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Marketing Automation Company Introduces World’s Easiest to Use Web Form Builder

ALLEN, TX — July 14, 2016 — Lead Liaison, a leader in marketing automation software, announces exciting new features to enhance user experience within their top rated platform.

World’s Easiest to Use Web Form Builder

Great marketing automation companies are superb listeners. One attribute that Lead Liaison is known for is the attention they give to what users have to say about their application. This upgrade is no different. Feedback indicated that there was a need for an easier interface when creating forms within Lead Liaison’s Revenue Generation Software® platform. Their new form builder, which mirrors user experience for their email builder, was released last week. It features drag and drop functionality and the ability to customize color, fonts, field sizes and more with just one click. This feature is expected to cut down on time markers spend creating campaign content.

Jen Worsham, Director of Marketing & Client Relations at Lead Liaison says “Being able to style a form from the user interface is huge! Prior to this new generation form builder, customers would have to create separate style sheets. Now, they simply select colors, fonts, and more with a few mouse clicks. This visual web form builder lessens the dependency that marketers need for IT and web developers to assist them in the form creation process.”

Email Enhancements that Save Time

Lead Liaison already makes database segmentation easy, allowing users to segment their leads into various categories, based off of things like lead score or location. In previous versions, users would need to build a separate list within the email function of the app in order to target specific groups. Now, they’ve made communicating to those groups even easier with their “Send to portion of database” email option.

“Our visual email builder is the best in the industry, hands down. It’s super easy to construct emails with our drag and drop designer. Now the user gets an inline experience, where they can create and send an email to a new list all without having to diverge from the core email sending experience. I expect a lot of marketers to recoup more of their valuable time with this new time-saving feature.” – Worsham

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, visithttp://www.leadliaison.com or call 1-800-89-LEADS (895-3237).

The Most Important Email Marketing Elements For 2016 (Infographic)

This article was posted as a Guest Blog Post by our affiliates at OnBlastBlog.com 

Let’s get one thing straight: email marketing is not dead, nor is it dying. It is still one of the most effective means of generating leads and conversions for a business. The old ways may have died, but there are new elements rising into the spotlight that change how we look at our email campaigns.

Today I’ll share several of the email marketing elements you should be using in 2016, followed by an infographic filled with the latest strategies that you can implement into your next campaign.

Today’s Top Email Marketing Trends and Strategies (Infographic)

You should start by avoiding the most common email marketing mistakes. Now, let’s look at some of the most important elements in any modern strategy:

  • Marketing automation such as drip campaigns and triggered message series are becoming more important to manage and nurture leads.
  • Segmenting your email lists based on a variety of factors (such as whether they’ve purchased or not) will ensure that your emails are personalized and relevant to each category.
  • Provide timely and relevant communication that addresses their needs.
  • Offer exclusive content they can’t get any other way.

Email marketing is a powerful tool in the right hands. Check out the infographic below for a closer look at today’s top strategies and let us know how it helps you in the comments!How to Send out Emails Like a Professional

Buzzwords in Marketing Automation: Database Segmentation

Database Segmentation

Database Segmentation: its meaning and how to apply it. A part of the series Buzzwords in Marketing Automation.

Many small businesses use tracking services to find information about their prospects or leads, be it contact information, age and gender, or even things like their buying behavior. Database segmentation refers to the organization of that data in a way that can then influence outreach such as email marketing campaigns, or strategic company decisions like selecting new product lines or determining pricing strategies. A few examples of ways to segment your data could be…

Lead quality – Within marketing automation software, leads can earn a score. Ten points for opening an email, 100 points for downloading content, 500 points for watching an entire video, etc. Lead qualification is a great way to segment. You could have different buckets according to lead score (i.e. 0-100 score, 101-500 score, 501-1000 score).

Ideal Buyers – Who are your ideal customers? Do they have certain job titles, company sizes, demographics or criteria. Ask your sales people, and then utilize your database segmentation tools. Once you’ve done that, you will be able to treat that group differently than you would a group that may not be as inclined to consume your product or services.

