Lead Liaison

Is Marketing Automation Worth the Hassle?

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Is Marketing Automation Worth the Hassle? Is Marketing Automation worth the hassle? We’ve been asking our clients over time whether or not they’re glad to have invested in marketing automation services. Time and time again we hear a resounding ‘yes’.

There’s no doubt that some work is involved on the back end after deciding to implement a marketing automation program. Different clients have different needs and it takes some time to analyze data and make decisions about what will be best. We believe – and our clients believe – the end result is worth it.

Understanding the Benefits

The first step toward understanding the benefits of marketing automation is to work with a team that can take a deep look at your business, your staff and your marketing. Not all companies need the same services. Ideally, we’ll help grow your business so much that you’ll have a greater need to automate various forms of marketing over time. However, starting out, most companies require a specialized look at what their needs are by one of our staff. Doing things in this way ensures the greatest value and builds a long and trusting relationship.

Analyzing the type of marketing automation your company needs is also helpful in terms of determining overall goals. Obviously you’ll want to increase revenue over time – but how can we best work together to analyze granular data and create a future roadmap?

Knowing where you want to go, how long it will take to scale and understanding the best ways to implement marketing automation for your business will help you understand the overall benefits. Working with a company that will come up with the systems, stay behind for the proper training and help you understand how the data can affect your decisions is critical to success.

Is Marketing Automation Worth the Hassle?

If you’re interested in establishing systems that help you understand granular data, as well as deploying marketing strategies that work on their own to establish further data and generate conversions, marketing automation is for you. The right team will help ensure there’s little heavy lifting on your end. You’ll just need to be ready to help create future goals and determine strategy as well as get your team prepared for training on how to use the systems.

Marketing automation isn’t a hassle for a business that’s ready to take the next step in onboarding and deploying advanced data information systems. These systems are easier to work with than you think with the right team in place.

To find out more, talk to us about how hassle-free marketing automation services can benefit your business today!

Lead Liaison

GPS Tracking for your Website

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GPS Tracking for your WebsiteTracking teenagers is similar to tracking for your website.

Having children is a wonderful thing. As kids get older we create stronger bonds with them, and they become more precious than ever day by day. Then they become teenagers. They start to do whatever they want, or at least thing they can do. They begin driving and hanging out with the wrong crowd. How do parents control such rebellious behavior? You can’t. But at least you have options to monitor their behavior and when you see something that’s serious, you intervene. That one option is to track your kids. Nowadays you can buy magnetic vehicle tracking devices that you stick to the bottom of your car. Then you hop onto the companies software interface and monitor where the car is going. It’s all done via GPS and cell towers to monitor where the vehicle is going and at time it’s at different places. In this case, if you see your 17 year old at a bar at 11PM, you’ll know to have that conversation with him/her; otherwise, let them be a teenager.

The concept of the GPS tracking device can also be applied to business. Companies like us, Lead Liaison, smacks a GPS tracking device underneath the chassis of your company’s website. Every time you have a visitor, we’ll track their activity, their online behavior, to help you look for key events that indicate a call to action. Different from solutions like Google Analytics, website visitor tracking identifies businesses, not just internet service providers, that come to your site. Visitor tracking can also help you convert visitors into identified people. Kind of like scanning someone’s drivers license. When a visitor clicks a link in an email, watches a video, downloads a document, submits a form, etc. your visitor tracking solution grabs the persons email address and adds it to their profile. When the visitor comes back, the sales person gets a Buy Signal, indicating buying interest.

Learn more about how you can attach a GPS tracking device to your website. 

Lead Liaison

Can I Afford Marketing Automation?

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Can I Afford Marketing Automation?Many businesses are asking themselves, “Can I afford marketing automation?” We hear it all the time – “What’s in it for me?” Or maybe, “How can I be assured such a major purchase is the right one for my company?” Generally, our answer always tends to be the same – with such advanced data tracking possible, the question is more, how can you not afford to be doing marketing automation these days?

Gathering the Granular Data

The basic and most fundamental principle of using any type of marketing automation is the timely gathering of data. If you’ve ever worked the back end of any business you know how powerful data can truly be.

Let’s start with an example – say the same individual keeps coming back to your site over and over again. They’ve bought once from you before, but are interested in comparing your pricing and services with a competitor’s. The thing that will truly make the sale is a more personalized touch.

Through marketing automation, you see this specific individual checking out service and warranty pages throughout your site. They keep coming back to these specific pages, and then bouncing.

