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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.

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Lead Liaison

Why Visitor Tracking Technology Exists

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Why Visitor Tracking Technology ExistsYou’ve heard of website visitor tracking, by why does it exist? Let’s answer that very point, why visitor tracking technology exists, in this post. Would you put your home on the market, put a sign in your yard, list your house on a bunch of real estate websites, and then have an open house without the realtor there to see who showed up? No way! You’d be wasting your time and your realtor’s advertising dollars. You could hope that someone calls you up, or you could be proactive, and identify visitors along with their interests as they walk in the door to look around.

Similarly, in the business world, companies spend tons of money on outbound marketing. Retargeting, pay-per-click, blog content, marketing collateral, and more. Unfortunately, 98% of a company’s website traffic is hidden. The other 2% fill out a form. Without visitor tracking technology, the vast majority of website activity goes undetected, resulting in lost opportunity and a shortage of valuable insight to help your sales team – there’s no agent (realtor) at the front door of your business, your website. Effectively, what happens on your website is a complete mystery until you begin identifying and tracking people and businesses.

Analytic solutions help with website performance; whereas website visitor tracking is largely a tool for sales people. Businesses would be remiss not to spend $3,000 to $8,000 per year on a good website visitor tracking solution to help identify crucial website activity.

For more insight into visitor tracking check out the other posts in this series:

  1. What is Website Visitor Tracking?
  2. How Visitor Tracking Works
  3. Benefits of Website Visitor Tracking
  4. 20 Ways you can Use Visitor Tracking to “Spice Up” Sales and Marketing
  5. What Questions Should you Ask your Visitor Tracking Provider when Evaluating a Solution?
Lead Liaison

The Anatomy of the Perfect Blog Post

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Twenty years ago, few people could have predicted the power and reach of the internet. Ten years ago, few would have dreamed that social media platforms would continue to evolve and develop. Ten years from now, who knows what the Internet and social media will look like. But the reality of today’s business connection with customers includes the Internet and social media, and in all likelihood that includes a blog of some kind. While who posts, what they post, and how often they post may vary from business to business, what doesn’t vary is what it takes to put together a successful blog post.

That content includes several key components that are crucial to helping deliver your business’s information and message. From element to element—headline, intro, subhead, copy, to name just a few—there are ways that users tend to interact and information that stands out or gets lost. Constraints include length and keywords as well as time that it will take a user to get through the information. Because you’re competing not only with other businesses but other types of information on the internet, following guidelines for text as well as visual elements is important. This useful information can help you fine tune your marketing efforts online to enable a strong, positive interaction with current and potential clients.

Matt Banner expounded on the idea of writing the perfect blog post in his article, How to Write a Blog Post with Perfection: The Only Step-by-Step Guide You Need.

The graphic below breaks down each section of a blog post and provides tips on how to optimize it. Creating a share-worthy post is easy with this guide.

Click To Enlarge

Anatomy of a Blog Post

Via Salesforce

Lead Liaison

Actionable Data – What to Do with Website Visitor Tracking Info, like use it for Lead Qualification

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Actionable Data-What to Do with Website Visitor Tracking InfoOnce you have information from your website visitor tracking, you need to know what to do with it. After all, information does not provide much value if you do not put it to use. Below, we cover a few ways you can put the information you obtain from website visitor tracking into use.

The Importance of Lead Qualification

One of the ways in which you can use your actionable data is by qualifying leads. Lead qualification is a two-way street. In addition to understanding whether a lead is interested in your products and/or services, you also need to determine whether you are interested in that lead. After all, you need to invest sales resources in pursuing that lead. If you feel that the lead is not strong enough, you might decide not to invest those resources. The most common reason for this is that you feel the lead simply is not qualified to purchase. This technique gives your sales team the ability to focus on the most likely leads without wasting resources on unlikely candidates.

