Tag Archive for: Marketing Automation

How to Plan for a Successful Automation Strategy

How to plan for marketing automation with a “TOPS” approach? Team, Objectives, Personas, Scenarios

Planning a successful automation strategy shouldn’t be done in a vacuum. It should be methodically planned out and executed only after your plan is created. But how do you start a plan? We came up with an easy acronym to help you. Whether your automation strategy is for sales automation, marketing automation, event automation, or all of the above, all strategies should cover a basic approach (at a minimum). We call this approach the TOPS strategy. If done right, you’ll find yourself at the top.

TOPS stands for Team, Objectives, Personas, and Scenarios. It’s an easy way to remember how to assemble a great automation strategy. Let’s cover each of these points in more detail, starting with Team. Having a great team is important and probably goes without saying. The real point is that you shouldn’t go at it alone. Use other members of your organization to put together your version of a dream team. Your team could include should include at least two of the following: data scientist, marketing person, salesperson, and content creator. Gather your team and let them know you’re trying to plan a successful automation strategy.

Next, identify your objectives. Ask yourself what you’re trying to accomplish. With your team in the room, whiteboard a mind map that identifies your end goals. Are you trying to convert people (collect their information), drive demonstrations of your product, increase awareness, educate, etc. You might want to start with a bunch of different objectives, but keep it simple. I’ve always learned there’s only one way to eat an elephant – and that’s one bite at a time. Pick your one objective, run with it, then rinse and repeat using your automation strategy.

The “P” in TOPS stands for persona. A persona is the type of person you are targeting. This could be an ideal buyer, partner, etc. Come up with criteria for who you’re trying to target/sell to with your strategy. For example, with our business, we commonly target marketing leadership. So the role is marketing, with titles containing “Chief” or “VP”. List out all your criteria with your team. Once you’ve identified the persona, put yourself in their shoes. Empathize a bit. If you were them, what messaging and/or communication would interest you? It’s important not to think like a vendor, but think like a prospect.

Finally, run through different scenarios. Come up with messaging around each scenario. For example, if you were to execute your automation strategy what would trigger it and what would you say to your targeted persona? Let’s begin with a simple one. When someone submits a contact us form, what information do you want to collect on them? Who do you want the lead to go to using what criteria? What do you want to respond to the lead with? How do you want to nurture the lead (what will you say to them and for how long?). It’s not uncommon to have 10s of different scenarios you’ll go through. Start with one (remember that elephant), and then tackle the next one.

In summary, remember your TOPS strategy when implementing automation to help scale your sales and marketing. Having a team, objective, persona, and scenario are the four basic steps to go through for any successful automation strategy. Alright, let’s get going. We look forward to seeing you on TOP(S)!

Lead Liaison Press Release

Sales and Marketing Automation Solutions Provider Lead Liaison Celebrates Major Milestone

Dallas, TX – Lead Liaison officially opened for business in November 2013 with a clear vision: to help companies drive revenue by scaling sales and marketing. They made a splash with the introduction of a website visitor tracking solution. A few short months later, a fully integrated marketing automation solution was launched. Over the years, Lead Liaison has grown exponentially with last month marking five years in the industry.

Founder, Ryan Schefke, shares why he acted on his vision to create sales and marketing solutions that drive revenue. “I spent 15 years working for organizations, from large to small, that constantly had sales and marketing teams operating in silos. Most of my time was spent in the sales organization. I always wanted more leads, better quality leads, and software that could help me and my team do our jobs better.”

“I couldn’t handle the constant differences between sales and marketing teams and had to take action,” Schefke continues. “We first created a website visitor tracking solution because it’s an essential component that all businesses should have to support their sales and marketing. It’s the only way to close the loop on inbound and outbound activities as it ties it all together. We’ve evolved to be much more than that. When I reflect back over these five years on our progress, I’m blown away by the breadth of our portfolio and the number of businesses that have sought out our help to take them to the next level. We’re helping marketing teams, sales teams, and more importantly, we are helping both of them work better together – that’s the ultimate goal.”

From the beginning, Lead Liaison has focused on building a suite of solutions for marketing and sales teams. Last year they launched an event lead management solution, GoExhibit!™, which integrates seamlessly with almost any CRM or marketing automation platform – including their own marketing automation platform called Lead Management Automation (LMA)™ and their own CRM, aptly named OneFocus™. They’ve taken the market by storm, quickly becoming a leader in event lead management.

“Our focus on events started in October 2017 with our lead capture app, GoCapture!™. We’ve gone on to develop an end-to-end Event Lead Management (ELM) solution called GoExhibit!™, which is powered by our original app,” says Sam Darrell, VP Product Management at Lead Liaison. “We already provide incredible value to sales and marketing teams. Our enterprise customers were asking us for a solution that could replace antiquated badge scanners and poor quality OCR apps, while also integrating instantly with all other marketing and sales efforts.”

Also in recent months, Lead Liaison enabled advanced security features to support evolving online privacy regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Their Sales Enablement solution debuted in December 2017.

Lead Liaison has not wavered in their core values of simplicity, personalized and intimate support, and flexibility. Clients continue to benefit from this clear focus, and that is represented in top ratings on esteemed software review sites such as Capterra and G2 Crowd. The company is forecasting 2018 revenue growth to be double that of 2017, another indicator of stability and growth for a company that plans to be a force in the sales and marketing automation industry for years to come.

To learn more about Lead Liaison’s innovative solutions, visit leadliaison.com.   

About Lead Liaison
Lead Liaison provides cloud-based sales and marketing automation solutions that helps businesses accelerate revenue by attracting, converting, closing and retaining more prospects. Filling a void in the small pool of marketing automation providers that focus on marketing-centric functionality, Lead Liaison gives equal focus to sales providing sophisticated visitor tracking and additional website engagement tools to boost sales effectiveness. Lead Liaison blends ease-of-use, a flexible business model, deep external integration, marketing across social, web, mobile, email and offline channels and powerful functionality, all specifically tailored for mid-sized businesses, into a single platform, called Revenue Generation Software®. Lead Liaison is headquartered in Dallas, Texas. For more information, visit http://www.leadliaison.com or call 1-800-89-LEADS (895-3237).

When Should a Startup Implement Marketing Automation Software?

When should a startup implement marketing automation? It’s a great question and we decided to answer it with 10 reasons every startup should implement marketing automation.

If you’re a startup you’ve got a lot of things on your mind. We totally understand, we were a startup once. We’ve been through the struggle, and it’s not easy. Fortunately we’re a bunch of sales and marketing-minded people that have an affinity for building cool software. We liken the Amazon model wherein they build solutions for themselves and then sell it. Amazon created their ecommerce platform for book sales, built out capacity, then began to lease that capacity to other businesses. Bang! The Amazon Web Services (AWS) offspring appeared. AWS is now the cash cow for Amazon, and they’re making billions from it. We’re not that greedy now…but we enjoy building software to help our company and then sharing the software with others, at very competitive rates – especially for startups.

