Tag Archive for: Analytics

Lead Liaison

Nonprofits and Marketing Automation: Omni-Channel Fundraising

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Nonprofits need marketing automation, plain and simple. Specifically because marketing automation can help nonprofits make the most of their marketing budgets. In this series, we are talking about the ways that nonprofits and marketing automation can work together to generate more giving.

Omni-Channel Fundraising for Nonprofits

Omni-channel fundraising should be part of a nonprofit’s strategy. Also a part of marketing automation, omni-channel fundraising allows nonprofits to reach audiences across multiple channels, both online and offline. It allows marketers to be omnipresent. When the strategy is implemented correctly, omni-channel fundraising drives up retention rates and increases the long-term value of donors.

Let’s look at the components that go into omni-channel fundraising.

Online Methods

The online world is full of potential donors, just looking for the perfect story or philosophy that hits home. These donors have a higher cumulative value than mail-acquired donors do, so you want to reach this market in any way possible.

Email Marketing & Social Media

Lead Liaison uses a multi-pronged approach to online fundraising. Automated email marketing (aka “Lead Nurturing”) is an excellent way to build relationships with donors on a personal level, while social media allows nonprofits to showcase their culture and promote events. You can also use social media for building and continuing conversations with donors.

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) should be a part of any online fundraising campaign, as well. You’ll use this strategy to optimize your landing pages and forms, and to include a call to action that’s easily searchable. Lead Liaison tracks all the results and continues to optimize the campaign.

PPC

Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing is a tool you can use to quickly drive traffic to your nonprofit site. You can build and track campaigns, constantly optimizing them to generate the best results. In many cases, you may use the same keywords for your website and your pay-per-click campaigns, while testing out new keywords, as well. This will help you improve your paid reach while also improving your search engine optimization.

Text Messages

You should also include text messaging in your campaign. Ninety-nine percent of text messages are read within five minutes of being received, so you know your texts will get out in front of your market. Reach out to your donors on text, and let them donate by sending a text message. With an average text-to-give donation of $107, this is a lucrative option.

Offline Methods

In order to truly be everywhere, omni-channel fundraising should also include offline methods. Mail-acquired donors have good retention rates, so you’ll want to reach out via postcards or personal, handwritten letters. This helps build relationships and is an excellent way to stand out to donors. You can automate this process, so the postcards and letters (yes, you can even automate the handwritten letters!) go out to your lists without you having to fill out address labels or send the mailings yourself.

Omni-channel fundraising is an important aspect of marketing automation. The best campaigns reach people online and offline. This maximizes retention and donation amounts. Use these strategies to increase the amount of money you have coming into your nonprofit organization.

To learn more about how marketing automation can help nonprofits increase giving, nurture donors, and empower their communities, click here!

Lead Liaison

Nonprofits and Marketing Automation: Automation & Analytics

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Nonprofits need marketing automation, plain and simple. Specifically because marketing automation can help nonprofits make the most of their marketing budgets. In this series, we are talking about the ways that nonprofits and marketing automation can work together to generate more giving.

Automation and Analytics for Nonprofits

With 57 percent of nonprofits claiming they don’t get the most out of donor data when crafting fundraising strategies, it is clear they can benefit from basic marketing automation capabilities. These capabilities allow nonprofit organizations to use the data they collect to communicate more effectively with existing donors, and to also encourage new donors.

Automation and analytics are the cornerstones of any successful marketing automation campaign. See how these two strategies help organizations make it to the next level.

How Does Automation Work?

Automation might seem as if it is the wave of the future, but companies are using it right now to improve their bottom line, and nonprofits can benefit, as well. Nonprofits can benefit from using automation because they often struggle with manpower. There aren’t enough people to do the work that needs to be done, but marketing automation can step in and do a lot of the work for them! 

There isn’t a limit to what nonprofits can do with automation. They can trigger email campaigns to begin as soon as someone donates money, or they can use automation to nurture potential donors. Organizations can also use automation to create digital profiles of leads, segment those leads, and qualify them. This is just a snapshot of the power provided by automation.

