What do Google, NetFlix, and your microwave all have in common? They’re all great at providing instant – or at least nearly instant – gratification. Within seconds, you go from wanting to having. While meaningful improvements in email marketing conversion rates often take time to develop, you can get a little instant gratification today by asking and answering these quick questions.
“Who Is Our Audience?”
It may be tempting to answer this with “everyone,” but very few companies truly have a universal market, and that’s especially true in B2B business. To improve your marketing team’s focus immediately, work on refining your answer to this question. Think about who your lead gen programs target and why. Some follow-up questions you might ask include:
- Are you basing your current lead gen on known customer data?
- How much of your audience knowledge is guesswork?
- Do you market to the audience you have or the one you think you have?
- Which industries are your leads in?
- What are their job titles and descriptions?
- Where are they located?
“How Do Our Leads Find Us?”
You already know how you reach out to your leads, but another essential question to answer is how your leads reach you. Inbound marketing through SEO, content marketing, and referrals can be incredibly potent, but only if you know the details of how leads find their way into your funnel so you can smooth the path. When you know what influences a lead to sign up for your newsletter or add their name to your email marketing list, you need to know more. Surveys and sign-up forms with a “how did you hear about us?” line can help. So does marketing automation technology that tracks incoming traffic and links anonymous visitor data with accounts as soon as leads take the next step and share their email addresses.
“What Do Our Leads Want – and What Do They Avoid?”
This one’s really two questions in one, but they’re so closely related that they deserve to be mentioned together. Look at which areas of your site are the most visited, which blog posts are most widely read, and which social media content is most shared. Note that not everything that’s popular is repeatable; your next steps involve understanding why this content got a spike in interest and capitalizing on the buzz it generated.
Once you know where the traffic is, you can also look at where it isn’t. Is there a mechanical problem with reaching that content, such as a broken link or a landing page with a missing button? Maybe it’s content that just doesn’t resonate with your audience, and that’s useful knowledge too; you can now divert energy from less effective content marketing to areas that produce a greater ROI.
“How Do We Analyze Lead Data?”
Having stacks of reports is good. Knowing how to analyze them and derive useful insights is vastly better. Investigate whether you’re getting the most out of your analytics, and you’ll learn where you can drill deeper and where the well comes up dry. For example, a productivity software company might find that industry type is highly correlated with sales for them while geographic location isn’t. The marketing team can then decide to prioritize content using industry-related keywords over localization.
“How Do We Know It’s Working?”
This may be the single most important question marketers ask, and it’s the one that takes the most time to answer. You will see improvement in your email marketing strategy as soon as you make this question a priority, but answering it will take a gradual accumulation of historical data.
If your answer to any of these questions is “We’re not really sure,” calling on email marketing experts who can help you find your answers is another step you can take today to improve your results.
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