Best practices for lead generation, marketing automation and revenue generation topics.

Integrating Your Website Forms to Convert More Visitors

Integrating Your Website Forms to Convert More Visitors

Integrating Your Website Forms

Adopting a marketing automation system can provide a number of benefits, including helping you save a tremendous amount of time and maximizing your resources. Unfortunately, many people miss numerous key opportunities to maximize their marketing automation system. The first step when you’re adopting a marketing automation system is to integrate all your website forms. From there, you can use one of several approaches.

Options for Integrating Web Forms into Marketing Automation

  1. One option is to have your existing form scanned. You can then pipe the data from your form directly into your marketing automation system.
  2. Another option is to replace existing web forms with forms that are developed by your marketing automation system.
  3. You could also post form results back to your marketing automation system and your own system using a parallel approach.

Using the web forms developed by your marketing automation provider offers several benefits, including progressive profiling that helps you collect new information on visitors rather than asking for information that has already been provided. Marketing automation forms can also often block or even redirect submissions sent by your competitors.

One of the most common concerns for many people is whether forms will reflect the same look and feel of their website. Forms built by marketing automation can be designed to look identical to the theme of your website, ensuring a completely natural look and feel. Integrating a form designed in another system is a snap. All it takes is a small snippet of code to insert such forms into your website.

Exactly what is provided with a form will depend on your marketing automation provider, but some providers will capture basic information automatically. Such information may include name, company name, and email.

Summarizing the Benefits of Integrating Forms with Marketing Automation

Regardless of the approach you choose, once you have integrated your web form the marketing automation system can correlate anonymous users with a recognized identity. Doing so can make tracking visitors more powerful, as well as easier. Once you have linked up your form, the marketing automation system will then be able to make necessary connections between past and future website activity, as well as other types of digital engagement.

Giving Salespeople a Lead Generation Tool with Visitor Tracking

Giving Salespeople a Lead Generation Tool with Visitor TrackingEvery Salesperson Needs a Good Set of Lead Generation Tools

When it comes to surviving in the world of B2B and B2C sales today, your business needs every lead generation tool available. Regardless of whether you actually sell services and/or goods online or have a brick and mortar business and are trying to attract more customers, you still need tools in place for generating leads. Visitor tracking is an incredibly effective tool for doing just that.

The reality is that you probably have more people who are primed to be excellent leads visiting your website than you know. Unfortunately, when you do not know about those leads, you cannot take action. Visitor tracking is designed to help you identify every possible lead and provide that relevant information to your salespeople, so you can ensure that there is never an opportunity lost.

What Exactly Is Visitor Tracking?

Visitor tracking works to provide your salespeople with the ability to monitor visitors to your website by name, company, and/or location. With this information, your salespeople will be better able to identify prospective clients as well as their needs. As the world of business becomes increasingly competitive, visitor tracking is beginning to form the crux of all online marketing efforts.

If your business has a sales team in place, you need visitor tracking. Most companies provide a number of tools to help their sales teams succeed, and marketing automation is an effective tool. Visitor tracking is another lead generation tool designed to aid your sales team in approaching potential customers intelligently and at the right time. When handled correctly, visitor tracking can help your sales team work more efficiently and effectively.

Visitor tracking can be particularly beneficial if your sales team travels to networking events, conventions, or tradeshows. Rather than having your team waste significant resources following up via phone with contacts, you can instead take advantage of visitor tracking to ensure that you make contact with prospects when they are ready.

As digital marketing efforts continue to evolve, it becomes incumbent upon businesses in every sector to make the most of every available opportunity. Visitor tracking can help your sales team stay competitive. Get out there and grab a great lead generation tool for your company!

Identify People that Visit Your Website

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.

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

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.

3 Easy but Important Steps to Prepare for Marketing Automation

Prepare for Marketing AutomationAutomated marketing sounds complicated, but with some advance preparation, can be straightforward and managed with ease. The following three steps can make the process of launching an automated marketing campaign simpler, faster, and more effective. Let us help you with 3 easy steps to prepare for marketing automation.

1. Determine Sales Funnel Stages

Well-defined sales funnel stages are critical to automated marketing success. The goal of this process is to determine the various challenges and stages a prospective lead might go through before converting to a paying a customer. After these challenges and stages have been defined, marketing automation can be used to assist prospects in navigating the sales funnel with more ease. From sending prospects relevant, timely content at the various sales funnel stages to setting up campaign triggers to determine when leads are becoming hot, a well-defined marketing automation campaign can maneuver prospects through the sales funnel much more quickly.

2. Define Sales Targets

Far too many businesses skip over this step in preparing for a marketing automation campaign. It is vital to identify sales prospects along with their needs and wants. Consider the features of a product or service that prospects would appreciate most. What fears or concerns might prevent a prospect from making a purchase? What questions do prospects need answered? Understanding the answers to these questions makes it easier to identify prospects and develop content to drive greater success in an automated marketing campaign.

