Some B2B marketers just got one step closer to transforming cold calls into warm leads.
Digital marketing technology provider Silverpop just announce LinkedIn Integration to its Social Sign-In feature. The system collects email address when LinkedIn users register for content, promotions, and the like using social sign-in. The service not only simplifies the registration process for users, it also gives B2B marketers–thus the salespeople they support–access to prospect and customers’ business email addresses, which are preferred over the personal email addresses more likely to be collected from a social network like Facebook.
“By placing Social Sign-In on [a registration] page, you’ve got these social visitors who just came from LinkedIn where they saw this ad and now, instead of having to fill out this big form, there’s a button that says, ‘Here’s the easy way. Just sign in with your social network,’” say Bryan Brown, director of product strategy for Silverpop.
According to Brown, approximately 70% of people interviewed say they prefer to sign in to websites socially, rather than fill out a form. Customers are hesitant to fill out online forms to get content because it requires time, remembering a password, and trusting that the content will be worth the effort in the end, he says.
Although Silverpop has had Social Sign-In for over a year, Brown says LinkedIn previously prohibited marketers from accessing a LinkedIn user’s email via his profile when signing in socially—making it difficult to gain insight outside of a prospect or customer’s name and company information. However, Brown says the ability to now access LinkedIn users’ email addresses via Silverpop’s Social Sign-In benefits B2B marketers specifically.
“It’s great because consumer marketers don’t really think much about LinkedIn, they’re all about Facebook and Facebook has already been providing email,” Brown says.
Brown says that it’s LinkedIn’s business community that makes LinkedIn a B2B marketer’s paradise. According to an InsideView study, 47% of B2B companies use LinkedIn–and the business-savvy social network generates more B2B marketing leads than Facebook, Twitter, or blogging.
“It’s just a huge business community and if you can allow those people to sign up for your contact offers via LinkedIn Network, then you’ve just lowered the bar to a great interaction with a large network of people,” Brown says.
As for future endeavors, Silverpop, who partnered with user management channel Janrain for LinkedIn Integration, intends to enhance its Social Sign-In capabilities through Pinterest and Google+.
