Archive for the ‘OneView’ Category

Why APIs Matter

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

One of the primary functions of a Marketing Automation system is to automate tasks that would otherwise be a manual process, just as the name itself would imply.  However, what is often missed is this automation can expand outside of the product itself.  Using application programming interfaces (APIs) to integrate with internal systems can also help automate systems running outside the Marketing Automation system as well.  LoopFuse offers a wide variety of webservice APIs to allow for such automated integration.

For example, with the LoopFuse webservice APIs, users can make programmatic calls into their account to send out email campaigns.  This can be useful for internal processes such as an account management system where automatically sending out a warning email that a client’s account is about to expire would be desired.  There are LoopFuse customers using this functionality today within their internal account management system to trigger the sending of a pre-build email campaign with the notice of expiration via the LoopFuse webservice API.  This not only allows for their marketing team to control and manage the content and messaging of the email notice, it also allows them to track the email campaign to see if the recipient opened the email and took action based on the email.  It is even possible for them to then put the recipient into an automated lead nurturing program to monitor these tracking events and automatically follow up via a follow up email or CRM activity if the recipient had not performed an action within a given amount of time.

Not only does LoopFuse allow for inbound webservice calls, but users can utilize outbound webservice calls within their lead nurturing programs.  This is important because it allows automated workflows to incorporate specific internal business data points within the decision logic of the workflow.

One LoopFuse customer uses the outbound webservice call feature within their lead nurturing program to determine how best help their users who may be having trouble.  Once an end-user downloads their demo software, they will be placed into a lead nurturing program within the customer’s LoopFuse account.  The next day, their lead nurturing program will make a webservice call to their internal system to see if the end-user has installed and run the downloaded demo.  If not, an email will be sent to the end-users asking if they are having trouble installing the software along with troubleshooting tips.  If they have installed and run the software, then the end-user will be sent an email covering more of the advance features of the software to help them progress further.  The lead nurturing program will even monitor via an outbound webservice call to see if the software has been uninstalled and email the end-user a survey to get feedback on their experience with the demo.

For more information on the LoopFuse webservice API, check out our reference documentation on outbound webservice API and lead nurturing nodes.

The Value in Free Marketing Automation

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

End the Status Quo in Marketing Automation

Last week marked a dramatic turning-point for us at LoopFuse and the general Marketing Automation sector, with the unveiling of our Free Marketing Automation offering, FreeView. The release of FreeView and a new low-cost, zero-risk pricing model, marks an almost year’s-worth of work in  planning and infrastructure investment geared to accelerate the adoption of Marketing Automation.

The Value to Marketers

While most in the industry often reference a Forrester report claiming 5% penetration in the Marketing Automation sector, the unusual thing is that no one seems to wonder (publicly) why the rate of growth isn’t much higher given the value Marketing Automation provides.

So allow me to rain on the price-gouging parade. Many of our competitors would have you convinced that Marketing Automation is reserved for marketers with million-dollar budgets, dedicated staff to manage the tools, and a bus-load of expensive professional services representatives to “help” them manage it. “Oh, marketing automation is much too complex for you mere mortal marketers…”, the million-dollar-quota sales-rep claims. In many ways, our competitors are distorting the market by projecting their own enterprise-sales commission structure on to you. The model works for them, at the cost of the consumer (your arm, and your leg). In a market with single-digit penetration, and many competitors continuing to follow Eloqua in to the realm of pricing-out the masses, it is evident that many marketers are simply priced-out of the market. And so now the high price barrier to entry for marketers wanting to adopt marketing automation is lowered to ZERO.

The benefits to marketers under this innovative model are clear:

  • Zero-Risk: Sign-up and use a full-featured marketing automation product for FREE. Forever.
  • Easy-to-Use: A complete wizard-based user-interface will have you up-and-running in minutes, identifying high-quality leads, sending email campaigns, and tracking lead conversion rates.
  • Help at your fingertips: Our comprehensive knowledge base and community site is backed by LoopFuse support staff and community members exchanging ideas and best-practice advice.

The value in “free, forever” to marketers is clear with a zero-risk, easy-to-use, supported, and proven product.

