7 Tips on How to Make Marketing Automation More Personable (Part 2)

7 Tips on How to Make Marketing Automation More PersonableOur previous post, 7 Tips on How to Make Marketing Automation More Personable (Part 1), shared three tips on how to make marketing automation more personable. Here’s the follow up to that article with four more useful tips to drive your marketing automation strategy.

Here are the last 4 of 7 tips on how to make marketing automation more personable:

4.       Create Informative and Relevant Content

After leads are segmented, marketers can create personalized content that is relevant for each lead segment. This content should be focused on the needs that were established during the lead profiling step.

5.       Encourage Feedback and Participation

The key to obtaining new customers using any form of marketing is engaging and connecting with the lead. One way to make marketing automation more personable is through questionnaires and helpful popups. For example, if someone clicks on a page about “web design,” a popup could appear in the right-hand corner offering “10 tips to improve your website design” which leads to an informative and relevant article.  Make sure to keep the popups subtle, so they always appear helpful instead of pushy.

6.       Evaluate the Success of Lead Nurturing Content

A good marketing automation strategy should be constantly changing in an effort to improve upon its current level of success. It is important to use marketing metrics to weigh the success of every lead nurturing campaign and then use that information to modify anything that doesn’t appear to be really connecting with your potential consumers.

7.       Stay Committed After the Sale

Marketing automation is designed to build trust because it is based on a lead’s needs and personalized attention towards addressing their concerns. Don’t lose these relationships after the sale by switching from nurturing to neglecting. It is necessary that you continue to offer valuable information and support after a purchase is made. Success comes from building and maintaining strong mutually-beneficial relationships. This type of full-circle attention is what will make the marketing automation process more personable.

7 Tips on How to Make Marketing Automation More Personable (Part 1)

7 Tips on How to Make Marketing Automation More PersonableAutomated marketing systems are efficient at generating leads, but these leads won’t be worth much if they are not converted into consumers. Today’s consumers are tired of spam emails and computer-generated campaigns and they expect a more personalized touch.

Here are the first 3 of 7 tips on how to make marketing automation more personable:

1.       Understand Your Lead’s Needs to make Marketing Automation More Personable

Marketing automation is designed to quickly gather and analyze behavioral and demographic details about potential consumers. It tracks their online activity to give marketers and sales professionals an insight into their needs. Businesses can make marketing automation programs more personable by understanding and focusing on what the lead truly wants from the company. For example, they don’t want a blender. They want a better way to make smoothies.

2.       Use Sales and Marketing’s Input for Scoring Leads

When you are trying to determine a lead’s interest and needs, it helps to pick the brains of both your marketing and sales teams. Marketing professionals understand what trigger a lead’s interest and the sales teams know what it takes to satisfy their concerns. Scoring leads is necessary for prioritizing and providing personal attention to leads that are on the verge of making a decision.

3.       Segment Leads into Similar Groups

It is too difficult to personally target every lead, especially since marketing automation can generate thousands or even millions of leads per month. Leads that have similar backgrounds and needs can be grouped together to simplify the process. This way lead nurturing campaigns can be personalized towards each lead segment rather than every single individual.

Why High-Quality Lead Nurturing Can Improve the Customer Experience

Why High-Quality Lead Nurturing Can Improve the Customer ExperienceOne of the reasons that marketing automation is so effective at converting leads into customers is high-quality lead nurturing. Every article, blog, ebook, and webpages on a website needs to provide real value to the reader to be considered high-quality lead nurturing content. This higher-caliber of more relevant content will improve the customer experience by educating, inspiring, and engaging them.

Educates & Informs Customers

Leads are visiting various websites in search of answers to their problems. It is rarely in search of a specific item that they want to purchase. Instead, they are looking to fulfill a need. For example, they are not searching for Eucalyptus oil, but they are looking for an all-natural solution to their joint pain. The content in the article should be directed at dealing with joint pain naturally and then subtly mention how applying warm Eucalyptus oil to your sore joints will provide relief. Lead nurturing content can improve the customer experience by educating them on alternative solutions to their problems.