Analyze Results with Analytics

Anyone who works at a nonprofit knows the importance of numbers. Numbers tell a story in a way that nothing else can, so you have to dig deep and look at the numbers to evaluate your success. Marketing automation is no different. Analytics play a very important role when running marketing automation campaigns.

Lead Liaison has tons of base-level reporting features. We also have an add-on called Revelation™, which is used to organize and analyze data. This enterprise analytics suite provides visual and interactive data, making it easy to see what is working and what isn’t working. Once you know what’s getting results and what isn’t, you can make changes to your campaign. That is the great thing about marketing automation. Campaigns can get changed and tweaked at any time. Then, the results can be measured in real-time to see if those changes helped or hurt the campaign.

Marketing automation is full of possibilities, and basic automation and analytics just scratch the surface. This technique is full of possibilities for nonprofits. Nonprofits that are serious about increasing donations will benefit from this technique.

To learn more about how marketing automation can help nonprofits increase giving, nurture donors, and empower their communities, click here!

Lead Liaison

How Do Analytics Influence Marketing Automation

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how do analytics influence marketing automationAnalytics 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.

Lead Liaison

3 Ways Marketing Automation Helps to Build Your Buyer Persona

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Marketing Automation Helps to Build Your Buyer PersonaImplement successful marketing strategies and make the most of content-driven, scalable automation confidently through understanding your buyer persona. Marketing automation is a useful tool in gathering the analytics you need to build your buyer persona, strategically reach your target audience, and truly understand what they’re looking for.

According to an article by Tony Zambito, thought leader on the topic, buyer personas describe “who buyers are, what they are trying to accomplish, what goals drive their behavior, how they think, how they buy, where they buy, when buyers decide to buy, and why they make buying decisions.” That’s quite a bit of information to gather. In the end, building accurate models of buying behaviors helps you to understand how your prospects expect and prefer to interact with your brand. Use marketing automation to build your buyer persona. Uncovering such knowledge will arm both sales and marketing teams with the information and assurance they need to seal the deal.

Integrate the Analytics

With features such as Lead Liaison’s Social Append, marketing automation allows you to gather data available from a variety of sources and channels and build a telling profile of your ideal prospect. Not only will you understand their social interactions, but you’ll also have a grasp of how they expect to interact with your brand and product. Another useful way to implement the numbers and stats you’ve gathered is to sort your prospects: what actions were taken by you that won a prospect over? What were the signs that you were about to lose a prospect? Building out a thorough analysis of this data will help to create a persona based on previous experience that will ensure a successful plan for the future.

Work with the Sales Team

Get insights from the sales team to refine the personas. They’re the ones with the most direct contact with prospects, so take advantage of their findings. When using marketing automation to build your buyer persona, marketers and sales teams need to maintain a two-way communication plan so that they can nail down the specifics- what questions are your prospects asking during their buying process? What are their goals, or what are their company’s goals? What are the signs that a prospect is ready to buy? Productive lead tracking and nurturing can provide the data you need to see what action steps the marketing team is taking that lead to higher success and ROI in the sales interactions.

Create a Range of Different Personas

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket by creating and implementing just one persona. Recognize the common factors in your buyers’ decision-making process, and develop a few different personas that are testable. When thinking about a relevant range of personas, utilize customer surveys, case studies, and other tools and strategies already in place. Having a broader perspective allows you to try out various strategies to discover which works best.

Lead Liaison

Get the Most Out of Your Analytics

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Get the Most Out of Your AnalyticsWhat exactly are marketing analytics and why are they so important? First of all, marketing analytics help to put accountable numbers behind your marketing programs. By monitoring the right numbers, you can maximize ROI and ensure your marketing efforts are producing the greatest response. In turn, you’ll be able to get the most out of your analytics through applying the data to future marketing plans.

