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Lead Liaison

Three Campaign Ideas For Lead Nurturing Success

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Three Campaign Ideas For Lead Nurturing SuccessAre you stuck for lead nurturing ideas? Here are a few ideas for lead nurturing success.

Introduce a sales agent

If your company has a round-robin lead distribution policy, introduce the next sales agent in line through a series of introductory messages. Connecting a brand to a human being is a consistent theme in today’s digital marketing space and you can be effective when a person is introduced early in the nurturing process.

When a lead comes into your marketing automation system, send a message that describes the sales rep – include a picture, a few personal details, and, of course, contact information (don’t forget to include a reason for the email response – i.e. the lead’s webinar registration).

The first message should ask permission to contact the lead in the future. Then each subsequent message can deepen the engagement cycle by sharing stories about some of the sales rep’s previous positive client experiences or, depending on your enterprise policies, a personal story not related to your solutions.

Bringing a sales rep in early in the marketing cycle develops trust while the lead is moving through his buying process. Early engagement also provides opportunities to respond to questions or provide unique information.

Offer a free trial

What works especially well for SaaS and software providers is the free trial. For whatever length of time you offer for a trial period, use that time to provide support. Offer helpful hints about using the product or tips about the process a lead is using your solution for (like lead nurturing!). The level of engagement may depend on how complex your solution is to learn. For more complex solutions, engage frequently. Your trial leads will thank you.

Make sure to enhance the user experience during the trial period. Clearly explain features and functions, hold the lead’s hands throughout the trial experience. As the trial period comes to a close, ask if there are questions or specific features he would like to explore. In the final message before the period expires, make sure to indicate that the trial period will be ending and provide a valuable opportunity to buy now.

After the trial ends, send out a hard-sell email with a one-time, limited offer. Review all the features that were used during the trial, refresh his memory about the experience. Make sure to send this message within at most a week from the trial expiration.

Launch a community or forum

Gathering people under a common theme is a tried-and-true method of engaging with your market. Although this type of campaign requires some set up and management to execute properly, it can pay dividends down the road.

Invite leads to join a forum or social community that discusses relevant issues in their industries or professions. This is a great way to connect, nurture, develop trust, and deepen your understanding of your market(s). Use email messaging to introduce a recent topic, announce notable forum attendees/industry leaders, or update on a past topic. Ask leads to contribute an issue as a forum “presenter”.

While there will be times that your community/forum will require your marketing team to facilitate discussions and introduce topics, the community will often engage leads on its own. One tricky situation arises when participants are discussing competitors’ solutions. Make sure the moderator handles comments about competitive advantages (and disadvantages) quickly and professionally.

Through the use of lead nurturing assets, you can inform, educate, and remind leads about the community while mixing in relevant messages about your solutions and how they can solve issues being discussed in the forum.

Have you got a winning lead nurturing tactic? Share your knowledge and receive 10% off your first year of using our robust Lead Management Automation™ platform.

Lead Liaison

Lead Liaison Provides a Marketing Spark in its Marketing Automation Platform

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Allen, TX (PRWEB) September 1, 2013 – Lead Liaison announced the release of another upgrade to its Lead Management Automation™ (LMA) platform. A new feature, called Sparks, is the latest in a series of upgrades released throughout 2013 in their marketing automation platform.

Sparks function as an automated response mechanism that triggers a series of actions following certain types of engagements. Examples of activities that can be assigned as triggers include an email click-through by a prospect, a website visit following an organic search, and a response to a Send and Track email.

Once a lead has initiated an engagement, Sparks can deliver an email or other marketing asset and immediately assign the lead to an owner based upon the style of lead distribution deployed by the Lead Liaison customer. The platform enhancement allows sales teams to quickly absorb the lead and respond immediately to the inquiry.

