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Lead Liaison

6 Ways to Retain B to B Customers Using Marketing Automation

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Retain B to B customers using marketing automationThere are many ways to retain B to B customers using marketing automation – let us tell you 6 key ways to do so. With Marketo raising $85 million and Silverpop raising $25 million recently, the marketing world is abuzz about the awesome potential of B to B marketing automation for lead generation and management practices. More prospects are being targeted and nurtured using a marketing automation (MA) platform than ever before, but did you know that MA can be just as effective at retaining your existing customers? It’s important to remember that customers should be managed as leads at all times; B to B buyers can migrate to competitors at any time. Here are a few ways you can maximize customer retention through marketing automation:

“Typically, much of our effort is focused on filling top of the funnel, but seldom do we make time to plug any leaks we may have in the sides.  If we’re serious about maximizing customer lifetime value, however, we’ve got to find room in our strategy to prioritize retention as well as acquisition.” – Andy Worobel, Eloqua

1) As a purchase follow-up tool. Customers want to feel like they are cared about after a sale. Using a marketing automation platform like our Lead Management Automation™ solution, your sales team can schedule email messages to routinely “check in” with customers to inquire about satisfaction, provide tips and tricks, uncover issues that must be addressed, or provide product updates. A follow up process is a great way to retain B to B customers using marketing automation.

2) As an up-sell/cross-sell tool. Sales agents know that it is often easier to sell add-ons to existing customers than it is to solicit new business. A marketing automation platform can be an effective mechanism at driving ancillary sales. Through a sustained campaign of sharing special offers and other purchase opportunities delivered by an MA system, your sales team can be more effective at revenue generation.

3) As a time-sensitive reminder tool. An MA platform allows your sales team to deliver reminders about deadline-driven offers without the need to personally contact each customer. Special offer reminders delivered occasionally throughout the offer period can be a great way to stimulate interest and generate revenue.

4) As a customer engagement tool. Even with a protracted sales cycle where your sales team spends months building a relationship with their prospects, there are likely still hidden needs or wants that a customer might have. A marketing automation platform provides cost-effective yet powerful way to engage in an ongoing dialogue with customers without your sales agents spending valuable time performing outreach activities. Creating dialogue and interactive discussion with customers is a great way to retain B to B customers using marketing automation.

5) As a “Happy Birthday” tool. Users can automatically deliver holiday or special occasion greetings to customers following a purchase. Once a sale is complete, your sales agent can immediately schedule brief messages to be delivered throughout the year. This tactic will drive top-of-mind-awareness (TOMA) by maintaining a consistent contact process and recognizing your customers.

6) As a customer appreciation tool. Customers often want to sense that your company appreciates their business. While a sincere expression of gratitude is important at the time a sale closes, occasional expressions of gratitude months or even years after a sale can be effective at maintaining TOMA.

Lead Liaison

How Marketing Automation Makes B2B Marketing More Efficient

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Marketing Automation Makes B2B Marketing More EfficientThe world of business has become increasingly competitive due to the vast reach of the internet. Companies can now easily conduct business online from anywhere in the world. They can work with any vendorthey choose and receive almost the identical products or services as they would locally. No company is too small to be exempt from global competition.

B2B providers need an advantage to stand out from every other supplier if they expect to convert online traffic into sales. Marketing automation is that advantage. It is an automated system that efficiently streamlines the entire marketing process, so companies can create stronger relationships with B2B buyers faster.

Automated & Efficient Lead Generation

Marketing automation makes B2B marketing more efficient by tracking every contact on a business’ website and automatically recording all of their online activity. It starts at the very beginning of the B2B purchaser’s buying process when they are still researching their options. It evaluates the pages they are clicking on and the information they are gathering to determine what they need to know and what they are interested in buying.This is valuable information that can be used to direct a lead towards additional information about a specific product or service.

Determines Leads with the Greatest Potential

Marketing automation is used to screen and segment leads based on their demographic characteristics and online behavior. It compares each lead against a typical B2B buyer and ranks their activity based on relevancy. For example, if a lead is a senior buyer with a lengthy history with their company, there would have a greater ranking than a new junior buyer. Once the potential of each lead is assessed they are grouped into similar segments based on their profile. Lead segment groups will make it easier to create more personalized lead nurturing campaigns.

