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Lead Liaison

What Are Email Gates and How to Use Them to Convert

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What Are Email Gates and How to Use Them to ConvertAre you giving away all of your content? Learn what are email gates to convert more visitors. Today, such a large amount of content is available and given away for free that many business owners believe their leads will turn to their competition if they do not give away content. While this line of thinking has become commonplace, it does not take a number of factors into consideration. Certainly not all content should be gated, but your highly valuable content should always be gated.

What Is Gated Content?

What exactly is gated content? What are email gates? Gated content refers to any content that a visitor must provide an email address in order to receive something valuable in exchange. The key to using gated content is to encourage visitors to enter an email address to receive the content they want the most. Different types of content can be gated, including case studies, testimonials, datasheets, brochures, and more. Basically, anything you can convert into a word document or PDF. Videos can also be gated, when using providers like Wistia and their turnstyle feature. Web pages can also be gated by using engagement popups with solutions like Lead Liaison’s SiteEngage™. Your marketing automation provider will help you gate all of your valuable content. First, start by creating a marketing content map to take inventory on what’s valuable, which you’ll inevitably gate.

When Should You Use Gated Content?

Not all content should be gated. It is particularly important to make certain the content at the top of your sales funnel remains open. You want people to find your business and your products/services to be interesting. This content often serves as an effective icebreaker to encourage visitors to take the next step. There is a time and place to use email gates, and you must ascertain the correct time to position those gates based on what is best for your business.

Throwing up email gates on all of your content will usually have the exact opposite effect that you desire. While you might get a lead by having a visitor enter his or her email, if the customer is not yet ready to buy, you still won’t get the sale. The last thing you want is to bombard leads with emails they do not want. This is why it is essential to determine the best time and place to use email gates. The goal is to make the determination between those leads that are ready to receive your emails and those leads that would be alienated by your emails. Doing so can help you achieve the desired balance between whetting the appetite of a lead and converting those leads that are ready to buy.

Convert More Visitors!
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

First Marketing Automation Software Company to Include Handwritten Letters

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Lead Liaison continues its disruptive path in the marketing industry as the first marketing automation software company to include handwritten letters, written by humans, as a native offering in a marketing automation platform.

ALLEN, TX — April, 28 2016  — Lead Liaison, the leader in sales and marketing automation software to the mid-market, is the first marketing automation software company to help businesses send handwritten letters online using a native, out of the box solution as part of their automated software suite, called Revenue Generation Software®. The new solution gives B2C and B2B salespeople a classic way to be unique with their outreach and follow up efforts.

Before the internet, before cell phones, before email, handwritten letters were a surefire way to do business. Fast forward to today. Businesses are engulfed in technology, forced to move at a rapid pace, forced to multi-task, forced to meet and exceed results. Consequentially, salespeople are under pressure to perform and have very little time to step back and think outside of the box.

Handwritten letters are an excellent way to take a different angle with customers, prospects, and partners. They’re the exact opposite of an outbound sales and marketing strategy that companies have come to expect in this digital age. But who has the time to sit down, write a letter, buy something to drop-in the envelope, get stamps, and run to the post office? It might work for a short period of time, but fails in the long run. Persistence and process certainly pays in sales. The task of writing handwritten letters is way too time consuming, and time is money in sales. It’s opportunity cost, it’s the cost of paying a salesperson to write the letter, it’s the cost of materials – it all adds up.

Lead Liaison’s VP of Customer Success, Alan Page, says:

“We are jumping out of our seats with enthusiasm! We’re the very first company including handwritten letters as a native feature in a marketing automation platform, without needing to integrate 3rd party logic – it all just works out of the box. We expect other companies to follow suit.

“Writing a letter adds such a personal, unique touch point, and converts at an incredibly high rate. With our offering, we’re also including the ability to drop in different items with the handwritten letter, like a $5 Starbucks gift card, or include other items, like books or bags of popcorn. This further ‘humanizes’ the experience and gives it that wow factor. We want our customers to have the opportunity to make an impression. That’s why we’re reviving this lost art. Sending email after email is boring and loses someone’s interest and attention fast. Handwritten letters are different, and memorable – they’re here to stay and add a welcome mix to our multi-channel marketing capabilities.”

Lead Liaison simplifies the process of creating and sending handwritten letters to reduce a time-consuming task that could take up to an hour of time (and make hands hurt) down to a few minutes, and can be fully automated. The letters are unbelievably customizable, allowing users to choose handwriting style, ink color, letter size, insert dynamic data fields (lead owner information, recipient information), and add company logos to stationery or the envelope. The importance of multi-touch, multi-channel communication in B2B (and B2C) is critical. Handwritten letters, coupled with other forms of online and offline marketing such as SMS messages, direct mail, email, and phone calls can make a serious impact on a sales team’s ability to convert more prospects into paying customers.

