Lead Liaison

Direct Mail with Marketing Automation

/4 Comments/in , , , , /by

Front of Direct Mail PostcardWe recently added the ability to send direct mail with marketing automation using Lead Liaison. We’re genuinely excited about this new marketing channel that our customer base can take advantage of. Designing our first direct mail campaign was easy. In this post we’ll talk about how simple it was to put together a direct mail campaign using Lead Liaison’s marketing automation software.

Background on Direct Mail

B2B marketing typically requires 5 to 7 touches before a prospect buys from a provider. Why? They want to build trust, build the relationship and know you’re not a fly-by-night vendor blasting out communications hoping you’ll respond to the first thing they see. Using all of those 5 to 7 touches on phone calls or emails could get old, really fast. Enter direct mail.

According to the Direct Marketing Association, typical response rates are 4.4% for direct mail (overall)

While response rates are high, so are conversions for new customers.

The CMO Council reports direct mail has the highest rate of success in new customer acquisition at 34% compared with other marketing channels.

It’s time we start thinking about integrating direct mail with marketing automation.

How We Did It

Back of Direct Mail Campaign

Adding direct mail to our marketing automation campaign was easy. Here are the steps we took to launch our campaign.

  1. Created a template in Photoshop. This took us about an hour to do. Alternatively, you could use pre-made templates from our partner, Direct Mail Manager. They’ve got 100s of pre-made cards to choose from.
  2. We put a QR code on the back of the postcard that linked to a landing page we built in Lead Liaison. When the recipient gets the card they scan it with their smart phone which loads the landing page along with an attractive offer.
  3. We deposited $1.04 into our account at Direct Mail Manager. Yes, only about a buck! Each card cost $.52 and we sent one to our Product Manager and one to an Account Manager. You can deposit as little as $.52 into your Direct Mail Manager Account.
  4. We created a Webhook in Lead Liaison.
  5. We added the Webhook as an action in our marketing campaign workflow.
  6. Boom! Within three (3) days the postcard showed up in the mail.

Let us help you get your direct mail campaign off the ground!

Start Direct Mail Today!
Lead Liaison

Why Marketing Automation Makes Sense

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Why Marketing Automation Makes More SenseMarketing automation is the perfect tool for today’s consumer audience. Marketing automation makes sense. There are several features that give automated marketing the upper hand when it comes to conversion rates (we’ll get into that in a bit), but today’s consumer is certainly web-savvy—they spend more time on the internet than they do watching TV or reading magazines. So why not reach them where they’re already going to be, right?

Behavior-based lead scoring

Companies benefit from choosing marketing automation in that the potential customer’s behavior is tracked and scored. No need to manually track click-through rates from Google Analytics, your software is already doing that for you. Marketing automation tracks your leads and generates profiles based on their online behavior. This information warms the leads automatically for the sales reps. How awesome is that? No more shots in the dark, no more cold calling. Read more about how this is helpful for small business owners.

It’s not just for scheduling; it’s for maintaining a conversation

Automation is so often misunderstood as simply a means of scheduling. Sure, scheduling happens, but more importantly using marketing automation includes complex analytics that capture the behavior of your potential customers, scores it for you, and therefore helps maintain a relevant conversation that closes the lead. The important thing to note is that, although it sounds like kind of the opposite, automation actually helps to keep the personal touch in your interactions with leads. Automation supplies enough relevant information to take the relationship to the next level by offering products that the lead is already interested in. Of course, this can be done manually, but automating this relationship-building process saves so much time for your business, allowing your employees to spend their time closing the leads rather than researching them.

The bottom line is a higher conversion rate. These rates are ultimately a result of a system that creates highly targeted and personalized efforts, utilizing conditional logic. This means that once you reach out to your lead it is not in an unsolicited manner (such as a spammy email campaign). What good is your analytical data if you don’t utilize it in future lead generation endeavors? Marketing automation makes this process a breeze.

Lead Liaison

Lead Strategy Creation 101

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Lead Strategy Creation 101

Lead Strategy

Lead strategy is, in part, about segmentation – ensuring that the proper messages are sent to your audience in a way that will make them convert. Many businesses find it hard to start identifying sales funnels and developing a lead strategy – in part because the term “conversion” or “conversion point” doesn’t make any sense.

A conversion is what happens when your customer buys, becomes a lead or otherwise engages with you in a way that meets your advertising goals. The term ‘conversion’ refers to the fact that the customer has converted to your brand messaging – meaning they find use for your products and find you trustworthy enough to leave their information or buy.

Identifying Your Conversion Point

For many businesses, there is no email collection form, phone number or other conversion point on the site – product sales will be the only way your business converts users. Having multiple conversion points gives you the opportunity to stay in touch with your audience and ensure future conversions. For instance, if you’re only selling products and never capturing a customer’s email, you may be missing out on valuable data that will lead to a conversion later. Your first step in creating a lead strategy is to identify your conversion points, and establish multiple points for conversion if you don’t have them already.

