. What else are you going to do with your growing list of non-opted in email lists? Contact us at support@webleadsb2b.com to learn more.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 30th, 2012at 2:41 pm and is filed under Lead Nurturing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Since writing our earlier blog on How to stop competitors clicking your AdWords adverts, we have received a good number of emails asking for he

lp.

In this blog article, I will assume you are familiar with what click fraud is, so I will skip the usual basic description of what it is. What is very clear is that it has many of us worried and uncertain.

Just a glance at some of the conversations on the Adwords Community reflects this:

“It’s said that there are 50% chance in average for adwords click fraud by competitors or adsense account owner. Is that true?”

“Hello There, I’m having fraud problems I guess. My clicks tripled but my new customers halved.”

“I am concerned competitors are clicking my paid campaigns. It seems the past few weeks there has been in a surge in clicks”

“I have a massive problem with click fraud. Google contact is useless and you cannot contact anyone”

Part of the reason click fraud remains a worry is that despite Google’s attempts to curb it – and they are putting some serious muscle behind it – is because people are making easy money out of it. After all, it’s the advertising networks themselves who are key beneficiaries of this fraud.

In this blog I hope to set out what you should do if you think you are a victim of fraud, and how not to be victim, and share some experiences our customers have shared with us in using our WebWHO tool to help them out.

What you should do about it
:
If you use Adwords or any PPC advertising, it is important that you spend some time monitoring your website visitors using popular tools such as Google Analytics, and look for signs of unusual click activity.

To identify unusual behavior, you must first become familiar with the usual visitor statistics that come from your website. Get to know the normal levels of activity for your site by frequently reviewing the numbers over a number of weeks or months. Here are some of the things to watch out for:
▪ Repeat visitors from the same IP address: this is usually the first thing to look for if you are trying to identify Click Fraud. Repeated visits from one IP address, especially if coming from one organization (such as a competitor) could be a sign of fraud. However, if the IP address is coming from an ISP (internet service provider) these could be legitimate. So check the times and frequency of these visits. Check also the keyword they used to come to your site via Google Adwords. All of this might not be easy to do unless you have supporting tools to help you, which we will discuss later.
▪ The Number of Entries from one IP address. This tells you the number of times that a particular IP user appears in your web log file. If a visitor seems to be visiting far too many times compared to the norm, this could be a case of fraud clicking. However, if this is coming from an ISP (serving possibly hundreds of users from their own homes) this is less suspicious. Look at the times of their visits, if they visited only a page (most fraudsters just click the ad to your page then leave) and the keywords they used.
▪ A high number of Returning Visits. An unusually high number of returning visits may indicate some suspicious activity on your site. Some tools can show you a history for each IP address so

at a glance you can see if there is anyone you should particularly watch out for.
▪ Discover more information about the IP Addresses in your web log files. This can be a tedious task if you use free tools like WHO IS, but a fruitful one. Luckily there are tools to help you out here again. Discover which organization or ISP they come from, their location, their frequency of visits etc. If the IP address is from a competitor or suspicious country, this may signify click fraud.
▪ Beware of Suspicious Countries. There are unscrupulous organizations that outsource the task of click fraud to others to boost their profits at your expense. Many of these third party click fraud operators are located in the following countries : Ghana, India, Morocco, Nigeria, Romania and Russia. If you get an unusual number of high clicks from these countries, this could indicate click fraud. Within Google Analytics, you have the Map area to help you out, but its not always easy to work out which ones are organic searches and PPC searches. Again there are specific tools

to help you in this.

As discussions on the Adwords Community show, the methods being used to commit click fraud are becoming increasingly sophisticated, but it is also becoming quite clear that if you show yourself to be no easy mug for taking it by detecting it early on, many of the fraudsters will turn to easier targets. For example, in our previous blog we described how you could block some suspicious IP addresses. This might be just enough to deter them and move on. Certainly, using the suggestions in this article should better enable you to protect yourself from these fraudulent practices.

How to avoid being a victim of click fraud
We should start by being frank and saying, if an organization is determined enough, and has the right resources, it’s almost impossible to stop them fraudulently clicking your adverts. Some of the activities that are difficult to stop is if they keep switching their IP addresses; using local ISP providers you really don’t want to block; or even using totally different locations around the globe to disguise themselves. The good news is that it certainly is possible to limit your financial loses, and in some cases stop them almost entirely if you want to take all the measures.

