Most businesses at a certain stage of their marketing maturity understand that an email marketing program is an efficient and cost-effective way to communicate with customers and prospects.  Products like MailChimp, Constant Contact, Vertical Response, and iContact (now part of Vocus) made this capability accessible to even the smallest of businesses.  This further leveled the marketing playing field between small and large companies.

The same can be said of marketing automation.  No longer just for the largest companies with the biggest budgets, marketing automation is accessible and affordable for businesses of any size.  We are very focused on this with LoopFuse and, in addition to our unlimited time free trial, we have paid offerings starting at just $275 per month.  This makes the ROI on a marketing automation investment quick and meaningful.

So why should a company think beyond a basic email marketing approach?  The impact of a one-off single email campaign can be positive but is limited if it does not include the following two pieces:

1. Prospect Activity Information – this includes not only what email campaign(s) a prospect received and their open/click activities but their site visits and pageview activity.  This information combined with email campaign activity yields a lead score which helps your sales team better prioritize their time based on a measure of prospect engagement beyond an open or click in an email campaign.  Email campaigns become even more effective when utilizing a list segmentation approach that can create groups of prospects not only on email campaign activity but pages visited, information requested, etc.

2. Automated Follow Up Emails – once a one-off email campaign is completed, the marketing team will create/share a list of who opened the email and/or clicked on the offer included with sales.  This manual hand off can be automated via Salesforce.com integration and personalized follow up emails can be sent from a designated salesperson after a selected wait time (a day or two).  Proper follow up drives a high performance sales pipeline so adding this automated follow up activity ensures proper and timely follow up.  You can even create different messages based on different activity (open, which link clicked/page viewed, etc.)

The bottom line here is that you can do everything you are doing now for email marketing with a product like LoopFuse AND reap the benefits of adding prospect activity information and automated follow up to the mix.

We would love you to try out LoopFuse here.

To find out exactly what LoopFuse does, click here.

To add LoopFuse to Salesforce.com, click here.

You can follow LoopFuse on Twitter here or join us on our Facebook fan page here.