Existing customers have immediate access to this exciting new feature once activated on their account. To see a demo of Lead Liaison’s handwritten letters feature contact us.

About Lead Liaison

Lead Liaison is a cloud-based sales and marketing automation solution that helps businesses accelerate sales 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

Too Many Website Visitors Leaving Your Site? Show an Offer

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Too Many Exiting Customers - Show an Offer

Stop those Visitors Leaving Your Site!

Do you have too many visitors leaving your site before you even have a chance to convert them? It’s a common phenomenon that most website owners have no idea how to correct. They simply notice a trend when reviewing their analytics, but feel powerless to do anything to correct the problem. When visitors lose interest in what they see on your website, whether they are simply closing the browser tab, typing in another URL, or hitting the back button, you need to take action right away. Showing an offer, also known as presenting an engagement window, can help you to do that.

Pop-Ups versus Engagement Windows

You might be thinking…”hey, this sounds like a pop-up”. While a pop-up has a negative connotation and can be intrusive to the user’s experience, an engagement window is not intrusive. Engagement windows are designed to show the right message to the right user, at the right time. This is accomplished through the use of personalized content, such as the user’s name, his or her location, etc. These engaging tactics can absolutely stop visitors leaving your site.

The key to making this system work for you is to ensure you have the right marketing automation provider. Unfortunately, not all marketing automation providers offer this type of service. To be effective, you need to be able to detect user behavior at the right time in order to determine when a user is about to exit your website and provide a compelling offer to capture the visitor’s attention and interests. Without this type of behavior-detection system in place, you run the risk of alienating visitors by displaying an offer at the wrong time. The goal is to capture a visitor’s attention and encourage him or her to stick around and take you up on your offer rather than leaving.

Your offer should also be carefully crafted to be enticing enough that the visitor is encouraged to take action right then. Oftentimes, this means presenting a limited-time offer that the visitor must take action on right away in order to avoid losing.

Learn More About a Solution to Detect Exit Intent
Lead Liaison

Personalize Your Website to Convince and Convert

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Personalize Your Website to Convince and ConvertPersonalize your website with the use of dynamic content to make a tremendous difference in your conversion rates. As the world of online marketing has grown increasingly competitive, it is no longer enough to simply update your website with new content. Instead, you must focus on creating dynamic user experiences that encourage visitors to convert. The use of personalized content makes this possible. By moving visitors to conversion faster with a personalized website, you can significantly reduce the sales cycle.

Benefits of Personalized Website Content

Simply relying on generic content is outdated. Today, you must make web experiences as relevant as possible to each individual user. Personalization offers a number of benefits, including a highly targeted approach that helps you cut through all of the noise, clutter, and distractions faced by your visitors. Providing a personalized experience encourages visitors to remain on your site longer, download more, and in the end, make more purchases.

To maximize the benefits offered by a personalized website, it’s important to use on-page content in conjunction with targeted emails. Doing so helps to ensure that visitors see an offer designed to move them to the next part of the sales funnel.

Getting Started with Personalized Website Content

Personalizing your website content is easier than you might think. For instance, you might include text referencing the visitor’s location on your home page. Even something this simple can be all it takes to capture a visitor’s interest and encourage him or her to stay on your site longer. Another option for personalizing your website content is to upsell your current customers by displaying dynamic content for a solution for which the customer is not already paying. You could also use a visitor’s name to catch his or her attention. Case in point, with Lead Liaison’s solution, known as SiteEngage™, standard and custom fields can be used to create rule criteria to determine what is shown to a prospect and at what time and that data can also be included into the content.

While this may sound complicated, the right marketing automation package can make this a breeze. Not all marketing automation packages provide this level of personalization, so make sure you review what your package provides.

Convert More Visitors!
Lead Liaison

Mid-Market Marketing Automation Software Leader Announces Integration with Wistia for Video Marketing

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Integration Creates Opportunities for Mid-Sized Companies to Leverage Video Marketing with Visitor Tracking and Marketing Automation Software for More Sales Intelligence and Higher Website Conversion Rates

ALLEN, TX — April, 18 2016  — Wistia, the video platform of choice for business, and Lead Liaison, the leader in sales and marketing automation software to the mid-market, announced a technology integration today. The integration gives salespeople more sales insight into potential buyers’ interests and marketers’ opportunities to rapidly convert more website visitors while using video marketing data to trigger multi-channel, multi-touch marketing campaigns.

Companies that are not large enterprises have been underserved in recent years and large enterprises have been forced to work with marketing automation providers that don’t offer smaller, more palatable offerings to whet their appetite. Different from other marketing automation vendors occupying the enterprise space, Lead Liaison offers a stand-alone website visitor tracking solution, called ProspectVision™, for companies not quite ready to take on marketing automation. Wista works with ProspectVision™. When using Lead Liaison’s Wistia Connector with ProspectVision™, companies can take visitor tracking to a whole new level. Leads are more qualified, salespeople get more sales insight, and more website visitors convert from anonymous to identified through Wistia’s Turnstile feature, which creatively adds an email gate inside your video.

