Revenue Generation Blog Archives – Page 27 of 82

Is Your Company Ready to Adopt Marketing Automation?

July 2, 2015/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

If your company is experience a period of growth, or worse, a period of stagnation after a period of growth, you may wonder how you can effectively market to all of your new leads and customers. While you may have heard of marketing automation, it can be tough to decide to switch your business over to a new approach to marketing, especially if you have been doing things a certain way for a long time. Here are some common issues businesses face before realizing their company is ready to adopt marketing automation.

The Competition is Gaining an Edge

If it seems like your immediate competitors are pulling ahead of you in sales or their ability to penetrate market share, they may have already upgraded their marketing strategies to incorporate marketing automation. If this is the case, you will need a new set of tools to interact with leads consistently and effectively. Marketing automation is the perfect answer to competitive pressure.

Your Company’s Growth is Making Marketing Difficult to Scale

If your sales and marketing teams have a hard time scaling up their efforts to personalize marketing materials to new leads and existing customers, marketing automation can be an invaluable tool. With marketing automation, prepared marketing content can quickly and automatically be personalized to all of your leads and customers, freeing up marketing teams to design new content and develop strategies and sales teams to focus on making sales.

Your Sales Team is Wasting Time Due to Lack of Lead Scoring

If your sales team expends energy on leads that aren’t interested because there isn’t a dependable lead scoring system in place, then marketing automation can help. Marketing automation builds a database of leads and then, through a process of evaluating the behavior exhibited by a lead and any demographic data available, qualifies the lead and assigns a lead score. This lead score lets your sales team know whether or not a lead is ready to be contacted directly. And if a lead is not, marketing automation software can insert a lead into a lead nurturing program and notify sales when the lead is qualified.

Your Sales Team is Marketing at Random

If you’re spending a lot on marketing but not seeing the results you expect, then it may be because your marketing team doesn’t have a method to direct marketing materials at the correct audience. In this case, high-quality marketing is being misdirected at a largely uncaring public when it could be delivered directly to interested leads. Marketing automation gives you the tools to see how an audience reacts to marketing materials so you can focus on the material and the audience that is working for you.

When your company is ready to adopt marketing automation, visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resource blog online to learn more about the ways that marketing automation can revolutionize your marketing department.

Common Mistakes with Email Marketing Campaigns and How to Fix Them

June 30, 2015/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Email Marketing, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

One of the best ways to utilize your marketing automation software is to engage leads directly through automated email marketing campaigns, tailored to gradually entice the lead through specific lead nurturing programs. Of course, the modern consumer receives an enormous amount of email every day, so you need to make sure that emails your marketing team sends out get noticed. Here are some common mistakes with email marketing campaigns, and some good ways to fix those problems.

Bad or Misdirected Content

If you have placed a lead in a lead nurturing campaign, then one of your most important struggles isn’t getting them to open the first email – it’s to get them to open all the ones that will follow that first one. It may seem obvious, but you need to ensure that all of the content you send to your leads is strong, readable and engaging, or else your leads may lose interest with your company before they reach a point where they are ready to buy.

A related problem is sending content that isn’t appropriate to the person receiving it. If your marketing automation has scored your lead as not yet interested in your product, don’t try to over pitch them. Your content should be informative, helpful and there to remind your leads that you’re out there, ready to assist them. However, if your lead looks like they might be ready to purchase your services, then make sure you’re ready with well written, compelling content that will convince them to buy!

Some marketing automation software, such as Lead Liaison, can even help you craft email marketing campaigns that target extremely specific demographics. Lead Liaison’s software can look through social media profiles to find information about your leads interests, which would let you, for example, send out a deal that was tied to a baseball event and specifically sent to baseball fans.

Email That Is Not Optimized For Mobile

Another common mistake in email marketing campaigns is failing to optimize for mobile devices. Mobile devices are quickly becoming one of the most common ways that consumers read their email, and if your emails are not optimized for mobile devices, it makes them that much more likely to be ignored. Make sure that any images you’ve included will scale appropriately, that your text displays in a readable size and font, and you’ll find your email marketing campaign will bring you much more success.

Ineffective Call To Action

The last common mistake in email marketing campaigns that you should keep track of is a sloppy or ineffective call to action. If your marketing automation software indicates that your emails are being read but you are seeing poor conversion rates, then the problem could lie with your call to action. Using strong action words, such as buy, click, or register and making sure any images you use have bright colors with high contrast can help make your call to action more effective.

