eMarketing Association Membership

Contact me: netmarketing@comcast.net   >> Net Marketing Inc. Services <<

I got my start in internet sales and marketing 10 years ago as a Marketing Manager when I had an opportunity to pioneer the online marketing for a a modest $9 million company with a small sales and service staff. At the time I used traditional marketing tools — direct mail, print ads, catalogs, sales collateral to spread the word.  (by the way, word of mouth is still the killer app).

I was a reluctant hero when I showed the CEO how we could get to the top engine rankings in minutes using pay-per-click for a quick infusion of leads. After getting PPC management in place, I got to work learning about organic search. It took about six years to grow to a thriving $40 million global industrial sales organization with an e-commerce call center, service department, and outside sales team.  I was thrilled with this experience to bridge IT and marketing teams with “tech-marketing”. Eventually I trained some of the IT folks in this new marketing side so we could work together building a site that dominated the search engines at that time and the company still enjoys excellent ranking today for a majority of its products. Today the call center simply takes orders as fast as possible and makes very few outbound calls to get business.

Breaking it down…

Search Engine Marketing: I planned and managed 25 Google AdWords campaigns and Yahoo Search Marketing with 75,000 key phrases. One of the keys to my success is that I didn’t just present a lot of numbers and charts so the stakeholders could ask “so what”. Yes, I gave some analysis followed by actionable insights. Why were they abandoning our cart !! Well look here, since we added all those terms and conditions early in the checkout … you get the idea.

Search Engine Optimization: Cross-trained IT members in search engine optimization techniques to get products indexed on major search engine natural listings. Developed and generated over 75,000 web landing pages containing product details for superior indexing on search engines. Ontimized content based on analytics for improved Google Page Rank.

Web Analytics: Segment and test email, search engine marketing, and affiliate marketing campaigns to recommend action items for web-based initiatives. My analyses showed that partnerships I established increased traffic from Referring Sites by 40%. Partnership traffic and now comprises 9% of total site traffic and growing.

Web Design and Programming: Designed, programmed product search features on company website, PlcCenter.com, using SQL Server, Visual Studio (ASP.NET), and html editing software. Managed 3 graphic designers.

Database Administration: Manage database of 2.5 million products advertised on company and affiliate websites. Direct a team of 5 data support persons for this project.  Maintain database that automates fulfillment of direct mail and email campaigns.

Corporate Communications: Developed and managed marketing database used by marketing support personnel to generate customer mailing lists and provide fulfillment lists to direct mail processing center. Provided sales lead reports to account managers for Customer Relationship Management. Directed graphic designers creating online and offline content. Strong writing skills and an education in marketing communications enables me to see that the company’s online message mirrors offline branding.

Some of my prior assignments include being marketing manager for Acrodyne Industries, leading the company’s branding of its digital broadcasting products. Greg got his start in marketing communications graduating from NATO’s Defense Information School as a U.S. Navy Journalist.

Drop me a line: netmarketing@comcast.net

So the following approach can be used by Marketing to do the “backend work”, setting up contacts and tasks in the CRM for Sales to pursue. Here, rather than ask salespersons to set up their tasks, you, as the CRM expert, use your database marketing skills and intimacy with your CRM tool, to feed your salespersons the leads that they are to follow up on.

Integrated Sales and Marketing
(Making it easy to use)

Purpose:  Integrate Sales and Marketing activities using the Contact-By-Salesperson (CBS) report for managing outbound campaigns. Business Units (GM’s) and Support Unit (Marketing) will use this Customer List as a roadmap toward qualifying and placing contacts into the “Contact Pipeline” for generating new business.

The premise here is that rather than have salesperson set up CRM tasks in P21, Marketing will use P21’s Call Center Task Generation feature to push Tasks into P21 for each salesperson. The benefit is that with this approach, Tasks are Integrated, and Sales and Marketing are simultaneously targeting the contacts chosen in the CBS report.

ABOVE: Task Management can be used for salespersons and marketing to focus on accounts and contacts.

The activities required are:

1. 1.       Set Parameters/Expectations
2. A pre-defined number of contacts need to be touched monthly — either created, or qualified in the case of contacts existing in P21. A pre-defined number of Outbound Calls will be made by the salesperson assigned to the contact according to the CBS report.
   1. 2.       Data Cleansing
       Marketing needs to address:   1) Sales Rep ID not assigned   2) Contact Types (Customer or Ship To) inconsistencies. These issues are being addressed and require ongoing attention. During the Contact Pipeline management initiative. Reports are being generated on a weekly basis identify data discrepancies.
   2. 3.       Contact by Salesperson Report (CBS)
   3. The CBS identifies contacts and the salesperson responsible. This list is used by GM’s and Marketing to coordinate sales and marketing efforts in generating opportunities. These contacts are the ones placed into the CRM Contact Pipeline.
   4. Segmentation: The CBS can be filtered based on sales activity for contacts. For example, contacts with no sales history, contacts with sales history but need reactivation, etc.Note: Not all salespersons have the same capacity, so the requirement may vary.