Encourages B2B Leads to Share Information

Marketing automation uses online registries as barriers to encourage leads to share vital information. A quick pop up questionnaire appears prior to revealing pertinent content, so it can extract details about a lead to determine theirbackground and purchasing authority. Anytime a lead wants to download relevant and informative content, they are first required to share a bit about themselves. If the B2B lead needs that article or tutorial to help with their decision, they will willingly supply the necessary contact information to obtain it.

Marketing Automation Focus on Quality Content

Today’s B2B buyers are smart. They have higher expectations and want businesses that are willing to offer support and guidance prior to the sale. Marketers will have greater insight into what a lead needs because marketing automation profiles every lead. Various articles and tutorials can be created for each different lead segment and then sent automatically using auto-responders. Offering a lead informative content prior to a sale will help build trust and loyalty in a company.

Most computerized marketing approaches fail to connect with B2B buyers, because the entire system is automated. Marketing automation makes B2B marketing more efficient without eliminating the human element by automating the lead generation, scoring, segmenting, and nurturing process while always maintaining focus on the customer’s needs and interests.

Lead Liaison

Why You Should Track Visitors on Your Website

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Why You Should Track Visitors on Your WebsiteIf you haven’t made the decision to track visitors on your website, now is the time. Companies are ramping up for summer marketing campaigns. For some of us, this means a busy few months ahead. Others will experience slower times in the year – and for these companies, every lead counts. If you’re not ready to track visitors on your website, you could be missing the opportunity to close leads that will ensure a stronger summer for your business.

The Key to Visitor Tracking

Many web admins or business owners throw Google Analytics on their domains and call it a day. This is great – but if you’re not analyzing or using the data in the right way, Analytics won’t help you. Many businesses are opting to track traffic using marketing automation software that can tell them so much more about user behavior on the site.

If you’re considering tracking visitors on your website, it’s important to know the tracking information that sites like Google Analytics may not be able to tell you. Some of this info includes:

Business email collection. If visitors from certain companies are reading your blogs or engaging with you via email, you can get a better idea of how users from certain companies are interacting with your website. If you’re ready to track visitors on your website, you can work with a suite of tools that will work with your email. When you send out a newsletter or an important email message – or write a new blog – and a user captured via marketing automation clicks around on your site, the software will track that user’s email domain along with their activity.

This allows you to get an idea of how many individuals from different companies are interacting with your site. If you decide to track visitors on your website and see a certain number of visits from a particular company, it might be worth engaging with that company’s marketing department as a lead.

Track Visitors on Your Website with Marketing Automation

When you know what content your users are looking at, you’re in a viable position to give them more of the same. If you have great blog content, users can literally fall “down the rabbit hole” and become lost in your content throughout their visit. When you track visitors on your website, you can see the path users are taking through your website and come up with new blog topics and content that matches what your target audience is looking for.

Without the ability to track visitors on your website, you can’t follow users down the rabbit hole, profile specific individuals at companies that may be of interest or know what features of your site might need changed. This summer will be more competitive than ever, so it’s time to get a game plan in place that ensures your content and offerings can compete.

Take a look at Lead Liaison’s robust platform if you’re ready to track visitors on your website. We can get you set up in just a few days!

Lead Liaison

Website Visitor Tracking for New Leads

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Website Visitor Tracking for New Leads Website visitor tracking is a useful technology to help your direct and indirect sales channels develop new leads. It is an automated system that records and analyzes all prospects that cross path with your company’s website. It is an extremely efficient way to generate and track new leads online.

Here’s how your sales and marketing team will benefit from using Lead Liaison’s website visitor tracking:

1.       Brand new prospects presented daily through a web portal or desktop application.

There are hundreds or thousands of visitors on your website daily that slip through the cracks. Experts estimate as much as 96% of your website traffic is hidden and never identified. Website visitor tracking ensures no potential lead is missed. It is a completely automated system that guarantees every visitor is captured and accessible.

2.       Marketers gain insight into potential leads that are visiting your website.

Website visitor tracking provides marketers with useful demographic and behavioral characteristics of potential leads, so they can identify those with the greatest potential for conversion. When they pick-up on this info they can put sales on high alert. This can turn new leads into instant customers.

3.      Marketers gain insight into which competitors are checking out your company.

Not only does website visitor tracking provide insight on leads, it will also advise you when competitors are visiting your website. Competitors can gain an endless amount of useful information while visiting your website and it helps to keep a close eye on those businesses that are taking the time to check out your site.

