Anything related to marketing tips, strategies, best practices and more will go here.

Lead Liaison

Your Crash Course to Offering a Crash Course

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Your Crash Course to Offering a Crash CourseConverting visitors often requires giving away something of value. An excellent way to convert visitors, as well as maintain relationships and grow your subscriber base, is to provide a crash course. This method ties in well with making an offer when a customer tries to exit a page. Encourage the visitor to sign up for a crash course by piquing their interest. Clearly, the visitor had at least some passing interest in what you have to offer to have been on that page in the first place. There can be many reasons why a visitor might choose to exit a page, but before they go, make an offer they cannot refuse with a crash course.

Why Offer a Crash Course?

Doing so gives you the opportunity to convert your website visitors by capturing their name as well as email address. With that information, you then have the chance to market to that lead in the future. The person becomes a prospect in your system, and a part of your company’s most valuable asset – your database! In the future, you can segment your database to easily target people that took your crash course.

Designing a Crash Course for Prospects

To be effective, crash courses should be brief in nature. The ideal length of time to offer a crash course is around two weeks. Make sure you do not inundate prospects with too many emails. Furthermore, all emails should be kept short and be educational in nature. Avoid the temptation to make your emails promotional and too salesy.

Make Sure You Have the Right Tools

The chief reason that many website owners do not take advantage of the opportunity to offer a crash course is that they feel they simply do not have the time to do so. Others sometimes feel intimidated at the prospect of offering even a short two-week course.

Tools such as SiteEngage™ can help make this process easier through automation. By creating an automation for a series of emails that are spread out over time, you can provide your visitors with a crash course to maintain their interest and nurture the relationship, all without expending a lot of time or resources.

Offering a crash course at the right time can provide you with an excellent opportunity to engage and convert visitors.

Start Offering a Crash Course Today with SiteEngage™
Lead Liaison

Video Marketing: Your Key to Converting More Visitors

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Video Marketing: Your Key to Converting More CustomersAll marketers know about email marketing, direct mail, etc. But, what about video marketing for converting more visitors? Doesn’t that just play videos and push information, one-way, to visitors or can it be interactive? It can be interactive, and there are ways you can use video marketing to to begin converting more visitors.

Adding video to your website is an effective way to convert more visitors into customers. Among the most frequent reasons people do not add video to their website is that producing a video can be expensive. With that said, video production does not have to blow your entire marketing budget. In fact, you might be surprised to discover that you get a quality video produced for far less than you might expect. Ask us too! We’ve done video marketing on a budget. We’ve had multiple video explainers created for less than $1,000 USD each. That’s quite a bargain. But buyer beware. Videos can cost upwards of $15,000 to $20,000 if you need a voice over, storyboard, script, and more.

Types of Videos to Produce that Convert Visitors

Another common question among business owners that consider adding video to their website is what type of video should I use to start converting more visitors. Numerous options are available, including testimonials, solution instructions, marketing, and more. The addition of videos can help to increase both conversions and sales by discussing how a product works, the benefits of using a product, and even how a product can resolve certain issues. Along with explaining how to use a product, you could also use videos to answer frequently asked questions. With the addition of a video, you can transform your site into a sales rep for your business that offers help to the leads as they browse your website. Rather than just seeing a product on your website, customers can learn about your products by watching a video.

What Video Hosting Providers Convert More Visitors?

You will also need to have a place to host your videos. Your choice of hosting service should not be taken lightly. YouTube might be the first place to come to mind for hosting your videos. For businesses, Wistia is often a better choice. With Wistia as the hosting service, you can benefit from lead conversion tools and analytics—tools that are not available with Vimeo or YouTube. You can also exercise complete control over both your video and viewers. For instance, you can protect your viewers from advertisements, commercials, and even potentially dangerous redirects that might ultimately send your leads to your competitors.

The addition of video to your website can make it more powerful and effective, giving your leads the information they need to make a more informed decision.

Convert More Visitors!
Lead Liaison

Identify People that Visit Your Website

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Identifying People that Visit Your WebsiteYes You Can! Identify People that Visit Your Website

So, you’ve got a website up and running and you think you’re doing well in terms of attracting people to your website. While that’s certainly a positive step, you might be missing another critical piece of the puzzle. You also need to identify people that visit your website. Why does that matter, you might wonder?