Geography  – Maybe certain areas of the world are more important to you than others. Or perhaps they should just receive separate content that is specific to their region. The folks down in Austin might need to know when your new barbecue recipe is available, whereas the crowd up in Chicago are more interested in when your winter boots are on clearance.

What’s even better (and more effective) is that you can then combine these! Perhaps you would like to send a handwritten letter & company t-shirt out to only your highest scoring leads in California. If you’ve utilized the data segmentation features within your marketing automation tool, you can get that personalized content out to that specific group of prospects in no time.

Database Segmentation Can Be Easy

Database Segmentation Can Be Easy Database segmentation is a crucial element of allowing your marketing and sales team to communicate effectively with leads and customers. It becomes even more important as the overall number of leads and customers grows to ensure that you are able to remain in contact with everyone. However, it is equally important that the communication you send to your customers is relevant to the individual, and that you are not spamming leads with unwanted information, potentially turning them away from your business. Lead Liaison features many intuitive automated tools to help you manage your growing database of customer contacts.

Different Methods Of Data Segmentation

One of the most important features of Lead Liaison is the ability to dynamically create lists in order to quickly and accurately send emails to your relevant leads. Lead Liaison has over 65 preset attributes to segment your database and help you communicate the correct information at the correct times to your leads. Those categories can broadly be defined as related to lead strength, helping you access customers when the Lead Liaison database has determined they are most ready to purchase your services, and personalization, so you can send communications based off specific relevant information gathered about your customers.

Segmenting customers according to the strength and type of leads helps you connect with customers when they are ready to purchase your service with the correct level of service appropriate for their needs and budget. Lead grade is an attribute that is defined in the Lead Liaison database based on how well an individual fits your buyer profile. This helps ensure that each customer is being approached with an appropriate level of service by your sales and marketing teams. Lead score is an attribute that is determined by a customer’s interaction with your website, sales team and marketing. This attribute helps you know how interested a customer is in your service and when they might be most likely to buy.

By creating lists based on personalization attributes, you can contact your customers with services that are specific to their location, needs or ability to interact with your services. One of the best ways to use this is by creating lists based on geography, so you can quickly communicate with your leads in a specific region with relevant information. Another important factor is a customer job title, since an owner or vice-president can make purchasing decisions that individuals lower in the hierarchy would not be able to. Past purchases is another important factor to consider when segmenting your customer database, so you can inform your customer of services that could be repeated or inform them of a complementary offer.

Use Data Segmentation To Maximize Efficiency

In addition to accessing customers to inform them of relevant opportunities, you can also use data segmentation to help reduce waste. Attributes such as delivery bounce, do not call or do not email all help to ensure that your marketing and sales teams aren’t wasting their time contacting someone who is uninterested in your service.

These are only some of the ways that Lead Liaison’s automated data segmentation services can help your business, visit our resource blog to learn more.

Marketing Segmentation and Personalization for Clients

Marketing SegmentationIs marketing segmentation necessary to a successful advertising campaign? Not necessarily. Success is based on generating ROI – bringing in enough revenue to cover your advertising expenses and overhead while retaining a profit. That’s the bottom line for most advertising campaigns –right?

Well, not necessarily. If you’re running a successful advertising campaign, return is imminent. At the same time, businesses who are successfully marketing should always be taking steps to deepen their marketing funnels and ensure marketing segmentation reaches users in a way that encourages conversion. Many business owners are so wrapped up in their day-to-day business operations that deepening marketing segments is last on their lists.

More Intimate Marketing Segmentation

Establishing trust with your user base or customers is in some cases about deepening intimacy. By deepening intimacy you’re basically approaching users in a way that identifies with their unique needs right away.  When customers get marketing from you, they should feel like you’re speaking to their specific needs. The more you can establish that intimacy and create a more personalized experience, the higher your likelihood of conversion. If you’re prepared to work with marketing segmentation, you can find opportunities to create more intimate and personalized marketing materials with less hassle.

