Lead Liaison

Email Marketing and Anti-Spam Laws in North America

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Email Marketing Anti-Spam Laws in North AmericaIt’s important to be aware of email marketing and anti-spam laws in your country. If you’ve done any type of email marketing, you’re likely familiar with the CAN-SPAM act of 2013. This is the first bill outlining national standards for how email marketing should be used by United States businesses. CAN-SPAM details a procedure and fine/criminal penalty structures for businesses that blast recipients who haven’t opted in to a list with unsolicited advertising.

While folks who have been routinely spammed may not be able to afford the legal bills and filing fees associated with going after spammers, the government has been cracking down on ESPs (email service providers) over the past few years. This makes purchasing lists wholesale from larger providers tricky. If users haven’t directly opted into your list, you could run into problems with your email service provider, including being banned from using the ESP, sending further emails until you disclose how you built your list, etc.

When it comes to legislation, it’s not just about understanding your country’s guidelines – new email marketing legislation is popping up all over the world, most recently in Canada. Doing efficient email marketing now includes understanding the laws of the country whose users you’re marketing to.

The CASL (Canada Anti-Spam Law)

The new CASL legislation went into effect July 1 of this year. Harsher penalties will be enacted for businesses that don’t comply with new regulations. The law defines businesses must obtain implied or express consent from recipients. Implied consent may include exchanging messages with friends or family members, business emails sent to you from a recipient’s business address or a customer who transacted business with in the past 24 months.

Making sure that you comply with the laws of countries you’re marketing to can save you headaches in the future. Losing the ability to send emails across ESPs can hurt your chances of reaching your audience and cause huge headaches for sending to a list in the future. It’s a good idea to do a Google search on the law changes in Canada to make sure you’re on the right side of the law – and your users.

Ethical Email Marketing

Legislation in different countries is essentially created with the goal of ensuring businesses do email marketing ethically – using emails that are given to them freely and willingly by users rather than soliciting to people who don’t want to receive marketing in their emails. Email providers like Google are also changing their algorithms to ensure that spammers make it to inboxes less and less. It makes sense to use a progressive ESP and take a good look at how you’re building your email marketing list.

Marketing automation can help connect all the different pieces of your advertising together. Doing efficient, compliant email marketing is a great step in the right direction of an effective marketing campaign. We can help! Contact Lead Liaison for more ideas on how we can help your email marketing ethically grow as your business grows.

Lead Liaison

Marketing at the Top of the Funnel

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Marketing at the Top of the FunnelWhat does it mean to focus your marketing at the “top of the funnel?” The sales funnel is essentially a model that depicts the purchasing process of prospects. The top of the funnel, the widest part, is where your brand makes itself known to the potential customer; this is prospect awareness and education. As the funnel narrows, so does your prospect pool. Here, your marketing and sales efforts become much more direct and personalized and you can focus on quality lead nurturing. The bottom of the funnel is when the purchase is made—leads turn into paying customers. When you maintain strong marketing at the top of the funnel, the bottom of the funnel should never be empty.

Marketing at the top of the funnel can include several different types of practices; a couple of the most successful include social media marketing and content marketing (namely, via blogging). Take a look at all of your current marketing channels: email marketing, blog posts, search ads, social media posts, how-to videos, etc. Which are the ones that educate prospects and invite them to explore your website? In order to answer that question, you need to have a solid understanding of who your prospects are and what they’d like to know. The best way to figure that out is to monitor your marketing analytics so you can keep an eye on the numbers that matter in terms of your company’s goals. Taking a look at these numbers will show you which articles are most popular, what your social media followers like to read, and which landing page designs are most effective in terms of leading the prospect to the information they are looking for.

As far as the overall process of the funnel, here’s a simplistic overview:

  1. Start with content marketing (blog/social media).
  2. Insert links that take the visitor to your landing pages.
  3. Provide something of value on the landing pages (for example, whitepaper downloads).
  4. Continue to nurture the lead with personalized information that helps them to make their purchasing decision.

When implementing marketing at the top of the funnel, communication between marketing and sales is key. This allows the sales process to continually evolve and increase effectiveness with each cycle. An effective marketing plan leads to a more effective sales process. Involving marketing at the top of the funnel means implementing productive marketing strategies at the early stages of a prospect’s interactions. Here, you can weed out the ones who are not likely to turn in to paying customers, saving your sales team time on those wasted efforts.