There are several important questions that you need to ask in order to determine whether a lead is actually qualified or not. Two of the most important questions to ask are whether the lead actually needs your product/service and whether they will use it. It should always be kept in mind that many people will search for things they want online, but that doesn’t mean they need it. It’s always more challenging to convince someone to buy something when they don’t actually need it. Assuming that your lead needs your product/service, you also need to consider whether he or she will be able to implement it. One of the most significant challenges to implementing a product/service is potential capital requirements that extend beyond the purchase itself, such as recurring costs.

Another excellent way to put that data to use is understanding the best time to follow up with visitors. Among the goals of lead qualification is to deliver the best leads to your sales team first. Yet, at the same time, you want to nurture other leads that may be interested in your products and/or services until the time they are actually ready to buy.

For more posts from this series see:

  1. Uncovering lost opportunities with website visitor tracking
  2. Getting the most from website visitor tracking
  3. Going beyond page views and gaining insight into online activity
  4. Actionable data from tracking visitors
  5. Understanding when to follow up, the importance of tracking
  6. Using website visitor tracking over time to build higher quality leads
Lead Liaison

What is Website Visitor Tracking?

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What is Website Visitor Tracking?What is website visitor tracking?

Website visitor tracking is the process of identifying important website activity to generate leads and insight for sales and marketing teams. These solutions generate reports of companies and/or people that visit your company’s website. Visitor tracking is very different from analytic solutions, such as Google Analytics, Clicky, or Woopra. Analytic solutions focus on identifying how your website is performing via statistics such as page views, devices used to access your website, and overall traffic volume.

Solutions such as this are great for SEO companies and marketers trying to measure the impact of their efforts; however, they’re not valuable business-to-business (B2B) sales tools and often time contain more clutter than clarity. Website visitor tracking cuts through the noise to present meaningful business information that sales people can use. This article also discusses the differences between Google Analytics and visitor tracking technology. Hopefully, now you understand what is website visitor tracking more clearly.

For more insight into visitor tracking check out the other posts in this series:

  1. Why Visitor Tracking Technology Exists
  2. How Visitor Tracking Works
  3. Benefits of Website Visitor Tracking
  4. 20 Ways you can Use Visitor Tracking to “Spice Up” Sales and Marketing
  5. What Questions Should you Ask your Visitor Tracking Provider when Evaluating a Solution?
Lead Liaison

Going Beyond Page Views and Gaining Insight into Online Behavior with Website Visitor Tracking

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Going Beyond Page Views and Gaining Insight into Online Behavior with Website Visitor TrackingOkay, so you know that website visitor tracking is important, but what exactly can you do with it? You might be surprised to find that visitor tracking can provide you with a wealth of information. When most people think of visitor tracking, they think of tracking the number of pageviews their website receives. While it is certainly beneficial to know how many page views you’re getting, website visitor tracking can actually tell you much more than that, including information about visitor behavior, companies and people visiting your site.

The Importance of Behavioral Lead Scoring

Marketing automation has developed significantly in the last few years and visitor tracking now has the ability to give you tremendous insight into the online behavior of your website visitors. Behavioral lead scoring is an incredibly effective method for understanding the potential for converting a lead. But, in order to understand that potential for conversion, you need to understand exactly what a prospect is doing on your site. Some common examples of online, trackable visitor behavior includes:

  • Which keywords were used in a search engine to locate your website
  • Whether the visitor read press releases while on your site
  • Did the visitor participate in a website chat?
  • Did the visitor click on multiple pages during one visit?
  • Did he or she visit a specific page multiple times?
  • Were relevant articles, tutorials, or ebooks downloaded?
  • Did the visitor complete an online survey?
  • Did they view or share videos?

All of this information is a veritable goldmine when it comes to understanding visitor behavior. The more you are able to understand about precisely how a visitor spent his or her time while on your website, the more you will be able to understand the visitor’s conversion potential and tailor your follow up to the visitors interests.

The goal of marketing automation is to make it easier for you to identify and reach your target audience. Website visitor tracking gives you the insight you need about visitor behavior to do precisely that.

