Leading Marketing Automation Provider Brings Donation Management to Nonprofit Organizations

Lead Liaison Empowers Small to Mid-Sized Nonprofit Organizations (NPOs) with Complete Marketing Automation System to Grow their Business, Community and Donor Base

Allen, TX (PRWEB) March 31, 2015 – Lead Liaison, the leading provider of marketing automation software to the mid-market, has announced the availability of their donation and payment management system as part of their solution for marketing automation for nonprofits.

The software market for nonprofits is very fragmented with limited choices for small to mid-sized nonprofits. Today, a nonprofit has to cobble together different solutions for email marketing, donor management, social media, event marketing, etc. to form an effective solution. Larger, “heavy” nonprofit software packages geared for enterprise-level nonprofits aren’t a good option either. Most small to mid-sized nonprofits don’t have a need for volunteer management, auction management and other services that might be overkill. Many platforms for nonprofits, such as Blackbaud, Salsa Labs and the like, aren’t right-sized for small to mid-market nonprofits that can’t afford the hefty price tag.

Nonprofits share a few things in common, donors and communities. Donations are the lifeblood of nonprofits making it essential to accept, track and manage donations. In recognition of the market gap for a complete system that builds donor and community followers, Lead Liaison has integrated a robust, flexible donor management system with its leading marketing automation platform. The donation management system supports both one-time and recurring donations and integrates with over 30 payment gateways. Now, small to mid-sized nonprofits will benefit from having donation management in addition to Lead Liaison’s core marketing capabilities for socialemail, mobile and offline marketing to extend donor and community outreach and create long lasting relationships with donors. Read more about Lead Liaison’s marketing solution for nonprofits.

Lynn Rogers, Development and Community Relations Manager at Fossil Rim says:

“We’re always looking for better ways to serve our donor base. When I heard about Lead Liaison’s new donation management features, I thought it was a perfect fit for nonprofits. Fossil Rim is a growing nonprofit, we know first-hand that it’s important to have the right marketing tools to be successful. We’re excited about what Lead Liaison is doing. They’re making the process of accepting recurring and one-time donations super easy. Now, it’s simple to communicate with your donor base once you’re collecting and tracking all donor activity. Donation management is a crucial piece of functionality for nonprofits. When you tie that functionality into marketing automation you’ve got a powerful solution that can help any nonprofit.”

Alan Page, VP of Customer Success, adds:

“We understand our Revenue Generation Software platform is horizontally applicable. In other words, the technology spans multiple markets. We’re always thinking of ways to optimize the platform for specific applications. For this reason, we’ve introduced our donation management module. With a few button clicks, a nonprofit can build a payment collection form that supports over 30 payment gateways. We’ve worked with leading payment processor platforms such as Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net, Worldpay and some 20+ others to enable acceptance of one-time and recurring donations. Nonprofits simply embed our form into their website and Lead Liaison begins tracking and managing all donations. When donations come in, we can trigger a series of multi-channel marketing actions, such as texts, emails, postcards, and much more (over 3,000 marketing items) as a follow-on from the donation. When the marketing arm of a nonprofit needs to reach back out to their donor base, its a 2-minute process since we keep a log of all donations.”

About Fossil Rim

Fossil Rim Wildlife Center is where Africa comes to Texas. The 1,800-acre preserve holds a 9.5 mile scenic drive where you can interact with over 1,100 rare and endangered animals roaming free in their herds. Stay in your car, reserve your spot on a guided tour, or even spend a night at Safari Camp or Lodge to see over 50 different species of wild animals including cheetahs, wolves, giraffes, rhinos and more. For more information on Fossil Rim visit http://www.fossilrim.org/

