Top Ten Tips for Online Lead Generation

[Title Goes Here]
An Informative E-book from the
Marketing White Paper Series Sponsored by
WinGreen Marketing Systems
Top Ten Tips for Online
Lead Generation
An Informative E-book from the
Marketing White Paper Series Sponsored by
WinGreen Marketing Systems

Top Ten Tips for Online Lead Generation
The Marketing White Paper Series from WinGreen Marketing Systems
Page 2
Contents
Introduction....................................................................................................................... 3
Online Lead Generation Definitions...................................................................................... 3
Top Ten Tips for Online Lead Generation.............................................................................. 5
1. Work closely with sales to define “the perfect lead”........................................................... 5
2. Communicate campaigns to salespeople.......................................................................... 6
3. Never “sell” during the lead generation phase.................................................................. 7
4. Offer fresh, relevant content........................................................................................... 7
5. Use a mix of marketing assets ........................................................................................ 8
6. Don’t stray outside the target segment............................................................................ 8
7. Stick to a consistent schedule.......................................................................................... 9
8. Don’t mix objectives......................................................................................................10
9. Use multiple waves in every campaign............................................................................11
10. Comply with CAN-SPAM...............................................................................................11
Conclusion........................................................................................................................12

Page 3
Introduction
By now, everyone knows that online lead
generation can reach a much broader audience,
deliver many more leads, and improve sales
conversion rates, all at significantly lower cost
per lead when compared to conventional direct
marketing methods. Companies are paying more
attention to their web landing pages, their search
results, and their content marketing, and seeing
good results.
Still, very few companies have created integrated
systems of marketing that include original
marketing content (papers, blogs, webcasts,
podcasts), software systems (mass emailing,
de-duplication, CRM), and well-honed methods
and procedures, all operating together as a
synchronized lead generation machine.
This paper will provide the top ten tips for
creating your own lead generation machine and
getting the best possible results from it.
Online Lead Generation
Definitions
Let’s start with some definitions. When we say
“online lead generation”, we mean the process
of using Internet outreach (typically email) along
with content marketing to deliver interesting
offers to members of your target segment in
order to create enough interest on their part to
self-identify themselves back to you (typically
through a Web landing page). Here are the
common terms used in digital marketing and
online lead generation.
Content Marketing: Content marketing is a
marketing technique of creating and distributing
relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire,
and engage a clearly defined and understood
target audience - with the objective of driving
profitable customer action1
.
Marketing Assets: These are the “premiums”
used to attract the interest of a potential buyer
or influencer from within your target market
segment(s). Examples include webcasts,
web seminars, white papers, surveys, email
newsletters and articles, podcasts, video,
animations, and teleseminars. (Live seminars,
“lunch-and-learns”, and roundtables might also be
considered as marketing assets, but exist in the
physical world, and so are considered separately
from digital marketing.)
Campaigns: A campaign is the release of the
offer of the marketing asset to a mass audience
from within the target segment. The release of
the offer is typically through bulk email. Inputs
to campaigns include marketing assets, email
addresses, email content, and custom landing
pages. Outputs of campaigns are leads, opt-outs,
data, and reporting.
Target market segment: The entire segment
to which the marketer targets their product or
service marketing. Segments are usually defined
by geography, industry, company size, and/or
lifecycle stage (early growth company vs late-
stage company, for example).
1 http://www.junta42.com/resources/what-is-content-marketing.aspx

