Tag Archive for: Automation

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

Making Workflow Automation Simpler and More Manageable

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Workflow AutomationOne of the most challenging tasks business owners face is workflow automation. Without someone sitting in the middle of everything and pulling all the necessary levers to get things done, many businesses struggle with engaging in a variety of tasks – including marketing automation and lead flow.

Workflow automation doesn’t have to be painful, and it doesn’t require hiring a full time project manager for your business. The right marketing automation system can give you a workflow out of the box without a lot of hassle or time training.

Determining Your Workflow

The key to using software to get your workflow automated is to establish dependencies. This means that once an action happens on the business side, tasks, follow up and lead flow are created automatically.

Before marketing automation, business owners and project managers had to determine and set up these lead flow channels themselves. Workflow changes all that. The right marketing automation system allows your company to create these dependencies, schedule them for you and keep everything in one place so you know what isn’t getting done and can delegate accordingly.

For instance, say your dashboard registers a new lead. This lead comes in the form of an opt-in, containing an address and business information. You can set up a dependency on your backend to add this new lead to a certain geo-targeted or relevant content list. You can set tasks in your project management system for your sales team to call this lead within a few days after you get it.

The Power of Workflow Automation

You can also collect emails and send correspondence each time a new user visits your site. That’s something that a human project manager simply can’t do for you – no one should be tasked with watching IP addresses and a ticker all day to try to get leads deeper into your funnel. That’s why automation is so important – it takes the hassle out of marketing and gives you the option to create dependencies that allow business management tasks ease of flow.

Lead Liaison’s dependencies and workflow automation are set up within a program called Sparks. Lead Liaison’s automated software will monitor your back end and lead flow, and then create a series of events in the system once certain triggers happen. From a filled out lead form to a visitor coming to your site, different Sparks can be set up to create events in the backend of your business you can use to make your daily operations more productive. We’d love to show you how Sparks works – connect with us today for a consult!

Lead Liaison

Automating Business – The Buick Way

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Automating BusinessOne of our founders recently bought a Buick Enclave. Most of the folks on our team are not car experts. Needless to say, we knew little about Buick Enclaves. When we heard she bought a Buick, we thought – “that’s an old man’s car”. Buick Regal, Roadmaster, Park Avenue, LeSabre – the list of old school Buick’s goes on. Why wouldn’t we formulate that opinion? Several of us got to take a spin in her new Enclave. Let’s just say this; it was a real eye opener. It reminds me how one can be so ignorant about new things. After all, you only know what you know. It got us thinking, if Buicks have evolved like this how has business evolved?

Business, in particular sales and marketing, has evolved considerably. Similar to what technology has done for Buicks, technology has given business a boost. For example, consider our founders Buick Enclave. The vehicle is OnStar equipped. Our co-founder showed us the OnStar iPhone app. We were amazed she could remotely unlock, lock and start her vehicle with the press of a button. And check this out – she remotely started the vehicle and it adjusted the climate control inside the vehicle based on the temperature outside. Wouldn’t it be nice if one could automate business with the press of a button?

Guess what, we can! Sales and marketing is no longer the old school Buick. Marketers have an opportunity to “OnStar-their-business”. Businesses can take advantage of software that automates common marketing processes. For example, with a few button clicks marketers can automate lead nurturing, or drip campaigns, lead qualification, lead distribution and alerts that highly benefit sales. Let’s draw from another analogy in the spirit of Buick/OnStar. While having the iPhone OnStar app up, our co-founder showed us how to find a place using Bing, say the closest Indian restaurant, and push that destination to the in-car navigation or turn-by-turn system. When she jumped in the vehicle her Buick asked her if she wants to go to the Indian restaurant.

That’s similar to configuring an automated marketing campaign and pushing it out to your business. With marketing automation software marketers can configure their prospects route, navigating them through your business and driving them forward along the revenue cycle. Marketer can send automated emails and other actions as part of an automated program and either run/activate the program or schedule it to start at any time in the future.

It’s time to harness technology and start automating business.

For a demo of OnStar and Lead Liaison ping us!

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