Learn about more ways to make your email marketing campaign, and other marketing automation strategies, more effective at Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resource blog.

Lead Liaison Unveils New Enterprise Marketing Automation

June 29, 2015/0 Comments/in Press Releases, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Enterprise Marketing Automation that’s Cost Effective

Allen, TX (PRWEB) June 29, 2015 – Lead Liaison, the leading provider of marketing automation software to the mid-market, unveils new enterprise marketing automation. A key highlight of the release is advanced user Security Profiles, something required by today’s multi-million dollar companies.

Security Profiles allow customers to build tailored user profiles for admins, sales, marketing and any other roles across the organization. Access to key features can be restricted and hidden from the user interface to remove superfluous features based on roles. Security Profiles also work with Lead Liaison’s Teams feature. Teams can be assigned to a Security Profile to easily manage usage rights for specific groups.

With the introduction of the new enterprise marketing automation platform, Lead Liaison maintains the superior ease of use that it’s known for. The majority of its features are drag and drop, such as the landing page designer, web form builder and email designer. Another easy to use, enterprise level feature, called Lead Liaison SiteEngage™, was just released last week. SiteEngage™, helps businesses convert and engage more website traffic by personalizing all types of content, including “engagement windows” (sometimes referred to as pop ups) for website visitors.

Over the past 12 months, more large enterprises have been migrating to Lead Liaison, including a $500M oil and gas company, a $150M large telephony provider, and a multi-million dollar non-profit. The new user Security Profiles position the company’s software as a scalable solution fit for large enterprises looking to acquire enterprise marketing automation software with the highest value per dollar in the industry.

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 support with solutions such as a hot-lead dashboard, Buy Signals and a live ticker alert of businesses on the customer’s website. 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, and employs 22 people. For more information, visit http://www.leadliaison.com or call 1-800-89-LEADS (895-3237).

Lead Liaison Unveils Amazing Content Personalization Solution to Increase Website Visitor Engagement

June 22, 2015/0 Comments/in Press Releases, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Increase Website Visitor Engagement and Conversions by up to 200%

Allen, TX (PRWEB) June 22, 2015 – Lead Liaison, the leading provider of marketing automation software to the mid-market, has announced limited availability of an exciting new solution for content personalization. The product, called Lead Liaison SiteEngage™, allows companies to configure data-driven website content (popups or embedded content) personalized to website visitors to help increase engagement.

Lead Liaison found that most companies do a poor job of converting website visitors. Companies pump lots of money into retargeting, pay-per-click advertising, SEO, salespeople and digital marketing – they all share a common purpose, to drive people to the company’s website. However, companies forget to close the loop and take the necessary steps to convert visitors by giving them something valuable in exchange for their contact information, such as email and name, once they’re on their site. Unfortunately, 98% of a company’s website traffic goes unnoticed. Lead Liaison expects to seriously tip the scale with Lead Liaison SiteEngage™.

The new product is deeply integrated with Lead Liaison’s Lead Management Automation (LMA) solution, which delivers award-winning marketing automation capabilities. Combined with Send & Track for Outlook™/Google Chrome™, and ProspectVision™ , for website visitor tracking, Lead Liaison’s suite of marketing automation tools, called Revenue Generation Software®, for the mid-market rivals competing solutions. Companies are able to better attract, convert and close business using Lead Liaison – with conversion and closure being the key focus for content personalization.

Lead Liaison’s content personalization solutions are easy to setup. Customers choose from different styles of “engagement windows”, such as a canvas, modal, footer, ribbon, or slider. They choose from over nine pre-created themes that can easily be customized using a drag and drop designer. After creating visually appealing content, customers set up rules on when to show the content. Content is delivered based on a wide range of data, for deep personalization. Using any combination of demographics, social, or behavioral information companies can display their dynamic content to convert more visitors and accelerate sales with relevant offers.

This level of ease of use and personalization is unparalleled in the industry, establishing Lead Liaison as a true innovator in the market. As other marketing automation providers follow suite with larger companies, Lead Liaison continues to think outside the box, distancing themselves from competitors, offering unique, highly valuable solutions that help companies accelerate revenue, faster.

