Tag Archive for: Marketing Automation

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Create Marketing Customers Love

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Create Marketing LoveIf implemented correctly, marketing automation provides the framework of sending customers and prospects messages that resonate with their specific needs and wants.  Ultimately, marketing automation is the tool you will use to drive customers to your website and products.  It will keep your customers happy, informed, and connected – and provide you with real-time analytics that are invaluable to a marketer.  When done right, you’ll create content that your customers will fall in love with.

Humans make decisions based on emotions – how something makes them feel, what it reminds them of, and what kind of experiences they’ve had in the past with similar products or businesses are all influencers on how your prospects will react to a product.  This means that your marketing needs to leverage this to your benefit. When a customer loves your marketing they’re more likely to try and love your products.

How Does Marketing Automation Do It?

Marketing automation makes it easy for you to be aware of where your prospects are in the buying pipeline.  This, in turn, allows you to interact with your prospect in a way that’s appropriate for whatever stage they’re at – cultivating relationships with prospects who aren’t ready to buy, networking with those who are in contact with sales, and developing relationships with customers who’ve already purchased.

How Does It Work?

Marketing automation can also give you great details on what your prospects are reading, how they engage, and what they’re doing socially.  Using this information, you can see what they like and send them more of it – all because marketing information provides you with segmented information.

Additionally, you’re able to send messages at the right time and on a schedule that works for the customers instead of your marketing team.

Before marketing automation, messages were generally sent during normal business hours or by snail mail.  This means that your customers sometimes received communications when they weren’t able to reply.  Messages were forgotten or pushed aside.  Even worse?  Prospects received marketing in their mailbox days after they’d already purchased.  Marketing automation creates better timeliness, which increases the appeal of your marketing.

Customizing each interaction, whether it’s through e-mail or your landing pages renders every bit of content is customizable for each prospect.  Relevant content automatically makes it more enjoyable and the bonus is that you can also make sure prospects are receiving consistent communications.  Prospects and customers don’t want to receive disorganized messages but it’s easy to make this mistake, especially if the customer is interacting with different departments at the same time.  Marketing automation ensures that communications and every interaction are smooth and easy.

For marketing automation to work correctly and for your customers to love it, you’ll need to use it intelligently.  Following the tried and true tips of successful automation will be key to making your messages and content relevant and personalized.  Make sure you’re using your automation software to make the best marketing possible. The Lead Liaison staff is happy to help you make this happen!

Lead Liaison

Are You Ready to Deploy Marketing Automation Software?

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Deploy Marketing AutomationIf you’re considering deploying marketing automation software, you may have wondered if your business is actually ready for the change.  After all, adopting software is an already risky venture if you’re not prepared and if you do it too soon, it can be a disaster.  Let’s take a look at why you might be ready to deploy marketing automation software.

Decreased Conversions and Inability to Scale

Having a significant decrease in sales conversions from your email marketing campaigns?  It might be time to implement marketing automation.  Marketing automation can help you move away from generic email messages by providing your prospects with relevant information that applies to their unique situation.  This will help you improve your conversion rate significantly.  If you’re having trouble figuring out how to deliver quality messages, then you have an inability to scale.  Marketing automation gives you real-time analytics and service communications that will win and keep customers.

High Cost Errors and Privacy Concerns

New privacy laws will soon be implemented and the rules regarding tracking of opt-ins and audit will be strict.  If you’re worried about execution of these new regulations and the consequences that come with them, you should probably add marketing automation to your business repertoire.  Tracking and compliance issues will be reduced with marketing automation software.  Because you’re doing your marketing manually, risk of human error is high.  Automation mitigates that risk ensuring that your emails get to the appropriate place.

Competition

Let’s face it – your competitors are probably already using marketing automation software.  Reaching prospects is done the most effectively by automation and this means that your competitors are reaching prospects faster than you.  Worse than that, it could mean that they’re reaching your customers more often than you.  If they are, it means that in all probability your customers are receiving more relevant content from someone else and are probably considering why they’re with you as opposed to another company.