Understands their Needs & Wants

Lead nurturing content will be more effective if it is catered specifically to each person’s wants and needs. By using marketing automation to profile each lead, marketers can group leads with similar interests and behavior together, and then create lead nurturing campaigns to specifically target each segmented group. This will improve the customer experience by giving them the feeling that someone is listening and responding to their needs and wants.

Helps Leads Make Informed Decisions

High-quality lead nurturing is meant to educate a lead, while guiding them towards a specific product or service. The content should help them make a better decision by answering all of their questions or concerns with facts and real-life examples. This will improve the customer buying experience by providing them with all the details they will need to make an informed decision.

Build Trust in a Brand

If lead nurturing content is well-written, informative, and provides the reader with real value, it will help to brand the business or the author as an expert in their respective field. It will demonstrate that the company is knowledgeable and understands what their customers are looking for in a product or service. This will improve the customer experience, by making the buyer feel more confident in the company they have chosen.

High-quality lead nurturing shows customers that someone cares about their needs. It helps them make better decisions and increases their confidence in the brand they choose. Fortunately, it is also not just more beneficial to the customer experience. High-quality lead nurturing will also help increase revenue generation, since quality lead nurturing will result in 50% more sales leads at 33% lower cost per lead. Everyone wins with high-quality lead nurturing content. 

Marketing Automation Makes Visitor Tracking Even More Powerful

Marketing Automation Makes Visitor Tracking Even More PowerfulVisitor tracking is one of the most important things you can do for your business. When people come to your website, they should have an opportunity to convert in some way – whether that’s contacting you, filling out a form or buying something. Once you have a clear visitor path in place on your website, you have the ability to track visitor behavior to see how appealing your offer is, whether your website should be changed or whether your current visitor funnel accommodates your actual sales cycle. Marketing automation technology can help you do all this.

Visitor Tracking and Google Analytics

Many businesses are already signed up on the free Google Analytics platform. It’s easy to use, it’s robust and you can get a good idea of how visitors are interacting with your site and data from Google Analytics reports. There are, however, some underlying components of your sales cycle using Google Analytics alone won’t address for you.

1) Ease of use – Many organizational executives don’t have the technical know-how to translate the reports into something meaningful for their businesses.

2) Ease of implementation – A similar problem. A company will need a web development professional to install Google Analytics or similar tracking software in most instances.

3) Addressing needs – Google Analytics and similar visitor tracking software will let you know about certain aspects of your users’ behaviors, but won’t translate them into your specific sales cycle. Many firms address this by hiring additional personnel or simply trying to squeeze working with the metrics into their sales and performance programs. If you’re doing your own full time executive or sales job, trust us that this approach doesn’t often work in the most efficient way for your business.

Marketing Automation Tailored to Your Sales Cycle

When you implement an automated marketing solution for your business, you’re addressing the unique needs of your business and your sales cycle at every level. Your marketing automation platform can work with a Google Analytics installation to help capture your data in a way that will truly benefit your business.

re sending that get the most conversions or reactions from your visitors. Marketing automation makes use of dozens of useful tools that help streamline your process and make running your business and marketing teams that much easier.To find out more about how Google Analytics compares to Lead Liaison’s website visitor tracking read this post.

To find out more about how marketing automation can help you gather, analyze and execute on website visitor tracking today, talk to a specialist at Lead Liaison.

Why Marketing Automation is Revenue Generating Software

Why Marketing Automation is Revenue Generating SoftwareMarketing automation is designed to generate revenue. It has its hands strategically placed in all aspects of the buying process. It covers everything from initial sales prospecting to final lead conversion, and it includes valuable metrics for evaluating the results.

