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Lead Liaison

Offline Marketing: Build, Send, and Track Postcards with Lead Liaison Multi-channel Marketing

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ALLEN, TX Lob

It’s a match made in heaven. The marketing automation powerhouse Lead Liaison has partnered with Lob, a company that is aggressively building a suite of APIs that allow businesses to build applications within their own software for offline marketing tools. Together, they have created an integration that allows marketers to build, send, and track postcards within Lead Liaison’s software platform.

“A marketing automation solution should make your life easier, not more difficult. Lead Liaison and Lob share that goal, which is why we were excited to partner with them on this project. Their postcard builder is intuitive, which allows users to spend less time learning how to use it and more time creating exciting and valuable content.” – Shrav Mehta, Growth Engineer at Lob

Here are some highlights of the integration:

Flexible Design

Custom postcards can be built from scratch or from pre-designed templates in the platform. Users can add their own images, colors, and fonts. The interface allows users to choose between various postcard sizes, such as 4 x 6, 6 x 9, and 6 x 11, and customize both front and back designs. Drag-and-drop technology allows users to easily design a postcard in minutes, not hours.

Dynamic Data Insertion

The new Lead Liaison Postcard Builder gives users the ability to insert standard or custom fields as dynamic text inside of their postcards. This option allows information to be added to each postcard based on the recipient’s data in their prospect profile. The ability to include relevant data that’s specific to the recipient transforms offline marketing into personalized marketing. Companies can better use personalized data for account based marketing (ABM) or one-to-one marketing.

Send on Demand with Flexible Delivery Options

Flexible delivery options minimizes costs. Users no longer need to hit a minimum number of recipients. Send a one-off postcard wishing clients a “Happy Birthday!”, send multiple postcards to a list of people, or include as an action in automated drip marketing.

Folders & Cloning

What’s the use of valuable content if you can’t find it when you need it? Lead Liaison recently released a new feature that allows users to organize their content, personalizations, and automations into folders. Once marketers have identified valuable content, Lead Liaison’s powerful software provides to ability to clone it, saving valuable time.

More About Lob 
Lob is building a suite of APIs for the enterprise. Built with developers in mind, Lob provides tools that allow businesses to build scalable and powerful applications. The most popular API is a print and mail API that enables companies to send postcards, letters, checks, and more as effortlessly as sending emails. Lob is based in San Francisco, CA and is venture backed with over 6000 customers including Amazon, Square, and Counsyl.

More about Lead Liaison 
Lead Liaison provides cloud-based sales and marketing automation solutions that helps businesses accelerate revenue by attracting, converting, closing and retaining more prospects. Filling a void in the small pool of marketing automation providers that focus on marketing-centric functionality, Lead Liaison gives equal focus to sales providing sophisticated visitor tracking and additional website engagement tools to boost sales effectiveness. Lead Liaison blends ease-of-use, a flexible business model, deep external integration, marketing across social, web, mobile, email and offline channels and powerful functionality, all specifically tailored for mid-sized businesses, into a single platform, called Revenue Generation Software®. Lead Liaison is headquartered in Allen, Texas, near Dallas. For more information, visit http://www.leadliaison.com or call 1-800-89-LEADS (895-3237).

Lead Liaison

How to Get Positive Reviews for Your Business

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Reviews

Most companies (if not all) have one very similar quest: get positive reviews.

Sixty-seven percent of consumers are influenced by online reviews when making a purchasing decision.

Unfortunately, it seems like the only people who want to leave reviews are the people who are angry. They certainly don’t help you get new customers.

Don’t be discouraged, though. There are a few things you can do to increase your positive reviews. If you follow these tips, it won’t be long before you start reaping the benefits of positive reviews.

Don’t Be Afraid to Ask

You know you need to use a call to action (CTA) to get people to buy products. You also need to use CTAs to get people to leave reviews. After you complete a positive transaction, ask people to leave a review. If they are happy with you, they will want to show it by doing what you ask. Point them in the right direction, and they’ll do the rest.

Make the Process Easy

People will climb a mountain to write a bad review. However, people don’t want to go out of their way to write a positive review. You have to make it very easy for them, or they won’t do it. Send them an email that directs them to the online review site or include buttons on your site. The easier it is, the more positive reviews you will receive.

