Do prospects lie on registration forms? Of course, they do … but just how much? Creating a lead generation form that balances your need for information and high-quality leads requires thinking of it as a transaction

In our latest Chart of the Week, we look at what personal information tech buyers are willing to give up before they say, “Back off!”

Some of the most frequent questions we get concern registration forms. How do you create a balance between the need for information and a high volume of leads? Most marketers know that longer forms have higher abandonment rates. Ones that ask only for name and email get substantially higher conversion rates than those that require contact and intent information.

The dilemma over a complex sale is whether to press for the needed information since name and email often aren’t enough. Here are a few of the issues:

• Bandwidth of your sales team: Unless you have all the call time in the world, there’s a limit to the number of calls that the sales team can make. So, you need to focus attention on quality more than quantity. After all, a good content offer can produce hundreds or thousands of leads. The questions asked in the registration form are the easiest way to begin separating the wheat from the chaff.

• Lack of respect: The No. 1 complaint we get from lead gen marketers is that the sales team doesn’t follow up on leads, which implies a lack of respect for their quality. If salespeople were confident that a lead passed along would be a hot one, they’d clamor for more. It comes back to the quality-vs.-quantity question and collaborating with sales to analyze past successes to determine the signs of a good lead.

• Hesitancy by prospects: So, you have a great piece of content and you know that prospects will fill out a long form to get it. Now the problem is accuracy. In the chart above, technology buyers admit to lying on their registration forms. From the drop after Name/Email, you can guess that they share only as much as they feel necessary to get your white paper or pricing information. After that, the quality of responses drops in relation to how ‘business-personal’ the questions get. When questions get into areas like buying intent, company size, timing and budget, the chance of getting accurate data drops sharply.

Key takeaway: Marketers need to think of lead generation forms as a transaction. People trade their time (via contact information and the anticipation of being marketed to) for information. A well-designed form lets those who are genuinely interested in company/product information to identify themselves while giving those who are earlier in the cycle (or just interested in that white paper) what they came for and move along. Ultimately, the creation of a strong form is the result of testing.

Attempting to put a price on your work is one of the hardest tasks there is. To do it properly, you have to remove your emotions about your creation and view it solely as a commercial product. You must then assess objectively how it compares with other similar art, consider why they should cost more than some and less than others along with what your clients can afford, and ultimately come up with a pricing structure.

Before you settle on a number, you need to understand all of the costs you will incur so that you ultimately profit from the sale. It’s possible that some artists in the market have their own reproduction equipment, or have supplier agreements that allow them to sell work at a price that you not be able to.

Understanding your costs

This may be obvious, but you need to know the cost to create or reproduce your work. Don’t underestimate your time for the time you spend doing this you are taking time away from other important processes. If you are doing the reproduction yourself, it’s simply the cost of the materials and your time, which you should base on an humble per hourly rate, in order to create the artwork.

If you decide to subcontract the reproduction of your work; use the cost they are charging you to do this. It’s important that you ensure that their quality is up to your standard as it will be a reflection of your work. While you should price around to get the best deal, cost is not always the most important factor as the partnering company should to be responsive to your needs.

Also, don’t forget about shipping costs, sales tax, and credit card processing fees. If you do not understand the cost structure around these fees in your transactions, your total margin will be significantly cut.

Recapturing Operational Expenses

Try to build in some amount to recapture expenses for the initial creation of the artwork, and help cover other operational expenses (i.e. advertising, web site hosting, photography equipment, film). Coming up with this number will be a best guess that will evolve over time as you get a better handle of your expenses.

Profit Margin

This is what you’ll ultimately make on each sale. Each person needs to decide for themselves what their price strategy should be. You may want to consider, for example, setting lower price points thus making more money by moving more of your product. The alternative is to price your work higher and make more per unit. It is somewhat of a fine line, as you do not want to instill in the mind of collectors that your work is not of great value. However you want to keep your prices high enough so that you reinforce the value of your work to the collector base.

I saw the following chart this morning from MarketingSherpa, which backs up a position I’ve held for a long time when it comes to pricing.  There is a belief out that if you release your pricing, it could scare off a prospect, be matched, bettered, or negotiated down.  Thus marketers would rather force the prospect to reach out to the company before disclosing their prices. Being open about pricing can be an asset.

