Lead Liaison

Companies with Bad Websites Need Marketing Automation

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bad websitesYou’ve likely heard of the importance of marketing automation, but you might think that your site isn’t very good so it might not help you. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Bad websites need marketing automation even more than good websites do. While all sites benefit from marketing automation, it actually helps guide struggling companies to where (and what) can be changed to make the biggest impact.

What’s Working, and What Isn’t?

First, marketing automation will let you know what is working and what isn’t. You will quickly find out which pages aren’t getting any clicks and which ones are causing people to leave your site.

On top of that, you will find out which content and information people are devouring on your site. Maybe you have a great page or a whitepaper that is buried on a bad site. You will find out what content you need to showcase and what content you need to shelve.

With the help of this information, you can fill your site with content that engages and converts. It won’t be long before you’re beating the competition.

Better User Experiences with Dynamic Website Engagement

You can take it a step further by using a marketing automation company that also offers a package that gives you the ability to create dynamic website engagements. This allows you to analyze your visitors and then provide them with relevant content. That means that you could alter what visitors see on your website based off of their location, or how they interact with your site. If the system notices that they are looking at a certain product on your page more than once, it can trigger an engagement window with a 10% off coupon for that specific product. So even if your website doesn’t grab their attention, the pop-up will.

Don’t give up on your website. With the right tools, your not-so-great website can turn into a oh-so-great one.

Click here for more info!
Lead Liaison

Being Prepared in a Marketing Automation Demo

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This is the first post in the series What Questions to Ask in a Marketing Automation Demo. 

Being Prepared in a Demo

You’ve spent some time researching different marketing automation tools and now you’re finally ready to move on to the demo stage. Many people kick back and watch the demo unfold, but you need to prepare questions ahead of time and ask them during the main event. The right questions will ensure that you get the marketing automation tool that you need.

Get Real Information

Demos are full of useful information, but do you know what else they are?

They’re scripted.

You can toss that script out the window by asking some useful questions. You will get unscripted information that you can use when deciding if you want to purchase the tool.

Boost Engagement Levels

Questions also keep you engaged in the presentation. It’s easy to be passive and possibly even catch a few zzz’s during a presentation, but that is a terrible idea. If you have some questions prepared, you’ll be engaged and will be certain to understand what the tool has to offer.

Questions play a huge role in demos. Don’t make the mistake of coming up with questions during the demo. If you do that, you will waste your energy thinking of questions instead of listening to the demo. Come up with them ahead of time and then insert them at the appropriate times. Then, you will listen to the demo and get answers to your questions.

Check in next week for the next post in this series. We’ll begin covering important questions, and what you should and shouldn’t hear in the answers that you receive.

Interested in putting your questions to the test?

Request a Demo!

 

Lead Liaison

Offline Marketing: Build, Send, and Track Postcards with Lead Liaison Multi-channel Marketing

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ALLEN, TX Lob

It’s a match made in heaven. The marketing automation powerhouse Lead Liaison has partnered with Lob, a company that is aggressively building a suite of APIs that allow businesses to build applications within their own software for offline marketing tools. Together, they have created an integration that allows marketers to build, send, and track postcards within Lead Liaison’s software platform.

“A marketing automation solution should make your life easier, not more difficult. Lead Liaison and Lob share that goal, which is why we were excited to partner with them on this project. Their postcard builder is intuitive, which allows users to spend less time learning how to use it and more time creating exciting and valuable content.” – Shrav Mehta, Growth Engineer at Lob

Here are some highlights of the integration:

Flexible Design

Custom postcards can be built from scratch or from pre-designed templates in the platform. Users can add their own images, colors, and fonts. The interface allows users to choose between various postcard sizes, such as 4 x 6, 6 x 9, and 6 x 11, and customize both front and back designs. Drag-and-drop technology allows users to easily design a postcard in minutes, not hours.

