Archive for December, 2009

Yammer – keeps them coming back

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

Yammer is a secure Twitter (and more) for your internal organization. We have been trying it out and one feature I really like is the occasional email reminders letting me know the activity going on within our account and the gentle coaxing to participate. The emails are short and to the point and usually start off with “We haven’t heard from you lately.” Then it provides some ideas for posting and a link to login.

Although I’ll admit that the majority of the time I delete the emails, Yammer is persistent, yet doesn’t nag. Eventually, Yammer catches me between tasks and the reminder works as I’ll log in to catch up and the ideas for posting give me a quick starting point. I’m not a Yammer addict yet, but with respect to email reminders, they’ve certainly done a great job.

There are two interesting aspects of Yammer’s lead nurturing program here.  First, this program is a response to a lack of activity on an account.  This is a subtle, yet important, distinction.  The vast majority of nurturing programs are reactive; a user is enrolled into the program as a result of submitting a form, visiting a landing page, etc.  In essence, this program must be running continuously and must check for inactivity on an account.  The second interesting aspect of this nurturing program is that it must take into account activity data that it assumably stored in a separate application database (my next post will show you how to do this in LoopFuse OneView).

Does your organization automatically engage with users/prospects based on inactivity?

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Is Your Social Media Marketing Accountable?

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, Delicious, Yelp, YouTube, FreindFeed, Slideshare, Flickr… it seems like every day another social media channel is launched. With ever dwindling resources, marketers must choose where to spend their time and effort. It’s tempting to just engage on the most recognized channels. But how many of us really know which of these channels is most effective for our particular audience?

Many of these services can offer metrics and statistics, but how easy is it to compare the efficiency of your LinkedIn question versus your blogpost, versus your tweets?  Marcus Tewksbury of “The Marketing Mojo” fame is hosting a webinar on this topic for Alterian on Thursday of this week. I’ve been reading The Marketing Mojo site for almost a year now and they have a good handle on both social media and general marketing.  I’m curious to see what Marcus has in store. Here’s a link to the webinar if you’re curious.

Easy gets Easier with the SalesForce.com Wizard

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

A recent Forrester report on Marketing Automation vendors places total marketing penetration somewhere between 2-5%. The report and its estimates point to several problems that contribute to lower adoption rates, including a lack of “innovation and easy-to-use features“. This is not something that has gone unnoticed by LoopFuse and other vendors in the industry; yet the vendor reponse to the problem is often worlds apart.

Other vendors try to answer the problem with difficult-to-configure/use/maintain products, yet back them with the promise of professional services designed to get you up-and-running quickly. This is a mirage that acts as a leech to your marketing budget, thus removing the incentive for the vendor to ever innovate. Certainly this Enterprise 1.0 way of conducting business (i.e. enslaving customers) is contributing to the slow pace of adoption during these lean times.

Our answer to the problem is simple – LoopFuse seeks to make adoption painless, by innovating on features and ease-of-use and NOT throwing a bus-load of $500/hr consultants your way. The choice could not be clearer in that LoopFuse OneView empowers marketing and sales with a full-featured simple-to-configure/use/maintain product that doesn’t require hand-holding or a monthly chunk of your marketing budget. We have the incentive the innovate as we have to win your business every month.

To simplify the on-boarding process for trial users and customers, our latest LoopFuse OneView 3.21 release included the easiest-to-configure SalesForce.com integration method in the industry. Our new SalesForce.com Integration wizard uses a 4-step process to integrate OneView bi-directionally with SFDC. The entire process takes you from establishing a connection between the two systems, to importing all of your Lead Records within minutes. That means, within a few minutes of signing-up for the free trial, you are ready to send an email campaign or build a nurturing program to all of your prospects/leads.

For more information on the SalesForce.com integration wizard, click here.