Anyone who takes joy in seeing a direct marketer tear his hair out should ask said DMer to evaluate the effectiveness of traditionally untrackable media channels.
Paul Pellman isn’t going to be reaching for the Rogaine anytime soon: The executive vice president of product and marketing for Hoover’s Inc. uses inbound phone numbers keyed to specific campaigns; call volume analysis around the launch of branding campaigns and promotion codes and online landing sites specific to offline media to evaluate each channel’s merit.
Leads that come in via inbound telemarketing are especially valuable, and Hoover’s has taken pains to track which online sources, such as search results or banner ads, generate phone calls. A landing page can contain a different telephone number based on whether a prospect has arrived at it via Overture or Google or any of a number of search sites, or based on specific search terms entered. It can also serve up unique phone numbers based on whether an advertisement carried a price or creative test.
If a prospect is led to the landing page via an ad with a tracking code, or through a URL tailored to a specific medium, Hoover’s links the source code of this initial contact for 30 days, allowing it to assign a conversion rate to each ad. But Pellman does not recommend using publication-specific toll-free numbers to feed leads into a sales team: These provide directional information regarding media usage, he said, and tend to significantly understate the ad’s impact. Ad-specific numbers are best reserved for true direct-response-oriented offers.
One method the business information firm largely ignores is “how did you hear about us?” questions on online surveys. Pellman recalled a campaign for Q-Charts, a service offered to day traders by Lycos, his former employer. The Q-Charts site offered a menu of choices visitors could choose from. Virtually none of the visitors chose “print,” although it was the only medium Q-Charts was using.
Once leads are captured, Hoovers has a built-in advantage in qualifying them: The company is owned by D&B, and it uses its compiled business information to model the roughly one million firms that could buy its services.
This has dramatically improved both the likelihood of closing a sale, and its internal telemarketing sales force’s willingness to embrace leads that come from the information technology department. Initially the company had passed along every name that signed up on its site, without screening any of them. As a result, the sales team was flooded with more than four times the leads it could handle — and many of them weren’t likely prospects.
As Pellman put it, “It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If a sales team thinks a lead source is a bad source, it will be a bad source.”
Pellman spoke at the National Center for Database Marketing Conference in Chicago on Tuesday.
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