Rebel Brown called them four letter words, but I like to call them TLA’s.

What’s a TLA?  It an acronym like SOA, CRM, ERP, BPM, etc.  Three Letter Acronyms.  Duh!

It’s meaningless technobable.  No one buys TLA’s.

They look for solutions to business problems.  People ask questions using English.  Business people look for answers using English.  They want to see the answers to their business problems on your website.

So if you talk in TLA’s, knock it off.

For companies looking for best practices in b2b lead generation who wish to improve the way they acquire new customers, Find New Customers is the place to go.  CSO Insights says companies need to improve the way they generate leads and implement processes for business to business lead generation.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is a demand generation expert and sales leader, as well as the President of Find New Customers, a lead generation company, who helps businesses create lead generation campaigns and continually publishes the best lead generation ideas, so his readers can determine the best lead generation strategy to find new customers.

Written by Amanda Ferrante for the DemandGen Report

With the growth of smartphones and mobile Web usage exploding, email marketers are tasked with the challenge of delivering relevant, rich content to customers that can be read and interpreted over the mobile phone. Industry experts say the design of emails is critical, as the mobile phone offers a different experience that may not be cohesive to the intended message.

The market for smartphones is expected to reach one billion units and grow 1,600% in the next three years, according to research from The Yankee Group. 52% of smartphone users access the same email account through mobile and computer, while 48% maintain a unique mobile email address. “When talking about mobile email, it is important to keep in mind that 96% of consumers access the same accounts on their mobile devices as they are already accessing at work or home on a regular computer,” says Morgan Stewart, Director of Research & Strategy, ExactTarget.
“A few short years ago, email to mobile devices was very clunky and in most cases a hit and miss or panic situation for marketers. The reason being is that many devices did not have the capability like what we see with the iPhone today to display HTML or images on the screen. Today [the email] game has changed,” says Dennis Dayman, Chief Privacy Officer, Eloqua. “We are seeing a tremendous growth in the mobile arena and the expectations by consumers of mobile devices to read their email while on the road.”

Dayman says this shift requires marketers to ensure their email is recognized by either the from or subject lines. The design of emails can be as important as the content, as marketers should have several important factors for mobile email in mind.

“One of the larger concerns today is we just don’t know who’s reading emails on the mobile device,” says Michele Eichner, COO & Vice President of Client Development, Pivotal Veracity, a leading independent email delivery auditing and optimization company for large enterprises. “Even if you were to design emails specifically for mobile customers, you actually don’t really know who today is reading on a mobile phone. And part two of that is which mobile phone…That’s probably our number one challenge at this point.”

Stewart says a big concern is how what gets delivered to the inbox appears to the user due to a lack of recognized standards for how email design. “Email has become a feature benefit for smartphone manufacturers, each attempting to create an experience better than the competition, developing and adhering to standards are not a priority,” he says. “Worse still, consumers (and business users alike) use a variety of smartphones, they change or upgrade their phones frequently, and it is difficult to predict if the user will first view your email on their mobile phone or their traditional computer.”

Eichner says there are several best practices that can help email marketers to optimize emails and make sure they render well on various devices.

Pivotal Veracity’s Tips for Improving Cross Platform Email Performance:

1.    Rendering differs by email client:
•    Use short, concise URLs that work across all operating systems
•    Test what your email will look like and render to see what the customer experience might be.
2.    Images off is the new norm:
•    Emails heavy with images are not likely to be seen. Expect images to be off and pitch your message by clearly identifying who it is from.
•    Maximize your subject line and have your call to action in the top lines of the email to draw immediate attention.
3.    Size does matter:
•    There are different ways of looking at an email message on various operating systems and devices. This is why it’s important to test your message to take into consideration how the message will be received.

4.    URLs- quick mobile makeovers:
•    How you code URLs matters, to ensure that they click through across various mobile operating systems
•    Add a very short link (TinyURL) to the top of the email message to offer a mobile version of the message on a Web page.

“Too many marketers use the same URL generation systems for other links, images, etc. to develop their mobile version links which causes issues,” says Eloqua’s Dayman. “Make your landing pages smart! If you can get really fancy with your content and web designers, they can code the web systems to understand what version of a mobile device browsing software the device is using to visit the landing page and serve up an optimized webpage for viewing for that particular device.”

Pivotal Veracity’s Eichner says more operating systems and mobile devices are now supporting HTML and images, which is a positive trend for marketers. “It’s going to make it easier for consumers to want to read an email on the mobile device, which is nice,” she says. “It’s going to take some times for the population to buy these smartphones that have these capabilities, but it’s a trend we’re seeing. It’s going to be more user-friendly to do so, which is the biggest advantage from a marketer’s perspective.”

Eloqua’s Dayman says one of the most important things for marketers is to make sure the entire email is NOT an image. “Similar to regular email clients that tend to suppress images, you should ensure the mobile version doesn’t lead or take up most of the message restate space with an image,” he says. “You should use ALT tagging which will place useful identity text where images and logos are blocked or not rendered. Again, ensure the important message/words are at the top of the subject line and body of the message in HTML/text. This is typically the call to action or offer line.”