Establishing Personalization in Marketing

Marketing segmentation helps you establish personalization by knowing who you’re talking to. In order to understand the different segmented needs of your audience, you’ll need to understand the audience and what needs set them apart. For instance, if you sell a beauty product that’s mostly used by teens and women in their early 20s, you have two separate buying markets: Younger women and the parents of teens.

Knowing this information, you can look back at analytics or at your marketing automation to get an idea of who’s visiting your website and materials based on what channels. You might find that most of the teens find you via Instagram and buying parents open most of your emails. Knowing this, you can craft customized marketing materials for these networks and test those materials over time.

Once you’ve worked with marketing segmentation and sent out personalized messaging, you can continue to work with modifying that messaging over time to bring in higher conversion rates. You can continue sending out comprehensive marketing messaging to your entire client list while you’re doing this, ensuring multiple opportunities for your audience to buy while retaining personalization.

If you need some help decoding your marketing segmentation, give us a call! Lead Liaison’s marketing automation dashboard makes marketing segmentation a snap. Let us tell you more!

10 Answers to Why Your Marketing Campaigns Aren’t Effective

10 Answers to Why Your Marketing Campaigns Aren't EffectiveToday’s B2B companies compete at hyper-speed for market attention. Many struggle with creating and maintaining effective automated marketing campaigns. Here are 10 reasons you may among those who are struggling:

  1. Not creating the right messaging. Automated marketing platforms, though effective in many ways, cannot produce content by themselves (although we have a great way to integrate content into campaigns!) so messaging must still be created in-house or contracted out. Make sure to distribute segmented messaging and be sure to conduct A/B testing as frequently as possible.
  2. Message delivery is scheduled too frequently/too infrequently. Hey, you don’t want to bug them but you don’t want to lose them. Finding the “sweet spot” for message delivery is key to hitting your metrics.
  3. Not segmenting your database effectively. Database segmentation doesn’t mean grouping contacts by industry alone. Examine buyer traits, preferences, and behaviors for grouping opportunities outside the norm.
  4. Nonexistent/inappropriate attribution to revenue. Once leads have been moved through the marketing funnel, which ones produce revenue? What messaging or marketing assets were influential in converting? Many companies still lack the ability or determination to uncover conversion attributes but knowing what drove a sale is key to practicing effective marketing automation.
  5. Promotionless content. You’re investing in content to generate sales, right? Deploy content that has a call to action or offer attached to it. Don’t be afraid to inject an “ask” in a blog post* but don’t overdo it. Keep your CTAs to a minimum and make the content persuasive.
  6. Not getting personal enough with your markets. Providing effective content is more than simply distributing helpful content, it’s knowing who your customers are. Take the time to research closely each market segment. Connect marketing and sales to create a customer persona.
  7. Don’t just blog. While blogging remains a key component to building trust and getting found by search engines, content marketing extends to video, case studies, webinars, and more.
  8. Blend channels effectively. If you’ve got social, Web, search, email, deploy them in a cohesive way. Integrate messaging through multiple channels so, when prospects find you, they can connect in multiple ways easily.
  9.  Be consistent. B2B buyers expect consistency from their vendors. This is true when it comes to content delivery. If buyers have signed up for a newsletter or email updates, make sure to deliver them using a rigid schedule.
  10. Know your SEO. Search engine algorithms change frequently. Tactics that have worked historically are becoming less relevant. Stay on top of the latest updates and adapt your search marketing practices to match how SERPs are now calculated.

*For a look at a highly effective MA platform, schedule a demo!

Segment Your Database for Email Success

Segment Your Database for Email SuccessDatabase segmentation can have a significant impact on your email campaign effectiveness. The relevancy of your messaging and offers is critical to generating opens and – more importantly – sales. Lead Liaison’s database segmentation tools provide parameters that allow you to create email distribution lists that target lead attributes, buying status, behavioral identifiers, and trigger events. Make sure to segment your database for email success.

Segmenting your lead database is important for two reasons: 1) you can target specific leads for customized messages and 2) you can avoid spamming uninterested suspects. With our database segmentation feature, you can accomplish both in a matter of minutes. There are over 65 preset attributes and over 10 trigger events that can be used to filter your email list.

