Archive for September, 2010
Wednesday, September 29th, 2010
If you want to know what’s happening with your customers, start with your sales team. Nobody should have a better perspective than sales. They are in constant contact with the customer and are highly compensated for their ability to establish and grow relationships.
Success in sales is tied to the ability to understand a client’s problem and translate that into a solution that can be delivered. As it so happens, that’s exactly what’s also needed for truly effective marketing. As a starting point, therefore, you need to get out there and talk to your sales team.
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Tags: Marketing, Sales
Posted in Marketing, Sales | Comments Off
Monday, September 27th, 2010
Thursday, September 30th, 2010 2:00PM EST
Join us for the second installment of our new webinar series “Light the
Fuse.” This series is intended to provide you, the LoopFuse user, valuable
tips and tricks on how to use LoopFuse OneView to grow your business.
Learn about the different options available when integrating your CRM with
LoopFuse from Tom Elrod, co-founder of LoopFuse. He will walk you through
the CRM integration process, start to finish, and give you tips along the
way on how to use LoopFuse more effectively.
How will this help grow my business?
By integrating your sales and marketing tools together you have taken the
first step in closing the loop between marketing and sales. You can give
your sales team visibility into the hottest leads by providing lead
activity and scoring right in your CRM.
You will learn how to:
- Configure your CRM and the different options available
- Create the CRM interaction rules best suited for your business
- Send real-time activity inserts to your CRM
- Set up lead nurturing flows to specify what lead information is synchronized with your CRM
Click here to register for the webinar.
Get Fused!
Tags: LoopFuse, Salesforce.com Integration
Posted in CRM Integration, Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring, OneView, Salesforce.com, Webinars | Comments Off
Tuesday, September 21st, 2010
Lead Nurturing is the corner-stone of today’s marketing automation and automated email marketing processes. With it, marketers are able to lower their costs of new customer acquisition, build interest and awareness for their product and services, and help retain existing customers; all in an automated fashion requiring little effort from marketing staff.
Before making a purchase decision for a marketing automation platform, buyers should research and accumulate knowledge on successful lead nurturing programs, and more importantly, what types of lead nurturing programs they plan to implement. Of all features found today in marketing automation systems, it is important to note that with lead nurturing you should choose the system that is right for you and not simply buy the prettiest, cheapest, or what-the-consultant-tells-you. Implementing a Lead Nurturing program is a serious undertaking that seldom get right the first time. A system that can grow with you and can produce measurable and refinable results will suit you best in the long-run.
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Tags: CRM Integration, Lead Management, lead nurturing
Posted in Buyer's Guide, CRM Integration, Lead Nurturing, Marketing Automation, Salesforce.com | Comments Off
Tuesday, September 21st, 2010
There are a variety of different emails that I send out through LoopFuse OneView on a monthly basis. With a freemium offering of our product, the volume of inbound leads we receive has increased substantially making it more important to nurture these prospects through email marketing. I have emails that have been created and built into leadflows so that my existing database of users feel the LoopFuse love and we continue to educate them on the best practices within the product. In addition, there are prospects that we reach out to through email marketing to help educate them on marketing automation and the benefits of utilizing such a tool.
No matter what type of email I am crafting, I always run down a checklist of 5 things before I click the “Send” button. Because once that button has been pressed – there is no going back.
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Tags: eMail Marketing, LoopFuse
Posted in LoopFuse, eMail Marketing | Comments Off
Wednesday, September 15th, 2010
Email Deliverability is a hot-topic today as marketers seek to fine-tune their outbound messaging and engage customers with mass email campaigns and lead nurturing programs. Before making a purchase decision for a marketing automation platform, buyers should know the basics of email deliverability, as it will have a direct impact on the success or failure of their marketing programs and ROI.
The list below is composed of technology and usability items that we believe are a base-line for achieving increased deliverablity rates from your email marketing campaigns.
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Tags: Demand Generation, email deliverability, eMail Marketing, Marketing Automation
Posted in Buyer's Guide, Marketing, Marketing Automation, Technology, eMail Marketing | Comments Off
Tuesday, September 14th, 2010
For a while now we’ve all heard plenty about how the emerging trend in marketing is moving towards “content marketing” or the creation of custom pieces aimed at generating a relevant engagement at a specific point of time.
What I’ve found lacking in the discourse, however, is a real pragmatic approach to leveraging this for marketing purposes. Part of the explanation for this is certainly that it’s not an easy thing to do. It is, however, possible to apply a methodology for content creation that will consistently outperform traditional approaches.
Over the coming weeks I will begin to breakdown the evolving approach I’ve seen work for a number of clients. As a starting point, I’ll focus on getting to know the customer. This is the key starting point for any content strategy. If you don’t understand what makes them tick you can’t consistently generate interesting perspectives. There are a lot of very tactical, very actionable steps you can take. In fact… there are at least 15 of them! Some of these will certainly be familiar, but on the whole hope you will take away some nuggets and a plan on how to string them all together to greatest effect.