According to the research by MarketingSherpa, 89% of decision makers were able to recall a purchase when open pricing had a specific impact on the progress of the purchase. While it is true that the more consideration and cost that a product requires, the less likely it is that having open pricing will be enough to shortlist a vendor; there is a limit to the number of companies a prospect is going to contact just to get basic pricing so you run the risk of not being contacted due to sales fatigue. Another point to consider is in cases where companies require a rapid turnaround, open pricing can make the sale before you even “meet” the prospect.

Consider this anecdote from a post-survey interview from this research: a growing software company realized the need to upgrade their physical printing of manuals to include full color. They went looking for a printer who could meet their volume and time constraints.

In the words of the Marketing Director: “First of all, every website looked the same, so I couldn’t tell who was big and who was small – they all looked small from their sites. Bad design, no functionality. I tried calling a few to get quotes, sent a few emails and didn’t hear back from some and heard back later in the week from others. It blew my mind – I was looking to give the first decent candidate 25,000 full color books to print in two weeks. Finally, I found a site that had a pricing calculator that got me started, and it turned out that the final price was 5% lower after we haggled a bit. That JavaScript calculator made them a lot of money.”

Getting Started

When deciding to display your photography online, there are a number of considerations that need to be taken into account as presenting imagery on the web. What I will cover today is image scan quality, the dimensional size of the image, and the impact of image file formats.

Image Scan Quality

Resolution is the image quality measured in terms of how many pixels make up your image. It is commonly referred to as “ppi”; (pixels per inch). One of the common delimias when scanning photo transparancies to digitize them for use on a person’s website is how detailed of a scan do you need to provide your webmaster to post your imagery online. I’m going to sidestep the issue of image copywrite concerns for the time being as I’ll cover that in an upcoming article on it’s own. However, because your images are to be viewed on a screen, all web graphics should be no larger than 72 ppi and thus anything higher has no improved effect, and only creates longer download times. This will also reduce what an individual could do with the image file if they had alteriave motives.

Image Dimension Size

Pixels are the unit of measurement for the screen and most webmasters design a website to fit one of the standard display sizes. Based on statistics that can be looked up on the internet, we have found that most people today have their monitor’s set to display at least 1024 x 768, if not larger.

Why this is important, is that if your scan dimensions in Adobe Photoshop say that the image is 8.5 inches by 11 inches, saving the file at those dimension will not allow a user at 1024 pixels by 768 pixels to see the image in it’s full presentation without scrolling both vertically and horizontally. Adobe Photoshop provides the ability to resize the image to a size that will fit within your website design. As an added bonus, it will also reduce the download size of the image that the view of the image will experience without losing image quality. This is something that you will need to work with your webmaster to come up the proper tradeoff between file size and the presentation size of the image in your portfolio. It is important to realize that not everyone has broadband connections, so thumbnails are very much appreciated by those who use dialup connections. One thing I would recommend is to come up with standard demension sizes for your horizonal, vertical, panoramic and thumbnails and stick to them as it will make your life, and your webmaster’s much easier.

Image File Format

There are two types of color that can be used in Web graphics. The colors can be associated with the Web graphic file formats we just mentioned: GIF and JPG.

GIF

GIF is short for Graphics Interchange Format and consists of the 216 common colors found on all computer monitors and within all Web browsers. These common colors reside in a Web palette and its advantages are that it is supported by practically all web browsers, can include transparent backgrounds, supports interlacing (providing a low-resolution preview of the graphic to the viewer while it downloads), and can be used as an image map (allowing the viewer to click on the graphic as they would a regular link to another site).

JPEG

JPEG is short for Joint Photographers Experts Group and is superior in rendering colour and detail found in photographs or graphics using blends, gradients, and other tonal variations. JPEG files use red, green, and blue (RGB) for graphical color. The strength of these colors is set in from zero to 255 with zero being the least intensity and 255 being the highest intensity. When red, green and blue are combined at zero intensity the result is black. At full strength, high intensity, where the values are set at 255, 255, 255, the result is pure white. As a photographer, it is important to utilize photographs as much as we can within your Web portfolio to present your work in the best possible quality so that it captures the true spirit of the subject work.

