This post is being shared this week in our updated Newsletter which we plan to publish about once a month. The newsletter is designed to be easy to scan at a glance so readers can click only articles of interest. Articles are pulled from “Things We Think”, the Revenue Architects Blog. The blog is named after the 2001 Viant weblog.

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Viant was an innovative company designed from the ground up to build digital businesses. We also created Revenue Architects from the ground up – to address our client’s revenue agenda. We thought the name worked.

The Business Issue

The pursuit of top-line revenue growth is more challenging than ever. The web, social media and mobile technologies have transformed buyer process. Businesses must integrate marketing and sales and better engage the web to capture, deepen and expand relationships. Yet, executing successfully requires a wide range of talent – from creative design and branding to content creation and technology. At the same time, some of the best experts are working independently from the traditional agency. We flexibly and adaptively bring these expert teams to our clients – helping them capture customer value with new marketing and sales.

2012 Momentum

Thanks to great clients, a great team and an extended expert network, Revenue Architects enjoyed a solid 2011 and is off to a great start in 2012. We continually refine our business model to ensure we are positioned to adaptively deliver marketing support for our client’s growth agenda. We are celebrating new members of the team, expansion of our client base, an updated website and new offices in downtown Boston. Here are some highlights:

• We helped over 15 new clients expand revenue performance in 2012
• Working with Charles Schwab and other leaders, we expanded our wealth management footprint
• With Betaspring, we launched Revenizer – a new company developing easy to use marketing score cards
• We moved to Post Office Square in Boston – co-located with Boston Insurance Brokerage
• Roy Satterthwaite joined our team to build out our client work in the west coast
• We launched a new website with some improved branding and plans for video and enhanced content
• We expanded our client base across technology, life sciences, financial services and mid-market
• We expanded our network of independent professionals and agency teams.

Welcome to “Things We Think” and our newsletter. We hope you are able to enjoy some of the perspectives and thank you to all that helped Revenue Architects have a successful 2011 and start for 2012.

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It is great to be kicking off the Revenue Grader development project working with our partners Icicle Technologies.

Revenue Grader will be an entertaining yet informative way for business leaders to quickly and easily measure their potential for revenue performance. By self-scoring maturity levels across three main domains of a revenue architecture (Revenue Strategy, Revenue Systems and Revenue Programs), leaders  can rate maturity levels, identify gaps and map priorities for a marketing plan.

We decided to test drive the Revenue Grader with a set of B2B mid-market companies working with the Swiss-American Chamber of Commerce (SACC).

About the SACC:

“The Swiss-American Chamber of Commerce plays a vital and active role in assisting Swiss companies in the United States and U.S. companies in Switzerland to expand their business. The Swiss-American Chamber of Commerce is a not-for-profit organization.”

About the Workshop

The workshop for the SACC will explore the opportunities and challenges for small and medium sized B2B companies seeking to develop strategies to leverage social media and digital marketing to expand their businesses. This will be an interactive 6-hour workshop and will be limited to 8 companies and will include:

• An overview and key principles of social media and digital marketing
• Group discussion of lessons learned, best practices, and challenges
• Working sessions to develop specific strategies for each participating company

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Here are some metrics that Marketo and Eloqua suggest as what you might expect from successful lead nurture programs. Given the complexity of effectively implementing a personalized lead nurture program, it is interesting to see where the impacts might be and what benefits you might expect.

Marketo pointed to these metrics in a recent webinar invitation:

• Fewer marketing-generated leads ignored by sales (from 80% to as low as 25%)
• 150% increase in contact-to-lead conversion rate
• 2-3x lift in conversion rates on raw leads to qualified opportunities
• 20% more sales opportunities
• 225% increase in volume of prospects that convert to sales opportunities
• 7% points higher win rates on marketing-generated leads
• 6% points lower rate of “no decisions”
• 2x increase in bid-win ration
• 47% higher average order values

Eloqua points to the following metrics and a case study in one of their white paper guides:

• Improved conversion rates at every stage of the demand waterfall, most significantly at the top of the funnel
• Nearly eliminated “unrated” leads in its database as a result of the discovery nurture
• Increased suspect-to-MQL conversion rate from 8% to 11% on net new leads entering the system
• Saw an additional 30% of “suspects” (or new visitors) convert to MQLs over time due to its seed nurture
• Drove a 64% increase in SQL productivity from corporate sales development through cultivate nurtures
• Increased by 118% the number of opportunities entering the pipeline

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Below are some interesting facts and opinions about Facebook curated from the current Economist article.

“Last year the company had sales of $3.7 billion, a little below recent estimates, and made a net profit of $1 billion.”

“The network boasts 845m users, which, were Facebook a country, would make it the world’s third most populous, behind China and India.”

“Every day 250m photos are uploaded to the site. One out of every seven minutes spent online is on Facebook, according to comScore, a research firm.”