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Tags: Content Marketing, Customer Acquisition, Demand Generation, lead nurturing
Posted in Customer Acquisition, Marketing | Comments Off
Monday, September 13th, 2010
Live Webinar: Thursday September 16th, 2010 11am PDT/2pm EDT
Join us for the launch of our new webinar series “Light the Fuse.” This series is intended to provide you, the LoopFuse user, valuable tips and tricks on how to use LoopFuse to grow your business.
First on the agenda: Launching your first email campaign and viewing analytics
How will this help grow my business?
Email marketing is an effective way to nurture your existing database of prospects. By continuing to email relevant content about your product or service you are reminding them of the value you can bring to their business. Email marketing can help you start turning your most valued prospects into paying customers.
You will learn how to:
• Create and send great looking email campaigns.
• Personalize emails using CRM contact information.
• Schedule email marketing campaigns for delivery.
• Track and Analyze email response metrics.
• Track email activity in your CRM
Click here to register for the webinar.
Get FUSED!
Tags: eMail Marketing
Posted in OneView, Webinars | Comments Off
Monday, September 13th, 2010
For the benefit of our readers, we have assembled a list of our most-read blogs that provide marketing automation best practice advice, tips, tricks, and industry news. We normally follow these blogs actively and believe them to be the most important and up-to-date group of expert bloggers covering the field of marketing automation:
- LeadSloth : Covers all aspects of marketing automation (including best practice advice, tips, tricks, webinars, and news) with the most up-to-the-minute and non-biased reporting in the space. Follow LeadSloth on Twitter for the most up-to-date events announced in the marketing automation space: @leadsloth
- Customer Experience Matrix : Managed by David Raab, this blog’s focus is mostly centered around industry news within marketing automation and complementary spaces like web analytics, email marketing, and SEO. David has covered the industry for a long time and is possibly the most knowledgeable (and objective) blogger in the field.
- Marketing Consiglierie : Allinio’s corporate blog is filled with marketing events/conference news, and general best practice help and advice for those starting out. Allinio is a consultancy dedicated to helping organizations maximize their marketing automation investments.
- Marketing Interactions : Ardath Albee does a great job of providing nuggets of wisdom in every blog post. Aside from marketing automation topics, this blog covers social marketing, sales process, email marketing and content-writing.
- Digital Body Language : Steve Woods, CTO of Eloqua, is a visionary in the space of demand generation and marketing automation. Ths blog updates very frequently with great advice for all levels of marketing automation users.
- The Funnelholic : Covering online marketing, b2b marketing, b2b sales, lead nurturing and general marketing automation trends and events. Insightful and regularly updated.
- DemandGen Report : You may have to wade through the vendor-sponsored content, which is often hard to distinguish from the regular editorials, but this site provides well-written and informative articles, covering industry news from all the vendors in the space.
Marketing Consigli
Tags: Demand Generation, eMail Marketing, Lead Management
Posted in Marketing, Marketing Automation, Thought Leadership | 2 Comments »
Thursday, September 9th, 2010
We’ve had several requests for better LoopFuse integration with Drupal CMS version 6.x. LoopFuse has heard the call and has released an initial 6.x version of the “LoopFuse Integration” project.
The objective of a CMS is to make developing your website less complicated. Having to modify the themes and pages of a Drupal integration directly to accommodate the requirements of LoopFuse’s tracking beacon was essentially defeating the purpose of the CMS. With this module you simply add your CustomerID to the admin section and enable it. The tracking code is then automatically inserted in to the footer of your site, just above the Google Analytics code (if you use it).
We looked at the requirements that customers had asked for in a Drupal integration and decided to start from the ground up for version 6.x. Rather than re-invent the webform we’ve decided to integrate with the popular and actively maintained Webform plugin (http://drupal.org/project/webform). This allows you to take advantage of many Webform options while still being able to submit your information to OneView. Integrating with Webform will make migration to Drupal 7 easier as well.
We do plan to add some extra functionality in the near future to help support the capture of User registration. We hope you find the module to be useful and we welcome any suggested improvements the community may have. Get started with a FreeView account and see how LoopFuse can make Marketing Automation work for your Drupal site.
Tags: drupal 6, Lead Capture, LoopFuse, Marketing Automation
Posted in LoopFuse, OneView, Plugins | 2 Comments »
Friday, September 3rd, 2010
Getting qualified leads to your sales team cannot happen fast enough. When I think back on the days when I used to send spreadsheets full of leads to each individual member of my sales team based on territories, I cringe. That was the best way I knew how to show them where a lead came from, where it had been or simply what type of company they worked for. This type of information is invaluable to a salesperson. But so is there time – time is money and so back to my original point. You need to get qualified leads and all the information that goes with them to your sales team as soon as possible. We all know that spreadsheets flying all over the place is not the answer.
What is the answer, your CRM, the place where salespeople live and breathe. Make the information accessible to them the minute they login to their place of record for everything they do – log calls, log emails, convert leads and forecast their pipeline. By providing your sales team with this information every time they call on a new lead you are making both of your lives easier. They are presented with all the qualifying information they need to have an interactive conversation with the prospect and you are not troubled with the manual processes of sending sales members spreadsheets full of leads.
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Tags: Salesforce.com Integration
Posted in CRM Integration, OneView, Sales, Salesforce.com | 1 Comment »
