Lead generation is a great way to drive sales and build qualified marketing lists. But when you’re putting in place a plan to work with digital lead suppliers beware: not all leads are born equal.

Australia (click to enlarge graph)

New Zealand (click to enlarge graph)

Lead generation has been a growth digital channel in Australia and New Zealand over the last few years. There are many suppliers – local and international  - offering their services to help build email databases or generate a constant stream of telemarketing leads.

Leads are generated from many different audiences and in many different ways. Three key lead sources include membership, ecommerce and publisher sites. These sites have one thing in common: they exist to provide a service to their audience with lead generation an ancillary revenue opportunity. There are also sites that exist for the sole purpose of generating and selling leads.

A review of data from actual campaigns run in Australia and New Zealand indicates that the value of a lead differs significantly based on its source. In other words: not all leads are born equal!

The analysis was carried out on leads from source to a sale on the client’s website. A subset of the results is presented here which focusses on the conversion rate from an email lead to the acquisition of a new customer.

The study found that 3Di’s own member rewards website Great Sites recorded the highest conversion rates in Australia and was also a strong performer in New Zealand relative to other lead sources. Great Sites was not only a top source in terms of lead conversion rates but was also able to deliver a high volume of leads. There are a number of reasons for this result.

• - Quality traffic sources used in member acquisition
• - Engaged and loyal membership
• - Multiple touch points across;
  • - offer path
  • - on-site featured offers
  • - email promotion

Another category of site that consistently produce quality leads are offer paths that are presented to users on ecommerce sites once the user has completed their purchase (transaction). Post-transactional paths – by their definition – are full of prospects with income that they are happy to spend online.

Publisher email databases and competition pages were also shown to be quality sources. When referring to ‘publishers’ we are excluding sites whose sole purpose is to generate leads. One of the contributing reasons publishers typically outperform standalone offer paths is that they generate quality traffic via their primary content.

The final group are sites that have been designed for the sole purpose of generating leads, often using competitions as the incentive to register and view offers. These sites can generate a large volume of leads and can play an important role in any lead generation campaign. They tend to produce lower quality leads in terms of conversion rates. They can also demonstrate large variations in quality from one path to another, and even in the same path over time. The reasons for this include:

• - Lower quality traffic sources
• - Misleading offer presentation
• - Too many competing offers
• - Incentivised registration
• - Incentivised leads

The leads from the standalone offer paths on average converted 60% less often than those from membership sites like Great Sites, ecommerce sites and publisher sites. And the best standalone offer path was almost 4 times as good as the worst. It is therefore vital to constantly monitor, optimise and manage these offer sources. The key is to know how each source actually generates traffic and how they convert this traffic into leads. This robust tracking and optimising is critical to maximising your lead generation return on investment.

To provide advertisers with a reliable, effective and transparent service 3Di has developed its own sophisticated lead generation platform and methodology and offers an end-to-end solution that takes the guess work out of lead generation. It allows advertisers to focus on their business while 3Di manages and optimises all their lead sources.

Talk to an Account Manager today:
Contact 3Di (Sydney)
Contact 3Di (Auckland)

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TPN Leads is a proven comprehensive lead generation service encompassing unique media, marketing services and technology. TPN Leads generates a constant stream of prequalified warm new business leads. TPNs flexible toolkit allows it to meet the requirements of a wide range of clients and industries whether B2C or B2B. Our expert team can advise on which solution is right for you. TPN Leads is suitable for any company looking to generate demand and drive new business. TPN Leads can be used to generate;

- Email sales leads
- Email newsletter registrations
- Prospect Engagement (lead nurturing)
- Tele-sales leads
- Postal Direct Marketing leads

All these leads are prequalified and opt-in; they have positively chosen to engage with you.