Lead Scoring

If you want to align your marketing and sales teams, you should really consider trying to deploy marketing automation software.  Lead scoring will give you insight and prioritize your leads based on a slew of criteria:  demographics and prospect activity being the main two.  Automation platforms can provide you with a way to save time, money, and frustration of your marketers and sellers – and employee productivity and relationships are real features that can make the difference in your business thriving or failing.

Ensuring that you’re implementing marketing automation at the right time will ensure maximum effectiveness for your business and teams.  Making the move at the right time will significantly improve your chances of success as you utilize this new tool in marketing. Talk to the Lead Liaison team today about how deploying marketing automation can change your business for the better!

Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation in 2015: This is YOUR Year

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Marketing Automation in 2015We’re confident that 2015 will be The Year of Marketing Automation – this could be both our and your best year yet. After all, the idea of Marketing Automation isn’t a new one.  Marketing automation has been around in one form or another for decades.  Mailing campaigns intending to engage customers have existed long before we became a social medial and email culture.

Now, marketing solution is one of the fastest growing marketing solutions available and 2015 is poised to be a grand year for it.  Let’s go over what’s happening in the market right now that makes this the best time to add marketing automation to optimize your performance and get the best results.

Why Add Marketing Automation in 2015?

First, when you look at the data it’s easy to see why you should add marketing automation software to your repertoire of business solutions.  75% of top performing companies have been using some type of marketing automation in their businesses for the last two years.  Other data suggests that business-to-business companies increase their sales-pipeline contributions by 10% when adding marketing automation – this includes 25% of business-to-business Fortune 500 companies.

Mobile Marketing and Marketing Automation in 2015

If you really want to get serious about marketing automation in 2015 and you already have a platform, then your next logical step is to think about mobile marketing.  Mobile technology is the first screen in a customer’s life and a marketing tool that they carry everywhere.  By employing mobile marketing, you’re able to tell when, how, and where they’d like to be approached.  However, to properly engage customers using mobile devices, there are some hard and fast rules you should note:

  • Don’t engage based on location alone.  With location services activating marketing messages, consumers are likely to be blasted with messages at every street corner.  This will lead to frustration and many customers will begin to ignore messages, even when those messages are relevant.
  • Beacons aren’t able to engage successfully.  Beacons are messages, much like location services, that engage a consumer based on what they’re near.  Staying at the Hilton?  Beacons will send messages to a device letting the consumer know what restaurants, sporting events, and theaters are nearby.  Poor beacon strategy will decrease engagement and drive consumers away.  Don’t rush to roll out beacons unless you’re sure you have a strategy in place that will be successful.
  • Protect your customer’s data.  With high profile data breaches in the news last year, consumers are aware that you’re collecting their information and that there’s always a potential for it to get out.  Taking appropriate steps to ensure a checks and balances system before collecting data will ensure that your customers are safe and you’re protected from bad press and customer disenchantment.

Marketing automation is also getting more affordable. Many new marketing automation startups that have proven successful, are forcing old players to get with the times and reduce prices.  If they choose not to lower prices they’ll become more specific in different areas in order to service their customers.  Competition will be fierce in 2015, which will lead many to change the way they do business.  Many startups will see success and offer freemium services and/or services with no startup fees involved.

2015 will truly be the year that any company, no matter how small or the size of its budget, can begin to market like Fortune 500 businesses.  Let us show you how marketing automation can make this year the best yet for your business!

Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation and Trial Conversion

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Marketing Automation and Trial ConversionIf you’re failing to convert customers from your free trial offers then there’s probably a very simple reason why:  you’re failing to engage them.  Failing to engage potential customers within the first three days of a free-trial sign up is the number one reason why customers lose interest in a product or feature.  And if they’re not interested or find the experience enjoyable, they’ll get bored with the product, and will fail to convert.

