Tag Archive for: Marketing Automation

Lead Liaison

What is Marketing Automation and Should You Care?

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What is Marketing Automation and Should You Care?What is marketing automation anyways? Companies need to look for ways to develop marketing strategies in the highly competitive business world today and produce satisfactory results. Studies have shown that companies who have achieved high annual revenue and return on marketing investment were four times more likely to implement market automation.

When it’s time to make a strong business case to upper management for implementing marketing automation solutions, it helps to understand where the benefits can be achieved and what functions can be performed. Before we discuss the tangible and intangible benefits, let’s take a look at what marketing automation means.

Basically, marketing automation is software that automates marketing processes such as defining, scheduling, tracking and creating marketing campaigns.

The benefits to a company are listed below.

Marketing Automation Benefits

● Improved engagement with customers and prospects resulting in more deepened relationships.
● Repetitive tasks reduced so the marketing team can focus on marketing strategy.
● Improved customer satisfaction and retention resulting in quality of sales being improved.
● Reduced costs and increased productivity.
● A marketing strategy can be reviewed and approved through an automation process resulting in quick decisions.
● Marketing campaigns can be stored in a centralized system for easy access to all team members.

There are many functions that can be performed by market automation. Let’s focus on what these functions can do for your company.

Marketing Automation Functions

● Lead Management – This process can score prospects and move them up and down in the sales funnel based on who they are and what they do. Only the best leads will be passed to the sales team thereby reducing time wasted on customers who are not ready to buy.
● Build Emails – Emails can be automatically created using a database of customers and delivered at the ‘right time’ based on their behaviour on social media or visits to your web pages.
● Track Marketing Campaigns – By tracking results of phone or email campaigns you can improve the ones that work and abandon the ones that fail.
● Provide Metrics – Reports can be created to provide for strategic planning. Metrics can be obtained from your website by looking at who is visiting your site, what pages they are visiting and what actions they are taking.
● Data Collection – Data can be collected from numerous databases to effectively target customers.
● Automate Inquiries – Processes can be put in place to handle sales inquiries and comments. Faster response times will increase conversion rates.
● Customer profiling – Data can be gathered for a campaign based on demographics such as geography, age, gender, interests, etc.

Marketing automation technology is here to stay. It has become a critical component for organizations and it will be very difficult to compete without it.

We encourage you to learn more about how Lead Liaison’s Revenue Generation Software™ provides marketing automation technology that harnesses the benefits and functionality mentioned above.

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Using Marketing Automation with Customers

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Using Marketing Automation with CustomersLooking for happy customers? The solution is not that far away. Marketing automation technology has many use cases. Businesses often think about using marketing automation as a prospecting tool. Why not use marketing automation with existing customers? Creating new clients is very challenging not to mention expensive. When you break down the numbers new customer acquisition costs can be very high. See how expensive it is to acquire your new customers by using this tool from Panalysis. Once you see how expensive it is to obtain new customers you’ll realize that keeping them is vital to the health of a business. Customer retention is even more important for businesses that have a subscription-based business model. Subscription-based businesses are faced with the challenge of keeping their customers happy through the entire term of the relationship, not just in the beginning. Waiting until renewal time to contact your subscription client is bad business. Marketing automation helps businesses stay in touch with their customers, keep relationships warm and keep communication levels high. This makes perfect sense, but it’s near impossible for companies to do without the proper tools.

I bet 80% to 90% of all business make the sale and move into a completely reactive mode, responding only to customer support inquiries. A paradigm shift is necessary for companies with a reactionary model. They’ve got to start thinking about proactive communication. The purpose is not to add administrative overhead, but to reduce risk of customer churn. Also consider the benefit of

• Up-selling customers by keeping them updated on new products or services,
• gaining referrals from customers as they’ll now be keeping your top of mind,
• accelerating word of mouth marketing as customers can forward informative content to their colleagues, industry contacts and friends,
• educating your customers with new product information and/or ways they can get the most out of your product by tapping into features they may not be aware of,
• brokering communication with your clients which fosters feedback and product growth,
• training customers using methodical, automated communication that ties in lessons, delivered via email, quizzes delivered via surveys and answers delivered via email

Marketing automation technology can also help you create a risk score for your clients. A risk score serves as a key indicator of the likelihood your client will stay or leave. If there’s a low lead score then you’ve got reason to be concerned; however, if there’s a high lead lead score you’ve got reason to feel good about keeping your customer. Lead scoring can take into account the recency of activity. For example, if the client has not recently logged in, watched a webinar, downloaded a document or engaged with your brand in over six months they might be losing interest.

