Tag Archive for: Visitor Tracking

Lead Liaison

Five Things to Consider When Buying Visitor Tracking

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Five Things to Consider When Buying Visitor TrackingPeople often ask me ‘What should I look for in a visitor tracking solution’?  Here are five things to consider when buying visitor tracking that will help you eliminate inadequate providers:

  1. Does the program have active or passive visitor tracking capabilities (or both).  Active visitor tracking will allow your sales and marketing teams to directly engage high value targets and identify their visits nearly 100% of the time.   Passive visitor tracking relies on people wandering onto your website and someone being identified (more on that later). Active visitor tracking offers the following advantages over passive visitor tracking:
    • Track prospects that you met outside of the website
    • View ongoing interest of existing customers
    • Understand the potential buyer’s true timing (as opposed to what they told you) and availability
  2. Is the program relationship based vs event based?  That means that someone that returns to your site 3 times in a week will appear to be three different people.   I don’t know about your sales strategy, but a client that comes to my “store” on a regular basis warrants a lot more attention than three lurkers that show no further interest. You should always select a program that gives you relationship based data.  Event based systems are way behind the curve, and will cost your company sales.
  3. Is the individual/company that visited your site provided?  It seems unbelievable, but there are still visitor tracking companies that won’t give you names (or company names) of your visitors.   If your goal is just to track generic traffic, use Google Analytics.  If your goal is to learn about individuals whom you hope to cultivate a business relationship with then use a platform like Lead Liaison.
  4. Will your data be shared?  The majority of visitor tracking companies use your data to help your competitors build a correlation between IP addresses and names.  We think that this is a dirty practice that results in errors and potential legal problems, let alone losing business that your company might be entitled to, to your competitor.   It’s a lazy approach to visitor tracking and we would never recommend using a company that shares data.
  5. Integration and reports:   Daily reports are a basic necessity of every company.  Real-time alerts are important to companies with high value sales opportunities.  I would also survey potential vendors to learn about how they can help you interface with your CRM and marketing automation visions. 

It also doesn’t hurt to explore what other solutions the vendor has to offer. If you go with their solution just for visitor tracking will you be “trapped” and not have a broader-based solution offering marketing automation that you can grow into? We’ve seen several companies spend thousands of dollars on visitor tracking to find out they still need marketing automation; then they find themselves investing in two disparate platforms. Costs sky rocket as companies pay for two separate solutions and have higher total cost of ownership managing two separate platforms. Why not have both visitor tracking and marketing automation tightly integrated into a single software platform?

The bottom line:  Visitor tracking programs can be an incredible asset for your sales efforts.  These tools are affordable, super easy to use, produce results day one, and show the most rapid ROI of any marketing investment that I’ve seen.  Make sure to remember these things to consider when buying visitor tracking and be sure your vendor gives you the right answer to all five topics above. If you do, then you are on your way to making one of the best sales & marketing investments in your company’s history.

Lead Liaison

Business Intelligence and Visitor Tracking Solutions

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Visitor Tracking IntelligenceBusiness intelligence can benefit a business at any size or level, and visitor tracking is an important part of that intelligence. Many small businesses look past marketing automation as a viable option due to size, not enough staff on hand, etc. However, with the right marketing automation tools in place, small businesses can utilize the same type of visitor tracking and business intelligence tools that larger businesses use.

Lead Follow-Up

Small businesses won’t become larger without figuring out how to sell more and how best to utilize leads. Smaller businesses may be using tools that weren’t necessarily meant to track leads just to keep all their data straight. For example, Google Docs is a powerful, flexible tool, but isn’t necessarily best used to classify the movement of leads through your funnel or different buyer stages.

The right CRM can do that – but paying for an enterprise level CRM plus all the other tools you need can be a waste of money when your relevant business leads and successful advertising information can be funneled through one solid backend.