Lead Strategy: Identifying CPA

Your CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) reflects how many marketing dollars you must spend to get a sale. Obviously you want your CPA to decrease over time so that your marketing dollars result in a profit. You’d be surprised how many businesses haven’t identified a CPA. When creating a lead strategy, it’s important to take into account how much money you’re spending and your overall return. Lead strategy often requires investment, so it’s critical to know where your money is going.

Creating a Lead Strategy

Now it’s time to build funnels. Ask yourself these questions: How do clients find your site? What actions do they take when they get there? What does your buying process look like? Use these questions to imagine actual sales funnels that relate to your business offerings and selling points. Factor in whether or not your different sales points require different messaging to sell your clients faster – for instance, should clients who previously purchased products from you receive the same marketing messaging as new clients? These questions are important to answer.

Finally, get some help when it comes to lead strategy. Marketing automation might be the best bang for your buck – talk to us at Lead Liaison today to find out how marketing automation could change your marketing messaging and increase sales!

Lead Liaison

Getting Your Subscribers to Open and Click

/0 Comments/in , /by

Getting Subscribers to Open and ClickIt’s tough to send good marketing emails. Even after they’ve opted in, you have to reaffirm their interest with each and every email you send. And let’s be honest, it takes time to develop a winning email marketing strategy, and no matter the size of your business, time is expensive. Here are a few quick and simple things to implement in your email marketing strategy:

A/B Testing

Try A/B testing with several strong subject lines to see what works better. What’s going to make your recipient open this email? The first step is getting it opened. Check out these email subject line hacks taken from SXSW session titles. Try out your own version of these against something else you think might work. It’s all about experimentation and understanding your subscribers. Tailor it to them personally as often as possible.

Spicy Subject Line

Surprise your subscribers with an interesting subject line. Play-up the sense of urgency and scarcity of your product. Along the same lines of A/B testing, test out what times of the day work best for your content. Are you grabbing your audience at a time when they’re looking for your services? Or are you sending at a time when your email is just one of many and it’s lost in the pile? Check out a few tips on improving your open rate here.

Know Your Subscribers

Understand your buyer persona. What makes them tick? Why would they have subscribed to your list and what kind of information are they seeking? This is where organizing your leads properly will really pay off. Read more about email tracking here. Targeting your subscribers personally makes them believe that email is for them, not just the whole pool of subscribers.

Lead Liaison keeps email marketing simple for you through our marketing automation services. We make it easy for you to succeed in each email campaign, keeping each email personalized, utilizing drip campaigns, keeping your lists clean and organized, and providing important analytics.

Lead Liaison

Mobile Marketing Automation: Is Your Business Ready?

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Mobile Marketing Automation

Mobile Marketing Automation

Mobile marketing automation is happening – though mobile marketing and marketing automation are not new concepts, businesses who pay attention to their mobile marketing are finding the information they gather more useful and profitable than ever.

If you’re thinking about doing mobile marketing for your business, the first question is, how mobile is your audience? If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, if you’re not working on being found in places like Google Local or doing any form of local marketing and if you have no plans to consider a mobile-friendly site in the future, you might consider skipping mobile marketing.

Is Mobile Marketing Right For You?

Not all businesses really need to do mobile marketing – but many who would find qualified mobile traffic are avoiding mobile. Likewise, the vast majority of businesses haven’t discovered how amazing marketing automation could be for their businesses. Considering a mobile marketing plan for your business could put you ahead of the curve.

Putting the Data Together

A marketing automation dashboard gives your company access to marketing funnels that are individualized and that work for your particular business. Your dashboard not only streamlines your funnel – it helps you better manage team workflow, marketing tasks and to more easily interpret your data stream.

Mobile marketing data may be vastly different from your regular data – for instance, mobile users may tend to look at your site at a specific time of day that laptop or desktop users don’t. Without the proper analytics, this type of information is hard to come by.  Many companies aren’t even using the free, most basic analytics out there. The only way to truly determine whether or not your marketing services are working to bring in new leads and re-engage existing clients is to consistently and carefully analyze your data.

With mobile use consistently on the rise, mobile marketing will play a key role in the success and productivity of future businesses. Many businesses don’t want to go into mobile marketing because they fear the cost – but there are many responsive website builders out there that will convert your website at low cost. For many businesses we work with, responsive web technology for mobile marketing has been worth looking into.

How Will I Know if I’m Ready?

Talk to us at Lead Liaison and let us take a look at your site, your offering and your mobile-readiness. Mobile marketing might actually benefit your business more than you know.