Dynamic Data Insertion

The new Lead Liaison Postcard Builder gives users the ability to insert standard or custom fields as dynamic text inside of their postcards. This option allows information to be added to each postcard based on the recipient’s data in their prospect profile. The ability to include relevant data that’s specific to the recipient transforms offline marketing into personalized marketing. Companies can better use personalized data for account based marketing (ABM) or one-to-one marketing.

Send on Demand with Flexible Delivery Options

Flexible delivery options minimizes costs. Users no longer need to hit a minimum number of recipients. Send a one-off postcard wishing clients a “Happy Birthday!”, send multiple postcards to a list of people, or include as an action in automated drip marketing.

Folders & Cloning

What’s the use of valuable content if you can’t find it when you need it? Lead Liaison recently released a new feature that allows users to organize their content, personalizations, and automations into folders. Once marketers have identified valuable content, Lead Liaison’s powerful software provides to ability to clone it, saving valuable time.

More About Lob 
Lob is building a suite of APIs for the enterprise. Built with developers in mind, Lob provides tools that allow businesses to build scalable and powerful applications. The most popular API is a print and mail API that enables companies to send postcards, letters, checks, and more as effortlessly as sending emails. Lob is based in San Francisco, CA and is venture backed with over 6000 customers including Amazon, Square, and Counsyl.

More 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

How to Get Positive Reviews for Your Business

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Reviews

Most companies (if not all) have one very similar quest: get positive reviews.

Sixty-seven percent of consumers are influenced by online reviews when making a purchasing decision.

Unfortunately, it seems like the only people who want to leave reviews are the people who are angry. They certainly don’t help you get new customers.

Don’t be discouraged, though. There are a few things you can do to increase your positive reviews. If you follow these tips, it won’t be long before you start reaping the benefits of positive reviews.

Don’t Be Afraid to Ask

You know you need to use a call to action (CTA) to get people to buy products. You also need to use CTAs to get people to leave reviews. After you complete a positive transaction, ask people to leave a review. If they are happy with you, they will want to show it by doing what you ask. Point them in the right direction, and they’ll do the rest.

Make the Process Easy

People will climb a mountain to write a bad review. However, people don’t want to go out of their way to write a positive review. You have to make it very easy for them, or they won’t do it. Send them an email that directs them to the online review site or include buttons on your site. The easier it is, the more positive reviews you will receive.

Give People an Incentive to Leave a Review

You’ll also get more positive reviews by giving people an incentive to leave a review. You have to be careful with this, though. You cannot buy reviews, and you cannot give an incentive to leave a positive review. You can only give an incentive to leave a review. The incentive has to be the same across the board, regardless of if the review is positive or negative.

You can enter all of the reviews in a drawing and give the winner a prize. Hold the drawing each month. That is a great way to get people to leave reviews. You’ll find that your negative reviews will stay the same because people don’t need incentives to leave bad reviews. However, your positive reviews will go up dramatically.

Good reviews can make a huge difference for your business. Use these tips so you can bring more people into your business. As your positive reviews go up, the number of customers you serve will go up, as well.

If you’re looking for ways to increase the quality of your outreach, try using a marketing automation tool that can help you with your marketing and sales goals. People won’t think twice about giving you a positive review!

Request a Demo!
Lead Liaison

How to Run a Webinar: Have a Marketing Automation System in Place

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How to Run a Webinar

This is the fifth installment in the series How to Run a Webinar.

You’ve defined your invitation and registration process. The next step is to consider using your marketing automation software to help you with the entire process.

A marketing automation system can help you automate your webinar and create a repeatable model to use for future webinars. Marketing automation is used to manage the Invite, Registration, and Follow Up Processes. It can also help:

  • Qualify prospects based on their participation in the event
  • Log their status (no show, registered, etc.) with the event to use for future targeting
  • Automatically create a Prospect in your database
  • Nurture Prospects that attend or do not show up for the event
  • Automatically sync leads into your CRM system, such as Salesforce.com
  • Track landing page conversion rates and email statistics
  • Keep everything in one place (folders)
  • Measure ROI of the webinar, including cost per lead

In the next installment of How to Run a Webinar, we’ll talk about how to promote your webinar.