Marketing automation tools aren’t just about keeping track of lead flow – they’re about managing information in one easily organized place. With the right visitor tracking systems in place, any member of your team should be able to check in, get an idea of what ‘s happening and use that business intelligence information to better determine how to sell to clients.

Visitor Tracking and Onboarding

Ease of use is one of the most important components of using any marketing automation dashboard. A smaller company that can best care for the individual needs of a small business is best. Within that smaller company is housed various team members who need the right training to use whatever business intelligence or visitor tracking systems are in place. Training is crucial – you don’t want to pay for a tool that you or your staff members are never going to use.

It’s important to take your time making the right choice for a marketing automation company. The marketing automation giants out there offer plenty of solutions with built-in visitor tracking – but are they going to take the time to train employees and get everyone on-boarded? Working with a smaller marketing automation company can be better because every client counts – so every function that’s utilized, every staff member that’s trained and every tick in your “sold” column keeps the machine running.

Talk to Lead Liaison specialists today about how marketing automation can take your small business to the next level!

Lead Liaison

You’ve Got Visitor Tracking Going – Now What?

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Visitor Tracking - Now What?So you’ve been using marketing automation tools to engage in visitor tracking for your business and you have all the data you could ever hope for. What’s next?

Visitor tracking isn’t something all businesses are doing, but they should be. The in-depth information provided by the knowledge of who is visiting your site, how long they stick around and what they’re clicking on can provide advanced intelligence data you never thought possible. We’ve already established how great it is to have this info – but what do you do once the data starts coming in? How can you make the right decisions for your business based on the data you’re seeing?

All the Articles

When users engage with business websites, many of them determine the service value of the company they’re researching based on what kind of content or information the business provides. You may look at visitor tracking data and find that users are clicking on or paying attention to certain blogs as opposed to other areas of content. Maybe more visitors are finding your blog entries or other content via entry from Google. What does this tell us about the way you can use this information in future marketing efforts?

First, if users tend to engage with certain content and you don’t have a sign up box somewhere on your page, you’re missing a valuable opportunity to get users into your information funnel. Promising similar content to the kind that’s really engaging users is a great way to grab email addresses and get your customers that much closer to a sale.

You can also use this as an opportunity to get users further engaged with your website. Info blocks that promise similar content if a user clicks on a story can be really helpful in getting users to spend a fair amount of time on your website, therefore seeing you as a trusted content source. 

What About Advanced Visitor Tracking?

When you’re able to log individual users based on identifying information such as an IP address, you can use this information to tailor your content to what that user wants to see – or to have an agent chat with them in a way that can better capture a sale. There’s no shame in preventing your value proposition in a way that gets you closer to a sale, specifically if you know which individual user your sales staff is talking to.

Lead Liaison offers advanced visitor tracking via its marketing automation services. Talk to us today and discover which marketing automation opportunities will best serve your business!

Get Awesome Visitor Tracking

 

Lead Liaison

Ethical Visitor Tracking

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Make Sure You Have Ethical Visitor TrackingThere will always be buzz in the analytics community about whether or not visitor tracking is ethical. With Facebook’s latest Messenger company and online privacy issues hot on the minds of many internet users, the issue of what data a company should or shouldn’t have access to will likely remain a hot news item over time.

Regardless, is there anything wrong with companies using visitor tracking to meet their potential or current clients’ needs? When is visitor tracking ethical or unethical? How can businesses ensure their visitor tracking complies with the email programs, analytics programs and marketing automation software they’re using?

When Is Visitor Tracking Ethical?

Visitor tracking is all about logging information on individual website visitors for business intelligence use. Having this information on hand allows businesses to determine which action to take that might result in a conversion from the visitor. Whether this is logging IPs, collecting emails or initiating chat with a user, getting personal information about users can be beneficial for many businesses.

So when is this type of tracking ethical? When a user willingly gives a business information such as an email address, phone number, street address or any other personal data, they’re essentially giving their permission to contact them. Knowing who that user is by logging their IP and identifying further visits to determine which marketing methods might be best is permissible.

