Stay Connected with RSS Ray: RSS Ray on LinkedIn RSS Ray on Twitter RSS Ray on MySpace RSS Ray on Facebook
Free Podcasts via iTunes Free Podcasts via Feed

Posts Tagged ‘crm’

eBay eCommerce and Digital Body Language

Monday, March 2nd, 2009

Last week on Online Marketing with RSS Ray:

Segment One

RSS Ray interviews Jen Cano, VP of Education, Hammertap, LLC.

What You’ll Learn:

  • How to find products that are in high demand with your customers.
  • Tips for increasing sell-through rates.
  • How to create a niche site, populated with eBay products.
Listen Now!

Additional Resources:

eCommerce Marketing Podcasts

Hammertap’s Website

eBay

Segment Two

RSS Ray interviews Steven Woods, Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer, Eloqua

What You’ll Learn:

  • Why the traditional sales cycle is dead.
  • How following the buying cycle can greatly increase sales.
  • How to correctly read your customers digital body language.
Listen Now!

Additional Resources:

Understanding Digital Body Language

Eloqua’s Website

Digital Body Language Blog

Understanding Digital Body Language

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

Steven Woods, CTO of Eloqua, explains key concepts from his new book Digital Body Language.

Digital Body Language

In today’s digital age, the behavior of prospective buyers – the way they identify, understand, evaluate, and buy products – has fundamentally changed. In the past decade, buyers have achieved new capabilities to understand an industry’s trends, translate that into business pain/opportunity that can be addressed, assemble a list of potential vendors, and analyze the best solution for their specific needs – all without the involvement of a sales professional.

Buyers are leveraging these new information sources, rendering the salesperson to a secondary role (or even a non-presence) – particularly early in the process.  As the professional salesperson somewhat fades from view, so, too, does his ability to observe and understand the buyer. 

In this environment, it is far more challenging to align the prospect’s buying process with the company’s selling process – which are no longer synonymous.  And that carries significant implications for lead qualification and hand-off.  When a prospect appears on the corporate Web site – perhaps to download a white paper – he is most likely merely “kicking the tires” and is not ready to buy.  As a result, the sales rep disqualifies the lead and ejects the prospect from the funnel.  It’s not that the prospect isn’t going to buy – he’s just not going to buy right now.

This creates the “leaky funnel” with which most marketers are painfully familiar.  They devote huge efforts to generating raw leads, but if those leads aren’t in a perfectly synchronized phase of their buying process, the sales team will waste marketing’s efforts by ignoring the lead. Sirius Decisions found that, of the leads passed over to sales, a shockingly low 20 percent actually received follow-up from the rep. Of that 20 percent, the rep sets aside 70 percent of them as “disqualified” – even though subsequent objective analysis shows that 80 percent of them eventually buy a solution (usually from another company). They were good leads – just early leads.

So what should we, as marketers, do to meet these growing challenges?  The answer requires understanding the buyers’ web activity – their digital body language — in context of how you are communicating with them.  Here are a few key things to look for and how you can respond.

  1. Know where the prospect is in the buying process.  By looking at downloads, areas of interest, and search terms, you can understand whether they are in an education phase, selecting potential short-list vendors, or validating a vendor choice.  Once you understand this you can tailor your email marketing messages to match each buyer’s interest stage.
  1. Understand the prospect’s level of interest.  Research shows that many email recipients will think of an email as spam, even if they legitimately subscribed, if they are no longer interested in the company or products behind it.  By watching recipients’ web activity, you can determine their interest level and identify those who have “emotionally unsubscribed,” even if they have not explicitly clicked an unsubscribe link.  Catering your messaging content and frequency to this awareness will keep you more engaged with your audience.
  1. Determine their area of interest.  By understanding which product line, what industry, or what type of information a prospective buyer finds interesting, you can match the content of your email marketing to their interest area.  Dynamic content capabilities are available in most leading email and marketing automation platforms.  By leveraging the insights available in a prospect’s web activity, you can make dynamic content even more powerful.

The complex, consultative process is experiencing dramatic shifts that are transforming the very way in which buyers conduct transactions as they accrue and exercise new power.  Marketers who adapt to this new buying reality will thrive.  Those who don’t will find themselves consigned to a steady erosion of relevance, influence, and value.

Steve Woods is cofounder and CTO of Eloqua, a leading provider of marketing automation technology. He is the author of a forthcoming book, “Digital Body Language,” and also writes on the topic at his blog.

Learn to Read the Digital Body Language of Your Customers

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

Online Marketing with RSS Ray and RSSRay.com announces a new episode that you do not want to miss.