The Value to Partners

As individual marketers benefit from a free offering, so do our Partners. The benefits are actually much more clear to partners, as they are now able to fully-implement a customer for FREE and not have to worry about the product vendor affecting their pricing structure. To a Partner, the relationship becomes pure-profit, and not revenue-sharing, as our competitors would enforce.

Last week, the status-quo of distorting the market with overpriced products ended. Marketing Automation is now open to any and every marketer, to use it for Free Forever. No strings attached, no bait and switch, no credit cards required. Just Sign-up and you’re ready to go in minutes.

Thoughts on the announcement, by others:

The Future of Marketing Automation

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

Over the last couple of years, particularly in the marketing space, nothing has been hotter than the marketing automation space.  The promise of doing more with less, speeding response times, and focusing sales efforts on the most likely prospects have held wide appeal during these lean times.

Looking to the future of the space, however, I think the near term promise is going to have less to do with the automation and more with the data capture.  As digital begot social, and social continued to fuel the adoption of digital it cumulatively is changing the face of marketing.

When the current crop of marketing automation tools was built email marketing was pretty much the centerpiece of an online strategy.  Connect an outbound email to eventual web site behavior and you really had something.  Largely this really is no longer the case.  Email is rapidly approaching extinction as an acquisition vehicle.  Today you need more diversity in your mobile mix that equally represents web, search, email, display, social syndication, social engagement, and some cases mobile.

One of the most intriguing early features of marketing automation was the ability to spot and track the behavioral trends of customers.  Steven Woods over at Eloqua did a great job of describing this in his book Digital Body Language.  As digital volumes grow his perspective becomes more and more relevant.  The challenge now lies in figuring out how to do this in the multi-channel, digital world.

The future of marketing, all marketing, lies in the ability to craft relevant offers to much smaller audiences.  What will fuel this is the ability to capture integrated customer profiles that span all the relevant channels.  Customers are sharing more data than ever before and the smart marketer will use that to inform their creative, improve their offers, and begin a dialog with their customer.

OneView Plugin for WordPress

Friday, May 28th, 2010

As companies look for comprehensive CMS website solutions, a site powered by WordPress is an increasingly popular option. They find that WordPress sites are flexible and powerful enough to serve their business needs at the right cost.

With that in mind, LoopFuse is happy to announce that we have made the process of incorporating our tracking code in to your WordPress website very simple. The LoopFuse OneView plug-in for WordPress allows you to quickly instrument your website to take full advantage of OneView without having to edit the template directly. This makes instrumentation much faster and easier.

Simply enter your Customer ID in to your WordPress settings screen to enable the LoopFuse OneView tracking code on each page of your site. You’re now collecting data on visiting prospects and ready to use that information to help qualify Prospects and Leads.

New Salesforce.com Plug-in Provides Sales Personnel with Real-Time Activity

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

Earlier this week, we announced a new Salesforce.com Plug-in for Loopfuse OneView, our flagship SaaS offering.  This new addition provides real-time activity information for Loopfuse customers on any lead or contact in their database, enabling salespeople to rapidly assess the quality of each sales lead at-a-glance.  In short, we are helping sales teams focus on the most important, qualified leads and thus close deals faster by viewing information such as:

  • The number of page views visited on the site
  • The number of lead capture forms submitted
  • The number of opens and clicks on all email marketing campaigns

This new tool is hosted on Salesforce.com’s Appexchange and can be accessed at here (note:  you need to have a Loopfuse instance running and a free trial is available here).

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Q&A with Laura Ramos – Part 3: Implementation & Keys to Success

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

Following up on the interview with Laura Ramos, I am releasing the third and final part of my interview:

7.  Dwyer:  Who should be involved in the implementation of the Lead Management Automation platform?

Ramos:  Lead management automation should include marketing and sales as equal partners in the requirements gathering, selection, and implementation process. IT will be involved, too, but will play a more minor if the company chooses an on-demand solution. IT must make sure that integration with existing customer support, database, and sales automation systems goes according to plan and that the new system doesn’t introduce any security or unforeseen technical problems in the current environment. Marketing and sales folks shouldn’t have to take on the burden of understanding the existing technical infrastructure and the “what’s needed” to make marketing automation work.
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Tech talk – Cloud, Multitenant, J2EE, Open Source and other techie buzz words

Friday, March 26th, 2010

I’ve been asked a lot lately to talk about our solution platform and technology used here at LoopFuse, so figured it would be worth a blog… To start, LoopFuse OneView is an on-demand marketing automation software solution. In a nutshell, this means it is software hosted by a vendor on the internet that can be run using a web browser without having to install any software, so is ready for use immediately. This is also called SaaS (software as a service), which is a term originally made popular by vendors such as SalesForce.com. Lately the term “Cloud” has replaced SaaS as the new buzz word.