4.      Advises sales when buyers with worthwhile potential are online.

Sales teams can identify companies or individuals as “Favorites” and receive SMS or email alerts when their Favorites go online. This enhances their ability to engage and converse with buyers in real-time while buyers research their options.

5.      Real-time view of prospect`s online behavior.

Website visitor tracking gives your company new leads plus identifies what potential buyers are doing online, as they are doing it. This provides your business with valuable information about who’s visiting your website and what they are interested in at any given moment. Sales will develop a unique competitive advantage by gaining key insight prior to their outreach.

Website visitor tracking for new leads is an essential component of the marketing automation engine that is designed to generate revenue. It brings in new prospects daily, gathers demographic and behavioral insight into prospect and competitors, alerts sales when prospects are surfing, and provides real-time views of their online behaviour.

Lead Liaison

7 Tips on How to Make Marketing Automation More Personable (Part 2)

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7 Tips on How to Make Marketing Automation More PersonableOur previous post, 7 Tips on How to Make Marketing Automation More Personable (Part 1), shared three tips on how to make marketing automation more personable. Here’s the follow up to that article with four more useful tips to drive your marketing automation strategy.

Here are the last 4 of 7 tips on how to make marketing automation more personable:

4.       Create Informative and Relevant Content

After leads are segmented, marketers can create personalized content that is relevant for each lead segment. This content should be focused on the needs that were established during the lead profiling step.

5.       Encourage Feedback and Participation

The key to obtaining new customers using any form of marketing is engaging and connecting with the lead. One way to make marketing automation more personable is through questionnaires and helpful popups. For example, if someone clicks on a page about “web design,” a popup could appear in the right-hand corner offering “10 tips to improve your website design” which leads to an informative and relevant article.  Make sure to keep the popups subtle, so they always appear helpful instead of pushy.

6.       Evaluate the Success of Lead Nurturing Content

A good marketing automation strategy should be constantly changing in an effort to improve upon its current level of success. It is important to use marketing metrics to weigh the success of every lead nurturing campaign and then use that information to modify anything that doesn’t appear to be really connecting with your potential consumers.

7.       Stay Committed After the Sale

Marketing automation is designed to build trust because it is based on a lead’s needs and personalized attention towards addressing their concerns. Don’t lose these relationships after the sale by switching from nurturing to neglecting. It is necessary that you continue to offer valuable information and support after a purchase is made. Success comes from building and maintaining strong mutually-beneficial relationships. This type of full-circle attention is what will make the marketing automation process more personable.

Lead Liaison

7 Tips on How to Make Marketing Automation More Personable (Part 1)

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7 Tips on How to Make Marketing Automation More PersonableAutomated marketing systems are efficient at generating leads, but these leads won’t be worth much if they are not converted into consumers. Today’s consumers are tired of spam emails and computer-generated campaigns and they expect a more personalized touch.

Here are the first 3 of 7 tips on how to make marketing automation more personable:

1.       Understand Your Lead’s Needs to make Marketing Automation More Personable

Marketing automation is designed to quickly gather and analyze behavioral and demographic details about potential consumers. It tracks their online activity to give marketers and sales professionals an insight into their needs. Businesses can make marketing automation programs more personable by understanding and focusing on what the lead truly wants from the company. For example, they don’t want a blender. They want a better way to make smoothies.

2.       Use Sales and Marketing’s Input for Scoring Leads

When you are trying to determine a lead’s interest and needs, it helps to pick the brains of both your marketing and sales teams. Marketing professionals understand what trigger a lead’s interest and the sales teams know what it takes to satisfy their concerns. Scoring leads is necessary for prioritizing and providing personal attention to leads that are on the verge of making a decision.

3.       Segment Leads into Similar Groups

It is too difficult to personally target every lead, especially since marketing automation can generate thousands or even millions of leads per month. Leads that have similar backgrounds and needs can be grouped together to simplify the process. This way lead nurturing campaigns can be personalized towards each lead segment rather than every single individual.

Lead Liaison

Why High-Quality Lead Nurturing Can Improve the Customer Experience

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Why High-Quality Lead Nurturing Can Improve the Customer ExperienceOne of the reasons that marketing automation is so effective at converting leads into customers is high-quality lead nurturing. Every article, blog, ebook, and webpages on a website needs to provide real value to the reader to be considered high-quality lead nurturing content. This higher-caliber of more relevant content will improve the customer experience by educating, inspiring, and engaging them.