Lead Liaison

Is Conversion Tracking Enough?

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Is Conversion Tracking Enough?Conversion tracking is at the heart of any effective marketing campaign. Without the ability to understand where sales are coming from, any company’s overall marketing campaign suffers.

Conversions should be tracked from the time a lead lands on your pages through to the sale. Fortunately, most modern PPC and other marketing services allow businesses to see how users are converting down to the keyword. But is it really that easy? Is there additional information a business can gather to determine how users are finding them, buying and interacting with various marketing materials?

Advanced Tech is the Key

Nowadays, conversion tracking is a given in most marketing services – but it’ll only go so far. Google has great tracking and remarketing tools, but at the end of the day you can’t personalize a lead down to an IP address, name or business due to Google’s privacy policies. When half your Analytics data comes up as “not set”, it’s not always easy to use free tools to figure out how your marketing is working.

Marketing Automation for Conversion Tracking

When you’re working with marketing automation tools, you never have to worry about getting a metric or data back that will tell you “information unavailable” or “not set”. This is why so many businesses have come to rely on marketing automation to take conversion tracking a step further.

Personalization is a big reason for this. Analytics and similar sites don’t function as a CRM that will also manage your leads for you while you’re personalizing them.   Marketing automation does this automatically and flawlessly – letting you know who’s looking, what they want to see and giving you hints on how best to advertise to them in the future.

Once you get the hang of it, personalizing leads via marketing automation is ten times easier than relying on many free tools. You can see the individual pathways a user takes through your site, whether or not each individual IP can be connected to a returning user as well as what content engages the user most.

For many small businesses, conversion tracking isn’t enough – that extra level of data that separates a truly qualified customer from someone who is just passing through can be so critical to success. Additionally, the ability to segment lists based on information personalization can ensure quicker conversions in the future.

Lead Liaison offers the opportunity to take conversion tracking one step further with our marketing automation. We’d love to tell you more! Talk to us about how we can increase leads through your pipeline today.

Lead Liaison

Is Mobile Marketing in Your Wheelhouse

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Is Mobile Marketing in Your WheelhouseMobile marketing isn’t just about running ads in popular apps. It’s about tailoring your ads across the board to a mobile user experience. The way people use their mobile phones to access data has changed drastically over the last few years. If you’re not on board with those changes and tracking your mobile user data thoroughly, you could be missing important marketing opportunities for your brand.

Mobile Marketing in Facebook Ads

One great example of the way users are engaging with mobile marketing is Facebook ads. In case you haven’t noticed, Facebook ads are now available in the main news feed section of a user’s Facebook stream.

If you’re selling an app or have a mobile-friendly web store, users can simply click a “download now” or “shop now” button right in the ad that will allow them to go to your next conversion step – or convert right then and there.

Mobile Marketing via text

With Lead Liaison’s incorporation of Twilio’s back end text marketing systems, engaging your audience with text messaging has never been easier. Sparse, correctly targeting mobile marketing via text can work if users have opted in to receive your promotions.

Mobile marketing also works well to interface with your business or advertising teams about meetings, upcoming events or weather delays. Mobile marketing isn’t just about reaching out to the customer – it’s about creating connections, even within your own business structure.

Mobile Marketing on the Back End

The power of mobile marketing increases when you’re able to read and interpret the resulting data from your marketing campaigns across the board. Working to compare what percentage of users access your site on mobile can give you some important insight on how to best engage your mobile users. Is your mobile browser bounce rate higher? What types of smart phones are people using to access your site? Is mobile information presented so that users can engage with dynamic content easily?

Google Analytics provides tracking and acquisition options for people who are interested in mobile marketing, but sometimes Google data just isn’t enough. If you want the opportunity to dig down deep into your backend analytics, identifying core users from IP address and frequent visits, then linking your data to corresponding marketing campaigns, Lead Liaison could be a great solution for you. Marketing automation helps you collect and utilize mobile marketing data in the fastest, most reliable way possible. To find out more let us come up with a customized proposal for your business needs today!