Additionally, we are informed that if you can prove you are a victim of click fraud, you can report it to your advert provider to claim a refund. If anyone knows how to report this with Google, let us know since it’s a common question from the Adwords Community, and with no obvious answer. Irrespective of this, if can identify a competitor or organization committing click fraud, you should at least send them a letter from your legal department – it’s usually enough to deter them from doing it again.

What customers have to say in using WebWHO to detect click fraud:
Perhaps we should have mentioned it before, but one of our strongest pieces of advice is to use our WebWHO product. For $25 a month, it provides you pretty much with all the things we mention you should watch out for … all within one main screen. Reports can also be generated and customized to show who exactly is clicking on Google Adwords, and if there is suspicious activity afoot.

The good news is that while cases of click fraud are detected, most of the feedback we get from our customers is that what they suspected to be click fraud was not the case. So what was causing all these poor click-through rate results? Well, that varies from case to case, but in a number of examples, the tool helped show that many of the clicks (that did not convert to a lead) was due to having the network feature on in Google Analytics. Here is one of our customer comments:

“WebWHO helped us understand who was clicking on our Google ads and from where. It turns out I had the network feature on. By turning it off I reduced my cost and improved my CTR. Thank you for your help.”

Click Fraud – The Conclusion
No-one is immune from click fraud, but often the reasons for poor Google Adword results is due to something else. By using tools such as WebWHO, you can determine if you are a victim of click fraud or just needing to fine-tune your ads better. While Google is making some great strides in reducing click fraud, they do not catch all illegal activity. It’s up to all of us who spend money on PPC advertising to take our own preventative measures if we want to avoid click fraud.

Tags: click fraud

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 26th, 2012at 1:31 am and is filed under Web Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

It won’t come as any surprise that the best list to use for any B2B email campaign is not one you bought from a third party but one that you built and carefully nurtured yourself over time. It sounds so obvious and logical, so why do so many organ

izations use purchased lists from ZoomInfo or Data.com or local providers such as those in Europe or Asia?

The main reason seems to stem from the lack of a well defined and disciplined process to build and maintain internal lists, and this seems to be true whether you are a large corporation or a small business.

For example, big corporations often suffer from having too many chefs, each living in their own island and offering only fractured lists. When attempts are made to centralize these lists it is often a cumbersome and flawed process. The result is that each division goes its own way and often purchases (in-part) duplicate lists. With smaller companies, the issue seems to be a lack of patience and time to see things done better. Consequently, they too purchase.

So each of them use purchased lists and, not surprisingly, with poor results.

Another big challenge with both internal and purchased lists is that they suffer from a data hygiene problem. As a result, it is not unusual to see lead generation campaigns using email records that have not been validated in quite some time. For this reason, we always advocate and carry out for our customers a 3 or 6 month check on all email lists since we know how much lists can deteriorate in a short time.

So what should you do about it? Should you abandon purchased lists, as many experts would insist? Well, my answer might surprise a few people when I say no, you shouldn’t. You see, it’s more a case of using both internal and purchased lists. First prioritize on keeping your internal lists healthy; but if you also take a responsible approach to new purchased lists and know their limitations, then these too can pay off for you.

My recommendation is based on experience. For example, in the last few projects we ran, we have seen internal lists produce as much as 50% of all the new potential leads generated in a campaign; the rest coming through the other usual channels of social media, online advertising and so on. Purchased emails contributed only 2% to 8% more leads. This might not sound impressive, but even a 2% contribution to your lead numbers can make a notable difference. And if these are then nurtured, they can be converted into part of your internal list you can more reliably depend on for the next campaigns.

So how does one manage purchased email lists so that they generate leads for you?

Here are a few of my tips for you:

• Provide a clear profile of whom you want to target (which organizations, titles etc). Get as detailed as you like, and if the email list vendor provides too many records, narrow down the criteria.
• Ensure they are validated. One tip is to also ask for records that have been updated/validated in at least the last 3 months, but this should not stop you from running your own validation check. Validation does not just mean that the email has the correct syntax, but that it actually works and will not end in a hard bounce. There are a number of ways to do this, which include using software than pings (but does not send) the email addresses to see if they are working; or use services (such as our own) to do this for you.
  We have found the use of software to validate emails to be not reliable enough (about 80% accuracy), hence we use them and other extra measures to try and get near 98% accuracy.
• Filter out unwanted records. This can be a cumbersome process but if you want customers, partners, gmails etc removed from the list, this is a necessary step in the process.
• Request opt-in. Before sending them an email with your offer, ask them to opt-in first. Many find this difficult to do, but again we have services that help you out here, and can carry this out on your behalf. This also applies to all those business cards you have from trade shows and aging email list you might have. Changing business cards to opt-in emails is one of our specialties.
  Also notice
  no fax payday loans

  that this step spots all hard-bounces that might still exist in the list, and removes them. This is actually an important step given that some email servers will penalize you if your bounce rate is higher than 2 percent, or if your unsubscribe rate is higher than 1%.