If you’re an early stage startup with seed stage funding or Series A, or even B funding, and you haven’t implemented marketing automation yet – it’s time! Here are 10 reasons why a startup should implement marketing automation:

1) Implement scalability (ideal for future fundraising)

Startups typically have limited resources. Resources spanning from time, to humans, to money – there’s no doubt there’s a shortage for the average startup. It’s impossible to grow your business by adding more resources. In short, you’ve got to do more with the resources you have. You’ve got to be more efficient. Marketing automation is the means to scalability and efficiency.

2) Create a customer acquisition machine

Marketing automation has many offshoots, such as Lead Liaison’s Sales Enablement, which integrates with marketing automation and helps sales reps book more meetings. When sales automation and marketing automation work hand-in-hand it’s a customer acquisition machine. Wouldn’t it be nice if your startup can begin to forecast how many meetings and demos you can book with automation at the core to help book those meetings?

3) Emphasize sales and marketing (most startups are enamored with prod development)

It’s the classic example of the ostrich with their head in the sand. Startups have horse blinders on. They typically have a myopic view of their product/service that they’re creating. They want to perfect it. They spend countless hours tinkering, revising, tweaking…to no end. At some point you’ve got to draw the line in the sand, create your Minimum Viable Product (MVP), and go to market. Even if your product/service is not 100% ready you’ll be able to land some customers – which is gold for startups. Customers should define your product, not you.

4) Cost isn’t a barrier. Minimal upfront investment. Cash flow is critical.

You’re probably thinking you cannot afford marketing automation as a startup. Some companies, such as Lead Liaison, have specialized programs that offer qualifying startups a 90% discount on Services. Most companies can get a full sales and marketing suite of products for less than a few dollars a day. Stop eating out for lunch, pack a brown bag lunch, and use that money for a sales and marketing platform. Your brown bag lunch will buy you a digital sales rep and marketing assistant, another way to think about the software, which you won’t find on job sites for that kind of money!

5) Measure Efforts

What doesn’t get measured doesn’t get done. Whether you’re a startup or a large enterprise, this metaphor holds true. Track website visitors, form conversions, social media engagement, prospect engagement, qualified leads, and more. Start looking at your business from a holistic perspective with a lifecycle funnel that tracks prospects from anonymous through to customer and beyond. Spot check your growth or track trends over time as your database and business grow.

6) Gives investors visibility into your business.

So you got your funding. Maybe it’s an initial round or follow up round. As a startup one of the hardest things is to hold periodic meetings, prepare your data, present at the board meeting, etc. That’s time consuming and it can be a drag. It’s a heck of a lot easier if the data is prepared for you via an application. Alternatively, if you give your investors a login to your sales and marketing automation platform so they can see firsthand how their money is working for them.

7) Recover lost time.

Without marketing automation, or sales automation, you’re going to do a lot of things manually. Save yourself the pain of shopping for disparate email, form, landing page builders and bring a single platform into your company. As noted above, it’s about efficiency. If you can do less but accomplish more why wouldn’t you do it?

8) Attract new personnel.

As a startup it’s hard to recruit talent. There’s got to be something in it for new hires. As a company, you’ve got to give them a reason to want to work for you. A professional sales and marketing platform can make eyes glow. It’s a platform that can help attract talent. If they know you’re investing in your company and you care about sales and marketing, it makes a bold statement. Use marketing automation as a magnet and don’t look at it as a deterrent.

9) Care for your customers.

Startups don’t have a lot of customers, and most don’t have any as they’re just starting up. But once you get those customers you’ve got to take care of them. But, therein lies the conundrum! How can you care for your customers if you’re too busy creating your product/service. Take some of the pressure off by implementing client communication plans to nurture your new customers. They’ll appreciate it and you’ll build stronger relationships.

10) Get with the times.

Marketing automation is like CRM 10 years ago. It’s a necessary thing. If you meet a company these days that does not use marketing automation it makes you wonder what they’ve been doing. Also, most startups have much more mature competitors. Rest assured your competitors are using the latest and greatest tech. And rest assured they’ve paid a hefty price for it.

Thank the lucky stars that you’re a startup. Take advantage of your status, and sign up to marketing automation while you can get your discounts. To learn more about Lead Liaison’s Startup program click here. To refer a VC, incubator, accelerator, or University Startup Program to apply and help their startups click here.

Lead Liaison Webinar

PPC and Marketing Automation, Webinar Transcription

To watch “PPC and Marketing Automation” in its entirety, click here.

Summary

Google Ads Premier Partner, Ben Herman, and marketing automation expert, Chris Kipgen, team up to cover how using AdWords and marketing automation together can get you more conversions at the same or lower cost per acquisition.

Presenters

Ben Herman, Mad Fish Digital

Chris Kipgen, Lead Liaison

Transcription

*Please note that this content was presented live and then transcribed. It will read exactly as presented in the webinar. Welcome message and company introductions have been removed.

[Ben Herman:] The benefits of PPC and marketing automation includes covering the basics. You can quickly deliver a lot of traffic to test CTAs. So those are calls-to-action. That’s landing page optimization. Getting feedback and data on that and not real time but within about 24 hours depending on how much traffic you’re able to drive.

You’re also able to gather a ton of customer insights these days from AdWords alone as well as all the social platforms. But there’s demographic data, there’s a lot of age data. Things like that. So there’s a lot of ways to make decisions based on the data that comes back from paid search which makes it really great even if you just run small short campaigns to gather a lot of insight on your customers. And then also the ability to hyper-focus brand messaging and then segment your audiences across the board so that you can properly customize or tailor your messaging to each audience.

So the basics of paid search includes your clicks, you’ve got your impressions, your cost, your conversions, and your keyword position when it comes to– This is specific to like AdWords or Bing ads center any time we’re bidding on keywords essentially. There’s performance metrics for each of those. And so the next level of what we call the “Click through rate” the CTR, your conversion rate, and then your cost per acquisition. Those three are the drivers behind the success of any campaign. So we’re looking at all of those on the frontend before data even go in on the Lead Liaison platform.

And then of course there’s quality score and if anybody has managed a pay-per-click campaign, they understand that quality score is a big contributor. It’s part of the Google algorithm on the paid search side to help you get the best cost-per-click essentially. So you can have a lower cost if you have a higher quality score and that’s all based on relevance.

Basic lever for paid search would be click through rate. We approach all of our engagements, all of the campaigns, we optimize and manage on by starting on the simplistic level and then we kind of boil down to getting a little bit more complex. But on the high level, it starts through click through rate. That’s just your ad copy and really what that means is how effective is your ad copy. And the levers there are updating your ad copy or updating the bids.