Alan Page, VP of Customer Success at Lead Liaison says:

“We’re thrilled to bring content personalization to the market! This was really the missing piece in our product portfolio. There are multiple use cases for our new product. Companies can use the solution to increase the size of their newsletter database, display offers for valuable content (such as whitepapers), run promotions for first time visitors, all in an effort to increase conversions and drive sales. The days of showing the same content to every visitor is long gone. You’ve got to personalize communication, and give people relevant content at the right time – something Lead Liaison does extremely well. Our tracking engine is bar none in the industry, building a rich profile of online and offline engagement on prospects. Now that we can use that information to personalize content – the likelihood of driving more sales and converting more visitors has skyrocketed.”

Lead Liaison SiteEngage™ is available to qualified prospects and existing customers as of the time of this release. General availability is planned for mid-June 2015.

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 support with solutions such as a hot-lead dashboard, Buy Signals and a live ticker alert of businesses on the customer’s website. 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, and employs 22 people. For more information, visit http://www.leadliaison.com or call 1-800-89-LEADS (895-3237).

How Do Analytics Influence Marketing Automation

June 18, 2015/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Analytics are a key element in many of the functions that make marketing automation such an effective tool for interacting with and eventually converting leads. At its core, analytics is simply a catch all term for looking at raw data collected by marketing automation software about the behavior and demographics of leads currently monitored by your marketing automation software. By collecting and understanding this data, your marketing automation software will help your sales and marketing teams build more effective strategies for converting leads. Let’s take a closer look at how analytics influence marketing automation.

In all honesty, analytics influence almost every part of modern marketing automation, but there certainly are a few clear examples of marketing automation functions interacting with analytics. When your marketing automation software acquires a new lead, it also scores that lead to help your sales team determine whether or not it is an appropriate time to contact them directly or to place them in a lead nurturing program.

If a lead is entered into a lead nurturing program, then your marketing automation software builds a lead profile and performs continued analysis on the leads behavior to measure whether they should be moved to a more aggressive lead nurturing program. It can even determine if they are ready to buy. If this is the case, then your marketing automation software sends an alert to your sales team so that they can contact the lead at the optimal time.

Below are a few different types of analytics that influence marketing automation that every marketing team should be aware of and monitor regularly.

Behavioral Analytics

Behavioral analytics tracks how customers interact with elements of your online presence, such as your website, blog posts or other online promotional material. This can help your marketing team understand what is getting a response from leads, and what is not.

Customer Lifecycle Analytics

These analytics help your marketing and sales team understand how your customers interact with your marketing materials in the past, where current leads are in processes such as lead nurturing and how to predict the behavior of future leads. This type of analytics influences many different marketing automation processes.

Messaging Analytics

This type of analytics helps your marketing team judge how well your direct marketing campaigns perform. Messaging analytics are a great place to run side by side comparison marketing campaigns. Running side by side marketing campaigns helps you test which marketing strategies, and can yield surprising results, which may help you discover new markets and new ways to advertise to them.

Conversion Analytics

Although all types of analytics are important and should be given equal attention, conversion analytics are definitely the type of analytics that influence marketing automation perhaps the most. If you’re not converting at a successful rate, then some part of your process is flawed and should be revised.

There are many more types of analytics that help craft successful marketing automation campaigns. You can learn about these and much more at Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resource blog.

Problems That Can Limit Your Marketing Automation Strategy

June 16, 2015/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Marketing automation is an incredible powerful tool that can bring an increased numbers of potential leads and higher conversion rates than your business has ever seen. However, if you’ve invested in marketing automation software and are not seeing the results you were hoping for, it can be incredibly frustrating. Here are some of the basic problems that can limit your marketing automation strategy and keep your business from the success it deserves.

Untrained Staff

With a name like marketing automation, it can be easy to think that the software can market automatically. This is far from true however, and if you are implementing a marketing automation strategy, then you must ensure that your staff is ready to use it. Marketing automation can present a lot of new ways for your marketing and sales teams to interact with leads and customers, and you need to ensure that both teams are ready to take advantage of those new opportunities.

In the same vein, you should also ensure that your marketing and sales teams are working well together and able to deliver and share the data that concerns either team. These two departments have always had a need for cooperation, but with marketing automation, there will be quite a bit of new data. It is important that the two groups can communicate with one another to ensure the best marketing material is reaches your leads and the sales team takes advantage of opportunities when they present themselves.