Page 4
Campaign members: The subset of the target
market segment who will receive the campaign
offer. This could be 100% of the target market or
any subset. Marketers often sub-segment their
targets into smaller campaigns in order to test
different subject lines and marketing assets.
Landing page: Recipients of email offers are
typically asked to click a link within the copy of
the email to receive their offer (e.g. “Click here to
request your copy of the new white paper”). A
landing page is a web page specifically set up to
be the page that people see first upon clicking
the offer link. Landing pages typically include a
registration form for people to fill in their names
and email addresses, and an area of content for
people who may wish to learn more about the
subject, the company, or other information on the
website prior or subsequent to filling out the form.
Mass email (or “email blast”, or bulk email):
Mass email is the usual method for distributing
the offer of a marketing asset to the members
of the campaign. Because opt-in and member
lists often number in the tens of thousands, email
blasts require specialized emailing software and
hardware.
De-duplication: Incoming registrations on
campaign landing pages often include people
who have registered in the past, or are already
prospects or even customers. Most CRM systems
have some level of de-duplication built in (e.g.
the “Find Duplicates” button in Salesforce.com).
However, they do not do well with duplicates
that have different spellings, or other “fuzzy”
differences. Specialized de-duplication (or
“de-cloning”) software utilizes deeper matching
technology to recognize duplicate records that
CRM software might not find. In massive email
marketing and large-scale CRM, integrity of data
is critical. De-duplication software plays a key
role in ensuring that databases are clean and
accurate.

Page 5
Top Ten Tips for Online
Lead Generation
1. Work closely with sales to
define “the perfect lead”
All lead generation efforts must start with true
collaboration between marketing and sales. Far
too often we’ve seen organizations where the
marketing and sales groups operate entirely
separately from one another. Marketing conducts
campaigns or other efforts unilaterally. Sales
ignores leads provided by marketing, or conducts
its own “lead generation”. This division between
the two organizations leads to underperformance
in sales, overspending in marketing, and a
company that is left with not enough in the sales
pipeline to meet financial objectives.
It’s critical to get the marketing and sales
leadership and rank and file together on a regular
basis to discuss what’s going right and what’s
going wrong in lead generation. The most
important thing to do at the outset of setting
up an annual or quarterly lead generation plan
is bring sales people and marketing people
to a common table and create the definition
of the “perfect lead”. Salespeople bring their
years of experience with hit-and-miss prospects
to the table. Marketing brings research and
a scientific rigor to determining what target
markets might look like. Together, the two groups
of professionals need to come to a common
definition of precisely the right type of leads to
go find. What size company? What geography?
What vertical industry? Fast-growing “sunrise”
company, or late-stage “sunset” company? What
are the titles of the people we seek?
Once the “perfect lead” is described on paper,
the marketing organization can do its research
and go about creating the target market segment
for lead generation campaigns. As leads come
in, the entire organization can compare them to
the desired profile to understand the quality of
incoming leads. Salespeople will have an accurate
expectation of the types of leads they’ll receive
and what level of further interest and qualification
they should expect when they conduct follow-up
calls. With common definition of the perfect lead,
the days of marketing throwing leads of unknown
or poor quality over the wall to sales, and sales
ignoring them, or dismissing all efforts with the
all-too-common “The leads are garbage” refrain
will come to an end.

Page 6
2. Communicate campaigns to
salespeople
Another part of the essential collaboration
between marketing and sales is communication
of plans. It may
seem self-evident
that marketing
should provide
an overview of
their campaign
plans to sales
prior to launching
anything, but in
our experience,
it has been the
exception rather
than the rule.
Prior to launching
a lead generation
campaign,
the marketing
organization
should communicate the following to all sales
people:
• Date of the campaign launch
• Date of the event (if there is one, e.g. a
webcast that will follow three weeks after
the email invitations are sent)
• Name of the campaign
• Short description of the campaign (e.g.
“White Paper, `Virtualization for the Data
Center’, 40,000 recipients”)
• Key message of the campaign’s assets
(e.g. “This white paper will educate IT
managers and directors on the economics
of virtualizing Linux servers in large-scale
data centers.”)
• URL for the
landing page
• Marketing
asset(s) being
used. If the
campaign utilizes
a white paper
as a premium,
then the paper
should be emailed
directly to all
salespeople ahead
of the launch.
If a webcast or
teleseminar is
being offered for
a future date,
salespeople should
be provided the abstract, and if possible
even the slides for the event
• Talking points about the campaign. Some
salespeople prefer to directly contact
existing prospects and contacts ahead of
the campaign launch to add a personal
touch to the offer. Marketing should
provide sales with bullet point summaries
of the papers, webcasts, podcasts, etc.,
so that they can intelligently make a
personalized invitation on the phone or in
person