About Lead Liaison

Lead Liaison is a cloud-based sales and marketing automation solution that helps businesses accelerate sales by attracting, converting, closing and retaining more prospects. Filling a void in the small pool of marketing automation providers that focus on marketing-centric functionality, Lead Liaison gives equal focus to sales support with solutions such as a hot-lead dashboard, Buy Signals and a live ticker alert of businesses on the customer’s website. Lead Liaison blends ease-of-use, a flexible business model, deep external integration, marketing across social, web, mobile, email and offline channels and powerful functionality, all specifically tailored for mid-sized businesses, into a single platform, called Revenue Generation Software®. Additionally, Lead Liaison provides content creation services leveraged for communication vehicles such as press releases, blog posts, emails, and posts on social media platforms. Lead Liaison is headquartered in Allen, Texas, near Dallas, and employs 22 people. For more information, visit http://www.leadliaison.com or call 1-800-89-LEADS (895-3237).

Do You Know Which Leads Are More Likely To Become Customers?

Do you know which leads are  more likely to become customers?Do you know which leads are more likely to become customers? There’s nothing more exciting than a fresh new group of leads, all contacted through a successful marketing strategy and ready to be turned over to an eager sales staff. But as we all know an unfortunately small percentage of those leads, no how well they were acquired, will be ready to buy when they are contacted. So how do you know which leads are likely to become customers, and how do you help your staff contact those leads at the right time? Using a combination of tools available through Lead Liaison’s software and solutions you can help your marketing and sales staff capitalize on every opportunity.

Lead Liaison is able to offer these sorts of results by employing a variety of different approaches to information collection, analysis, and automated marketing solutions to keep leads engaged and accessible for the right moment for your team to make the sale. How does this work? It begins with the analysis of data gleaned from your website and other materials, which feeds into a sophisticated algorithm of lead grading and scoring to tell you’re sales team when a lead can be converted into a customer.

Analytics

One of the basic principles of creating an automated marketing solution for your company is gathering and examining the data that customers bring to your marketing team through their activity on your website and with other materials. Actions like web form conversion, email opens and social media activity inform your marketing team of what is working with customers and helps sales better understand the interest of their leads.

Buy signals are a real-time system of alerts that will communicate with your sales team when a potential lead performs an activity that exhibits a good chance to make a sale, such as a time-sensitive email click through or web form submission.

Lead Grading

Lead grading is a vital technique in helping your marketing team identify ideal buyers. Lead Liaison’s lead grading algorithms take a variety of factors into account, including job title, industry, geography and revenue to determine whether or not they are a good match for your product or service and thus would make a likely sale. These qualifications are fully customizable, letting your team develop the ideal customer for your company.

Using the data compiled by the lead grading algorithms, Lead Liaison’s software scores individual leads, and passes this data on to your sales team. Using the hot lead dashboard, Briefcase, your sales team will have all the information they need to know when a lead is ready to buy and have the information they need to make the sale. Information such as buy signals, overall activity and lead grade is delivered into the engine to create a complete picture of your potential customers.

Lead Liaison’s tools for helping your team know which leads are more likely to be converted to customers don’t end there. Visit our marketing automation blog to learn more about practices such as lead nurturing, which helps you turn cold leads into warm one.

 

Marketing Automation Tools Every Company Should Be Using

Marketing Automation Tools Every Company Should Be UsingMarketing automation is far from a trendy phrase that businesses are using to create buzz. When marketing automation tools are implemented, lead nurturing skyrockets: an astounding 451% of companies see an increase in quality leads and 53% higher conversion rates. Marketing automation will also save you time, money, and stress and will condense many of your daily activities so your team can focus on more important tasks. Clearly, marketing automation is a solution that many businesses should be engaging. If you’re just now considering adding marketing automation, you may be overwhelmed in the sea of options. We’ve broken down a few marketing automation tools for you to consider.

Blog Content Management Systems

You’re probably familiar with this type of marketing automation system and don’t even know it. Popular blog content management systems include WordPress which is an active user community that has an enormous range of plugins available, all designed to help you create and manage a blog. Other options include Joomla and Drupal. Like WordPress, Joomla has an enormous interactive user community who can answer your questions or address concerns. Drupal is an additional option that is an open source CMS and is used to create blogs as well as enterprise applications.