1. 4.       Contact Maintenance Training
   Marketing provides continued training. To correctly enter contact information, the following must training must occur and become standard practice among users:

1. Marketing reviews Contact Maintenance steps with all persons who touch P21 contact information including basic contact setup, Ship To Address validation, setting the “Contact Type” and using the Classes tab.
2. Salespersons fill out a Contact Maintenance form to aid in capturing new contact information

Note: Historically (January 2011), salespersons create on average 2 contacts per day. With continued training, this is a manageable number of contacts to be entered correctly by each salesperson.

1. 5.        Integrated Sales and Marketing
   “Pipeline” refers to the Sales and Marketing activities that are triggered when Sales qualifies a contact (existing or new) and requests Marketing support.
   1. Step One: Marketing places contacts identified in the Customer List (See Section 2) into the Pipeline (P21 Task Maintenance) . Contacts now appear in salesperson’s P21 Task Maintenance window.Note: this approach eliminates the need for salespersons to set up Tasks. Marketing can batch enter multiple tasks that will appear in the salesperson Task Maintenance queue. This is made possible through P21’s Contact Fast Edit function.
   2.  Step Two: Salespersons select contacts in Task Maintenance and make an outbound call to pull up the contact and qualify.
   3. Salespersons choose to send qualified contacts an introduction packet using the existing CRM Literature Request drop-down. There is minimal change to what Salespersons already doing (e.g. literature requests) to trigger Marketing to follow-up with communications.

i.      Capabilities Brochure: personalized with stamped business card

ii.      Email Greeting: Personalized plain text email greeting from salesperson and a brief listing of our capabilities.

iii.      Post Card: Special offer on front, Salesperson contact information on back

iv.      Product Catalog (modify back to be self mailer

v.       First Order/Next Order, send gift

Salespersons mark their Tasks complete once they make the outbound call. This clears the Task from the Salesperson’s queue.

1. 6.       Benchmarks and Success Metrics:
2. Outbound Call Report
3. Measure revenue increases for all contacts, including new contacts in the Pipeline reached via Outbound Calls and Marketing Touches.

Summary: This plan is designed to coordinate Sales and Marketing efforts on the same group of customer contacts –in other words, working together.

Here’s an outline of the CRM Best Practices I implemented:

Important: If your organization has geographically disperse locations, form a Panel made up of Power User/CRM Champions  who assist in reinforcing day-to-day training at their locations. This person will also be the voice of users at their location, giving feedback to the committee.

What do you want to know? Sit down with your sales team and ask “what 10 questions about our customers do we want to know?

Task Scheduling: Meet with account representatives and review their Targeted and Assigned Accounts.2.            Agree on 5 Targeted Accounts to be cultivated over the next 3 months. Use CRM Task Scheduling Tools to Assign the Task to the salesperson. This will allow Task Notifications to send updates upon completion of the task (such as an Outbound Call)

Sales Force Automation: Completion of the Outbound activity should trigger marketing communications events. Become an expert at querying the customer database for your outbound marketing initiatives such as personalized email welcome messages, welcome kits and ongoing communications.

Have sufficient resources: Adding more contacts than you can actually follow up on will result in database full of unqualified contacts ! I’ve seen cases where more than 76% of Assigned Contacts had no sales.

Measure the ROI: CRM Task Reports should be linked with sales data (by Contact ID, Ship To ID, etc.) to show growth in revenue. Once you are able to do this, your organization will embrace CRM tools. Without the link to revenue, the perception of the tool over time may be that it is nothing more than MS Outlook with some bells and whistles.

I’ll end here with a graph that summarizes the process with emphasis on the maintenance of your customer database during your CRM implementation:

– Set Benchmarks, define what you want you want to accomplish and what success means

- Data Cleansing: Before you start reaching out to the contacts, do a little housekeeping

- Contact Report: Reach agreement on who the contacts are. Tag them for targeting.

- Customer Maintenance: Hold training on how contacts and company information should be entered

- Integration: Sales and Marketing need to be coordinated in outbound touches using the CRM

- Metrics: First cycle is completed. Measure how things are working. Improve with each cycle.

For example, having database skills has allowed me to extract data and pull images together into an MS Access report to present a catalog that includes item numbers,  product descriptions and images.  Or update  a “live” database that feeds a web page containing the dataset. Or something as simple as output a .pdf that can be printed or delivered through the web. Yes, people still like to print stuff.

