Golden Nuggets from eConsultancy's FUNNEL event

I had the pleasure of sitting in Ashley Friedlein’s session on ‘Data-driven decision making – optimising your sales efforts with online data” at FUNNEL on Tuesday.

For me this was the most relevant session for our own client base (online communities, events and conference companies), as eConsultancy was the actual case study. Ashley took us through the evolution of the business and the journey of its targeting tactics.

PPC and Social Media is low down on website traffic for eConsultancy
Organic search and Email drives the most traffic
Ashley talked about the ‘window of attention’ – the short time to enhance (or indeed ruin) brand perception. With emails, open rates start to drop quite quickly.
57% of people buying paid membership, purchase on their first day/first visit – indicating that people become a member to take advantage of the discounts.
Interesting to see the website stats showed that eConsultancy has an overall bounce rate of 71.4%
Social Media bounce rate is 77% – not good as this traffic isn’t as ‘sticky’.
Interestingly 53% of social media website traffic is from existing members and 95% of sales from social media is also from existing customers
Shows that social media is great for generating buzz, engagement, retention and loyalty but not necessarily a strong tool for attracting new customers.
The true value is in content to attract and then engage – content is king!
Perceptions of paying members being more socially engaged are challenged – Silver members are more proactive than Diamond members.
Employee LinkedIn and Twitter accounts have more success than eConsultancy’s corporate account – back to the point from Kate Shoppers session – ‘Peer-to-Peer’ or Individual-to-Individual is what works best.
eConsultancy track everything! They measured staff answers in Linkedin groups/forums and it out-performed PPC. Fantastic success story for companies still not recognising the value and power of social media. It may not bring in much bottom-line revenue, but the value is in being positioned as an industry expert. Brand awareness is much more effective through social media than paid advertising.
Ashley shared their new funky real-time visualisation tool ‘Arachnid’. Do check it out – it’s very hypnotic!
Great for a bit of visual fun – but what’s the true value? Well the tool internally alerts staff to follow up on hot member activity – the drawback being members have to be logged on to be able to harness the power of this tool.
A double-edged sword – as caution needs to be taken on the ‘big brother’ approach, but can be cleverly and subtly used to integrate with direct mail, email and sales campaigns.
Ashley shared his views on the future for marketers – it’s all about data visualisation, social CRM, realtime location and gamification (the latter two are pretty unexplored by B2B).

I was pleased to hear about gamification being on the future list – as we were recently nominated for an innovation award for a B2B Online Viral Game, “Kill The Paper Invoice“ launched early this year – a bit of trumpet blowing there!

Check it out and play for yourself – hopefully illustrates a refreshing marketing tactic for the B2B space and financial industry, which is often thought of as “boring”.

That nicely comes back to the memorable quote from FUNNEL “Your industry isn’t boring, your marketing is boring!”.

Come on B2B marketers, let’s give B2C a run for their money!

Read ‘Gold Nuggets from eConsultancy’s FUNNEL event – Part 1‘