Lead Management Resources » Social Media and Lead Generation

Share your credit card purchase transactions on Blippy

Paddu — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 05:01:16 +0000

A new Twitter like service, named Blippy, is in private launch. The tool provides the answers for the question “What are your friends buying?”, similar to “What is happening” in Twitter. Take a look at http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/11/blippy/ post on TechCrunch. With all the privacy and massive data breach issues around, will people share their specific purchase information on the web?

Here are the views on Blippy from Phil Kaplan aka Pud (founder):

Insurance Lead Management Resources for Agents and Brokers from LeadPro247

Paddu — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 16:01:04 +0000

While this blog serves as a lead management resource center for small and medium sized businesses and marketing professionals, a dedicated blog has been launched by LeadPro247 lead distribution, tracking and management service providers to cater to the Insurance Lead management needs of Agents, Brokers and professionals. Insurance lead segment is one of the competitive areas in internet lead generation and agents have started using internet generated leads increasingly. The entire insurance lead generation and management domain has undergone a sea change in the past couple of years.

The blog is located at http://www.Insurance-Leads-Management.Com. The subjects covered in the resource center include Insurance lead generation, leveraging social media by agents, buying internet leads, evaluating third party lead companies and lead providers / vendors, assessing insurance lead quality, lead tracking best practices, lead delivery and tracking processes, drip emails (autoresponders) for lead nurturing and automatic follow-up, insurance lead tracking software tools, lead management tips, tricks and guidelines, automating routing of leads to insurance agents, and effective lead conversion methods.

The entire spectrum of the insurance industry is covered. Health, Life, Auto, Home, Commercial / Business, Annuities, Renters and other insurance lead management professionals can benefit from these resources. The insurance industry centric blog will be a great complementary tool in you are in the insurance service industry.

Social Media for your Business Survival

Paddu — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 02:35:10 +0000

Whether you are running a business or working for business, you just cannot ignore Social Media. Not anymore. It is not just about lead generation or sales growth. Social networking media combined with the web 2.0 tools and resources is becoming an ecosystem. Take look at the following brief video about social media and its impact on the consumers and businesses.

Effective Lead Response Management to Convert More Leads

Paddu — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 20:01:07 +0000

Lead Response Management is the process of responding to and managing the inquiries / sales leads in a timely, consistent fashion. While choosing and deploying a Sales Lead Collection, Tracking and Management software system will help you in the process, this alone will not result in lead conversion. The business lead management software is just a tool in the hands of a marketer which helps to capture leads from internet and other sources, route to sales reps, provide real time alerts and management the sales process. Lead Management includes lead response management phase.

Lead Tracking and Management Processes

In the era of Internet Lead Generation and sky high expectations from the consumers and prospects, it is essential to equip yourselves with resources and lead management processes for achieving a great sales conversion rate. Here is set of great resources on lead response management and allied areas, including research studies from MIT and Kellogg.

http://www.leadresponsemanagement.org/research

If you are converting the leads for your business, then effective lead response management is a critical phase of your marketing and sales process.

If you are an internet lead generation company and distribute the captured leads to the buyers, it is essential to deliver the prospect information to the end buyers in real time using a lead collection and distribution software system as the delay in response will result in lost customers.

Twitter populated by bots

Sue — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 14:28:53 +0000

24% of tweets are by bots: What does this mean?

Social media networks like Twitter have become and indispensable part of Internet Marketing. Giant Corporations use Twitter to reach out to their customers and get valuable feedback. A recent Sysomos study has revealed that 24% of tweets are by bots. Sounds cold, uncaring and not very social?? Probably but not actually so. There are a lot of situations when bots are useful.Tweeting of blog updates,collecting tweets on a specific topic from twitter users etc. Take a look at this Mashable article for more examples.

Most internet marketers automatically post their blog updates to Twitter. Although these are automatic updates, it does not mean that they don’t care (as long as the blogs contain relevant material). This is like drip- emails or newsletters; they are sent automatically but the content is original every time. Bots spell doom only if the tweets are from various sources and not very original most of the time.

A company using bots to follow keywords may still seem ’social’ if it replies to people with appropriate comments. Just following all customers based on keywords and automatically tweeting pages is not going to make anyone happy. Auto-reply bots; Not very cool!!