3. Match Content to Sales Funnel Stages

The entire goal of marketing automation is to provide the right content to sales prospects at precisely the right time. This means mapping content and correctly matching content to sales funnel stages at the appropriate time. Begin by identifying the type of content that will appeal most to target prospects, such as blog posts, videos, articles, whitepapers, etc. Next, determine which type of content sales prospects would find valuable enough that they’re will to provide personal information in order to receive that content. Finally, consider the type of content prospective customers would want once they moved further down the sales funnel.

Planning and preparing for an automated marketing campaign is vital to succeeding. With proper planning, automated marketing can help any business reach its expansion goals. We hope you enjoyed these 3 easy steps to prepare for marketing automation.

5 Tips for Making Marketing Automation More Personal

5 Tips for Making Your Marketing Automation More PersonalWhile marketing automation might seem a bit mechanical and cold, there are steps that can be taken to make it less robotic. The marketers who tend to make the most of marketing automation are those who take the time to understand their audience, and who customize their content to meet the expectations of that audience. Here are 5 tips for making marketing automation more personal.

1. Building Your Own Marketing Automation List

A marketing automation campaign is only as good as the quality of the list behind it. Rather than purchasing lists, generate unique lists featuring qualified leads. We suggest using a solution like SiteEngage™ to engage and convert visitors using relevant “engagement windows” to offer valuable content and build your list.

2. Scalability Over Time

A common mistake made by many new to marketing automation is trying to grow too quickly. This type of approach can result in an impersonal feel. A better approach is to start simple, by identifying the most important stages in the sales funnel. Over time, what is working or not working will become more easily visible, offering the opportunity to add additional stages.

3. Nurture Relationships

Ultimately, the goal of any marketing automation campaign is to develop and maintain valuable relationships that will increase both the quality and quantity of leads over time. By delivering high-value content to leads at the right time rather than focusing solely on numbers, it becomes possible to do precisely that.

4. Getting Creative

Marketing automation may get its start with email, but it involves a multitude of channels to move leads through various stages of the sales funnel. For a successful marketing automation campaign, it’s important to develop a marketing automation strategy that focuses on the delivery of relevant content throughout every channel.

5. Always Include a Personal Touch

Marketing automation performs at its best when it functions with a personal touch. Service is at the heart of marketing automation. Ideally, the needs of an audience should be anticipated in advance to ensure that customers receive the right information at precisely the right time. Never become so bogged down in the mechanics of an automated marketing campaign that the real goal is lost.

Improving Customer Relationships with Marketing Automation

Improving Customer Relationships with Marketing AutomationWith all of the hustle and bustle associated with attracting, growing, and converting leads, it can oftentimes be easy to forget the real key to achieving sustainable growth: cultivating loyal customers. This means not only a customer that will offer a consistent source of revenue, but who will also provide valuable recommendations to help in enhancing products, and even drive new prospects to your brand by recommending your products and offering testimonials.

Strong customer relationships are vital to any business strategy, but unfortunately, they are often given little priority. Marketing automation can help in improving customer relationships. While there is a common misconception that marketing automation comes to an end once a customer is converted, that is actually not the case. Marketing automation can continue to provide a number of important benefits, even after a deal is concluded.

Improving Content

Oftentimes, marketing automation efforts focus on personalizing content for the purposes of bringing new clients on board. In reality, however, customization is just as important to current customers. Marketing automation can provide a wealth of information regarding a client’s recent activity, including any content he or she may have recently downloaded, areas where he or she may be struggling, or an area where they may be interested in expanding their knowledge. Having this information available can ensure that the right questions are crafted, while also ensuring that you’re providing a more valuable customer experience.

Identifying Brand Ambassadors with Lead Scoring

Lead scoring can prove to be a highly effective method for identifying the biggest fans of a brand quickly and easily. This is important for several reasons. Customers who download and share content regularly and who interact on social media accounts are extremely valuable. Not only can they offer credibility, but they can also become powerful brand ambassadors. Lead scoring offers the opportunity to identify such customers and begin the process of building relationships with those individuals, while also rewarding them for their loyalty.

Marketing automation is excellent at providing drip marketing capabilities, which can be quite beneficial for helping current customers have an even more valuable experience. This is precisely what drives true customer loyalty and retention.

Mistakes with Marketing Automation – and How to Fix Them

Mistakes You May Be Making with Marketing Automation and How to Fix ThemWhile marketing automation has become an increasingly popular approach for generating quality leads and driving them through the sales funnel efficiently, it’s not uncommon for marketers to make mistakes in implementing marketing automation tools. The power of marketing automation cannot be denied, but it also is not a magic solution that will resolve all marketing problems. As is the case with any solution, marketing automation is only as effective as the team behind it and the time you invest in it. Failure to properly implement and make the most of marketing automation will almost always result in failure. In this post we’ll share common mistakes with marketing automation and how to fix them.