Companies ready to scale up sales and marketing efforts can move from website visitor tracking to marketing automation by upgrading to Lead Liaison professional-grade marketing automation software suite, called Lead Management Automation (LMA)™.

Wistia-hosted videos embedded into a company’s website get additional perks with Lead Liaison’s marketing automation. Video analytics, such as who played the video, who engaged, and who converted, get saved into the marketing automation database. Marketers can later return to the system and use this data to create segmentations or re-target prospects that interacted with their video content. Companies can also tap into what Lead Liaison calls “responsive marketing”, by initiating a stream of intelligent marketing communications driven from video engagement.

Since the Wistia Connector has been available, marketers are loving it:

“We absolutely love the integration between Wistia and Lead Liaison. Prior to this, we used YouTube and had no insight into who was watching our content. Now, we use Lead Liaison and Wistia together to identify the people and businesses that are watching our videos. We also qualify more visitors by scoring video engagement and use video analytics for retargeting campaigns within Lead Liaison. The integration helps us convert more website visitors into identified prospects, which get stored into Lead Liaison for subsequent lead nurturing.”  

The timing of this announcement is on the heels of Wistia’s recent launch of their Marketplace for third party applications integrated with Wistia. Lead Liaison is one of the applications included in the initial rollout of Wistia’s Marketplace.

Wistia is thrilled with the launch of their new Marketplace and inclusion of Lead Liaison’s Wistia Connector:

“We’re delighted to count Lead Liaison among our first round of integration partnerships. They’re pushing the envelope of how mid-market businesses can leverage the power of video marketing. Additionally, they drink their own kool-aid, which is something we love to see. As a company, Lead Liaison itself understands how to use video well to attract, engage, and close new business. And they integrate video into the rest of their marketing and business strategies. ”

The integration is available now. To get started today, visit Lead Liaison’s profile in Wistia’s Marketplace or contact Lead Liaison directly. Lead Liaison’s Wistia Connector is available at no charge in the Lead Liaison App Cloud for all customers using any software license from Lead Liaison.

About Wistia

Wistia is the video platform of choice for business. We enable marketing, sales, training, and more to harness the engaging and connective power of video. Our technology solution provides world-class video hosting, marketing tools, and analytics to help companies grow. Wistia boasts an impressive customer portfolio across industries, with top brands including Amway, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Sephora, and Tiffany & Co., leveraging Wistia to form authentic connections with customers, employees, and more.
We’re on a mission to make business more human. Founded in 2006 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Wistia serves more than 200,000 businesses in over 50 countries. Learn more at wistia.com and follow us on Twitter @wistia.

About Lead Liaison

Lead Liaison is a cloud-based sales and marketing automation solution that helps businesses accelerate sales 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

Integrating Your Website Forms to Convert More Visitors

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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.

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Lead Liaison

Generate Sales Insight with Website Visitor Tracking

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Generate Sales Insight with Website Visitor Tracking

Generate Sales Insight

Interested in finding out more about what your website visitors are thinking and what they want from your content and website? While no one has a crystal ball, website visitor tracking does come fairly close in terms of providing critical insight into your sales prospects. No longer do you have to wonder and guess what it is that your visitors are looking for when they visit your site. Technology exists to generate sales insight using website visitor tracking tools.

Timing is Part of Good Sales Insight

Beyond simply giving insight into what your visitors want, website visitor tracking can also help you identify precisely the right time to follow up with a visitor. It’s well known that timing is critical to marketing. Follow up too soon and you run the risk of scaring away a prospect if he or she is not ready to take the next step. Wait too late to make contact and you also run the risk of losing that prospect, often to the competition. It’s a delicate balancing act, and with so much on the line, including your bottom line, you simply cannot afford to make any mistakes. Website visitor tracking helps you maintain that balancing act by identifying the right time to follow up with prospects.

Good Sales Insight Means Better Lead Qualification

Over time, website visitor tracking can also be used to build much higher-quality leads. While all leads have some value, the fact that some leads are more valuable than others cannot be denied. It’s also true that your resources are better spent following up and cultivating higher-quality leads than poor leads that might not ever go anywhere. Website visitor tracking helps you do that by qualifying leads. For instance, you can find out whether a lead actually has a need for your products and/or services. It should always be kept in mind that people will often search online for things they might want, but that does not necessarily mean they are willing and/or able to purchase those items. Qualifying leads is vital to successful online marketing. Website visitor tracking gives you the insight you need to qualify leads and avoid wasting resources.

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Lead Liaison

Giving Salespeople a Lead Generation Tool with Visitor Tracking

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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!

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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.

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