Lead Liaison

How to Create a Successful Sales and Marketing Collaboration Plan

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How to Create a Successful Sales and Marketing Collaboration PlanIt’s no secret: a well-oiled organization understands the necessity of inter-department collaboration and productive communication. In order to boost lead generation, keep leads nurtured and happy, and gain return customers, you must have a successful sales and marketing collaboration plan in place. Maintaining a healthy communication internally should translate to developing a strong engagement with the target audience which helps boost your rate of return.

Marketing automation, smartly implemented, can make this process easier and more efficient. However, without sales and marketing collaboration and alignment, your sales team will inevitably waste time following leads that just aren’t qualified (yet). By keeping both parties in the know on how to properly analyze your lead tracking practices, you’ll find it’s much easier to nurture leads and provide personalized marketing efforts. Cold calling everyone who signs up for your newsletter will probably deter leads from taking the next step and you’ll risk looking desperate. Strategize and implement a clear and concise protocol for points of contact to potential leads at the appropriate times.

Maintain two-way communication

Studies have shown that returning customers make up a significant portion of your revenue, so proper lead nurturing sets the stage for a lasting relationship. Ensure your sales and marketing collaboration plan includes guidelines on how and what is communicated between departments. This level of collaboration means greater customer satisfaction through better communicated ideas. Let your marketers set up sales for success through targeted marketing campaigns that communicate a positive message about your brand and delivers what the potential customers are looking for.

Keep tasks relevant and separate (don’t do the same thing twice)

While collaboration is key, it’s still a good idea to have tasks and responsibilities that the marketing team is responsible for, and tasks and responsibilities that the sales team is responsible for. This is the reason for the division—play up each department’s strengths. The marketing team should be able to create killer content that gives the sales team the upper hand when it’s their turn to reach out to qualified leads. Sales and marketing collaboration means communicating key points between departments, not consolidating the whole process into just one team or the other.

Strategic implementation of your marketing automation practices between sales and marketing is critical. Because most of your potential customers will find your brand through the internet, chances are they can easily find your competitors as well. Use the analytics from your marketing automation to draw up a plan of action for your leads as they request more information and take the next steps. The joint efforts of both departments will enforce this plan of action. The marketing team needs to head up key strategic, back-end development while the sales team can focus on maintaining lead (and customer) satisfaction. Keeping the customer in mind throughout the whole process means keeping everybody engaged and will provide the greatest return.

Lead Liaison

Lead Liaison Announces New User Experience for Marketing Automation

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Lead Liaison has announced a simplified version of their user interface giving businesses a “Google Apps-like” experience when setting up marketing automation assets and strategies

Lead Liaison, a software as a service company that helps businesses improve efficiency in sales and marketing operations, announced today a major improvement in user experience with a redesigned user interface. The new user interface builds on Lead Liaison’s industry position as the easiest to use and easiest to buy marketing automation platform. Although the company sees marketing automation as a strategy, not software, and brands their platform as Revenue Generation Software®, it’s feature-rich platform stacks up to other industry leaders delivering only marketing automation. The company expects to accelerate adoption of its platform because of its new, innovative and improved user experience.

The new user experience gives customers a “Google Apps-like” feeling when inside the application, making it easier to navigate. Working with the software is more intuitive than ever. The company has grouped capabilities into four logical areas: create, process, manage and administer. The user experience is also highly configurable and customizable, unlike anything to date in the industry. Other systems, such as Marketo, require full-time admins, or even 3rd parties, to setup and manage the system. Having dedicated resources on these types of systems just inflates total cost of ownership, which reduces the return on marketing automation. With a more intuitive and elegant UI, users will shorten their learning curve, save money and be more satisfied overall.

In a follow on release the company plans to release a tagging feature. Tagging is a modern way to stay organized. By tagging prospects, marketing assets, Lead Liaison Campaigns and Programs and other components in the system companies will be able to more easily locate important items. Combined with their highly configurable, and easy to use software Lead Liaison continues to distance themselves from competitors that move in the opposite direction by overcomplicating the user experience.

About Lead Liaison:

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 automated processes.

Press inquiries:

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

Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation for Agencies Just Got Easier

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Lead Liaison introduces a powerful, yet easy to use marketing automation for agencies solution with frictionless go-to-market options.