Give People an Incentive to Leave a Review

You’ll also get more positive reviews by giving people an incentive to leave a review. You have to be careful with this, though. You cannot buy reviews, and you cannot give an incentive to leave a positive review. You can only give an incentive to leave a review. The incentive has to be the same across the board, regardless of if the review is positive or negative.

You can enter all of the reviews in a drawing and give the winner a prize. Hold the drawing each month. That is a great way to get people to leave reviews. You’ll find that your negative reviews will stay the same because people don’t need incentives to leave bad reviews. However, your positive reviews will go up dramatically.

Good reviews can make a huge difference for your business. Use these tips so you can bring more people into your business. As your positive reviews go up, the number of customers you serve will go up, as well.

If you’re looking for ways to increase the quality of your outreach, try using a marketing automation tool that can help you with your marketing and sales goals. People won’t think twice about giving you a positive review!

Request a Demo!
Lead Liaison

How to Run a Webinar: Have a Marketing Automation System in Place

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How to Run a Webinar

This is the fifth installment in the series How to Run a Webinar.

You’ve defined your invitation and registration process. The next step is to consider using your marketing automation software to help you with the entire process.

A marketing automation system can help you automate your webinar and create a repeatable model to use for future webinars. Marketing automation is used to manage the Invite, Registration, and Follow Up Processes. It can also help:

  • Qualify prospects based on their participation in the event
  • Log their status (no show, registered, etc.) with the event to use for future targeting
  • Automatically create a Prospect in your database
  • Nurture Prospects that attend or do not show up for the event
  • Automatically sync leads into your CRM system, such as Salesforce.com
  • Track landing page conversion rates and email statistics
  • Keep everything in one place (folders)
  • Measure ROI of the webinar, including cost per lead

In the next installment of How to Run a Webinar, we’ll talk about how to promote your webinar.

Can’t wait to get your hands on the rest of this intuitive guide? Download the full white paper here.

Interested in a demonstration of our robust marketing automation tool?

Click here for a demo!

 

Lead Liaison

Marketing Guru Covers: Social Posting and Targeting

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Social Media TargetingIt’s time to think about social posting and targeting. There’s a common misconception that all social networks are the same. Companies think they need to target the same people, regardless of the network, but that isn’t the case. You need to adopt a unique strategy for each network. Some networks cater to B2B or B2C markets, and some focus on specific age groups. Understand the various demographics so you can get more out of social networking.

Facebook

Facebook is mainly geared toward B2C marketing, although some B2B marketing does take place on the site. In fact, this is the top social network for B2C marketing since consumers spend most of their online social time on the site. That makes Facebook an excellent place for businesses to connect with their consumers, especially since everyone uses the site. It’s popular with people of both genders and all ages.

Still, B2B companies use the site to show off their human sides. If you run a B2B business, don’t be afraid to use the network. You just don’t need to post every day, like B2C businesses do. Post once a week instead.

Twitter

Like Facebook, Twitter is available for both B2B and B2C marketers, but it is most appealing to B2C marketers. The site is popular with college-educated people under 50, so this is a good option for people who are trying to reach a specific target market. Use this social network to educate people and to provide interesting and compelling news. It’s also a great place to make connections with other folks in your industry.

Google+

Google+ is one of the most interesting social networks out there. While it hasn’t caught on as much as Google would like, most companies and people have Google+ pages. When companies sign up for Google Places and people sign up for Gmail accounts, they create Google+ pages. This has created a huge opportunity for marketers to reach their targets.

As of right now, 59 percent of Google+ users are men, and around a third of them are between the ages of 25 and 34. However, if businesses start to use the tool that is in front of them, there is no telling what will happen with this social network.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the B2B marketer’s haven. The network is full of professionals, and you can use it to target them and get immediate results. This is the only social network where the majority of the users are 30-64. Educational content works well on this network. Use your advertising space to teach others about your industry.

Social networks provide B2B and B2C marketers with countless opportunities. Don’t put all of your marketing efforts into a single network. Branch out so you can reap multiple rewards.

See how Lead Liaison’s software helps you manage and track your social media efforts here.

 

Lead Liaison

How to Run a Webinar: Define Your Invitation and Registration Process

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How to Run a Webinar

This is the fourth installment in the series How to Run a Webinar.