Failure to Develop a Documented Strategy

Without a documented marketing strategy, marketing automation tools cannot possibly hit your desired target. A proper marketing automation strategy should effectively tie together the goals of a company with the techniques used to reach those goals. Marketing automation tools serve as a means to execute a proper strategy; they are not an actual strategy on their own.

Only Using Marketing Automation Tools as Email Marketing Tools

Marketing automation tools provide far more than just email capabilities. While email is still an incredibly effective marketing automation tool, a successful marketing automation campaign requires harnessing all available features, which may include lead scoring, search engine optimization, landing pages, and metrics and reporting.

Focusing on Selling Instead of Nurturing

Lead nurturing is one of the most powerful benefits of a marketing automation tool. When used properly, it can help to move prospects through the sales funnel more quickly than when using traditional marketing tools. The problem is that many marketers focus on selling rather than nurturing leads at the top of the funnel. When a heavy sales pitch is used too early, it often drives leads away rather than moving them forward. Selling should be reserved for the bottom of the funnel leads, while the top of the funnel leads should receive useful content related to their specific interests.

Tracking the Wrong Metrics

It can be incredibly easy to get sucked into the vast array of data available from marketing automation tools. Placing too much emphasis on the wrong data, however, such as social shares and traffic, can prevent you from tracking metrics that really matter, such as lead conversion rates. Always keep in mind that the importance of certain metrics may change based on where a lead is in the sales funnel.

Taking the Next Step after Implementing Marketing Automation

Taking the Next Step after Implementing Marketing AutomationAs important as planning is to the success of marketing automation, it’s also important not to drop the ball after a marketing automation campaign is implemented. Unfortunately, marketers often tend to struggle with the next step after implementing marketing automation. Most often, these areas include starting small, sourcing quality content, and implementing steps for passing leads on to sales management as quickly as possible.

Begin with Micro-Campaigns

Many times, marketers are so excited at the prospect of launching a marketing automation campaign that they try to implement too much too soon. The key to success is to drive some valuable activity to your marketing automation system right away. Launching small campaigns by targeting great prospects, including existing customers, can generate high-value activity. Try offering valuable information and educational content to encourage leads and get them excited about what is to come.

Sourcing Good Content

Among the biggest bottlenecks many marketers face is trying to source good content while keeping it updated, fresh, and relevant. Planning ahead can help to eliminate many of the struggles associated with sourcing good content. It is vital to the success of an automated marketing campaign to always have a steady supply of quality content. Consider the different types of content available, and plan to include a mix of content genres to keep things interesting. For example, mix it up between articles and videos, blogs and infographics. Sources should be updated frequently. The ultimate goal is to deliver fresh content that will help target leads to move to the next stage of the sales funnel without delay.

Tips for creating good marketing content.

Pass It On

The results of an automated marketing campaign are only beneficial if they arrive in the hands of sales managers as quickly as possible. Establishing report subscriptions to deliver valuable data from the marketing automation system to the right people can ensure that leads are acted upon quickly, before they grow cold.

Following these easy steps can help in getting data flowing into an automated marketing campaign once it is implemented, and ensure the greatest degree of long-term success.

What You Need to Know to Make Your Marketing Automation More Effective

What You Need to Know to Make Your Marketing Automation More EffectiveThe benefits of marketing automation are well known, including improved lead management, staff efficiency, marketing ROI, and increased sales. Even so, not all marketing automation campaigns are as effective as they could be. The tips below are provided to make your marketing automation more effective.

Planning Is Primary

The first and most important step in developing an effective marketing automation campaign is identifying and fleshing out goals for connecting with leads. Whether that is through social media, email, website content, or a mix of methods, it is important to consider the best ways to communicate, as well as how frequently to communicate with leads, to obtain optimal results.

Gathering Data

The process of building an effective marketing automation plan relies heavily on understanding as much about a target audience as possible. Taking the time to gather and analyze data for the purposes of determining a lead’s choices is well worth investing the effort and time.

Tell Prospects What to Do

Including a clear call to action is vital to help prospects uncover the information they want while also driving follow through. By linking a call to action with an offer, a marketing automation campaign gives prospects greater incentive to take the next step. This is particularly important for prospects at the top of the sales funnel.

Scoring Leads

Among the greatest benefits of marketing automation is the ability to score leads. While marketing automation tools are great for driving leads, it should be recognized that not all leads are the same. Some leads are hot, while others are simply should be passed by. Lead scoring helps to discern the difference between the two, and ensures that valuable time and effort is not wasted on leads destined to generate little return, while simultaneously focusing more effort on leads with the most potential to convert to paying customers.

The process of building a new marketing automation plan can at first seem overwhelming. If you approach the process in a step-by-step manner, however, the process becomes simpler and sets the stage for greater success.