“Our research has shown that real-time user-based triggering events ‘spark’ B2B relationships more effectively and relieve marketers and sales teams from having to manually respond and update their CRM systems,” said Alex Brown, Lead Liaison’s VP of communications. “Users are also able to sharply focus the messaging to specific inquiries such as completing a web form or requesting a data sheet.”

B2B marketers using the LMA can easily define what actions will trigger a spark, which activities will be automatically deployed, and schedule delivery of marketing messages in a few easy steps. The system allows multiple actions based upon only one trigger, and users can deploy assets from existing marketing campaigns or assign specific assets to be delivered based a lead’s digital activity.

For a preview Lead Liaison’s new Sparks feature or any of the 50+ integrated marketing automation and lead management functions, request a 10-minute demonstration of the Lead Management Automation platform.

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Lead Liaison is an application development company that designs, develops, and sells cloud-based marketing and sales automation software. The company markets to small and medium-sized businesses worldwide, and focuses on creating the broadest and most user-friendly revenue generation software platform. Applications cover all phases of lead management automation including sales prospecting, lead generation, and marketing automation functions that directly influence revenue generation. It’s innovative and robust lead management platform combines unparalleled sales prospecting, lead capture, real-time lead tracking, lead qualification, lead distribution, database segmentation, lead nurturing and ROI reporting. The Software as a Service (SaaS) model delivers an effective user experience and integrated cloud computing capabilities.

For More Information:

Alex Brown
VP, Corporate Communications
abrown(at)leadliaison(dot)com
888.895.3237 (888 89 LEADS)

Lead Liaison

Customer Relationship Management: Not Just an App

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Customer Relationship Management: Not Just an AppCustomer Relationship Management (CRM) refers to a type of software or application you can use to manage your interactions with customers, keep a customer’s contact information secure and manage deals and sales. Right?

Well, sort of. A good CRM will do those things for you, but apps can’t do it all. Customer relationship management should actually be about proficiently managing your relationships with your customers – meaning, putting the right tools in place to make sure you offer consistently great customer service. With all the lingo and the acronyms and the must-haves in the app world, we can forget that a solid CRM won’t help if there is no plan for actually managing customers.

Solidifying Your Strategy

Marketing automation can be helpful because the right platform gives you much more information than standard analytics tools ever will. If you are able to use marketing automation data to determine specific consecutive days that a certain visitor has spent on your site, it makes sense to contact that visitor personally, strategically discuss some of the areas of your site they spent the most time on, and determine how your offering suits their needs. Without marketing automation tools, you simply can’t give this level of service to your clients. In fact, you won’t even know what specific users are visiting your website. All Google Analytics and other services will give you is a lump of customer data that doesn’t single out specific IPs.

Take a look at your web visitor data over the past 90 days. If you don’t know who’s visiting, it might be time to consider a marketing automation tool that can help you log specific visitors and tie their needs to your services. If you do know who your visitors are, develop a lead flow strategy for using your customer relationship management tools to pinpoint them, then contact and pitch to them.

Customer Relationship Management Strategy

For instance, does a potential client continue to hover around price points for a certain service you provide? If so, it makes sense to call that person or email them with a special promotional deal. Does a specific client keep coming back to your website to look over terms of service or specific offering points on a package? If that’s the case you might experience future problems from that customer or need to answer a question.  A simple call to check in might remedy a complaint that’s about to surface.

With marketing automation tools, you can better manage the relationships you have with current customers and put systems in place to give them better service. For more information and to take advantage of what marketing automation has to offer for your customers, visit leadliaison.com.

Lead Liaison

How to Successfully Generate B2B Leads Using Twitter

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How to Successfully Generate B2B Leads Using TwitterWe were talking about lead generation at lunch the other day. The subject of Twitter use for B2B lead gen came up. We started sharing stories of customers’ Twitter experiences when it occurred to us that some marketers are not using Twitter effectively because of a their approach to leveraging the channel properly among other marketing assets.