Nine ways Marketing Automation Software Generates Revenue:

 

1.       Sales Prospecting

Marketing automation begins with sales prospecting. The software is designed to expand your contact database by capturing a broad-range of potential online consumers. Depending on the marketing automation provider, it can also increase the numbers of leads by allowing marketers to upload their contact database and earn trading credits based on the quality of the leads they provided. Businesses can then take the credits they received and exchange them for new contacts.

More Leads = More Revenue

2.       Database Segmentation

It is too hard to customize campaigns based on each individual lead, but there still needs to be some personalization based on leads’ basic needs. By dividing leads into segments with similar interests, marketers can send more relevant messages to segmented groups which will increase response rates and generate more revenue.

3.       Lead Tracking

Marketing automation is revenue generating software because it can track every visitor’s online activity. This tracking software is used to expand on a lead’s current profile data and assess their interest in certain products or services. Marketing automation tracks both a lead’s activity and their inactivity, so marketers can capture the lead’s entire buying process.

4.       Lead Generation

Marketing automation brings new leads into the marketing engine using web forms, landing pages, email campaigns, and website tracking. It is able to generate more revenue by capturing new leads from the 95% of your website traffic that currently goes by unnoticed.

5.       Lead Routing

Marketing automation software improves efficiency by instantly distributing qualified leads to the sales team. Striking while the iron is hot can sometimes be the difference between converting a customer and permanently losing them to a competitor. Most marketing automation providers can send leads automatically through Salesforce.com, text messages on cell phones, or by email depending on the company’s preference.

6.       Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is one of the most effective ways to convert customers and generate more revenue. If the material is well-written, informative, and relevant to a potential consumer’s needs, it can be a valuable sales tool. Marketing automation software can be setup to instantly send lead nurturing content based on parameters established by database segmentation.

7.       Inbound Marketing

A good marketing automation strategy should be focused on increasing a company’s exposure and creating methods for prospective leads to easily locate their website. By establishing credibility on other reputable websites, marketing automation can build their brand authority and bring in new customers.

8.       Lead Conversion

Every step of marketing automation is gently guiding the lead towards conversion. Once a lead is showing sincere signs of interest, it can be passed onto to sales to close the deal. Marketing automation generates more revenue by producing up to 50% more sales-ready leads.

9.       Metrics

Marketing automation software includes metrics for analyzing and evaluating each campaign. It is hard to judge whether or not a campaign was successful, unless you can physically see the results. This is the final and most important step to using marketing automation to generate revenue. Constant review and improvement will be necessary to ensure that it is capturing, nurturing, and converting every lead within the loop.

The Top 5 Reasons Every Business Needs Website Visitor Tracking

The Top 5 Reasons Every Business Needs Website Visitor TrackingWebsite visitor tracking is an essential technology your business should use to stay competitive. More consumers shop online than anywhere else and website visitor tracking monitors buyer behavior while creating in depth profiles on every lead that comes in contact with your company’s front door and brand; your website. It is the most efficient and effective way to capture, profile, and convert leads.

Here are the top 5 reasons every business needs website visitor tracking: 

1.      Captures all online traffic that visits your site

There are hundreds or thousands of leads passing through your website on a daily basis and right now approximately 95% of them are moving onto another site unnoticed. Website visitor tracking is an automated program that guarantees every single lead is caught and profiled.

2.      Produces pertinent data for lead qualification

Tracking visitor’s online behavior provides the marketing automation engine with powerful data that can be used for lead scoring and qualification. By monitoring where each lead travels on a website, it will help determine their needs and interests. This also includes registration forms and surveys to draw-out useful demographic characteristics.

3.      Gives your salespeople a better understanding of your customer’s needs

Website visitor tracking will not only make it easier to qualify leads, but it will also provide your salespeople with valuable information about each visitor. It shows exactly which pages they are visiting, how long they stay on each page, and how frequently they visit your site. This insight can be used to nurture and convert more leads into customers.

4.      Proves whether campaigns are working or not

Unfortunately, not every effort that is made in your marketing automation strategy will have stellar results. Website visitor tracking is a great way for marketers to see exactly what is working and what methods still need more work.