• Create a final cleaned up purchase list. With your list now validated and “opted-in”, you should now get no or few hard-bounces when you use the list to send your email.

Last but not least, get to know the email legislation that applies when using purchased lists. This varies from country to country, especially outside the USA such as Europe. If you need advise on this, just contact us via our website.

And that’s about it. I hope these tips help you get the most from purchased lists and produce the conversion rates to leads we are experiencing. If you are getting even higher conversion rates, please do drop me a line; I’m always curious to see how things can be done even better.Rich Text AreaToolbarBold (Ctrl + B)Italic (Ctrl + I)Strikethrough (Alt + Shift + D)Unordered list (Alt + Shift + U)Ordered list (Alt + Shift + O)Blockquote (Alt + Shift + Q)Align Left (Alt + Shift + L)Align Center (Alt + Shift + C)Align Right (Alt + Shift + R)Insert/edit link (Alt + Shift + A)Unlink (Alt + Shift + S)Insert More Tag (Alt + Shift + T)Toggle spellchecker (Alt + Shift + N)▼
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It won’t come as any surprise that the best list to use for any B2B email campaign is not one you bought from a third party but one that you built and carefully nurtured yourself over time. It sounds so obvious and logical, so why do so many organizations use purchased lists from ZoomInfo or Data.com or local providers such as those in Europe or Asia?
The main reason seems to stem from the lack of a well defined and disciplined process to build and maintain internal lists, and this seems to be true whether you are a large corporation or a small business.
For example, big corporations often suffer from having too many chefs, each living in their own island and offering only fractured lists. When attempts are made to centralize these lists it is often a cumbersome and flawed process. The result is that each division goes its own way and often purchases (in-part) duplicate lists. With smaller companies, the issue seems to be a lack of patience and time to see things done better. Consequently, they too purchase.
So each of them use purchased lists and, not surprisingly, with poor results.
Another big challenge with both internal and purchased lists is that they suffer from a data hygiene problem. As a result, it is not unusual to see lead generation campaigns using email records that have not been validated in quite some time. For this reason, we always advocate and carry out for our customers a 3 or 6 month check on all email lists since we know how much lists can deteriorate in a short time.
So what should you do about it? Should you abandon purchased lists, as many experts would insist? Well, my answer might surprise a few people when I say no, you shouldn’t. You see, it’s more a case of using both internal and purchased lists. First prioritize on keeping your internal lists healthy; but if you also take a responsible approach to new purchased lists and know their limitations, then these too can pay off for you.
My recommendation is based on experience. For example, in the last few projects we ran, we have seen internal lists produce as much as 50% of all the new potential leads generated in a campaign; the rest coming through the other usual channels of social media, online advertising and so on. Purchased emails contributed only 2% to 8% more leads. This might not sound impressive, but even a 2% contribution to your lead numbers can make a notable difference. And if these are then nurtured, they can be converted into part of your internal list you can more reliably depend on for the next campaigns.
So how does one manage purchased email lists so that they generate leads for you?
Here are a few of my tips for you:
Provide a clear profile of whom you want to target (which organizations, titles etc). Get as detailed as you like, and if the email list vendor provides too many records, narrow down the criteria.
Ensure they are validated. One tip is to also ask for records that have been updated/validated in at least the last 3 months, but this should not stop you from running your own validation check. Validation does not just mean that the email has the correct syntax, but that it actually works and will not end in a hard bounce. There are a number of ways to do this, which include using software than pings (but does not send) the email addresses to see if they are working; or use services (such as our own) to do this for you.
We have found the use of software to validate emails to be not reliable enough (about 80% accuracy), hence we use them and other extra measures to try and get near 98% accuracy.
Filter out unwanted records. This can be a cumbersome process but if you want customers, partners, gmails etc removed from the list, this is a necessary step in the process.
Request opt-in. Before sending them an email with your offer, ask them to opt-in first. Many find this difficult to do, but again we have services that help you out here, and can carry this out on your behalf. This also applies to all those business cards you have from trade shows and aging email list you might have. Changing business cards to opt-in emails is one of our specialties.
Also notice that this step spots all hard-bounces that might still exist in the list, and removes them. This is actually an important step given that some email servers will penalize you if your bounce rate is higher than 2 percent, or if your unsubscribe rate is higher than 1%.
Create a final cleaned up purchase list. With your list now validated and “opted-in”, you should now get no or few hard-bounces when you use the list to send your email.

