Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation Software Competitive Analysis Report – Lead Liaison and University of Dallas

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University of Dallas

University of Dallas and Lead Liaison Provide Marketing Automation Competitive Analysis Report

The marketing automation software market size was approximately $750M in sales revenue last year (2013), which represents an astounding growth of 50% year over year for the past several years. By the end of 2014, the market is expected to grow to $1.2B, 60% year over year. According to IDC, marketing automation will be growing faster than any other CRM segment over the next three years. Gartner finds marketing automation will lead CRM application segment growth with a 10.7% compound annual growth (CAGR) through 2016, reaching a total market value of $4.6B.

A research study performed by the University of Dallas, Satish & Yasmin Gupta College of Business, called the Marketing Automation Software Competitive Analysis Report, revealed that smaller marketing automation providers offer the same amount of features to small to medium sized businesses as larger competitors. Their offerings prove to be advantageous to small companies looking to save money and increase reach to potential leads.

The study compares four companies, Act-On, SharpSpring, eTrigue and Lead Liaison. The companies were chosen because they specialize in offering marketing automation solutions to small to medium sized businesses. Standard offerings for marketing automation software include email, social media, search engine optimization, blogging tools and CRM integration. Act-On is considered a leader in the market by its competitors as they offer a full package for automation software and have been used by departments in larger organizations. The study found that Lead Liaison, a marketing automation upstart in Allen, TX, offers almost all the same capabilities as the leaders in the market and provides distinct advantages to small to mid sized businesses. A rich and easy to use interface, comprehensive lead qualification, and a multi-channel communication engine that sends email, text messages, direct mail and other physical marketing items standout as superior capabilities. The research study also revealed unique services tailored for small businesses, such as content creation, where Lead Liaison offers businesses a portal to generate marketing and leadership content for SEO purposes – necessary for small business with resource constraints. Act-On and Lead Liaison offer flexible payment plans including an offering on a monthly basis. This provides small companies with tight budgets the flexibility to manage cash flow and reduced risk by knowing they don’t have to commit to a contract for several years. These platforms are valuable to the small to mid sized market as they help attract customers and increase sales and awareness.

The research study also offers guidance on what small businesses should consider before choosing a marketing automation solution. Some areas of consideration are; update your CRM data, dedicate time for training, develop a sales and marketing process, develop content to provide to customers and prospects, and understand how others have implemented marketing automation. Please feel free to download the report published on 1/21/2015.

Download the Report

About Lead Liaison:

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

About University of Dallas:

The University of Dallas is a co-educational, Catholic university founded in 1956. Our students are enrolled in undergraduate, graduate and continuing education programs through the Constantin College of Liberal Arts, the Satish & Yasmin Gupta College of Business, the Braniff Graduate School of Liberal Arts, the School of Ministry and the Center for Professional Development. The University of Dallas has its main campus in Irving, Texas, and an international campus near Rome, Italy.

The main campus, in Irving, is only minutes from downtown Dallas in a city of 200,000 residents. The campus is an oasis of nature in the center of Metroplex, on 225 rolling acres that overlook both the Las Colinas Urban Center and the skyscrapers of Dallas. The University of Dallas is about 10 miles from the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.

Press inquiries:

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

Lead Liaison

Lead Liaison Closes Record Year with 171 Percent Year-Over-Year Growth

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Allen, TX (PRWEB) January 21, 2015 – Lead Liaison, the next generation marketing automation platform that provides enterprise-level capability at small to mid-market prices, today announced it achieved record-breaking growth in its fiscal year ending December 31st, 2014 with a 175 percent year-over-year increase in bookings.

Lead Liaison continues its pace as one of the fastest growing marketing automation companies in the industry. The companies growth was driven by its rapid innovation of new, game-changing capabilities, and deep integration with over 400 third party software programs. Legacy systems like Marketo and Eloqua have become too complex and too expensive for most companies – creating a window of opportunity for Lead Liaison’s emerging business. Companies seeking a solution that’s easy to use, not cost prohibitive, with enterprise-level functionality don’t have many choices. Lead Liaison delivers on these needs with a business model that’s unique. Their single platform delivers a robust set of capabilities that helps companies capture, convert, close and retain more business.