We hope you put these tips to good use and use marketing automation with your customers. Not using marketing automation technology yet? Try Lead Liaison’s Revenue Generation Software™ and start creating happy customers today.

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Closed Loop Marketing Automation

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Closed Loop Marketing AutomationWe’re doing many presentations with new prospects these days. One of the most challenging terms for many of them to grasp is the concept of closed loop marketing automation. The idea of a “closed-loop” is especially confusing for companies using email marketing as their primary (and usually only) marketing solution. Traditional email marketing solutions do not give companies and their sales and marketing team a deep level of insight into prospect activity. Consequently, sales people only see present activity and have no way of closing the loop on prospect’s other activities.

Closed-loop marketing automation is the process of identifying a prospect’s, customer’s, competitor’s or partner’s past, present and future engagement with your brand and tying that activity to the first step (lead source) and last step (revenue) in your revenue cycle. Past activity could be anonymous website visits, present activity could be real-time lead scanning to identify who’s on your website and what they’re interested in and future activity could be future website visits. Once a lead converts (changes from unknown/anonymous to known – we have a name) closed-loop marketing automation can associate past, present and future activity with the known person.

Let’s look at a simple example of Tom who is an IT manager at Microsoft. Suppose Tom is interested in finding IT solutions for Microsoft’s IT network and begins his research online – where most B2B buyers start. Let’s also assume your company’s name is IT ‘R US and you’re selling IT solutions and using Lead Liaison for your closed-loop marketing automation system.

1. Tom types “Intel Hyper Thread Servers” into a Google search and sees a Google PPC ad for “IT Solutions” from IT ‘R US. He clicks on the link. Lead Liaison automatically tracks the Lead Source as PPC, adds the prospect to the “November Marketing” Program and “Google PPC – IT Solutions” Campaign and tracks the keywords Tom used to find the Google PPC listing.
2. Tom clicks four pages during the same visit then moves on to his next search. He never fills out a web form. Lead Liaison automatically tracks Tom’s pages viewed, how long Tom spent on the site, his status (online/offline/chatting/exact page he’s viewing) in real-time and much more.
3. Tom comes back six days later and visits IT ‘R US’ website again. This time he views five pages and finds an article named “Are Your IT Solutions Up to Snuff?” The article leads Tom to a landing page where he downloads a checklist document. Tom fills out the short form to get the document. Lead Liaison knows the same visitor six days ago was Tom and associates his present visit with his past visit to compile a holistic view of Tom’s interest. As an added benefit – Lead Liaison allowed IT ‘R US to visually build the web form and landing page in less than 60 seconds by dragging/dropping items. Lead Liaison’s tracking technology changes Tom’s name from “Anonymous” to “Tom Sanders”. All other form field information such as company name, email, etc. is captured, tracked and tied to his profile.
4. Tom is still not ready to speak with a sales person at IT ‘R US yet so he waits five more days and visits IT ‘R US’ website one more time. Once again, Lead Liaison tracks this activity (future activity) and associates it with Tom’s profile.
5. When Tom finally reaches out to IT ‘R US the IT ‘R US sales person will have lots of information on Tom before they speak. The sales person will know what Tom was looking for (search words – “Intel Hyper Thread Servers”), what interests Tom (pages viewed), what documents Tom has (landing pages and forms submitted) and now understands how Tom engaged with IT ‘R US. Marketing also benefits by being able to measure the impact of their contributions (marketing ROI).

Marketing delivered sales a wealth of pre-sales information, sales was more effective in their sales cycle and Lead Liaison’s Revenue Generation Software™ provided organizational efficiency and sales effectiveness. Check back next week and we’ll publish part two of closed-loop marketing automation which will expand on the use case above.

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Marketing Automation Vendors

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Marketing Automation VendorsIf you’re researching marketing automation vendors then you’ve found the right spot. Marketing automation helps companies drive revenue by converting leads into customers. It’s a necessary technology to be competitive; however, vendor selection is not easy. The marketing automation space is growing rapidly – double digit growth year-over-year. Vendors of all types are clamoring to get into the space. All in all, there have been over 100 companies reportedly classified as “marketing automation vendors”. With all these choices, how can you decide?