Can’t wait to get your hands on the rest of this intuitive guide? Download the full white paper here.

Interested in a demonstration of our robust marketing automation tool?

Click here for a demo!

 

Lead Liaison

Marketing Guru Covers: Social Posting and Targeting

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Social Media TargetingIt’s time to think about social posting and targeting. There’s a common misconception that all social networks are the same. Companies think they need to target the same people, regardless of the network, but that isn’t the case. You need to adopt a unique strategy for each network. Some networks cater to B2B or B2C markets, and some focus on specific age groups. Understand the various demographics so you can get more out of social networking.

Facebook

Facebook is mainly geared toward B2C marketing, although some B2B marketing does take place on the site. In fact, this is the top social network for B2C marketing since consumers spend most of their online social time on the site. That makes Facebook an excellent place for businesses to connect with their consumers, especially since everyone uses the site. It’s popular with people of both genders and all ages.

Still, B2B companies use the site to show off their human sides. If you run a B2B business, don’t be afraid to use the network. You just don’t need to post every day, like B2C businesses do. Post once a week instead.

Twitter

Like Facebook, Twitter is available for both B2B and B2C marketers, but it is most appealing to B2C marketers. The site is popular with college-educated people under 50, so this is a good option for people who are trying to reach a specific target market. Use this social network to educate people and to provide interesting and compelling news. It’s also a great place to make connections with other folks in your industry.

Google+

Google+ is one of the most interesting social networks out there. While it hasn’t caught on as much as Google would like, most companies and people have Google+ pages. When companies sign up for Google Places and people sign up for Gmail accounts, they create Google+ pages. This has created a huge opportunity for marketers to reach their targets.

As of right now, 59 percent of Google+ users are men, and around a third of them are between the ages of 25 and 34. However, if businesses start to use the tool that is in front of them, there is no telling what will happen with this social network.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the B2B marketer’s haven. The network is full of professionals, and you can use it to target them and get immediate results. This is the only social network where the majority of the users are 30-64. Educational content works well on this network. Use your advertising space to teach others about your industry.

Social networks provide B2B and B2C marketers with countless opportunities. Don’t put all of your marketing efforts into a single network. Branch out so you can reap multiple rewards.

See how Lead Liaison’s software helps you manage and track your social media efforts here.

 

Lead Liaison

Lead Liaison Gives Customers Exactly What They Need

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Lead Liaison Press ReleaseWhile it might be news to some, Lead Liaison’s clients already know that their marketing automation solution is tailored to fit their specific needs. With innovative minds, a core team who listens to their clients’ wishes, and an ultra-responsive support staff, it’s no surprise that each new release is full of enhancements that really matter.

In their latest release, Lead Liaison added several new capabilities that clients requested within the past few months. It doesn’t take long for Lead Liaison to hear their clients and take action.

Site Search

One of their newest features is a Site Search-tracking function. Most company websites have a “search” option, allowing visitors to save time by finding exactly what they’re looking for with a search icon or search field. Lead Liaison’s website visitor tracking product and marketing automation product will track a person’s interests while browsing and searching a company’s website. And they don’t stop there. This valuable information is then added to the visitor’s profile, forever capturing a person’s interest and making their profile even more robust. Sales teams can then use this information to hyper-target their efforts, leading to more closed business. This profile information can also be used as segmentation and automation criteria – saving marketers valuable time in qualifying and nurturing their database.

“Since implementing Lead Liaison’s software, we have been thrilled with the capabilities,” says CEO of Digital Attic, Troy Vasquez. Digital Attic is a creative digital agency specializing in innovative web and multimedia solutions nationwide. “They’re always improving, which lets us know that they care about their clients and strive to be everything that we need.”

