Whether you’re planning your lead generation strat­egy or analyzing campaign results, strike “cost per lead” from your vocabulary. In online marketing, just as in life, you get what you pay for.

Seeking a low cost-per-lead sets you up for the wrong goal. Your real goal should be to win a profit­able customer at the lowest possible cost.

The metric you want to focus on is cost per acquired customer.

But first, make sure you understand the lifetime value of a customer—a key, yet often overlooked, concept. Looking at revenue from a one-time trans­action viewpoint is a flawed assumption and leads to selecting poor-quality leads.

The lifetime value (LTV) of a customer, according to the Database Institute’s website, is “the expected profit that you will realize from sales to a particular customer in the future. Although it builds on past customer history, LTV is all about the future. It is based, primarily, on the customer’s expected retention and spending rate, plus some other factors that are easy to determine.”

Use your customer’s LTV as a gauge for what a truly qualified lead is really worth in your customer acquisition program. Then, for each marketing buy, be willing to pay more for the programs that have effective conversion rates. In the end, you could care less about the cost of a raw lead–you want a profit­able cost per acquired customer!

Clearly define what a lead is and set the price you’re willing to pay for it according to how deep in the conversion funnel it is. A name from Hoovers is not worth nearly as much as a contact that completed a form and requested more information. And that lead is not worth as much as a prospect who has agreed to an in-person demonstration.

Keep in mind that leads from different sources convert at different rates. A higher cost lead may convert at twice the rate of a lower cost lead, making it more valuable.

Setting up a program to generate profitable leads begins with a close look at your business model. What are the telltale qualifiers for your best pros­pects? For example, for financial services, it might be net worth. For pharmaceuticals, it might be age. What are your close ratios? Expect to pay more for better or deeper leads.

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“We generate quite a few leads from the free trial of our software, but not enough leads convert into paying customers. What can we do?”

It’s a question I’ve been asked by clients, seen on LinkedIn and other online forums, and a problem I had to help solve while working in the marketing/PR department of multiple software companies. Since free trial offers are a main source of lead generation for many B2B software companies, it’s imperitive that these leads are converted if sales revenue goals are to be met.

Free Trials Alone Won’t Sell Software

I believe the root of this problem comes from the mentality of many software marketers that once a prospective customer uses their software they’ll love it, and once they love it they’ll eagerly pay money to have it. The prospect will convert from lead (free trial user) to paying customer without much influence from marketing or sales because the software will basically sell itself.

Unfortunately this way of thinking doesn’t take into account:

• Prospects are probably not only using your free trial, they are also using other vendor’s trials for comparison

• Prospects are busy and may only spend a few minutes with your software then not use it again

• Prospects may not understand how to use your software correctly and therefore not experience its full value

• Most B2B software sales involve several people making the purchase decision, so unless all of them are using your free trial, you’re not influencing everyone you need to in order to close the sale

Focus on Lead Nurturing

Having a lead nurturing program specifically for free trial users is the most effective method I’ve found for converting them into sales. It’s important to note that free trial users are usually further along in the sales cycle than most leads, meaning they’re usually past the ‘information gathering’ stage and into the ‘evaluation’ stage. Follow-up contact with free trial users needs to focus on providing information that makes it clear:

• How your software is different from and better than competitors
• How using your software is better than trying to solve their problem themselves

Lead Nurturing Tactics

There are many ways to nurture leads, but here are a few that I’ve found to be successful. If at all possible, invest in marketing automation software (such as Genoo) and a solid CRM system (like Salesforce.com) to ensure timely follow-up and the ability to track the success of your lead nurturing program and optimize it for even better results as time goes on.

Email

When prospects submit their personal information to register for your free trial, offer a simple way to opt-in to receiving emails from your company. To encourage prospects to opt-in, offer a valuable ‘how to’ guide or other marketing asset that they immediately receive.

Send a confirmation email to all prospects thanking them for registering for the free trial, and include a link to brief instructional materials or FAQ document that they can download to ensure they use your software trial correctly. If you offer customer support to free trial users, make sure to explain how to get help. Ask the prospect if there are other people in their organization who are evaluating your software who would like to participate in the free trial, and provide an easy, fast way for them to send the trial info to colleagues. If possible, send the email from the salesperson that is assigned to the lead, and provide that salesperson’s contact information.