Why You Need to Identify People that Visit Your Website

Perhaps the biggest reason for identifying who visits your website is so that you can take advantage of the ability to offer your visitors personalized content. If you already have great content on your website, why do you need to be concerned about personalized content? A few reasons, actually. Along with increasing your open rates and click-through rates, personalized content also helps drive higher conversion rates.

The only way you can achieve that level of personalization is by knowing who is on your site, however. Without knowing exactly who is visiting your site, there is a certain amount of ambiguity regarding your target audience. Personalized content helps to cut through that and also works to build trust by delivering relevance based on the wants and needs of your audience. Visitor tracking allows you to deliver the right content to precisely the right person at the right time. When you are able to do that, you will be able to convert more visitors into paying customers. Without visitor tracking in place, it’s likely you are missing incredible leads and opportunities because you simply do not know about them. There is no need to miss those leads. We encourage you to check out Lead Liaison’s solution for website conversion and engagement, called SiteEngage™.

Ensuring that you have the right tools in place for identifying the people who visit your website is essential. Ultimately, it’s simply not enough to know how many people are visiting your website. You also must be able to target precisely who is visiting your website and what it is they hope to gain from your website, your content, and your products and services. Once you are able to do that, you will be in a much better position to deliver exactly what your customers want and watch your conversion rates start climbing.

Get a Demo!
Lead Liaison

Website Visitor Tracking Isn’t Just for Salespeople – It’s for Marketers, Too

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Website Visitor Tracking Isn’t Just for Salespeople—It’s for Marketers, TooWebsite Visitor Tracking Isn’t Just for Salespeople

Think website visitor tracking is just for salespeople? Think again! While visitor tracking does offer a number of important benefits for your sales team, marketers can also take advantage of the opportunities offered by effective visitor tracking. That’s why we’re confident in saying website visitor tracking isn’t just for salespeople, it’s for marketers too!

Stop and think for a moment. How do you know the best way to reach out to prospects and capture their attention? Suppose you are planning a new marketing campaign—what words would best resonate with your target audience? You could guess. You might even review past marketing campaigns to determine what worked and what didn’t. Without knowing exactly who is visiting your website, however, you would simply be taking a shot in the dark.

Gain Insight Into Your Website’s Visitors

Website visitor tracking can provide you with a wealth of information that can be used in a variety of different ways. Along with determining precisely when is the best time for your sales team to reach out to prospects, visitor tracking can also help you design the most effective marketing campaigns possible.

Once you know exactly who is visiting your website, and are able to identify their primary interests, you will be able to deliver highly customized, personalized content. That can prove to be invaluable in terms of crafting content that is most likely to catch the attention of your target audience. This will not only help your marketing team deliver more effective content, but will also help you save a tremendous amount of time and resources. Rather than spending time on content that is destined to be ineffective, meaning you eventually have to go back to the drawing board, you can instead focus your attention and efforts on designing highly customized marketing campaigns that will truly resonate with your target audience.

Marketers today need every available tool and advantage they can muster. When implemented correctly, website visitor marketing can help your business move ahead of the competition by gaining tremendous insight into what your visitors are thinking and what they want from you.

Measure Return on Marketing Campaigns

We’ve worked with companies using 3rd party software to send out email campaigns or hired 3rd parties to send out email campaigns on their behalf. A little known secret of website visitor tracking is that you can add special hooks into the links inside your 3rd party emails to measure click-through activity and subsequent engagement on your website. Website visitor tracking brings it all together. For example, we’ve worked with automotive companies (car dealerships), that are sending out email campaigns from four to five different vendors at a time. How do you know which vendor’s campaign is delivering results? With visitor tracking it’s easy to answer those questions.

Check out how our company saved $9,618 on an email marketing campaign by using website visitor tracking!

Yeah, now you see website visitor tracking isn’t just for salespeople.

Get a Demo!
Lead Liaison

Building Referral Programs using Marketing Automation

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Building a Referral Program using Marketing AutomationThe dynamics of buying and selling are complex. Buyers have a hard time making a purchase if they don’t have much to go off of. For example, no reviews to look at, no other customers to talk to. Sellers have it just as rough too. Closing deals is not easy, especially if you’re starting a relationship from scratch. It’s much harder to convince prospective buyers to make a purchase if they’ve never heard of your company or solution before.