Lead Liaison has released an enhancement to its marketing automation solution for agencies. Marketing agencies of all sizes can now boost their digital service offerings with a professional-grade marketing automation platform at the core of their business at affordable prices.

According to manta.com, there are close to 135,000 Advertising & Marketing Companies in the United States alone. Now, all of these companies have an ideal sales and marketing automation platform to help manage their customers multi-channel marketing across a variety of online and offline channels in a very targeted way. Lead Liaison’s Revenue Generation Software® helps agencies automate web, email, direct mail (postcard), social media, SMS and promotional marketing using a drag and drop interface that’s simple, intuitive and powerful.

Lead Liaison’s marketing agency solution is vastly different from competing solutions offered by other marketing automation providers like Marketo, Eloqua or HubSpot. First, Lead Liaison offers a disruptive business model. Instead of gouging customers with various editions and escalating prices Lead Liaison delivers a single platformwith cost predictability – helping agencies go to market with less friction. Second, Lead Liaison provides the best value-per-dollar with enterprise-level software at small business prices; usually a fraction of what a marketing agency would pay another vendor for similar services. Marketing agencies can take a deep breath knowing they’ve got lower total cost of ownership with an easier solution to manage, lower fees, better digital marketing services and ultimately, peace of mind.

The catalyst for the enhancement is a new feature from Lead Liaison that makes it easy for marketing agencies to manage multiple accounts. A marketing agency administrator can dynamically switch between multiple end-customer accounts, just like switching between email accounts using Google Mail. Marketing agencies can also favorite accounts to have them appear below their login and selectively assign accounts to account managers, making it easy for account managers to work with their client pool.

On the short-term horizon is even more good news for marketing agencies looking to dive into marketing automation. The ability to white label, also known as private label, Lead Liaison’s software to keep tighter control of their customer base and retain brand experience.

For more information see Lead Liaison’s Marketing Automation for Agencies page.

About Lead Liaison:

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 automated processes.

Press inquiries:

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

Lead Liaison

Consumer Engagement is Key to Brand Success

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Consumer Engagement is Brand SuccessConsumers aren’t just looking for you to hold their hand throughout the transaction process – they are looking for consumer engagement, the core concept in making trusted transactions happen for your business. Keeping consumers engaged is all about providing them with an experience that they can find informative and trustworthy. That experience should also hold their attention.

The right marketing automation software can help you measure engagement, but unless you have a solid consumer engagement strategy for your brand on the whole, automation isn’t going to give back the kind of helpful data you’re looking for. It’s important to incorporate marketing automation into your overall strategy. The automation itself is not meant to serve as a standalone strategy.

Understanding Consumer Engagement

The first step to engagement is to understand the various methods consumers use to engage. Social media is a big one – you’ll want to target areas on the web where consumers are spending a great amount of passive time. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are easily available via desktop or mobile, allowing you the ability to engage with consumers no matter where they – or you – are. Social media also presents ease of engagement, with the ability to chat so quickly back and forth that the flexibility and power of a chat room can be utilized.

The same holds true for blogs and forums. Even if you’re not engaging directly, you can create contextual ads that give customers the opportunity to find out about you and engage with you in other ways. The Google Adwords Display program is a good example of this. Adwords Display places your ad on relevant blogs and news sites. Customers can engage with you via a text, graphic or video ad.

Tracking Consumer Engagement

Once you have an engagement strategy in place, it’s important to let your marketing automation company do the monitoring, then interpret your data. For instance, you may want to measure social media engagement over time based on what time you’re posting. Your marketing automation service can give you an idea as to what the profile is of your average user, what time Tweets or Facebook posts are most effective and how users are getting to your website based on your social profiles.

Because this is sensitive data that can be critical to your company’s marketing strategy, it’s important to select a marketing automation partner with the right tools – a company with your best interests in mind. Lead Liaison helps businesses stay in line with success through marketing automation tools that work for businesses of all sizes. Visit us at Lead Liaison.com to find out more!

Lead Liaison

Get the Most Out of Your Analytics

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Get the Most Out of Your AnalyticsWhat exactly are marketing analytics and why are they so important? First of all, marketing analytics help to put accountable numbers behind your marketing programs. By monitoring the right numbers, you can maximize ROI and ensure your marketing efforts are producing the greatest response. In turn, you’ll be able to get the most out of your analytics through applying the data to future marketing plans.