The levers for quality score, all of it more complex but essentially, it’s going to be your ad relevance. So you can actually get a higher quality score by bidding on less keywords or more specific keywords in an ad group and then making sure that that keyword shows up in the ad headline. Again, not rocket science but time and time again when we go to optimizing campaign, we see ad groups that maybe have too many keywords or they don’t have ads that are relevant. Even if we’re trying to push a quality score from a 5 to a 6 or 6 to a 7, we always just go back to the fundamentals here of looking at ad copy and adjust enough.

The conversion rate. Conversions obviously are what we’re all going for. So the levers for conversion rate are pretty simple. What’s the call-to-action, where’s the placement of the form, what does the form look like? Is it three steps? Is it ten steps? What’s the time of day that we’re advertising? So some clients, the sweet spot between 6:00 AM and 11:00 AM in the morning, we tend to see that in like the healthcare side of the healthcare industries. And it becomes really important to make sure our ads are only showing during those key times of day where there’s a higher conversion rate. It can drop as much as half if you get to like 1:00 PM in those cases and then it’s not as effective for your ad spend.

So your driving conversions but not every completion of that transaction stage of that funnel is a sale, all right? And so what we considered the conversion as somewhere in the middle to the bottom of that transaction stage of the funnel. But we definitely understand that not everybody is going to purchase. So let’s say your conversion rate on a purchase is 3%, that means 97% of your visitors came and they were interested but they left. So what happens to them?

We want to make sure that if it’s not a sale or a purchase, we’re still capturing the data from that conversion. And that brings us to the micro versus macro conversions. And this is where Lead Liaison becomes really important. For the micro conversion, that would be any email or newsletter sign up, a gated content download or request for more information, schedule an appointment. Something that’s a little bit softer than somebody putting in their credit card and basically transacting at that moment.

These are all points where putting people into a marketing funnel and tagging and organizing them correctly is going to be imperative to future sales. So you maybe didn’t get the sale today but you didn’t lose the folks that came to your site. You get a higher conversion rate here. So let’s say you’re capturing extra 10 of these people. That’s 10 potential prospects you could keep warm or lukewarm as you kind of market them through or bring them through or nurture them through your sales cycle.

Then there’s the macro conversion which is what we all want in the end. So you’re trying to nurture people that didn’t maybe make it to the macro conversion right away. You’re trying to get them to the stage if they didn’t already get there. So that’s going to be your purchase. A webinar sign up for example, a request for quote, an account sign up, or a free trial set up. It’s basically considered.  Macro conversions are cash money essentially. That’s when somebody did what you wanted them to do that helps you grow your top line revenue or your sales.

You’ve got all these conversions coming through even on the sales, the data needs to go somewhere. And that’s Lead Liaison. So in this case, we’re sending traffic from multiple marketing channel. So that’s going to be your paid channel, your organic channel, paid social. There’s a lot of different avenues for folks to get to a landing page or parts of your site these days that becomes really important that you got your data organized correctly.

After the click, data sent to Lead Liaison and Lead Liaison does a great job. We like it for connecting visitor back to what’s called, “Their current session” but that’s basically somebody’s been navigating through a website and the correct tracking them in place, you can actually see in Lead Liaison what page has somebody viewed prior to the transaction as or conversion as well as what maybe they came back to your site later. So future sessions are really important especially for those long sales cycles. You can see who maybe signed up for some information today, and then when they come back in the future which makes it really great for kind of prioritizing prospects for a sales team.

Organizing the data up-front, it’s almost just as important as driving that traffic in the first place. We recommend every single client that we worked with that we make sure everybody’s using it – Google Tag Manager. It’s super easy to use. It’s one code snippet and then through tag manager, you use your analytics and any other tracking. That’s how we use Lead Liaison as we embedded it into the tag manager tag. And that allows basically non-programmers on our end to non-developers to interact in that tags to website and get the tracking in place. It saves a lot of cost to our clients because we don’t have to incur dev time. We don’t have to get on a dev schedule and there is almost little to no testing that needs to happen once basic tags are added.

There is still some check and balances that need to be there. It’s not just code it and load it. Google got the process streamlined. We use a methodology for labeling or naming your campaigns. It needs to have multiple kind of data points and a campaign name for you to bring it back to the importance or the contribution that that campaign is making to your overall lead funnel.

We always put the campaign name, the funnel position. Was it top, mid, or bottom? Right? If you think of that ACT example. Awareness would be top consideration and mid and then bottom is going to be the transaction. So that’s how somebody found you essentially. So were they doing a branded search? Somebody is searching for a brand name of your client then the bottom is typically where that person comes in. But if they are searching for a non-branded term, just a generic keyword that then brings at prospect to your brand for the first time. That’s going to be the top. So we consider that awareness. These are very important when you’re labeling your campaigns so you can organize the data when you’re tagging and sending follow up emails and nurturing people through the full process.

Geo target and focus of the campaign are important as well. For different national campaigns, it’s a little bit easier but when you start advertising or having different messaging or different campaigns running in different cities, especially like the higher education realm, it becomes necessary that those are properly labeled as well so you can identify back where this person came from. Maybe you didn’t capture that data bit on the landing page, maybe when they filled out the form there wasn’t a dropdown for what state are you coming from or what city or something like that. You want to be able to easily go back in the future and send messages to these people based on a certain geo area. Your campaign name is a great way to do that. And there’s some other tools in Lead Liaison that let you do that as well. But on the front end, this is what we recommend.

The benefits that we get from marketing automation and connecting it back with paid search campaigns, we can nurture long and short sales cycle, we can keep prospects. Basically keep the brands of our client top mind for their– For leads, prospects, for whoever their target audience is that they’re trying to get in front of. Cross promote products and services that works great for kind of even after the transaction, even after somebody has bought something with the number of services or new product that’s available that either complements or matches what they purchased.

And then it greatly improves the sales team’s efficiency so when we talk with sales reps and folks in the past they’ve talked with a lot of prospects that were not ready to transact with them or they weren’t far enough for long. They need more information and they’re kind of repeating a lot of efforts. They’re sending them the same info all the time. There’s always processes that they’re doing which are completely automatable in a sales conducive way. There’s still that personal touch to those emails that can be accomplished.

And so building a list that evangelizes your new site content, that’s great for you if you’re doing a lot of new blog post. You could send out the list to your people every week of like, “Here’s kind of a run down or our weekly digest.” We do things like that for our own clients just to stay in front and we get such positive feedback about that. Because people are just excited to hear what’s going on at the end of the story.

Healthcare, higher education, events and conferences are some of just the easiest one to wrap our heads around when it comes to marketing automation. You can also use it in sports parallel marketing. Marketing automation fits to just about any B2B or B2C sales cycle even if it’s short, even if it’s long.

