dianomi now serve 1 billion ads per month, up from 700m in June 2013, through our financial commentaries units and Smart Links.

12 tips to cut wastage and make your marketing budgets work harder

As presented ad ad:tech London 2012 by Cabell de Marcellus, Co-Founder, Chief Technology Officer and Gareth Davies, Chief of Design
 

Why Lead Generation?

It gives advertisers what they want:
 Prospects that convert into customers
 ROI, that is easy and straightforward to calculate
 Transparency – how and where the data is collected
 Excellent customer feedback
 

When Lead Generation goes wrong

 Wrong demographic
 No means to purchase
 No intent to purchase (incentive based offers)
 Spammed to lists
 1000s of low quality leads that will never convert
 Re-sell them again and again to a series of call centres

= Lead Generation Nightmare

Best Practices – the basics

 Ensure prospects actively consent to be contacted
 Clearly communicate how the user will be contacted – email, phone etc.
 Allow opted-in users to unsubscribe from further marketing
 Approve data capture forms and creative before going live
 

Lead generation tip 1 – Target audience using demographic data

Exedra™ is fully integrated with Experian down to the household level
Users are demographically profiled in real time
30% of the prospects generated by the Exedra™ platform come from the UK’s 10% most affluent

 

Lead generation tip 2 – Contextual marketing is key

Capturing lead data in a relevant environment will generate high quality engaged prospects
Investing in Facebook report promoted alongside Facebook IPO article:
Engaged prospects
Quality leads

Lead generation tip 3 – When using email marketing, deliverability is key

You’ll be wasting your time if the email never reaches user’s inboxes.
List hygiene:
 Manage unsubscribes
 Handling bounces
 Stopping emails to inactive users
 Monitor complaints via ISP feedback loops (Yahoo!)
 Digitally signing emails
 Whitelisting certification
 Sending consistent volumes
 Sending emails at the same time of day as original request

In just 6 months we increased our email deliverability from 57.2% to 99.7%

Lead generation tip 4 – Don’t dupe your prospects

Make sure the prospect knows what they’re signing up for.
Include tick boxes for prospect to actively consent
Lead volume will DECREASE but quality & prospect engagement will INCREASE Users do not feel ‘tricked’
Advertisers do not waste time speaking to people who are not happy to be contacted

 

Lead generation tip 5 – Use CSS media queries to display responsive promotions on mobiles & tablets

>10% of traffic is mobile

Lead generation tip 6 – Use CSS media queries to display responsive emails on mobile devices

Lead generation tip 7 – Optimise your form

Use the following:
 3D Hero shots
 Benefits
 Awards
 Testimonials
 Open brochure image

 

Lead generation tip 8 – Optimise your form – don’t ask unnecessary questions

 
Required fields:
 Name
 Address
 Email
 Phone
Form 2 extra questions:
 How often do you trade?
 Which best describes your in- vestable assets?
 How would you characterise your trading experience

The extra questions in Form #2 decreased the submit rate by 48%

Lead generation tip 9 – Qualify prospects – even if volumes reduce

Would you rather 1000s of low quality leads, or fewer that will actually convert?
Including a consent tick box prevents users from being surprised if they are contacted.

 

Lead generation tip 10 – Validating your leads is key

Data validation
Validation combines 30+ data cleansing and enhancement checks including:
 Name check
 Address check
 Telephone – real-time network query
 Email domain check
 IP address region check
 Experian financial demographic tagging

 

Lead generation tip 11 – Get prospects to confirm their request

Asking prospect to confirm their initial request will reduce overall lead volume. However you will supply the advertiser with those leads that are most engaged, and most likely to go on and convert. You will save your client time and money.
77% of users confirm their requests via email or phone.

 

Alternatively, get prospects to confirm their interest on the phone

11% say they are happy to speak to someone about the product. It can take 6 attempts to reach the prospect via phone (source: Leads360).