5.      Provides marketers with a bounce-rate for landing pages

A bounce-rate shows how many visitors arrived on your website from a specific landing page and then immediately left. This information will help marketers determine why consumers are not staying longer than a few seconds when they land on certain pages. This is usually a sign that the link taking them to a page is misleading or there is an issue with the information on the landing page.

Website visitor tracking captures every lead, produces necessary data for lead qualification, assists salespeople in understanding their customers, provides a metrics for measuring campaign success, and provides a bounce-rate for landing pages. All five of the top reasons your business needs website visit tracking have one critical thing in common; they all work together to generate more revenue. Revenue generation is really the greatest reason why all businesses need website visitor tracking.

Automatically Nurture Leads on Behalf of Sales

Automatically Nurture Leads on Behalf of SalesLead nurturing is the process of advancing leads from suspect status to sales-ready buyers. In the past, lead nurturing was the responsibility of salespeople who received homogenous contact information from the marketing department. There was no process of determining which leads were preparing to buy and which leads were “kicking the tires”.

With our Lead Management Automation™ platform, you can automatically nurture leads on behalf of sales without the man-hours that were typically required using traditional lead nurturing practices. Users can schedule messaging to prospects, create specific digital assets such as email messages, surveys, and landing pages, and move leads to a point where a sales contact can advance the relationship.

Using the Lead Management Automation platform, marketing can develop relationships with prospects without engaging sales agents by:

  • scheduling your marketing campaigns to be delivered sequentially without the need for staff interactions along the way
  • creating and delivering email campaigns with personalized messages
  • distributing surveys for existing customers to uncover up-sell and cross-sell opportunities
  • creating customized landing pages that provide specific responses to lead activities such as filling out an online form
  • creating customized web forms that can be added to landing pages to collect information for progressive profiling of engaged leads
  • assigning a lead score calculated by the number of activities a prospect engages in, such as opening an email message or visiting your website
  • nurturing leads through a digital “conversation” by automatically delivering a response email following an activity trigger such as a request for information
  • segmenting prospect lists according to response activities so sales agents can target engagements with leads that have shown interest in specific features or benefits of your products
  • automatically delivering leads that have reached a scoring threshold to an existing CRM program like Salesforce

Our customers find the user interface easy to manage when lead nurturing. Users start by creating a marketing program then adding a campaign for each marketing effort. Once responses occur leads can be targeted for nurturing based upon geographic, demographic, or behavioral criteria. Lead nurturing through our Lead Management Automation platform allows smaller sales and marketing teams to nurture more leads using less man-hours and allows larger sales and marketing departments to become more agile and effective in their lead nurturing practices.

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.

Why Website Visitor Tracking is Essential

Why Website Visitor Tracking is Essential Website visitor tracking is the recording and analysis of visitor’s online behavior as they traverse your company’s website. It is the beginning, as well as the core of a solid marketing automation strategy.

What makes website visitor tracking so essential?

The first and most important reason why website visitor tracking is essential is that it captures every single person that crosses path with your website. Without website visitor tracking, businesses are missing out of 95% of the visitors that land on their website. Website visitor tracking is performed with automated software, so every IP address is gathered and analyzed.

Website visitor tracking is also essential because it provides greater insight into a lead’s buying process and their online behavior. Every move they make is tracked and included in their lead scoring profile. Marketers can see exactly which pages they clicked on, how long they stayed on each page, and how often a specific lead has returned to the same website. It also shows when a lead has become inactive.

Website Visitor Tracking is Essential Fuel

Website visitor tracking is the fuel for the lead scoring and qualification process. It provides a real-time view of prospects activity, so your sales team can act quickly if a lead is demonstrating a strong potential for conversion. Some marketing automation companies will send real-time alerts via text messaging if a prospect views a particular webpage that signifies sincere interest.

Website Visitor Tracking is Essential Metrics

Another benefit of website visitor tracking is that it provides a valuable metrics for analyzing the success of a marketing automation campaign. Since tracking shows how long a lead stays on a specific page, the reports it generates will show marketers exactly how well each landing page is doing.