Steven Woods, Cofounder & Chief Technology Officer of Eloqua

Show Date: February 25, 2009 at 6 pm Eastern, 3 pm Pacific

Show Topic Learn to Read the Digital Body Language of Your Customers

Show Guest: Steven Woods, Cofounder & Chief Technology Officer of Eloqua

About Steven Woods: Mr. Woods cofounded Eloqua in 1999 and has held the position of Chief Technology Officer since that time. Steven brings to Eloqua years of experience in software architecture, engineering and strategy, and is responsible for defining the product strategy and technology vision at Eloqua. Steven’s insights into the application of technology to the marketing profession have been key to Eloqua’s consistent record of client satisfaction and he was recently named as one of Inside CRM’s Top CRM Influencers of 2007.

Sample Questions for Steven Woods:

What is digital body language?

Why is reading a buyers digital body language important?

Do you think that the traditional sales cycle is dead?

Jen Cano, VP of Education of HammerTap

Show Topic: Creative Ways to Drum Up New eBay Business

Show Guest: Jen Cano, VP of Education of HammerTap

About Jen Cano: Cano, HammerTap’s spokeswoman, is an eBay Certified Consultant and is recognized as an eBay market research expert. She currently acts as a contributing editor for eBay Radio, providing weekly reports on “What’s Hot on eBay,” and creates and hosts monthly workshops for the eBay community. Cano also serves on the content committee for Online Market World (a nationally recognized convention), and speaks at many industry events each year.

Sample Questions for Jen Cano:

How can eBay sellers use market research to increase their final sales amount?

When would you concentrate on increasing sell-through rates instead of sales price?

Tell us about how you can use eBay market research to make eBay sales on a niche website.

How to Listen: Live on wsRadio.com or available by Podcast on iTunes or by RSS Feed.

RSS Ray’s Comments: “The art of reading digital body language is both highly profitable and massively underutilized. It will be fascinating to learn from the person who literally wrote the book on the subject.” stated RSS Ray, host of “Online Marketing with RSS Ray.” RSS Ray went on to say “eBay is one of the most important sites available to eCommerce sellers. Jen will be discussing some excellent strategies that every eCommerce business should utilize.”

Turning Browsers into Buyers

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

Brian Deagan, CEO of Knotice wants you to start increasing your conversion rates. In this exclusive article he wrote for RSS Ray, Brian explains how companies can use integrated online marketing systems to boost their conversion rates and their bottom line. Be sure to catch RSS Ray’s interview with Brian this Wednesday at 6 pm EST, 3 pm PST on wsRadio.

Knotice Logo
It’s all about the conversion. Especially in today’s uncertain economic times, online advertisers are more diligent than ever about chasing the conversion and making the dollars they spend online more valuable. The inherent difficulty in this quest is finding an efficient way to do it – in terms of both time and money. Research analysts from all over agree that the online marketing landscape is fragmented, with companies forced to engage multiple systems to provide a complete approach for their online marketing.

This historically piecemeal approach looks like this: A company uses one vendor for email, another for onsite targeting, another for mobile marketing, a different vendor for content management, yet another vendor for planning and workflow, a completely different vendor for optimization, etc. The results of this approach are understandably poor from the consumer’s perspective. The consumer receives disjointed communications and little to no consistent relevance and personalization. But, the approach doesn’t really work for the company, either. It is extremely inefficient for a company to coordinate and integrate multiple vendor relationships, not to mention the innate monetary cost (both out of pocket and paying for redundant capabilities with multiple systems) and opportunity cost.

With this piecemeal approach fully ingrained in the marketplace, the debate has gotten even more complicated with CRM companies and web analytics companies claiming to solve it. The analytics providers are saying “we have the data,” while the CRM providers are saying “data is just one of many things we do.” The Achilles Heel in their claims is that neither company has the ability to do what’s needed – marry the data to the content. Without the data and content working together the consumer will continue to receive online marketing communications that are not timely, not targeted and not optimized. And, they will not convert.

The glue holding together the concept of meaningful interactive channel integration is the marriage of the data and the content. Data is only valuable if it’s actionable. When data joins forces with content, it becomes useful in new, compelling ways for the marketer – who now has the tools necessary to create an ideal online consumer experience.

So, I’m excited to appear on RSS Ray’s radio program on September 24th to discuss the value in integrating interactive marketing channels, and the positive effect it has on both the online consumer experience and the conversion rate for marketers. If you’d like to find out more about Knotice prior to my appearance, visit our website (http://www.knotice.com) or our blog (http://lunchpail.knotice.com).

See you on the radio!

How Effective is Your Online Marketing

Download this free report to learn how to measure your web effectiveness by entering your name and email address below.






Adgooroo


About Our Radio Show

Online Marketing with RSS Ray is a weekly radio program about internet marketing best practices. It is carried live on wsRadio.com, the internet's leading talk station with more than 3 million listeners. You can listen live Wednesdays at 1pm Eastern/10am Pacific or get free podcast versions of the show.

Previous Guests