Landing Pages and Lead Capture Forms

A landing page is a single web page, designed to be individual from your main web pages. In simpler terms, a landing page can be any web page that someone ‘lands’ on but it’s generally used for one main purpose: to guide users to convert. Some landing pages are ‘click-through’ which means your user will click a link through to another page. Typically, this page will be a descriptor page offering them more information about your products. Lead capture forms are often on the landing page: a place where users can submit their information for a Freemium trial, get a free sample, or request that the sales team call them back with more information. Truly, the lead capture form should be the focus of your landing page and its placement is important.

Contact Management and Lead Nurturing

The most popular contact management suites for midsized companies include Lead Liaison, which allows you to rank your website and sales team generated leads according to buying interest – making your leads all the more powerful and improving conversion rates. Some content management suites also allow you to manage your social media accounts and offer extensions that will make you even more automated – especially common and time-consuming tasks. You can even choose software that will track your interactions with potential customers, making it clear where they fall in the conversion funnel.

Email Marketing

Perhaps the most time-consuming and tedious task, automating your email marketing frees up a considerable amount of your time. Want to email all contacts that are about to exhaust their Freemium version? Email marketing automation can send out targeted communications and automated messages while also appearing to be customized to each receiver: this means that you’ll create a more personal relationship, which will hopefully lead to higher conversion rates.

This isn’t an inclusive list of all the marketing automation tools available but it is a good place to start. There are options that can automate some or all of your marketing. You just have to do your research and decide which one is right for your company and your customers!

Myths about Marketing Automation

Myths about Marketing AutomationWe’ve heard it all from companies about why they’re delaying their decision to use marketing automation. Myths about marketing automation get in the way of making logical decisions. We gathered our sales force and asked them, what are the myths you’re hearing from companies about marketing automation? The list went on and on, here’s a short list of objections to marketing automation that our sales force commonly runs into:

  • Waiting for website to be re-done
  • Not a priority right now (focused on sales right now)
  • Technologies changing (ERP, CRM, etc)
  • Not enough time to implement
  • Busy hiring salespeople and traveling
  • Downturn in economy/industry
  • Not ready to benefit from all functionality in the system
  • cost/competition

Let’s take a moment to address this:

Great Myths about Marketing Automation

One of the great failures in sales and marketing comes from a belief that you are not in a position to prepare for the future.   Marketing automation is a great example of an investment that you can make today in the future of your growth and sales success.

Here are five common reasons why people wrongly believe that they cannot tackle a program that will yield sales results within 30-90 days in most cases:

Myth # 1: Until my website is perfect, we can’t really benefit from marketing automation

Truth:  75-80% of the value of marketing automation has nothing to do with your website!  In fact, poor messaging on your website is MORE of a reason that you want to identify and nurture prospects who may not have given your brand enough time to truly understand what you do.

Myth #2 :  You need to spend a ton of time preparing strategies and focusing on marketing automation for it to be successful.

Truth: Some of the most successful users of marketing automation spend less than 15 minutes a week building and deploying content.  As an example, one Lead Liaison client was able to build a connection with 100s of prospects as a result of a message that took less than 20 minutes to create and deploy.  With historic sales and marketing approaches, it would have taken a dozen sales people a year to reach that many people.  Now those salespeople can focus on stage two messaging with more qualified prospects!

Myth #3 :  When shifting technology (CRM, ERP, etc) you should not use marketing automation because you will have to restart your efforts later.

Truth:  Unless you are using an all-in-one system (which we heavily discourage), a good marketing automation system will stand on its own.

Myth #4:  We are putting all our focus on the website, tradeshow, end-of-the quarter, etc.   We don’t have time for marketing automation.

Truth:  The fact that your company didn’t invest in marketing automation is precisely why you are working so hard to put out fires this quarter, and this will repeat itself next quarter as you make excuses for not acting now.   Furthermore, marketing automation can make your other efforts (like tradeshows) more effective and efficient.

Myth #5:  We are watching costs right now, so we are delaying our marketing automation program.

