• Wordpress – We have the ability to integrate with Fast Secure Contact Form for a quick integration with OneView. We also have a plugin that allows you to integrate your Wordpress site, Contact Form 7, and LoopFuse together.
• Drupal – Using this module, organizations of any size can integrate their Drupal website with LoopFuse OneView to automate marketing processes.
• Joomla – Although we don’t have a specific plugin for Joomla, you can add the tracking script and make use of Chronoforms to achieve the desired results. Check out our Help Pages for more instructions.
• Unbounce – An online service that provides an easy and elegant solution for building and hosting landing pages and web forms. Track your landing pages for free. Forms integration only available with paid OneView accounts.
• Wufoo – An Internet application that helps anybody build amazing online forms. We have a method that allows you to put your captured leads in to OneView.
• ZenDesk – Add LoopFuse tracking to your ZenDesk account

We’re always on the lookout for more integration options with awesome products. If you know of a potential integration that would make your life easier, let us know! We’ll see what we can do.

Richard Murdock (@shinyranger) is the Senior Manager of Customer Support at LoopFuse. Our goal is to make sure you have the best experience possible with our products.

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.

Promotion and Communication

One of the basic components for any marketing automation tool is an email campaign module. Despite the rise, utility, and importance of social media, email continues to play a vital role in getting your message out to potential customers, especially when they have opted in to your lists and are willing to hear more about your products. I’m not putting down social media, but in my opinion, a well-crafted email can represent your branding efforts much clearer than 140 characters can. You still need as much reach as you can get, however, so always include your social media presence in your email communications. Coordination between your social, email, and web site messaging will create a much more effective impression on your prospects.

Product and Consumer

Know your product. Know your customer. Get those two in harmony and you’ve got yourself a winning formula. Marketing Automation software helps you extend the communication portion of the marketing mix in to other areas so you can effectively meet the needs of your customers. Track how people respond to the product line on your web site by tracking page view behavior – know whether they visit your pricing page and if they are interested in your product features. Make use of LoopFuse Custom Events to track user behavior within a SaaS product – get your product to sell itself and serve up relevant content automatically based on user actions. Tailor messages for different markets – automated list segmentation eliminates all the wasted time and headaches involved with sending a targeted email campaign.  Set up some list criteria for a couple of “buyer personas”. Do this using demographic data (who are they?) such as industry, title, role, stage of sales process and/or behavioral data (what were their search keywords?  Have they viewed your pricing page 3+ times?).  Tailoring your messages to a few key “buyer personas” is much more effective than a one-size-fits-all email blast, so you can expect much higher engagement rates if done correctly…and say goodbye to copying/pasting those Excel spreadsheets!

Price and Cost

You may have the most killer App or the most fantabulous product ever devised by mankind, but without a solid understanding of how much it will cost your customer, they will not have a satisfying sales or user experience. When pricing your product you need to make sure that you include everything, including marketing costs. Marketing Automation programs can help you by cutting the amount of time sales teams waste on unqualified prospects. A well-organized MA effort can also help you use assets more effectively to get the most for the money spent on developing them. See how quickly people have saved money using LoopFuse by check out our case studies. See how many extra closed deals you would need to have LoopFuse pay for itself at your organization by using our ROI calculator.

Place and Convenience

Most of what marketing automation facilitates in the B2B world are products that can be accessed or acquired online. In this context placement of your product or ease of access is very important. You want lead capture forms that give up access to useful product information, such as white papers or webinars, in exchange for useful information from the prospect, such as email address and level of interest.  LoopFuse can help you by gathering that customer data and using it to serve up other meaningful bits of information that will help them down the path of customer acquisition. We also integrate with other customer facing tools that you might use on a daily basis like Wordpress, Wufoo, and Unbounce.

Marketing Automation is becoming an ever increasingly important tool in the Marketing Manager’s arsenal. Make sure you’ve got an understanding of just how well it can help you as you strive to balance your company’s marketing mix. Get started with LoopFuse for free and start seeing success!

Richard Murdock (@shinyranger) is the Senior Manager of Customer Support at LoopFuse. Our goal is to make sure you have the best experience possible with our products.

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.

Planning makes a difference

“If you fail to plan, you plan to fail” goes the old adage. Success depends on having a plan in place to make sure everything goes smoothly. It’s a good idea to even make a back-up plan in case the first one doesn’t go as you’d hoped. For marketing automation efforts that could be creating alternate email campaigns or different copy on landing pages to run some A/B testing. Have more than one person record that webinar (been there – ouch!) or make sure you have extra customer quotes for a press release. Your efforts are more likely to be rewarded if you take your time and make plans in advance rather than throw things together at the last moment.

Valentine’s Day Tip: Buy her a card just in case you can’t get that iPad. Get her flowers regardless. 

