You’ve defined your invitation and registration process. The next step is to consider using your marketing automation software to help you with the entire process.
A marketing automation system can help you automate your webinar and create a repeatable model to use for future webinars. Marketing automation is used to manage the Invite, Registration, and Follow Up Processes. It can also help:
Qualify prospects based on their participation in the event
Log their status (no show, registered, etc.) with the event to use for future targeting
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While it might be news to some, Lead Liaison’s clients already know that their marketing automation solution is tailored to fit their specific needs. With innovative minds, a core team who listens to their clients’ wishes, and an ultra-responsive support staff, it’s no surprise that each new release is full of enhancements that really matter.
In their latest release, Lead Liaison added several new capabilities that clients requested within the past few months. It doesn’t take long for Lead Liaison to hear their clients and take action.
Site Search
One of their newest features is a Site Search-tracking function. Most company websites have a “search” option, allowing visitors to save time by finding exactly what they’re looking for with a search icon or search field. Lead Liaison’s website visitor tracking product and marketing automation product will track a person’s interests while browsing and searching a company’s website. And they don’t stop there. This valuable information is then added to the visitor’s profile, forever capturing a person’s interest and making their profile even more robust. Sales teams can then use this information to hyper-target their efforts, leading to more closed business. This profile information can also be used as segmentation and automation criteria – saving marketers valuable time in qualifying and nurturing their database.
“Since implementing Lead Liaison’s software, we have been thrilled with the capabilities,” says CEO of Digital Attic, Troy Vasquez. Digital Attic is a creative digital agency specializing in innovative web and multimedia solutions nationwide. “They’re always improving, which lets us know that they care about their clients and strive to be everything that we need.”
Trigger Engagements on Page Scroll
Lead Liaison’s dynamic website engagement software, called SiteEngage™, allows personalized interactions with a website. Lead Liaison’s clients wanted options when it came to where and how those engagements appeared on their websites, including the option to trigger on page scroll. The Lead Liaison team heard that need, and made it happen. Now, clients can set the page scroll percentage to trigger a dialog at exactly the right moment, which is a fantastic option for long pages when scrolling demonstrates engagement.
Interested in seeing how SiteEngage™ works? Check out Lead Liaison’s innovative self-guided demo (the first in its class!), Your Customer Journey. Follow along and see the many possibilities of SiteEngage™.
Folder Cloning
Recently, Lead Liaison announced an exciting new organizational feature within their platform that helps clients track and manage all content and assets in a marketing campaign.
“I love being a marketer for a marketing automation company, because I’m the first to try out helpful features like this,” says Director of Marketing, Jen Worsham. “As a marketer, Folder Cloning is my favorite new feature. Being able to easily copy successful marketing campaigns has been such a timesaver!”
It’s easy to see why Lead Liaison welcomes customer input, which is the inspiration to the design of their software. It’s the most surefire way to give clients what they need.
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).
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You’ve picked your ideal webinar service provider. The next step is to define your invitation and registration process.
Define Your Webinar Invite Process
Once you’ve got your data ready and your target audience defined, it’s time to start putting together a process for inviting people. We propose the invitation process below. The process sends out three invitation emails to your database. The second and third emails are sent out to people that did not open or click previous invite emails.
Make sure to vary your “preview text” for each invitation email. In your marketing automation software, you should have an option to enter in some preview text in the email builder. The preview text is usually at the upper left side of the email in small text. It’s what shows up in the preview pane of the recipient’s email inbox. They’ll usually see anywhere from 1 to 3 lines of text in their preview depending on their settings. With more than half of all emails getting opened and read on mobile devices, it’s critical to have a compelling preview text. Use different preview text verbiage for each of your three invite emails.
After the event is over, add recipients who opened the email into an “Active List” in your MA software. As an optional step, you could email everyone that opened any of your three invite emails but did not register for the event. We suggest sending this email the day before the event.
Define Your Webinar Registration Process
This is the process people will go through once they register for your event. As shown in yellow below, there are two ways to register participants. Through the event provider, such as GoToWebinar, or via your marketing automation system. If using the marketing automation system, create a web form and landing page in the platform. There are a number of advantages for creating the form and landing page in a marketing automation system. Some of those advantages include the ability to build a smart form with progressive profiling, deeply customize your landing page, style your web form to your liking, and control all of the branding. Data also gets injected directly into the marketing automation system, which can be used for future marketing purposes.
In the diagram above, the steps in green require your company to create email content for each step. With the invite process, there are nine (9) emails in total. All emails should use your standard template though, which will be recognizable to recipients and prevent them from marking your email as spam.