Truth:  If your organization isn’t striving to increase sales revenue and profitability, then you should shut down your doors right now.   Why would you invest in sales people, a marketing department, etc.. if you aren’t committed to making every penny of those investments matter?   Marketing automation tends to cost 10% to 20% of what a company pays for a single employee.  If you have 5 salespeople that you are paying for every day; but do not want to spend the extra 4% to make those people successful… you are putting your company at a huge competitive disadvantage.

Bottomline:  Implementing marketing automation is not a big deal.  It’s easy and scaleable.  Based on the simple premise that people buy more of the products and services that they know, trust, and feel are best supported.

Each month that you delay in implementing marketing automation is a day in which your competition creates a competitive advantage that could have been yours.  Such delays will result not only in a loss of existing business; but struggles to increase your revenue in the short-term and long-term.

Lead Liaison Brings Marketing Automation to Google Apps for Work and Google Chrome

Industry Innovator Puts Sophisticated Power Into the Hands of a Salesperson

Allen, TX (PRWEB) March 17, 2015 – Lead Liaison brings marketing automation to Google Apps for Work and Google Chrome. Sales emails just got a whole lot easier with Lead Liaison’s introduction of Send and Track™ for Google Chrome. Now, sales people have the power of sophisticated marketing automation at their fingertips, fully integrated with Google Apps for Work and Google Chrome.

Companies typically standardize their business software on Microsoft or Google. Lead Liaison sees more and more small to medium sized businesses using Google for email, calendar and document management. When companies use Microsoft, they typically send their email through the Microsoft Outlook email client. Lead Liaison’s Send and Track™ product has supported Microsoft Outlook for years, including 2007, 2010, 2013 and Office 365, in 32-bit and 64-bit versions. With the introduction of Send and Track™ for Google Chrome the companies sales efficiency software now covers the majority share of email clients used by professional sales people.

Companies like ToutApp and Yesware lack the ability to deeply integrate into powerful sales and marketing automation software, which Lead Liaison has been offering ever since the company’s game-changing software was introduced in 2013. With a deeper level of integration into Lead Liaison’s Revenue Generation Software® platform, sales people can now nurture and educate prospects on the fly, right from within the Google compose window. In additional to nurturing, sales people can insert top performing marketing content and templates into their 1:1 emails, making Lead Liaison a powerful solution for companies standardizing on Google’s platform. Sales people can also add prospects into lists, such as a newsletter or update lists with a few button clicks.

Lead Liaison’s VP of Customer Success, Alan Page, says:

“Google just got marketing automation! We’re pleased to surpass other marketing automation vendor’s capability to tie into Google Apps for Work. What we’re doing is unparalleled in the industry. Getting this solution to market has helped us continue our disruptive path as the highest value per dollar solution for marketing automation.”

The enhanced offering that now includes solutions for Google Chrome and Google Apps for Work gives Lead Liaison’s enterprise-grade marketing automation software a booster shot with more best-in-breed sales tools.

Lead Liaison is planning more enhancements in 2015 to its Microsoft Outlook integration to pair up with its integration with Microsoft Dynamics. Send and Track™ for Google Chrome will also be enhanced to include game-changing features such as browser-based notifications, advanced statistics and other powerful sales capabilities.

Effectively Implementing Marketing Automation

Effectively Implementing Marketing Automation Often, the biggest challenge in effectively implementing marketing automation software to your repertoire of business tools is how to deliver messages that are appropriate to your audience while engaging leads. Marketing automation can help you reach a broader audience than other marketing strategies but it can be stressful software to implement and the concept can often seem overwhelming.

Decide What Your Goal Is

A successful marketing automation program really begins with a company deciding what they want to accomplish. Creating a plan for implementation before purchasing or even considering software is key for success. It’s easy to get carried away by all the excitement that good marketing automation can bring but you’ll need to set expectations to be really satisfied. If you really want to be successful at marketing automation, your sales and marketing teams will need to get on board with the plan and come to an agreement on how they will work together and what their roles will be. Starting with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) between sales and marketing is always a good first step.