Educates & Informs Customers

Leads are visiting various websites in search of answers to their problems. It is rarely in search of a specific item that they want to purchase. Instead, they are looking to fulfill a need. For example, they are not searching for Eucalyptus oil, but they are looking for an all-natural solution to their joint pain. The content in the article should be directed at dealing with joint pain naturally and then subtly mention how applying warm Eucalyptus oil to your sore joints will provide relief. Lead nurturing content can improve the customer experience by educating them on alternative solutions to their problems.

Understands their Needs & Wants

Lead nurturing content will be more effective if it is catered specifically to each person’s wants and needs. By using marketing automation to profile each lead, marketers can group leads with similar interests and behavior together, and then create lead nurturing campaigns to specifically target each segmented group. This will improve the customer experience by giving them the feeling that someone is listening and responding to their needs and wants.

Helps Leads Make Informed Decisions

High-quality lead nurturing is meant to educate a lead, while guiding them towards a specific product or service. The content should help them make a better decision by answering all of their questions or concerns with facts and real-life examples. This will improve the customer buying experience by providing them with all the details they will need to make an informed decision.

Build Trust in a Brand

If lead nurturing content is well-written, informative, and provides the reader with real value, it will help to brand the business or the author as an expert in their respective field. It will demonstrate that the company is knowledgeable and understands what their customers are looking for in a product or service. This will improve the customer experience, by making the buyer feel more confident in the company they have chosen.

High-quality lead nurturing shows customers that someone cares about their needs. It helps them make better decisions and increases their confidence in the brand they choose. Fortunately, it is also not just more beneficial to the customer experience. High-quality lead nurturing will also help increase revenue generation, since quality lead nurturing will result in 50% more sales leads at 33% lower cost per lead. Everyone wins with high-quality lead nurturing content. 

Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation Makes Visitor Tracking Even More Powerful

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Marketing Automation Makes Visitor Tracking Even More PowerfulVisitor tracking is one of the most important things you can do for your business. When people come to your website, they should have an opportunity to convert in some way – whether that’s contacting you, filling out a form or buying something. Once you have a clear visitor path in place on your website, you have the ability to track visitor behavior to see how appealing your offer is, whether your website should be changed or whether your current visitor funnel accommodates your actual sales cycle. Marketing automation technology can help you do all this.

Visitor Tracking and Google Analytics

Many businesses are already signed up on the free Google Analytics platform. It’s easy to use, it’s robust and you can get a good idea of how visitors are interacting with your site and data from Google Analytics reports. There are, however, some underlying components of your sales cycle using Google Analytics alone won’t address for you.

1) Ease of use – Many organizational executives don’t have the technical know-how to translate the reports into something meaningful for their businesses.

2) Ease of implementation – A similar problem. A company will need a web development professional to install Google Analytics or similar tracking software in most instances.

3) Addressing needs – Google Analytics and similar visitor tracking software will let you know about certain aspects of your users’ behaviors, but won’t translate them into your specific sales cycle. Many firms address this by hiring additional personnel or simply trying to squeeze working with the metrics into their sales and performance programs. If you’re doing your own full time executive or sales job, trust us that this approach doesn’t often work in the most efficient way for your business.

Marketing Automation Tailored to Your Sales Cycle

When you implement an automated marketing solution for your business, you’re addressing the unique needs of your business and your sales cycle at every level. Your marketing automation platform can work with a Google Analytics installation to help capture your data in a way that will truly benefit your business.

re sending that get the most conversions or reactions from your visitors. Marketing automation makes use of dozens of useful tools that help streamline your process and make running your business and marketing teams that much easier.To find out more about how Google Analytics compares to Lead Liaison’s website visitor tracking read this post.

To find out more about how marketing automation can help you gather, analyze and execute on website visitor tracking today, talk to a specialist at Lead Liaison.

Lead Liaison

Why Marketing Automation is Revenue Generating Software

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Why Marketing Automation is Revenue Generating SoftwareMarketing automation is designed to generate revenue. It has its hands strategically placed in all aspects of the buying process. It covers everything from initial sales prospecting to final lead conversion, and it includes valuable metrics for evaluating the results.

Nine ways Marketing Automation Software Generates Revenue:

 

1.       Sales Prospecting

Marketing automation begins with sales prospecting. The software is designed to expand your contact database by capturing a broad-range of potential online consumers. Depending on the marketing automation provider, it can also increase the numbers of leads by allowing marketers to upload their contact database and earn trading credits based on the quality of the leads they provided. Businesses can then take the credits they received and exchange them for new contacts.