Leading up to the event, most of the messages are reminders. Don’t forgot to include a shortcut for the user to add the event to their calendar of choice (Outlook, Google, etc.) in your thank you for registering and reminder emails. We like using AddToCalendar for this. Once the event is over wait a few days for data to be collected and send a follow up to people that registered and showed up, with a separate follow up for people that didn’t show up.
Your marketing automation system will help you capture this data and configure the process from start to finish – ahead of time. This can be a relief to most companies. The stress of running a webinar increases around the time of the event. If your processes are setup and scheduled ahead of time you’ll have more peace of mind, more time to get things done, and more time to focus on your webinar content and execution. All administrative and marketing tasks will be handled by the system!
In the next installment of How to Run a Webinar, we’ll talk about the importance of having a powerful Marketing Automation tool in place.
Can’t wait to get your hands on the rest of this intuitive guide? Download the full white paper here.
Interested in a demonstration of our robust marketing automation tool?
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You’ve gotten your data ready. The next step is to subscribe to a webinar service. But, which one?
Choosing a Webinar Service
There are a few key things to look for when choosing your webinar service. Obviously, it needs to be web-based. But also think about how you want the registration to look. Think about your budget. How many people do you estimate will attend? Is it important to you that the recording can concert to MP4 (we think so!)?
This webinar comparison is a great little tool that guides you through a series of questions to help you find your match.
We suggest using GoToWebinar from Citrix for running webinars, simply because the user experience is very similar to Citrix’ GoToMeeting platform. As of July 2016, a little over 1 out of every 4 companies using webinar solutions in some capacity use GoToWebinar. This means the majority of your audience will be familiar with GoToWebinar, making it easier for them to join and participate in your event. And you want things to be easy for people. Adding roadblocks only gives people a reason to no-show. Adapt to the needs of your intended audience.
Check back next week when we cover how to define you invitation and registration process!
Can’t wait to get your hands on the rest of this intuitive guide? Download the full white paper here.
Interested in a demonstration of our robust marketing automation tool?
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You’ve determined that you are definitely ready to run a webinar. The next step is to get your data ready. Albeit tedious, this is an important step to keeping things running smoothly.
Make sure you have a good database to start
It’s important to know the topic of your webinar and who it relates to. Don’t invite people to a webinar when you know the topic would not be of interest to them. To maximize registrations, use your existing database of contacts with a focus on opt-in contacts. This could be customers, partners, or leads you’ve had any type of engagement with over the past year.
Determine criteria for who you’ll invite
Once you’ve got your database ready, gather criteria for who you’ll invite. If you’re sending out invitations to thousands of people you’ll want a good marketing automation or email marketing solution to help you. Marketing automation platforms will help you easily segment out people using lists, demographics, behaviors, and other types of criteria. These systems also support dynamic segmentation. Dynamic segmentation helps you create rules for your lists that never have to be updated again. The same audience will be ready for you to send invites to for future webinars.
We suggest staying away from purchased lists if you’re using a marketing automation or email marketing system. Most email service providers do not allow purchased lists as part of their email sending policy. There are services available to help you target certain industries and send out communication. Outsourced lists and invites should not be your core invite strategy, but could be used to complement your invite process.
Your data is ready. The next step is subscribing to a webinar service. Check back next week for the next installment of the series How to Run a Webinar: Subscribe to a Webinar Service!
Can’t wait to get your hands on the rest of this intuitive guide? Download the full white paper here.
Interested in a demonstration of our robust marketing automation tool?
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This is the first installment in the series How to Run a Webinar.
You’re probably reading this with the mindset that you are going to do a webinar. You’ve thought about the topic, decided your company is going to do it, and thought about the material to use; but – are you really ready for a webinar? Executing a successful webinar can be expensive, and requires a lot of preparation. Here are some things to consider before moving forward:
Expect Higher Attendance with:
Strong audience connection. If the audience already knows, likes and trusts you or they know, like and trust whoever is promoting the webinar then attendance will be much higher.
Your opt-in database or cold audience. Participation will be much higher when marketing to your own opt-in list vs. a “cold audience”.
Low industry/topic saturation. If your industry or even the topic has been saturated with webinars expect a lower turnout.
Hot topics. If your subject matter is a hot topic right now that’s pushed the audience’s emotional hot buttons of pain, desire or curiosity, then you can expect a higher attendance rate.