With marketing automation, your marketing team’s new job will be to deliver the right message at the right time so you can engage your audience and nurture your leads. This means that marketing will be getting a new workload, probably from the sales team, and everyone will need to realize his or her new roles. Avoiding unwelcome surprises regarding workload, tasks, and interaction between teams will be easier if all these issues are discussed beforehand.

Start Small

It’s tempting to take your marketing automation software and throw everything into it but it might not be wise, especially at the beginning. Sometimes, less truly is more, and trying to include every feature of your marketing automation program right at the offset is more likely to set you back than push you forward. You’ll be in a much greater position if you start small, measure your successes and reevaluate your challenges, than you will be if you toss everything into the pot and hope for the best.

To get off on right foot effectively implementing marketing automation, think of your first full-fledged campaign as a trial run and learning experience will help mitigate any difficulties or disappointments. What you learn from your first sales and marketing campaign can help you learn what works and what doesn’t work for your next one. You also need to decide what exactly you’ll be automating. Do you have on the fly content that needs to be automated or are you looking for a more complex plan on creating, distributing, and re-employing your creative content? Don’t forget to include in your plans some action items for what should happen after the leads start coming in. You need to ensure you have a dedicated and knowledgeable sales team who can answer all your leads questions and concerns.

Keep in mind while you’re doing all of this that the process, planning, and implementation can be overwhelming. Remember that your investment into marketing automation isn’t just your monthly or quarterly subscription, but it’s also the time you put into the software and the data it produces.

Artificial Intelligence and Marketing Automation

Artificial Intelligence and Marketing AutomationAs marketing and technology continue to embrace one another, it seems inevitable that the future holds great innovations, especially in the field of marketing automation. While marketing automation has made many common marketing tasks like copywriting and strategy computerized, there is a field of marketing jobs that are still to be innovated using technology. As technology evolves, the possibilities of artificial intelligence and marketing automation are real.

Marketing automation is a billion dollar market but despite the money being invested into it, we still haven’t figured out a way to consistently legitimize the data and use it to make action plans. All in all, marketing still relies heavily on the people behind the marketing including our biases, beliefs, opinions, experiences, and education. Since the majority of customers are constantly connected via social media or mobile devices, the influx of data received is often overwhelming. Marketing automation can save time and money while increasing efficiency, but still, when it comes to providing us with information about consumer spending habits and buy decisions, those statistics are often confusing and platforms used can’t strategically recommend action plans.

All of these significant problems have one solution and a grand one at that: artificial intelligence. While it may seem like a notion straight out of a science fiction movie, artificial intelligence is actually used among some of the most profitable companies marketing automation programs including Amazon, Netflix, and Facebook. Artificial intelligence is used to turn data into real, marketable experiences that drive traffic and attract customers. Instead of raw data, you get highly personalized content that delivers as if a person with tone, personality, and voice wrote the content. This means that customers and potential customers are more connected to the material and, therefore, more likely to engage and buy.

Natural language, dynamic learning, and hypothesis generation are all traits of a successful artificial intelligence program. Marketing automation uses these programs by adding an intellectual layer to the marketing – this means that content generated is done much faster, more effectively, and cheaper than any employee could ever do. The future of artificial intelligence in marketing automation means that time spent reviewing analytics, writing and scheduling social media posts, copywriting and a variety of other time consuming tasks could be done by your automation program. This frees you up from repetitive tasks and gives you the ability to focus on moving leads throughout the purchasing funnel while establishing important relationships with customers.

Artificial intelligence and marketing automation together  is the next logical advancement in the evolution of marketing automation. Driven marketing tools will deliver more personalized content that’s intelligent – already this technology is being used when delivering online customer service chat sessions. Self-service web, voice response systems, and other marketing automation media incorporating artificial intelligence will be coming to a marketing automation system near you. The future is here!

How Can Marketing Automation Save Money: How Does $181,059 Sound!

How Can Marketing Automation Save Money?