Traditionally, marketers are seen as the creative types that focus on sculpting an impactful message to drive prospect response. Recently, we’ve seen marketing analytics creep more and more into the marketers’ day-to-day routine. Why is this? Mostly this is because numbers are easily trackable and provide a means for interpreting how prospects interact with your business. Read more about bringing an analytical culture into your marketing practices here.

How to Get the Most Out of Your Analytics

 

Integrate analytics into the rest of the marketing plan.

Utilize marketing automation to track your web visitors’ activity. The data from those reports will show you which landing pages are the most effective and which CTAs your prospects are following. The tracking software will enable marketers to effortlessly integrate analytics into their daily routine and follow up with prospects, understanding where everyone stands in the funnel. A successful integration should reinforce your sales and marketing alignment. Use your marketing analytics to turn your sales funnel into data.

Interpret the data.

So now you’ve got all of this data, how will you interpret it to get the most out of your analytics? You’ll see better ROI when you’re able to more personally connect with your prospects, so a thorough understanding of their activity and interaction with your brand will help marketers get their point across effectively. Interpreting the data will also aid in sales and marketing alignment in that you’ll be able to refine your funnel, maximize the CTAs that work and cut the attempts that aren’t as fruitful. It is important to prune your data—don’t waste time analyzing data that isn’t showing results or giving actionable items.

Review regularly.

Checking the stats once a year won’t create as much of an impact and certainly won’t help you to get the most out of your analytics. Make checking the numbers regularly a habit—have the data available for monthly or quarterly marketing meetings when the whole team is present so that everyone’s on the same page. Lead Liaison has a solution for keeping an eye on visitor behavior and enables you to gather information and metrics as they happen.

Incorporating these simple steps into marketers’ day-to-day will ultimately aid in gauging new marketing initiatives. You’ll be able to monitor unique visits as well as track return visitors to keep an eye on their buying interest and ensure they are qualified appropriately. Tracking the referring sites of your visitors will also help to point out potential marketing partnerships. Use this fact-based decision-making in order to get the most out of your analytics and ultimately the most out of your current marketing practices.

Lead Liaison

Leveraging the Power of Automated Text Messaging

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Many people feel their relationships with their mobile technology – particularly smart phones- is sacred, limiting the opportunity for businesses to use automated text messaging and similar services to market their products. Many businesses overstepped their boundaries with automated text messaging, resulting in unsubscribes and giving text solicitation a bad name.

Fortunately, not all text messaging to potential clients is bad or unwanted. The key to working with bulk text messaging automation is understanding what clients want to see from you as well as proper segmentation. Blasting customers on the same list over and over again with daily texts is sure to get you bounces early on in the process.

So, how can you approach customers with automated text messaging in a way that doesn’t irritate the customer, but creates a conversion opportunity for your products or services?

Split Your List

Text messaging is something you should definitely take it easy on – messages should be brief, concise and sent infrequently. The lack of frequency requires a solid commitment to delivering only the most important messaging. That’s why it’s so important to split your list – make sure that the messaging you send out reaches the right clients.

Segment lists based on special offers, reminding clients when a certain promotion or webinar is taking place or announce contests. Make unsubscribe options very easy for clients to meet federal regulations. Ensuring you deliver the right kind of messaging to the right subscription list will decrease your chances of high unsubscribes.

Also, keep time frames in mind. Customers don’t want to receive texts from you on a daily basis. Avoid texting on holidays when clients may be enjoying time with their families and will only be distracted or annoyed by messaging.

Automated Text Messaging That Works

It’s important to work with a service that will allow you to segment lists and use text messaging for a variety of purposes. You can also create company lists that will allow you to remind employees of important meetings or office functions. You can use bulk texting to broadcast weather updates that affect work hours or keep your employees in the know about any other important happenings.

Bulk text messaging allows customers and even employees to stay on top of what’s happening at your organization. If used the right way with the best service provider, text messaging can provide some return on your investment.

Lead Liaison has partnered with Twilio to offer bulk text messaging, giving even more functionality to your site’s marketing automation back end! Contact us today to find out more.