All of them are worth sharing, but today we’ll start with these 7 awesome eCommerce infographics on topics like loading time, design, experimenting, mobile versions, going viral, fans and advertising.

1. Cut the loading time. (via KISSmetrics.)

2. Keep a close eye on design. (via Bop Design)

3. Understand and experiment. (via Lemon)

4. Optimize for mobile. (via Milagro Mobile Marketing)

5. Go viral. (via Harkable)

6. Build a fan base. (via Zintro)

7. Advertise. (via Prestige Marketing)

Did you find them helpful? Here are some other infographics you might like: Page Speed and Web Performance, What makes someone leave a website?, Mobile Mania, The Future of Mobile Payments, 6-Step Facebook Cheat Sheet and Personalized Emails.

Did you find any infographics worth sharing lately? Please tell us about them in the comments below.

The good thing is that such data is accessible. The reliability depends on how it is calculated and the sample of traffic that each demographic data tool has access to. Where to start?

To get accurate demographics data you only need details about a sample of random visitors. The bigger and the more random the sample, the more accurate the data.

Demographic data by Google and/or Facebook

Yes, Google does provide demographic data for most of the websites out there, though you need to dig in for it  little. You can get details about the localization and language of your visitors from your Google Analytics account:

Details about your audience profile can be found from Google Webmasters Tools under Traffic > +1 Reports > Audience

Details about how many people click on the Like Facebook button, can be found in Facebook Insights for your website page.

While these reports represent only the people that +1 or like your website, this image of theirs is accurate because of the quality of data owned by Google and Facebook. If the people spending time on social networks are representive for the majority of your visitors, the above reports are spot on.

Demographic data from your email service provider

The easiest would be to ask your visitors directly demographic data. Make all the fields optional as you only need a sample of your visitors to fill in the data. Having at least 1000 people fill in all the data should do it.

If you are a MailChimp customer you are even luckier. Their SocialPro feature offers demographics data about your visitors automatically.

Demographics data from past sales

This is the one that interests you the most: the demographics of the people that buy. It’s an esy one to do, actually. Just export in a list as many email addresses as possible to increase accuracy of the data.

Go to rapleaf.com, and for around 100$ you’ll be able to profile around 1000 people. Rapleaf looks for all the social networks for which accounts were created with those email addresses and takes the data out from there.

Ok. Now we know how to get demographic data for our website. How do you think we should use this data for optimizing marketing campaigns?

I’ll tell you what. If you have an idea we like but you don’t want to test it first on your website, we’ll do it first and share all the results we get with you.

For instance, you might want to create a subscription form for your website, one that looks great on any computer or mobile device. But these things are such a drag sometimes, aren’t they? And the optimization will probably take a few good hours, which is practically forever in your busy schedule. Why not just download ours?

What’s so special about this subscription form?

Well, two things. Firstly, it is what’s called responsive design. This means you can open it on any computer, no matter the resolution, as well as on any mobile device, and it will always look awesome. But don’t take my word for it, give it a go and see for yourself (try slowly modifying your browser’s size for maximum fun):

Live Demo

Secondly, it’s really easy to install. All you have to do is download it and copy it on your site. And if you want to personalize it, you must only modify a few lines of code; which, rest assured, isn’t more difficult than your basic website maintenance.

How do I install it?

You can, of course, just copy-paste the code and start from there. Here it is:

[crayon-4fb3f893431fb/]

However, if you prefer to have it in a nice ZIP format, you can always download it from here:

Download Now

Whatever option you choose, feel free to modify the form in any way you want. And if you found some way to make it even more awesome than it is (which is quite difficult, as it is already rather awesome), please let us know what you did.

Do you have any questions or want to give us your feedback? Please let me know in the comments below.

OK, let’s assume you want the bad news first.

After reading a bunch of articles on the matter of scheduling email deliveries and checking out stats from all the big email providers like Aweber, Mailchimp, Get Response and other companies we integrated PadiAct with, I reached a STRONG CONCLUSION.

There’s no specific formula for the perfect delivery time of email campaigns.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that there are a few patterns emerging from billions of emails sent, and we will talk about them in order to help you find the best time to deliver your emails.

Know this from the start: All email lists are unique!

Even though you can benchmark your list with almost anyone in your industry, that doesn’t mean the same rules apply to your audience.