Incorrectly Used Tools

Marketing has a lot of extremely useful components, ranging from lead scoring to automated email marketing. However, it is important that each of these components be used in conjunction and correctly. If your data tracking software gives you a bunch of new leads because they visited your website, make sure your sales team isn’t immediately harvesting those leads to pitch and drive away potential customers. They should understand what lead profiling and lead scoring is, and how to use that in conjunction with lead nurturing and buy signals.

Underprepared Content Strategy

Another all too common problem that can limit your marketing automation strategy, especially for a company that has just started using marketing automation, is not having a content strategy ready to go. When you begin to run multiple email marketing campaigns for different levels of leads, you will quickly need a lot of content to stay on course, and companies who are just starting out sometimes can underestimate the volume of work that must go into that. In addition, all of that content must meet a high standard of quality, as subpar content can be even more damaging than a lack of content. So if you’re getting ready to adopt an email marketing campaign, be prepared to put the work in.

These are just a few common problems that can limit your marketing automation strategy. Visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation marketing automation resource blog online to learn about more.

Why Content Creation is Crucial to your Marketing Automation

June 9, 2015/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

The strategic use of content created by your marketing team for your marketing automation solution is one of the greatest strengths of marketing automation’s ability to convert a lead. While marketing automation has many different strengths in its varied abilities to gather and deliver leads and data to your marketing and sales teams, if you want to convert those leads, you must approach them with compelling content that is appropriate to the person receiving it. In order to do that, you must be able to utilize your marketing automation lead scoring tools to determine what stage of content each lead is receptive to. Read on to learn why content creation is crucial to your marketing automation strategy.

Early-Stage Leads

An early-stage lead is someone who isn’t ready to be actively pitched, and are at risk of being turned away from your company if they are approached too aggressively. When approaching an early-stage lead, your content is primarily concerned with two main goals – reminding the lead that your company exists and that you and your business can help them solve problems. Low impact, helpful content such as blog posts or how-to articles sent to them as a part of a relaxed lead nurturing campaign will be most effective. Keeping these leads engaged and receptive is why these seemingly unimportant types of content creation is crucial to your overall marketing automation strategy.

Mid-Stage Leads

Mid-stage leads are where you and your marketing can begin to get more direct with a lead, although mid-stage leads can be tricky and are still susceptible to becoming disinterested in your company if they are over-sold to. In general, a mid-stage lead is aware that they have a problem – but they may not be sure what the solution, or who can help them solve it.

If the lead scoring software that is a part of your marketing automation software detects that a lead has become more active in responding to your softer content, then now is the time to put them in a more aggressive lead nurturing program. Sending those leads content such as data sheets, case studies or demo videos will help a customer understand the solutions your company can provide, and help move them into the last stage. Once again, having the right kind of content created is crucial to making sure your leads move seamlessly through your lead nurturing programs.

Late-Stage Leads

When a lead reaches the late stage, it means that not only are they aware of a problem and its potential solutions, it also means that they know that your company can provide those solutions. This is a crucial point for your sales team to act and contact the lead to make the sale, but even then, you need to be able to support your sales team with solid content. Competitor comparisons, product demonstrations and personalized webinars will all help to ensure your sales team has the best possible chance to convert your leads into customers.

These are just some of the ways that content creation is crucial to your marketing automation strategy. Visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resource blog online to learn more.

Optimize your Marketing Automation Content with an Effective Call to Action

June 4, 2015/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Marketing, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

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

When Is It Appropriate To Include A Call To Action?

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

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

Simplicity

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

Clarity

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

Visibility

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

Urgency

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

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

How To Use Marketing Automation Software To Generate Leads

June 2, 2015/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Looking for software to generate leads? At its very core, marketing automation is software that works to combine the strengths of your marketing department with the strengths of your sales department. It is a system that reduces static between the two departments and streamlines every tool that each department has so they can reach the customer or prospect at the right time. This process starts at the very beginning, and this article will show you how to use marketing automation software to generate leads – but generate better leads.

Data Collection

One of the first ways that marketing automation software generates leads is simply by recording all the information a potential lead provides from places such as advertisements, your webpage, or even email click-throughs. All of this data is aggregated within the software, and is then assigned a lead score based on the lead profile that the software is able to interpret from the leads various activity. This helps you determine which leads are ready to be approached and – sometimes even more importantly – when they are not. This makes sure that an overly enthusiastic member of your sales team won’t scare them away, keeping a potential lead from ever making a purchase from your business.

