LoopFuse is definitely worth sharing!

Tell your friends about LoopFuse and if they create or upgrade to a paid OneView account, you get a $200 gift card and they get a $200 credit on their next bill.

Who do you know that could benefit from automating their marketing, understanding more about who visits their site, or nurturing their prospects?

Refer as many friends as you like – the more who sign up the more you can earn!

Marketing’s Expanding Complexity and Closer Role with Sales
Marketing has changed dramatically over the last 5 years, where prospects and customers need to be engaged on their terms with relevant content, engagement and respectful communication. Marketing’s role has also expanded and coexists more with sales than ever before, especially as 90% of all purchases are researched online and decision makers no longer want to talk to sales until they are 60-70% down the decision cycle.

The purchasing process has also changed significantly, and so must your ability to create and leverage your digital ‘assets’. Marketing must attract and move prospects much deeper into the funnel than ever before, intelligently monitoring and engaging them with easily accessible content and automating more self-service until they are ready to connect with sales or business development.

Missed Opportunity + Need for Funnel Management
The diagram below shows how a mix of digital and traditional marketing creates traffic to a company’s prime online asset, its ‘master’ website. Once the traffic has arrived (at the top of the sales and marketing funnel), today’s tools and techniques used to engage/capture/convert are limited and ineffective. The discipline of digital funnel management is foreign to most companies, but is essential to generate strong ROI from marketing investments. Generating 25%, 50% even 100+% more business from digital traffic is absolutely possible with intelligently placed content + innovative conversion tactics/tools (such as Loopfuse).

What Limitations with Today’s Online Conversion Strategies Do We Need to Overcome:

• Few attempt to engage visitors/prospects at all stages of the funnel. Engaging only at the bottom (ACTION step) of the funnel via a phone number and Contact Us form misses 80% of the opportunity to capture/nurture prospects until ready to close.
• Few automate the nurturing of prospects until they are qualified leads ready to be closed by sales, and most allow leads to slip through the net due to human mishandling.
• Few effectively enable access and distribution of marketing content at the right stage of the decision cycle.
• Most websites are ‘leaky’, losing prospects that would like to take a next step but are not ready to contact sales, and have no other available call to action or engagement step.

Create an “Engagement Zone”

One way to overcome these limitations is to create an “Engagement Zone’ that integrates content access, next steps, calls-to-action and marketing automation.  This zone is so much more than a ‘Contact Us’ form as it should include all the possible options for connecting with your company, with the prime intention of allowing a visitor to select a next step or piece of content that would enable them to identify themselves to you.  That is the lowest conversion stat of them all; 2-3% of websites earn the respect of a visitor so they identify themselves and become a contact.  Execute this effectively and a greater % of those contacts will be genuine and not mickey@mouse.com.

Rather than try to explain in words what an engagement zone is, take a look at a couple of examples out in the real world.  Click on the “Take Action Now” orange button at http://www.mikewittenstein.com/ and see an engagement zone appear.  There are 7 menu options which provide ways for a visitor to take a next step and educate themselves more.  Another example is at http://www.banyancapital.com where the zone is accessed via the ”Quick Info Access” green menu option.  This one has 8 options for a visitor to engage.  Tying marketing automation behind this type of  engagement and capture solution ultimately creates more business out of the bottom of the funnel.  It connects with visitors, prospects and leads no matter where they are in the funnel, as it can be designed to deliver content at the appropriate funnel stage. For example, you could have a menu option called “Competitive Benchmark” for someone evaluating your product(s) or service(s).

Once you have your engagement zone in place, take the next step which really can supercharge your contact and lead generation …. engage people from any digital location, placing links to your zone directly in content delivered via:

• Company Blog(s)
• Thought Leadership
• LinkedIn/Facebook
• Feeder/Community Sites
• Online Ads/Adwords
• Emails/Texts/QR Codes (e.g. add links back to the zone from inside emails for next steps or additional content)
• Links in Current Website (e.g. for a PDF download link on a product page, point back to the zone)
• Links Inside Collateral

An important point to note here … by bringing a visitor/prospect/customer into your zone, they are able to see other engagement options and may well connect in additional ways, increasing the acceleration down your funnel.

The idea of an engagement zone makes sense in many ways, so consider designing one for your organization, and let me know the improvement in your capture and conversion stats!

Regards to all,
Andy McCartney
andy@imccmarketing.com

If you sell a sophisticated product or service, expect that much of the focus of your marketing automation campaigns will revolve around education.  If you provide this value to potential buyers, then your expertise becomes established in their mind.