Your list is unique, because your subscribers are unique, and that means you have to listen to your audience are silently saying through the measurement of important email metrics.

Email Scheduling Patterns

As I said earlier, I learned that there are a few patterns that can help you decide when is the best time to reach out to your list.

1. Early mornings

A few email marketers learned that sending their emails early in the morning work best for them.

Why?

There are 2 main reasons to this:

• The nature of their subscribers’ jobs which allows or requires early morning email checking
• The important of emails
• You want your emails to rank higher in your subscribers’ inbox

So if your subscribers are busy working people that usually have time only in the morning or your emails are so important that are like pancakes in the morning, then you should test if early morning deliveries work for your list.

2. Lunch time

Some ventures went on a “lunch time” strategy.

It’s very obvious the reasoning behind this strategy. You are looking to capitalize on the spare time that your audience has.

So if your offer is important enough that people don’t leave for lunch because they may get a great deal for you, you should test lunch time as a choice for your scheduled campaign.

3. Weekdays

With different clients I tested different weekdays to set up as the “official newsletter day”.

If your audience is catching up with work on Monday, maybe Tuesday of Wednesday is a better choice for you.

If you are managing an e-commerce shop and you want people to cruise your website to acquire new gadgets and electronics, then you better send that email in Thursday.

Nothing is set in stone.

That’s why you have to test different weekdays. And you can do that with the same list.

Split your email list in 2 groups to test 2 different delivering days. To group A you will send your newsletter, let’s say Wednesday and to group B, Thursday.

Repeat this test next week. What were your results?

4. Weekends

Some marketers send emails on Friday afternoons because they want their subscribers to schedule their weekends after their offers.

Some marketers send their emails on a Sunday morning. Why? Because their lists consist of ambitious and busy entrepreneurs that use Sunday as a planning day for the upcoming week.

So if your audience is a busy one or your offers is important enough to schedule a weekend around it, maybe it’s proper to send your emails throughout the weekends.

5. Several times a day or as news breaks out

This delivery schedule is preferred by news sites and coupons dealers.

I think it’s kind of obvious.

You want your emails to match your offer, so in order to strive, you match your email frequency with your content frequency.

Without a doubt some emails will be completely ignored, that’s why you should offer alternatives like: daily summaries, weekly newsletter or preference based subscription, when users can select what kind of content should be delivered to their emails.

Final thoughts

Testing is imperative. You cannot determine the best time-frame for deliveries if you don’t have the patience to test different schedules.

Every niche and every campaign is different. So you can adapt your schedule according to the purpose, or end goal of your campaign.

Delivering emails is not only a service to you, because you get better open rates, it’s also a great services to your audience because they get their emails exactly when they’re available to read them, or are in need of your content.

I run into these two versions of the same email quite by chance, and I’m glad I did. Even though there is no way to find out which variant performed better, nor if the AB test was more complex than this, there is still a lot to learn from the two versions.

Click on image to view full email

Click on image to view full email

Here is what it’s being tested:

• the title
• the introduction (specifically, whether to mention why a user receives the email)
• the greeting formula
• personal tone vs formal tone

Which email do you think got a better response and why? Would you have done anything different?

While it can do many other things, it pretty much sucks at them. So, what shouldn’t you do with Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is not a financial tool

Yes, there is eCommerce tracking but it is only meant for adding revenue data to your traffic data and do correlations between them. I’ve seen hundred of eCommerce implementations and I am yet to see one that fits exactly the reality.

Why isn’t it 100% accurate? Chargebacks, plugins that block Google Analytics, pages that load slowly and are abandoned are just a few reasons.

However, financial reports need to be 100% accurate. Don’t base your financial reports on Google Analytics as it will only cause frustrations.

How big of a frustration? I once had a fake payment of 2 billion screw up all my eCommerce data. A user placed an order of $2.000.000.000 on a customer’s website. Luckily we were able to delete the transaction from Google Analytics, otherwise the eCommerce data would’ve been compromised.

Google Analytics is not a stalking tool

No, you can’t use your visitors name, email address or security number as custom fields or events in Google Analytics. First, it’s against their terms of use. Doing it might get you banned from their service. It’s also illegal in many countries.

