Theory: conversion funnel is a simple funnel. Reality: there’s a variety of channels interacting and sales/lead are never or rarely a single channel linear funnel.

Before

  1. What do you want to achieve?
  • App installs?
  • SaaS signups?
  • Qualified leads for manual approaches?
  • Newsletter signups?
  • Nielsen audience?
  1. What’s the lifetime value associated with objective?

Sometimes, requires hypothesis on conversion ratios.

  1. Deduct the associated Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).

  2. Define budget / channel.

Channels

«Free»

  • Organic search. Search is the expression of a user intent.

    • You can chose to write content: good, relevant, unique, on a regulat basis.
    • You can chose to create “intent grids” X x Y x Z, by dimmension.

  • Social reach

    • LinkedIn Publishing and group share
    • Medium
    • Facebook

  • Mail-based Outbound-Marketing

    • Generate lists of prospects and automate.
    • Clean up your lists (kickbox, briteverify)
    • Enrich with tools (lusha)
    • Test schedules, A/B test objects, texts, stories.
    • Automate (mixmax)
    • (on personal mail) Don’t give up before 9 touches () but send 50-250 mails /day.

  • Visibility exchange

    • Guest post, banners, targeted newsletters

  • Public relations

    • Experts for guest posting
    • Agencies (pressking …)

What do you pay?

» Cost per 1000 (CPM), click (CPC), action (CPA), lead (CPL), signup, install, sale, etc.

Who do you actually pay?

» Attribution to… last click, first click, linear, position based, time decay, data-driven.

  • Affiliation (mostly valid for B2C)

    • tradedoubler, zanox, effiliation, growsumo, affilinet, …
    • E-mailing (publishers look for 1-2€ eCPM)
    • Co-sponsoring (CPL ~10cents, dubious optin techniques, low qualification level)
    • Co-registration/survey (CPL ~30 cents, better option than cosponsoring, medium qualification level)
    • …

  • Programmatic

    • SEA (adwords)
    • Display (banner, video)
    • Social Advertising (facebook, pinterest, snapchat instagram; tools: adespresso, makemereach)
    • Social for business (linkedin, twitter …)
    • Retargeting (google, facebook, criteo)

Organization

  • ICE impact, comfidence, easiness

  • assets (banners, content …)

  • tools

    • google tag manager
    • analytics
    • conversion pixels
    • mailchimp trigger pixels
    • retargetting pixels

  • optimisation

    • data driven
    • cut the dead branches in segments
    • reset campaigns
    • refresh assets to reduce boreness

  • hire a traffic manager

    • freelance to start
    • internal
    • yourself if core

  • give measurable targets and review them.

  • process leads

    • loyalty manager (cold leads nurturing)
    • call centers (requalification, easy to outsource if script is good)
    • sales (convert hot leads)

Use cases

  • Occupy your prospect mind

    • retarget them after visit of our site
    • retarget after specific action
    • target your prospect base

  • Leading insurance broker selling exclusively by phone on very cold leads

    • ltv of few hundreds euros
    • massive volume of cosponsoring (20k/day @ 20 cents)
    • close the sale in one shot (process)
    • nearchore call centers
    • 2 lead providers with volume engagement
    • always try new channels / providers

  • B2B lead gen on facebook : recruiting practitioners for a medical ios app on facebook (casual social net)

    • B2B leads on FB can work
    • custom audience targeting (blacklist your users) and lookalike (similar users)
    • test a lot (multiple campaignes,direct trafic, intermediate landings)
    • be careful on auto-competition if small target

  • Scraping interesting leads (find prospects on locked down platforms)

    • webscraper.io, import.io, phantomjs, casperjs, selenium (and bonobo-selenium), …

  • Marketing automation

    • automate repetitive
    • drip campaigns for low cost inbound email nurturing (mailchimp) or outbound email prospection (mixmax)
    • trigger specific email when user visits specific page (mailchimp)
    • complex engagement campaigns across multiple channels (marketo)
    • other tools: ifttt, zapier, intercom … infinite list of tools.