Here’s when it gets tricky – the sharing of information with other net properties or other businesses violates privacy all the way around, can be illegal and gives individual users due cause not to trust a business or engage with them further. It’s important for businesses to disclose that they take privacy seriously, and give users a 100% fair and complete expectation of what will be done with their data.

The Appropriate Disclosure

This Lead Liaison blog entry details how unethical visitor collection practices violate user privacy and could cause problems for businesses. To avoid issues, businesses should make sure they are engaging with software and visitor tracking solutions that are ethical at their core. Many marketing automation solutions have the tracking power available to provide business intelligence without violating ethics or spam or privacy laws.

At Lead Liaison, we take privacy and ethics very seriously. We work to make sure clients can get the intelligence they need without compromising user security or the trust of current or potential clients. To find out more about how our ethical visitor tracking solutions work, contact us for a consult today!

Get Awesome Visitor Tracking

 

Lead Liaison

When Visitor Tracking Violates the Law

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Where Visitor Tracking Violates the LawMake sure you understand where visitor tracking violates the law. Utter the term “sharing data” and most IT groups cringe.   Your legal team pulls out their cease and desist demands.  Your customers collectively scream “hell no”. Your company might be subjecting themselves to being involved in a lawsuit, such as what happened to Facebook in this lawsuit. The lawsuit stated Facebook violated Right of Publicity, Right of Privacy laws and consumer protection laws in California by sharing members’ personal information with others for commercial purposes.

Now ask your sale and marketing team if they like the concept of opening up your CRM and sharing your contacts with your competitors and anyone else.  Would you knowingly do this? Is your current provide sharing data for commercial reasons similar to Facebook and also in the state of California?

If you are using a number of “Visitor Tracking” aka Visitor Identification tools, you are likely doing exactly that!  Here is how it works:

Your company invests money in a technology that helps you create relationships with individual visitors to your website usually by putting a “cookie” on an individual’s device when they fill out a form on your site (as an example).   That allows you to know that “Customer: Sarah Smith” is on your site; and you can help her find the information that she cares about in less time, customize her experience, or as a way to trigger future discussions.   In short, Customer: Sarah Smith is happy to have this personalized experience with your company.

The problem arises when Competitor “X” decides to invest in the same Visitor tracking product.   The Visitor tracking provider will sell their ability to track more visitors than their competitors.   How do they do that?   Simple: they violate Right of Publicity and Right of Privacy laws.  When a prospect that you have identified goes to Competitor “X”’s site they are searching the customer’s computer for all cookies they added regardless of the source.   Thus, they are using your data to 1.) Help them sell their software to your competitors 2.) Help your competitors identify competitive opportunities against your company.

It gets worse.   Many of these visitor tracking companies are touting their ability to provide email addresses along with the names of the people identified.  Most won’t tell you if they secured this email because a visitor opted in via one of your forms, or if they “borrowed” the data from one of your competitors.   That makes it very difficult (and often illegal) for you to contact these people through automated email methods since they have never opted-in to receive email from you.  In fact, those that HAVE opted-in may become polluted.

How do you avoid hurting your company, and helping your competition?

  1. Make sure your Visitor Identification provider is not sharing data amongst its customers
  2. Make sure the source of all email triggered communications are segmented to only people that have opted-in to receive messages from your organization
  3. Demand that your provider indemnifies you against willful data breaches and “sharing” of data with any other companies
  4. Make sure your provider understands they could be violating Right of Publicity, Right of Privacy and consumer protection laws

The bottom line is that while it may be alluring at first to go with a company that shows you the most name/email addresses in their daily reports of site visitors, there are a number of other marketing techniques that can be employed to keep your company safe and within the guidelines of the law.

Lead Liaison

Get the Most Out of Your Analytics

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Get the Most Out of Your AnalyticsWhat exactly are marketing analytics and why are they so important? First of all, marketing analytics help to put accountable numbers behind your marketing programs. By monitoring the right numbers, you can maximize ROI and ensure your marketing efforts are producing the greatest response. In turn, you’ll be able to get the most out of your analytics through applying the data to future marketing plans.