In healthcare, it’s  great way for announcing new location, new services, and new specialists. Higher education, it’s great to keep top of mind because folks tend to be researching multiple colleges or advanced degree programs when they’re looking online. And so keep it in front of your folks that have expressed interest without having to use a lot of the rep’s time for follow up, can be really key for kind of nurturing people through each year cycle in some cases.

And then announcing campus visits, we see that all the time. It’s really nice when a rep is going to be going to a certain area and they don’t want to mingle around campus or set up a booth. They can do that but we want to let people know that they’re going to be there and it’s a great way to kind of take it from just the click to actual human contact there.

And then at events and conferences, you could be very flexible. And one of our favorite features is being able to streamline cross-device messaging. Which is fancy words for saying and utilize push notifications and text messages as well as email. When you let and people know everything from upcoming speaking events to room changes or breakout sessions. Different things that kind of happen along the way.

[Chris Kipgen:] For Lead Liaison, one of the first important points are pay-per-click and visitor tracking. So really what happens once they click on that link, it comes back to your website or even just click on a link in general in the case of Google AdWords. We’re also going to talk about ways that we could start to nurture the people who are coming from these ad clicks. There’s a couple different ways to do it and there’s several different ideas that we have. And therefore, so a lot of you are really getting into that automation keys.

Whenever the visitor clicks on the link in your paid advertisement, it’s going to redirect into our site. In the case of Google AdWords, we’re fully integrated with AdWords. We have a tracking URL that you put in to AdWords and that basically marks that link clicked and lets our system know that, hey someone has clicked on this particular ad. When it takes you back to website, we’re actually going to place that tracking cookie in their browser.

The tracking cookie allows us to remember our visitor from one visit to another and in just a second, we’re going to see how we’re able to remember someone whether they visit a geo six months ago, six days ago, and from the time that they come to your site to the time that they finally convert. And hopefully, eventually, we’ll actually get a sale or a demo or something equivalent out of that.

As they keep going through the cookie, we’re going to track every engagement that they do on your website and we’re going to put that into a really convenient timeline. You’ll see in just a second. But when they first get to our website, there’s a couple of things that we get just right off the bat. So using your reverse IP address lookup, we can get detailed information about the prospects location. In many cases, if that IP address is connected to your company, then we can also tell you what company is searching your site. And that’s really valuable to one of those organizations where you’re still doing a lot of outside sales and outside prospecting. It may at least give you a good idea of which company to start targeting. We can also tell you the type of browser and the type of device, if you’re kind of curious. We have more mobile users, we have computer users. We can see all of that just from their visit.

In the case of paid searches, we also capture the keywords. And in fact, we can even capture keywords from some organics or just depending on their search settings.

In Lead Liaison’s visitor tracking page, we just make sure that we have the right audience here on. With my example, you can see my visitor record that was on the page a little bit earlier today. So the system remembers me. We have me marked just as an employee type. That’s the purple dot is. As I go through here the page, you can see that we’re tracking things like the original lead source that came in firms so paid search would be what you would see from an ad click when they come in. In this case, this is PPC from Google, the internet service provider. I can see things like the site search terms that are in here and again, the state and country.

We actually have quite a few other pieces of information that we can choose from as well. If we’re connected to your CRM, we could tell you if they’re CRM or not. Their city. We do actually have a link for LinkedIn so it’ll actually take that prospects based on their company, their name. You can go to LinkedIn. Try to figure out who they are.

So a lot of really cool information that’s in there. You can also look into a  general overview of that visitor record. So when a visitor first comes in, they’re going to look like this. This is an anonymous profile. So on the visitor tracking page, they’ll be listed as anonymous. That means that they clicked on the ad and made it to your website. They just haven’t done anything to identify who they are.

When it comes down to it, there’s no magic sauce. A reverse IP lookup isn’t going to tell us who they are. But this is where we’re going to come in and start helping you figure out who they are piece by piece. So this is the webpage. We’ll first look at our first visit. So we have things like the company, we have the original lead source that’s in the record, we know the general location of the prospect as well. A cool thing I can do is I might want to see what they’ve been doing on my website once they came in. So I can see the website visit and their timeline here and if I wanted, I could actually get a quick instant replay to actually see the steps that they took on my website.

So they started on homepage and then they moved through a couple of product pages and then finally, the Contact Us page. So I can get an idea how serious is this person, how long was he spending on each page. It’s a nice little feature that we have in there.  Where Lead Liaison comes in, is going to be getting this anonymous profile to what we call, “a known profile”. So as they continue to stay on the website, we’re going to continue to track these engagements. In this case, you can see the anonymous profile.

He saw a few dialogues while he’s on the website. So a dialogue is a model or a kind of the old-fashioned term for that is a pop up that may come. In this case, this one says, “Hey sign up for our marketing automation playbook.” And this other subscriber engagement is a newsletter sign up. So just little things as he is browsing, going from page to page. We’re trying to get his attention and pull him in. And very briefly we’re going to switch back to the presentation over here.

And this would show you the other ways that we’re able to capture prospect’s information. So we can do that through the form of a one-to-one email. We have a couple plug-ins for Google Mail as well as for Outlook. You could send that email to your prospects maybe a prospecting email asking for a meeting. It’s kind of a first touch sort of thing. We’ll know if they click on the link in that email or not and we can actually pull in their email address and associate a tracking cookie that way. We can associate the tracking cookie through mass email. Classic used case would be a web form. So all of your forms could be integrated to Lead Liaison.

Marketing content in videos, both of these things can have an email that we are going to talk about in just a second. And then we have our product we call, “Site engage”. They’re popping up throughout the visitor’s engagements on the website.

The main thing when it comes to pay-per-click and these conversions is you want to make sure that that ad is taking them somewhere they’re going to convert. So a lot of times, I’ll see an ad taking prospects to the homepage. You can do things like send them to a landing page that maybe has a video about what you’re all about. Videos seem to have a very high conversion rate. Maybe you would take them to a page that has your product that they can download.

But we can use these pieces of content to actually capture the visitor’s information. Email gate and downloadable content is directed straight from our website. So if you were to go to our website right now, and we don’t already know who you are and you’re trying to download one of our web papers, we’re going to ask you to enter your email address received. There’s a couple ways to do this. You can also do a soft gate where you’ll have the option to skip this step if they don’t want to give their email.

So it’ll all going to depend on your client-base and on your general market if you feel like you need the hard gate or the soft gate. But this is a great way to convert someone and to get more information. And you know because they’re downloading your brochure. They’re downloading white paper you know they have some interest in the top they just downloaded. Also, on the right, we have a video with an email view. We have an integration through our partner Wistia.

Videos tend to have an extremely high conversion rate on them. Especially if you put that gate about 15% of the way through the video. So if it’s a 10-minute long video, about a minute and a half of the way through, clip that email gate in there. You’ll tend to have a higher conversion rate. So you get some people that see the first part they’re interested. We can say things like, “Hey if you’re interested, give us your information so we can send you a little more.”