Trigger Engagements on Page Scroll

Lead Liaison’s dynamic website engagement software, called SiteEngage™, allows personalized interactions with a website. Lead Liaison’s clients wanted options when it came to where and how those engagements appeared on their websites, including the option to trigger on page scroll. The Lead Liaison team heard that need, and made it happen. Now, clients can set the page scroll percentage to trigger a dialog at exactly the right moment, which is a fantastic option for long pages when scrolling demonstrates engagement.

Interested in seeing how SiteEngage™ works? Check out Lead Liaison’s innovative self-guided demo (the first in its class!), Your Customer Journey. Follow along and see the many possibilities of SiteEngage™.

Folder Cloning

Recently, Lead Liaison announced an exciting new organizational feature within their platform that helps clients track and manage all content and assets in a marketing campaign.

“I love being a marketer for a marketing automation company, because I’m the first to try out helpful features like this,” says Director of Marketing, Jen Worsham. “As a marketer, Folder Cloning is my favorite new feature. Being able to easily copy successful marketing campaigns has been such a timesaver!”

It’s easy to see why Lead Liaison welcomes customer input, which is the inspiration to the design of their software. It’s the most surefire way to give clients what they need.

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

How to Run a Webinar: Define Your Invitation and Registration Process

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How to Run a Webinar

This is the fourth installment in the series How to Run a Webinar.

You’ve picked your ideal webinar service provider. The next step is to define your invitation and registration process.

Define Your Webinar Invite Process

Once you’ve got your data ready and your target audience defined, it’s time to start putting together a process for inviting people. We propose the invitation process below. The process sends out three invitation emails to your database. The second and third emails are sent out to people that did not open or click previous invite emails.

Webinar Invitation Process

 

Make sure to vary your “preview text” for each invitation email. In your marketing automation software, you should have an option to enter in some preview text in the email builder. The preview text is usually at the upper left side of the email in small text. It’s what shows up in the preview pane of the recipient’s email inbox. They’ll usually see anywhere from 1 to 3 lines of text in their preview depending on their settings. With more than half of all emails getting opened and read on mobile devices, it’s critical to have a compelling preview text. Use different preview text verbiage for each of your three invite emails.

After the event is over, add recipients who opened the email into an “Active List” in your MA software. As an optional step, you could email everyone that opened any of your three invite emails but did not register for the event. We suggest sending this email the day before the event.

Define Your Webinar Registration Process

This is the process people will go through once they register for your event. As shown in yellow below, there are two ways to register participants. Through the event provider, such as GoToWebinar, or via your marketing automation system. If using the marketing automation system, create a web form and landing page in the platform. There are a number of advantages for creating the form and landing page in a marketing automation system. Some of those advantages include the ability to build a smart form with progressive profiling, deeply customize your landing page, style your web form to your liking, and control all of the branding. Data also gets injected directly into the marketing automation system, which can be used for future marketing purposes.

Registration Process

In the diagram above, the steps in green require your company to create email content for each step. With the invite process, there are nine (9) emails in total. All emails should use your standard template though, which will be recognizable to recipients and prevent them from marking your email as spam.

Leading up to the event, most of the messages are reminders. Don’t forgot to include a shortcut for the user to add the event to their calendar of choice (Outlook, Google, etc.) in your thank you for registering and reminder emails. We like using AddToCalendar for this. Once the event is over wait a few days for data to be collected and send a follow up to people that registered and showed up, with a separate follow up for people that didn’t show up.

Your marketing automation system will help you capture this data and configure the process from start to finish – ahead of time. This can be a relief to most companies. The stress of running a webinar increases around the time of the event. If your processes are setup and scheduled ahead of time you’ll have more peace of mind, more time to get things done, and more time to focus on your webinar content and execution. All administrative and marketing tasks will be handled by the system!

In the next installment of How to Run a Webinar, we’ll talk about the importance of having a powerful Marketing Automation tool in place.

Can’t wait to get your hands on the rest of this intuitive guide? Download the full white paper here.

Interested in a demonstration of our robust marketing automation tool?

