There are some Inbound Marketing best practices that don't resonate with me (that I follow for the most part anyway as they are called "best practices" for a reason), and others that make perfect sense.  Form submissions on landing pages are hard enough to come by (some say a good conversion rate is 30 to 40 percent), that I find the idea of emailing a download link as the only means to fulfill a CTA a downright "worst practice."

Why risk the loss of attention and possible spam trap of an email follow-up?  This one is easy to cure on HubSpot, with its easy presentation of thank you pages (a few clicks and you're done).  The only system I am certain that I've seen this "email follow-up" from is Eloqua.  And I've seen it enough times from B2B Inbound Marketers that it got my attention today.  

My first thought was that this can't be that hard in Eloqua (at least latest version) and then I ran across this query on the Eloqua user forum that makes me think differently.  For Eloqua users reading the blog, try this link in the user forums for a likely solution.  Interestingly the forum comments seem to suggest it's easier to get this done in Eloqua 9 than 10...

The larger point is that the user experience during a site visit matters to your ultimate objective of generating leads that move down the funnel.  Part of that path is fulfillment of their inquiries.  Since I started writing this blog post (right after seeing the confirmation page image above) I haven't received the promised CTA.  Did it get caught in spam?  Was my inquiry lost?  I'm beginning to lose interest, and the vendor is losing a prospect.  It's 45 minutes since my inquiry and I still haven't received the promised CTA.

The moral of the story: learn the best practices for Inbound Marketing.  Many of them will pay off and most of them make your prospects' lives easier, too.