So if anyone goes to our website and wants to view our previous webinar, we would be asking for their email. And the cool thing about it is remember, we actually know who that prospect is. Thanks to the tracking cookie in your browser. So if we have already converted them in the past, if we already know their email address, we’re not going to ask them again. We’re not going to bother them by having them enter their email a million different ways on your website. Once we know them, we know them.

And what would eventually happen with this prospect, let’s say they were to continue on down the cycle. Is eventually we’ll be able to convert them. So here is a converted profile. With this profile, we’ve identified their email address, their one form of capture or another. We’ll be able to capture their name, maybe we’d get that through your form submission but a cool feature of Lead Liaison, is once we get their email address, we’re going to scan social media. And we’re going to try to find their social media accounts that match up to that name. That match up to their email rather. And if we don’t already know their name, we can pull their name from social media, we can pull their job title, and we can pull a lot of stuff from there.

At the timeline, you’re able to see the engagements that they’ve had on your website. Right down to if they watched a video, how much is the video they watched, which parts they rewatched. We can see when they click down links and emails, every visit that they’ve had, what content they’ve downloaded. So it’s a great way of keeping them together.

We also have qualified them for you. We do scoring actions. We can score them every time they come to the website. We can also put in grading list. So based on their job title, based from their location, how much of a fit are they for your company. We can give them a grade from there. That way, to see prospects with the highest score and a high grade, you know that these are going to be worth going after compared to some of the others.

It’s a very valuable tool but through all of it, we’re always going to remember that original lead source, the pay-per-clicks. So even once they convert, even once they give their email and something else, when it comes to our live reporting, when it comes to just finding out where your prospects are coming from, we’re always going to remember the first way they came to your website. In the case of an ad click, we’ll always have it as the pay-per-click. So it’s a great tool for anyone who’s going to be making new set of paid advertisements.

We can use automations in combination with ad clicks in a few different ways. We can send buy signal alerts to our prospect owners. If we have a sales team and inside sales team or even an outside sales team. We can let them know, “Hey, someone has clicked on your ad.” They’ll get the alert right away. They can also know if that come from peak clicks so maybe from a known prospect instead of just an anonymous prospects. We can start tagging those prospects through segmentation so later on you might want to divide and specialized marketing to the people you know clicked on paid ads versus the people who have not clicked them paid ads.

And of course once we know them, once we have people converted, we have things like email nurture campaigns. So this could be your standard campaign where we send the email, we wait a week, we send another email, we wait a week. It’s a classic email campaign. Our marketing automation platform is omni-channel marketing.

We’re not limited to just email, we’re not limited to things like web forms and other inbound marketing. We can actually do things like direct mail, we can do things with hand-written letters, we can even send out text messages.

We also have what we call, “Behavior-based automation.” So this is triggered by the prospect taking new action. And in this case, we can actually say we want this to trigger based on the prospect clicking on an ad campaign. And I can even specify which campaign. These are all pulled in from Google AdWords. So I might say we have a search from 2014, this is a dummy account. Let’s say it’s a search made 2014 ad campaign. If the prospect clicks on the link in this campaign, then I’m going to take the actions well defined on the next page. I can also go down and I can narrow down further. So if I want it to only target people to certain area with a certain job title, with a certain annual income from other company, we have literally hundreds of ways of breaking down their criteria.

And as I get into the automations, I can choose any of the actions like from here. So again, the standard campaign, I can send the email, I can wait. Let’s say in this case five hours. I can send another email but I can do things too like add conditions. So I could say if this first email, say 4th of July email, I could add a condition saying if they click on the link in that first email, I’m going to send an email one and if they didn’t click the link, I’m going to send them email two. Or if I learn something else about them maybe if there are one industry, I send them one email. If they are in the other industry, I’ll send them another.

But these conditions are basically if then statements where we can build different branches into the automation. And heck I can go so far as to say, “Hey, they haven’t responded to the last five emails we’ve sent them.” So instead of sending an email then, I’m going to send a hand-written letter. And the neat thing about the hand-written letter is we actually will write that letter for you and we have really good handwriting by the way. So it’s not something you have to worry about there. Again we could send you alert, we can upgrade.

A lot of possibilities here. The last major piece is ROI reporting on paid search. So this is where we can start helping you on the backend. So it’s great that we’re tracking them. It’s great there we’re sending nurture out to them. But what are you getting out of all this is what comes down to this. This is where revenue appeals.

We have reports specifically based on AdWords ad clicks. The clicks, these are imported directly from AdWords. They know how many people have clicked on that ad. The cost is also directly imported from Adwords. Again, the cost is looking a little different because I think we only turned it on for two when we did this test. We also get the CPC or cost-per-click from an AdWords.

From there, we can tell you how many people in the system are associated with this particular ads. So how many people had visited your website that had clicked on this ad before. And then prospects, this will be people with their known email address. These are people that actually converted and their original lead source was the ad campaign. And from there, we’re actually able to tell you the cost per prospect. So we can take the initial cost divide it by the prospects and there’s your cost per prospect.

A good example of this is when I was working with a client a couple of months ago and he saw that he has an ad campaign. He’d spent roughly $10,000 on over the course of eight months. Added those $10,000 he only had a handful of converted prospects so yeah but 6,000 people visit his website and that’s okay but only a few of them actually converted. His cost per prospect was something to the effect of $80 per prospect. And that was insane to him as it used to be.

Versus a couple down, there was another ad campaign where he had spent a similar amount on it but it had a much higher conversion rate. And this case, he was actually taking them to a different part of his website and his cost per prospect was a much more reasonable $5-$6. So obviously, he pulled one ad campaign and started other ad campaigns instead. It’s great information, its great insight for you.

If you’re using Salesforce.com or Microsoft dynamics, we also have very deep connectors with them into their CRMs. So we can take it a step further and we can also tell you how many opportunities are associated with prospects that would come in from these campaigns. We can tell you the cost per opportunity and the total value and then finally, we can tell you your revenue and your total ROI. So we’ll use the revenue as your cost– Or the revenue likely cost and that’s where you’ll get your ROI percentage from. And the idea here is you want to have a very high ROI. I think we can all agree that that’s the end rule marketing that’s going to get ROI on it.

And we can go a little further than this too. Not only can we look at the individual ads but we can also look at keywords. So in this case, I can see the keywords for the people who are looking– The people that I have my one opportunity with $17,000 here, they had searched for visitor tracking stuff were Egypt. So for whatever reason, I now know that I have people looking for visitor tracking software in Egypt. You know it. I’m getting opportunities out of them.

So maybe I’m going to expand my location in Egypt a little bit more. Maybe I can focus more ad revenue there. Create some personalized content for it. That in a nutshell, are a few of the things that Lead Liaison can do in combination with AdWords. So there’s a lot to it there. Hopefully you saw similarly neat ideas or new– Or come up with something you might want to try a little later on.