It takes time, baby

Don’t rush things. You may be getting pressure from others to get things done quickly but make sure you’ve got enough time to get the done right. Do your research and find out the best practices that others are using to be successful. Don’t be afraid to ask for more time if you’re not confident in your time-line. If they are really good, your team will support your decision in making sure things are taken care of the first time. Too much time and money is wasted trying to come back and fix things that should have been done correctly out of the gates. Automating a poorly crafted message will negatively affect how people perceive your product, employees, and company.

Valentine’s Day Tip: Romance is not dead.

Greater effort – greater reward

Let’s be honest here, most marketing automation tools out there have just about the same amount of core features to get the job done. The difference between success and failure lies mostly with the implementer and the amount of effort the team is willing to put in for reward. It’s not necessarily how much you spend, but how well you execute the plan and use the tools at your disposal. Sure, you can see some results with a quick implementation but it may not be the quantity or quality you desired. Find a nice HTML template instead of plain text emails. Design a lead flow that captures more complex user behavior than simply dripping them email. Integrate your SaaS product with LoopFuse Custom Events and turn your product in to a self-regulating marketing engine.

Valentine’s Day Tip: You know it’s worth it, so put in a little extra effort to show her you care.

Richard Murdock (@shinyranger) is the Senior Manager of Customer Support at LoopFuse. Our goal is to make sure you have the best experience possible with our products.

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.

Just like a well-proven recipe, Marketing Automation programs (like LoopFuse) can generate success such as a 178% increase in deals if you start with the right software and get your processes in place to take advantage of it.

Start with a good recipe

This may take some trial and error to find something that suits your tastes, but there are plenty of recipes out there that can be used as a starting point for your next masterpiece. The salsa recipe I use came from my dad. He found it at a county fair about 15 years ago when he bought an “all-in-one” salsa maker. The source didn’t matter as much as the end results. I liked the combination of ingredients and the overall flavor, but there was room for me to interpret it the way I wanted to.

There are all sorts of good examples on the web on how to build lead flows, set up scoring, and build email templates for your marketing automation campaigns. Find the resources that match your needs and then build from there. We have some great Tips & Tricks in our customer database, but you can use email templates from other vendors, lead flow structures and logic from competitors, or scoring rules based on your own experience.

Tweak the recipe

With a good base, I was able to experiment with the recipe a bit and make it my own. For example, normally I use Serrano peppers for my heat. It has sort of a delayed heat to it so you get that kick at the end of the bite. Sometimes I’ll use jalapenos if I can’t find the Serrano peppers. They deliver a more immediate kick. For the occasional special knock-out I’ll put in habanero peppers. Although my recipe is fairly well set, now, I do still allow for tweaking during each batch. For example, I’m able to adjust the amount of lime or cilantro if needed. This allows me to zero in on the preferred taste.

Once you have a Marketing Automation mix that looks good, adjust it to your needs. No example flow or email template is going to be an exact fit right out of the box. Own it. Make it work for you. With the right Marketing Automation suite of tools like LoopFuse, you can make those examples fit within your business process and produce the results you’re looking for.

Refine the technique

When I started out making salsa, I used the exact same method as my dad. I bought a salsa maker and dropped in the ingredients to chop them up by hand. I didn’t do that for long because it was too much work… and if I wanted to make a larger batch for a party I had to repeat that process over and over. I quickly moved to using a food processor. I would pulse the individual ingredients to get the right texture and then combine them in a larger bowl to get the right balance of flavors. It was some work at first to get the recipe *I* wanted, but now I can repeat the process in almost no time at all and get consistent results.

It will take a little while to get your Marketing Automation in place because each business case is different. Anyone who tells you otherwise is not being honest with you. There are methods you can use to help shorten that implementation time, but there will always be a bit of customization to make it perfect for your needs. Don’t get frustrated with that personalization time. Use it to your advantage and create something you’ll be proud of.

Not all salsa is created equal

I took some salsa to a family event over the holidays. My sister came up to me and asked me what I put in the salsa that made it different (and better )than hers. I asked her what recipe she used and it turns out we started with the same basic ingredients that our dad had put together. The difference was in the execution. She was still using a hand-crank salsa maker and dropping everything in together. I had moved on to a more automated, carefully crafted recipe that was now producing much better results.

Marketing Automation can be a success or a failure, depending on who is cooking up the recipe. Given the same basic ingredients, instructions, and techniques, a Marketing Automation plan can still fail if it’s not executed properly. You may get decent results if you just grab a recipe off the shelf and copy what others have done, but you won’t see true success until you take some time to tweak and refine your processes to suit your needs.

By now you’re probably hungry for salsa and you want that recipe. I’m happy to share it. Just remember that it won’t turn out exactly the way I make it. This is for a decent sized batch of salsa.

15-20 Roma (plum) Tomatoes
1 White Onion
1 Red Bell Pepper
1 Green Bell Pepper
2-3 Serrano Peppers
1 bunch of Cilantro
3-4 cloves Garlic
1-2 Limes
1-2 Tbsp. Salt

Chop the tomatoes, onion, cilantro and bell peppers in the food processor. I use a food processor to pulse my ingredients individually to a good texture. I don’t want the pieces too big (crunchy salsa is not good) or too small (we don’t want soup). I do the tomatoes first and set them aside in a strainer over a bowl to catch the extra juice. This helps keep the salsa from getting too runny later because the salt will draw out moisture from the tomatoes.