Last but not least, get to know the email legislation that applies when using purchased lists. This varies from country to country, especially outside the USA such as Europe. If you need advise on this, just contact us via our website.
And that’s about it. I hope these tips help you get the most from purchased lists and produce the conversion rates to leads we are experiencing. If you are getting even higher conversion rates, please do drop me a line; I’m always curious to see how things can be done even better.
Path:

Tags: lead generation

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 14th, 2012at 6:11 pm and is filed under Lead Nurturing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

We got quite a response

to our last blog where we stated that at WebleadsB2B we use both WebWHO and Google Analytics.

Why use both of them? How do they differ? These were just some of the questions that we received.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 20th, 2012at 6:57 pm and is filed under Web Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

The interest in our product WebWHO (which provides the names of your web visitors) never seems to go ago – and why not? Who doesn’t want to know who is visiting their website?

Yet the technology we use to capture this information has changed over

the years, and with it, the way our customers use the product.

On the one hand, we still have the on-line marketers who use the product routinely to scan the names of latest visitors to their websites.

We also have the inside sales teams that use the information as a potential “foot in the door” to get appointments with prospective customers who visited their website.

Yet there are the others who

find it a bit creepy that you can detect

who is visiting your site. Other people also find it awkward to reveal that they know someone from a company who was looking at their web site. Let’s face it, most people still have the misconception that they can browse through the web anonymously. Sorry, folks, it just isn’t so.

Some interesting data is also coming back from our customer surveys. For example, while it’s true that 98% of your visitors go undetected, only about 30% are of interest to you as potential buyers. Still a great statistic, but not as high as some vendors in this market would claim it to be.

Also of interest: generally, our customers found that they already knew the prospects or customers looking at the site. At first, this might sound like it devalues the need for tools that tell you who is visiting your website, but no, the survey response shows the opposite; as one of our customer responses nicely explains:

“Greetings WebleadsB2B, 
I’ve used several web detection tools, and WebWHO is one of the better ones in getting the job done. It is most effective if we leverage the tool in the middle of our sales process, rather than at the beginning. For example, it’s great to know that ‘Company A’ has visited our site, but it’s even better to know that AFTER we have pitched to someone at ‘Company A’, showing they have responded to our pitch. Depending on your budget, we use WebWHO and Google Analytics for our web analytics needs.”

The point our customer raises about the value of knowing who visits your website after a pitch is good one.

Other values mentioned in the survey were “enhancing our prospect intelligence gathering process”, and “helping us measure our campaign results”. The latter does not surprise us. We use WebWHO the same way, and by seeing which companies came our campaign landing page, we can see how effective the campaign was it reaching our target audience.

So there you have it. Finding out who is visiting your website pages is as valuable in the middle of your sales process as it is at the start of it. To find out more about WebWHO, read our brochures or get a free trial.

Tags: lead generation, web analytics

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 26th, 2012at 11:31 am and is filed under Web Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

If you’ve been looking at ways to improve your lead generation, then there is no better place to look than your own website.

With the majority of buyers now using the internet to help them in their purchasing decisions, you should be asking, what mor

e can I do to optimize my website to find these buyers? Below we give you our 5 “must-do” actions:

1. Analyze your existing website

When was the last time you examined your website? What are the first impressions people get when they visit the site? Carry out some user tests even if it’s with your friends to see what general impression they get. Even better, if your site is aimed at a particular target audience, see if you can get some of them to pass on their general comments to you. Consider online surveys, or other useful free tools out there that allow online visitors to pass on their review comments to you.

Think also about the search engines trawling your site. They are important in ensuring your pages can be found when people enter search words. Use free tools, some of which are very helpful, to see how search engines read your site, and the keywords they find.

When analyzing your website, look into how it looks compared to your competitor sites. How do they rate compared to you? How does their navigation of

the site compare? Does the site look more appealing or more informative than your own? If you find they are engaging with their target audience better than your own site, then its time to invest in revamping your website.

However beautiful your site is, it’s no good if visitors are finding your competitor sites instead. How easy is their site found compared to yours? Is their site ranked above yours in important keywords? There are several good tools that give a good picture of how well you rank compared to others, and how many visitors you get compared to others, and how many inbound links you have compared to your competitors. You can even find out which keywords they target with Google Adwords.