Cloud computing as a concept and even as a practice has been around for a long time. Although “the cloud” is often seen as a synonym for SaaS, it actually is a broader term in that it refers to hosting all types of internet based services such as remote file storage and not just packaged software solutions. Many “cloud” hosting vendors exist, but the most well known one is Amazon with their AWS (Amazon web services) which includes offerings ranging from data storage to payment services to distributed database hosting.

Although there are many upsides for on-demand software vendors to deploy in the cloud, there still exist a few downsides as well; the main one being loss of complete control of the NOC (network operations center) they run their software service from. For many on-demand applications that are not mission critical, such as photo sharing sites, the tradeoff between losing control of network operations and the cost savings of outsourcing their IT is very acceptable. However, for mission critical applications such as marketing automation where businesses rely on leads being captured to drive revenue, the tradeoff can be less compelling.

At LoopFuse, we made the decision to host all our core services ourselves within our own NOC instead of hosting with a cloud hosting provider such Amazon. Collectively, we’ve had a lot of experience building out network infrastructures and felt this would be the best way for us to ensure the reliability, security, and scale which our customers would depend on. To date, this decision has proven to be a good one. For example, under the Amazon EC2 Service Level Agreement the target uptime is at least 99.95%. While this is very good, it could potentially translate into almost 55 minutes of downtime since the beginning of this year (54.72 to be exact). The actual uptime for the LoopFuse lead capture service since the beginning of this year has been 100% (i.e. no downtime). Even though just under an hour of downtime over a three month period may not seem like much, not being able to capture leads after launching a major customer acquisition campaign would be a major problem for most businesses. Another area where having complete control of the NOC is beneficial is being able to implement specific security controls. An example we encountered of this at LoopFuse was a customer who worked with government agencies that had the specific requirement of degaussing hard drives containing their data after being decommissioned. Because we have direct physical access to all our hardware running within our NOC, we were able to meet this requirement.

Another somewhat unique decision we made related to being an on-demand software provider is how we implemented our multi-tenant architecture. Most SaaS vendors use a multi-tenant architecture where all their customers share all the same hardware, application instance and the same database instance. Although LoopFuse OneView is a multi-tenant application with shared resources, all customer accounts are stored in separate database instances. Because every customer has their own database instance, there is no commingling of customer data (i.e. customer A’s leads to not sit next to customer B’s leads within a database table). Besides being inherently more secure, customers having separate database instances also helps will scalability since can allocate hardware based on size and usage of individual accounts. For example, many smaller customers can be put on a database server where share hardware resources such as CPU and memory and a large enterprise customer can be put on a similar database server by themselves. This prevents the smaller customers from being impacted by the larger customer consuming all the hardware resources and vice versa. Also, scaling up as more customer accounts are added is not limited by what a single server can handle across all customer accounts which would require expensive hardware upgrades, but instead can simply add more reasonably priced servers to the server farm.

Finally there is the actual technology we used to build LoopFuse Oneview, which is primarily J2EE (Java Platform, Enterprise Edition). This was an easy decision for us since Roy Russo, the other founder, and myself both came from JBoss, an Open Source J2EE vendor, we were already very familiar with J2EE.  As you might guess, we also deploy on JBoss as well.  Using J2EE, along with JBoss, provides many inherently “enterprise” features such as clustering, failover, load balancing, caching, and distributed processing along with enterprise grade security via JAAS.

We also use a number of other Open Source products such as Red Hat linux and MySQL.The use of Open Source technologies and products was a no-brainer as well since we were already well aware of all the benefits.  The first and most obvious benefit is cost.  The next biggest benefit of Open Source is access; not only to the code but to information.  Because of free and open access within the Open Source world, it is much easier to find information about issues and work-arounds, how to implement specialized requirements, and best practices in general.  This is a very powerful benefit and one of the main reasons access to our customer support portal is free and open to all.