For more posts from this series see:

  1. Uncovering lost opportunities with website visitor tracking
  2. Getting the most from website visitor tracking
  3. Going beyond page views and gaining insight into online activity
  4. Actionable data from tracking visitors
  5. Understanding when to follow up, the importance of tracking
  6. Using website visitor tracking over time to build higher quality leads
Lead Liaison

How Visitor Tracking Works

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How Visitor Tracking WorksYou’ve probably heard of website visitor tracking, but how does it work? We explain how visitor tracking works and disclose the details of how companies are able to identify people and businesses that visit your website.

Website visitor tracking works by placing a small snippet of JavaScript code onto your website, usually in the footer. The JavaScript code collects the IP address of the visitor and looks up the IP address against a database to identify the company associated with the IP. Often times the IP address is the IP of an internet service provider (ISP). For example, a person visiting from their mobile phone or an internet café will show up as an ISP. Most solutions help you filter out ISP traffic, to just see pure business traffic. That’s basic tracking 101. Some visitor tracking providers use cookies, which is a small piece of code that resides on the visitor’s browser, to collect information on the visitors buying behavior and track future visits. Other providers use don’t use cookies, and rely on IP addresses only – making it difficult to identify individual people, recurring activity, and build unique, genuine profiles of buying activity over time.

For more insight into visitor tracking check out the other posts in this series:

  1. Why Visitor Tracking Technology Exists
  2. What is Website Visitor Tracking?
  3. Benefits of Website Visitor Tracking
  4. 20 Ways you can Use Visitor Tracking to “Spice Up” Sales and Marketing
  5. What Questions Should you Ask your Visitor Tracking Provider when Evaluating a Solution?
Lead Liaison

Uncovering Lost Opportunities – Why Website Visitor Tracking is Vital

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Uncovering Lost Opportunities - Why Website Visitor Tracking Is VitalIn the next series of posts, we’ll be talking about website visitor tracking. The topics we’ll cover will span the following:

  1. Uncovering lost opportunities with website visitor tracking
  2. Getting the most from website visitor tracking
  3. Going beyond page views and gaining insight into online activity
  4. Actionable data from tracking visitors
  5. Understanding when to follow up, the importance of tracking
  6. Using website visitor tracking over time to build higher quality leads

In this post, we talk about topic #1, uncovering lost opportunities from visitor tracking.

Are you losing out on valuable opportunities? The sad reality is that if you aren’t taking advantage of website visitor tracking, you probably are. Many people think they don’t have time to delve too deeply into website visitor tracking, but the truth of the matter is that you can’t afford not to do so.

Perhaps the most important reason for tracking who visits your website is the fact that you cannot target an audience you don’t know. You also can’t make adjustments if you don’t know there is a problem.

By implementing a website visitor tracking system in your website, you can uncover a wealth of actionable data that can be used to improve your website and ultimately increase sales. If you have ever wondered why people are leaving your site, and more specifically, why they are choosing to leave your site at specific junctures, website visitor tracking can give you the insight you need. If your goal is to improve your website and make it more appealing to visitors, you need to find out exactly what visitors are doing once they are on your site, and at what point they choose to leave.

Without tracking visitors, you’re playing guessing games; you will have no idea what is going on in the minds of visitors. The good news is that you don’t need a crystal ball to figure it out.

While an online operation can provide an incredible number of benefits, there is one significant drawback. In a brick-and-mortar store, you would have the opportunity to hear a customer’s objections. You would have the chance to ask questions. You might even be able to find out what it would take to persuade them to stay and maybe even make a purchase.

That is an opportunity you simply don’t have when visitors come to your website and then leave without leaving a trace. You have no way of knowing what it is that they wanted when they arrived or why they left. Website visitor tracking can help to eliminate that disadvantage and give you the tools you need to uncover lost opportunities.

Lead Liaison

Benefits of Website Visitor Tracking

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Benefits of Website Visitor TrackingOkay, so you put a chunk of code on your website that spits out a list of IPs and companies visiting your website. Yeah, what next? You’ve got to put that information to good use, and make it actionable, able to work for you. Let’s take a moment to really understand the benefits of website visitor tracking.