Those of you deploying marketing automation for lead generation practices understand that Twitter can be embedded easily within a campaign without consuming a lot of time and energy. In fact, Twitter works great as a lead generator when tweets are folded into an automated campaign. The following four steps can lead you to B2B lead generation success through Twitter using a marketing automation platform in our article on how to successfully generate B2B leads using Twitter.

1) Provide a survey

Survey your Twitter followers with a brief, five-question survey to uncover a common unfulfilled need or desire. Tweet out the link to a landing page with a short explanation. The follower should land on a squeeze page with a web form (created in your MA platform!) including email address with 1 or 2 qualifying questions. Below the form, the survey should be clear to understand and easy to complete. (P.S. Offer a bonus for completing the survey.)

2) Send a thank you email

Distribute an email thanking followers for their participation in the survey. In the message, tell them that a solution will be tweeted in the near future and ask/encourage them to share the upcoming announcement with their followers.

3) Announce a solution

Once you’ve determined you can provide a solution to respondents’ needs or desires, tweet out an announcement about the solution with a link to a video, product page, or other asset where interested followers can learn more. Link tracking will reveal behavior that can escalate a follower further into the marketing funnel.

4) Send an autoresponse email to click-through followers

Express thanks for learning more, offer additional value by providing more information, and provide a link to a tweet announcing a promotional offer that can be found on a dedicated landing page. (If the promo tweet is retweeted or shared, extend an additional offer to those followers who act as a brand ambassador.

At this point the leads generated through this process are beyond top-of-funnel and can be entered into a nurturing program. There are many other ways Twitter can be used to successfully generate leads. Stay on top of Lead Liaison’s revenue generation blog for more social media and marketing automation ideas.

Lead Liaison

How to Humanize Your Marketing Automation Practices

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How to Humanize Your Marketing Automation PracticesCompanies that are deploying marketing automation practices are finding out that a marketing automation platform (MAP) can positively impact marketing budgets and improve close rates. However, for a MAP to be truly effective, there should be some human engagement woven between digital engagements. How do you dovetail automated functions with live engagement effectively? We’ve got a few ideas on how to humanize your marketing automation practices.

Set Alerts

Sales reps should be alerted when a lead is visiting your site. You want sales to respond quickly to inbound activity. Set an alert based on certain parameters, such as a lead visiting a specific landing page. Prior to responding to an inquiry, sales should be able to view a lead’s profile including company data and lead scoring. With a platform like Lead Liaison’s Lead Management Automation™, sales reps a provided critical information that they can use when they respond to active leads.

Be Social on Social Channels

Don’t simply distribute canned messages to your followers – mix it up with your leads! Using automated social posting will make your team more efficient but make sure they take the time to respond to inquiries, comments, etc. Best practices suggest setting email or SMS alerts when a social channel has been engaged or “checking in” at least 2x daily as an appropriate schedule during the early stages of deploying social marketing.

Introduce a Sales Rep Early in the Nurturing Process

Why wait to connect a sales rep with a B2B buyer until later in the buying process? If your lead distribution style is round robin introduce the next sales rep early in the lead engagement process. This doesn’t mean the sales rep has to personally engage with the lead, simply sending contact details in case there are questions can be a way to connect. (You may know by now that customized lead distribution is a great feature when you want to assign ownership of a lead to a specific rep.)

Collect Business Intelligence from Third-Party Sources

Best-in-breed MAPs integrate with research company databases covering 1000s of industries. Sales reps should have company details, contact information, and online behavior when they view a lead’s record. Lead Liaison’s LMA platform integrates with industry-specific resources so the platform automatically embeds lead data into your records.

The key to humanizing your marketing automation practices is to know when leads should be contacted. It’s not always easy to determine but there are a few tactics you can use consistently. In our next post, we’ll discuss those tactics.

Lead Liaison

Integrating a Marketing Automation Platform with Your CRM

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Integrating a Marketing Automation Platform With Your CRMAn interesting interview published in eMarketer came across our desks recently about integrating a marketing automation platform with your CRM. The subject was Kevin Quiring, managing director of sales and customer service at Accenture. It caused us to reflect on a few points Mr. Quiring made during the interview.