The company is poised to have another year of explosive growth in 2015. Now that the company has achieved parity in functionality with other enterprise players like HubSpot, Pardot, Marketo and Eloqua, they can focus on furthering it’s distance from competitors through unique solutions – driven by customer input.

Alan Page, VP of Customer Success at Lead Liaison, says:

“We’re working on a number of solutions that will blow away our competition. Now that we’ve hit on the cornerstones of a solid marketing automation solution through heavy investments in ease of use and functional-parity with other enterprise systems, we’re starting to look in the rear view mirror as we pave our own path of innovation. We’re already off to a good start in 2015 with the release of Send & Track™ for Google Chrome. That version offers a number of features only included in independent solutions like Tout App and Yesware. These solutions sell for hundreds of dollars a month as a standalone solution. Now that it’s part of our Revenue Generation Software® platform the value of our offering to other businesses is magnified even more. We’re excited to continue providing our customer base with the highest value per dollar in the industry.”

The company wraps up a successful 2014, as emphasized by its growth, growing nearly 3x its size from 2013. Advanced features like layout templates, email testing, event integration, social appends, video marketing, an API, tags and more have rounded out the application and serve as a testament for the companies ability to rapidly develop new features. The company has also added more diversity to its customer base with non-profits and enterprise companies joining the list of satisfied customers.

Lead Liaison

How our Company Saved $9,618 on our Mailchimp Email Campaign – Get More out of Email Marketing

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Get More out of Email Marketing

Get More out of Email MarketingOur company recently sent an email campaign the “old school way” to see how difficult and costly it would be compared to sending the email campaign and complement the strategy with Lead Liaison. We wanted to empathize with the 100s of thousands of companies that spend money on email marketing but aren’t equipped with the full software solution to turn their salespeople into “happy heroes”. Companies think they’re saving money by going with email service providers like Mailchimp or Constant Contact, when they end up spending way more than they anticipated in the end without having software that fosters sales efficiency. In this post we explain how to get more out of email marketing. Lets unfold what we did.

In this exercise, we sent out an email to 17,000 contacts. Although Lead Liaison has a powerful email marketing component to the platform, we wanted to act like most businesses and signed up for Mailchimp. The campaign was a huge success and cultivated the average click-throughs (2.2%) in the software and web application industry. That’s 374 people that clicked at least one link in our email campaign. Now, most businesses would send that list of click-throughs to their sales team and ask them to follow up. Let’s look at the investment required to properly follow up with these 374 “leads”:

  1. 374 people clicked a link.
  2. Consider an average time of 20 minutes for each rep to research the lead, contact them, add reminders in their CRM, follow up, etc. It’s probably more, but we’ll be conservative here.
  3. 374 people x 20 minutes = 7,480 minutes = 125 hours spent chasing these leads.
  4. We all know salespeople are the most expensive resource in a company. The average fully burdened cost of a software salesperson is $175,000 per year. $175,000 / 2,080 business hours in a year = $84 per hour.
  5. 125 hours x $84 per hour = $10,500 spent following up with these leads.

Yep, that’s right…a typical company would spend over $10,000 on their email campaign. These companies might be looking for some cost savings as a Mailchimp subscription at this contact level is $150 for the month; however, they end up spending a lot more in operational costs. It’s important to look at the total cost of the campaign, from the price of the software to deliver the campaign through the follow up. The problem with this type of traditional approach to email marketing is that the marketing person has to invest more time (and ultimately the company’s money), extracting data from Mailchimp, parsing data to determine which reps should get each lead, and delivering data to them. Now, let’s look at how we saved 92% of that investment, or $9,618, by using Lead Liaison for sales efficiency.

Instead of following up with everyone that clicked a link in an email, we used Lead Liaison to take care of all our tracking, lead qualification and lead distribution. It took us 20 minutes to set things up before sending our campaign through Mailchimp. We spent 5 minutes adding a tracking token to the end of each of our links inside the Mailchimp Campaign. Then we spent 15 minutes setting up a Workflow that ran for two weeks following the launch of our email campaign. In our Workflow we told the system to look for:

  • new leads from email marketing with
  • website activity after the date we launched the campaign
  • with a lead score more than 30

With these rules we could automatically distribute warm leads to our sales team, based on territory, round robin, or sales rep performance. The lead is then automatically synced into our CRM and the salesperson gets a task reminder to follow up. The sales team is a lot happier as they’re focusing on qualified leads and don’t have to bother with data entry. Lets look at the numbers:

  1. 21 hot leads were generated that met the above criteria
  2. The reps were able to spend more quality time (30 minutes per lead) on each prospect as they knew their prep and research would be more meaningful with higher quality leads. Reps used Lead Liaison to see what the person looked at after they clicked the link in the email and how many other times they visited our website. Reps could see all kinds of digital behavior like when they played our video explainer, visited our pricing page, and more.
  3. 21 hot leads x 30 minutes per lead = 10.5 hours spent chasing hot leads
  4. At $84 per hour, that’s $882.
  5. Compared to $10,500 for the “traditional” approach to following up to an email campaign, our company saved 92%, or $9,618, had a happier sales and marketing team, kept all the data in the system, and saved time not having to export or lose data.

That’s a pretty compelling ROI. Even if we didn’t invest the 15 minutes setting up the Workflow in Lead Liaison, we could have used our visitor tracking solution for the period of our campaign, filter out Known Leads (people with an email) with an Original Lead Source of Email Marketing, and sort by Lead Score. The website visitor tracking view displays businesses visiting our website in real-time and tracks activity across all our marketing channels. We could have easily clicked the “Hits” column to see what pages people viewed during their visit and how many times they visited our website since the campaign ran.

website visitor traffic

We hope you try a modern approach to email marketing and connect email to web using Lead Liaison to get more out of email marketing.

Lead Liaison

Are You Ready to Deploy Marketing Automation Software?

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Deploy Marketing AutomationIf you’re considering deploying marketing automation software, you may have wondered if your business is actually ready for the change.  After all, adopting software is an already risky venture if you’re not prepared and if you do it too soon, it can be a disaster.  Let’s take a look at why you might be ready to deploy marketing automation software.

Decreased Conversions and Inability to Scale

Having a significant decrease in sales conversions from your email marketing campaigns?  It might be time to implement marketing automation.  Marketing automation can help you move away from generic email messages by providing your prospects with relevant information that applies to their unique situation.  This will help you improve your conversion rate significantly.  If you’re having trouble figuring out how to deliver quality messages, then you have an inability to scale.  Marketing automation gives you real-time analytics and service communications that will win and keep customers.

High Cost Errors and Privacy Concerns

New privacy laws will soon be implemented and the rules regarding tracking of opt-ins and audit will be strict.  If you’re worried about execution of these new regulations and the consequences that come with them, you should probably add marketing automation to your business repertoire.  Tracking and compliance issues will be reduced with marketing automation software.  Because you’re doing your marketing manually, risk of human error is high.  Automation mitigates that risk ensuring that your emails get to the appropriate place.

Competition

Let’s face it – your competitors are probably already using marketing automation software.  Reaching prospects is done the most effectively by automation and this means that your competitors are reaching prospects faster than you.  Worse than that, it could mean that they’re reaching your customers more often than you.  If they are, it means that in all probability your customers are receiving more relevant content from someone else and are probably considering why they’re with you as opposed to another company.

Lead Scoring

If you want to align your marketing and sales teams, you should really consider trying to deploy marketing automation software.  Lead scoring will give you insight and prioritize your leads based on a slew of criteria:  demographics and prospect activity being the main two.  Automation platforms can provide you with a way to save time, money, and frustration of your marketers and sellers – and employee productivity and relationships are real features that can make the difference in your business thriving or failing.

Ensuring that you’re implementing marketing automation at the right time will ensure maximum effectiveness for your business and teams.  Making the move at the right time will significantly improve your chances of success as you utilize this new tool in marketing. Talk to the Lead Liaison team today about how deploying marketing automation can change your business for the better!

Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation in 2015: This is YOUR Year

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Marketing Automation in 2015We’re confident that 2015 will be The Year of Marketing Automation – this could be both our and your best year yet. After all, the idea of Marketing Automation isn’t a new one.  Marketing automation has been around in one form or another for decades.  Mailing campaigns intending to engage customers have existed long before we became a social medial and email culture.

Now, marketing solution is one of the fastest growing marketing solutions available and 2015 is poised to be a grand year for it.  Let’s go over what’s happening in the market right now that makes this the best time to add marketing automation to optimize your performance and get the best results.

Why Add Marketing Automation in 2015?