“Facebook accessible to ever more people. (The Boston Consulting Group reckons that around 3 billion people will be online by 2016, up from 1.6 billion in 2010.) The second is the rise of the mobile phone. Already more than 425m people are tapping into Facebook on these devices and in future most of the social network’s growth will come from the mobile web. Together, these trends could propel the number of users beyond 1 billion.”

“People are now spending far more time on Facebook than on rival web services such as Google (see chart 2) and why it has benefited from strong network effects. ”

Another interesting perspective- will a new hot social network take over? Tumblr? Twitter?

“One is that people stop using Facebook, either because they lose interest or because they are put off by its behaviour. As News Corporation discovered to its cost after it splashed out $580m on Myspace in 2005, network effects can also go quickly into reverse. Once large numbers of people started leaving the service, which became more cluttered than a teenager’s bedroom, it proved hard to stem the tide. Last year, News Corp sold the business for just $35m.”

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An effectively designed website is only one element of an effective web marketing ecosystem. To achieve effective  web presence and drive qualified leads, we developed an easy to remember mnemonic “AEIOU” (attract, engage, influence, optimize, understand).

AEIOU helps to consider the strategies that make up a digital marketing strategy. But to really power the  strategies, companies need marketing automation tools. Platforms like Hubspot (www.hubspot.com), Act-on (www.act-on.com) and Marketo (www.marketo.com) and many others  are very powerful ways to manage multi-stage buyer processes and map content and engagement at each stage of the process – nurturing relationships from awareness to customer.

When budgets are a little smaller or the sales cycle is a little less complex, we often recommend using a component-based approach as a marketing solution. Some of our preferred solution components and web services include:

• WordPress content management system- we often recommend WordPress due to its ability to integrate nicely with other preferred web marketing systems and the ease of use our clients enjoy (www.wordpress.com)
• Unbounce landing page setup – easy to create and test marketing landing pages to drive qualified leads (www.unbounce.com)
• MailChimp – email marketing system – we set up custom email templates for this easy to use email marketing tool and measure the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns (www.mailchimp.com)
• Revenizer – a marketing dashboard we created (sister company) specifically to help measure the effectiveness of web and social presence and increase revenue from web marketing campaigns (www.revenizer.com)
• CRM -  Salesforce is the leading CRM and is often a great choice, however it is worth looking at many of the more “social CRM” solutions like Batchbook.

In selecting these solutions, we recommend that you find sets of solutions that work well together with strong APIs and integrations. If your needs are not too complex a component based approach can be a very affordable and effective way to deliver marketing automation.

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Here is another a collection of  article links that we found interesting!

#wealthmanagement

Next-gen advisor breaks the standard RIA mold to grow with her young clientele—many with $100,000 or less of assets>
http://bit.ly/wD1ZfZ

Columbia Management Launches Social Media Program> http://bit.ly/x5k2Cs

FINRA Opens Door for Social Media with New Rules  http://bit.ly/zAqJ5o

Penton’s Registered Rep Launches Unique Social Behavioral Investment Dashboard for Financial Advisors>http://bit.ly/xfW25X

Penton’s Registered Rep Launches Unique Social Behavioral Investment Dashboard for Financial Advisors> http://bit.ly/xfW25X

The Investment Adviser and the Fish Story> http://bit.ly/wEVmYg

Financial Advisor – Efficient Financial Advisor Marketing Tools>http://bit.ly/xv5wtY

#b2B

B2B marketers may find significant benefit with QR codes> http://bit.ly/z1w8T4

Rainmaker Releases Latest Enhancement to B2B Commerce Solution> http://bit.ly/wlkWxx

Social Media Lets B2B Companies More Effectively Engage Customers> http://bit.ly/wjcnNC

Technology Marketing: Is Your B2B Social Media Strategy Sending Mixed Signals> http://bit.ly/yk5Xpr

How to Structure a Kick-Ass Marketing Team for Any Company> http://bit.ly/yvysaY

Where Social Media Marketing Fits In Your 2012 Budget?> http://bit.ly/xj62Ng

Content Curation Tools for B2B Marketing> http://onforb.es/xWLhoZ

#lifesciences

Outlook 2012: Life Sciences> http://bit.ly/wverdG

Applications: Wireless Monitoring Solutions for Life Sciences> http://bit.ly/AuAJlm

#general

Be A Social (Business) Survivor> http://onforb.es/wOe2fY

Using Social Media Marketing to Promote Green Business> http://bit.ly/x5aZq4

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An Overview of Lead Nurturing: For Every Business

Up to 95% of qualified prospects visiting your company’s website are there to research but are not yet ready to make a purchasing decision; ultimately, as many as 70% of these prospects will buy from you or your competitors. How do you gradually mold these prospective leads into buyers?

This is where lead nurturing comes in. A lead nurture program involves adapting calculated marketing strategies to share useful, relevant information with prospects regardless of how ready they may or may not be to buy. The goal is to establish your brand and build a relationship based on trust and credibility, which will ideally position you to be their first choice once they are ready to make a purchasing decision.