Page 7
3. Never “sell” during the lead
generation phase
Lead generation is just that: generation of
leads. It’s not a sales call. It’s not even an
advertisement. It’s a function designed to identify
people in your target market(s) who have some
level of interest in what your products or services
can do for them.
Time and time again we’ve seen lead gen
campaigns fail because the urge to change a mass
email from an offer into a sales pitch is too strong
to overcome. As a generalization, the desire to
use mass email to deliver tens of thousands of
“sales pitches” or “advertisements” originates
in the sales department. It is critical that all
organizations – sales, marketing, management
– understand that the use of mass email to sell
rather than make an offer will (1) fail to achieve
any sales or new prospects, (2) damage the
credibility of the company and severely reduce
the effectiveness of all future campaigns, and (3)
potentially set up the company to be blacklisted
as a spammer.
For the purposes of lead generation, all
outbound communications should be informative,
educational offers of content or premiums (e.g.
white papers). The marketing leadership should
make sure to reinforce this throughout the
communications and collaboration with the sales
department noted above.
4. Offer fresh, relevant
content
Before setting out your three, six, and twelve
month plans for lead generation campaigns, take
time to find out what content is already available
from your competitors and others. Offering the
same or similar topics and content as others won’t
hurt your efforts in the early going, but over the
course of months of multiple campaigns, your
opt-in recipients will start to notice that your
offers are repetitive or unoriginal.
Finding fresh, relevant content is yet another area
where the collaboration between marketing and
sales can yield terrific results. After all, every
time marketing delivers a new white paper or
webcast to 200 people, it’s the salespeople who
make 200 follow-up phone calls and get direct
feedback on the value of the content. Sales
follow-up scripts should contain explicit requests
to the contacts for their input on what topics
they’d like to see in the future. A solid pipeline
of ideas directly from the target market back to
the marketing campaign planners will set your
campaigns apart and yield better results.
(This isn’t to say that the repurposing and re-
use of marketing assets shouldn’t be done. In
fact, using common content in multiple formats
is a great tactic for reaching more people in the
manner they prefer. For example, a white paper
on “Virtualization in the data center” may also
have a companion webcast two weeks later. Each
type of vehicle can and should reinforce and
promote the others.)

Page 8
5. Use a mix of marketing
assets
Different people absorb and understand
information in different ways. There are three
types of people: (1) verbal people, (2) visual
people, and (3) tactile/experiential people2
.
People who learn verbally prefer to absorb
information in words. They understand best
through reading or listening. Visual people
prefer to take in information as pictures or
graphics. They understand best through graphical
depictions, icons, video, etc. Tactile people take
in information best through how they “feel”.
These types of people will often talk in terms
of how they feel about something. “I feel that
virtualization will save us big money.” They are
best reached through emotive words and pictures,
and concepts that appeal to the idea of touching
or experiencing something.
Because people are spread out across these
preferred information absorption types, the best
marketing plans address all three.
It’s best to use a mix of marketing asset types.
For example, in the case of the “Virtualization in
the Data Center” topic, the marketer might create
a white paper, a webcast, a podcast, a Flash
animation, and a video all from the same core
content. By spacing out the use of each medium
over time, each offer can promote the next or
the past offers. In this fashion, the 300 people
who want to learn about virtualization by reading
about it can receive a paper. The 200 who prefer
to learn about virtualization through pictures
2 http://www.trcc.commnet.edu/Ed_Resources/TASC/Training/Learning_Styles.
htm
and visuals can attend a webcast or download a
Flash animation or short video vignette. And the
tactile/experiential person might respond best to
a free software demo that she can experience, or
she might prefer the white paper because she can
print it and feel the pages as she reads.
6. Don’t stray outside the
target segment
It can be tempting to add more and more
contacts to your campaign lists in order to get
bigger numbers of leads coming in. However,
the effect of this will simply be more “leads”
coming in that will only be disqualified later in
the process. Adding contacts to an emailing list
that do not satisfy the attributes of the target
market segment that was created when sales
and marketing worked together to define the
“perfect lead” just adds time and frustration to
the salespeople’s efforts. Sales has the job of
winnowing through the hundreds of “interested”
leads generated by the campaign to find the 10
to 20 percent that will be “pre-qualified” and the
subsequent five to ten percent that will become
“qualified”3
. Adding dozens or maybe even
hundreds of people who appear to be “interested”
leads, but turn out to be from companies that are
too small, or too large, or too far away, or in the
wrong industries will simply frustrate the sales
force and waste precious time.
By promoting campaigns exclusively to the target
segment, as defined mutually between sales and
3 Most sales methods define “qualified” as a prospect that has Budget, Au-
thority, Need, and a reasonable Timeframe to make a purchase. This is known
as “BANT”.