On average, you can expect somewhere around 15% of your free-trial users to become paying customers.  That number drops significantly within ninety days as you lose customers as they try the product and find that it might not work for them.  So you might be wondering how exactly you’re supposed to attract more free trial users, convert them to customers, and keep them as customers.  This is where marketing automation and trial conversion comes into play.

Marketing Automation and Trial Conversion

Email marketing can be a useful tool in getting customers to convert.  Even if you have a small percentage of users converting to paying customers, a small improvement in activation rate will increase your paying customers.  Developing a relationship with your potential customers can be as simple as sending short, concise, and personalized messages via marketing automation.

You’re going to want to send your first messages within ninety minutes of your leads expressing an interest in the product – this will give you the best chance of converting them.  Marketing automation can do all of this for you.  All you have to do is set up your software to trigger an email once a customer signs up for the free trial.

Crafting Scheduled Messages

You should also have a scheduled messaged that explains all of the features of the free trial program or product and how to get started quickly.  This message should give customers the option of contacting a representative at your company or within your customer service department if they have questions – which is just another way for you to establish a personal relationship with the customer.

Scheduling multiple messages throughout the trial period will also help you with your conversion rate but only as long as you’re adding convincing content.  Marketing automation via trial conversion can help you monitor your customer’s free trial use and trigger appropriate e-mails to be sent to them.  For example, if your customer hasn’t used the free trial in a week, your marketing automation software could trigger an email with the goal of getting the customer back to the trial.

By monitoring usage of the trial, marketing automation can give you valuable insight into whether or not an extension of that free trial is appropriate.  Users who have already stopped using the product prior to the end of the free trial are unlikely to move forward in your sales funnel.  However, users who are actively using the product but stop due to attrition may be viable candidates for at trial extension.

If you’re ready to take the next step in applying a marketing automation solution to your business, contact us today!

Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation Trends to Watch

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Marketing Automation: Trends to WatchTime to keep your eye on a few marketing automation trends to watch. With more than 60% of top performing companies utilizing marketing automation, one might believe that marketing automation has hit its peak. After all, there’s nowhere left to go but down.  However, the percentage of businesses utilizing marketing automation continues to increase.  While the benefits of these services are impossible to ignore, it’s important to be aware of upcoming trends to make the most out of your marketing automation.

With marketing automation pervading all business functions, it’s not enough to just automate and personalize content and messages.  In fact, marketers are beginning to demand automation that predicts interactions and lead conversion rates.  Software continues to evolve at such a fast pace that predictions about consumer behavior and buying patterns isn’t that far off.  As algorithms and technology advance, marketers are able to determine who their best customers will be.

Mobile Marketing Automation

An astounding ninety-one percent of American’s now own cell phones.  What this means for marketing automation is that messages and content are being delivered whenever and wherever a customer is.  In fact, market research predicts that mobile apps will own almost 30 percent of all sales in just two short years – by 2017.  Additionally, the price point of mobile marketing is astounding:  for every $1 spent, marketers can expect $20 in sales returns.

Even now, mobile data and location services can give marketers powerful information, like what brands or stores a customer is near.  That information means that soon marketing automation will be able to transmit messages that are not only personalized but messages that are specific to the right time and place, as well as tracking online and offline events. Marketing automation is also evolving to let marketers make their own goals.  The best indication of success is real-time customer behavior instead of clicks and opens.  Tracking these numbers will give valuable insight into measuring smaller progressions to reach an ultimate goal, which is set by you and not the service.

Looking into the Future

Another big trend in marketing automation is the fact that you are no longer required to possess a deep technological knowledge to understand or operate marketing automation software.  Drop down menus and drag and drop functionality have changed the way marketing automation is used.  It’s incredibly simple software that can make a tremendous impact on how you do business and your results.  Also, no longer is the software a big expense – even the best marketing automation software out there can be affordable and relatively inexpensive – especially when you consider your return on investment.

These trends are just some that you can expect to see over the next 12 months.  While there will be others, these are the ones most likely to make a significant impact in 2015.

Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation: Before and After

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Marketing Automation Before and AfterIf you’re on the fence about marketing automation, it might be best for you to take a look at how it can transform your business by comparing the before with the after.

First, you may be wondering how a move to marketing automation will benefit your business financially.  It’s a fair question and one with an interesting answer. On average, marketing automation costs less than what it would cost you to hire three to four employees to do the same job.  Combined with payroll taxes, health insurance, and other benefits – this could mean huge savings for companies.

Marketing automation is also able to make a significant impact in small to medium sized companies.  For the most part, those marketing departments are relatively small, so it’s difficult to devote the time and energy to daily tasks let alone things like updating databases and tracking content performance.  Marketing automation can make a major impact in these areas by doing that work for you.

Marketing Automation: The Before

When we start getting into the before of larger, multi-national companies, the impact that automation can have becomes even clearer.  Large companies are often running campaigns and social media accounts for several locations or departments, all at the same time.  As an example, Unilever owns more than 400 brands worldwide.  They have a variety of marketing campaigns for different brands, in different parts of the world, for different products; at any given time.  Marketing automation would help a company like Unilever manage the activity on all of their social media sites, including scheduling content, tracking interactions and followers, and delivering real-time data to see how a strategy is performing overall.

Working the Demographics

Besides tracking how well your campaigns are performing, marketing automation gives you the ability to target them to specific demographics.  If you’re targeting clients of all kinds, marketing automation can help you specify where they fall in the buying pipeline.  Are they marketing managers themselves or are they business owners?  Automation can help you keep that information straight while sending targeted messages to all of your clients.  Most companies will see an increase in sales and conversion rates once they implement marketing automation solutions.

Beyond all this, marketing automation will create a more predictable revenue cycle and align your sales and marketing teams, which will substantially increase your growth.  Some experts say that by using marketing automation, a company can expect a 29% increase in won deals as opposed to 19% won deals, without marketing automation.  Your sales department will benefit as well.  For a majority of companies, 73% of the leads that the sales department receive, go nowhere.  With marketing automation, you’re able to identify and cut out the 73% ahead of time, which means that your sales team is able to focus on high-quality leads.  Not only that but since nurtured leads tend to spend about 47% more than non-nurtured leads, you don’t have to wait around for your sales team to establish relationships.  Marketing automation has already done that for you, with targeted, personalized messages and content.

These are only a few of the ways that marketing automation can benefit your company and transform your sales team.  If the after looks better than the before to you, contact us today to get started with your marketing automation solution!

Lead Liaison

What Companies Provide Marketing Automation?

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Marketing Automation CompaniesIn the never-ending list of software options that business owners consider when trying to improve efficiency and save money, marketing automation ranks high.  In fact, marketing automation software has become one of the most in-demand tools for marketers.  In all that noise, it’s difficult to navigate what companies provide marketing automation software, and which one is best suited for your particular wants and needs.  Let’s take a look at some options.

First, there’s a key distinction to make. 100s of companies claim to provide marketing automation. Case in point, many email marketing companies say they’re a marketing automation provider. There are only a handful of pure-play marketing automation companies that focus deeply on key areas of automation, including lead qualification, lead nurturing, lead distribution and sales intelligence. What it really boils down to is the size of company you’re looking to work with, public or private, and how fat your wallet is. Here are some pure-play vendors to keep in mind:

Oracle Eloqua

With more than 50,000 users, Oracle’s Eloqua software ranks at the top of the list of marketing automation software.  Robust and allowing for considerable customization, Eloqua is appropriate software for businesses that focus on email marketing and data cleansing. Eloqua also offers pre-designed templates for landing pages as well as the option to block free email addresses on contact forms, which provides better quality leads to sales teams.

Before choosing any marketing automation software, you need to decide what your priorities are.  You should be aware that high technical skills and knowledge will be required to use Eloqua.