2. Find out which are your best keywords

Keyword analysis is an important factor in getting the right people to your website. Including the right keywords in your web pages can help ensure your website is found before your competitors. Several methodologies and tools are available to make sure you select the right keywords.

Everyone wants the most popular keywords, but use the bounce rates (found in Google Analytics) to find out if these keywords really work for you. High bounce rates mean the keywords you are using are not working for you. Updating keywords is simple if you know basic HTML or have a decent content management system. However, inbound links are even more important, so consider ways of getting others to point to your website, including your chosen keyword in their link.

3. Convert your visitors into leads

Create tasty landing pages. Simple and direct landing pages continue to be among the best methods for lead generation. Treat landing pages almost like a marketing campaign figuring out the best ways to get your target audience to land on them. Include a link to the landing page in emails, social media, banner advertising, Google Adwords, and you name it – it’s all good in getting as much traffic as possible to your landing page.

Don’t forget about the anonymous visitors. 98% of visitors don’t leave their calling card, so monitor who is visiting and figure out ways to reach them. For this we recommend using our own product WebWHO (view brochure, request demo).

4. Investigate each inquiry

If an inquiry is someone who filled in a form on your landing page giving their contact details, discover everything about the ones that interest you the most as potential leads. It is said that the majority of inquiries are squandered away by sales and marketing, so enrich the data you have on each one. What’s that? You only have what they provide when they fill in a form? Wrong. There is so much more you can find out, from using their IP address to find out their location, to leveraging B2B data connectors such as from LinkedIn giving their history, experience, and education. For investigating inquiries, we recommend our product INVESTIGATE (view brochure).

5. Nurture your inquiries

Many of your potential leads will not be ready yet to be contacted by sales. So nurture them by sending opt-in email requests followed by a number of automated emails over a period of time promoting your expertise and products. We provide this service for our clients so it is all automated for you.

Curious to learn more? Contact us and we’ll be happy to send you the details.

Tags: B2B marketing, lead generation, online marketing

This entry was posted on Monday, April 2nd, 2012at 1:23 pm and is filed under Lead Generation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

One area that has progressed in the last few years is in the ability to capture as much information about your web visitors as possible. Before you used web analytics tools to view the clicks and visitor numbers, but you often knew nothing about the

vast majority (some 98%) of visitors who anonymously roamed your website leaving no contact details. Today, that has changed with a growing number of products and vendors focusing on the ability to convert anonymous online visitors into leads.

WebleadsB2B is one of these vendors. We launched WebWHO back in 2008 allowing our clients to identify and convert web visitors to something more tangible and meaningful. We then launched INVESTIGATE which focuses not so much on the anonymous visitor but the visitors who do fill in form, providing investigation capabilities that tell you much more about that visitor. In our view, to leverage inbound marketing you need to focus on both the anonymous and non-anonymous visitor. Since then, our scope has widened but it is not uncommon for us to work in projects where we help clients convert anonymous online visitors into identifiable personas, and then take them through a nurturing and lead

qualification process.

The interest in anonymous online visitors should come as no surprise. An analysis of inbound web visitors can truly provide a wealth of information that should be the basis for the first step in the lead generation process. Today, the possibilities are near endless for building a stronger prospect database to nurture and qualify them until they are mature enough to be handed over to sales.

But why are many companies not jumping at the chance of finding out so much more about their on-line visitors? The answer varies a lot from company to company. Some:

• Still have an outbound marketing mindset and cannot focus beyond this
• They have no process or strategy for inbound marketing leads
• They see inbound cheap car mechanic web-based conversion as only a “nice-to-have”
• They do not have sufficient resources
• They feel uncomfortable about approaching online visitors unless they show more intent, such as by calling
  them by phone or email.

Given the established fact that most buyers are now using the Internet, I remain a little puzzled by this hesitation. The technology now exists to achieve this and get the best from your inbound marketing efforts, so why not try it?

So for those who have not made the jump yet, ask yourselves:

• How does your organization track anonymous and non-anonymous online visitors?
• Does your organization just track clicks and visitors numbers using Google Analytics?
• What happens to the data you collect about your visitors?
• Is there a process in place to ensure that online inquiries are quickly and efficiently analyzed and investigated before they go through the sales cycle process?
• Do you know how to convert an anonymous visitor into a name you can follow up?

Please leave me a comment to share your thoughts.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 2nd, 2012at 12:55 am and is filed under Web Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

I’m genuinely surprised by the general disagreement on this question. I have been taking part in a discussion on this at the FOCUS community web portal, and I see a very even split between those that agree with the question and those that do not.sale viagra