Click here for a demo!

 

Lead Liaison

Reach More Customers with Postcard Marketing

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Postcard Marketing

Did you know that 52.5 percent of postcards are read by recipients?

With that kind of read rate, it’s no wonder why postcard marketing is catching fire in the business world. In fact, businesses in all niches are using postcards these days. Business-to-business (B2B) companies as well as business-to-consumer (B2C) companies realize the power of sending a tangible piece of marketing material that delivers a message to the consumer without them having to open or do anything.

What is really exciting, though, is that postcard marketing is also available for startups and small businesses due to its low cost. If you have access to the right tools, you can enjoy a great deal of success from postcard marketing, even if you don’t have a big marketing budget.

Postcard Marketing 101 – How It Works

Most people are surprised by how simple postcard marketing is. Lead Liaison is making it even easier by becoming one of the only marketing automation companies to offer a seamless integration with postcard builder Lob.

Here’s how it works: after you cultivate a strong list of leads through our lead management platform, you can then personalize your postcards by greeting your customer by name. That personal touch will go a long way in a world full of one-size-fits-all marketing.

With Lead Liaison’s postcard builder, you have full control over the design to create a design that generates results. Consider graphics on both sides of the postcard, along with your branding and a call to action.

Also consider your target market when creating postcards. If possible, divide your leads into groups and create postcards for the specific groups of leads. This will help you create highly targeted postcards that are certain to generate desired results. What’s even more revolutionary about this integration is that you don’t have to send to an entire list. You can add a single postcard into an automation, or simply send one to a client on their birthday. The cost is the same – whether it’s one postcard or 1,000.

Track the Results

Finally, once you’ve sent your postcard you need to track the results. In your marketing automation software, it’s tracked in the person’s profile. You will see an “activity” indicating you sent a postcard.

Offline marketing (handwritten letters, postcards, etc) is notoriously harder to track. You need to have a bridge to connect offline marketing with online marketing. Marketing automation software will help you accomplish that with in-depth visitor tracking and campaign-specific landing pages.

Postcard marketing is an excellent way to add an offline component to your marketing campaigns. Add an additional touchpoint and give your customers another way to find you through postcard marketing.

Do you want to stay informed on the launch of this powerful marketing tool? Visit our Postcard page and enter your information to get real-time updates.

 

LobMore About Lob

Lob is building a suite of APIs for the enterprise. Built with developers in mind, Lob provides tools that allow businesses to build scalable and powerful applications. The most popular API is a print and mail API that enables companies to send postcards, letters, checks, and more as effortlessly as sending emails. Lob is based in San Francisco, CA and is venture backed with over 6000 customers including Amazon, Square, and Counsyl.

 

Lead Liaison

How to Run a Webinar: How to Pick a Webinar Service

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This is the third installment in the series How to Run a Webinar.

How to Run a Webinar

You’ve gotten your data ready. The next step is to subscribe to a webinar service. But, which one?

Choosing a Webinar Service

There are a few key things to look for when choosing your webinar service. Obviously, it needs to be web-based. But also think about how you want the registration to look. Think about your budget. How many people do you estimate will attend? Is it important to you that the recording can concert to MP4 (we think so!)?

This webinar comparison is a great little tool that guides you through a series of questions to help you find your match.

We suggest using GoToWebinar from Citrix for running webinars, simply because the user experience is very similar to Citrix’ GoToMeeting platform. As of July 2016, a little over 1 out of every 4 companies using webinar solutions in some capacity use GoToWebinar. This means the majority of your audience will be familiar with GoToWebinar, making it easier for them to join and participate in your event. And you want things to be easy for people. Adding roadblocks only gives people a reason to no-show. Adapt to the needs of your intended audience.

Check back next week when we cover how to define you invitation and registration process!

Can’t wait to get your hands on the rest of this intuitive guide? Download the full white paper here.

Interested in a demonstration of our robust marketing automation tool?

Click here for a demo!