Marketo

Marketo’s marketing automation software has evolved since its introduction several years ago. Marketo has expanded to include B2B personalization and marketing management (budgeting software)solutions.  Marketo’s platform allows users to stream their overall marketing process and efforts.  In general, Marketo has seen extraordinary growth since introducing their software and was ranked the 78th fastest growing business in 2012.

Marketo has its ups and downs – one of its obvious downs being as a company of its size, individual attention may be limited. The novelty of going with a boutique firm in this space never wears off.

Pardot

Pardot introduced their marketing automation software in 2007 and was acquired by ExactTarget in 2012. Ranked the 172nd fastest growing business in 2012, Pardot experienced a 2,001% increase in growth over a three-year period.  Offering an email design interface including multiple pre-built templates, Pardot allows users to configure email content that’s driven by date fields or sales rep assignments.  Additionally, many users claim that Pardot is able to improve inbound marketing strategies while letting companies focus on the most promising leads.

Developing a wish list of features and requirements and then choosing the tool that best suits your needs is the best way to choose a marketing automation program. This way, you’re likely to spend your budget on the best software out there while embracing the technology that will likely improve your business processes.  Marketing automation is becoming mainstream and with it, the list of companies who provide this software is growing.  Research carefully, include your sales and marketing teams, and choose software that will best drive revenue and covert leads into customers.

Better yet, take a look at Lead Liaison’s offerings and work with a company that is not clamoring to satisfy Wall Street, can  meet your individual needs, and give you more in-depth training than anyone else on the market. You’ll need a fat wallet for Marketo, Eloqua and Pardot, and you’ll have plenty of money left over to eat lunch with Lead Liaison. We can help you take the next step in considering marketing automation solutions!  Feel free to ping us to learn more!

Lead Liaison

Is Marketing Automation a Good Idea?

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Is Marketing Automation a Good Idea?Have you been asking yourself, is marketing automation a good idea? Or maybe, is marketing automation worth the hassle? To run an effective marketing campaign and gather appropriate leads, marketers should take advantage of marketing automation.  Marketing automation gives you the ability to manage the targeting, timing, and content of your outbound messages in the most effective way possible.  By implementing marketing automation, you’ll be able to personalize your marketing to each prospect’s wants and needs based on where they are in the buying pipeline.

Of course, everyone knows that increased revenues are the number one reason most businesses decide to incorporate marketing automation.  In fact, out of top performing companies, 70% are found to use marketing automation.  But what you might not realize about marketing automation is that it also helps companies build and improve internal communications, making your sales and marketing teams more effective.  When marketing and sales teams come together, their mutual decisions are most effectively implemented through marketing automation.  This improvement results in effective lead nurturing, scoring, and a handoff process designed to meet both the marketing goals of the organization and sales requirements.

Marketing Automation: Is It a Good Idea?

Many times, marketing automation is the solution to specific challenges an organization has. For example, if you’re having issues capturing appropriate and solid leads, marketing automation can help solve this by accurately targeting leads.  It also gives you, the marketer, the advantage of sending out effective and personalized messages but automating this process so you’re able to focus on more important aspects of your campaigns.  Marketing automation will provide you with real-time data and analytics, letting you know what’s working and what’s not.  It takes the guesswork out of marketing and allows you to nail down the details that draw in your targeted audience.

Marketing automation works best for companies who are in specific situations, such as:

  • Companies in a large market with numerous leads;
  • Organizations with a longer sales process;
  • Businesses with sites that are content heavy;
  • Processes and systems already in place, to coordinate.

Will Marketing Automation Work?

Marketing automation is not a magic wand or a quick fix.  It’s a process that will take work, time, and adjustments.  Marketing automation strategies will be tested and adjusted continuously based off the information it gives you.  It will take initial effort on your part but your long-term workload will be lessened, if the system is implemented correctly.  For companies who are producing quality content and getting a steady flow of leads from their sites, marketing automation could be a solution to effective and timely follow-up.