For example, if there is a link on a connected social media site that is bringing in significant traffic, but the new visitors are leaving as quickly as they arrive, there is something askew with the landing page. This could be because the page they are landing on is not relevant enough to the claim made on the social media link and that is why potential customers are not interested. Website visitor tracking will show you a bounce-rate for each landing page, so you know which ones are working and which ones need tweaking.

Website Visitor Tracking is Essential for Online Business

The biggest marketplace in the world is the internet and 70% of all people start their buying process online. Online companies need website visitor tracking to gather as much information as they can on every potential lead, evaluate their campaigns, and convert more leads into customers. That is why website visitor tracking is so essential.

Lead Liaison Hits B2B Marketing Automation Milestone

Allen, TX (PRWEB) May 15, 2013 – Marketing automation innovator Lead Liaison has made a commitment to delivering more support to its customers than its largest competitors, and the company is on pace to fulfill that commitment. Lead Liaison announced on Monday that it had hit a B2B marketing automation milestone by delivering its 300th content piece ahead of schedule by over one month.

Since beginning an aggressive customer support campaign in November 2012, Lead Liaison has published business to business solution guides, industry datasheets, blog posts, social media links, decision-making tools, and sales and marketing resources. The company set a target date of June 30, 2012 to deliver 300 pieces of content that provide assistance to its customers. On May 8 it surpassed that goal.

Lead Liaison has become a fast-rising player in the b2b marketing automation space, a space dominated by giants Eloqua, HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot, partly due to its focus on providing digital sales and marketing resources at a steady rate.

Within this extremely competitive industry, marketing automation vendors have relied upon publishing digital content to attract and educate their markets, commonly known as “content marketing”. Article distribution, blog posting, press releases, and publication of extended documents like white papers or research reports have been commonly used to elevate awareness about automated marketing and lead management solutions. Content marketing to b2b marketing automation customers is typically driven through regularly publishing new content. Within the industry, companies often seek to surpass content milestones such as 100, 300, 700, and 1,000 published content pieces.

For Lead Liaison, the concept of content marketing doesn’t simply mean using content to attract customers, however. The company is using content to support its customers’ sales and marketing activities.

“Our mission is more than simply achieving top-of-mind-awareness by becoming a knowledge authority. We want (customers) to feel supported before, during, and after implementing our marketing automation and lead management solutions,” said vice president of communications Alex Brown. “We have felt, for a long time, that the key to driving sustained growth in this industry is through the integration of software solutions and knowledge sharing.”

Examples of content Lead Liaison has published include industry analysis, sales and marketing advice, lead management tools, and product tutorials. Topics such as aligning marketing and sales teams, managing the flow of marketing leads, developing an email marketing campaign, and others have been covered within the 300 pieces of content. And tools such as the Lead Management Grader, Scoring Model Designer, and 92 Lead Management Data Points have helped customers become more refined and targeted in their business to business sales and marketing practices.

For more information about Lead Liaison’s marketing automation products or its support services contact Lead Liaison at 888 895 3237 or sales(at)leadliaison(dot)com.

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Lead Liaison is an application development company that designs, develops, and sells cloud-based marketing and sales automation software. The company markets to small and medium-sized businesses worldwide, and focuses on creating the broadest and most user-friendly revenue generation software platform. Applications cover all phases of lead management automation including sales prospecting, lead generation, and marketing automation functions that directly influence revenue generation. It’s innovative and robust lead management platform combines unparalleled sales prospecting, lead capture, real-time lead tracking, lead qualification, lead distribution, database segmentation, lead nurturing and ROI reporting. The Software as a Service (SaaS) model delivers an effective user experience and integrated cloud computing capabilities.

For More Information

Alex Brown
VP, Corporate Communications
abrown(at)leadliaison(dot)com
888.895.3237 (888 89 LEADS)