“Businesses are placing renewed emphasis on generating new business… either through acquiring new customers or growing existing customers.” Lead management is a critical part of that effort because companies are competing for fewer real dollars as the U.S. continues to stumble out of the recession. Brands need to know their customers well and target suspects effectively. They also need to nurture leads towards a sales engagement. Thirdly, they need to be able to analyze individual pathways to conversion and global trends in organic search. Integrating marketing automation and CRM platforms can do all that.

“There is a chasm between marketing and sales. The two aren’t working together.” The integration of a marketing platform with a CRM platform brings the two teams together. It starts with lead scoring, which provides qualitative and quantitative metrics that indicate how ready a lead is for sales engagement and how close a lead is to conversion. One benefit: system synchronization transfers marketing scores to sales pipeline rankings so sales reps know how hot leads are when they enter the CRM.

Sales and marketing need to work together to establish lead scoring parameters. This way, scoring parameters and benchmarks are defined with a common understanding and accountability structure connected to lead management. Also, the lead distribution capabilities of a full-service MA platform assign ownership from first touch to last touch. Sales reps are connected with a lead at a deeper level as they progress through the qualification and nurturing processes.

“Trying to close a deal when prospects have the potential to be interested in so many diverse products requires multiple sets of activity.” A primary benefit of MA and CRM integration is to have the ability to seamlessly cross-sell through multiple channels. Companies with myriad product lines can serve multiple buyer chains within a single interface. Sharper analytics from integrated platforms allow product managers to understand their markets better. Sales managers can forecast more clearly with data collected through the integrated systems.

“They’re finding the salesperson’s intuition and the marketer’s opinion on what lead will be good or bad is interesting—but not predictive.” Companies are able to analyze both the attributes and online behavior patterns of their markets through analytics provided by both platforms. A customer persona can then be built that accurately reflects statistically significant characteristics. Instead of relying on intuition an opinion, executives have hard data to shape decisions around.

We appreciate that Mr. Quiring sees the value in marketing automation and CRM integration. If you’d like to find out how our Lead Management Automation™ platform integrates with CRMs like SFDC, request a 10-minute free personal demonstration.

Lead Liaison

Why Your New Web Design May Need Landing Page Testing

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Why Your New Web Design May Need Landing Page TestingMany new website owners shudder at the thought of doing landing page testing – particularly when a website has just been redesigned or newly launched. A few months after a new website is live, many site owners are sitting back and enjoying a few web-hassle-free months. Unfortunately, it might be in a business owner’s best interest to jump right back on the web accessibility horse, even when a new site or redesign is only a few months old.

Landing Page Testing: We’re Sorry

Because landing page testing often seems unnecessary or too complicated, many business owners gloss over it and continue worrying about lead gen strategies. For many businesses, this can be a bad move – particularly when the website serves as a primary storefront for the brand.

It’s a smart idea to not only set a newly designed website up with Google Analytics or comparable marketing automation tools, but to begin immediately making observations about traffic data. Some questions business owners should be asking include:

  1. Were visitors more interactive with our old site?
  2. Is our bounce rate increasing?
  3. Are users taking the new conversion actions we’ve set up on the site?
  4. Do users find the navigation helpful?
  5. What, if anything, should we include in future plans to make the website easier to use?

The answers to these questions will often determine whether a business owner should begin planning landing page testing right away.

How Landing Page Testing Can Make the Difference

Many business owners assume that building a new website will automatically yield better navigation, a more pleasing look and therefore higher conversion rates. Many new websites don’t split-test an older look against a new look, so it’s difficult to get an idea of how user-friendly visitors find a new website compared to an older version.