If you think that marketing automation might be an effective tool for your campaign and you’re ready to talk, contact us today for a quote!

Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation: Why Does Lead Nurturing Make Sense?

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Why does lead nurturing make sense?Lead nurturing, the marketing process of developing relationships with leads regardless of their current timing to purchase, is a straightforward concept. But many don’t realize the importance of lead nurturing or how it can help. Let’s look at lead nurturing and how it relates to marketing automation.

Why Lead Nurturing Makes Sense

One of the biggest pros for lead nurturing is the ability to market personalized messages to prospects. These messages can be generic in nature but personalized to an audience that’s only in Lead Stage 1 of marketing automation. These leads have only just entered the market and do not have a current timeline for purchasing.

It’s important if you’re looking into automation not to just send leads cold emails. Your first objective for beginning lead nurturing is to establish permission to stay in contact with the lead. If your audience loses interest in your messages, they’ll unsubscribe from your mailing list or mark emails as spam.

Target Your Leads

Make sure you’re creating content that your visitors want to see. The more you can find out about a lead who’s visited your website, the better. By creating high quality content that is relevant to your leads, you’re increasing the possibility of converting leads to customers significantly. Make sure that when sending out your messages, you’re not overdoing it. Ask yourself: when’s the best time to send messages so you can ensure your prospects will see them? Answer that and then tailor your messages to be sent out at the best possible time.

Another best practice for lead nurturing that might seem like it’s coming from the stone age, is using plain text emails instead of HTML. A few lines of content and a personalized signature go a long way toward establishing an individualized message, which is targeted to your audience. HTML based emails are fine when sending out training tips or when the emails are clearly coming from the marketing department and not the sales department.

When Lead Nurturing Works

Lead nurturing is a powerful way to use marketing automation to stay in touch with prospects. When it works, you’re able to establish purchaser preference while also gaining useful knowledge about your prospects timing. If you’re ready to take the next best step with lead nurturing and marketing automation, contact us today! Lead Liaison staff would love to chat with you about your company’s individual marketing needs.

Lead Liaison

How Does Marketing Automation Help Inbound Marketing?

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How Marketing Automation Helps with Inbound MarketingOccasionally we run into customers that are fortunate enough to have way too much business. They’ve got more leads than they can handle. That sounds like a good problem to have, right? Well, what if there are so many leads that the organization has a hard time keeping up? This is a reality for some businesses. They fall behind as all of their leads are look-a-likes and some of them start falling through the cracks.

There are two solutions to this problem. First, make sense of the data and leads resulting from your inbound marketing. Second, use automation to transform the task of following up into an efficient, well oiled machine. In this post, we’ll focus on the first step, making sense of your inbound traffic and help you understand how does marketing automation help inbound marketing.

How Marketing Automation Helps with Inbound Marketing

There are three corner stones of making sense of your inbound marketing. We call these the “three Ps of inbound marketing”; profiling, prioritizing and pinging.

Profiling your Prospects

You’ve got to profile your prospects by building a clear picture of who they are and what they’ve done before coming into your lead funnel. Create a digital DNA of your prospects that combines demographics, online behavior and social information.

Prioritizing your Prospects

Prioritize your inbound marketing by automating the process of lead qualification. Most marketing automation systems use lead scoring and lead grading as two ways to prioritize website activity using any criteria. Marketing automation companies that get it right offer both automatic and manual lead scoring, for greater control. As inbound traffic comes in each of your prospect’s behavior is scored. The higher the score the hotter the lead. Lead grading helps you identify ideal buyers. These two pieces of criteria are then combined with other criteria, such as recency of activity, and placed on a hot lead dashboard, which simplifies the process of identifying who’s hot and who’s not.

Pinging you

You know your inbound marketing efforts are paying dividends when your prospects express key buying behavior. We call these Buy Signals at Lead Liaison. When a Buy Signal is triggered we alert you via text or email. If you’re buried in new leads its good to know when you need to follow up with the hot ones instead of treating everyone as equals.