Other analytical programs simply won’t give you the kind of knowledge about this customer that marketing automation can. Knowing that one specific person from the same IP is hitting the same pages can give you quick incentive to act. Reaching out to that user via chat program and explicitly describing your value could turn this repeat browser into a sale.

Can I Afford Marketing Automation?

Having this level of granular detail can shorten your sales funnel, build more trust with buyers and give them exactly what they’re looking for. With a potential increase in sales based on this type of information, why wouldn’t you want to invest in marketing automation? Data drives understanding of your customers and their needs, and knowing what your customers want drives sales. We can all sit back and assume what we’re doing to please our customers is good enough – but when an opportunity to get to know customers presents itself and could lead to new sales, it’s an investment worth making.

So the next time you ask yourself, ‘Can I afford marketing automation?’, ask yourself if your company is doing enough at a high level to engage your customers and get to know their individual needs. By its very nature marketing automation can offer you the type of information that will lead to increased sales.

To get an idea of how marketing automation can increase your revenue over time, talk to a friendly member of the Lead Liaison team today!

Lead Liaison

When Building an Email List, Don’t Buy!

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When Building an Email List, Don’t Buy!Building an email list takes time. We all know this, yet something about the allure of buying emails and trying to “beat the system” captures the attention of many companies. It may seem at first that buying an email list is a great workaround – saving you from having to build a list organically and expend money and effort into lead gen – but at the end of the day, buying lists for sale could be hurting you more than helping you.

If you’re a company that’s built an email list via direct list purchasing, why should you stop doing this – and better yet, what can you do to get that legit list you’re looking for without a lot of legwork?

Learn to Build Clean Lists

 

Building an Email List Organically – Stop Buying!

The minute you buy a list and execute emails to that list, you’re sending spam. Why is this? Well, 100% of the list subscribers you just purchased opted in somewhere else. They never agreed to receive promotions from your particular company.

Any legit email service provider (ESP) is going to ask for your address and company information to comply with CAN-SPAM regulations. Additionally, your ESP should confirm that you built your opt-in organically to decrease the chance of spam. If your list isn’t organic, your ESP may shut down your campaigns and bounce you even after your first list send. If you’re in this situation and you just paid for an email list, you’re now out the new customers AND a way to send your emails. No bueno!

How Can You Build a List Organically?

For starters, you should be prepared to offer great content. A top of the funnel activity such as a blog post, a free offer like a white paper or an instructional video offers opportunities for you to build organic traffic and get customers engaged with you. The free, useful content you offer is bait and will also help you succeed organically – particularly if you use things your customers are searching for as the title of your videos or blog posts. For example, if you’re a financial planner you may use something general such as “what is financial planning?” that has a high search volume as your post or video title.

Once users take the bait, they’ll see an opportunity to download a whitepaper from you. Ask for their email address to get the whitepaper – and voila, you now have their email and can advertise to them again and again without spamming. Create several funnels and opportunities like this based on the different services you provide, or different topically separated content offerings on your site.

Want more info on how to build your list organically? Lead Liaison can help! We’ll assist you in rethinking your funnels, building out new campaigns and measuring them today. Let’s chat!

 

Lead Liaison

3 Ways to Use Marketing Automation to Enhance your User Experience

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Use Marketing Automation to Enhance your User ExperienceThe art of converting prospects into customers begins with their first interaction and experience with your brand, whether that’s through a landing page, social media ad, or (fingers crossed) word of mouth. If this experience is frustrating and not user friendly, what incentive do they have to return? Here are a few points to consider when shaping your user experience and ways to use marketing automation to your advantage:

Customize

  • Landing pages: How did a visitor find your website? Be sure what they’re looking for is the first thing they see. Create a few different landing pages for various scenarios, especially if you have a vast range of products.
  • Emails: Make sure you are providing pertinent information that will warrant them to open the email, not unsubscribe. This may include special deals/offers, but nothing too spammy.
  • Verbal contact: Utilize marketing automation software to synchronize platforms to be sure sales reps and customer service are on the same page when speaking to a customer or a prospect.

Interact

  • Survey your customers: Ask questions about what they believe is your most useful and convenient feature. Survey prospects, ask what they’re looking for in a product and see how closely you can meet their needs.
  • Reward: Host contests on social media to engage your followers, and provide a coupon code or free service to those who interact with your brand.
  • Customer support: There’s nothing more frustrating for your customers than to pay for a monthly subscription service and not receive the support they need to use your service to their greatest benefit.