As a buyer myself, I think about the recent experience we’re going through with a house renovation. We’ve got a three car garage and the third by in our garage is about to be converted to a mother-in-law suite. We thought that would be better than the attic ;-). I couldn’t tackle the project by myself, so we needed a general contractor to do the job. We contacted five general contractors. We found all five off of the Good Contractors List, on our own, with no references. Unfortunately, we didn’t know anybody that recently used a general contractor or went through a similar renovation project. If we did, and someone said – hey, try these guys out, they were great and we had a wonderful experience, you bet your bottom dollar they’d be our first call. Doing all the outreach and going through the process with these five contractors is painful and time consuming. When it comes down to it, people get lazy about all that research and most people will take the short route, which is the referral from someone else.

Building referral programs for your business using marketing automation is easy. It’s something every company should do, especially since:

  1. People are 4 times more likely to buy when referred by a friend – Nielsen
  2. 65% of new business comes from referrals – New York Times
  3. The LifeTime Value of a new referral customer is 16% higher – Wharton School of Business

You can see why it makes a lot of business sense to set up a good referral system. Here’s a four step plan to take to build your referral program with marketing automation:

1) Engage Customers

Engage customers through email and/or direct mail campaigns created and delivered with your marketing automation system. Your marketing automation system should have an easy way for you to segment your database to target customers only. This is one way to go back into your database and get a touch point out to existing customers. For new customers, set up a trigger-based automation to have your marketing automation system detect new customers, then fire off the email or direct mail message asking them for referrals. You might want to consider timing your referral request for about 3 to 6 months after they’ve become a customer.

2) Provide a Landing Page

When your referral request goes out you’ll want to send your customer to your purpose-built landing page. Once the landing page is submitted by your customer, you’ll be able to track who is making the referral using this landing page and form built with your marketing automation system. Moreover, when the form is submitted you’ll send an introductory email created with your marketing automation system to the person being referred introducing your company.

3) Trigger Incentives

The web form submission serves as the “trigger” for other actions. When the trigger happens an email or postcard is automatically sent to the referral with a concise and beneficial call to action: “try us”, “free trial”, or gift card. Your marketing automation system can match the appropriate incentive with the referral’s demographics (role, job title, etc.) if needed, setting the table for more precise and relevant communication. Tracking kicks in and the referral’s interaction with your company is monitored. Based on engagement, provide the new prospect with the appropriate level of nurturing.

4) Nurture

Using automation, nurture people that were referred but did not respond so that your business remains top of mind when service is needed. Nurturing is a great way to automate touch points and systemize the referral process.

We hope you enjoyed this guide on building referral programs using marketing automation.

Download this free brochure on Building a Referral Program using Lead Liaison and stick it up on your wall! It will help you stay on track with setting up your referral program.

Download Now!

 

Lead Liaison

Alternate Content Marketing Strategies besides Email

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Alternate Content Marketing Strategies besides EmailEmail has the ability to deliver a large amount of content quickly and its traditionally strong response rates. It’s probably the king of direct marketing strategies, but don’t forget that there are many other ways to reach your leads. There are other online options, such as through social media networks and mobile devices, and offline options, like direct mail or promotional materials. If you’re wondering how your company can take advantage of all these different ways to reach your leads, keep reading to learn how marketing automation companies such as Lead Liaison can provide a comprehensive alternate content marketing strategies that will benefit your business.

Social Media

Social media is becoming an increasingly vital element of any company’s online presence and overall marketing strategy. However, many small to medium sized businesses end up largely neglecting this important medium. There’s a large time investment required to cover multiple social networks and the demand for constant supervision. Lead Liaison’s social media management tools can help your business by allowing you to schedule your social media posts, removing the day-to-day upkeep that can bog marketing departments down. And if you simply can’t keep up with the content required to maintain a healthy social media presence, don’t worry! You can outsource your content creation needs to Lead Liaison, who can deliver quality content on topic and on time.

Text Messaging

While directly text messaging marketing materials is certainly a bit more aggressive than an email campaign, it gets results. Text message marketing receive a 98% open rate, which is substantially higher than the numbers email can provide. Using the data collected from your marketing automation tools and social intelligence software, you can narrowcast marketing materials and hit the right demographic at the right time to make the sales you need.

Direct Mail

While it may seem a little old school for a marketing automation strategy that relies on instant communication and data collection from the internet, direct mail remains an incredibly effective way to get a lead’s attention and get him/her interested in your product. A fact in the marketing world is that different leads react in different ways to different types of marketing material, and a lead who has generally ignored your email campaigns might finally become intrigued when a piece of marketing material lands on their desk.