So the conclusion: Use bots wisely and only when needed. They cannot replace the human connection!!The whole point of Social media is to be social. Bots can only make it easier in part.

Hear the Voice of your Customers with Online Surveys

Sue — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 00:24:50 +0000

Most of the small businesses and entrepreneurs can find many prospects (or leads) in their own backyard -their past customers. They often forget the customers once the sale is made, payment is processed and product / service is delivered. While the profit margins may not support pampering of the customers and engaging them on constant basis (as done by few large customer centric businesses), tapping their shoulders once in a while in this virtual world is not a cost-prohibitive exercise.

Starter: Email Marketing

The moment “customer engagement” is mentioned, many of us jump to the conclusion that newsletter communications with Email Marketing is the only cost effective way. While there is no denying that email marketing is a great tool in the hands of customer engagement managers, we have to remember that email marketing is an one way street. Information is fed by the marketing organization to the customers. Email Marketing Campaign Analytics data does provide an insight into the customers’ interest and engagement. Metrics such as email open rates, click rates and unsubscription rates helps to understand whether the customers are reading the email communications and the level of interest.

High Pedestal: Social Networking Media

However there is no way to have a conversation with them. Social Networking and Web 2.0 tools such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Forums and Blogs stand taller than email marketing in the conversation aspect. You can hear their feedback, comments, opinions and complaints by listening to the customers’ conversations in the social media, if you have a good presence in these communities. With a plethora of social networking media crowding the current market place, it is often difficult to catch the conversations in all corners of the Web 2.0.

Direct Dialog: Online Surveys

Remember that we are talking about your past customers, not some unknown, futuristic consumers or generation X or Y crowd. You have all the information about these customers in your database, you had positive experience in dealing with them, you made money out of their purchases, and you have their permission to talk to them – or to tap their shoulders. Then, why do you need spys in the social networking communities or use one way communications? In fact, most of your customers would love to interact with you.

Enter Online Survey solutions and Customer Feedback Management systems. You can reach directly speak with them and request them to provide their feedback. You can segment the customers based on their profile (already available with you) and ask the right questions – relevant to them. Online survey planning, survey questionnaire design, data collection and results analysis takes only few minutes! And it costs (almost) nothing!

Interacting with customers with online survey tool takes many names:

Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Patient Satisfaction Surveys
Website Usage Feedback Surveys
Online Shopping Experience Surveys
Incident Response Satisfaction Surveys
Employee Performance Feedback Surveys
Product Satisfaction Surveys
Warranty Service Experience Surveys
What Else Can We Do For You Serveys

By whatever name you call it, it all means the same – getting feedback from your customers, engaging them with product updates, and preparing them for the next sale!

The surveys can be made of simple one question poll, or 5 question quick survey or 30 question deep conversation. It depends on the customer segment, purpose of survey, relevancy of the survey, and customers’ interest in taking up the survey.

Don’t Over Do It

This rule applies for any marketing strategy – whether it is the (hated) telemarketing, email marketing, social networking posts or online surveys. Make sure that the right sized surveys are sent to right customer segment (target), at right time with right content. Do it right, the customers will keep coming back to you.

Voice of the Customers

Surveys (or reserach?) show that surveys are the most preferred medium / source to obtain information from the market. Here is some statistics from the 2009 Voice of the Customer Survey conducted by 1 to 1 Media:

Satisfaction Surveys – 44%

Focus Groups – 14%

Call Recording from Contact Center – 11%

Customer Advisory Board – 11%

Pulse Surveys – 4%

Net Promoter – 3%

Branded Online Community – 1%

Social Media Sites – 1%

Other Sources – 10%

Go ahead and leverage the online surveys to hear the voice of your customers and make some more money! Online Survey solutions come in all sizes, shapes and colors nowadays. You do not need any software to install or get trained. Go online, subscribe to a survey solution and design and deploy a survey in few minutes. Do spend sometime in analyzing your customer lists and suitable survey topics before hitting the go button. The software solutions provide real time survey data analysis and reporting for you to see the results as soon as your customer clicks the ‘Done’ button.