In a perfect world, business owners would make former elements of a website such as buy buttons, forms and login links as easy to find on a new website, but it doesn’t always work that way. The ability to set up testing before a website would be great, but not all business owners will do this. One alternative is to create a landing page that looks like the previous design of the site. This page could serve as a gateway to the new design. Business owners could execute landing page testing to gauge the effectiveness of the new page compared with simply sending visitors to the new site.

Marketing automation can give business owners a deeper insight into how landing page testing and new designs affect lead generation. Lead Liaison’s visitor tracking capabilities go much deeper than Google Analytics or heat maps. To find out more, visit www.leadliaison.com.

Lead Liaison

What is Important When Selecting a Marketing Automation Vendor?

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What is Important When Selecting a Marketing Automation Vendor?Marketing automation has created a much more efficient way to capture, monitor, nurture, and convert more potential leads. Although the automated software streamlines the process, it requires a capable and experienced marketing automation vendor for it to reach its full potential.

Here are a few important factors to consider when selecting a marketing automation vendor:

1.      Adequate Experience

Marketing automation is a hot trend due to its powerful capabilities and many new companies are emerging. Although it is a relatively new marketing concept, there are marketing automation vendors who already have years of experience working with it complex features versus companies that only have been doing it for a few months. Experienced marketing automation vendors are more in-tuned because they have watched it evolve since its inception. They will know what works and more importantly, what doesn’t work. Consider these suggestions when selecting a marketing automation vendor.

2.      Easy-of-use

The purpose of using a marketing automation strategy is to make it easier and faster for you to monitor and profile potential leads. Look for vendors that offer simple features and straightforward solutions. It should also be easy to integration into your current Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.

3.      Reliable Support

You shouldn’t have too many programming issues if you select an experienced marketing automation vendor that offers easy-to-use software, but you may have questions about how to get the most from it. Select a marketing automation vendor that has readily available and responsive support. You can test their support services with questions and concerns prior to choosing one. That is a great way to ensure they are truly helpful and knowledgeable.

4.      Comprehensive Plan

Marketing automation success won’t happen instantly. Look for vendors who offer a complete plan that follows the lead from initial connection to final conversion. Their marketing strategy should include lead generation, website visitor tracking, CRM integration, email marketing, lead qualification, lead distribution, lead nurturing, and all other aspect of the lead management process.

5.      Sales and Marketing Tools

There really shouldn’t be a need to hire additional marketing services if you are already employing a marketing automation expert. The marketing automation vendor you select should have ample knowledgeable of sales prospecting, SEO techniques, and social media marketing strategies. They should also have a resourceful blog that you can reference for marketing advice.

There are endless choices of marketing automation vendors that claim to provide the same results. Unfortunately, not everyone lives up to their claims. Make sure the marketing automation vendor you select has ample experience, an easy-to-use software program, reliable support, a comprehensive plan-of-action, and readily available sales and marketing tools. If those five components are addressed, you should see the results you expect.

Lead Liaison

Lead Liaison Improves Healthcare Industry Lead Management Practices

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Allen, TX (PRWEB) August 17, 2013 – Lead Liaison is making life easier for companies associated with the U.S. $2.8 trillion dollar healthcare industry. Earlier this year the innovative lead management/marketing automation provider launched a targeted campaign to assist healthcare services vendors.  Lead Liaison developers worked closely with healthcare vendors to optimize the company’s flagship platform, the Lead Management Automation™ system, to help with healthcare industry lead management.

“The healthcare segment is especially sensitive to relationship development,” said VP of communications, Alex Brown. “Physicians and other medical services professionals are extremely busy and must manage their time judiciously. The buying cycle for that market can be long, and challenging to maintain using traditional methods. Vendors who serve the healthcare markets are finding Lead Liaison’s  LMA platform allows them to connect with their prospects more efficiently and effectively, in terms of asset distribution practices .”