Traditionally, marketers are seen as the creative types that focus on sculpting an impactful message to drive prospect response. Recently, we’ve seen marketing analytics creep more and more into the marketers’ day-to-day routine. Why is this? Mostly this is because numbers are easily trackable and provide a means for interpreting how prospects interact with your business. Read more about bringing an analytical culture into your marketing practices here.

How to Get the Most Out of Your Analytics

 

Integrate analytics into the rest of the marketing plan.

Utilize marketing automation to track your web visitors’ activity. The data from those reports will show you which landing pages are the most effective and which CTAs your prospects are following. The tracking software will enable marketers to effortlessly integrate analytics into their daily routine and follow up with prospects, understanding where everyone stands in the funnel. A successful integration should reinforce your sales and marketing alignment. Use your marketing analytics to turn your sales funnel into data.

Interpret the data.

So now you’ve got all of this data, how will you interpret it to get the most out of your analytics? You’ll see better ROI when you’re able to more personally connect with your prospects, so a thorough understanding of their activity and interaction with your brand will help marketers get their point across effectively. Interpreting the data will also aid in sales and marketing alignment in that you’ll be able to refine your funnel, maximize the CTAs that work and cut the attempts that aren’t as fruitful. It is important to prune your data—don’t waste time analyzing data that isn’t showing results or giving actionable items.

Review regularly.

Checking the stats once a year won’t create as much of an impact and certainly won’t help you to get the most out of your analytics. Make checking the numbers regularly a habit—have the data available for monthly or quarterly marketing meetings when the whole team is present so that everyone’s on the same page. Lead Liaison has a solution for keeping an eye on visitor behavior and enables you to gather information and metrics as they happen.

Incorporating these simple steps into marketers’ day-to-day will ultimately aid in gauging new marketing initiatives. You’ll be able to monitor unique visits as well as track return visitors to keep an eye on their buying interest and ensure they are qualified appropriately. Tracking the referring sites of your visitors will also help to point out potential marketing partnerships. Use this fact-based decision-making in order to get the most out of your analytics and ultimately the most out of your current marketing practices.

Lead Liaison

Lead Liaison Partners with CodeLaunch Event to Give Away Complimentary Visitor Tracking Package

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Code Authority’s annual incubator event sets the stage for an array of unique startup business ideas.

Marketing automation company Lead Liaison, is pleased to announce its sponsorship with Frisco based tech company Code Authority Custom Software to sponsor this year’s CodeLaunch event. CodeLaunch is an annual Dallas-based ‘pitch’ competition that serves as the showpiece in an annual competition that allows select individuals to pitch their startup ideas to recognized area business leaders. The competition awards incubation resources such as investment and startup consultation to selected winners.

In addition to the grand prizes, Lead Liaison will offer six free months of complimentary visitor tracking to winners as part of a prize package totaling over $2100 in value. The addition of visitor tracking allows startup companies to focus on their target audience and potential companies with laser precision, identifying important website visitor characteristics such as business names, geographic location, IP, user behavior, people and other quantitative data that speaks to qualitative business decision making.

Jason W. Taylor, President of CodeLaunch and Code Authority spoke over the weekend on CodeLaunch and Lead Liaison’s sponsorship:

“Lead Liaison is exactly the kind of product that our CodeLaunch startups can benefit from. We are thrilled they are supporting CodeLaunch and the startup ecosystem.”

This year’s CodeLaunch Pitch Day will happen August 21st, 2014 at the NTEC Conference Center in Frisco, Texas. Code Authority will determine finalists and grand prize winners. Applications were accepted through May 31, 2014.

For more information, please visit CodeLaunch or follow @CodeAuthority. More information will be available on Lead Liaison’s corporate website at http://www.leadliaison.com.