You’ve picked your ideal webinar service provider. The next step is to define your invitation and registration process.

Define Your Webinar Invite Process

Once you’ve got your data ready and your target audience defined, it’s time to start putting together a process for inviting people. We propose the invitation process below. The process sends out three invitation emails to your database. The second and third emails are sent out to people that did not open or click previous invite emails.

Webinar Invitation Process

 

Make sure to vary your “preview text” for each invitation email. In your marketing automation software, you should have an option to enter in some preview text in the email builder. The preview text is usually at the upper left side of the email in small text. It’s what shows up in the preview pane of the recipient’s email inbox. They’ll usually see anywhere from 1 to 3 lines of text in their preview depending on their settings. With more than half of all emails getting opened and read on mobile devices, it’s critical to have a compelling preview text. Use different preview text verbiage for each of your three invite emails.

After the event is over, add recipients who opened the email into an “Active List” in your MA software. As an optional step, you could email everyone that opened any of your three invite emails but did not register for the event. We suggest sending this email the day before the event.

Define Your Webinar Registration Process

This is the process people will go through once they register for your event. As shown in yellow below, there are two ways to register participants. Through the event provider, such as GoToWebinar, or via your marketing automation system. If using the marketing automation system, create a web form and landing page in the platform. There are a number of advantages for creating the form and landing page in a marketing automation system. Some of those advantages include the ability to build a smart form with progressive profiling, deeply customize your landing page, style your web form to your liking, and control all of the branding. Data also gets injected directly into the marketing automation system, which can be used for future marketing purposes.

Registration Process

In the diagram above, the steps in green require your company to create email content for each step. With the invite process, there are nine (9) emails in total. All emails should use your standard template though, which will be recognizable to recipients and prevent them from marking your email as spam.

Leading up to the event, most of the messages are reminders. Don’t forgot to include a shortcut for the user to add the event to their calendar of choice (Outlook, Google, etc.) in your thank you for registering and reminder emails. We like using AddToCalendar for this. Once the event is over wait a few days for data to be collected and send a follow up to people that registered and showed up, with a separate follow up for people that didn’t show up.

Your marketing automation system will help you capture this data and configure the process from start to finish – ahead of time. This can be a relief to most companies. The stress of running a webinar increases around the time of the event. If your processes are setup and scheduled ahead of time you’ll have more peace of mind, more time to get things done, and more time to focus on your webinar content and execution. All administrative and marketing tasks will be handled by the system!

In the next installment of How to Run a Webinar, we’ll talk about the importance of having a powerful Marketing Automation tool in place.

Can’t wait to get your hands on the rest of this intuitive guide? Download the full white paper here.

Interested in a demonstration of our robust marketing automation tool?

Click here for a demo!

 

Lead Liaison

Reach More Customers with Postcard Marketing

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Postcard Marketing

Did you know that 52.5 percent of postcards are read by recipients?

With that kind of read rate, it’s no wonder why postcard marketing is catching fire in the business world. In fact, businesses in all niches are using postcards these days. Business-to-business (B2B) companies as well as business-to-consumer (B2C) companies realize the power of sending a tangible piece of marketing material that delivers a message to the consumer without them having to open or do anything.

What is really exciting, though, is that postcard marketing is also available for startups and small businesses due to its low cost. If you have access to the right tools, you can enjoy a great deal of success from postcard marketing, even if you don’t have a big marketing budget.

Postcard Marketing 101 – How It Works

Most people are surprised by how simple postcard marketing is. Lead Liaison is making it even easier by becoming one of the only marketing automation companies to offer a seamless integration with postcard builder Lob.

Here’s how it works: after you cultivate a strong list of leads through our lead management platform, you can then personalize your postcards by greeting your customer by name. That personal touch will go a long way in a world full of one-size-fits-all marketing.

With Lead Liaison’s postcard builder, you have full control over the design to create a design that generates results. Consider graphics on both sides of the postcard, along with your branding and a call to action.

Also consider your target market when creating postcards. If possible, divide your leads into groups and create postcards for the specific groups of leads. This will help you create highly targeted postcards that are certain to generate desired results. What’s even more revolutionary about this integration is that you don’t have to send to an entire list. You can add a single postcard into an automation, or simply send one to a client on their birthday. The cost is the same – whether it’s one postcard or 1,000.