How to Segment Your Database

So what are some of the effective criteria that marketers should use to segment a lead database?

Geography – where are your leads located? Whether your sales team is organized by territory or not, geography can play a role in how you approach a lead. The culture in Texas is different than in New York; messaging can be tweaked to appeal to each region’s cultural differences.

Lead Grade – leads that are graded on how well they fit your buyer profile should be segmented according to appropriateness. After all, should a line worker at a company with revenues below $1MM be approached the same way as a CEO of a company with $10MM in revenues?

Lead Score – marketers should segment according to the implicit (behavioral) attributes that are provided through online activities. For example, a lead that has attended a one-hour webinar should not be grouped with leads that have visited a single webpage.

Gender – this one is not always considered when segmenting a database. However, grouping by gender allows marketers to create messages that appeal to each gender’s buying triggers, emotional attachment(or lack thereof), and value systems.

Job Function (Title) – b2b decision-makers typically reside within certain positions: CEO, vice president, purchaser, etc. Though not always the case, segmenting email recipients by job function is effective at putting your salespeople in front of the right person.

Past Purchases – if a lead has previously purchased from you, it should be segmented for specific repeat, up-sell, or cross-sell purchase messaging. Once segmented, you can deliver special offers and build brand loyalty.

Buying Cycle – why should your sales team be contacting prospects who have just begun their buying process? Leads can be segmented according to indicators that reflect where they are in the buying cycle.

Reduce Waste

When you wish to avoid sending emails to unlikely prospects or invalid addresses, there are several criteria that can be used such as:

Delivery Bounce – an undeliverable address can be easily segmented into a cold lead list.

Do Not Call – often b2b sales require a phone engagement, leads that have indicated ‘do not call’ during previous engagements can segmented for digital communications only.

Do Not Email – whether a lead indicates ‘do not email’ through an opt-out request or on a form, that lead can be bucketed for phone or direct mail contact only.

In addition, you can use explicit (physical) criteria to segment leads that should be avoided. For example, companies with revenues below your target profile can be grouped as third-tier or lower prospects.

Our Lead Management Automation™ platform provides segmentation that can make marketers more effective at creating and delivering messages and make salespeople more efficient by routing the most appropriate and sales-ready leads to your sales team.

Segment Your Marketing Database

Segment Your Marketing DatabaseTo maximize sales effectiveness and work flow efficiencies, marketing and sales teams are looking for ways to target prospects more sharply. Segmenting and targeting email lists and database records can easily be accomplished using our Lead Management Automation™ (LMA) platform. The LMA provides robust segmentation and targeting features that allows users to organize prospect groups and deliver targeted messaging. The simple drag-and-drop process of adding parameters allows users to quickly segment your marketing database and target leads based on specific criteria.

You can filter the criteria used to segment your database according to attributes, historical events, and Salesforce CRM status. You can also filter for targeting and segmentation according to future activities or status changes in the CRM platform.

Users can filter segmentation according to nearly 80 different parameters. Segmentation can be based upon historical events, such as a submitted form, and/or future events, such as opening an email. Many times leads arrive at your site as a result of an organic search;  using the LMA, you can specify exact search terms that prospects used in an organic search while researching solutions. The Lead Management Automation platform provides segmentation and targeting based upon a variety of lead sources, activities, and other factors.

You can further filter segmentation results by assigning qualifiers to each parameter. For example, you can select the criteria “zip code” then specify “starts with” and enter 21 to segment leads from Maryland. With the Lead Management Automation platform, there are over 400 predefined options for filtering leads to segment and target.

There are several ways to segment email lists and database records:

By attributes includes:

  • Date added to database
  • Annual revenue
  • Area of interest
  • Industry
  • Geography
  • Lead source

By historical events including:

  • Link click-through
  • Email opened
  • Website activity (including number of pages visited or specific landing page)
  • Search term used

By future events including:

  • Email opened
  • Return visit to website
  • Future total website visits threshold

By Salesforce CRM status including:

  • Existing Salesforce records
  • Records queued for delivery to Salesforce CRM
  • Converted CRM leads

Users can add unique values to filter search terms in nearly all the criteria categories defined in the lead segmentation and targeting features.