Lead Nurturing

However, like I said earlier, marketing automation software doesn’t just give you more leads – it gives you better leads. Let’s say you have a lead that is quite clearly not going to be converted any time soon. Do you simply walk away? Not with marketing automation software. With marketing automation, you place all of your less interested leads in low impact, noninvasive lead nurturing programs that will send helpful and friendly content that will help remind the lead that not only do you exist, but you can help them solve their problems, whether they have given you any money or not.

While cold emails may seem risky, TechnologyAdvise.com has published statistics that indicate 60% of consumers read marketing emails, and any responses you get to your emails will feed directly back into your marketing automation software lead profiling technology.

Personalization

Another important way to use marketing automation software to generate more leads is by taking advantage of the personalization and automation tools built into the software. These tools are as varied as they are intriguing. For example, you can use social media automation tools to schedule social media posts around important dates or events, such as a trade show, in your industry. This can help make your business an active participant of the social media community surrounding the event and reach a wider audience.

Another great personalization tool you can use to help generate more leads is by using your software automation to perform active advertisement testing. By sending one set of advertising materials to one group and another to a different set, you can see what material performs the best, and how different demographics respond to it. You may discover a market for your product that you didn’t even know existed – along with an entirely new set of leads.

These are just some of the ways you can use marketing automation software to generate leads. Visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resource blog online to learn more about how you can improve you marketing automation strategies.

Remember When your Marketing Automation Company Focused on Marketing?

May 26, 2015/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

It seems that the trend in the Marketing Automation Industry is for companies to become a Jack of All Trades. We all know how that story ends. If you don’t, please ask the next guy you see with a Member’s Only Jacket and Blackberry.

There are ways to tell your Marketing Automation “partner” is out for their best interest and not yours:

They tout their CMS, even though 86% of the market uses WordPress, Drupal or Joomla. Good luck getting apps for that CMS, and if you do… they are going to make a pretty penny off you. If you don’t believe me, go look for apps in the Blackberry store. People don’t develop apps for closed environments with small market share.
They sell you on their CRM tool as an advantage of buying their Marketing Automation Platform. Awesome! Now you get to tell sales that they are locked into a substandard CRM because your Marketing Automation provider decided that it would be more profitable for them to sell a CRM than to integrate with the best players in the space. Not a good business decision, and a horrible way to go about aligning sales and marketing efforts.
They only offer one Email Service Provider. All-in-One solution providers LOVE locking you into their ecosystem. Even the best email solution providers today, may not be the best ESP’s tomorrow. Never buy from a company that is owned by an ESP (they are the copier salespeople of the industry) as they have not prepared for technical Armageddon.
SEO and Marketing Automation are two very different beasts, with two unique skillsets. Your marketing department probably needs both; but they probably also need toilet paper and computers. I wouldn’t buy any of these items from the same company for obvious reasons. Bottom line: Either your MA or SEO will suffer (or both) if you buy from one vendor. You will save a ton of money and get much better results by choosing best of breed in each category.
Your Marketing Automation product is being offered by an agency that is super proud of its “partner” status. The translation: They have invested a ton of time and money in a solution that might not be a good fit for you. Unfortunately, these “partner programs” dictate that they will recommend the company that they are invested in regardless of the value that it drives to your business. If you have doubt, demand an agreement with your agency that they will not have a financial benefit from working with any software provider. That should not only include your account, but all other account that such an agency works with. Otherwise, the Agency may shift its dollars.

You should also avoid the “All-in-One” solutions that focus on Real Estate, Flower Shops, and Supplement Companies. Even if you conduct business in these areas. There are a ton of these companies that prey on Mom and Pop shops. They advertise on Facebook and other consumer focused websites because they are looking for people that don’t have experience and won’t ask the tough questions. Some of their users will claim success because they don’t know any better. Others will be outraged that they were not able to achieve the required level of support, expertise and functionality for $ 200/month.

A solid solution provider will help you build a story.
Help you tie together all of the technologies that benefit your organization.
Create a compelling narrative that you can share with prospects.
Have a vested interest in your organization’s success.

If you have any questions about Marketing Automation or how your company could strengthen its efforts, I welcome your request. Even if my company, Lead Liaison, isn’t a perfect fit for you…I’ll point you in the right direction.

Don’t wait any longer.