First, when you look at the data it’s easy to see why you should add marketing automation software to your repertoire of business solutions.  75% of top performing companies have been using some type of marketing automation in their businesses for the last two years.  Other data suggests that business-to-business companies increase their sales-pipeline contributions by 10% when adding marketing automation – this includes 25% of business-to-business Fortune 500 companies.

Mobile Marketing and Marketing Automation in 2015

If you really want to get serious about marketing automation in 2015 and you already have a platform, then your next logical step is to think about mobile marketing.  Mobile technology is the first screen in a customer’s life and a marketing tool that they carry everywhere.  By employing mobile marketing, you’re able to tell when, how, and where they’d like to be approached.  However, to properly engage customers using mobile devices, there are some hard and fast rules you should note:

  • Don’t engage based on location alone.  With location services activating marketing messages, consumers are likely to be blasted with messages at every street corner.  This will lead to frustration and many customers will begin to ignore messages, even when those messages are relevant.
  • Beacons aren’t able to engage successfully.  Beacons are messages, much like location services, that engage a consumer based on what they’re near.  Staying at the Hilton?  Beacons will send messages to a device letting the consumer know what restaurants, sporting events, and theaters are nearby.  Poor beacon strategy will decrease engagement and drive consumers away.  Don’t rush to roll out beacons unless you’re sure you have a strategy in place that will be successful.
  • Protect your customer’s data.  With high profile data breaches in the news last year, consumers are aware that you’re collecting their information and that there’s always a potential for it to get out.  Taking appropriate steps to ensure a checks and balances system before collecting data will ensure that your customers are safe and you’re protected from bad press and customer disenchantment.

Marketing automation is also getting more affordable. Many new marketing automation startups that have proven successful, are forcing old players to get with the times and reduce prices.  If they choose not to lower prices they’ll become more specific in different areas in order to service their customers.  Competition will be fierce in 2015, which will lead many to change the way they do business.  Many startups will see success and offer freemium services and/or services with no startup fees involved.

2015 will truly be the year that any company, no matter how small or the size of its budget, can begin to market like Fortune 500 businesses.  Let us show you how marketing automation can make this year the best yet for your business!

Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation and Trial Conversion

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Marketing Automation and Trial ConversionIf you’re failing to convert customers from your free trial offers then there’s probably a very simple reason why:  you’re failing to engage them.  Failing to engage potential customers within the first three days of a free-trial sign up is the number one reason why customers lose interest in a product or feature.  And if they’re not interested or find the experience enjoyable, they’ll get bored with the product, and will fail to convert.

On average, you can expect somewhere around 15% of your free-trial users to become paying customers.  That number drops significantly within ninety days as you lose customers as they try the product and find that it might not work for them.  So you might be wondering how exactly you’re supposed to attract more free trial users, convert them to customers, and keep them as customers.  This is where marketing automation and trial conversion comes into play.

Marketing Automation and Trial Conversion

Email marketing can be a useful tool in getting customers to convert.  Even if you have a small percentage of users converting to paying customers, a small improvement in activation rate will increase your paying customers.  Developing a relationship with your potential customers can be as simple as sending short, concise, and personalized messages via marketing automation.

You’re going to want to send your first messages within ninety minutes of your leads expressing an interest in the product – this will give you the best chance of converting them.  Marketing automation can do all of this for you.  All you have to do is set up your software to trigger an email once a customer signs up for the free trial.

Crafting Scheduled Messages

You should also have a scheduled messaged that explains all of the features of the free trial program or product and how to get started quickly.  This message should give customers the option of contacting a representative at your company or within your customer service department if they have questions – which is just another way for you to establish a personal relationship with the customer.

Scheduling multiple messages throughout the trial period will also help you with your conversion rate but only as long as you’re adding convincing content.  Marketing automation via trial conversion can help you monitor your customer’s free trial use and trigger appropriate e-mails to be sent to them.  For example, if your customer hasn’t used the free trial in a week, your marketing automation software could trigger an email with the goal of getting the customer back to the trial.

By monitoring usage of the trial, marketing automation can give you valuable insight into whether or not an extension of that free trial is appropriate.  Users who have already stopped using the product prior to the end of the free trial are unlikely to move forward in your sales funnel.  However, users who are actively using the product but stop due to attrition may be viable candidates for at trial extension.

If you’re ready to take the next step in applying a marketing automation solution to your business, contact us today!