Second, it won’t do you any good. It’s like judging a huge crowd of people by just analyzing one person, or 2 or 10.

Google Analytics is not for analyzing individual behavior. It’s for analyizing what impact your website is having on segmented groups of traffic.

Google Analytics is not a tool for calculating CTR

Ok, maybe in some particular cases it can be used for this, but most of the time you’ll get into trouble.  There is a Google Analytics limit of 500 requests per visit and a limit of 10 requests per 5 seconds.

If you are going to track every impression of every banner on your website, the chances are you are going to hit that limit of 500 requests pretty soon, and you won’t get the rest of the valuable data of your visitors behavior.

As conversions usually happen at the end of a visit session, you might loose the most important part of a visit.

Google Analytics can’t calculate the real time spent by visitors on your website

The time spent on your website by visitors (as it appears in Google Analytics), is always smaller than how much time people actually spent on your website, even as an average.

If somebody visits a single page on your website, Google Analytics won’t be able to calculate how much time she stayed and will report 0 seconds, even if she spent 3 minutes on it.

The real bounce rate hack helps you get a better estimate of how much people spend on your website, but still, it won’t give you an absolutely accurate number.

But does it really matter if people on average spend 5 minutes or 5 minutes and 40 seconds? Would you take a different optimization decision if you would get the real number? My guess is no.

If you send a request to Google Analytics every second or even every 10 seconds of somebody’s visit, you’ll just hit the 500 requests limit so fast that Google Analytics will fail to log other actions done by a visitor on a website, and the time spent will be even more inaccurate.

Google Analytics is not a product database

Ok, this is something I actually tried to do a couple of times, but it ain’t a piece of cake. I’ve seen cases where people use it as a product inventory database. While they considered the implementation a success, and I have to agree I loved it, in the end I think it looks better as an experiment to try out your skills than a real solution.

If you are a geek and really don’t have another solution for it, ok, give it a try. Just do it in a separate profile as you might impact the rest of the data in an undesired way.

Can you think of any other Google Analytics misuses?

But it’s not like lead nurturing is a rocket surgery. Actually some people have done it before it was cool and easy to be leveraged with technology.

Lead nurturing is often misunderstood because some people are using it badly, and don’t want to admit that.

But you are lucky, you will find out from the start only the good and important parts of nurturing leads.

So prepare yourself to learn a great and effective strategy to turn leads into profitable relationships for your business.

The purpose of this article is to introduce you into the concept of lead nurturing, why is it important for your business and what are some few actions steps you need to take to start nurturing prospective leads.

What is lead nurturing?

Marketo defines lead nurturing as “the process of building relationships with qualified prospects, regardless of their timing to buy, with the goal of earning their business when they are ready.”

There are a few key elements in this definition I wish to discuss with you:

1. You are building relationships – building a relationship takes time, effort and needs to be maintained. If you are really into building relationships with prospective customers, than lead nurturing will be a great strategy for your business.
2. Qualified prospects – you need to build relationships with the proper people. If you are hoping to get everyone as a client, you will be disappointed. So it’s important you clarify which people you need to focus on, and how do you define a prospective customer or a qualified lead.
3. The goal is to earn new business – you are not doing this only for the sake of the relationship. You have a specific goal – to earn new business for yourself or for your company. Yeah sure, if you want to extend the relationship beyond the sale, that’s a good follow-up, but don’t forget that you will use lead nurturing for building new business for you or your company.

What isn’t lead nurturing?

When you are doing these things, you aren’t nurturing leads:

• If you are sending out emails whenever you have the chance.
• Sending out guides at irregular times or you write a new case study and you want to promote it right away.
• Sending frequent newsletters promoting products and offers.
• Writing news and updates on your products and services just to let know people you are doing stuff.

Lead nurturing is a very strategic process, with a goal at the end and all the action steps you take are planned steps.

Lead nurturing is a strategy for building smart and educated leads, that will favor you when it comes to choosing products in your market.

Remember these key words for later: educate, leads, planning.

