Thursday, February 26, 2009

Important Tools to Have in Lead Management


Lead management is a very important process for your business. Because of that, you need to do it right if you want to record some sort of success in your operations. What best way to do that than to have the best tools there are? Of course, you also should be able to know what tools marketers use in their lead management process.

Here are some of the most important tools that you can use for lead tracking and management:

A Database

The role of a database is central to the process of lead management. Through a database, marketers can easily store relevant information on a lead to be used later on when they take action on these prospects. In here, marketers can take out information like IP addresses, contact information, the source of the lead, and many others.

Aside from acting as a reference material for lead information, a database also has other uses. For example, the pieces of information within the database make it easy for marketers to evaluate their own performances. By simply looking at how many leads or visits come from an individual marketing campaign, marketers can check how effective that campaign has been, thus setting a benchmark for future applications. Using the database, marketers can also which advertising campaigns are lagging behind and need further improvements.

There are a lot of many other ways that a database can help in the marketing and lead management processes.

Web Analytic Tools

Without these tools, there’s no a way a marketer can find out the receptiveness of the target market to their offers and products. These tools make it possible for marketers to find out how many people have visited their websites and have become interested in the offer these websites are making. For example, they are able to track visitors’ movements within your website. If they have been able to browse through more than one page in your website, then his lead could be very interested in buying your product. Another function of the web analytic tools is to show you where these links came from and even tell you what link within that page referred them to your website. 

Without web analytic tools, there is no way your database can function. It is from these web analytic tools that marketers get the necessary information to input in a database, especially IP addresses. You could say that the database walks hand-in-hand with these tools while traveling down the lead management road.

Websites

Of course, without a website, there’s no a way a marketer is able to get his message out to the world--or to his niche market, at least. The website is where he places information about his products and where visitors see them. When designing a website, marketers should be able to add some so-called success pages in it.

One common example is the Contact Us page. This is usually viewed as a page where one can see contact information of the marketer. However, it has a very important role in lead management. Obviously, it is telling the lead how to get in touch with the marketer. In lead tracking, however, the number of leads generated through the contact page is used as a gauge in measuring the site’s performance.

Another one of the success pages is the Download Demo page. This is yet another page that can show how effective your marketing campaign is. This is simply where the lead downloads the demo version of your product, so he can test it and see if he likes it. Using your web analytic tools, you can find out how many people are interested in the product. You can check how many people have visited and clicked on the Download link in the page.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com

Friday, February 13, 2009

The Basics of Reading Web Analytics

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Web analytics is the most informative part of Internet marketing. Through web analytics, you are seeing how well the market is reacting to your advertisements and your campaigns so that you can gauge whether or not you have to improve on some parts and keep up with the others. You’d also know which parts are clearly not yielding results at all and which ones are not really reaching out to your intended market.

Web analytics, however, can be confusing for the first-timer. When you click on “stats,” for example, you can see a lot of information that, if you are not well versed in it, would be crazy. The web analytics information in your website’s control panel is composed of several information or data fields that you need to understand or know about.

However, once you learn to read what it’s in there, that won’t be a problem. You can then use the information there appropriately for your marketing campaign. Are you ready? Here are some of the things that you can see when you read your web analytic information for your website.

IP Address

The most basic information you can find is the IP address. This represents a unique address or individual in the whole of the Internet. From the number of IP addresses, people used to read how many computers or workstations (hence, people) have visited the website.

However, these days, the growth of ISPs that use proxy addresses makes it impossible to determine the unique visitors from all of them because proxies make people hold the same IP addresses. There are unique IP addresses for each network interface card; however, the ISP hides these addresses and substitutes them with the proxy address. Because of that, most web analytic software and systems now use an algorithm based not only on the IP address but also on the operating system the unit uses, among others, in order to determine the uniqueness of the visit.

Number of Visits

After the IP address column, you can see the number of visits that the same IP address has made to your website. For your lead handling functions, this number of visits is already a gauge as to what the lead score is to be assigned to this visitor. The concept is that the number of visits he makes to the visit is an indication of his interest to the content of the website and, hence, his interest to the niche market that your products belong to. This helps you to identify which visitor you can try to contact in order to try and offer a deal.

Referrers

One other column that you can see in a web analytic page is the referrer column. In this column, you can see either an IP address or a website address. Simply put, the referrer column shows you where the lead or the visitor came from or how he found out about your site.

The referrer column, like the IP address, can show you how successfully your ad campaign has become. If you are running multiple marketing campaigns--for example, article submission--the referrer column can be used to find out which of your articles or which of the article directories you have submitted to is giving you the most number of visitors and referrals.

These are the most basic information that you can find in the web analytics form of your websites. There are others, but these are the ones that you can see more clearly and the ones that you can use to find out how effective your marketing campaign is and how you can make moves to even further its effectiveness.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com