Q&A with Laura Ramos of Forrester Research – Part 2: Market Momentum

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

Following up on my post last week, I am releasing the second part of my interview with Laura Ramos of Forrester Research (blog).

Part 2:  Market Momentum

4.    Dwyer:  What key trends drive adoption of Lead Management Automation (LMA) today?

Ramos:  Besides the economy and the need to improve sales pipelines short term, I think there are 3 more systemic changes driving lead management automation investment and use. These are: 1) the need for greater marketing accountability, 2) the need to produce not just more demand, but better qualified demand, and 3) the need to scale the sales process more efficiently (another way of putting this is reducing the cost of customer acquisition).  There are a number of macro trends driving widespread change in B2B marketing, where I see automated demand management as a key response to these trends. In short, I expect marketers to adopt lead management automation to build customer dialogue and relationships much earlier in the purchase process and counteract issues like advertising avoidance, commoditization, and social computing (which creates unprecedented transparency and information sharing that is wonderful for buyers, but challenging for sellers).

5.    Dwyer:  What impact will a Lead Management Automation (LMA) system have on the typical marketing organization?

Ramos:  I think the impact of automation on a large marketing organization can be quite different than the impact for a small one.  Both experience different issues and challenges. Let me focus on the midmarket here and refer to the three trends I mentioned in the prior question to address the question of impact:

1) Greater marketing accountability. Over the past 10 years, B2B marketers have witnessed an explosion in available marketing approaches, especially in the digital world. While this has made more channels available, many marketers struggle to execute tactics in an integrated fashion that engage B2B buyers during what is often a lengthy sales cycle. Running from tactic to tactic, B2B marketers can also fail to demonstrate marketing’s impact beyond the point of campaign execution. Lead management automation helps marketers get a handle on the marketing mix and to learn which approaches work at which points in the buyer’s journey. LMA can also give marketers more flexibility to try new approaches and experiment with new techniques because the system lets them see, more directly, the impact between marketing activity and the volume and quality of leads that result.

2) Better qualified leads. Sales doesn’t really want more leads from marketing, but they do want better ones. Lead management automation helps marketing and sales get onto the same page and to answer the critical question “what makes a great lead?” Without automation to score leads across the purchase cycle, and the capability to nurture leads – start a conversation, educate, build dialogue, persuade – marketers will fail to put the best leads in front of sales and to help sales to convert pipeline into closed deals.

3) Scaling the sales process. Many executives think LMA helps marketing.  In fact, it helps sales. And it helps the bottomline.  Starting in the last decade, trends like software as a service, virtualization, and on-demand provisioning have changed how firms deliver high technology products. The services component of any solution has become more important. And IT buyers want to pay as they go. Long-term, on-premise, perpetual licenses will decline in favor of the on-demand model.  This also means that long sales processes, backed by high-commission sales reps, must become less expensive. Marketing will become key in this transition as buyers rely more on online channels – and communities of like-minded participants – to inform and validate purchase decisions. Lead management automation can help marketers connect with these buyers long before the first sales call and make selling more efficient as a result.

I think large, multinational firms can certainly achieve these results at the departmental level.  However, the challenges associated with building a global brand, driving message consistency, and managing marketing interactions across geographies, regions, industries, and multiple product lines increases demand management complexity significantly.

6.    Dwyer:  Are you seeing a shift in focus from traditional outbound marketing activities to inbound marketing? If so, how can marketing leaders prepare themselves?

Ramos:  In 2009, we saw B2B marketers shift from traditional to digital channels in a big way as marketing budgets got the ax and as buyers became harder to engage.  Social media popularity also accelerated the digital transformation.  However, much of what I see happening online in B2B – with social media in particular – I would characterize as “outbound marketing using new channels.” For example, firms put out a stream of press releases and marketing communications, and then tweet about them on Twitter.  Little value is added and certainly not much happening there to make buyers want to strike up a conversation.