Page 9
Very few organizations can keep up with writing,
editing, and releasing 12, 24, or 36 orginal white
papers per year. Every company finds scheduling
challenges for executives or other people required
to participate in live webcasts. These fire drills
get in the way of the schedule for campaigns, and
inconsistency in campaign releases will have a
negative effect on results.
It’s extremely important to publish a schedule
and stick to it. Creating a rhythm for campaigns
helps all constituents get into
the schedule and understand the
importance of it. Many successful
marketers set specific days for
campaign releases. For example, a
white paper offer will go out every
third Thursday of every month. A
webcast will be held on every first
Tuesday of every month. The
third Wednesday of every month
might be held for rich media offers
like podcasts and videos. Putting
together a repeatable, consistent
schedule in this manner helps keep
internal contributors on time, every
time, while also creating recognition
and anticipation in the external
world. Contacts who are not ready
to become qualified prospects
might start looking forward to each
month’s new webcast, and stay “connected” and
interested until such time as they might be ready
to consider purchasing.
Of course, the simplest way to ensure your
company’s lead generation campaigns stay
perfectly on schedule is to outsource the function.
marketing, you’ve injected quality control directly
into the process at the very first step.
7. Stick to a consistent
schedule
Here is another tip that appears rather self-
evident. Obviously, we all know we need to
run our campaigns and promotions to a set
schedule. But reality tends to be different and
distractions get in the way. We’ve all experienced
the monthly newsletter that turns into the “every
6 or 7 weeks newsletter”, and finally the “Do we
still do a newsletter?” newsletter. It’s common
for the marketing department to occasionally be
called upon to create a new Powerpoint for the
CFO, or edit the graphics in the sales collateral
overnight, or update web pages immediately.

Page 10
One of the biggest benefits of outsourced lead
generation (in addition to cost, quality, and
quantity benefits) is that an external agency can
never be distracted or worse by the fire drills that
an internal marketing group routinely faces. We’ll
explore outsourced lead generation in a future
paper in the White Paper Series.
8. Don’t mix objectives
As noted earlier, there is often a tendency to want
to leverage marketing campaigns, and particularly
mass email capabilities, for more than the goal
of receiving self-identifying, interested leads.
Additionally, it is tempting to try to accomplish
more than one objective within the campaign’s
emails and assets as they are released to the
targets.
It’s critical to keep the entire team focused
on the single objective of each campaign and
avoid the temptation to try to get more out of
the campaigns. The typical objective of a lead
generation campaign is to receive some number
of new, interested sales leads to provide to the
sales organization for follow-up. We recommend
ruthlessly defending this objective and keeping
all distractions and potential dilutions out of all
campaigns.

