As a bit of extra incentive to take LoopFuse marketing automation for a test drive, we are giving away iPad minis to a few lucky folks over the next few months.
It’s easy to get in the running for one – all you have to do is sign up for a trial account and do a few simple things including:
Deploy our web tracking beacon to your site
Send an email campaign (one at a minimum but we’d love to see many plus some lead flows)
Keep the account active for at least 60 days
That’s it! Super simple and you could get a fancy new iPad mini to go along with the huge value you see from marketing automation.
There is no cost to the trial and you can also check out our social campaign, lead nurturing, lead scoring, and CRM integration features as well!
We had a great time today during our product training session. Great questions and we enjoyed going over our product capabilities. Here is the replay of the event. Enjoy!
We wanted to share the details on a new report we’ve just added to LoopFuse – the “UTM Source” campaign report. It is located at the top of the reporting menu: Reporting>DeliveredReports>Campaign Reports>UTM Source Report or just click here if you are logged into LoopFuse.
UTM codes can be passed to LoopFuse when you create custom campaign elements for tracking purposes. These include Campaign Source, Medium, and Name. You’ll also see them in Google Analytics as you review campaigns and traffic sources. For more information on creating custom URLs with UTM codes, here is a post from Google on it as well as a simple tool to build them.
Tracking this information from the URLs that you include in email campaigns, on-line advertising, and promotional listings is key to knowing what’s working and what is actually contributing to your sales pipeline from your marketing efforts.
In this report, we show you the UTM source, medium, and name along with first name, last name, and email address of the prospect.
We’ve gone the next step and pulled in information from Salesforce.com including a link to that prospect in Salesforce.com as well as any Opportunity Name, Stage, Probability, or Amount information. You can now directly connect on-line marketing campaigns with sales pipeline activity. This is critical to make decisions on where to invest marketing dollars and understanding costs related to customer acquisition.
The report can be run “on demand” or scheduled for delivery via email. You will notice that we have improved our reporting capabilities by now attaching the report to the email as an MS Excel file vs. sending you a link that requires you to click and download. We want to save as many steps as possible to get you the information you need and the UTM Source Report is the first to showcase our new reporting infrastructure.
We are always interested in your feedback and can easily tweak the content or layout so please let us know what you think! The video below walks you through the new report. Enjoy!
This is a great albeit crowded graphic of the marketing technology landscape put out by the smart folks at Luma Partners. Innovation is happening rapidly in the on-line marketing world and there are lots (and lots) of technology choices to support you strategy and processes. Let me reinforce that point – use technology to support your strategy and processes. This means having them in place prior to wading into the world of marketing technology.
Having been a VP Marketing/CMO in a variety of companies over the past 10 years, I understand both the priorities and pressures the marketing department faces. Build awareness, drive the sales funnel, demonstrate ROI, properly package and position the company/product. Starting with technology will only confuse the situation so understand what you are trying to do (the outcome) then choose the technology that supports you getting there.
We, of course, are excited to be on this landscape in the marketing automation category and, with our Nearstream offering, cover social marketing management needs laid out here.
IT research firm Gartner Group released their 2013 CRM Lead Management Magic Quadrant in the last week or so. We participated in this research process with analyst Chris Fletcher but, much like last year, did not fit their criteria to be included (exclusive focus on large enterprise customers key among them) so LoopFuse was not covered in the final report.
This report is valuable to the largest of enterprises who have significant budget available to invest in a complex and expensive CRM Lead Management system (aka, marketing automation). Unfortunately, this leaves out a huge part of the market and CRM lead management solutions are not only for the largest companies in the world. Any company can use CRM Lead Management and our approach is to do this in a true “try before you buy” format. Do your research but there is no substitute for actually getting your hands on a product, using it, then making a decision to purchase it.
Congratulations to those identified as “Leaders” in the large enterprise segment of marketing automation (Oracle/Eloqua & Marketo).
We are staying focused on providing a full featured marketing automation system to small and mid-sized businesses at an affordable price.
We are continuing to integrate LoopFuse and Nearstream further and added a new selection from the “Campaign” menu in LoopFuse to make accessing Nearstream social campaigns that much easier! If you haven’t already set up a social campaign in Nearstream, simply click on the menu item, enter your current LoopFuse credentials, and you’ll be off and running.
We built Nearstream to give you true social media ROI but identifying and surfacing the most meaningful sales ready conversations in Twitter. We’re still refining things a bit so let us know if you have any feedback or would like to see us add anything. We’d love to hear it!