Marketers have never been faced with the challenge of making a major software purchase. The plethora of choices makes this software purchase even more difficult. To put this into perspective, if a marketer spent two hours researching each vendor they’d spend 200 straight hours, or a little over a month, tied up in vendor analysis. By all means, let us make the decision simple for you. Here are a few reasons why companies of all sizes choose Lead Liaison:

Why companies choose Lead Liaison…

1. Flexible business model with no limitations
2. Hands down the easiest user interface and user experience
3. Best-in-class CRM integration
4. Optimized for marketing *and* sales
5. Breadth of platform
6. True real-time performance
7. Post-sales experience
8. Best-in-class technology

Here’s a shortlist of the top marketing automation vendors. We’ll keep this list updated as new vendors come online:

List of Marketing Automation Vendors (in Alphabetical Order)

1. Act-On
2. Aprimo
3. Eloqua
4. Etrique
5. Genius
6. Genoo
7. Hubspot
8. Infusionsoft
9. LeadFormix
10. Lead Liaison
11. LeadLife Solutions
12. Leadmaster
13. Loopfuse
14. Manticore
15. Marketo
16. Neolane
17. Net-Results
18. Optify
19. Pardot
20. Silverpop

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Revenue Generation Software is Red Hot

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Revenue Generation Software is Red HotRevenue Generation Software may be the best thing you’ve never heard of. It’s a sales and marketing engine that’s loaded with fuel, ready for the ride of its life. Now is the right time and right environment for marketing technology to step up. In this article we cover why there’s a red hot market for marketing platforms like Lead Liaison’s and a huge opportunity for marketers to continue to reap rewards of these emerging solutions for years to come.

Three primary events are lighting fire to the space:

• Marketing budgets are on the rise
• The technology is extremely disruptive
• Data is finally easily accessible and abundant

Firstly, marketing budgets are on the rise. According to Gartner, In 2011 B2B marketing budgets as a percentage of revenue were three times higher than IT budgets. Gartner reported marketing budgets at 10 percent relative to IT budgets at 3.6 percent. In 2012 marketing budgets will grow faster than IT budgets according to Gartner. IT budgets will grow 4.7 percent, all marketing budgets are predicted to grow 9 percent and high tech marketing budgets are expected to increase 11 percent. Looking five years out:

By 2017, a CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO. – Laura McLellan, Gartner Group

Secondly, Revenue Generation Software is a disruptive technology. It forces companies to think about what matters most – revenue – and how they generate and measure performance around it. It gets companies to think about the transformation of a sales cycle into a revenue cycle. It brings sales, marketing and executive teams together to map out their processes for driving revenue. Marketing platforms that drive and measure revenue are here to stay.

Thirdly, marketing data is growing at a rapid pace. Compounded by changes in buying behavior – sales and marketing is forced to change the way they traditionally operated to better interact with data and prospects. As marketing databases grow there’s an opportunity for better transparency and usability of that data. CRMs make good use of data for sales people by acting as a system of record for the pipeline and the funnel; however, there is no equivalent for marketing. A layer of technology around marketing data helps to analyze data and create automated processes. With Revenue Generation Software businesses can finally leverage data for the benefit of driving marketing insights and measuring downstream prospect/client activities against their marketing spend.

Here’s a snippet from Ajay Agarwal, managing director at Bain Capital Ventures’, that highlights four primary causes of data growth. Ajay talks about how the web is a catalyst for the availability of data which fosters the perfect environment for marketers to leverage software as a service (SaaS) solutions like Lead Liaison.

Primary Causes of Marketing Data Growth – Ajay Agarwal

As more and more businesses across all sectors of the economy move to the web, this kind of data — and a massive amount of it — is finally available.

• A web business can mine thousands of signals from its prospects based on the hundreds of actions a consumer might make on a website (checking a price, looking at an image, reading a review, typing in a detailed search query, etc.).
• The holy grail of closed loop marketing is finally here. With sophisticated technology and analytics, marketers can link spending on customer acquisition directly to a set of downstream customer actions — whether those actions take place on the web, on a mobile device or in a physical location.
• Consumers with smartphones are conveying their intent while scanning QR codes, downloading mobile coupons or simply walking into a store with their location-aware device.
• Social networks are providing a new source of demographic data that, combined with Facebook’s Open Graph, offer marketers a new treasure trove of information.

Ajay further explains, “I am excited about this next wave in enterprise technology. Marketing will finally emerge from the backwater and will give rise to several multi-billion dollar companies.”

Want to learn more about this explosive marketing technology and why Revenue Generation Software is red hot? Please, let us tell you.