I usually chop the Serrano peppers and Garlic by hand. My processor is too big to effectively chop them individually and if I mix them with other ingredients I may get the balance wrong. I can also control the heat better by removing some or all the seeds from the Serranos before chopping them up.

Once I have chopped the main ingredients and they are in the bowls I start to mix them together. Cut a lime in half and squeeze the juice over the mixture. Sprinkle salt over the salsa and mix it in. Remember, you can always add salt and lime if there isn’t enough, so make sure you taste the batch after getting it mixed so you find the right balance for your palate.

Richard Murdock (@shinyranger) is the maker of a killer salsa, a “to-die-for” cheesecake, a fantastic Pecan pie, and Senior Manager of Customer Support at LoopFuse. Our goal is to make sure you have the best experience possible with our products.

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.

WebPage Views
You can see a history of what pages the prospect has visited. You can also see Page Title, what page they came from, information about the machine they were using to visit your site, IP address, and even screen size.  Although these individual details are not compiled in a report (yet), you can get an idea of the path that people take once they hit your site, common browsers, and even how much of your site they most likely see at first glance, based on screen size.

Form Registrations (List Imports)
See which forms the prospect has filled out over time, and get details on which values were provided on that form. This also includes and information uploaded via CSV import or automatic import from Salesforce.com LoopFuse keeps only the most recent data for any given field in the “Summary Profile” for a prospect so this can be useful if you’re investigating when a new value might have been provided.

Email Activity
Although this information can be found on the Email Campaign details, it’s also provided here to help give you a clearer picture of the time-line involved with user/email interaction. You can see when an email was sent from the system, how many times they opened the email, links clicked, and even forwards.

CRM Activity
Find out when the prospect was exported to Salesforce.com. You can see the data values that were passed for our system, see what CRM assignment rules have been set on export, whether an activity was created, score updates, or even if there was an error on export that prevented the record from making it to Salesforce.com

LeadFlow activity
Understanding how your prospects flow through your different processes is essential. Filtering in LeadFlow nodes will let you see when each node is triggering and what the result is, helping you diagnose potential problems. Nodes are color coded so you can see when a prospect enters, triggers a node, or exits a flow. This example shows the prospect entering the flow called “FreeView Signup”, triggering the Export to CRM node, the email send, and then a pause node. This is very useful in helping visualize the path your prospects take in your OneView flows.

Scoring Activity
You can see the overall score on the Prospect Summary page, but the Events page lets you see when those individual events happened.

Custom Events
Recently added to the Prospect Events screen, Custom Events allows you to see what actions users are taking within your product. See our press release and API documentation for more information on Custom Events.

List Activity
This can be used in conjunction with form registrations / list imports to give you an idea of when data values may have changed. This will help you in finding out how a prospect may have ended up in a given segmented list.

Richard Murdock (@shinyranger) is the Senior Manager of Customer Support at LoopFuse. Our goal is to make sure you have the best experience possible with our products.

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.

The business puzzle

There are some interesting parallels between building a business and putting together a puzzle. For example, even though you may not have worked on that particular puzzle before, each successive one gets a bit easier because past experience helps develop techniques that let you recognize patterns and find quicker solutions to completing a project.  Having a clear vision of what you want to accomplish in your business is critical to finding to right placement of the pieces, just as having a picture of the finished product is important for piecing together a puzzle.

Where does Marketing Automation fit?

So how do you fit Marketing Automation in to your business? Well, start with looking at what others have done. Study examples of how they have fit Marketing Automation products like LoopFuse in to their business model and discover the benefits of doing so. Recently, MarketingSherpa put out a fantastic article on how Opsview, a LoopFuse customer, went through the implementation process and ended up with a 178% increase in deals. We also have a great case study on how Objectivity was able to save $160,000 by using LoopFuse OneView.

How to put it together

Once you have an idea of what the end result should look like, take a methodical approach in fitting Marketing Automation in to your business mix. When putting together a puzzle I start with the known pieces…edges and corners followed by large, unique areas that are easily identified. Putting together a business is not very different. You start with product and vision then fill in some key players for sales, marketing, and product development/production. From there you start to work on the less obvious pieces that are still needed to bring the whole thing together. I know from past experience there is some trial and error as you move through both processes. The last few pieces may have seemed the most confusing as you passed them over and over as you went along. Once you get them in to place, however, they make sense and complete the picture.

LoopFuse completes the puzzle

Marketing Automation is one of those less-obvious but essential pieces needed to bring your business processes together. It should be identified and worked in to its proper place as early as possible. LoopFuse can help you find the critical Marketing Automation piece you are missing to your business. Check out the features we offer, the webinars we’ve made available, and even the Five from Five series for great lessons learned and thoughts from some startup experts.

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.