If the message is primarily a marketing message, ExactTarget’s Stewart advise marketers to continue to focus on optimizing the message for reading in traditional email clients, while making a few simple adjustments that benefit the mobile reader while improving the traditional experience at the same time:

• Use a pre-header to communicate the key value or call to action in the message. This should go above “View as a webpage” or “View as mobile” links in order to ensure the key benefit is shown on the mobile screen.
• Keep messages short, sweet, and too the point. This is especially important in mobile environments, but it’s a good practice in email anyway.
• Use ALT tags for any and all images.
• Continue to send emails as multi-part messages, paying attention to the text version.
• Create a separate mobile email version that is the destination page behind your “View as mobile” link.
• Think through the call to action. If consumers must go to your website to take action on your message, then consider if the landing pages have been optimized for the mobile environment or not. Your audience will dictate if it makes sense to create a separate mobile experience.

What do you think? We love comments and people who share.

Jeff Ogden is President of Find New Customers “Lead Generation Made Simple” Check out the online show every Friday at 11am ET, “Laugh and Learn with the Fearless Competitor.” Find New Customers is one of few lead generation companies in New York.

Find New Customers helps companies like yours (with 50 to 5,000 employees and complex products) implement lead generation programs to improve the way you find and acquire high quality sales leads using best practices in online lead generation. Quality leads matter. In fact, a recent study found that sales teams with fewer, high quality sales leads closed more than sales teams with more leads of dubious quality.

If you wish to do sales lead generation online, contact the B2B lead generation experts at Find New Customers using the form below.

Whom do buyers trust?  They trust credible people, like customers and partners.

On your website, you should have video clips of your customers talking about the results they got from your products or services.  Put it front and center.  Short, direct and the the point.  Check out Avitage to see a great example of how one company puts the people up front.

Salespeople should be armed with customers stories in slides and other marketing content.

In all of this content, customers should describe the solution from their point of view — the problem that was fixed, what resulted, how long it took, how it improved their competitive position.

Let others do the talking for your business and watch the results pour in.

For companies looking for best practices in b2b lead generation who wish to improve the way they acquire new customers, Find New Customers is the place to go.  CSO Insights says companies need to improve the way they generate leads and implement processes for business to business lead generation.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is a demand generation expert and sales leader, as well as the President of Find New Customers, a lead generation company, who helps businesses create lead generation campaigns and continually publishes the best lead generation ideas, so his readers can determine the best lead generation strategy to find new customers.

One of the things that marketers find difficult is finding fresh and innovative ideas in marketing campaigns, lead generation, demand generation, or as I like to say, find new customers.

There’s a new website that brings you the best of all the lead generation blogs.  The B2B Marketing Zone.  The B2B Marketing Zone is a marketing community site that was launched as collaborative effort between Tom Pick and Tony Karrer.

I’m honored that this blog is included in the B2B Marketing “Rock Stars” list, along with such luminaries as Brian Carroll, Ardath Albee’ MarketingInteractions, Paul Dunay’s Buzz Marketing for Technology; Jon Miller’s Modern B2B Marketing and the like.

If you are looking for experts in B2B marketing, I recommend you check out the B2B Marketing Zone.

For companies looking for marketing campaigns in b2b lead generation who wish to improve the way they acquire new customers, Find New Customers is the place to go.  CSO Insights says companies need to improve the way they generate leads through great marketing campaigns and implement processes for business to business lead generation.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is a demand generation expert and sales leader, as well as the President of Find New Customers, a lead generation company, who helps businesses create marketing campaigns for their lead generation campaigns and continually publishes the best lead generation ideas, so his readers can determine the best lead generation strategy to find new customers.

The bottom line: Companies need to find and acquire new customers.  But most don’t do it very well.

Companies suffer from being overly dependent in two critical areas:

1. Revenue from existing customers:Executives tell me they get as much as 75% or even 85% of revenue from existing customers and very little from new customers.That’s not healthy.  New customers grow market share and bring in future maintenance and upgrade streams. Worse, leaving them to be won by your competitor is a recipe for disaster.At least 50% of your revenue should come from net new customers.
   
2. Leads from salespeople:
   In 2008, over 1/2 of all company leads are self generated by salespeople, according to CSO Insights.  That’s up from 40% in 2006.  That number is heading in the wrong direction.If your salespeople are pounding the phones, emails, etc. to find leads — they’re not selling.

   At least 1/2 of all deals closed in a year should originate in Marketing.

For companies looking for best practices in b2b lead generation who wish to improve the way they acquire new customers, Find New Customers is the place to go.  CSO Insights says companies need to improve the way they generate leads and implement processes for business to business lead generation.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is a demand generation expert and sales leader, as well as the President of Find New Customers, a lead generation company, who helps businesses create lead generation campaigns and continually publishes the best lead generation ideas, so his readers can determine the best lead generation strategy to find new customers.