A recent study indicated that the use of at least three social media options in email marketing campaigns lead to a 55% higher click-through rate.  The interesting thing is that only about half of email marketers are adding some sort of social element to their email campaigns.

The real ROI comes in the shared messages of these type of campaigns. Messages that included a sharing option generated 30% higher click-throughs than emails without the social sharing links.  Three or more generated 55% higher click-throughs.  Twitter alone showed a 40% higher CTR than without a sharing link.  Twitter appears to be the most popular option at 67.2% of all social emails with Facebook coming in a close second at 62.7%.

Think about it, you send an email to a million users in your email list.  If 55% of the users that click through your message and share it with their 130+ friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter, imagine how much ROI you are getting on that email campaign without any additional cost!  Folks, time to start A/B testing!

It is not a surprise to anyone in the online advertising business that the CTR (click through rate) of your campaign does not always determine how strong or well your campaign is doing. If you are like most people you will just ignore the banner ads, or even more the annoying pop up ads while you are serving the net. Maybe only clicking on one, by accident when you are trying to close out of the page, won’t hurt.
So why do advertisers even bother with display advertising? Even though CTR may not be the best way to measure your success rate (but sure seems to be one one of the easiest) it still drives traffic to the advertisers site. According to adage.com, “Consumers exposed to a display ad were 65% more likely to visit the advertiser’s site than users who never saw the ad.” Personally, I think that advertisers should be focusing more on conversions rather than CTR. Having a high CTR is great, but you need a low CPA (cost per action), and high ROI (return on investment) to maintain/increase revenue.
Even with display advertising becoming more advanced over the past few years with expandable, floaters, and even interstitial, it still does not seem to cut it. Display advertising is great if you are just trying to get your name out there, but if you are looking increase and revenue there are defiantly many other better options to look into.

After reading some recent advice from some DMNews contributors, I thought I would pass along these suggestions on how to maybe maximize your lead generation efforts.  One suggests providing feedback on the leads to the publishers/companies where you get the leads from. Publishers then can use this information to try and alter the traffic so conversions increase.  Good feedback and bad feedback is always helpful to the lead generation company providing the leads.
Another suggests keeping landing page information short, and try and minimize the information that is asked of the consumers. Others suggest making webinars as simple of a sign up process as possible.  This all kinda correlates together in the fact that the more “simple” things are for companies and the consumers they are trying to capture, creates more success.  One suggestion I would recommend is utilizing your affiliate manager/account manager for information.  They work with campaigns all day long and can probably offer some information that will also help to make your lead generation campaigns a success.  If you have no way of speaking with a live person, then that could make it very difficult to get that extra help.  Find a company that has “live” people to help answer all your questions.

Leadpile Lead Exchange, and I am sure a lot of other lead generation companies, are always looking for ways to improve.  Having a successful experience with us on the advertiser/buyer and publisher/seller side is also our goal.  Simplicity of landing pages and buyer feedback on leads are just a few things we also agree are very important to the success of our marketplace.  Got any any suggestions for a successful lead generation campaign?