TPN Co-reg Network

One of the most popular media options TPN provides is Co-registration. “Co-reg” involves asking known users if they would like to be contacted by an advertiser about a specific offer or product. If they opt in then their details are automatically sent from the website displaying the ad to the 3rd party advertiser. TPN manages a network of Co-reg partners supported by TPNs unique co-reg ad server. TPN is delivering tens of thousands of sales leads and registrations every month. Advertisers simply pay per lead, typically between $2.00 and $15.00 depending on the type of lead required.

TPN Lead Nurturing System

Co-reg is very popular with telesales and DM marketers. However we have found that many other marketers are missing out on the opportunities offered by co-reg as they do not have a system or team to follow-up with all the leads it generates each day. TPN has developed a solution to this problem with its Lead Nurturing System.

Lead Nurturing is a form of Marketing Automation where the system delivers a series of email communications to the prospect depending on a predefined schedule. It can also send messages based on specific ‘trigger events’. These communications can be used to automatically engage with prospects, to further prequalify them and to even convert them online.  Online Reporting capabilities also allow the hottest leads to be identified and followed up.

Through its partners TPN can provide expert communication strategy, creative design and email copy writing. Typical communication strategies include;

- Simple download, link delivered via email
- Simple welcome email and subscription to a regular e-newsletter
- Sequence of emails; welcome, checkout Blog, Facebook, Twitter and an Offer
- Sequence of improving offers until online conversion occurs
- Sequence of product feature highlights
- Sequence of case studies
- Sequence of ‘useful tips’
- Full free e-learning course

These are normally delivered over a period of days or weeks.

To further extend engagement trigger events can be configured. For example by capturing the prospect’s date of birth, individual birthday offers can be automatically sent. Or downloads can be used to trigger an automatic follow-up after a defined number of days.

TPN Performance Media

Although Co-reg is a powerful and popular marketing tool which offers a guaranteed cost per lead, it is best suited to a long term ongoing campaign designed to deliver a constant stream of leads at a moderate rate. As there is often a need to increase the volume of leads over a specific period, or simply to generate as many leads as possible as fast as possible, we find a lot of co-reg clients also augment their co-reg campaign with performance media campaigns. These are purchased on a Cost Per Click basis, typically paying $1.00 to $3.00 per click (or $3 CPM). TPN operates extensive Email and Display performance networks offering marketers instant access to a flood of new business leads.

TPN Lead Capture & Score System

When buying traffic to drive lead generation one of the most critical factors is the prospect capture system used to turn clicks into qualified leads. Again, we found that many clients did not have a sufficiently effective lead capture approach and so we have developed a range of solutions to

maximise conversion rates and hence the campaigns Return on Investment. TPN offers an advanced lead capture form system which supports lead scoring based on answers given, as well as live feeds to 3^rd party CRM systems like SalesForce and the TPN Lead Nurturing System. This intelligent form system can also be enhanced by commissioning a new Landing page or running an online promotion. 3di can arrange both of these from our market leading partners.

Complementary Services

Landing Page Design

Our partners are experts in persuasion architecture and usability, designing landing pages offering unrivalled conversion rates. A dedicated campaign or product landing page will always outperform a standard website page as it can be designed with conversion optimisation at its heart, and typically has a single minded focus on conversion. www.MarketUnited.com

Great Promotions

For competition based lead generation programs we operate one of Australia’s most sophisticated and trusted promotions platforms www.GreatPromotions.com

Get in touch with our team to speak about pricing and service options to suit your campaign objectives.

info@3dinteractive.com.au

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Marketing Automation helps marketing departments to cut down the repetitive and time consuming task of email marketing. Specifying criteria and outcomes for tasks and processes using specific email software, which is then interpreted, stored and executed, increases efficiency and reduces human error.

There are three categories of software:

Marketing Intelligence uses tracking codes in social media, email and webpages to track the behavior of anyone interested in a product or service to gain a measure of intent. It can record which social media group or thread they followed, which link was clicked on in an email or which search term was used to access a website. Multiple link analysis can then track buyer behavior – following links and multiple threads related to product A but not B will show an interest only in A. This allows more accurately targeted response and the development of a nurturing program specifically targeted towards their interest and vertical market. Due to its interactive nature this has been described as Marketing Automation 2.0.