3 Common sensed reasons why lead nurturing is good for your business

1. It’s content marketing with a more targeted focus. Sometimes companies use content marketing just to spread their message and practices. They write eBooks, whitepapers and reports and they hope that in time, their audience will become smart enough to choose their products and services.  That doesn’t sound so planned and efficient?
2. It establishes reputation and trust. If you are educating people to make smart decisions, than you are establishing yourself as a trusted source of information and best practices. Thought leadership matters now, more than ever, and the key to that is to become trusted agent, or a tribe leader, that offers the means to better and informed choices.
3. It is permission based marketing at is finest. You are nurturing leads that accept your offer. If it’s all permission based, the chances you can convert a lead into a customer are in your favor. And it’s all because the people wanted, not because you forced it.

Now that you know what is lead nurturing, and you know why it’s important to your business, we can focus on the “how-to” part of lead nurturing.

Buying stages

When buying stuff, people have a really outlined strategy that helps them choose better solutions for them or for their business. This strategy has four stages:

1. Awareness: becoming aware of the need.
2. Consideration: considering several products or services that can resolve that need.
3. Research: comparing solutions to obtain optimal utility.
4. Purchase: choosing the product that fits best and doing the purchase.

Pretty obvious, isn’t it? Complicated so far? Not really.

Your job is to get mingled in these stages with the proper content and the proper timing. That means you have to become “the right guy at the right moment”.

Now here is where things become more interesting. Not complicated, interesting because you are facing a big challenge.

Even though we outlined a pretty specific model, that doesn’t mean that the decision making process of a lead is so streamlined and logical. Not at all. But you need some sense of how people are choosing products to fill needs and wishes.

Your purpose throughout the decision making process is to facilitate choice and inform your prospect about needs to be kept in mind and what alternatives you can offer. Nothing pushy and self-promotional, just letting your prospective lead that it’s all there and you are the easy step, a shortcut to filling the need.

Content

The key to lead nurturing is custom tailored content.

Establishing personas will help you define better content. So creating different profiles, also called buying roles, for leads that come from Twitter or Facebook or Emails, can help you create laser targeted content.

For the first two stages it’s safer to offer more educational content, in order to build trust and to establish yourself as a good intended entity.

Thought leadership matters more and more to branding, and content is a great tool for branding, because if you are offering value, people will follow you everywhere.

The more targeted is your content, the better. You can target based on:

• Job title
• Job responsibilities
• Tools used in day to day activities
• Company size
• Geography or regional particularities

If you are looking to target based on buying stages, here’s some tips:

• Educational content works best for the early stages
• Industry oriented content like whitepapers, reports and case studies work best when people are already looking and considering different solutions
• Company oriented materials or solution oriented content work best in the final stages of the decision making process

A few extra tips to consider when creating content:

• The more condensed and valuable, the better: people are more time sensitive that they were 20 years ago, so time is of an essence.
• More value, less marketing: a good piece of content promotes itself, so focus more on building a valuable resource than on pitching your offer.
• With every message, newsletter or email you send out find a way to get closer and more emotionally involved with your leads. Don’t forget, when we are nurturing leads, we are building relationships.

Timing

As we mentioned a few times, building relationships take time and lead nurturing isn’t something that happens overnight.

The timeframe for your strategy depends on what kind of product you are selling, and how easy is it to take a decision.

If you are selling a generic product, let’s say a phone, it’s easy to imagine that the decision making process will not take so long. I don’t think people duel with the decision of buying a phone for a few months.

If you are considering purchasing an marketing automatization product for your company, and most of the solutions are averaging 1000 bucks/month, I think you need to take a very informed decision. So the process may take a few weeks, even months depending on the strategic implications of the purchase.

The guys from Marketo outlined a great calendar for a lead nurturing campaign, and because­ I don’t want to reinvent the wheel, I will give you their example:

• Day 1 – Follow-up with introductory email
• Day 10 – Email offering new content  related to first download and subsequent  Web site activity
• Day 15 – Personal email from sales rep
• Day 30 – Email best practices whitepaper
• Day 45 – Call from sales rep to ‘check in’
• Day 60 – Email promoting webinar series
• Day 75 – Personal email from sales rep offering a product demo
• Day 85 – Call from sales rep to schedule  in-person meeting
• Day 90 – Send sales proposal via email

Let’s take some time to grasp some lessons from this example:

Look at the human approach of this strategy: they introduce themselves, they are offering relevant content, they are establishing human contact between the company and the prospect.

From time to time a sales rep contact to check how things are going. They then do a follow-up with content, webinar and more important, and a chance to get acquainted with the product.