Personify

  • Don’t be the bot: When automating your marketing process, it’s important to keep in mind your customers are real people that are intelligent and think for themselves. Canned messages just won’t cut it for most. Steer clear of creating bulk messages to send out on social media platforms, as that only invites ridicule. Engage with customers through carefully planned social media campaigns.
  • Get the details: Often a step of the implementation or customer support process, getting details from your customer in how exactly they plan to implement your service or product can truly help start a beneficial relationship. By understanding their needs, you’re able to gather insight for further improvement while also providing them with the most efficient way to implement your service.
  • Create a two-way conversation: This one is pretty self-explanatory. The basic take-away point is to create an environment in which your customers and prospects alike feel comfortable to interact. Check out these simple steps that encourage your customers to engage in a positive way.
Lead Liaison

Track Email from MailChimp, Constant Contact, Vertical Response and More

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Integrates with Any 3rd Party Email Service Provider or CRMDid you know you could track email from a 3rd party email service provider, or ESP, and get even more value out of your existing email system? Marketing automation from Lead Liaison will help you track email from MailChimp, Constant Contact, Vertical Response, iContact, ExactTarget, Emma and any other 3rd party email system you can imagine. We’re not just talking about basic stuff like opens and clicks that you have to dig up, we’re talking sophisticated tracking that delivers crucial sales intelligence pushed to your reps.

What’s the value-add?

This process will magnify the value of your 3rd party email system by 10x. Here’s what you’ll get above and beyond what you have with your 3rd party email provider:

  1. Complete history of online behavior. We’ll pull together past, present and future activity that your prospect demonstrates as they engage with your company’s brand. This includes all kinds of behavioral tracking, such as document downloads, pages viewed, videos watched, chats, social media engagement and more through the life of the prospect’s buying cycle.
  2. Real-time website visitor tracking. We’ll tell you when your prospect is online and what they’re looking at in real-time.
  3. Sales alerts. When your prospect comes back to your website and demonstrates buying signals we’ll send a Buy Signal alert to your sales rep via email and/or text.
  4. Profile enrichment. We’ll layer on data from 110+ social networks on top of the rich demographic and behavioral information collected on your prospect.
  5. Original lead source attribution. Marketers spend tens of thousands of dollars on marketing campaigns but often times have difficulty attributed closed business to their marketing campaigns. We’ll identify the original lead source of your prospects with “Email Marketing” if they engage with your email sent from the 3rd party system.
  6. Lead qualification. When your prospects engage with emails sent from your 3rd party system Lead Liaison will automatically add a point value, determined by you, to your prospect’s lead score. Lead scores range from 0 to 1,000 and provide a great way for marketers to help salespeople separate hot leads from stagnant leads.

What do you need to do?

Integrating marketing automation with your 3rd party email service provider is easy and can be done selectively, on a campaign by campaign basis. To integrate Lead Liaison with your 3rd party ESP simply add some special tracking code to the end of each of your links. We’ll use the email information and tracking code to add engagement activity to your Prospect’s Profile. If the Prospect is already in your system with an assigned Lead Owner we’ll trigger Buy Signals for the Lead Owner.

 

Lead Liaison

Marketing Life Hack 101: Lead Liaison Outsourced Blogs

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Outsourced BlogsWhat if you could sit back and produce a blog every week with less than 30 seconds of effort? Have you considered outsourced blogs or using an outsourcing service to complement your blog content with authentic, SEO boosting content?

Here are some predictable (SALES) benefits:

  1. Drive traffic to your site.  Blogs/content drives SEO. SEO drives traffic.
  2. Thought leadership.   Think about it.  The last time you saw an article in a blog, didn’t that person/company quickly become the thought leader in your mind?   The halo principle applies here; and if you aren’t winning the blog game… you’re missing out on sales
  3. Blogs are lasting.   Not only do you drive customers to your site when you release a blog, you win prospects and customers over for the future too!

With Lead Liaison you can outsource blog content with ease. You choose the content,  outsource it to our third party writers and schedule future blog posts. It’s an end-to-end project management interface that walks a marketer (or intern) through the process of requesting content, reviewing it, approving it and automatically publishing it to your website via content management systems like Joomla!, Drupal and WordPress.

The net results:  $ 250 + 10 minutes a month could yield a blog post each week for your company if you were a Lead Liaison Customer.

For the naysayers that say people don’t read blogs anymore.  You just did.

Learn More About Outsourced Blogs