Once you’ve defined the filters, you can save the filter group to retain the settings that have been applied. Users can also see a preview of the results provided after applying the segmentation and can save the settings and automatically schedule a future segmentation rather than segmenting and targeting existing records.

How to do Database Profiling

How to do Database ProfilingHave you ever wondered how to build a database profile? If you haven’t, it’s time you start thinking about it. Database profiling creates individual, sub-segmented databases to target marketing efforts and personalize messaging. Dust off the cobwebs and consider tapping into your most prized resource, your database, vs. buying lists and using common “spray-and-prey” marketing approaches.

While driving cross country the other day, I saw a big semi truck with the words “Our most valuable asset sits here” plastered across the side of the truck. There was an arrow following the statement. The arrow pointed to the truck driver! The trucking company clearly feels their drivers are a key asset to their company. It got me thinking, what would a business say their most valuable asset is? Rightfully so, some might say their employees; however, companies would be remiss not to mention their database as one of their most valuable assets.

Databases take time to build and contain a host of crucial information on partners, competitors, prospects and customers making them a rich repository for any marketing savvy professional. Unfortunately, many businesses aren’t able to unlock the true potential of their assets without a database profiling solution. Sophisticated technology is necessary to build rich database profiles, which effectively partitions a database into smaller, more targeted sub databases. Database profiling solutions allow businesses to do two things, segment and score their database. Let’s cover lead scoring and database segmentation in more detail.

Database Profiling using Lead Scoring

Lead scoring allows marketers to prioritize their database by assigning points to each record based on custom criteria. For example, marketers can run scoring programs across the database to give 10 points to people in a target industry. Similarly, assign 10 more points to people who work for companies generating more than $100M in revenue. These scores are examples of demographic lead scoring. Behavioral lead scoring takes into account contacts interaction with marketing. For example, if someone filled out a web form or clicked through an email campaign. The end result is a prioritized and qualified database, something very handy for a sales team.

Database Profiling using Segmentation

Database segmenting is the process of creating individual lists or groups based on select criteria. For example, marketing can create a list of contacts in a certain industry that have interacted with your company in the past 6 months. With a segmented database, marketers can send personalized communications to prospects that are more relevant and topical. Segmented databases are easier to nurture using lead nurturing technology and result in higher lead to opportunity conversion.

Make sure your lead scoring and database segmentation solutions are dynamic, not just static. In other words, make sure the tools you use can build a database profile that applies to your existing database as well as future contacts added to your database. Case in point, when a new contact is added to your database that fits specific segmentation criteria, the contact should be automatically added to your list. Likewise, once a lead scoring program is setup and defined future contacts should be scored based on your criteria.

Database profiling is easy when you have the right tools to segment and score your database. Fortunately, Lead Liaison delivers solutions to help you statically and dynamically profile your database. Don’t forget to market and re-market with relevant material. Start getting the most out of your shiny new asset today! Maybe the “most-valuable-asset” arrow might get pointed at you!

To learn more about Lead Liaison’s database profiling solutions please contact us.

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Marketing Segmentation

What is marketing segmentation?

Marketing Segmentation

Interestingly, marketing segmentation is not listed in Wikipedia – the mother of all definitions. However, Wikipedia does define “market segment” as “a sub-set of a market made up of people or organizations with one or more characteristics that cause them to demand similar product and/or services based on qualities of those products such as price or function.” Marketing segmentation and market segmentation are different. Marketing segmentation is, well, a way to segment your marketing, not a market. It’s time we gave marketing segmentation a definition.

Here’s our definition, marketing segmentation is the process of individualizing marketing efforts to a subset of targeted contacts or companies meeting related criteria. In plain English, it means marketing to sections of your database to address specific, and like needs. Using email marketing as an example, without marketing segmentation businesses would send out spray and prey email campaigns to every contact in their database. Recipients would become annoyed as they’d receive irrelevant content too frequently that doesn’t meet their needs.