“Marketing automation” has become such a buzz phrase over recent years that most vendors try to incorporate the term into their pitch, and sometimes go as far as completely branding their business as marketing automation. In reality, there aren’t that many pure-play marketing automation companies out there in the industry. 100s of providers stake claim on marketing automation to be part of the buzz, which causes confusion in the marketplace. Companies have a hard time understanding marketing automation let alone how marketing automation can save money. In this post we provide a quantitative analysis to answer the question, how can marketing automation save money? We’ll also touch on our approach to marketing automation.

ROI of Marketing Automation Based on Functional Usage

You’ll see some fancy calculators to add up the ROI of marketing automation, but not many resources provide a ROI analysis based on functional areas. We did that for you and looked at what a typical company would spend after investing in a piece-milled software strategy. When you list out the category of tools that companies use to help drive revenue, the list typically includes sales efficiency tools, landing page designers, form designers, email marketing, automation, and a handful of other tools. The problem with buying all of these ad-hoc solutions is two-fold. First, they don’t all play nice together as disparate solutions. Second, your wallet gets pretty thin when you’re buying all these pieces separately. We decided to do a little analysis and tally up individual, best-in-breed solutions to see how much money would drain from your budget over a five year period if a company were to acquire all of these solutions standalone.

Integrated Marketing - How Much Money Can Marketing Automation Save

How Much Money Can Marketing Automation Save You?

Below you’ll find the assumptions we used, cost of individual solutions, and a ROI analysis at the end.

The bottom line: Lead Liaison can save your company $181,059 or 362%! What we didn’t include are the incremental costs for:

  • Multiple learning curves
  • Multiple resources required to manage each ad-hoc solution

Add those in and you could very well double the ROI from what we’ve reported above.

Assumptions:

Assumptions
At least 5 sales people
Up to 10,000 contacts
No more than 100 forms
No more than 25,000 unique visitors per month
Email frequency to database 2x per month
Use each software package for 5 years

Cost of Individual Solutions:

SolutionMonthly PricePackagePurpose
Tout App$250TeamEmail for Sales
Blogging$6002 Posts Per Week, $75 per BlogMarketing Content
Litmus$149PlusEmail Testing
Marketo$1,795StandardMarketing Automation
VisiStat$500RocketVisitor Tracking
HootSuite$10ProSocial Posting
Gravity Forms/
Formstack
$99Business License / GoldWeb Forms
Unbounce$99Pro 99Landing Pages
Mailchimp$150Growing businessEmail Marketing
Opt-In Monster$199ProEngaging Popups

Total Spend on Ad-Hoc Solutions:

TOTAL$3,851
ANNUAL SPEND$46,212
LIFETIME SPEND$231,059

ROI with Lead Liaison:

AVERAGE ANNUAL SPEND with Lead Liaison$10,000
LIFETIME SPEND with Lead Liaison$50,000
ROI of Lead Liaison362.12%
SAVINGS with Lead Liaison$181,059

Lead Liaison’s Philosophy

We’ve got a different philosophy about marketing automation here at Lead Liaison. We don’t hate marketing automation, we just hate how the term is overused, misused, and misunderstood. The truth is that marketing automation is not software, it’s a strategy. You can’t really buy marketing automation software, but you can buy software that helps execute your strategy, which should include automation. No software out-of-the-box is going to automate your marketing – that’s wishful thinking.

Choices are getting “clouded” too. Some companies like HubSpot try to be the all-in-one solution, and get your CRM business too. Unfortunately, or fortunately for some, HubSpot is morphing into an Oracle or Salesforce.com type of company, is now public – trying to satisfy Wall Street, and now trying to take all your sales and marketing dollars with the emphasis on their new CRM. Lead Liaison fits in between the all-in-ones and marketing automation providers with our Revenue Generation Software® platform optimized for mid-market companies. Our mission has always been to focus on automation that improves a company’s sales and marketing operations but more importantly, generates more revenue for our customers. We believe companies care about revenue, not just automating marketing. We’re CRM agnostic, offer professional-grade sales and marketing automation functionality at killer prices, and have the industry’s deepest integration with 3rd party solutions.