Lead Liaison

3 Ingredients to Content Marketing

/0 Comments/in , , /by

3 Ingredients to Content MarketingWe know that customers today are armed with more knowledge than ever before. Instead of your sales team being the lead communicator of your product’s details, buyers are getting their expertise via the internet. This means that by the time you reach them, many have already made up their mind and are primed to purchase. How do you reach them before they’ve made up their minds? As we’ve heard over and over again: content, content, content. Read more about how content creates success here. Creative content leads to inbound marketing, meaning higher close rate. Let us provide you with 3 ingredients to content marketing.

Creating innovative marketing content will allow you to influence the buyer tremendously—you want to be the one that furnishes their knowledge, especially if it’s about your product. By establishing a reputation as a knowledgeable resource you become an authority in the marketplace. Here’s a step-by-step process that will help you organize your content marketing and increase your revenue because of it:

  1. Publish to your blog appropriate content. What do your potential buyers want to know? Which topics are getting retweeted? Is there a big change in the industry that needs to be reported? When creating content, it’s also important to write in a way that’s enjoyable to read. Read more about a few ways to let your audience decide your content.
  2. Use your landing pages to better understand your readership. Analyzing the bounce rate will inform you of the modifications needed to improve the performance of your landing pages. You can also use transactional landing pages to directly interact with potential buyers. Then, you can import the stats from the landing pages into your CRM for better lead management.
  3. Optimize the visibility of the content and convert into marketing automation. Use the appropriate key words and gather results from your social media sharing to determine what your readers are looking for. This is a process that will be repeated and improved constantly. Learn more about optimizing your website conversions here.

Last but certainly not least, structure your content conveniently. You want potential customers to be able to find the information they are looking for. Optimize your user’s experience on your blog by organizing by topic and creating hashtags. If you are able to influence the user with the information on your site, your chances of closing are that much greater.

Lead Liaison

Introducing the Lead Liaison App Cloud

/0 Comments/in , /by

Lead Liaison App Cloud

Allen, TX (PRWEB) March 10, 2014 – Imagine a marketplace that contains a host of marketing automation modules and apps that could be used to customize your marketing automation software. Need video marketing? It’s there! Want to download Lead Liaison Streamer, a desktop app for real-time website visitor tracking? No problem!

The new Lead Liaison App Cloud™ is an easy-to-use portal that allows access to 3rd party apps as well as Lead Liaison apps (features and functionality), both paid and free. If you’ve used Apple’s App Store, you’ll have no issue navigating the intuitive interface that includes application screenshots/videos and an area for users to leave reviews and feedback.

This innovation is one of many that sets Lead Liaison ahead of the rest when it comes to automated marketing. The Lead Liaison App Cloud™ proves the flexibility and the modularity of their platform. With the Lead Liaison App Cloud™, companies have the freedom to customize their own instance of Lead Liaison. Users can get right down to the business they’re concerned about immediately, and skip the stuff that can wait. It’s also a smooth experience since most applications are deeply integrated into Lead Liaison.

The Lead Liaison App Cloud™, to be released April 2014, makes Lead Liaison the most configurable marketing automation solution in the industry.

Applications included in the initial launch are:

  • Lead Liaison Streamer™
  • Lead Liaison Send & Track™
  • Social Append
  • Content Creation
  • Video Marketing
  • Media Tracking & Hosting

Lead Liaison is a software company that provides cloud-based marketing and sales automation solutions. The company markets to small and medium-sized businesses worldwide, and focuses on creating the broadest and most user-friendly Revenue Generation Software™ platform. It’s innovative and robust software combines lead capture, real-time lead tracking, lead qualification, lead distribution, database segmentation, lead nurturing, content creation, video marketing, media hosting/tracking, social media engagement and ROI reporting into a single platform.

****

For More Information:

Jamie Silzo
VP, Corporate Communications
jsilzo(at)leadliaison(dot)com
888.895.3237 (888 89 LEADS)

Lead Liaison

Steps to Simplify your Lead Nurturing

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Steps to Simplify NurturingLooking for a way to simplify your lead nurturing and better manage your leads? Effective lead nurturing starts in one place: organization. Ensure that your sales team knows the method behind the madness of the lead lists upon lead lists. Here is a simplified overview of what to keep in mind.

1. Segment, segment, segment. It cannot be stressed enough that organizing your streams of prospects into nurture tracks that fit them individually enhances their experience with your company, therefore increasing close rate. Understand what their interest level is and when they might consider buying. Don’t send the wrong targeted content campaign– that’s just asking them to unsubscribe. Still need to be convinced about the importance of high quality content? Read Why Smart Consumers Insist on High Quality Lead Nurturing Content.