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Resources:
1) Five Years From Now, CMOs Will Spend More on IT Than CIOs Do
2) Marketing is the next big money sector in technology
3) Marketing Automation Getting VC Attention

Lead Liaison

Reasons to Invest in Marketing Automation

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Reasons to Invest in Marketing AutomationLooking for a reason why you or your company should invest in Marketing Automation? Here are four reasons to invest in marketing automation:

Table Stakes

The adoption of marketing automation technology is expected to increase by 50% by 2015 (Sirius Decisions). Marketing automation has seen the fastest growth of any CRM-related segment in the last 5 years (Focus Research). Marketing automation isn’t an option. It’s table stakes to compete. Don’t miss the boat.

Buyers Buy Differently

By 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationship without talking to a human (Gartner Research).

Email Remains a Vital Strategy

89% of marketers said email was their primary channel for lead generation (Forrester Research). With a delivery rate of just 75%, achieving strong inbox placement remains a challenge in the B2B sector (Return Path).

Major ROI

Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost (Forrester Research). Businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads (The Annuitas Group). Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads (The Annuitas Group). Companies that automate lead management see a 10% or greater increase in revenue in 6-9 months (Gartner Research). Personalized emails improve click-through rates by 14%, and conversion rates by 10% (Aberdeen Group). Gartner estimates a 15% savings on creative production with marketing automation. Gartner estimates a 5% reduction in marketing waste through automating fulfillment.

Let us show you more reasons why you should invest in Lead Liaison’s software that provides marketing automation and more.

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A Simplified Perspective on How Marketing Automation Works

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How Marketing Automation Works - Simplified ViewMarketing automation is a simple concept if you’re in the industry or familiar with these types of solutions. But, what if you’ve never heard of marketing automation before? Take five minutes to read this simplified summary of how marketing automation works.

Eric Wittlake made some very important points about marketing automation. Let’s summarize what Eric says about the premise of marketing automation:

Marketing automation is built on the premise of delivering the right communication to the right person at the right time. When your competitor’s delivery of content is more timely than yours, you have been trumped. Even great content will not engage your audience if the need has already been met by someone else’s more timely delivery. – Eric Wittlake, Babcock & Jenkins

Eric also highlights what fuels the marketing automation engine,  successfully delivering the right content at the right time hinges on data. Data that is provided explicitly by prospects, and more importantly, data that is provided implicitly through their engagement with your communications and content.

Eric does a great job summarizing the marketing automation workflow. It’s important to note that marketing automation is only as strong as its weakest link. If any of the three links mentioned below break down then the marketing automation model loses strength. Eric discussed the drawbacks of removing a link in the workflow. We’ll invert Eric’s thinking to view the benefits of continuing the marketing automation cycle.

• Continued database profiling and lead qualification enables accurate follow up communication.
• With accurate follow up communication, prospects will engage.
• With engagement, lead profiles and lead scores are updated to deliver the right message at the right time.
• Rinse and repeat…

Check out our other articles to learn more about lead scoring and how to do database profiling.

Eric Wittlake (@wittlake) heads up the media practice at Babcock & Jenkins and is an active B2B and digital marketing blogger at B2B Digital Marketing.

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Why Marketing Automation for Small Business?

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Why Marketing Automation for Small BusinessWhy choose marketing automation for small business? If you’re a micro-sized business (< $5M in revenue) or a small business (< $20M in revenue) then there’s less than one percent (1%) chance you’re using marketing automation technology to help grow your small business. Interestingly, when comparing penetration rates of marketing automation (reference our write-up on the “Marketing Automation Market”) for micro and small-sized businesses to penetration rates of mid-size and large businesses, micro and small-sized businesses have the lowest adoption rates. Adoption rates should be much higher than mid-size and large businesses.

Small businesses stand to gain a lot from marketing automation technology. Two fundamental needs are commonplace in almost every small business:

Two fundamental needs of a small business…
• Rapid growth
• Large presence

First, small businesses need to grow rapidly to satisfy investors. When there’s growth, especially fast growth, there’s interest from additional investors in injecting capital into your company’s business. In the venture capital (VC) world, entrepreneurs win when multiple VCs want to invest – VCs end up competing against each other, fighting for their (unfair) share of your business.

Second, small businesses need to appear large, as a formidable competitor in their space and as a viable company customers are willing to invest in. Very few potential buyers will find interest in a company that appears small and unstable with limited resources. Appearing larger improves the chances of your business “winning the deal”.