Choosing between the two image formats

These full color images should not be saved as GIF files because of the limited number of colors. By having limited colors, the full color image will represent the true colors using the existing Web palette of 216 colors and will create a poor, dithered, and ugly image. That is why it is very important to use the right file format for each specific graphic. Sometimes it’s obvious that a graphic on someone’s web page was saved in the wrong file format. Photos may look too grainy, or flat-colour images may look too fuzzy. When selecting GIF or JPEG for your graphics conversion, it is important to consider the type of image you will be working with. Use a GIF format if you’re graphic consists primarily of line art or flat colours without gradients. JPEG-converted graphics are best for photographs or images with fine tonal variations in colours, such as images with gradients or metallic images. Choosing the right file format is not only important for the quality, but for keeping your images file size to a minimum.

Summary

With proper usage of image scan quality, the dimensional size of the image, and the correct image file format, you will be presenting your web portfolio in a manner that the rest of the world can fully enjoy your work.

Ever wish you could show your ads more often to a specific group like women aged 25-34? Want to see how your ads perform with certain demographic groups and then adjust your bids accordingly?

Google is introducing a new demographic bidding feature in AdWords that will allow you to display your ads to specific gender and age group audiences on some sites in the Google content network, giving you more control over who your audience is and greater insight into how your ads perform with certain demographic groups. This will help all advertisers of Google Adwords better target their marketing dollars, or if the advertiser doesn’t now, discover who their target demographic group even is.

Google will start testing this feature (which is in beta) over the next few weeks with a selected group of advertisers in the U.S. and U.K. For those who join and are approved into the beta program, demographic bidding and reports will become available to advertisers who run contextually targeted or placement-targeted campaigns (with CPC or CPM bidding) on certain sites in the Google content network.

So how does Google get this demographic information to be able to offer this ability to it’s advertisers? Some publishers in Google’s network, such as social networking sites, know the gender and age of their users because their users sign in with that information when they create a profile or fill out registration or subscription forms. Participating publishers anonymize this user reported demographic data and then send it to Google in aggregate form, allowing Google to adjust which ads are shown to members of specific demographic groups.

Here are two ways you can take advantage of this new demographic bidding capability. First, you can modify your bids for a particular audience segment, such as increasing your bid for 35-50 year-old females by 300%. Second, you can ask that your ads not be shown to certain demographic groups if they aren’t meeting your ROI goals.

If you’re not sure which demographic converts best for you, you can run Demographic Reports (found in the Report Center) to guide your bids for certain groups. These reports can show you campaign performance metrics (including impressions, clicks, CTR, and conversion data) by the gender and age range of users who saw your ad. If there are demographic groups that convert well, you can increase your bids for those groups, increasing the frequency your ad will be shown to this audience. You can also choose to have your ad hidden from groups that don’t respond well to your campaign.

If you’re an AdWords advertiser located in the U.S. or the U.K., you can learn more about this new demographic bidding option and how to get started by visiting this site. 

Online retailer 1-800-Contacts has sued a rival company over that rival’s purchase of an online search term that cuts a bit close to home, reports MediaPost.

The suit was filed in a Utah court against LensWorld over its purchase of “1-800-contacts” as a keyword triggering a LensWorld search ad.

1-800-Contacts is arguing that the use of its name to bring up a LensWorld ad could create confusion in the mind of the consumer that the two companies are related.

Previous court rulings have rejected that argument. However, the main related case was brought by Geico against Google for having sold the keyword - and not against the competitor for buying it. That difference could change the outcome of the present suit.

A court ruling that forbids buying a competitor’s trademarked terms could significantly impact search advertising, since companies often do just that, driving up the cost of those keywords when the actual trademark holder wants to buy it as well.

We’ve switched over to a blog format for our articles and when I get a chance, I’ll repost some of our past articles here as well. The reason for the change is I got tired of having a backlog of items that I would see that I wanted to write an article on, but due to client work or other demands it would fall by the way side. By having a blog, I’m no longer tied to the 400-700 character limits that syndicated articles require, which will make it easier for me to quickly convey relevant information and get feedback from my readers.