Generation Y Lists - by Russell Dunn

Source: Melissadata.com

The teen market is growing in a big way, and today's teens are ready to buy through the mail. When introducing a product to the teen market, direct mailers will encounter several problems when making their list selections. The first is the lack of quality direct mail responsive names. There are precious few response lists available for the teen market. As a result, teen marketers must rely more heavily on the use of compiled and enhanced lists. Once they have used every quality response name they can get their hands on, teen marketers should carefully select names from the recently burgeoning number of enhanced and compiled teen lists using tight demographic selects. Another dilemma often run into by teen marketers is to whether to mail to the parent's name or the child's name. Assuming that you are offering a quality product that is not offensive, it makes no difference who you mail to. Ultimately the parent's will view and approve the purchase prior to response, regardless of whose name is on the mail piece.

Are you losing web generated leads?

According to InsideSales.com, web-generated leads lose their potential by 6X if you don't respond within the first hour. These are the leads that you receive as emails when a prospect submits an online form in your web site or, when a lead vendor forwards you details of a potential customer.

Automating your leads processing with eMail-Lead Grabber Excel is one sure-enough way to significantly improve your web lead response time.

eMail-Lead Grabber Excel is an email processing automation solution that extracts data from your email messages and transfers them to Excel Spreadsheet or csv format (data export).It also sends auto response follow-up whenever a prospect fills up an inquiry form on your website.

Responding immediately to web leads is very important for any business because you never know which lead would be your potential customer. Your prospects always expect a quick response and so, prompt follow-up of web generated leads becomes very vital.

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Why to Tie Marketing to Time, Not Money

Source: WallStreet Journal Blogs
By Kelly Spors

In today’s recession, many small businesses may think it’s wise to tie their marketing to money and value to appeal to cash-strapped consumers. But perhaps they should tie it to something else of considerable value: time.

A new study by researchers at Stanford Business School, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, found that it’s generally far more lucrative for businesses to reference time and personal experiences in their marketing than focusing on monetary value.

“Because a person’s experience with a product tends to foster feelings of personal connection with it, referring to time typically leads to more favorable attitudes—and to more purchases,” says Jennifer Aaker, a Stanford marketing professor and one of the co-authors of the study, according to an article on Stanford’s Web site. One example the researchers point to is Miller beer’s “It’s Miller Time” – compared to say Stella Artois’s “Perfection has its price.”

To test their theory, the researchers set up a lemonade stand — staffed by two six-year-olds for authenticity — and tested the effect of three different signs. The first sign said “Spend a little time and enjoy C&D’s lemonade.” The second one said “Spend a little money and enjoy C&D’s lemonade.” And the third one said “Enjoy C&D’s lemonade.” Customers were asked to pay any amount between $1 and $3 for a cup of lemonade and then were questioned afterward about their impressions of the lemonade.

The experiment showed that the sign that stressed time brought in twice as many passersby who ultimately paid twice as much than when the signing stressing money was posted. Those customers who bought with the sign mentioning time also reported liking the lemonade more than the others.

In another experiment, the researchers asked college students about their Apple iPods. One group was asked how much time they spent on it and another group on how much money. Those asked about time expressed liking their iPod a lot more than those asked about the money spent on it.

The researchers uncovered one exception to the rule. When companies market items purchased for prestige, such as luxury cars, jewelry or designer jeans, focusing on the monetary value can be more effective than time and experience. They think it’s because the owners value just owning those products more than the time spent with them.

So what are the takeaways for real businesses? Prof. Aaker told Stanford GSB News that the results suggest businesses should spend more time thinking about how their product or service improves the lives and happiness of their customers and draw their advertising and marketing campaigns around those attributes rather than tying marketing to money.

But even just using the word “time” in marketing, and steering clear of mentioning money, can make a difference. “In the context of a real business, conducted among a variety of consumers, this experiment shows that merely mentioning time rather than money in a product’s marketing materials can make the very same product more alluring and better liked,” the authors note.

Readers, have you found focusing on time and experience is more effective than focusing on low cost or value?

Social Nets and Blogs More Popular Than E-Mail - Ranked by Active Reach

clipped from www.emarketer.com

Why Does Any Business Require Lead Generation?

Source: net-leads.com

Every business activity requires suitable and effective lead generation methods to get more business and profit. Lead generation is essential for pulling more opportunities in growing business world. So, if you are a business owner, you must be aware of process of lead generation that will help you to get possible chances to get golden chances to gain potential capabilities.

Need of Lead generation in business

Lead generation is the foremost activity for any business operation. Without a proper lead generation process, a business cannot gain potential clients for gaining possible profitable situations. The process is considered to be the most effective and workable Business-to-Business communication tool to generate possible profit gaining methods very easily and conveniently. On the scale of majoring its profitability, lead generation process has been getting positive impacts from a long period of time. However with the changing times, the format has been changed but the medium remains the same.

The activity of lead generation is a combination of many other activities and processes to give you a well-managed planned program to convince people and cater their requirements properly. This is reason why, the system is gaining popularity as it never had.

Role of appointment setting as a lead generation activity

The role of appointment setting is of great importance in this fast growing competitive business market situation. In order to make new clients, companies need to catch the attention of a large client base to secure their success. Nowadays, professional agencies are lending their supporting hands to provide a well-designed appointment setting process to gain the ongoing market waves. These agencies provide you quality results within a limited period of time to provide you benefits like never before.

If you want to avail such facilities, you can seek for professional agencies’ help and gain exponentially.