Having the knowledge to actually PERFORM these actions, gains the respect of anyone you might direct to do these things. As my career marches forward, I am surprised at how valuable this is, and more importantly, the people skills that makes the implementers want to perform for you.

The most challenging part of having such a skill set is differentiating yourself from the IT folks. The best way to explain is that “you know enough to be dangerous.” So as tempting as it is to venture into that world, I’ve had to draw the line somewhere, and accept, at least in my case, that I’m not a coder, and certainly not a systems administrator. I am just a guy who loves to apply technology in creative ways and generate revenue.

In marketing, it is extremely important to associate yourself with the “revenue side” of things. So I’ve positioned myself as a Sales/IT “liaison”. Stay close to the money and build your people skills. Unless you like talking to a computer all day. That’s just not me.

Greg Carter, NBC Interview

In a tight economy and looking for ways for “guerilla marketing” tactics, here’s one I used a few years back when the economy was in similar straits as it is today. Yes, e-Bay. I’ve launched an entire new product division just through a test on ebay that proved hugely profitable.

I listed 10 products, they sold, so I listed 60,000 more. They’re still selling today on the company’s main site, primarily from traffic that leaves the ebay site “About Me” page. Go to ebay Stores and do a search on PlcCenter. Look for the obvious link to the the About Me page on the main store page. All the links in the About Me paragraph reviewing our products take you directly to the our main site.

Ebay won’t advertise the fact  that you can have as many links to your About Me page on your main store page, and in turn, have as many links to your main site in your About Me page. Still not convinced of the traffic you can get?

Check out the tour I gave NBC cameras when we topped the nation in transactions on ebay during 2007-2008.

To measure Payroll Deferrals: Deferrals/Online Deferral Transactions to see the monthly trend in transactions offline for this channel compared to ordering the Deferral online.

The get the rollup of all Web Transactions: Web Transactions/All Channel Transactions (including Web). See the chart above. Notice the little red “forecast” line on the right side of the chart. As time goes on, the Blue “Actual” line and the “Forecast” line will intertwine. If this channels percentage of online orders stays dips downward, is that bad? Not necessarily. You may want this if there are promotions or other business reasons that are causing this. A dip in orders for this channel could be a red flag however if there have been some changes to this section of the site causing customers to bail and use the Contact Us page to do business with you. Check your referring pages to the Contact Us page. Are they coming from this Channel which is receiving fewer online orders? If you do have an FAQ page, don’t forget to measure exits to Contact Us page. If FAQ page or other content not answering the customer, then exits to the Contact Us page are a red flag that your website is not serving the customer online, forcing them to take yet another step by contacting you by phone or email. In our case here, the choices for contacting us were call center representative (expensive) or Voice Response Unit (phone tree/keypad). Remember, each additional step you require the cusotmer to take in getting what they’re looking for raised the chance by 10% that they will bail.

Performing Channel Shift of lends enable you to look at the page(s) for each Channel and compare them to the trend. If conversions are down in the Deferral Channels the Deferral page one of your Top Exit Pages. will uncover key metrics. Also look at your Path Analysis for the FAQ page being a Top Referring page.

Channel Shift is one of the best segmentation techniques you can use. Every business has different channels through which customers reach your product or service. You should definitely see an upward trend — even spikes where you introduced promotions or new products. If you are not for the most part seeing an upward trend, something is usually wrong. If you are doing a good job with optimziation, design or building awareness of your online presence, then visits and visit duration should move upward. If they are, seriously think about the purpose of your website. Many times what you need to focus on is not your online efforts, but good old fashion WOM (word of mouth) to get customers using your site. I’ll discuss a real life example of how I recently solved this. Remember your salespersons on the front line (hint). Focus on the site as a tool that will not replace what used to be the traditional sales model. Assure salespeople it will only enhance the experience. Ugh, what about the commission issue? Make sure you have an e-business liaison who can communicate your online strategy to the business units and communicate business needs back to your development team. Stay tuned.

Tangential to this project, any CSRs touching one of over 2 million SKUs must assign the part number/item to one of 30 categories. In the end, the Generic Descriptions and Categories are joined by part number. As you might have guessed, the goal of this project is to prepare the data for shopping engines. The data is immediately being put to use on our own ecommerce site, which is navigated through a short series of drop-down menus that guide the customer through the buying decision to the shopping cart.

If you are planning to use CSE to sell your products, you must undertake this kind of effort. This is the best way to ensure correct placement of your products through your data feed and into the CSE where consumers can easily find what they’re looking for. Most importantly, remember that with large volumes of products it’s easy to focus on quantity and not the quality of your data. If you’re going to pay for performance in the engine, don’t get caught up in counting the products you list. Instead, make the products you list, count.