Marketing Automation has a focus on lead generation with targeted marketing programs to drive awareness and interest in a company’s products and/or services and nurture leads from first interest through to sale. Commonly used in business-to-business(B2B), business-to-government(B2G), or longer sales cycle business-to-consumer(B2C) sales cycles, Marketing Automation involves multiple areas of marketing and is really the marriage of email marketing technology coupled with a structured sales process as delineated by a CRM program.

Advanced Workflow Automation encompasses automation of internal marketing processes. These includes budgeting and planning, workflow and approvals, the marketing calendar, internal collaboration, digital asset creation and management and essentially everything that supports the operational efficiency of the internal marketing function. Typically these systems require a CRM or COM administrator to set up a complex series of rules to trigger action items for internal sales and marketing professionals to manually process (designing files, sending letters, sending email campaigns). This type of system increases marketers ability to deliver relevant content to relevant individuals at relevant times.

Key Functions of Marketing Automation

In order to effectively aid marketers in fully understanding customers and subsequently developing a strategic marketing plan, marketing automation tools (MAT) are designed to perform three key tasks:

• Development and analysis of marketing campaigns and customers
• Management of marketing campaigns
• Appropriate customer data organization and storage

Fully developed marketing automation systems provide information across all phases of the marketing process, including:

• Demand Generation
• Lead Management
• Lead Scoring
• Lead Nurturing
• Lead Generation
• Campaign Analysis
• Lead Qualification
• Sales Effectiveness

Speak to our team about marketing automation and lead generation techniques for your next campaign at Australia: info@3dinteractive.com.au or New Zealand: info@3dinteractive.co.nz

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The Performance Network (TPN), a premium performance based advertising network, has launched a co-registration option offering publishers a new revenue stream at the same time as offering advertisers increased customer leads.

Co-registration (co-reg) is a form of online lead generation that involves asking consumers if they would like to opt-in for third party offers when they have signed up on a site, it’s already widely used especially in the UK and USA, however this trend has only recently started to hit the Australian market in a significant way.

By having the option to purchase  co-reg via a network advertisers are able to easily take advantage of this more contemporary online marketing tactic to expand their campaign beyond the usual display advertising (banner ads).

Jaysen Du Plessis, Head of TPN is already seeing more and more  advertisers adding  this additional component into their marketing mix as the resulting increase in the advertisers return on investment is significant.

“Advertisers are only paying for actual leads they receive rather than paying per ad impression or per click.” Mr Du Plessis said.

“One of the most frequently asked questions we get from publishers is how can they make more money from their site. Co-reg is a great solution as publishers can earn money on a variety of offers being made on their site and the consumer does not even leave their website,” Mr Du Plessis said.

It is often difficult for many publishers to offer co-registration to their advertisers owing to the amount of technical development and campaign management involved to ensure that the information gathered is verified as well as not a duplicated lead already held by the advertiser. TPN has created an ad platform that manages this whole process as well as offers real time reporting. All a publisher needs to do is copy and paste some code on a page and the network will do the rest.

With co-registration, a relationship is formed between a website publisher and advertiser, where the advertiser can use the consumer information provided to the publisher to communicate directly with the consumer once they give their permission.

As consumers have specifically chosen which offers they are interested in before an advertiser can contact them it means the consumer expects to be contacted, they are genuinely interested in learning more and the advertiser therefore has a higher chance of achieving a conversion or sale.

TPN are offering co-reg campaigns across a range of premium Australian and New Zealand websites and are looking to expand this in 2011. Leads can include email, phone or postal data.

3dinteractive is the exclusive sales agent for TPN. To find out further information  please contact your Account Manager or contact 1300 806 986 / experts@3dinteractive.com.au

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When businesses are looking for a fun, creative way to engage with customers, boost their sales and enhance their relationships with consumers, a digital promotional campaign is one marketing tactic that often ticks all the boxes.