Promo

Another old school method of marketing your company and your products is through the creation and distribution of promo materials. Nothing helps people remember your product better than seeing it on their desk with branded promotional materials!

If your company doesn’t have the resources or connections to arrange a large scale direct mail campaign or produce promotional materials, Lead Liaison can help. We can organize mailing campaigns and point you in the right direction to design promo items that reflect your company’s brand, and will help you convert leads to sales.

To learn more about how Lead Liaison and how marketing automation can help your company, visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation blog online.

Lead Liaison

Optimize your Marketing Automation Content with an Effective Call to Action

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Optimize Your Marketing Automation Content With An Effective Call To ActionLooking for ways to optimize your marketing automation content with an effective call to action? A call to action is one of the oldest and most important elements of web design, because it is what ultimately seals the deal and engages the customer to make an online sale or enter deeper into conversation with your company. A call to action is most traditionally thought of as a button on a web page that gets a customer to do something – such as a buy or download button. However, these days a call to action can be embedded in many different types of content and can come in many different forms – a well written sales pitch in an email can be thought of as a call to action, if it engages the lead to interact further with marketing material.

When Is It Appropriate To Include A Call To Action?

While a call to action is a valuable tool for many different types of content, it is important to know when a call to action can be misleading. As we’ve discussed before, if your content is directed towards a low-end lead, and is designed to simply remind customers of your existence and ability to be helpful, then attempting to sell to them can drive them away. Your marketing team needs to use good judgement when they try to sell your products, and should always take advantage of the tools your marketing automation software has to test different strategies against one another.

None of that is to say that you shouldn’t be trying to sell – just that you need to know when. With that out of the way, here are some of the essential elements of an effective call to action.

Simplicity

Whether the call to action contained in your content is an image or an invitation in the copy, it should always be straightforward and impossible to misunderstand. You should never miss a sale due to an unclear image or cluttered language.

Clarity

Utilizing strong action words can make or break an effective call to action. Words such as register, click, download or buy will provide clear direction to your viewers. If these words are built into an image or a button then use sharp contrast to make those words really stand out.

Visibility

Don’t bury your call to action. A great strategy is to place your call to action in a highly visible area, such as the middle center or in the top right corner relative to where the bulk of your content is displayed. Try to avoid making the user scroll, make it impossible to miss.

Urgency

Creating a sense of urgency is another important factor in a call to action that yields higher conversion rates. If there are a limited amount of items left or a limited time to get them, communicate that. Getting a potential customer to act now rather than later is important. That said, however, never attempt to mislead someone – breaking trust with them will hurt your company much more in the long run.

These are some of the most important steps in designing an effective call to action for your marketing automation content, but you can learn about even more ways to engage your leads at Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resource blog online.

Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation: What Defines Top Performers?

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What Defines Top Performers in Marketing AutomationIn organizations, job retention in the marketing department remains low. In fact, job tenures in a typical marketing department are as little as three years and it’s one role that is under constant analysis and assessment. When performance wanes, marketers can expect to have to answer big questions and fight for their jobs. Successful marketers from one company may have trouble transitioning to another because what works for one industry may not work in another. This can lead to confusion about what traits top performers have.

Most top performers tend to focus on keeping their existing customers while spending less time on expanding their customer base. Keeping your customers loyal and happy tends to work out much better for companies rather than chasing after new customers. It’s also less expensive with top performers only spending approximately 20 percent of their budget on expansion where others in the field spend around 30 percent. When it comes to customers, top performers also make it a priority to manage the entire life cycle of their clients. Instead of leaving the majority of the life cycle to sales and technical support, top performers recognize that marketing has a huge role to play in successfully managing the entire customer experience.

Speaking of the customer life cycles, top performers tie response rates, satisfaction scores, and other metrics into how well they’re performing. Instead of measuring typical things like number of leads, top performers are able to control their technology and make it work for them instead of the other way around. In fact, 30% to 75% of top performing marketers personalize their technology and data to get a better perspective on how they’re performing and what they should change to boost performance.

Finally, top performers recognize that retention is a problem. Recruiting and retention is a priority among top performing companies but it doesn’t stop there. Top companies make sure that they provide their crucial employees with the training, technology, and resources needed to get their job done – therefore, customer satisfaction tends to rank just as high as customer satisfaction with these companies.