Q&A

Q: Is there a threshold for visitor tracking? So how many sessions can it record?

So for visitor tracking, we do not have a set threshold. So we don’t cut it off after a hundred visitors or anything to that effect. We have some clients where we’re tracking hundreds of visits per day and remember, we’re tracking every unique visitors. So even if we don’t know who they are already, if they’re just anonymous, we’re still going to be tracking that. So again, no major limit to it. There might be some stipulations in the license where we’ve agreed on a certain number of visitors per day but that would have been done beforehand when we were analyzing your website for the amount of traffic. So we customize it to your site but we’ll never cut it off, we’ll never stop tracking people, we’ll never say no if you have too many.

Q: In regards to prospect profile, can you manually add it? The score. I think there is this score up there I think the one that you showed was about a thousand. Can you change that based on your business?

Yes. So there’s a couple ways of changing the scores. So first off, you can change the baseline scoring. When I say baseline scoring, I’m talking about each individual engagement that we have in there. So as for example, website visit would be a 10 points normally for your organization, you make it a ton of visits. You might want to lower that to 5 points from the baseline tracking just as one example.

You can change it for a particular prospect just like going in their profile and actually changing the score. And then you can also come up with custom scoring list. You might have a combination of engagements instead of just one engagement that you think has a closer buying signal and you’re able to do that for sure.

Q: Do you track multiple score touchpoints?

Multiple source touchpoint. So we will attribute the original lead source to whatever the first ones they come in on because we feel it’s very important. So let’s say they start with your website by clicking on an advertisement. Even if six months later they convert from watching your video, they’ve have a million different sort of visits, we know that it’s still very important to say, “Hey, this first one is how they’ve heard about you.” But we do track all of their different touchpoints. We do have other reporting or a live report so you can see how your different campaigns and different pieces of content have been effective.

Q: Is visitor tracking IP or cookie related?

It can be either. Normally, it’s going to be through a tracking cookie in the browser. And that’s going to be by far the most accurate way to make sure that it’s the same visitor coming through. We do realize in some locations, we have a lot of European clients. We do realize that cookies are a little bit stricter over there so we do have the option of doing IP tracking only. Which will use a combination of the IP address and browser session information to making connection with the prospect.

Q: With people using a private page on a web browser, are they being tracked as well?

Yes they are. Because there’s no cookies on a private page like for an incognito mode in Google Chrome for instance. Since that is a cookie-free sort of browser, when they come in, they would pop up as a new anonymous profile. However, if they did a conversion action like they put their email address in or anything else, we would then know that that session belongs to that prospect and we will put it into the appropriate profile.

Q: So you mentioned the ability to send text messages. Is that in the automation tab of Lead Liaison?

The text messages are done via a web hook with Twilio. So it’s actually going to be under settings app set up and web hooks you created there. The prerequisite for that is you would have to have your Twilio account and get the web hook information from them. If you would like to set that up or would like more information, you can send an email to support@Lead Liaison.com. They would be more than happy to give you the documentations and detailed instructions.

And then once you get that set up, then you can all as part of the automation. So it would be in the automation area once you’ve completed the set up. Once the web hook is set up, then in the automation there is a seen web hook action. So just like you saw over the emails you just drag over the web hook action and that would tell our system to send the text message over the Twilio and that would send the text out. And the cool thing is, those text do support data merge fields just like emails do so it can be personalized down to the individual person’s name, company, and such.

Q: Can Lead Liaison be used in place of email marketing platform?

Yes. That’s actually a major part of our platform. It’s built into it so when you set up with us through marketing automation, we set you up and records just like you would with a platform such as Woodpecker. We do email templates, we’re able to handle the bulk sending. Some of our larger clients were looking at sending out hundreds of thousands of emails per month. So we’re able to handle that with no problem.

The neat thing about using us for your email marketing is then all of those emails are tracked within Lead Liaison. So the emails opened are tracked, if they clicked on the link on the email, that’s tracked, it’s scored. So it’s really neat, it is for full email marketing platform but it’s combined with marketing automation into one seamless experience.

Q: Who is your target customer for Lead Liaison? For example, what is the typical ad spending out organization size of client who then purchase Lead Liaison?

I would say we take all. That’s going to be a really general question. So I think any customer is a target customer for Lead Liaison. I see ways that we can help businesses of all sizes. We currently and manage a lot of the client relation side of Lead Liaison and we’ve got clients from very small companies to very very large companies. And implementation is about the same across the board and I see help going in all different direction. So I would say there’s really not a target. So they’ve signed on with Lead Liaison, I can tell you from the accounts that I’ve worked with, the accounts that I’ve managed, I think my smallest account, they have something to the effect of like 500 prospects or even that. And they’re sending emails out of it and then I have other accounts where again, we’re talking about sending hundreds of thousands of pieces of content out on a monthly basis.

We have one just yesterday, I was helping them out with something that, email as going out to 75,000 prospects of one. So we really do have everyone from like small small businesses where there is like four or five people in an office all the way up to enterprise level. Where we have huge number of employees so we can support really just about anything there. Of course we do different marketing efforts for those different kinds. But that’s the great thing about marketing automation is it’s no extra work for us. We just put the content in and the system is able to sort it from there.

 

Interested in the solutions that you heard about in this webinar? Request a personalized demonstration today!

 

Marketing Automation Gone Wrong – Turn Your Cons To Pros

Marketing automation helps with three most-wanted things; speed, personalization, and better reach. But, if not done right, all of your marketing efforts can fire back pretty bad. Here are the most common mistakes that marketers do in automating their marketing efforts and how to avoid them.  

Reaching Out To Wrong People at Wrong Time

One of the most common drawbacks of marketing automation is that your subscribers get more emails than they may want. And if you are being just another “spammer” who sends all sorts of emails to all of your subscribers, they are most likely going to unsubscribe from your communications, or your marketing automation provider or ESP will put a stop to it.

Irrelevant offers, no matter how cool they are, don’t attract the customers. Make sure that you are reaching out to the right customers and at right time with a relevant message.

Personalization Not Done Right

Personalization goes way beyond the general interests of your customers. It is important to keep a close track of your subscribers’ online journey and trigger multiple marketing channels including emails, direct mail and personalized website content while making them highly relevant.  

Let us explain this with an example: suppose a customer buys a product or solution from you. It is highly likely that the customer may want to buy more items related to the orininal product/solution. It is important to let your customer know about other interesting solutions you have available, along with any special discounts and offers.  

Not Allocating Proper Budget/Resources

Automation does all kinds of amazing things, yet a few people expect to gain big results by investing nothing other than money. Keep in mind that a credible automation platform may cost you between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars. But, you also need to gauge how much time you have to invest in learning the platform and populating it with amazing content. The more you invest, the better results you get. 