Fortunately, marketing automation help small businesses grow and appear larger. In particular, marketing automation technology introduces a great deal of personalized automation thereby reducing the need to have dedicated resources managing mundane, yet critical, tasks. Lead Liaison goes many steps ahead of traditional marketing automation packages with our revenue generation software that automates emails, lead qualification (lead scoring, buy signals, lead activity), lead distribution, lead nurturing, lead capture and more. Our software provides a cost-effective framework for small businesses to help structure their lead management process.

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Marketing Automation in CRM

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Marketing Automation in CRMAdding marketing automation in CRM will help your sales team be more efficient. In today’s information age, it’s not about how much information you receive, rather, it’s about how you receive the information. Most CRMs cobble together leads and contacts into a few buckets, offering no way to separate hot leads from cold leads. Without a systematic way to prioritize leads, opportunities get lost in the shuffle, important opportunities get buried in the database and important leads are masked as yet another database record. Businesses finally have a way of differentiating their leads and optimizing sales people’s time with marketing automation in CRM.

Lead Qualification in Your CRM

Most solutions offer a host of additional marketing automation features in CRM. Adding leads/contacts to a lead nurturing campaign, sending an email campaign and customized dashboards are a few examples. One key area of integration is lead qualification. With marketing automation in CRM, vital lead qualification criteria is extracted from the marketing automation system and injected into the CRM to streamline access to high priority leads.

Various industry methods exist to prioritize leads. Lead scoring, buy signals and total activity are just a few examples. When CRM records are enriched with lead qualification criteria sales people can easily plan their day by running prebuilt dashboards and reports to expose highly qualified leads. The best part about these processes is the automation. It’s a set-it-and-forget-it model. With marketing automation in CRM, data is bi-directionally shared between both systems in real-time (usually every 5 minutes). Changes to data in one system are automatically updated in the other. With both systems in harmony, sales people only need to access marketing automation data in their CRM – simplifying the number of tools required to do their job.

Adding marketing automation in CRM is near effortless. Most CRMs, such as Salesforce.com, offer some type of marketplace for apps. For example, Salesforce.com’s marketplace is AppExchange. Installing Lead Liaison’s marketing automation in Salesforce.com can be done in less than 10 minutes. Configuration usually takes an additional 15-30 minutes.

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Cost of Marketing Automation

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Cost of Marketing AutomationThe cost of marketing automation is about as difficult to figure out as marketing automation itself. Everyone and their mother claims they provide marketing automation. But, do they really offer it? And what is marketing automation anyways? I’m sure these are all the questions you’re asking. For now, let’s focus on the complex cost of marketing automation and how you can find a solution to simplify your life.

Several vendors introduce complex business models that will have you pulling out your hair when trying to calculate the cost of marketing automation. The majority of vendors use the following parameters to tally your fee:

  • Number of contacts in your database (or “active” contacts – same thing really)
  • Number of users
  • Initial training (jump start)
  • Training
  • Good support
  • Email deliverability
  • Dedicated IP addresses

At Lead Liaison, we believe a complex business model is one reason why marketing automation is not widely adopted. Vendors just don’t get it. Customers want simplicity. They want a simplistic solution and a simplistic price to acquire that solution. Limiting usage and charging exorbitant fees for “extra” items increase your cost of marketing automation and is counter-intuitive with increased adoption and revenue growth. No one wants to be limited.

To better understand the complex cost of marketing automation let’s look at three companies in the space. In the table below, we compare their respective business models and highlight how each company introduces pricing parameters that amplify headaches:

ProviderBase Annual Subscription# of Contacts in Your DatabaseCost for TrainingCost for Initial Jump StartPrice for Additional UsersOther Fees
#1$24,00010K, 25K + tiersYes, $2,500+Yes, $8,000+YesLimited email deliverability testing, limited users
#2$24,00010K, 30K, 100K + tiersYesYesYes, $79+“Enablement Packages”, Professional Services, Enhanced email deliverability, dedicated IP address
#3$12,000UnlimitedN/AN/ANoneRestricted to email support, limited automation, nurturing, forms, landing pages and custom fields, no dedicated IP or email preview

Lead Liaison takes a much more simplistic approach to our business model which nicely complements our easy to use software. Since marketing automation is a feature of our Revenue Generation Software, we don’t introduce various pricing parameters around it. Our software is targeted to do one thing and one thing only – increase your revenue. With our revenue-based pricing model we’re able to provide the same set of features/functionality to businesses of all sizes; throwing restrictions in the trash. Any roadblocks that limit adoption and, ultimately, your revenue growth are removed.

Welcome to Lead Liaison and the wonderful world of simplicity!

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