Payment is made to the Publisher when an agreed upon goal has been met by the shopper, such as a purchase or filling out a form. The link that the shopper clicks on at our publishers’ sites is tagged so that the transaction can be tracked and rewarded. For example, the advertisers may pay 25 cents when a form is filled out to generate a lead. Or, the advertiser may agree to a 25% commission paid to the Publisher… very reasonable considering the customer might now be with the advertiser for a “lifetime.” The payment transaction is usually managed by a third party such as Commission Junction. Or, the tracking can be done in an analytics program where the link from the ad is also tagged.

This is just one of a number of strategies you can deploy to build your affiliate program. Think carefully about which side of the affiliate model — advertiser or publisher — suits your business. It may suit both sides, or you may be content like I am to focus on our core e-commerce business while our publisher affiliates send traffic my way. I give up a substantial piece of the profit due to paying a commission on the first sale, but if we play our cards right we keep that customer for life.

Greg Carter has served as online Marketing Manager for Radwell International since 1999. He has recently been assigned responsibility for building the company’s online inventory of over 2 million items. He also trains IT and marketing staffers how to use the internet to acquire and convert customers.

]]> http://m1stermarketing.wordpress.com/2007/11/02/building-your-affiliate-network/feed/ 1 m1stermarketing http://m1stermarketing.wordpress.com/2007/10/29/link-building-with-high-index-referring-sites/ http://m1stermarketing.wordpress.com/2007/10/29/link-building-with-high-index-referring-sites/#comments Mon, 29 Oct 2007 20:56:03 +0000 Greg Carter http://m1stermarketing.wordpress.com/2007/10/29/link-building-with-high-index-referring-sites/ ]]> We are know that Google Page Rank scores websites heavily based on their “link popularity”. More sites pointing to you means you are popular! And if you get popular sites – those with a lot of pages indexed by Google pointing at you – then you are worthy of being higher in Google search results. I’ve used the “site:www.[partnersite].com” method to find sites in my industry that have a high number of pages indexed by Google. The number of this site’s pages indexed by Google appear at the top right of the page. Type a popular keyword into Google and see what sites are good prospects for you based on their Page Rank “votes”. Then use this method to see which sites have a high number of pages indexed. Invest time and resources into getting your products listed on these sites. Then watch Analytics and see the number of “Referring Site” visits rise.

A search engine strategy usually goes something like this.Setup our Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing accounts to give the call center an immediate boost.– at a cost. Next, research keywords and phrases that are popular searches in top search engines and write good content using these words and phrases. Be careful not to “stuff” the pages. Somewhere around 10% of your copy containing the key terms is a good rule. Finally, get well indexed sites to link back to you either by link exhange or listing your products for sale on the site with a link pointing to your checkout page for that product. These are some basics.

Where you will likely have most of your success is building great landing pages which are crawled via your site map. I’ve had astounding success building product detail landing pages on sites with hundreds of thousands of pages that attract search engines to put products at or near the top of the first page on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Search result link to Landing Page

The following method is how I did it, albeit a bit “old school” according to a recent reader comment later in this post.

Explain to your webmaster that your goal is to get indexed in search engines.  e-commerce have products, often lots of them stored in a database. I recommend working with you IT folks to establish a connection to our backend database’ I’ve made a SQL connection to the database and run a Visual Basic routine to loop through product records and outpiut static html pages to a site directory. The number of pages could be 100 or 100 million !

From the search result, visitor lands here and can proceed to checkout. Notice the part number in bold is exactly what they typed in the search engine. The title of the landing page and the name of the file (page) in the site directory is also the part number name.

Wrap the routine with a bit more code, for example, ASP,Java and some html and you’re outputting some pretty awesome product detail pages for the engines to crawl. These are the pages that will eventually appear in the search results for your customers to land on. I suggest building a search feature into each of the pages subtly sugges that you’ve got a lot of products to choose from. Be careful here though. You’ve got the prospect where you want them — In the moment, ready to buy — so be careful not to lead them off the “buy” page. You want them in the cart, adding to the basket where they can always continue shopping.

At this point I’m sure many of you are saying this method is “old school” as one reader commented recently. Jack Mardack from eventbrite.com summarized a better, more current method that is much more current:

Jack recommends “a dynamic system builds the pages for you as they are called on the fly, much like a CMS. In fact, if you want to read some possibly-instructive documentation, I would take a look at Drupal and specifically at the Node Import Module — http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/node_import, which allows you to match data input fields from a CSV to output fields on a page template. Very powerful.”

Thank you Jack !