Automating Every Single Thing

Automation is good as it saves a lot of your time and resources. But don’t automate every single thing Automating campaigns and social media is good, but you will need to invest one-on-one time to engage with clients once they interact with your automations. There are many examples when companies turned all the odds into opportunities by prudently using the social media. Engage with your audience! 

Final Words

Marketing automation is a powerful car, but it needs a driver. Make sure that you are ready to commit to marketing automation as a strategy, not just a solution. 

 

Guest Post Bio:

Andrew Lowen is the CEO of Next Level Web, a trusted marketing agency based in San Diego, California. He has three lovely daughters and the most patient wife of all time. They specialize in Web Design, Search Engine Optimization, PPC Advertising, and Email Marketing (The Agency – not the daughters… yet). See case studies & results of happy clients at www.NextLevelWeb.com.

Pay-Per-Click and Marketing Automation Event with Lead Liaison and Mad Fish Digital

Allen, TX – The numbers are in for the Pay-Per-Click + Marketing Automation webinar, hosted last week by Lead Liaison and Mad Fish Digital. Lead Liaison saw an increase in registration and attendance of more than 300 percent against prior events. This increase in interest is likely due to the quality of both hosts’ history of webinars, as well as the topic discussed.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and its relationship with marketing automation are both topics that the majority of businesses are eager to learn more about. Oftentimes the two topics are thought of as separate solutions, but are more effective when used together. Hosts Ben Herman from Mad Fish Digital, and Chris Kipgen from Lead Liaison, unpacked the information in a way that was both insightful and actionable.

Seventy-three percent of the webinar attendees said that they currently use paid advertising for their marketing efforts, but only 22 percent of attendees were tracking those efforts using marketing automation. The presenters used this information to tailor the presentation to fit the needs of the audience. It was clear that most attendees needed to better understand the relationship between the two strategies, which is what the hosts focused on.

“I had a great time with Chris talking about digital paid advertising and marketing automation,” says Herman. “The audience had some great questions, and I was glad that we could shed some light on how Mad Fish Digital strategies and the Lead Liaison platform work hand in hand.”

Mad Fish Digital, a digital marketing agency based in Portland, OR, discussed how to harness paid search, and how to keep a handle on the levers a company can control as it relates to PPC. Herman explained the difference between micro and macro conversions, and how to organize the data “after the click.”

Lead Liaison, a sales and marketing solutions provider based in Dallas, TX, went even further to map out the relationship with PPC and their legion of sales and marketing solutions. Kipgen demonstrated how to nurture leads that are a result of an ad click, as well as how to calculate and track AdWords ROI and costs per Prospect.

“I was really pleased at the level of engagement during this webinar,” says Kipgen. “I could tell that our audience was very interested in what we were talking about, and I think that it really inspired folks to get out there and accomplish their sales and marketing goals.”

To view a recording of the webinar, visit this webpage. And, to make sure you don’t miss out on the next webinar register for updates here.

About Lead Liaison
Lead Liaison provides cloud-based sales and marketing automation solutions that helps businesses accelerate revenue by attracting, converting, closing and retaining more prospects. Filling a void in the small pool of marketing automation providers that focus on marketing-centric functionality, Lead Liaison gives equal focus to sales providing sophisticated visitor tracking and additional website engagement tools to boost sales effectiveness. Lead Liaison blends ease-of-use, a flexible business model, deep external integration, marketing across social, web, mobile, email and offline channels and powerful functionality, all specifically tailored for mid-sized businesses, into a single platform, called Revenue Generation Software®. Lead Liaison is headquartered in Allen, Texas, near Dallas. For more information, visit http://www.leadliaison.com or call 1-800-89-LEADS (895-3237).

What’s the difference between marketing automation and sales enablement?

What’s the difference between marketing automation and sales enablement? On the surface, the two solutions seem very similar; however, they serve different purposes. In this article we’ll compare and contrast marketing automation with sales enablement.

Primary User

The first difference is with the primary user. Sales enablement is used by sales people whereas marketing automation is used by marketers. Now, don’t get me wrong – sales enablement can be used by people in roles outside of sales, but we’re talking about the primary user here. Marketing automation is more advanced than sales enablement and is designed to meet the demands of different types of sophisticated marketing campaigns. For example, marketing automation actions can have different business logic (rules) wrapped around the actions while sales enablement actions have no additional criteria. Marketing automation also has a number of different action types, such as the ability to change field values, delete records, sync records to a CRM, distribute leads, and more. On the other hand, sales enablement has only a handful of actions commonly used by sales people when doing outreach, such as emails, handwritten letters, text messages, and postcards.

Where Do the Emails Come From?

The second difference between marketing automation and sales enablement is the way that email messages are sent. With marketing automation, emails are sent through the marketing automation provider’s network. Emails sent through sales enablement are sent through the company’s email server. This is typically an Exchange server, Google, Office 365, etc. With sales enablement businesses have more control over their messages, typically better deliverability, and optional unsubscribe text in the emails.

Email Tracking Differences

The third major difference between sales enablement and marketing automation is the level of email tracking. Marketing automation solutions typically track opens and clicks; however, they do not typically detect when someone replies to an email. On the contrary, sales enablement solutions can detect replies, out of office notifications, forwards, and more – making it easy to automatically take action based on this outcome. With sales enablement, people can be automatically removed from the flow when they reply to a message or the conversation can be paused for a defined period when an out of office occurs. With marketing automation, prospects need to be manually removed, or removed with an automated action, if they need to be pulled out of a workflow. Ideally, your marketing automation platform is used for building an already established relationship; whereas sales enablement is ideal for creating brand new relationships. As a result, the need to manually remove people from a marketing automation workflow is much lower if the focus is on building an existing relationship.

Who You’re Targeting

This is a great segue into the last difference between the two systems, which is who the solution targets and where the solution is used in the overall buyer’s journey. Because of its simplicity and sales-friendly setup, sales enablement is ideally suited to fill the top of the funnel. Relationships are usually not forged yet at this stage, and sales enablement can help build those connections. Companies with an inside sales team, business development reps, or reps focusing on major accounts will benefit from using sales enablement. Marketing automation is ideal for people in the middle or bottom of the funnel, when a relationship already exists. Since communication is sent out through the providers network its important to follow the providers rules and sending policies, and send to only prospects with whom you have a relationship with who want to get your email. With sales enablement, emails go through your company’s servers. How you send messages and to whom is up to you.

In Summary

Feel free to use the below summary to forward to your friends and colleagues to help them better understand the differences between marketing automation and sales enablement.

For a demonstration of Lead Liaison’s solution to sales enablement and/or marketing automation click here. Also, learn more about marketing automation strategies here and learn more about sales enablement strategies here. If you care about account based marketing, this strategy will be helpful to beef up on too!