Then the follow-up the demo offer with a sales meeting and a offer proposal.

I love the strategy. I love the timing and the timeframe. Even though it looks so planned because it’s all outlined, when I was thinking about the timeframe it ran so natural through my head. If someone applied the same strategy on me, probably it would have ended in a sale.

Why?

It isn’t pushy.

I find it very thoughtful and helpful.

It builds trust and establishes a relationship.

It flows naturally.

Depending on your product you can follow the same flow outlined in the above mentioned example, but with shorter periods between emails and calls.

Because this is only an introductory guide to lead nurturing, I’m sure you would like more resources and more in-depth materials, so I gathered some links for you to help you in your journey for lead nurturing mastery.

Important lead nurturing guides and articles:

• Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing – a great guide with specific examples and statistics, and also some more advanced tips & tricks.
• Become Lead generation God– to build a lead nurturing strategy or campaign you need leads, and this article can offer you ideas, tools and strategies for obtaining ridiculous amounts of leads.
• Email Marketing: Anti-newsletter strategy nurtures $1.5 million in leads in 4 months at Citrix – a great lead nurturing campaign example
• Lead nurturing for demand generation – how Marketo implemented their own advice to generate demand for their products
• How Lead life used Lead nurturing to generate more sales and improve relationships

Final thoughts

If you are interested on converting more leads into customers and building more meaningful relationships regardless of their timing to buy, then lead nurturing will become a central element in your marketing efforts.

What I find really cool is that you can automate most of the process, and you can convert more with less effort, just because you were smart enough to leverage technology and content marketing in your favor.

One warning before we end this article, never forget that building relationships takes time, and trust and value are key elements to any successful relationship, regardless of their nature, business or personal.

The more human you are about your marketing, the more people will invite you in their business and their lives.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, you have heard of A/B or multivariate testing for websites, aka conversion rate optimization. 2011 being coined by many “The Year of the Conversion Rate Optimization” and the fact that you’re reading this blog makes me think that you already familiar with jargon like CRO, LPO, MVT or A/B/. And, if you a smart marketer or website owner, then you already tried and reaped the benefits of website testing for conversion optimization.

Figure 1 – Image credit

Unfortunately, it is very common for the information-overloaded, super-busy, over-worked, {insert your other energy draining power here} online marketer not to be aware of the implications of website testing on search engine rankings. If your tests go live on a production server without some minimal SEO check up, you’re swimming in shallow waters. However, a well versed CRO consultant should make you aware of the possible risks of testing and your SEO company should provide some of the best practices to help you with the optimization process. Or, read below.

How Does Website Testing Affects SEO?

Here are some risks one has to take into consideration when testing and optimizing for conversions.

Duplicate Content Issues

When you setup an A/B test, you will create 2 URLs, i.e. www.site.com (aka the control) and www.site.com/index1.php (aka the variation). If you’re changing only some images and a couple of headlines on the variation page, you will end up with two highly identical pages, and this poses duplicate content issues. This might come as a surprise to some, since A/B testing is implemented with JavaScript redirects, which are supposed to be safe. But JavaScript is not to be blamed here.

Those pesky variation URLs will be indexed if somehow Google is able to find about them. Say you shared the test URL on a Google Webmaster Forum to clarify some technical issues, or you’ve mentioned it on your blog or someone came to your website, was served the test URL and then he published a link to your page, on his own website. To extreme cases, Google will use its own Google Toolbar to find out about new URLs (surprised about the Toolbar indexing? Then, please read this patent from Google). In all these instances Google will crawl and index the test URLs, and voila, you’re good for dupe issues.

Figure 2 – You don’t want your competitors to see these testing ideas, isn’t it?

With multivariate testing things can go even worse. Since multivariate testing doesn’t redirect to other URLs and keeps a single URL for all possible combination of the test, that can lead to hundreds of similar content URLs, which again turns into duplicate content problems.

Lost Backlink Equity

A little bit earlier I mentioned about people who visit your site and are served the test variation URLs of A/B tests. If they like the landing pages they will tweet, socially bookmark, or blog about them, thus creating backlinks to your site. And backlinks are generally good for rankings, right?