Traditionally, marketers are seen as the creative types that focus on sculpting an impactful message to drive prospect response. Recently, we’ve seen marketing analytics creep more and more into the marketers’ day-to-day routine. Why is this? Mostly this is because numbers are easily trackable and provide a means for interpreting how prospects interact with your business. Read more about bringing an analytical culture into your marketing practices here.

How to Get the Most Out of Your Analytics

 

Integrate analytics into the rest of the marketing plan.

Utilize marketing automation to track your web visitors’ activity. The data from those reports will show you which landing pages are the most effective and which CTAs your prospects are following. The tracking software will enable marketers to effortlessly integrate analytics into their daily routine and follow up with prospects, understanding where everyone stands in the funnel. A successful integration should reinforce your sales and marketing alignment. Use your marketing analytics to turn your sales funnel into data.

Interpret the data.

So now you’ve got all of this data, how will you interpret it to get the most out of your analytics? You’ll see better ROI when you’re able to more personally connect with your prospects, so a thorough understanding of their activity and interaction with your brand will help marketers get their point across effectively. Interpreting the data will also aid in sales and marketing alignment in that you’ll be able to refine your funnel, maximize the CTAs that work and cut the attempts that aren’t as fruitful. It is important to prune your data—don’t waste time analyzing data that isn’t showing results or giving actionable items.

Review regularly.

Checking the stats once a year won’t create as much of an impact and certainly won’t help you to get the most out of your analytics. Make checking the numbers regularly a habit—have the data available for monthly or quarterly marketing meetings when the whole team is present so that everyone’s on the same page. Lead Liaison has a solution for keeping an eye on visitor behavior and enables you to gather information and metrics as they happen.

Incorporating these simple steps into marketers’ day-to-day will ultimately aid in gauging new marketing initiatives. You’ll be able to monitor unique visits as well as track return visitors to keep an eye on their buying interest and ensure they are qualified appropriately. Tracking the referring sites of your visitors will also help to point out potential marketing partnerships. Use this fact-based decision-making in order to get the most out of your analytics and ultimately the most out of your current marketing practices.

Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation and the Latest Google Update

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Marketing Automation and the Latest Google UpdateThe latest Google update change, Hummingbird, rocked the search engine world this week. What’s most interesting about this update is that most SEO experts didn’t even see it coming. The algorithm has actually been in effect for over a month, and is Google’s largest update in years.

Small businesses are particularly nervous about the change. The Panda and Penguin programs Google rolled out in the last few years significantly damaged rankings for many businesses, literally causing small businesses to go under in some cases. This is particularly true for those that were relying on organic rankings to provide search engine traffic. If your business relies on help from the search engines to get new customers, you don’t necessarily have to worry-you just have to make sure your site is set up to provide more contextual engagement with your potential client base.

Working With the Hummingbird Update

The latest Google update ensures that not just a few keywords will rank a site – all of the keywords in a search query are important for determining search engine position. For instance, before this update someone could type in Train fares in Nova Scotia. Sites with good keyword ranking for Nova Scotia or train fares might show up, rather then search engine results that actually match with the user is looking for.

With this latest update, Google puts an emphasis on the user’s actual intent. Now, the user typing in train fares in Nova Scotia is more likely to actually get train fares rather than just general information that’s irrelevant to the query.

You can get a better idea of how your particular site is affected by checking your URL’s analytics and other metrics.

How does this affect your small business?

If your site is already rich in information and you have fairly streamlined advertising campaigns and an SEO plan, you shouldn’t necessarily worry about the latest Google update. What you should worry about is continuing to make sure that your advertising campaigns are in line with your SEO, and that the content you’re putting on your site is relevant to your users.

Marketing automation can help you here because it can allow you to identify what users are coming to your site based on keyword searches, and how to look at information about how those searches changed over the past month. Real time search results will allow you to determine your best marketing path moving forward. Once you know your results, you can change your SEO strategy to address what users are looking for, and discover how you can better get them to your site.

Plus, with the ability to flag particular users who visit your site via IP tracking, you can give your users a customized experience that other tools just can’t. To get an idea of how those customized tools can better your business, set up a consultation with an expert at Lead Liaison today!