Obviously, when it comes to performance, recognizing the link between customers, marketers, and the sales team is key. But you also have to take all of that data and put it to good use – making it work for you – instead of the other way around. Marketing automation may vary from industry to industry but top performers know that one thing remains true: using your stats and metrics to evolve and change your marketing strategy will maximize your effectiveness.

Lead Liaison

Create Marketing Customers Love

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Create Marketing LoveIf implemented correctly, marketing automation provides the framework of sending customers and prospects messages that resonate with their specific needs and wants.  Ultimately, marketing automation is the tool you will use to drive customers to your website and products.  It will keep your customers happy, informed, and connected – and provide you with real-time analytics that are invaluable to a marketer.  When done right, you’ll create content that your customers will fall in love with.

Humans make decisions based on emotions – how something makes them feel, what it reminds them of, and what kind of experiences they’ve had in the past with similar products or businesses are all influencers on how your prospects will react to a product.  This means that your marketing needs to leverage this to your benefit. When a customer loves your marketing they’re more likely to try and love your products.

How Does Marketing Automation Do It?

Marketing automation makes it easy for you to be aware of where your prospects are in the buying pipeline.  This, in turn, allows you to interact with your prospect in a way that’s appropriate for whatever stage they’re at – cultivating relationships with prospects who aren’t ready to buy, networking with those who are in contact with sales, and developing relationships with customers who’ve already purchased.

How Does It Work?

Marketing automation can also give you great details on what your prospects are reading, how they engage, and what they’re doing socially.  Using this information, you can see what they like and send them more of it – all because marketing information provides you with segmented information.

Additionally, you’re able to send messages at the right time and on a schedule that works for the customers instead of your marketing team.

Before marketing automation, messages were generally sent during normal business hours or by snail mail.  This means that your customers sometimes received communications when they weren’t able to reply.  Messages were forgotten or pushed aside.  Even worse?  Prospects received marketing in their mailbox days after they’d already purchased.  Marketing automation creates better timeliness, which increases the appeal of your marketing.

Customizing each interaction, whether it’s through e-mail or your landing pages renders every bit of content is customizable for each prospect.  Relevant content automatically makes it more enjoyable and the bonus is that you can also make sure prospects are receiving consistent communications.  Prospects and customers don’t want to receive disorganized messages but it’s easy to make this mistake, especially if the customer is interacting with different departments at the same time.  Marketing automation ensures that communications and every interaction are smooth and easy.

For marketing automation to work correctly and for your customers to love it, you’ll need to use it intelligently.  Following the tried and true tips of successful automation will be key to making your messages and content relevant and personalized.  Make sure you’re using your automation software to make the best marketing possible. The Lead Liaison staff is happy to help you make this happen!

Lead Liaison

GPS Tracking for your Website

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GPS Tracking for your WebsiteTracking teenagers is similar to tracking for your website.

Having children is a wonderful thing. As kids get older we create stronger bonds with them, and they become more precious than ever day by day. Then they become teenagers. They start to do whatever they want, or at least thing they can do. They begin driving and hanging out with the wrong crowd. How do parents control such rebellious behavior? You can’t. But at least you have options to monitor their behavior and when you see something that’s serious, you intervene. That one option is to track your kids. Nowadays you can buy magnetic vehicle tracking devices that you stick to the bottom of your car. Then you hop onto the companies software interface and monitor where the car is going. It’s all done via GPS and cell towers to monitor where the vehicle is going and at time it’s at different places. In this case, if you see your 17 year old at a bar at 11PM, you’ll know to have that conversation with him/her; otherwise, let them be a teenager.

The concept of the GPS tracking device can also be applied to business. Companies like us, Lead Liaison, smacks a GPS tracking device underneath the chassis of your company’s website. Every time you have a visitor, we’ll track their activity, their online behavior, to help you look for key events that indicate a call to action. Different from solutions like Google Analytics, website visitor tracking identifies businesses, not just internet service providers, that come to your site. Visitor tracking can also help you convert visitors into identified people. Kind of like scanning someone’s drivers license. When a visitor clicks a link in an email, watches a video, downloads a document, submits a form, etc. your visitor tracking solution grabs the persons email address and adds it to their profile. When the visitor comes back, the sales person gets a Buy Signal, indicating buying interest.

Learn more about how you can attach a GPS tracking device to your website.