Lead Liaison

Lead Liaison Releases Kit for Marketing in Higher Education

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Lead Liaison LogoAllen, TX – Lead Liaison, a software company that specializes in providing marketing and sales solutions, released a collection of resources for educational institutions this week. Their Education Kit includes an overview of marketing in the education sector, a checklist of how to apply marketing automation specifically to educational institutions, various case studies, and more.

“We already know that we’ve got a powerful solution, but the problem that a lot of people run into is how to apply it,” says Jen Worsham, Director of Client Relations at Lead Liaison. “Marketing for higher education can be difficult, but it shouldn’t be. We want to show, based on in depth research and real-life case studies, that marketing automation can help increase student retention, accelerate new student enrollment, and streamline communication.”

Lead Liaison’s Education Kit encourages educational institutions to evoke emotion with their audience by telling compelling stories and using a consistent theme across omni-channel marketing efforts – both online and offline.

The kit breaks down which of Lead Liaison’s features solve problems that are commonly found in marketing for higher education. Automation, for example, can improve response time and increase operating efficiency. Personalized website content tailors website visitors’ experience, making it unique to each student. Lead Liaison supports omni-channel marketing, including email, social media, text messages, postcards, and even handwritten letters, which helps build emotional ties between the audience and the university. They assist in overcoming budget issues by tracking Campaign ROI. Using ROI data can justify more budget, or assist in finding where to cut back by assessing the methods that have not been successful.

Florida International University uses Lead Liaison on a daily basis. They wanted to have more meaningful and relevant conversations with their students and prospective students. Features like Lead Liaison’s database segmentation, social append, Salesforce integration, and even onsite training, helped FIU accomplish these goals. Now, they are able to speak to prospective students the way that they want to be spoken to. “Lead Liaison has made our experience so much more efficient and enjoyable. We are now able to quickly create high impact messages with the email builder, we can assess email campaign performance, and even analyze real time insight into Prospect activity,” says Eva Marie Gasson, Assistant Director of Communications at FIU.

Lead Liaison also proves, with this Education Kit, that marketing automation isn’t just for prospective students. Educational institutions can communicate with alumni or faculty in the same way they automate other communications to prospective students. Advisors or Success Coaches can use the platform to coordinate and track university mentor programs. The opportunities are truly endless with a platform as powerful as Lead Liaison.

 

About Lead Liaison
Lead Liaison provides cloud-based sales and marketing automation solutions that helps businesses accelerate revenue 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 providing sophisticated visitor tracking and additional website engagement tools to boost sales effectiveness. 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®. Lead Liaison is headquartered in Allen, Texas, near Dallas. For more information, visit http://www.leadliaison.com or call 1-800-89-LEADS (895-3237).

 

Lead Liaison

5 Ways to Keep Your Marketing Organized

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I was working with one of our new clients the other day and they asked how successful companies get started with marketing automation. Without hesitation, I answered “they get organized.”

It sounds simple, sure, but when you’re dealing with a database of thousands of prospects and hundreds of pieces of content, it gets a bit more intimidating. Sure, you could send generic emails and event invites to your whole database, but are you going to get great engagement? Probably not. Unless you’ve got a way to personalize content and track ROI, you’re just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.

Luckily with Lead Liaison you don’t have to do it on your own. Let’s look at five awesome ways you can keep your marketing team on top of everything.

  1. Segmentations – The way you segment your database is key to how successful any campaign will be. We can automatically build segmentations based on your prospects’ individual profiles. All you do is tell our system what to look for. Do you want to market to all CMOs in the state of Georgia in the entertainment industry? Great, we’ll search your database, find all of them, and make a custom marketing list. Best of all, we’ll add new prospects as they come in and remove them if they no longer fit your criteria. Learn more about segmentations here.
  2. Tagging – Tags are one of the best ways to keep track of who is interested in what. When a prospect engages with your content, attends a show, views a webinar, or any other engagement you can think of, we can automatically tag them. Say they attended your 2017 We’re Awesome Webinar. We can tag them with the event name automatically when they attend. Later, if you want to build a nurture drip campaign around attendees, just search for prospects with that tag. Easy! Oh, and it’ll be even easier at live events with some cool things coming down the line.
  3. Campaigns – When we say campaign, we’re talking about your marketing efforts around a specific topic or event. Say you have a new product coming out. Your marketing for that product would go into a Lead Liaison campaign. And, because we’re not just an email marketing platform, we would also track your multi-channel marketing pieces. Since you can add a cost to the campaign, you’d have a super easy time finding your ROI. And because you’ve segmented and tagged your prospects for targeted content, that ROI will look pretty nice.
  4. Programs – Think of a program as a campaign of campaigns. While you would have a campaign for a specific trade show, you would have a program for all trade shows that year. And yes, this includes the costs of the individual campaigns. This could help you answer that age-old question, did you actually make money from the trade shows you attended this year? In my book, that’s a must-know for any B2B organization.
  5. Folders – Folders are great. You can put any list, segmentation, automation, campaign, or program into a folder. Want to see all of your marketing content that’s geared toward CMOs? Look in your CMO folder. Want to see all of your drip campaigns? Look in the drip campaign folder. Forget searching through pages of content if you want to make a tweak. Yes, it will take some initial setup, but you’ll be paid back the time spent tenfold.