Once you’ve identified a test winner and stopped the test, the variation URLs will stop existing also (given that the winner is not the control URL). But those backlinks from other sites will still be alive. Google will pass Page Rank (if the backlinks are followed) to the landing pages and from there throughout your website only as long as the variation URLs resolve to 200 OK response headers, or at least 301’s. The Page Rank and your search rankings might be affected if the test is improperly concluded.

Additionally, if someone clicks on those links and your pages are not there anymore then they will get a 404 Page Not Found Error, which is a bad user experience no matter how great the custom 404 page is.

SERP Bounce Rate

Search Engine Results bounce rate is not the same with the website bounce rate. A SERP bounce is when you bounce back to the Google search results page, without visiting several pages or spending a certain amount of time on the URL you clicked on.

Google has a feature called Block all www.site.com results, which is available when you click on a page in the SERPs and then bounce. Keep in mind that SERP Bounce is also a very strong user feedback signal to Google and also an SEO factor.

Figure 3 – SERP bounce in Google

When testing, many marketers measure the success of the test by looking at macro conversions, which can be a lead sign up or a purchase or a subscription. More advanced online marketers look and optimize for micro conversions and even event conversion (no page views). But not many take SERP bounce rate into account. If the number of visitors who bounce from Google increases, you jeopardize your rankings.

An increase in the SERP bounce rate can signal Google that the page is not worthy anymore and its rankings can decrease. Unfortunately, the SERP bounce rate is a bit more difficult to measure and integrate with your test, it requires some additional manual work and that makes many of us ignore this decision making metric.

Let’s finish the risks list with a couple of factors you don’t need to worry too much (at last )

Cloaking

While technically speaking showing different content to visitors than to Googlebot is considered cloaking, website testing in most cases is not considered cloaking. Just follow the official guidelines from Google and you should be safe.

Page Speed

While not a significant contributor to search rankings, load time is still an official SEO factor, affecting about 1% of the search queries. Unless your tests generate really slow pages (say more than 5 seconds for your content to start displaying in the browser) page speed should be the last of your concerns.

What Should You Do?

Below is a list of best practices that you can follow to make sure you’re safe with SEO when testing.

1. Add the following meta tags in ALL variation URLs:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow,noarchive”>
2. Put the test pages in a dedicated directory (i.e. mysite.com/testing/) and exclude the directory with robots.txt.
3. In your variation URLs use the rel=”canonical” meta tag to suggest to search engines the canonical URL that they should index.
4. Avoid linking to your testing directory/pages from anywhere.
5. Do a permanent redirect (301) for all tested URLs to the winning URL once the test is concluded.
6. Test only with a portion of the traffic, if possible. This is to be safe with the SERP bounce rate.
7. Watch the rankings for the page you’re testing. That will be very difficult for template based MVT testing, but easier for A/B testing.

Happy testing and please leave a comment!

1. Launching soon.

Your website isn’t ready yet, but you want to start gathering leads? Use LaunchRock to setup a personalized “launching soon” page, complete with subscription forms and connected to social media. It will give your users something to do and to talk about, and it won’t let you feel like you’re losing precious time. Because you won’t.

2. Ads.

Your website is up and running, so you might want to consider spreading the word through some ads. As I see it, you have three main advertising options: Google, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Google AdWords: anyone searching for your chosen keywords will see your ads. It has the Google Analytics advantage, the keyword tool to help you find better keywords and improve your SEO approach, and you have some great mobile ads options for your mobile savvy visitors. However, you have no control whatsoever on your target audience.

Facebook Ads: you can choose very specific target audiences, based on location, age, gender, interests, etc.  It’s easy to personalize your message for each sub-section of your target, so it can be the perfect choice for advertising B2C products. Still, it’s not so good for B2B companies, as not everyone is eager to share their professional life here.

LinkedIn Ads: you can target people based on job title, industry, geography, company size, and even LinkedIn Groups. It’s the best lead generation option for B2B companies, and you can use it for recruiting as well.

3. Landing pages.

Unbounce. If you want great landing pages to go with each ad, you need them fast, and you don’t want to be delayed by the IT guy, this is the go-to site. A page can be online in a matter of minutes and, more importantly, it is built with conversion in mind. From their features, we especially like the easy split testing, the lead capture forms and all the cool widgets.