Page 11
9. Use multiple waves in
every campaign
Modern email marketing technology allows the
marketer to set up email blasts and subsequent
“waves” of follow-up emails to target contacts
based on certain actions or lack of actions.
For example, some bulk email systems can be
programmed to release 50,000 emails at a specific
time and date, then release a second, different
email at a designated time (perhaps three days
later) to all those original recipients who received
the email but never opened it. A third, different
email may be programmed to be sent to all
recipients who opened the first email, but didn’t
click through, and a fourth email can be set up to
be sent to all recipients who opened and clicked
through, but didn’t register on the landing page.
In this manner, all recipients receive multiple
offers for each marketing asset (with, of course,
each email containing a clear opt-out or do-not-
send option within, as described in the next tip).
At a minimum, each campaign should be set up
with waves of emails to address the statuses
of “did not open”, “opened, not clicked”, and
“clicked, not completed”. In the absence of a
bulk emailer that can automate multiple waves,
the marketing team should use the reporting
functions in their software to manually set up
each new wave.
10. Comply with CAN-SPAM
The United States enacted federal law in 2004
to protect consumers and business people from
junk email, or “spam”. Official information can be
found on the Federal Trade Commission’s website
at http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/business/
ecommerce/bus61.shtm.
The major points of the law are:
• Don’t use false or misleading header
information
• Don’t use deceptive subject lines
• Identify the message as an ad
• Tell recipients where you’re located
• Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving
future email from you
• Honor opt-out requests promptly
• Monitor what others are doing on your
behalf
Non-compliance can put a swift end to your
online marketing efforts. In addition to the
legal ramifications (up to $16,000 in fines
for each separate email), companies found
to be spamming will be blocked by ISP’s and
their domains can be blacklisted by Internet
authorities. Blacklisted email domains can send
no email, so the price for being a spammer is far
larger than the benefit one might perceive when
considering breaking the CAN-SPAM rules.

Page 12
Modern marketing techniques are delivering
significantly higher volumes of sales leads, at
significantly lower cost, with higher quality
and conversion rates. Still, as a relatively new
practice in marketing, online lead generation
has not yet built up a critical mass of practices,
documentation, training, or experienced
practitioners. We hope that the ten tips
presented in this paper will help you get your
online marketing machine up and running and
delivering new leads to your sales force.
Make sure to stay up to date with the other
papers in WinGreen’s white paper series. Check
back at www.WinGreenMarketing.com each
month to see new titles are they are released.
Conclusion

Page 13
WinGreen Marketing Systems is a content marketing agency specializing in inbound marketing, outbound marketing, and high-impact lead gen-
eration programs for technology companies in the United States and Canada. Headquartered in Downingtown, PA, the company was founded
in 2009, and is a business partner of Salesforce.com, Microsoft, Ringlead Inc., and Predictive Response.
WinGreen’s content marketing services include authoring and publishing of client-
branded content in all digital forms, including white papers, e-books, articles, blog
posts, social media posts, webcasts, videos, and podcasts. WinGreen delivers compel-
ling content that attracts target buyers and influencers across the entire spectrum of
buyer personas and buying phases.
The company’s inbound marketing services utilize WinGreen-authored content in its
many forms to attract and engage target buyers and influencers to its clients’ websites.
WinGreen uses Hubspot’s world-leading inbound marketing automation to manage content, campaigns, and analytics. The combination of
content published by WinGreen and inbound marketing supported by Hubspot tools is unbeatable for building prospect pipeline and revenue
growth.
WinGreen also provides outbound content marketing services for predictable, reliable, cost-effective lead generation. In addition to author-
ing all required content, WinGreen also builds target email databases, delivers mass email marketing, plans and executes regularly scheduled
campaigns, and utilizes its own commercial-grade, cloud software infrastructure for all marketing automation. WinGreen’s outbound content
marketing is the perfect way to get immediate lead generation results while building long-term inbound marketing engagement.
Contact WinGreen at www.wingreenmarketing.net/Pages/contactus.aspx or call (650) LEAD GEN (650-532-3436). Learn more at
www.wingreenmarketing.com.
About the Sponsor
© Copyright 2009-2013, WinGreen Marketing Systems, LLC. All Rights Reserved. This document and its contents may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the express written consent of WinGreen Marketing Systems.
WinGreen Marketing Systems, The WinGreen System of Marketing, and The WinGreen Systems Architecture are trademarks of WinGreen Marketing Systems, LLC. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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