Also Read:

Sales Lead Generation with ListGrabber

Internet Lead Generation with ListGrabber

2 Easy Steps to Build your lead lists from free lead sources on the Internet

DupChecker for ACT! - Dedupe your database

DupChecker for ACT! is a tool that uses advanced fuzzy logic technology to quickly identify hard to find duplicates in your ACT! database. DupChecker automatically scans, identifies and groups duplicates for easy merging and de-duping. DupCheckers new feature, checks for duplicates even on user defined fields.

DupChecker for ACT! finds and displays duplicates that are created through

• Data entry errors
• Import mapping errors
• Common Abbreviations
• Pronunciation variations
• Formatting variations and lots more...

Features:

1.Highly Accurate - Uses Fuzzy Logic Technology to identify hard to find duplicates

a. Exact match on any field

b. Alternate Spellings (Hiatt, Hyate, Hiat, Hiate)

c. Abbreviatons (HP, Hewlett Packard) and lots more

2. Batched Merge - Preview and merge all duplicates in one click

3. Track Back - Maintains log of all merges in ACT! history

4. Two plus merging - Merges multiple matches into one record

5. Field Specific DupChecking - Finds duplicates in user defined fields and custom user fields

Benefits:

1. Protect Company Credibility- Gain customer respect and build brand superiority by avoiding repeated messages or calls to customer and prospects

2. Maintains Data Integrity - Consolidate the duplicates owned by different sales representatives into one contact - combat the problem of repetitive data

3. Save Time - Now your sales team can call up more leads and save time that could go into calling up duplicate contacts

Works with ACT! 2009/2008/2007/2006(8.0.2.81 / 8.0.2.82)

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Build Targeted Prospect Lists Quickly and Cost Effectively

Source: Article Base

The most fundamental requirement for any business or sales person is a prospect list.

A prospect list is a record of people who could be potential clients. At times, your existing clients are also part of this list as they might use your business again. The success of a business or a sales person can be measured by the number of sales resulting from its use and by the number of new additions to the prospect list. A targeted prospect list will ensure that time is not spent on markets with little or no returns.

Ideally, a sales person should create and manage his own prospect list. Hence, it is important that you form a clear picture of the target market for your business.

Most Sales and Marketing Professionals are interested in obtaining prospect lists that they can market or sell to. To get access to such lists you might:

Buy or Rent Lists

There are many ways to build a prospect database, but none can add new prospects as quickly as buying or renting a list. But, this option can be expensive and you can never be sure if you are getting the exact customers that you want. Also, there is the issue of outdated contact data since contact information may change at any time. Additionally, buying rights on commercial lists place restrictions on how you use those lists.

Build Prospect Lists on your Own

We highly recommend that you build your own prospect list. This is because you know the target market for your business better than anybody else. You know their characteristics and what appeals to them. Having said that, the question that comes next is -Where do I find them?

One of the secrets to building custom prospect lists is truly the Internet. There are so many places you could go to on the Internet to find all kinds of lists. There are broad categories of lists. The following are some of the sites that you could visit:

Online Directories

Online directories (such as YellowPages, SuperPages) have businesses categorized according to the product or service provided. You could search their database by name, business or location and they often contain far more comprehensive business information such as vicinity maps, company profiles, product information, and more. Some are not aware that these are great places if you wish to build your own targeted custom lists. You have business name, address, phone numbers, email, etc

If you are looking to prospect individuals in your neighborhood, White Pages is the place to go to. It contains personal listings in alphabetical order, together with their postal or street address and telephone number. Real Estate Professionals tend to use White Pages to farm their neighborhood.

Membership Lists

These are trade associations representing an industry. The National Association of Mortgage Brokers, or NAMB represents the mortgage broker industry in the United States. It has a membership of 27,000 members. One can find name, address, email, phone and fax number, etc of mortgage brokers by city/state. Realtor.org and cardealersusa.com are examples of other membership lists.

Example: Let's say you are a sales person attempting to build a list of automobile dealerships in a particular region that you can market to. To build such a list you can go to an online directory or website (cardealersusa.com, superpages.com) that contains such listings. Once you enter your search criteria matching listings are displayed.

Chamber of Commerce Lists

A Chamber of Commerce is a form of business network. Business owners in towns and cities form these local societies. Local businessmen are members. This will help you get to lists of businesses in a local geographic domain.

For example, the California Chamber of Commerce (www.calchamber.com) has 15,000 members ranging from large companies to local companies with just a handful of employees.

MLS Lists

These come in handy for Real Estate Agents. A Multiple Listing Service (MLS) is a group of private databases which allows real estate brokers, representing sellers, to widely share information about properties with real estate brokers who may represent potential buyers or wish to cooperate with a seller's broker in finding a buyer for the property.

The Pain of Manually Building Prospect Lists

If you are to build lists from all of the afore-mentioned sources, all you need to do is choose the source (website / online directory) that you think would be the most appropriate for your business / offering and enter your search criteria to have matching listings displayed. Its also possible that your search results are spread over multiple pages. Then, you would then have to manually copy and paste each piece of contact information -name, postal address, email, phone, fax, etc -into a column in an Excel sheet or a field in your contact manager. Typing it would be even more painful. The whole process is a big waste of time and effort.

eGrabber’s Solution

eGrabber's ListGrabber is designed to address the key problem detailed above -the pain of manually building prospect lists.

ListGrabber auto-extracts contact information -name, postal address, email, phone, fax, etc -from lists on the Internet and enters them into columns in an Excel spreadsheet or to respective fields in a contact manager. Using this tool, you can capture any list from anywhere on the Internet with a single button click. ListGrabber can help you save both time and money by automating the process of building custom prospect lists.

ListGrabber incorporates patented contact capture technology, that has been perfected over many years, to strip out the advertisements and other extraneous information and zero in on the relevant contact details alone. ListGrabber is tuned to work with all popular web sites, directories and listings in USA, UK, Canada and Australia.

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