The big takeaway is that organization will streamline your marketing pushes. Imagine being able to send truly relevant content to the right people, and then having the time to figure out who really is a qualified lead. I can tell you this, the sales team will love you for it, and the execs will love the detailed ROI.

Want to learn more about who Lead Liaison can help you organize? Give us a shout!

 

Lead Liaison

Lead Liaison Leaks a Glimpse of First-Ever, Fully Integrated Lead Capture App

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Lead Liaison LogoAllen, TX – Lead Liaison, an innovative marketing and sales solution provider, is elevating the scope of B2B mobile software with a first ever, fully integrated lead capture app, conveniently named GoCapture!™. Although it is not available for public consumption yet, the Lead Liaison has released a few specifics that have the technology world buzzing.

The app is intended to be used at events such as trade shows, seminars and conferences, and even in door-to-door sales, to capture hot leads or take surveys onsite. This new technology allows Lead Liaison to span the full life cycle of an event, from onsite lead capture and data collection to nurturing with marketing automation, and beyond. This application pairs with Lead Liaison’s Marketing Automation platform, Lead Management Automation (LMA)™ and their CRM, OneFocus™, allowing exhibitors to instantly capture, qualify, distribute, and nurture leads with a single system. It will be initially available for iOS and Android operating systems with support for Windows in a subsequent release.

Information is limited, but according to Lead Liaison’s engineers, GoCapture!™ will provide the ability to quickly capture leads using several methods. The first method is through a mobile form submission. Trade show attendees will be able to walk up to a company’s booth and manually fill in the form on a smartphone or tablet. Exhibitors can also directly fill in the form.

The second method for onsite lead capture is through a business card transcription portal. Employees working an event can simply take a photo of the lead’s business card. From there, OneCapture!™ offers the option to transcribe the business card using a self-service portal at a later time. Alternatively, Lead Liaison also offers a paid transcription service.

The third method for lead capture is by optical character recognition (OCR). OCR provides the ability to scan the business card, capturing the information automatically.

“The methods and flexibility in which we allow someone to capture a lead has grown. It is tailored around an event or a show,” explains Lead Liaison Solutions Specialist, Chris Kipgen. “What sets us apart is the fact that we own all of these pieces, from the CRM to the automation, which can deliver different kinds of touch points, digital and offline. The fact that we are not integrating with systems we do not own really makes this experience stand out from our competitors. It’s seamless.”

GoCapture!™ is scheduled for release in the fall, according to Lead Liaison. However, they are starting testing with early adopters over the next few weeks. To sign up for alerts about this mobile technology, visit this webpage.

About Lead Liaison
Lead Liaison provides cloud-based sales and marketing automation solutions that helps businesses accelerate revenue 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 providing sophisticated visitor tracking and additional website engagement tools to boost sales effectiveness. 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®. Lead Liaison is headquartered in Allen, Texas, near Dallas. For more information, visit http://www.leadliaison.com or call 1-800-89-LEADS (895-3237).

Lead Liaison

Reviews Matter

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During the last couple of years, traditional advertisement methods, such as television ads, and even Internet-based ads have decreased in terms of their influence on the market, and for obvious reasons. People are now free to state their very own, unbiased opinions, on practically all products and services sold over the Internet, almost everywhere in the world.

For those who do not know, online reviews are basically the opinions of consumers on certain products and services, posted either on the company’s website, on social media networks, on e-commerce sites, but also on review platforms, such as Yelp, TripAdvisor, G2 Crowd, Capterra, TechCrunch, Wired, IMDb, CNET, RateMDs, Foursquare and many more.  

With time, online reviews have managed to become a big trend on the internet, thus determining how consumers and business owners throughout the world act. Nowadays, online reviews can influence a multitude of our decisions, including what phone we have, what we eat on a daily basis, where we dine, where we travel, which hotels we book, and what other products we purchase. Reviews have become a way of assessing the overall quality of a product or service, prior to the first-hand experience, through the help of others that have used the product/service before.

Regardless of their importance, it is surprising that not many business owners can fully grasp the importance of online reviews yet. With this in mind, in a recent study by WebsiteBuilder.org, it was determined that with every star a business gets in terms of their rating, their profits will increase by around 5-9%. On the other side of the spectrum, 22% of customers are bound to give up purchasing a product after reading just one negative review, so the impact is huge. Business owners should be aware of the fact that there are numerous ethical practices that can be established, to reduce the number of negative reviews, and increase the number of positive ones.

If a little work is put into effective review management and customer satisfaction, then businesses throughout the world will be able to yield larger profits, and experience more popularity, both online, but also offline.