More Leads = More Revenue

2.       Database Segmentation

It is too hard to customize campaigns based on each individual lead, but there still needs to be some personalization based on leads’ basic needs. By dividing leads into segments with similar interests, marketers can send more relevant messages to segmented groups which will increase response rates and generate more revenue.

3.       Lead Tracking

Marketing automation is revenue generating software because it can track every visitor’s online activity. This tracking software is used to expand on a lead’s current profile data and assess their interest in certain products or services. Marketing automation tracks both a lead’s activity and their inactivity, so marketers can capture the lead’s entire buying process.

4.       Lead Generation

Marketing automation brings new leads into the marketing engine using web forms, landing pages, email campaigns, and website tracking. It is able to generate more revenue by capturing new leads from the 95% of your website traffic that currently goes by unnoticed.

5.       Lead Routing

Marketing automation software improves efficiency by instantly distributing qualified leads to the sales team. Striking while the iron is hot can sometimes be the difference between converting a customer and permanently losing them to a competitor. Most marketing automation providers can send leads automatically through Salesforce.com, text messages on cell phones, or by email depending on the company’s preference.

6.       Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is one of the most effective ways to convert customers and generate more revenue. If the material is well-written, informative, and relevant to a potential consumer’s needs, it can be a valuable sales tool. Marketing automation software can be setup to instantly send lead nurturing content based on parameters established by database segmentation.

7.       Inbound Marketing

A good marketing automation strategy should be focused on increasing a company’s exposure and creating methods for prospective leads to easily locate their website. By establishing credibility on other reputable websites, marketing automation can build their brand authority and bring in new customers.

8.       Lead Conversion

Every step of marketing automation is gently guiding the lead towards conversion. Once a lead is showing sincere signs of interest, it can be passed onto to sales to close the deal. Marketing automation generates more revenue by producing up to 50% more sales-ready leads.

9.       Metrics

Marketing automation software includes metrics for analyzing and evaluating each campaign. It is hard to judge whether or not a campaign was successful, unless you can physically see the results. This is the final and most important step to using marketing automation to generate revenue. Constant review and improvement will be necessary to ensure that it is capturing, nurturing, and converting every lead within the loop.

Lead Liaison

The Top 5 Reasons Every Business Needs Website Visitor Tracking

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The Top 5 Reasons Every Business Needs Website Visitor TrackingWebsite visitor tracking is an essential technology your business should use to stay competitive. More consumers shop online than anywhere else and website visitor tracking monitors buyer behavior while creating in depth profiles on every lead that comes in contact with your company’s front door and brand; your website. It is the most efficient and effective way to capture, profile, and convert leads.

Here are the top 5 reasons every business needs website visitor tracking: 

1.      Captures all online traffic that visits your site

There are hundreds or thousands of leads passing through your website on a daily basis and right now approximately 95% of them are moving onto another site unnoticed. Website visitor tracking is an automated program that guarantees every single lead is caught and profiled.

2.      Produces pertinent data for lead qualification

Tracking visitor’s online behavior provides the marketing automation engine with powerful data that can be used for lead scoring and qualification. By monitoring where each lead travels on a website, it will help determine their needs and interests. This also includes registration forms and surveys to draw-out useful demographic characteristics.

3.      Gives your salespeople a better understanding of your customer’s needs

Website visitor tracking will not only make it easier to qualify leads, but it will also provide your salespeople with valuable information about each visitor. It shows exactly which pages they are visiting, how long they stay on each page, and how frequently they visit your site. This insight can be used to nurture and convert more leads into customers.

4.      Proves whether campaigns are working or not

Unfortunately, not every effort that is made in your marketing automation strategy will have stellar results. Website visitor tracking is a great way for marketers to see exactly what is working and what methods still need more work.

5.      Provides marketers with a bounce-rate for landing pages

A bounce-rate shows how many visitors arrived on your website from a specific landing page and then immediately left. This information will help marketers determine why consumers are not staying longer than a few seconds when they land on certain pages. This is usually a sign that the link taking them to a page is misleading or there is an issue with the information on the landing page.

Website visitor tracking captures every lead, produces necessary data for lead qualification, assists salespeople in understanding their customers, provides a metrics for measuring campaign success, and provides a bounce-rate for landing pages. All five of the top reasons your business needs website visit tracking have one critical thing in common; they all work together to generate more revenue. Revenue generation is really the greatest reason why all businesses need website visitor tracking.