Lead Liaison is providing healthcare services companies with the ability to segment their markets and deliver customized messages to specific lead types. For example, a new Lead Liaison client that provides financial planning, contract review, and insurance advice, is able to separate their database by prospect type (physicians from advisors), marketing interactions (opened emails, visited select pages) and products purchased. By using Lead Liaison’s LMA platform, the client can seamlessly target physicians to discuss life insurance products while targeting advisors with informative material to help them foster curriculum and educational services to students.

Similar healthcare vendors will experience three key benefits in using the LMA platform: 1) creating and scheduling automated responses to digital inquiries; 2) increasing efficiencies within resource constrained marketing and sales teams; and 3) providing a structure for their lead engagement practices.

“Our new client’s marketing practices have to be efficiently run across multiple prospect categories. On top of that, they need to be responsive to lead inquiries within a structured market engagement program,” said Brown. “They serve a demanding marketplace, in terms of response time, that requires incremental value as they interact with a vendor. The LMA allows them to nurture leads at the pace they require.”

Healthcare services companies interested in how they can improve lead management practices can request a 10-minute healthcare lead management demonstration.

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Lead Liaison is an application development company that designs, develops, and sells cloud-based marketing and sales automation software. The company markets to small and medium-sized businesses worldwide, and focuses on creating the broadest and most user-friendly revenue generation software platform. Applications cover all phases of lead management automation including sales prospecting, lead generation, and marketing automation functions that directly influence revenue generation. It’s innovative and robust lead management platform combines unparalleled sales prospecting, lead capture, real-time lead tracking, lead qualification, lead distribution, database segmentation, lead nurturing and ROI reporting. The Software as a Service (SaaS) model delivers an effective user experience and integrated cloud computing capabilities.

For More Information:

Alex Brown
VP, Corporate Communications
abrown(at)leadliaison(dot)com
888.895.3237 (888 89 LEADS)

 

Lead Liaison

Lead Follow Up and Personalization: Getting the Sale

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Lead Follow Up and Personalization: Getting the SaleWhen your salespeople do their routine lead followup, they could be using client personalization to better appeal to clients. You may find that many sales people in your company do this without prompting. It might not be difficult to remember the location, job title or basic info of your warmer leads. Having more advanced data allows sales people to connect more heavily with the potential client and to demonstrate they’re listening to the client’s needs. Lead personalization is also viewed as a precursor to excellent customer service for many warm leads

Lead Followup: When to Personalize

Potential clients who enjoy talking to salespeople on the phone disclose many trivial details. Things like favorite vacation spot, recent travel or names of family members or pets tend to slip out. Many salespeople are so focused on getting the sale during lead followup that they tend to leave out the trivial details that personalize a lead’s experience.

When notating a lead, sales people often make notes about the potential client’s work schedule, any hesitations to buy, best times to call back and more info about the competitor products the lead currently uses. Personal details are often seen as sketchy to discuss or are outright neglected by sales people, but discussion about any personal snippets you pick up – when done the right way – can help a salesperson strategically close a sale.

Recording Personalization Information

The last thing a sales person wants is to feel they’re getting over-personal with a potential client. The modicum of respect necessary for good communication in business dealings is always on the table – however, throwing in personal details that warm the relationship can nurture the lead when done strategically.

Here’s an example lead followup and personalization scenario – a sales call to a particular warm lead isn’t accepted because the lead mentions she’s taking her sick dog to the vet. Let’s say that the lead gives more information about her pet – the nature of the problem, the name of the pet, is it a routine vet visit, etc.  Rather than blanking on these details or scribbling them in a personal notebook, tools exist that allow salespeople to map out these personal details for future use. This is particularly helpful when lead follow up is conducted by multiple members of a sales team – e.g., “HI Anne! Dave told me what was going on with your dog Scrapper – is she okay?”

The right marketing automation system will help sales people keep track of lead followup and personalization details across platforms. Lead Liaison’s easy-to-use customer details interface allows you to input custom fields where you can store customer birthdays, pet names, preferences or any general details that will help sales people relate with a client and get closer to a sale.

To find out more about lead followup and personalization, visit us at leadliaison.com.