About Lead Liaison:

Lead Liaison provides cloud-based marketing and sales automation solutions that help businesses worldwide attract, convert, and close leads. The company markets to small to mid-sized businesses and focuses on providing a user-friendly and innovative Revenue Generation Software® platform. Their software delivers powerful solutions that accelerate sales, improve efficiency and build stronger relationships with prospects, customers and partners through the use of automated processes.

About CodeLaunch:

CodeLaunch is an annual concept competition and pitch event for Embryonic Stage software technology startups produced by Code Authority Custom Software and a group of partners and sponsors interested in fostering entrepreneurism.

Press inquiries:

Amber Turrill
VP, Corporate Communications
corporate(at)leadliaison(dot)com
888.895.3237 (888 89 LEADS)

Lead Liaison

How to Keep Tabs on Your Leads

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How to Keep Tabs on PeopleSo you’ve got your marketing automation software in place, but are you utilizing it to optimize lead scoring? Once a lead is qualified by marketing to hop into the sales ring, it is important for the marketing team to transfer all pertinent lead details to sales so that each lead’s score reflects their conversion readiness. Lead scoring is not all equal, and different actions by the lead call for different scores. Make use of social media marketing together with sales and marketing alignment to ensure your sales reps are as ready as can be. Learn how to keep tabs on your leads. 

Know Who’s Coming to Your Site

Identify your leads. Understand who the visitors to your site are by asking a few (not too many) questions when they take certain actions. Find a balance between requiring too much information and not enough—if you allow prospects to browse your online content and even download a white paper without filling in some identifying details, you’re letting the leads slip right out of your hands. On the other hand, prospects can tell when you’re being too nosey, asking for more information than necessary, sometimes even pushing them to click the “x” in the corner and close your page all together. There’s a balance in there somewhere, try implementing some A/B testing to find it.

To capitalize on multi-channel marketing and social media marketing, provide your lead the option for a social media login. It’s not only convenient for the user to simply click once without having to create a new password, but it also allows the opportunity to gather more information from the user via their social media profile and better tailor their experience with your brand. They’ve filled in their preferences and “likes” for the world to see on social media, why not use that information to better understand them?

Let your Leads Know you Appreciate Them

While you keep tabs on your leads make sure to offer special coupons, badges, and other rewards to your leads that take the next step or requested action in the conversion process. Giving them an incentive to provide more information (and potentially even share it with their own network) is an opportunity for your brand to reach new prospects without additional effort on your part. Freebies and other forms of recognition help to build trust and encourage more conversions. Ask your leads to share the love.

Maintain Sales and Marketing Alignment

Use lead scoring to bridge marketing and sales teams. Your marketing team can utilize all of this information—preferences from social media logins, incentives/badges leads have earned, how each visitor interacts with the site—to score each lead, input this information to the CRM, and provide a detailed summary of each lead’s buying readiness. Many features in marketing automation software make it easy to transition a lead from marketing to sales, and even drastically improve conversion because of the transfer of knowledge per lead and the ability to personalize each touchpoint.

Make the Most of Lead Scoring

Finally, be sure to use certain parameters when implementing your lead scoring system. When using the incentive method, let your leads know there’s a deadline or an expiration date on their “points.” Often, you’ll see this will push them to take an action sooner or make a decision about something they were previously on the fence about. Use your marketing automation software to help you keep track of lead scoring as well as the amount of time the lead has been in your system to avoid inflating the lead’s score. This will help authenticate each lead’s score and provide more accurate transferral of information.

Lead Liaison

Want More Out of Your Visitor Tracking Software?

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Go Beyond Visitor Tracking

Visitor tracking is an amazing technology that exposes the 98% of website visitors that don’t submit a form. What most businesses don’t know is that they can get more from their visitor tracking software. Instead of tracking just pages viewed, Lead Liaison builds a complete digital profile of your prospects, partners and customers. Sales will have better intelligence/insight and marketing will have more ways to segment and target their audience. That’s not all – while we’re building a prospect’s digital DNA we provide key sales tools like a hot lead dashboard and help sales and marketing work better together through sophisticated nurturing. We’ll also automatically score and grade your prospects to help qualify leads. When your leads are hot, we’ll alert your sales team with text messages and/or email alerts. Want more out of your visitor tracking software?