Hope this helps!

Marketing automation:

  • is used by marketers
  • is intended for middle to bottom of the funnel people
  • is perfect for nurturing warm prospects, building stronger relationships, onboarding/upselling customers
  • delivers emails through Lead Liaison’s network
  • requires a process to be setup to remove people from an automation
  • emails require an unsubscribe link

Sales enablement :

  • is used by sales
  • is intended for top of the funnel sales activities
  • is perfect for Account Based Marketing (ABM) and prospecting
  • sends emails through your company’s email server
  • automatically removes people that reply from any automated communication stream (Lead Liaison Rhythms™)
  • emails do not require an unsubscribe link
  • is a platform to set sales goals

How to Use PPC and Marketing Automation Together, Webinar Hosted By Lead Liaison and Mad Fish Digital

Allen, TX – Google AdWords Premier Partner, Ben Herman, and marketing automation expert, Chris Kipgen, will team up to cover how using AdWords and marketing automation together can achieve more conversions at the same or lower cost per acquisition. The webinar will be held on Wednesday, January 24th at 1pm Eastern. Attendees can register for the event here.

Mad Fish Digital’s Ben Herman has a rich history of using and helping customers implement pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, with a concentration on Google search. He is the President and Co-Founder of Mad Fish Digital, a digital marketing agency based in Portland, OR. Lead Liaison’s Chris Kipgen is an industry expert, who is responsible for providing in-depth training and support for clients using the company’s sales and marketing automation solutions.

“At Mad Fish Digital, our mission is to provide marketers innovative solutions to the digital puzzle. I’m excited to be a part of this webinar because connecting Lead Liaison with paid search advertising platforms does just that. By combining the power of paid advertising with the marketing automation of Lead Liaison, marketers have an opportunity to optimize for the entire customer journey and smoothly facilitate leads through the entire marketing funnel.”

During this webinar, participants will hear how different industries use PPC campaigns, learn best practices and common pitfalls, and learn how to manage PPC campaigns in a marketing automation platform, such as Lead Liaison. Attendees will also learn tips and tricks on how to organize and educate hot leads throughout the entire buyer’s journey. Finally, attendees will gain actionable ideas to help implement these practices within their own organizations.

“AdWords is a great tool to get people to your content,” says Lead Liaison’s Chris Kipgen. “We come in at that point and help our clients identify, qualify, and nurture those Prospects. We can even show you which ads have generated the most revenue and the cost per qualified Prospect. If you want to get value out of your paid ads, Lead Liaison is the way to go.”

To register for this educational webinar, visit this webpage.

About Lead Liaison
Lead Liaison provides cloud-based sales and marketing automation solutions that helps businesses accelerate revenue by attracting, converting, closing and retaining more prospects. Filling a void in the small pool of marketing automation providers that focus on marketing-centric functionality, Lead Liaison gives equal focus to sales providing sophisticated visitor tracking and additional website engagement tools to boost sales effectiveness. Lead Liaison blends ease-of-use, a flexible business model, deep external integration, marketing across social, web, mobile, email and offline channels and powerful functionality, all specifically tailored for mid-sized businesses, into a single platform, called Revenue Generation Software®. Lead Liaison is headquartered in Allen, Texas, near Dallas. For more information, visit http://www.leadliaison.com or call 1-800-89-LEADS (895-3237).

Nonprofits and Marketing Automation: Omni-Channel Fundraising

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!

Marketing Automation with Squarespace

Marketing automation with Squarespace is easy to do when you connect two systems together, specifically – your website and marketing automation platform. As a standalone solution, Squarespace is a fantastic, cost effective way to build and manage your businesses website. However, without connecting it to a marketing automation platform you won’t be able to take advantage of data you collect on your website and run effective marketing campaigns with that data. Two important integration points are website traffic and form collection.

Lead Liaison provides a marketing automation platform that integrates these two areas, among others, with Squarespace. Customer’s using Squarespace as their website platform can easily add a few lines of JavaScript code into the footer or header of their Squarespace website. Once done, the marketing automation platform will begin tracking visitor activity, including names of businesses and people (something Google Analytics cannot do), and build rich profiles of visitor activity. As the system monitors visitor engagement, such as pages visited, documents downloaded, videos watched, on-site search terms, button/link clicks, and much more, a robust profile is created. This information is valuable insight that sales reps can use when contacting their prospect or following up website visitors. Marketers can also use this information for analytics, to gage how effective their Squarespace website is.

Web forms are another area where marketing automation platforms like Lead Liaison and Squarespace integrate. In Lead Liaison, users can build and style smart web forms and easily embed those into their Squarespace page. The smart web forms can pre-fill data, use advanced features like progress profiling, and most importantly easily capture the lead and/or inquiry and add it to your CRM. With the marketing automation platform, businesses can easily wrap critical business processes around the form submission. For example, lead distribution, lead qualification, lead follow up, and lead nurturing are all processes that can be built and automated using the marketing automation platform.

Once the marketing automation does it’s job of turning the Squarespace website from a static platform into an inbound marketing machine, marketers can use the rich data collected to run sophisticated outbound marketing campaigns. Instead of using basic email integrations with Squarespace, such as Mailchimp, for outbound communication, marketers can now leverage the true power of a modern day outbound marketing platform to run their campaigns. Marketing automation platforms like Lead Liaison help deliver omni-channel communications. Omni-channel communication includes both offline and online marketing channels. Instead of relying only on email, marketers can easily send handwritten letters, postcards, text messages, and more as one-off campaigns to select prospects, or as part of an advanced automated campaign. Imagine hooking up marketing automation with Squarespace and being able to automate a process around a web form submission. For example, the visitor comes to your Squarespace website, submits a form, gets an immediate response, gets sent to the right sales rep at the right time, then gets nurtured on behalf of the sales rep (because they’re not quite ready to buy – a common occurrence!). All of these things are possible when you connect your Squarespace website with a marketing automation platform like Lead Liaison.

One final area of integration is with dynamic content. Lead Liaison provides a solution called SiteEngage™, which adds a level of higher engagement to your Squarespace website. With this solution, businesses can tailor embedded content (images/text) on their Squarespace site to the visitor’s interests. For example, changing a text headline stating that your company loves working with people in the visitor’s state. Since your marketing automation platform will know where the visitor is from, this information can be used to personalize the website experience. The other benefit of making your Squarespace website dynamic with SiteEngage™, is with popups. In addition to smart web forms, Lead Liaison can use pop ups to help convert more visitors to your Squarespace website. These pop ups can use information on the visitor, like the state mentioned above, to tailor the content in the pop up. Pop ups can be trigger by button clicks, page scrolls, exit intent (closing the browser or hitting the back button), and page clicks.

To learn more about how you can integrate your Squarespace website with a marketing automation platform like Lead Liaison contact us today!