Track the Results

Finally, once you’ve sent your postcard you need to track the results. In your marketing automation software, it’s tracked in the person’s profile. You will see an “activity” indicating you sent a postcard.

Offline marketing (handwritten letters, postcards, etc) is notoriously harder to track. You need to have a bridge to connect offline marketing with online marketing. Marketing automation software will help you accomplish that with in-depth visitor tracking and campaign-specific landing pages.

Postcard marketing is an excellent way to add an offline component to your marketing campaigns. Add an additional touchpoint and give your customers another way to find you through postcard marketing.

Do you want to stay informed on the launch of this powerful marketing tool? Visit our Postcard page and enter your information to get real-time updates.

 

LobMore About Lob

Lob is building a suite of APIs for the enterprise. Built with developers in mind, Lob provides tools that allow businesses to build scalable and powerful applications. The most popular API is a print and mail API that enables companies to send postcards, letters, checks, and more as effortlessly as sending emails. Lob is based in San Francisco, CA and is venture backed with over 6000 customers including Amazon, Square, and Counsyl.

 

Lead Liaison

How to Run a Webinar: How to Pick a Webinar Service

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This is the third installment in the series How to Run a Webinar.

How to Run a Webinar

You’ve gotten your data ready. The next step is to subscribe to a webinar service. But, which one?

Choosing a Webinar Service

There are a few key things to look for when choosing your webinar service. Obviously, it needs to be web-based. But also think about how you want the registration to look. Think about your budget. How many people do you estimate will attend? Is it important to you that the recording can concert to MP4 (we think so!)?

This webinar comparison is a great little tool that guides you through a series of questions to help you find your match.

We suggest using GoToWebinar from Citrix for running webinars, simply because the user experience is very similar to Citrix’ GoToMeeting platform. As of July 2016, a little over 1 out of every 4 companies using webinar solutions in some capacity use GoToWebinar. This means the majority of your audience will be familiar with GoToWebinar, making it easier for them to join and participate in your event. And you want things to be easy for people. Adding roadblocks only gives people a reason to no-show. Adapt to the needs of your intended audience.

Check back next week when we cover how to define you invitation and registration process!

Can’t wait to get your hands on the rest of this intuitive guide? Download the full white paper here.

Interested in a demonstration of our robust marketing automation tool?

Click here for a demo!

 

Lead Liaison

How to Run a Webinar: Get Your Data Ready

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This is the second installment in the series How to Run a Webinar.How to Run a Webinar

You’ve determined that you are definitely ready to run a webinar. The next step is to get your data ready. Albeit tedious, this is an important step to keeping things running smoothly.

Make sure you have a good database to start

It’s important to know the topic of your webinar and who it relates to. Don’t invite people to a webinar when you know the topic would not be of interest to them. To maximize registrations, use your existing database of contacts with a focus on opt-in contacts. This could be customers, partners, or leads you’ve had any type of engagement with over the past year.

Determine criteria for who you’ll invite

Once you’ve got your database ready, gather criteria for who you’ll invite. If you’re sending out invitations to thousands of people you’ll want a good marketing automation or email marketing solution to help you. Marketing automation platforms will help you easily segment out people using lists, demographics, behaviors, and other types of criteria. These systems also support dynamic segmentation. Dynamic segmentation helps you create rules for your lists that never have to be updated again. The same audience will be ready for you to send invites to for future webinars.

We suggest staying away from purchased lists if you’re using a marketing automation or email marketing system. Most email service providers do not allow purchased lists as part of their email sending policy. There are services available to help you target certain industries and send out communication. Outsourced lists and invites should not be your core invite strategy, but could be used to complement your invite process.

Your data is ready. The next step is subscribing to a webinar service. Check back next week for the next installment of the series How to Run a Webinar: Subscribe to a Webinar Service!

Can’t wait to get your hands on the rest of this intuitive guide? Download the full white paper here.

Interested in a demonstration of our robust marketing automation tool?

Click here for a demo!

 

Lead Liaison

Buzzwords in Marketing Automation: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO): its meaning and how it relates to marketing automation. A part of the series Buzzwords in Marketing Automation.