To achieve marketing segmentation, businesses should do two things. First, turn to their most valuable asset, their database, and compartmentalize it. Second, split up their sales pipeline into two separate pipelines, one for marketing and one for sales.

Step 1, analyze your database for segmentation

Let’s first look at compartmentalizing your database. If you have a clean and accurate database you can probably skip this paragraph. However, if you’re like most companies and have an immature or messy database, take the time to get it in order. Your database is the foundation for your marketing segmentation strategy. To clarify, database segmentation is different from marketing segmentation. Database segmentation is a part of the overall marketing segmentation solution and helps you send more personal emails while avoiding unnecessary ones. Once your database is segmented, create unique and relevant content to send to each segment.

Before segmenting your database, it helps to make a list of how you’ll market to your database. When you understand how you’ll market to your database you’ll know what database information or fields you’ll need for segmentation. Reference our article 101 ideas for B2B lead generation to spark your thoughts.

For this article, let’s assume we’ll use email marketing as our marketing strategy. Next, identify your segmentation criteria. Here are 16 examples of how to segment your database.

  • Email address vs. no email address
  • Interest-based preferences – does the prospect/customer like product A or product B? does your prospect/customer like information on products, use cases, documentation? These are just a few examples. Use interest-based questions in your web forms to collect data.
  • Title – is the prospect/customer a Vice President or in Engineering?
  • Referred by – was it a partner who referred the contact to you?
  • Source – did the lead come from a tradeshow, purchased list, internet search?
  • Clicked links – has the prospect/customer clicked any links in your email campaigns sending them to your company website? This indicates interest.
  • Geography / territory / time zone – where is the prospect/contact located?
  • Recency – was the contact added to your database within the last 3, 6, 9 or 12 months?
  • Networking – where did you meet the prospect/customer, at a restaurant, trade show, on-site?
  • Frequency – who is buying more frequently than others? Separate these folks from the rest of the pack to hone your selling efforts.
  • Monetary – which customers are spending the most? Push them to the top of your stack.
  • Pareto’s Principle of 80/20 – Pareto state’s that for many events, approximately 80% of the effect comes from 20% of the causes. Identify which customers bought something in the past year and what they paid. Figure 80% of the total sales for the year and determine which customers contributed that amount; these are your “A” customers. Next, identify the next 10%; these are your “B” customers. Identify the next 10%; these are your “C” customers. Mark everyone else a “D”. Ignore the Cs and Ds and focus your sales and marketing efforts on the As and Bs.
  • Buyers by Product – who’s buying and who’s not? which products are they buying?
  • Sales stage – where is lead/customer at in your sales and marketing efforts? Feel free to use our article on the sales pipeline to get some ideas of the pipeline stages to use in your database.
  • Lost business – which opportunities have been lost? Don’t forget about them, they may have other projects or interests. You’ve invested a lot of time and energy trying to sell to them. Don’t let that go to waste.
  • Active vs. inactive – for example, who has not opened or clicked an email in the last 180 days

Most marketing automation solutions have built-in technology to help you partition your database into individual contact lists by running a query on your database. The query can be a one-time query only or an ongoing query that adds new contacts to your list as they appear in your database and match your requirements.

Step 2, allocate a marketing pipeline and a sales pipeline

The second step to marketing segmentation is to split the sales pipeline into two separate pipelines. We’ve gone into depth on this topic already so we won’t repeat ourselves. Read this article on dividing your sales pipeline for more information. In summary, sales will manage a pipeline of leads, contacts, and opportunities ready to talk whereas marketing will manage everyone before they’re ready to talk.  Marketing’s pipeline is most likely interested in getting an education vs. a sales pitch.

Once your contact lists and pipeline process is separated, create unique and relevant marketing assets (whitepapers, kits, email messages, etc.). Finally, leverage closed loop email marketing to send personalized email messages and nurture your lists using lead nurturing technology.

Good luck with your marketing segmentation efforts. Special thanks to Lori Feldman, the Database Diva, for providing her list of ideas for database segmentation.

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