Premise. This is an excellent choice if you need landing pages for your WordPress site. Besides the landing page itself, it offers testing and optimization, copywriting and strategy tips and more.

4. Behavioural targeting.

PadiAct. When you are ready to start your first email marketing campaign, right from your website, use this tool for increased conversion rates. It targets the right visitors without being invasive or annoying, customizes their experience and invites them to subscribe to your newsletter. Also, the results are easy to track at all times, so you can constantly improve your campaigns.

5. Check how well you did.

HubSpot’s Marketing Grader. A while after you started generating online leads, enter your website URL into this marketing grader and see how well you did and what needs improving. Among the things that are being graded are your site, blog, SEO and your social media presence.

Like this tool? You’re going to love the Tweet Grader and the Search Grader. Have fun!

6. Ask your visitors what they want.

KISSinsights. It’s always a good idea to ask your users what they need: in your emails, on social media, even at the end of your blog posts. But if you want to do the asking on your website, we recommend you use KISSinsights’s bottom sliding surveys. They are unintrusive and yet highly visible, so they are a great way to get results.

7. Groups and questions.

LinkedIn Groups. Join as many groups as you can. Keep in mind though, your constant presence there (through the asking and answering of questions), is essential to networking and your lead generating success. So don’t join too many. They will allow you to meet professionals interested in the same business, and if you do this right, you can meet your future clients and partners there.

Also, creating a group is a great way to meet and engage your customers, to attract an audience of professionals and to raise awareness for your brand.

Quora. This is where all the serious people are asking all the serious questions. And if their questions are related to your product and/or industry, you need to be there. Through informed and detailed answers you can position yourself as an expert in your field, raise the awareness for your brand and even generate leads.

Was this information useful? Do you have any suggestions for other cool lead generation tools? Please tell us what you think in the comments below.

What makes a good and mature approach to dealing with analytics data? How do pros and beginners deal with web analytics in different scenarios?

A new web analytics feature comes up

Boys play a few hours with it, apply it to random sets of data, take a few screenshots and jump up to write a blogpost or tweet around about how amazing the new feature is.

Men ask themselves: Does it help me and does it help now? If the answer is yes, they go through the documentation, try the feature on small sets of data on which results can be easily validated.

Based on the value the new feature offers, it will be included or not in the personal framework for analyzing the performance of a website.

A new hack is published on a web analytics implementation

Boys copy and paste it on their website, among many other hacks, barely understanding what the code does. They wait to see if the reports meet their expectations and brag around about their new toy.

Men bookmark the code, debug it if they have the skills or ask a programmer to explain each part of the code. They know what works for one website won’t work exactly the same for another. Understanding the hack is crucial before even thinking if it is needed or if it helps in any way.

A major discovery is done with existing data

Boys feel like they just received a new toy. They take the data as it is, think of the first thing that might of have caused it and offer an action plan to fix it. When the impact of their fix isn’t as expected they look for somebody or something to blame.

Men go scientific about it. They know that if a set of data tells one story, than the rest of the data need to support the same story. They first look to validate the initial story and make sure they don’t miss out any pieces of the puzzle.

When men are sure about the conclusions, they team up with different people and start brainstorming ideas on how to fix it. The best ideas go into AB testing that is rigurously followed.

Another department asks for help

Boys already know how to help before diving into data, therefore they just look for the reports that validate their idea. They ignore anything that doesn’t.

Men ask a lot of questions and try to make sure they understand the real problem and not the stated problem. They dive into data and take out every piece of it that is related to the problem. They brainstorm and come up with different solutions to be tested.

The CEO asks for the monthly reports

Boys come up with every report they can use to brag about how good they are at genereting reports. The more metrics and the stranger the names, the better.

Men reply with an excel sheet that includes as few metrics as possible that answers the question: is the business growing or declining. An email accompanies the excel sheet that states in 1 phrase the conclusions of the excel and what, from his perspective, the next priorities in improving the business should be.

Every men has been a boy at some point in his life. The faster they grow the better for the organizations that employ them.

One of the ways to grow faster is to look out there for role models. And because we talked enough about men today, here are some role models next to which I still feel like a teenage web analytics boy:

• Emer Kirane
• Michele Kiss (Hinojosa)
• Gabriele Endress

Are you menly enough about your web analytics?