Big name involvement. If you’re going solo on the webinar, and don’t have a lot of people to invite, it’s a lot harder to drive attendance than having a co-presenter, as well as invite-support, from a big name company. For example, suppose you were a technology company with Google as your partner. Could you get a Google employee to co-present with you? Could Google help broadcast the event through their marketing channels thereby sending more people to your landing page? Your webinar will benefit from a big brand name, making it more attractive to your audience, with a larger pool of people to invite.
A larger invitation list. The quality of your invitation list is certainly a factor, but the size of your invite list matters as well. Inviting 50 people to a webinar is a lot different than inviting 50,000.
Let’s be honest though. If you’re a young company (startup) without much brand recognition, a database that’s not quite “there” yet, and no partners to help with the event…you might still be able to pull off a good webinar with a few tricks. Try offering some incentive to get people to attend. Here are some ideas:
Offer up a free white paper (worth $X)
Provide a discount on your product/service if they attend
Offer a giveaway for the first X number of registrants (think iPod, Chromebook, etc.)
Attendance depends on the factors that will be described throughout this series. About 40-60% of registrants will show up for live viewings, but you can expect more registrants to trickle in and watch on demand over the next few days following your webinar.
Now, you’ve thought through things and you’ve decided you are ready. The next step is to get your data ready. Check back next week for the next installment of the series How to Run a Webinar: Getting your Data Ready!
Interested in a demonstration of our robust marketing automation tool?
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At one time, outbound marketing was all the craze. Then, marketers finally woke up and realized that inbound marketing is the way to get qualified leads. They realized something else, too, though. Inbound marketing is a time-consuming process. Fortunately, folks quickly discovered that combining inbound marketing tactics with marketing automation strategies allowed them to harness the power of inbound marketing without the burden of finding extra time to do so.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Before you dive into inbound marketing with marketing automation tools, you need to be certain you are clear on what this type of marketing is. To put it simply, inbound marketing is the process of using quality content to bring people to your website, and then turning those people into paying customers.
There are three main components of inbound marketing. First, you attract potential customers. You do this with blog posts, white papers, eBooks, and other forms of content. Each piece of content is targeted in order to attract the right people.
Then, you convert visitors into leads. You do this with calls-to-action and lead generation forms on your website.
This is a simplified look at inbound marketing. If you had to go through the process all by yourself, you would have to roll up your sleeves and go through a series of tiresome steps over and over again. Fortunately, things can be simplified with marketing automation.
Marketing Automation to the Rescue
Marketing automation software has the power to track leads as they engage with different types of content. For instance, if they download a piece of content, the software can track that person from here on out. The software also has the power to score leads based on their actions once they arrive at the site. This will help you understand what strategies are working and which ones need to be replaced.
Normally, you would have to submerge yourself in hundreds of pages of data to understand user behavior, but marketing automation software is able to assign scores and provide data in seconds. This information makes it easy to run a powerful inbound marketing campaign.
If you try to manage an inbound marketing campaign on your own, it is incredibly complicated. You have people coming in from multiple traffic sources and once they arrive on your site, they engage with different pieces of information. Utilize marketing automation software to quiet the noise so you can see the real picture – what’s working and what’s not.
ALLEN, TX – Lead Liaison is known for their easy-to-use marketing automation software. What sets them apart is their exceptional level of support. Now, they’ve gone above and beyond to offer a helping hand to anybody who is currently using or planning to use a marketing automation system.
A Recipe for Implementing Marketing Automation
A common misconception with marketing automation tools is the idea that it’s a quick-fix to your marketing struggles. The truth of the matter is that it takes time, attention, and a great deal of effort to get your automations set up in a way that is effective for your sales and marketing teams. The more you put into it, the more you will get out of it. But it’s not always easy to figure out where to start, and where to take it. Lead Liaison’s Marketing Automation Playbook gives people ideas on how to use marketing automation to help themselves be more efficient.
The Playbook walks through the steps of getting data ready, presents best practices, and provides ideas on how to make the most of a company’s marketing automation software license by increasing traffic to websites, communicating better with audiences and more.
“It’s an invaluable tool,” says Lead Liaison’s Director of Marketing, Jennifer Worsham. “Marketing automation isn’t something you can just flip on with a switch. It’s a strategy. You have to figure out what specifically you can automate or make more efficient. That’s where the Playbook comes in.”
Not Just Ideas
Not only does the Lead Liaison Marketing Automation Playbook walk through practical applications. It dives in deep to address common issues like measuring marketing return on investment, also known as ROI. Here’s a snippet from Lead Liaison’s Marketing Automation Playbook:
“A good marketing automation system will help you attribute a cost to each campaign and assign each of your marketing assets (emails, webinar, imported contacts from the event) to the marketing campaign. When the marketing automation system is connected to your CRM, it will use the contacts associated with closed-won deals, identify their campaign, and use the revenue from the deal to attribute it to your campaign. Precise ROI analysis helps marketers justify their campaigns and prove their worth. Without this type of analysis, you’re flying by the seat of your pants.”