It’s Simple Really: Your Introduction to Marketing Automation

Your Introduction to Marketing AutomationThe Age of Technology is truly upon us. If it doesn’t send email, it wasn’t built in this century. If the toaster can’t be programmed with Bluetooth, you need a new toaster. And now, we’re taking things a step further. And you’re going to be part of it. You’re ready to embrace automated marketing. Excellent… what is that?

Despite its popularity, more than a few companies struggle to grasp the concept of marketing automation. We’ll give you a fun and light-weight introduction to marketing automation. Here’s where part of the problem lies:

Marketing, people understand. Automation is the part that trips them up.

So lets break down “automation.”

Imagine instead, your FAQ page. A customer or prospective client has a question, you have the answer there waiting for them. You provide information they didn’t realize they’d need. And it came at no added cost to you. Now imagine a FAQ page, addressed to and tailored for each individual client.

How is that useful?

You want your customers to feel valued. To do that, you need to show them they’re more than just a number to you, that their needs are your priority.

You want to get your latest products and special offers seen by the right audience. To do that, you need to gather what relevant information is available and send out the appropriate response.

You want to make the most of your leads.

This is what marketing automation software was created for.

Automated marketing encourages leads to become personalized sales.

Great. Job done, right?

Lets go back to the FAQ page. Have you ever been denied the option of sending in your unique complaint, referred only to a static script of answers, with the very distinct sense that the site owners are trying to avoid dealing with you? How did that influence your opinion of that company?

This is where automated marketing falls short.

When handled badly, it’s mistakenly viewed as lead generation, in a campaign left unable to adapt. Investing in automation and failing to take into account your client’s specific and ever-changing needs is a sure-fire way to lose on that investment. In the end, your once quality leads have discredited your company.

Marketing is still the question of “what can I do for you?” Automation hasn’t changed that.

Knowing what it is is only half the battle. Knowing what it’s for, whether it’s right for you and how to use it is the real key to success.

Marketing Automation: What Defines Top Performers?

What Defines Top Performers in Marketing AutomationIn organizations, job retention in the marketing department remains low. In fact, job tenures in a typical marketing department are as little as three years and it’s one role that is under constant analysis and assessment. When performance wanes, marketers can expect to have to answer big questions and fight for their jobs. Successful marketers from one company may have trouble transitioning to another because what works for one industry may not work in another. This can lead to confusion about what traits top performers have.

Most top performers tend to focus on keeping their existing customers while spending less time on expanding their customer base. Keeping your customers loyal and happy tends to work out much better for companies rather than chasing after new customers. It’s also less expensive with top performers only spending approximately 20 percent of their budget on expansion where others in the field spend around 30 percent. When it comes to customers, top performers also make it a priority to manage the entire life cycle of their clients. Instead of leaving the majority of the life cycle to sales and technical support, top performers recognize that marketing has a huge role to play in successfully managing the entire customer experience.

Speaking of the customer life cycles, top performers tie response rates, satisfaction scores, and other metrics into how well they’re performing. Instead of measuring typical things like number of leads, top performers are able to control their technology and make it work for them instead of the other way around. In fact, 30% to 75% of top performing marketers personalize their technology and data to get a better perspective on how they’re performing and what they should change to boost performance.

Finally, top performers recognize that retention is a problem. Recruiting and retention is a priority among top performing companies but it doesn’t stop there. Top companies make sure that they provide their crucial employees with the training, technology, and resources needed to get their job done – therefore, customer satisfaction tends to rank just as high as customer satisfaction with these companies.

Obviously, when it comes to performance, recognizing the link between customers, marketers, and the sales team is key. But you also have to take all of that data and put it to good use – making it work for you – instead of the other way around. Marketing automation may vary from industry to industry but top performers know that one thing remains true: using your stats and metrics to evolve and change your marketing strategy will maximize your effectiveness.