2. Add a personal touch. Make sure they have a name and maybe even a face to go with the emails and the voice. Letting them know they have their own point of contact helps them feel more comfortable working with your company. Along the same lines, give new leads a warm welcome, roll out the royal treatment to let them know you’re in it for the long haul with their company. This can also be done with older leads, as a sort of recycling process to revamp their interest.

3. Keep the communication relevant and two way. Include feedback surveys in your campaign that invite them to share their thoughts. Be sure to target industry news to them specifically. Include exclusive offers to let them know you are interested in a long term relationship with them and are invested in the success of their business. Here are some ideas on including offers in nurturing to get you started.

4. Last but not least, keep marketing and sales teams in the same loop. What could be worse than sending an impersonal email to someone a sales rep has almost closed? Understanding the prospect’s journey is a crucial part of building the relationship.

Lead Liaison

Rely on Year Round Marketing for CPAs

/0 Comments/in /by

Marketing Automation for CPAs

Marketing for CPAs. Consider it.

Marketing for CPAs isn’t always something small business leaders have time to think about. If you’re a CPA working right now, you’re probably buried in tax season type stuff. Onboarding a new marketing program – particularly a marketing automation program – might not be one of the topmost things in your mind at this particular moment. Should it be?

Marketing needs to happen year round – whether you’re at your busiest or could use a break from the influx of new clients, we find that CPAs often neglect marketing activities when tax season rolls around. Even seasonally hired help does little to tamp the wave of clients coming in.

Good marketing for CPAs shouldn’t be about just getting that one-time tax client, but should involve getting a client on a more permanent basis whose finances you can manage throughout the year. Using marketing automation to onboard new clients and prove yourself a thought leader in your industry can provide more resources for getting new clients than you ever thought possible.

Becoming a Thought Leader?

So, what exactly is a thought leader? If you’re a thought leader, you’re providing a valuable wealth of informational resources to clients – becoming the “go to person” clients look to when they have a question about their finances.

You can establish your credibility in your field through applied marketing automation. Working with professionals who can help you determine what kind of content your audience is looking for, how you can release it on a schedule that won’t create another full-time job for you and how you can use tracking to gauge its reception is an important route to maximized marketing for CPAs.

Your Competition Isn’t Doing This

CPAs who get the best and highest volume of clients are already doing some of this – they’re out there creating and releasing great content – but many are shelling out tens of thousands of dollars a month to marketing agencies rather than using marketing automation and its built-in resources to succeed.

Marketing automation is one of the best-kept secrets out there when it comes to marketing for CPAs. Some of our out-of-the-box solutions are customized for folks in the financial planning field – we’d love the opportunity to show you how marketing automation, thought leadership and robust marketing for CPAs can revitalize your business. This way, you won’t have to look at tax season as your payout period- you can work with clients who rely on your leadership and expertise all year long.

Contact us at Lead Liaison for a free marketing automation demo today!

Lead Liaison

Is Contextual Keyword Research In?

/0 Comments/in /by

Contextual Keyword Research Although Google’s algorithm changed quite dramatically over the past few years, proper keyword research is necessary to creating great content. Although the days of keyword stuffing meta-tags on your webpages are over, keyword research is still quite important-it allows you to direct your content in a certain way as well as give search engines some clues about what your website has to offer.

We’ve discussed the importance of context before. Creating context in your writing helps Google determine what your pages are about and how close to the top of search engine rankings your site should be. Context is everything-but without the proper keywords in place, you still can’t build context. Your content needs to be easily followed, interesting to your audience and well curated-and to do this you’re going to need some signal words that give both your audience and search engines an idea of a centralized theme.

Keyword Research with Google

Until fairly recently, just about anyone could use Google’s keyword research tool in order to come up with a lengthy, relevant keyword list based on industry and page content. In the past few months, Google’s keyword tool has changed. The change now essentially forces you to look at keywords the same way Google’s Adwords program does. Keywords are now grouped together in tighter clusters with a more centralized theme.

This further signals Google’s commitment to creating context-based results for its users. Your content can’t just be about individual keywords, but must involve these themes. When you’re creating content for your audience, ask yourself this: is there more than one keyword that would explain the theme surrounding your content? If you could sum up 4 to 5 different keywords, for instance, to explain your blog content, what would those keywords be? Considering context when creating content is absolutely critical to ensuring better placement in search engines.

Translating Your Data to Adwords

If your company uses Google Adwords, you can also translate the information and statistics you get from your blog readers over to your ad groups. Do certain readers respond better to content you created using a certain cluster of keywords? What copy insights users to take action when they read your article or blog? If you can answer these questions – and you can using Lead Liaison’s digital marketing analytics – you can determine ad copy that may work better for you in your Google Adwords ad groups.

Lead Liaison’s writers create content using only the latest known technology in keyword research and contextual search science. Chat with us today about your site and let us come up with a strategy that will work for you!