What’s even more helpful is that Lead Liaison provides their clients with an updated version of this Playbook, laying out how to do all of these things within its software in great detail. Marketing automation is a powerful tool, and thankfully Lead Liaison doesn’t leave users in the dark. They believe that is not the way to truly be a helpful tool for their clients.
Eager to see what the fuss is all about? Visit Lead Liaison’s Resource Page to download the Marketing Automation Playbook, as well as many other valuable resources.
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).
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Are you wondering how to prepare your business for a marketing automation tool? Marketing automation lets you automate various processes, but before you can enjoy the benefits, you need to prepare your business for the software. Otherwise, you won’t be able to use the various features. If you take the time to prepare your website and your business for visitor tracking and other marketing automation tools beforehand, you’ll enjoy the wealth of benefits they provide.
Set Goals and Identify KPIs
Your marketing automation success rests with your ability to identify goals and develop key performance indicators based on those goals. Once you know your goals, you can program your marketing automation tools to help you achieve them. At the same time, the KPIs will ensure that you collect and measure the right data at all times. Then, you’ll know if you’re on the right track or if you need to make adjustments so you can reach your goals.
Build Up Your Content
Many companies start with marketing automation tools, only to realize they don’t have enough content. These tools work best when there is a lot of content available. In the marketing world, there is no such thing as too much quality content. Put your team to work and have them create some great content for you. Build it up as much as possible before you deploy your marketing automation software.
Identify Your Funnel
Companies often have poorly defined sales funnels, even within their own walls. For example, sales and marketing teams might refer to different groups as leads. In order for marketing automation to work, you need to have a clearly defined sales funnel, and everyone in the organization must understand the funnel and how it works. Discuss the names for each part of the funnel and agree on how people pass through the funnel. Also, discuss the probability of people moving from one point of the funnel to the next. In addition, determine when you need to send someone from the funnel to your sales team so your team can close the deal. You need to iron out all of these details before moving forward.
Once you have everything ready, you are ready to take the plunge with marketing automation! Everything will be ready, making the integration much smoother. Then, you can dive right in with minimal downtime. Your processes will be up and running before you know it.
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In order for marketing automation to be successful, you need to understand the quality of your leads. Leads are evaluated based on their readiness to buy, with cold leads requiring a lot of nurturing and hot leads ready to take their credit cards out and buy. Lead scoring is an effective way to identify hot leads, so that you can send them over to your sales team. Companies that do this properly spend more time focusing on leads that are “ripe”, while “unripe” leads continue to be nurtured through other automations.
Lead Scoring 101 – How It Works
When people visit your site, they complete a series of actions, and each action tells a story. If someone reads your About Us page, it shows a little bit of interest. However, if someone drops something in a shopping cart or downloads a white paper, it tells a different story. Every person who visits your website is a lead but each person is different, and you must treat them as such. You cannot treat the person who visits your About Us page the same as you treat the person who abandons something in the shopping cart.
That’s where lead scoring comes into play. With this marketing automation strategy, you assign a value to each action on your site. For instance, you could say that putting something in a shopping cart is worth 100 points and downloading a white paper is worth 50 points.
Setting a Target Score with Lead Scoring
You will need to set a target score that indicates a lead is ready to go to your sales team. This magic number means someone is ready to talk to a member of the team and make a purchase. Don’t set this number too low, or you’ll aggravate your visitors. Then again, don’t set it too high, or you’ll lose potential customers. This will take some practice. Spend some time finding your industry’s sweet spot. Each industry (and even each company) has its own sweet spot. Finally, don’t pick a number and stick with it. Have sales and marketing work together to always fine tune the lead scoring threshold. Consider creating a sales and marketing service level agreement to identify what should be scored.
Consider Other Qualifications Besides Lead Scoring
For many companies, lead scoring isn’t enough. Qualify your leads further by combining lead scoring with additional criteria, such as age, location, education level, company, and more using concepts like lead grading. It’s possible to adjust the lead score based on these criteria to better represent the quality of the lead.
Lead scoring is an advanced process and one you should not take on by yourself. It’s something that you get set a process for and move on, giving you more time to closing that deal. Automate it with easy-to-use software like Lead Liaison. This lead scoring software will help you identify your leads and convert them into customers.
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