As the online sector continues to grow, more creative concepts for digital promotions are being thought up and we’re seeing exciting new forms of instant wins, games, competitions, lucky draws, sweep stakes and rank and wins.

As with all marketing efforts, attempts to cut corners and costs can lead to an ineffective digital promotion, so if you’re considering such a campaign, it’s worth knowing where companies often go wrong

Mistake 1: Over complicating the message

K.I.S.S – Keep It Simple Stupid!

Your customers don’t want to have to work too hard to win a prize. This is the key point to remember when implementing a digital promotions campaign, starting with the initial message you use to reach the consumer. Keep it simple! What are they going to win and how do they enter? If this information is lost in the flyer amongst detailed content, you will just as easily lose the customer’s interest.

A simple glance at the flyer should be enough to entice them to enter.

Mistake 2: Reinventing the wheel

Although for some companies, digital promotions are a new concept, they’ve actually been around long enough for a number of techniques and systems to be well and truly tried and tested. There is no reason for you to start from scratch; this is an easy way to make many of the most common mistakes.

Similarly, if you hire a team to run the promotions and they’re excited to create a new site or program that hasn’t been used before, you may get some innovative ideas but you’ll end up paying them for trial and error. Inject that energy into exciting creative but make sure the technical side of the campaign can run like clock-work.

Mistake 3: Too many barriers to entry

If you compare digital promotions to traditional competitions when people had to cut out a coupon, fill it in, buy a stamp and post the entry, you’ll understand how much easier the digital age is!

We like things to be easy, so by adding barriers of entry, for instance asking customers to purchase 20 of your product to make them eligible for entry; it’s just too much hard work! Even including a game of skill like making entrants write in 25 words or less why they deserve to win the major prize, automatically cuts a large number of possible entrants from your competition.

Not only do you lose the people who can’t be bothered to write an entry, there are also those who just believe someone will do a better job so they don’t bother trying. The best advice is to remove as many entry barriers as possible and open up the promotion to as many people as possible.

Mistake 4: Offer prizes customers don’t want

It’s like giving your dad socks for Xmas…

If you’re running a competition on a men’s razor packet, you’re not going to have the winning prize as a luxury spa treatment as this is not really going to interest your target audience. If the prize is totally irrelevant to your customer you’re going to find it very difficult to get people to enter.

The other mistake is not making the prize attractive enough or big enough to make it worth the customer’s time to enter. This mistake could be in the form of spending $5,000 on prizes compared to doing an underwritten promotion for a $1 million lucky dip at the same cost.

Mistake 5: Not storing data securely

With so many options now-days for people to enter competitions and sign up for mailing lists, consumers are becoming savvy about where they share their personal details. If you’re not storing your entrant data securely, you could be one step away from breaking privacy laws and seriously annoying your customers who suddenly end up with unsolicited marketing materials.

If you don’t have a way of storing sensitive data securely you increase the risk of data loss or manipulation which can damage your business’ credibility.  Do it right the first time and treat your entrants’ personal information with the utmost respect.

Speak to the 3Di team for more information about the benefits of hosting a digital promotion and for ideas on interactive online promotions for your or your client’s brand.

1300 806 986
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About Great Promotions

Great Promotions is a comprehensive end to end digital promotions service build around a powerful digital promotions platform. The technology platform offers leading advertisers and promotion agencies a reliable, secure, flexible and proven platform to meet all their digital promotional needs. Available supporting services include promotion strategy, creative, development, media and campaign management. The platforms list of features is extensive including; Instant Win, Scratch Cards, Rank & Win, Q & A, Trivia, Leader Board, Sports Tipping, Interactive Games, Unique Entry Codes, Coupons, Tell a Friend and Social Media Integration supported by a powerful CMS & live reporting.

www.greatpromotions.com.au

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