“Social selling” is getting quite a bit of coverage and discussion these days and I suppose this blog post is evidence of that. Sales (and marketing for that matter) have always been social disciplines because they involve interacting with other people directly and in a meaningful way. The presence of technology in the mix is designed to make this human interaction more efficient for both buyer and seller as well as enhance the time together – not about replacing humans with machines.
So how do you implement a successful social selling program? Start with these three guidelines and you’ll be off to a great start.
1. Be helpful, answer questions
The great thing about social media is that it gives a voice to an individual that can be shared as they choose – to their social graph, to a group, or to the world. This creates a great opportunity to engage in a helpful and meaningful way when a question is broadcast or need identified. This is not the place for a sales pitch. If you can help answer the question or otherwise prove you are knowledgeable, then you are headed down the right path. The time for “the pitch” will unfold naturally and, in many cases, without you having to formally deliver it based on the prospects own research.
2. It’s all about timing
Social signals go stale fast. You should aim to respond in minutes if not hours. Wait for the weekly report and you are toast. Respond in a real-time format like Twitter days late and you are completely out of context. Q&A sites like Quora are a bit more forgiving but always best to answer early rather than late. To do this, you have to either have a program in place to monitor these channels and act as they come up or use something like our Nearstream offering which is specifically designed to give you the most actionable social signals via Twitter with minimum effort (we’ll even send you a daily summary for you to act on).
3. This is just the beginning
Back to the point about sales and marketing always being social pursuits for this one. Rarely does one interaction lead to a sale and social is about beginning conversations that lead to meaningful relationships. Take the long view on social as a place to find and acquire customers and it will pay huge dividends. But, just as importantly, be vigilant to balance the time invested with the results you are generating. Steer clear of vanity metrics like followers, favorites, or likes as evidence of success. They are delivered at extremely low transaction cost and have very low meaning as it relates to true customer engagement.
Paul Greenberg does so much for our industry from great insights to the CRM Idol contest to his annual CRM Watchlist publication. We were very excited to be included as a “Company to Watch” on the 2013 CRM Watchlist and had briefed Paul early on about our strategy around combining Nearstream and LoopFuse into one company. Here’s Paul’s write up on us:
“What makes Nearstream an intriguing choice for the near future is the recent merger between Nearstream and Loopfuse, both CRM Idol contestants. Individually, the CRM Idol judges thought well of each (see reviews of Nearstream here and Loopfuse here) and both were already solid companies with good sized customer bases and relatively mature products. Nearstream is a demand generation focused social analytics platform that finds highly targeted possible leads from the social stream and Loopfuse is an small business focused marketing automation/demand generation set of products, a bit comparable to Infusionsoft. Separately good, together very strong possibilities for a small business focused marketing automation powerhouse. But they are still a long way from being an impact player with all the market facing things to do, the mind share to capture, the depth of their competition and the integration of the products into that powerhouse I think it can become. That’s 18-24 months away, and on the right track.”
You can read the full post over on the Enterprise Irregulars blog here.
Thanks Paul! We’re excited to be a company to watch and wear this with pride!
Marketing budgets are limited and always smaller than we’d like them to be in a perfect world. As a result, marketers have to make hard decisions about what to invest in and how much to invest along with an understanding of the expected return on that investment.
The decision to invest in marketing automation requires the same scrutiny both in terms of whether it is appropriate for your business and will it deliver a return greater than your investment.
We think these questions and the resulting business case are easy to address with LoopFuse. Why?
We offer an unlimited time free trial that provides the ultimate “try before you buy” experience. You experience the product directly and we are here to help with tutorials, demos, help content, and direct support from our team. Our free trial version has all the capabilities of our paid versions minus our Webservice API. If you need to test that piece of the product, we’re happy to enable it for a limited time.
One of the fastest paybacks in the industry with plans that start at just $295 per month. The efficiencies gained by implementing a simple email drip campaign, scoring leads to better prioritize sales outreach, and just knowing more about your prospects (site visits, referral sources, etc.) more than justifies this monthly investment. We deliver a lot of bang for the buck!
A lower overall total cost of ownership (TCO) with no need for long and expensive implementations or additional staff to manage the system day-to-day. Our customers are up and running in hours if not minutes (see #1 above) and we don’t believe you need to hire a dedicated “marketing automation administrator” to manage LoopFuse. Anyone on your marketing (or sales) team can be a power user with limited training and we become an extension of your marketing team and lead management efforts vs. adding overhead costs. We even offer affordable QuickStart packages to get you up and running that start at just $500.
So there you have it. Build your business case for marketing automation by actually using a marketing automation system. We’re confident you’ll see immediate results and that the business case will almost write itself!