To truly move to inbound marketing, B2B marketers need to stop thinking about campaigns and start thinking about multi-step conversations.  They need to efficiently reach buyers at a group or individual level. Mass marketing doesn’t work in B2B, relationship marketing does. This is where I can see LMA playing a key role because lets vertical industry, product management, or local marketers in the field have conversations with targeted groups of prospects – customer segments in the truest sense – using online tools and social media to fuel the dialogue.  By tracking their behavior and interactions, marketers can then pass a rich set of “background” information – behavior, preferences, activity — to sales and help them close deals more efficiently.  When this doesn’t work, because it doesn’t always, the LMA system can now give both marketing and sales quantitative, factual information about what they need to do differently.

Next up, Part 3:  Implementation & Keys to Success

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Make Marketing Intelligence Actionable

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

And now the fifth way marketing automation provides job security for marketers from 5 Ways Marketing Automation Provides Job Security for Marketers.  Below is the excerpt from the white paper:

“5. Make Marketing Intelligence Actionable

For most marketers, the challenge with channel proliferation is not a lack of data, but a lack of data integration.  Disparate systems (email marketing, web analytics, landing page creation tools, digital asset management, and CRM) often fail to bring critical information together in one centralized location.  Marketing automation tools should integrate with CRM solutions (e.g. Salesforce.com) to deliver a centralized source of multi-channel analytics for one version of the truth in simple, drill down dashboard reporting designed for marketers.

Website Analytics allow organizations to quickly assess website trends with accurate statistics covering a wide-range of metrics. This type of real-time insight is critical to marketers so they can identify areas of improvement and better tune the website to increase message response.  Likewise, marketers can measure response and engagement by incorporating call to action website links in email campaigns.

It’s also important for marketers to track the success of their email campaigns, in real-time, to make adjustments or additions to a campaign based on user response. Marketing automation can provide comprehensive reporting across CRM and marketing tools, so marketers can see a complete picture of recipient activity, email bounces, bad email data, link activity, geographic breakdowns, as well as associated opportunity. Comprehensive reporting allows marketers to adequately judge the effect of marketing campaigns on real dollars.

Job Security Scorecard:

  • Drill down reporting gives marketers the confidence to say “We have that information” instead of “I’m not sure” when the CFO or CEO ask for more granularity on trends in the data.
  • Centralize prospect behavior across marketing channels.  Marketing becomes an offensive asset in the organization. Rapidly adapt to changes in the market and streamline marketing campaign execution.
  • Real-time dashboards standardize key metrics: funnel analysis, call-to-action, click-through rates, the number of qualified opportunities, website performance, and collateral downloads.”

Download a free copy of 5 Ways Marketing Automation Provides Job Security for Marketers

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Track customer engagements and qualify the best leads for sales

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

Last week, we released 5 Ways Marketing Automation Provides Job Security for Marketers, and we have received very positive feedback from B2B marketers.  So, I’ve decided to share more sections of the white paper to help marketers be more effective within their organizations.  Here is an excerpt of the first way marketing automation provides job security for marketers:

“1. Track customer engagements and qualify the best leads for sales:

The process of engaging with customers and prospects across one or more channels is complex, and marketers simply can not realistically build relevant, timely, personalized relationships with every prospect unless they can automate this engagement. Marketers need to realize, it’s not about the quantity of leads, rather it’s about quality of leads.  Marketing automation can help marketers review their pipeline and find out the attributes of the best opportunities and then automate prospect nurturing so only the most qualified and educated prospects are passed to sales as “sales-ready” leads backed by qualified and verified data.

Marketing automation tools integrate email marketing, web analytics, landing page creation, and other marketing channels for a comprehensive account-by-account view of the customer engagement.  By tracking the number of “sales-ready” leads that are passed to sales over time, marketers can literally demonstrate how effective marketing collateral has been at converting prospects into qualified opportunities.  Marketers gain credibility with sales and executive stakeholders when they can demonstrate exactly how the marketing budget translated into top-line opportunities for the organization.

Job Security Scorecard:

  • Identify the number of qualified opportunities that are passed from marketing to sales
  • Real-time visibility into the sales pipeline for the C-suite, marketing, sales, finance, and operations”

Download a free copy of 5 Ways Marketing Automation Provides Job Security for Marketers

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