Sales and marketers will benefit from visitor tracking. For sales, don’t think visitor tracking is going to be the savior for your sales team and automatically identify easy-to-close deals. In fact, if you’re using the wrong solution, it could send you off on a wild goose chase. Make sure to pick a solution that gives you the best opportunity to identify people, not buildings. Keep in mind that visitor tracking technology is only a very preliminary step in the demand generation process and should be viewed as a complementary tool to your overall B2B sales process. Sales people can use it in three primary ways:

  1. As a tip. To get pointed in the right direction when companies visit their website.
  2. For sales insight. To know what interests a company/person has after visiting your website.
  3. To time follow up. Knowing when someone is on your website helps sales know exactly when to follow up.

Marketers will benefit from getting key insight into the results of their marketing efforts. For example, they’ll see the lead source of the visitor. Some companies track original lead source (from the very first visit) and some companies identify lead source of the visit. Marketers will also know which social channels (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) are performing best, how Pay-Per-Click campaigns are performing, and how their outbound marketing drives business activity on their website. If you don’t understand the benefits of website visitor tracking after reading this, then watch this cool video on visitor tracking which might help.

For more insight into visitor tracking check out the other posts in this series:

  1. Why Visitor Tracking Technology Exists
  2. What is Website Visitor Tracking?
  3. How Visitor Tracking Works
  4. 20 Ways you can Use Visitor Tracking to “Spice Up” Sales and Marketing
  5. What Questions Should you Ask your Visitor Tracking Provider when Evaluating a Solution?
Lead Liaison

Why Marketing Automation Isn’t Going Away and Will Continue Expanding Well Into the Future

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Why Marketing Automation Isn't Going Away and Will Continue Expanding Well Into the FutureAccording to recent reports, marketing automation is not going away anytime soon. In fact, it is poised to continue growing bigger well into the future. The key to expanding usage; however, appears to be marketers becoming more comfortable with the concept of marketing automation. A study conducted by Ascend2 found that less than 25 percent of marketing professionals around the world used marketing automation on an extensive basis last year. Interestingly, 35 percent of respondents who were not using marketing automation stated they plan to use it in the future. That’s why we confident saying marketing automation isn’t going away. Here’s some more insight into the marketing automation industry that we’ve been talking about for years.

Among those using marketing automation or who have plans to use it in the future, objectives tend to range. The most common objectives for implementing a marketing automation strategy typically include lead nurturing, customer engagement, and marketing productivity. Personalization is currently a popular objective, but only about 25 percent of those surveyed rank it is an important objective.

Changes Looming on the Horizon for Marketing Automation Industry

As we move forward, we are likely to see a number of changes in the evolution of marketing automation, including the platforms becoming more scalable, faster, and more responsive. In addition, we will likely see marketing automation platforms become optimized for tracking vast amounts of data regarding customers and leads.

One of the most important changes that is likely to take place in the marketing automation industry is a shift toward predictive first. Future platforms are likely to be thinner as well as more intelligent, capable of accommodating more specialized applications. As a result, these platforms will be able to utilize far more data for delivering more relevant recommendations. Predictive intelligence will make such platforms easier to use as well as capable of adapting with your business as it grows and evolves. Consequently, you never have to worry about tweaking the system to accommodate growth. Such predictive systems not only have the ability to learn, but can also adapt and even make improvements on their own with each of your customer’s actions.

Comprehensive recommendations will provide the ability to leverage full visibility across the marketing and sales funnels to determine and recommend the best content to share or actions to take. By spanning both marketing and sales, such customer predictions are able to actually learn from historical sales data in order to develop models of good sales leads. That intelligence can then be applied to the top of your sales funnel, touching every aspect of your marketing programs and filter down through the funnel to complete the sales cycle.

While marketing automation has come a long way, it is quite likely that we are only now just beginning to see how this technology can transform marketing, particularly in the B2B sector. Over the course of the next year, it is quite likely that we could see a revolution in the B2B sector fueled by marketing automation. Discover more about the future of marketing automation and what it can do for your business.