Here are some approaches we have used to in our marketing automation consulting to help our clients funnel their prospects through the buying process which will help you design your own processes:

1. Focus on the problem. Use a sequence of autoresponse emails to articulate the specific problem your customers seek to solve.  The scenarios can vary.  You can segment each lead flow by problem definition to allow your landing page visitor to opt into a personalized experience with the problem they face.  Speaking about features and benefits is marketing talk.  Start with the problem and how your offering makes a difference and helps people every day.
2. Ensure the copy is conversational. If you merely provide an encyclopedia of answers, people can turn to Wikipedia or other sterile sources of information.  Use plain language in your copy and connect as a human being.  Assume your buyers know very little about how your industry or market works.  Provide the rudiments and help them gain expertise in a sequential diet of information that makes sense to any person new to the industry.
3. Provide branched lead flows. When your email campaigns reach a logical point, provide other calls to action for further lead flow opportunities that get further than preliminary education.  This could be an e-course or videos that go further into the education process.
4. Score your leads for their opt-ins. As your leads opt into further lead flows, ascribe scoring that helps to qualify their lead status for your sales team.  If there is deep interest in the education process, then create a triggered task for your salesperson to make contact.  The sequence of Lead activities should reveal a high level of engagement and interest which makes sense for sales engagement.
5. Break up the content. Our attention is sparse.  Instead of a thirty minute video, make 5 smaller videos.  Condense white paper content to multiple pieces or email template communications.  Create anticipation for the next Lead Flow sequence and integrate them together into a cohesive experience.  This creates fresh engagement for your buyers and keeps their attention and engagement.  Furthermore, your marketing automation rules can be further engineered to funnel the buyer for each interaction.

If your buyer feels educated, they feel empowered.  Furthermore, if you are the one providing the education, then you will have permission to engage in dialogue.

Help them know the right questions to ask and frame the sales discussion from the education process.

Using your Loopfuse system to design multiple educational Lead Flows will create the growing pipeline for lead qualification for your sales team.  You will notice a difference in the sales conversation with higher levels of trust and readiness to buy.

What are some areas that you could provide marketing automation for education?

Wufoo Integration

Wufoo is a free online service that provides a simple and attractive way to build and host web forms. Wufoo features can include field data validation, user prompts, customized HTML, and a host of other goodies that would normally require a programmer to implement.

With the addition of the LoopFuse integration to Wufoo forms, users will be able to automatically capture these form submissions within their LoopFuse account while still maintaining all the other tracking data for prospects, such as page views.

International Character Support

The world is getting smaller and marketers need to be able to communicate on a global level.  This, along with our increasing international user base, has led to the full support of the UTF-8 character set within all aspects of LoopFuse, including lead capture, list import, email campaigns, CRM export and reporting.  LoopFuse now supports over 650 languages.

Extension of Inbound Marketing to the CRM

Last year we added Inbound Marketing / Search Engine Marketing to our feature set, which enables marketers to analyze which referring sites, search engines, and keywords are leading to the highest level of lead capture form conversions.  Within this release, we are extending this functionality to the CRM by passing along data, such as referring site and search keywords, to the CRM lead and contact records.  This, in turn, provides more information to the sales team and the ability to generate more comprehensive reports from within the CRM.

Special thanks to our customers for submitting these and other feature requests via the LoopFuse Community!

Join us for the next installment of our 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.

This webinar will focus on how sales team members can benefit from using LoopFuse. Tom Elrod, co-founder of LoopFuse, will walk you through the different features available as a sales user and how you can use them when following up on leads. He will give you tips along the way on how to use LoopFuse more effectively.

How will this help grow my business?

By getting both your sales and marketing teams involved with LoopFuse you can save time and resources sending information back and forth between the two departments. Visibility into your website traffic and visitors can be accessed by your sales team real-time with marketing dashboards. Individual sales representatives can set up alerts so they receive valuable information about their top prospects daily.

You will learn how to:

* Set up sales alerts so you can get real-time activity on your top prospects
* Utilize the marketing dashboards to view your target companies activity
* Implement the salesforce.com plug-in to view all your lead’s activity right in your CRM
* Use lead scores to manage which leads are the most qualified prospects

CLICK HERE to register.

Get Fused!

Later this afternoon, we will have our first guest blog post for the Loopfuse Exchange by one of our partners, Greg Malpass of Traction Sales and Marketing.  Stay tuned for more exciting information on the Loopfuse Exchange.