If free trial users haven’t converted into buyers by a certain time period (whatever is appropriate for your particular software) and have opted-in to receiving emails, send them a link to a document, video, podcast, or other marketing asset directly comparing your software to competitors. You might also send a link to a case study describing the success of a customer that is similar to the prospect. One client I worked with had great success with a case study we did on a customer that had switched to their software from a competitor.

If it’s possible, send prospects a link to an ROI calculator or some method for prospects to calculate how much money or time they can expect to save or amount of revenue they can expect to generate, etc. by using your software.

Direct Mail

Use direct mail to send marketing materials discussed above to prospects who don’t opt-in to emails. You can send the materials themselves, or send postcards with links to get the materials online.

Phone

The salesperson assigned to the lead should call the free trial user 2-3 days after they register, simply introducing themselves and inquiring as to the user’s experience with the trial so far, if they have any questions, etc. Ask prospects what problem(s) they’re having that drove them to evaluate your software, which is a good way to break the ice and engage the prospect in a conversation about their needs and how your software can help solve them.

Kim Cornwall Malseed, principal at MarCom Ink, has over a decade of global marketing, public relations, analyst relations, and inside sales experience with Fortune 500 and startup high-tech companies. As the founder of B2B technology marketing and PR firm MarCom Ink, Kim has worked with clients on marketing strategy and implementation that significantly increased lead generation and sales conversions, leading to improved revenue. Check out the B2B Technology MarCom Blog for more practical advice on what works – and doesn’t – in B2B high-tech marketing.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/marketing-tips-articles/how-to-convert-b2b-software-free-trial-users-into-paying-customers-1484383.html

In dental practices, there are three kinds of herd in the dental business. The first herd in dental practices is the current patient base and inactive patient base. This base should be nurtured and offered more services every single month. The second herd in dental practices is the herd of all the people that we have relationships with. They are our friends, our family, and all the business owners that we go on the other end, where they call us and we write our checks to. And now for the third herd…

The Third Herd In Dental Practices:

The third herd in dental practices is what we call the “interested but not ready herd”. In other words, they are your lead. I have already talked about lead generation marketing in my previous articles . Take for example, if we’re going for cosmetic dentistry, and we call on a certain patient and ask them this question: “Are you embarrassed by your smile?”. Then we give them two options – first option: they can call directly to the office just to set up a consultation; second option: they can come in and get them to call toll free order message hot line number or go to a website to get a frequency awareness report. Then as time goes on, that group of people who requested would build up in number. And in a span of over a year, you might have 3,000 people or 5,000 people who are on that list. However, there are some people on that list who just will never come in. But on the other hand, the good thing about marketing with these people and getting a ton of leads of people who are interested is the fact that we know that they’re really interested! That’s why they requested for a report, which means that they’re interested of whatever it is that you have to offer them. Then you can do anything you want to in your business: you can have headache sufferers; you can go to implant patients; you can do cosmetic dentistry. So you get to decide on how you want to do it. You can mail them until the time comes that they ask to get off your list, or after 18 months minimum and they drop off and you just get rid of them.

Nurturing And Targeting The Herd In Dental Practices:

Truth be told, this is the herd in dental practices that most people fail to nurture and take care of. So how do you nurture or target them? You can do many things: first, you can run a website campaign for the tv; second, you can do radio advertisements; and third, you can send out tear-sheet mailing wherein they opt in and out of our funnel (wherein we mail them a direct mail package, then we go to postcard, postcard, then direct mail package and all on that time where we send them e-mails all at the same time). Now, the challenge here is how you manage all of them. Right now, I’m personally running five different companies under the same umbrella. There’s so much marketing that’s going on automatically every month, and it’s close to impossible that we’ll be able to manage all of them if we try to use the contact management system; or even try to use traditional management software we have. As a remedy, what we have done for the last couple of years is that we actually work with the company called Infusion and they’re speaking our next super conference, and probably in every event. If you would like to sign up for the next event, you can do so and just log on to our website over the next days.

Visit our website at www.DentistProfits.com and get a free CD and Book titled, “How To Predictably Grow Your Practice 25-35% Every Year While Enjoying More Control, Time Off, And Bottom-Line Net Profits!”.

My name is Ed O’Keefe, and over the past 7 ½ years I have shown over 5300 General Dentists world wide how to flood their practice with patients using my counter-intuitive, yet extremely effective dental marketing, internet dental marketing secrets, and dental advertising secrets that are proven, guaranteed, and unmatched by anyone else in dentistry!

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/marketing-tips-articles/dental-practices-nurturing-the-third-herd-in-the-dental-business-1448656.html