We’ll cut to the chase and not write some fancy article here, instead, here’s a bullet list of additional value Lead Liaison can offer:

More Sales Intelligence by:

  • tracking all web form submissions (and build them in Lead Liaison with a visual designer)
  • tracking document downloads
  • tracking landing page visits (and build them in Lead Liaison with a visual designer)
  • tracking video watches/plays/conversions
  • tracking social media clicks
  • tracking email click-throughs and all engagement
  • tracking one-to-one emails sent by sales reps

More Sales Awareness by:

  • turning a traditional “flat” database into a prioritized database with a hot lead dashboard
  • qualifying all visitors based on their online activity
  • identifying ideal buyers by grading them
  • sending real-time alerts via text and/or email when key buy signals occur

More Marketing tools to Help you Grow by:

  • Nurturing customers, prospects and partners
  • Attracting more visitors to your site through social media and landing pages
  • Converting more prospects to identified people
  • Measuring return on marketing campaigns
  • Distributing leads using multiple methods (round robin, direct, by performance)
  • Creating surveys and rich looking email campaigns
  • Segmenting your database using any demographic or behavioral criteria

You’ve got to learn more!

Learn More
Lead Liaison

Alternatives to LeadLander®

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Are you looking for alternatives to LeadLander®? We can help. LeadLander® has been an excellent choice for many businesses over the past few years; however, companies are usually left wanting more. Alternatives to LeadLander®, such as Lead Liaison, exist to deliver companies the solutions they need to start with visitor tracking and scale upward as their business grows.

Companies that begin with Visitor Tracking, such as LeadLander®, typically end up buying a Marketing Automation Platform (MAP), such as Marketo, Eloqua, or Lead Liaison’s Lead Management Automation (LMA), or replace their Visitor Tracking solution as a whole with a Marketing Automation Platform. Although, most Marketing Automation Platforms do not offer the ability to get started with visitor tracking only. Marketing Automation Platforms include a very rudimentary version of visitor tracking but expect their prospects to dive “all in” and buy the entire platform (upwards of $35,000) instead of being able to dip their toes in the water. Note, Lead Liaison’s LMA is an exceptional to this rule and costs a fraction of other MAPs.

Lead Liaison has worked with a number of companies seeking alternatives to LeadLander® to help them get started with what we would call, a LeadLander®+ package, that includes desktop tools and real-time sales alerts – typically for less money than what they’d spend with LeadLander®.

We describe our lead tracking solutions much different from other lead tracking vendors out there, such as LeadLander® or Lead Forensics®. These types of solutions will help you set your fishing pole with some bait while you wade in the river. On the other hand, Lead Liaison will help you cast a wide net deep into the ocean. There’s limited opportunity with basic tracking services.

When clients need more we deliver a full suite of sales and marketing automation tools ranging from lead distribution, lead nurturing, lead qualification, analytics and more. We’re proud to offer the industry’s most flexible packaging and business model.

Come on board and see what it’s all about.

Disclaimers:

  • (1) Lead Liaison is not affiliated in any way with LeadLander®, does not provide LeadLander®’s services, and does not own the LeadLander® Service Mark. Lead Liaison provides its own unique visitor tracking solution as shown here.
  • (2) For comparative purposes in this blog post, LeadLander® is referred to as Visitor Tracking instead of a Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) as LeadLander®’s Visitor Tracking does not offer features provided in Lead Liaison’s MAP, known as LMA. 
  • (3) Any pricing mentioned in this blog post is merely for comparison of Visitor Tracking vs. MAPs. 
  • Reference our Blog Disclaimer.