 

Lead generation tip 12 – Collect customer feedback and report it to the advertiser

Summary – Best practice lead generation

An efficient way to capture interested consumers.
Consumers are satisfied – they get the information they are looking for, without being tricked into giving their details.
Advertisers don’t waste their time trying to convert poor quality leads and instead get:
 The right kind of prospect
 With the intent and means to purchase
 Who is educated on the service provided
 And who is happy to speak to someone about the product
by Cabell de Marcellus and Gareth Davies
Download as a PDF

The fold

 
At dianomi we spend a lot of time talking about the positioning of ad placements on websites. The accepted wisdom is that ‘above the fold’ is the best place to be. ‘The fold’ is a publishing concept that moved from print to digital and it describes the area of the page that you can see above the fold of a newspaper or the area of a website that you can see without scrolling down. Both editors and advertisers want their stories or advertisements to be above the fold because another accepted wisdom is that users don’t scroll down, or few of them do.
 

Hierarchy

 
Another concept you’ll hear in web design is “hierarchy” and that hierarchy is important because it makes pages look ordered. Many sites these days will order their pages with a headline rotator or about 4 major items, step down in size to 4 or 5 more and then arrange the remaining content underneath in smaller and smaller units – just like newspapers used to.
 
But aren’t these accepted wisdoms of ‘the fold’ and hierarchy making it harder to monetise a site? If you accept that fewer users will look down the page and place less important content below the fold, don’t you reinforce that users won’t look down the page? Doesn’t this in turn devalue the ad placements further down the page as advertisers and sales teams accept that they have a lower value? Effectively monetising a site is now top of every publisher’s priorities – but this is made harder if advertisers only want to appear above the fold and compete for space with the lead editorial items which attract users attention in the first place.
 

The Prize

 
So here’s my suggestion to all publishers and web designers:  it is time to think about ‘The Prize’
 
The prize is a simple idea: place some important content with equal value to the lead items at the bottom of your pages giving the user a prize for reaching the bottom of the page. Make sure this content is big and bold. Change it as often as your lead content. Remove the random and sometimes extensive white spaces under different columns and look at the page as having a defined start and end. If users get to know that all parts of the page are worthwhile then they will read the whole page – their clicks and attention will be more evenly spread. In turn advertising placements further down the page will increase in value. Monetising will be more effective and design of pages will become more creative.
 

 
Full credit here: I read about ‘The Prize’ in Paddy Donnelly’s excellent article Life Below 600 pixels and thanks to Fublo for pointing me to it.
 
By Julian Peterson
dianomi Sales & Marketing Director APAC

 
 
Australia – All eyes are on Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd who have put one of their Aussie newspapers ‘The Australian‘ behind a paywall this month. Even their arch rivals Fairfax are [secretly] hoping News can make it profitable.
 
The paywall highlights the difference in strategy between major newspaper publishers News and Fairfax – News have introduced paywalls on mastheads such as The Times in the UK and The Australian in AU whilst Fairfax’s CEO and publisher of digital for their Metro division recently said in an interview that they will be aiming to pursuade 50-60% of readers to sign up in the next 2 years with a better digital experience being provided for free in exchange for personal details.
 
This week John Allan, COO of The Australian told The FED (video interview) that The Times and The Sunday Times in the UK now had 100,000 digital subscribers but would not be drawn on The Australian’s subscriber numbers yet. I have heard it argued by paywall supporters that ‘casual’ users of newspaper sites who rarely visit and are blocked by paywalls are not of much actual value to publishers or their advertisers (although they do contribute to Unique User figures) but Allan outlined an interesting opening in the paywall for search and social users. It was pointed out to him that if a user tried to read an article and was blocked by the paywall from reading the whole article, the user could copy the heading, switch to Google, search for the heading, click on the inevitable result from The Australian and read the whole article. Allan said that this was a deliberate and permanent policy and News felt that users clicking on a search result or, say, a Facebook share of an article should be able to read the whole article without subscribing – but only a limited number in a day, currently 5.
 
The cost of a digital subscription is going to be $2.95 per week with free passes available until late January 2012. Many people in newspaper publishing and advertising around the world will be watching the News paywalls closely.