 

 

Discover the other half of SEO

Search Engine Optimization and Marketing Automation

You can’t spend any time studying online marketing without reading the term “search engine optimization.” Still, you might be a little fuzzy about what this term means, and you might be even more confused regarding how it relates to marketing automation. Let’s take a look at what search engine optimization (SEO) is and how marketing automation can help your SEO efforts.

What Is SEO?

SEO is a set of techniques that marketers use to grow visibility in the online world in order to improve organic search engine rankings. There are various components involved in a successful SEO campaign, including keyword research, link building, content marketing, on-page optimization, and social networking. A solid marketing strategy utilizes all of these components in order to create a powerful campaign that helps a website move up in the search engine rankings.

Most website owners use Google Analytics or other similar tools to track their results. These tools provide them with instant results. They see immediate cause and effect results for their SEO campaigns, but they don’t get long-term results with these analytics. That makes it impossible for them to understand their return on investment for their SEO campaigns.

That is where marketing automation saves the day.

Marketing Automation and SEO

Marketing automation tools provide tracking options that you can’t get with traditional analytics software. Instead of just giving you the cause and effect relationship between your SEO efforts and your traffic, marketing automation provides you with the value of the traffic.

For instance, if someone visits your site because of your SEO efforts, marketing automation software immediately starts tracking that person. The software can continue to track that visitor every time he or she comes to your site. It will record what they are interested in when they get to your website, what content they download, which videos they watch, and more. Not only does this allow you to hyper-target your marketing or nurture efforts based on the person’s actions, it also makes it much easier for you to determine if you’re making a profit with your SEO efforts

ROI is possibly your most important marketing statistic available. If you cannot track your ROI, you don’t know if you’re making or losing money. That is why marketing automation is so important in regards to your SEO campaign. Add marketing automation to your SEO efforts to see the other half of search engine marketing.

Request a Demo of Marketing Automation!

 

 

Lead Liaison

How to Run a Webinar: Are you Ready for a Webinar?

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This is the first installment in the series How to Run a Webinar.

How to Run a Webinar

You’re probably reading this with the mindset that you are going to do a webinar. You’ve thought about the topic, decided your company is going to do it, and thought about the material to use; but – are you really ready for a webinar? Executing a successful webinar can be expensive, and requires a lot of preparation. Here are some things to consider before moving forward:

Expect Higher Attendance with:

  1. Strong audience connection. If the audience already knows, likes and trusts you or they know, like and trust whoever is promoting the webinar then attendance will be much higher.
  2. Your opt-in database or cold audience. Participation will be much higher when marketing to your own opt-in list vs. a “cold audience”.
  3. Low industry/topic saturation. If your industry or even the topic has been saturated with webinars expect a lower turnout.
  4. Hot topics. If your subject matter is a hot topic right now that’s pushed the audience’s emotional hot buttons of pain, desire or curiosity, then you can expect a higher attendance rate.
  5. Big name involvement. If you’re going solo on the webinar, and don’t have a lot of people to invite, it’s a lot harder to drive attendance than having a co-presenter, as well as invite-support, from a big name company. For example, suppose you were a technology company with Google as your partner. Could you get a Google employee to co-present with you? Could Google help broadcast the event through their marketing channels thereby sending more people to your landing page? Your webinar will benefit from a big brand name, making it more attractive to your audience, with a larger pool of people to invite.
  6. A larger invitation list. The quality of your invitation list is certainly a factor, but the size of your invite list matters as well. Inviting 50 people to a webinar is a lot different than inviting 50,000.

Let’s be honest though. If you’re a young company (startup) without much brand recognition, a database that’s not quite “there” yet, and no partners to help with the event…you might still be able to pull off a good webinar with a few tricks. Try offering some incentive to get people to attend. Here are some ideas:

  • Offer up a free white paper (worth $X)
  • Provide a discount on your product/service if they attend
  • Offer a giveaway for the first X number of registrants (think iPod, Chromebook, etc.)

Attendance depends on the factors that will be described throughout this series. About 40-60% of registrants will show up for live viewings, but you can expect more registrants to trickle in and watch on demand over the next few days following your webinar.

Now, you’ve thought through things and you’ve decided you are ready. The next step is to get your data ready. Check back next week for the next installment of the series How to Run a Webinar: Getting your Data Ready!

Interested in a demonstration of our robust marketing automation tool?

Click here for a demo!