Here’s a cool infographic that WebsiteBuilder.org put together. 

onlinereview-infographic-by-websitebuilder.org_-1

Lead Liaison

Ten Things Marketing Should Review with Sales When using Marketing Automation

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marketing and salesMarketing automation software is a necessary solution that all viable businesses should use. I’ve said many times that marketing automation is like CRM 20 years ago. Companies that are not using marketing automation risk losing ground to their competitors, who likely are using marketing automation. Unfortunately though, companies seem to think that marketing automation is just for marketers – when it’s not! Salespeople can realize a number of gains from marketing automation software, such as better, more qualified leads, key alerts, reports that identify new leads, and more. Marketers are the main buyers of marketing automation software. However, they’re not always clear on what they should tell their sales team once they bring the software in-house. Here’s a list of ten things marketing should review with sales when using marketing automation:

  1. Ask them if they want to get a daily alert via email that sends them a list of businesses checking out your company’s website in the area they are responsible for. For example, a rep covering Texas, Oklahoma, and Nebraska might only want to see companies visiting your website only in these states. Also, it’s possible to see the people that visit your website, but limit that to only people with whom the sales rep is the “lead owner” of. Ask them if they prefer to filter out what’s on the daily report. For example, only see leads they own, etc.
  2. The Automated Lead Flow Management guide would be a good document to read through to see what’s possible: http://www.leadliaison.com/resources/library-of-resources/. Can your sales team agree on a flow for all inbound leads that help your company establish a process for managing, distributing, and nurturing inbound leads?
  3. Try to better understand from them how they segment clients, so the marketing automation provider can help you build dynamic segmentations from your database. In other words, what “groups” of people do they want to communicate with frequently and why?
  4. Do they ever want emails to be sent by marketing on their behalf? Most marketing automation platforms can send emails from the Lead or Contact owner.
  5. Better define lead distribution processes with them. Most marketing automation systems can help you set up a rock solid lead distribution process.
  6. Get a feel for the buyer’s journey. The Marketing Content Map, http://www.leadliaison.com/resources/library-of-resources/, can help you map out the buyer’s journey. Make sure you build nurturing around each of these journey’s to build the relationship as prospects move through the sales cycle.
  7. Ask if they want to nurture customers (up sell, cross sell ops, birthday wishes, contract anniversary reminders, etc). Marketing automation is not just for top of the funnel activities, but also for bottom of the funnel relationship building.
  8. You could ask them what activities make a qualified lead in their mind, and start building a scoring model with them (what activities to score, what points, etc.). If you’re really digging in, we have a guide that kind of acts like a contract between marketing and sales, called the service level agreement between sales/marketing. You can download it here: http://www.leadliaison.com/resources/library-of-resources/.
  9. Ask them if they want to add a plug-in into their email client (Google Mail, Outlook, etc.) to send trackable 1:1 email. Most marketing automation providers offer plugins to email clients. We do this with our Send & Track plugin.
  10. Ask them if they could use help nurturing trade shows leads (if you attend trade shows). This last one is sort of specific to Lead Liaison. We have a mobile app to simplify the process from lead capture, to transcription, to nurture! It’s a pretty slick end-to-end process.
Lead Liaison

The Importance of a CRM

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CRMDoes your company need a CRM? To put it simply, a CRM means the difference between retaining or losing customers.

It really is that black and white.

It makes sense when you think about it. Customer relationship management (CRM) is all about the practices, technologies, and strategies that companies of all sizes use to analyze and manage customer interactions throughout their lifecycles. If you are able to access this information, you can improve the customer experience and increase your revenue.

Still not convinced? Look at some cold, hard facts related to CRMs.

It Impacts Customer Satisfaction

You want your customers to be satisfied. Satisfied customers come back and buy more, so you will do anything you can to make sure your customers are happy. That is why you need to adopt a CRM system. CRMs allow businesses to better track individual clients or accounts, meaning less information slips through the cracks. Taking notes is an important part of keeping up with your CRM. When you’re on the phone with a client, it’s nice to reference something personal that you talked about on your last call. It shows them that you care, and that their business matters to you. It creates a personal connection.

Forty-seven percent of CRM users state that their CRMs positively impact their customer satisfaction statistics. In other words, CRMs create satisfied customers, and that, in turn, helps with customer retention. The same number of people surveyed stated that their customer retention was impacted by their CRMs. Those two go hand in hand, so that should come as no surprise.

Improved Access to Customer Data

Data is the most powerful tool that you have at your disposal. When you get data on your customers, you know what they want and how to deliver it. The more data you receive and keep track of, the better your results will be.

That’s another reason that a CRM is so important. Seventy-four percent of CRM users state that their systems provide them with better access to customer data. Imagine how your business would change if you had more access to data.

The ROI Is Huge

Let’s be honest. Business is all about dollars and cents. You are willing to spend the dollars if you’re going to make even more off of the investment. On average, the ROI for CRM is $8.71 for every dollar you spend. You are able to serve your customers better with CRM, and that pays off in big ways.

So why is the ROI so high? It has to do with what a CRM does to your sales. It can increase them by as much as 29 percent.

It doesn’t just improve sales. It also increases sales productivity by a whopping 34 percent and the accuracy of the sales forecast by 42 percent.

As you can see, you need a CRM to excel in the business world, but these systems can be pretty pricey. Fortunately, you can get a top-notch CRM system without the high cost by going with Lead Liaison. Not only does Lead Liaison have a CRM ready to deploy, but it is completely free. Find out more about how this CRM can help you reach your business goals.