First, identify a set of new prospects by monitoring certain activity on your website, such as who has downloaded a white paper or filled out a form, and determine which leads are ready to be sent to sales and which need to be nurtured. This can be achieved through a lead scoring methodology, which should take into account demographic attributes; budget, authority, need, timeline (BANT); lead source; and level of engagement with your materials.

For those prospects that you have determined to be nurturing candidates, establish permission to be included in your nurturing campaign by asking prospects to opt in or out. This is the first step in building a relationship that is based on trust and relevancy. At the very least you need to comply with the CAN-SPAM Act by providing a clear way to opt out, but you might want to go the extra mile and ask for explicit permission on registration forms. Not only does this earn you the prospect’s trust by proving your concern for privacy, but it also increases your deliverability and sender reputation scores.

Throughout the nurturing process, gradually send pertinent information over time. Timing is critical; consider the duration of the buying process and the communication approaches you will use to determine the best frequency of communication. A general rule is to contact prospects at least one a month but no more than once a week.

Personalize the content of your communications to ensure that it will be relevant to your prospect, which will keep them interested in staying on your list. Develop profiles of your prospects that include characteristics that will help you best tailor your communications to their needs, rather than simply providing less valuable generic content.

Do not let leads sit at any point in the process. You should always be communicating with prospects and continuing to move them along a cycle, even if they are not ready to buy. Pay attention to a prospect’s activity and engagement with your website and adjust your communication according to these cues. Accelerate communication with prospects identified to have a higher interest, and reduce communication with prospects that are slower to respond.

By building a positive impression of your company and keeping the prospect engaged and interested throughout the lead nurturing process, they will be more likely to select your company once they decide it’s time to buy.

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A few tweets from the last few weeks we liked.

Gartner trends> http://onforb.es/tS9M1o

20 Marketing Automation Terms Marketers Should Know> http://bit.ly/uVg92n

6 Core Benefits of Well-Defined Marketing Personas>http://bit.ly/suZO30

Twitter Adds Brand Pages. The Brand Pages War Gets Bigger>http://bit.ly/ugNH85

Marketing Automation Institute Brings Recognized Industry Leaders Together>http://bit.ly/ryezN2

Game Theory for Marketing Automation>http://bit.ly/teyup8

Algebra, Analytics & Automation for Marketing ROI > http://bit.ly/tGWMbI

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Emails are one of the most often used communication methods used by businesses to reach clients and potential leads, and if used correctly email marketing can be among the most effective methods as well to grow your business. In a climate where communication is becoming increasingly digital, crafting effective email marketing messaging is vital for any financial advisor. Successful emails that clearly communicate their message enhance customer experience and generate business, while unsuccessful emails lead to may lead to confusion or lack of action. The following are a few simple steps that can be taken to maximize the effectiveness and clarity of your email marketing message while also optimizing the user experience of the email’s entire audience: the foundation of any successful email marketing campaign.

Like all good writing, email is most successful when the who, what, when, where, why, and how of the message is taken into consideration. For the purposes of user experience, the what, where, and how are the three most important of these categories.

“WHAT are you saying to me?”

• First impressions matter- make the most of your subject line: Is it recognizable, trustworthy, and relevant? What is the relationship between the receiver and the sender (whether an individual or company)?
• Use client friendly language
• Make a clear point, and provide enough context for understanding. Avoid ambiguity and a lack of call to action
• Make the email interesting and not too dense- use imagery, data, and personalization if possible
• Create a hierarchy in content, message, and visual elements- prioritize the important information and eliminate extraneous details. Differentiate colors, fonts, and placements.

“HOW do you want me to take action?”

• Take advantage of opportunities to engage your audience- linked imagery, video, buttons, charts, colored backgrounds, forward and share links
• Make the call to action obvious- Use active language. This comes back to the clarity of the message and the hierarchy of the content, message, and visual elements.
• Leave no question as to what the reader (your client) is being asked to do.

“WHERE am I reading your email?”

• Bigger is better- Be aware of recommended minimum font sizes (body 14 px, header 22 px). Body copy of less than 13 px will often be re-sized.
• Create touch targets- Include tappable touch targets and make them easy to activate with a 44 px x 44 px minimum. Try both text and image buttons.
• Streamline- Simplify content and stay within a single column template. Confine content to a skinny 320 px X 540 px frame. Make sure to prioritize the “What” and “How” aspects of the email, with short, direct content and a clear call to action.
• Ditch the automatically-created mobile version- it only represents an extra click for the reader. Instead, design with a “mobile first” mentality.

For financial advisors, where customer relationships are so important, client experience should be the basis of the design of any email. Making sure the what, how, and where of the email from the audience’s perspective is analyzed and accounted for will ensure that a successful marketing message is composed.

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As part of a recent presentation on social media and digital marketing, I developed a Mnemonic “AEIOU” to help the audience remember some of the key elements of an integrated revenue architecture and associated marketing best practices. After all, most English speakers remember our vowels (A.E.I.O.U. and sometimes Y)!

This short slideshow introduces the model and offers a few of the best practices for each element:

• Attract
• Engage
• Influence
• Optimize
• Understand

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